The flawed assumption underlying both sides of the intra-conservative debate kicked off by Sohrab Ahmari
Conservative circles are currently engaged in a debate between two approaches to politics in the broadest sense — not just political office, but the entire enterprise of advancing interests in the public sphere. The debate primarily concerns whether social conservatives, especially Christians (both Catholic and Protestant), should respect classical liberal values or abandon them to fight the culture war.
New York Post editor Sohrab Ahmari kicked it off by denouncing National Review columnist David French for being “nice” and “guileless,” arguing that conservative Christians must “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”
French countered by advocating “consistent and unyielding defense of civil liberties, including the civil liberties of your political opponents,” arguing that upholding individual rights is both morally correct, and the best long-term strategy to defend Christian interests.
What I find most striking about this debate is how all participants share the premise that American Christians face an existential threat. They’re arguing about strategy — how to counter the threat, whether the threat means one must back Trump, etc. The notion that social conservatives are a victimized minority who, if they’re not careful, will soon be wiped out is taken as obviously true.
But is it?
An Existential Crisis?
Descriptions of this threat border on apocalyptic. Ahmari argues that freedom of religion as enshrined in the First Amendment is “unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives.”
In an essay defending Ahmari, Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist, warns of “culture war white walkers, bent on utter and total destruction of everything American Christians hold dear,” comparing “the left” to the undead monsters trying to wipe out humanity in Game of Thrones.
Rod Dreher, senior editor of The American Conservative, places himself between Ahmari and French, arguing “I can understand traditional Christians voting for Trump as the only realistic alternative to annihilation by the angry left.”
French shares this frame, albeit less apocalyptically. To counter Ahmari’s charge that he’s a naive squish, French lists his bonafides, including speaking “at events from coast to coast about the immense threat to Christian liberties and livelihoods.” He says Domenech “paints with too broad a brush,” but still concedes the Game of Thrones analogy as essentially correct. His main disagreement concerns conservatives’ response:
But the Valyrian steel that stops the cultural white walker is pluralism buttressed by classical liberalism, not a kind of Christian statism of undetermined nature, strength, power, or endurance.
The debate is taking place within narrow bounds, in which the danger ranges from “immense threat” to “annihilation.” This, in turn, informs whether the best counterstrategy is
standing up for universal rights — because they protect Christians along with everyone else — or
trampling on the rights of others out of existential necessity.
We Have Met the Enemy
The villains in this story of Christian victimhood are “the left” and “the culture” — terms that have enough meaning to unite conservatives against a shared enemy while remaining ambiguous enough to accommodate a wide array of specifics. Within this framework, one can inflate any small discomfort into a narrative of existential threat.
For example, here’s what prompted Ahmari’s polemic against individual freedom:
But the Valyrian steel that stops the cultural white walker is pluralism buttressed by classical liberalism, not a kind of Christian statism of undetermined nature, strength, power, or endurance.
The debate is taking place within narrow bounds, in which the danger ranges from “immense threat” to “annihilation.” This, in turn, informs whether the best counterstrategy is standing up for universal rights — because they protect Christians along with everyone else — or trampling on the rights of others out of existential necessity.
We Have Met the Enemy
The villains in this story of Christian victimhood are “the left” and “the culture” — terms that have enough meaning to unite conservatives against a shared enemy while remaining ambiguous enough to accommodate a wide array of specifics. Within this framework, one can inflate any small discomfort into a narrative of existential threat.
For example, here’s what prompted Ahmari’s polemic against individual freedom:
Lest readers think this was just an angry tweet, Ahmari reiterates it in his published essay: “What prompted my ire was a Facebook ad for a children’s drag queen reading hour at a public library in Sacramento.”
Dreher agrees, denouncing Drag Queen Story Hour by name and declaring “I am a thousand percent behind Ahmari in despising this stuff, and I am constantly mystified by how supine most American Christians are in the face of the aggressiveness of the LGBT movement and its allies.”
It’s worth unpacking what exactly has them so upset.
There’s an event at a public library in a city of half a million people, and a social media algorithm brought it to Ahmari’s attention. It’s voluntary and in a public space — not Ahmari’s church, or anyone else’s.
Churches and other houses of worship enjoy legal protection from the First Amendment and government support in the form of tax exemptions. Safe spaces for religious conservatives remain numerous. Ahmari and Dreher’s problem is that some drag queens didn’t stay in theirs. Their “aggressiveness” was participating in public life.
I have two kids and this event strikes me as totally fine. I haven’t been to one, but it’s probably fun, since drag queens tend to have a lot of personality, and that comes in handy when reading to children.
You might disagree. Maybe you think anyone who takes their kids to this is a bad parent. That’s up to you.
But you don’t have to go. If you don’t like seeing the ad, Facebook would like your feedback (click those three dots in the top right corner). You’re not involved, other people — who you don’t know — enjoy it. Let them do their thing.
Ahmari denounces this libertarian logic as weak, a recipe for defeat. Instead he proposes a fiery culture war in pursuit of religious superiority — the ability to impose his beliefs on others.
It’s telling that he caricatures libertarian conservatives this way. Ahmari tells a tale of dystopia, with conservatives desperately seeking refuge from the unrelenting onslaught of… one afternoon at the library. The private space he seeks is church, home, someone else’s home, an Elk’s lodge— you know, private spaces.
Plus there’s the library any other day, or any other part of the library that day.
Cultural Power
Many conservatives disputed Ahmari’s call for illiberalism — French, Bret Stephens, Charles C.W. Cooke, Robert Tracinksi, etc.— but few challenged his premise of conservative Christians, encircled by a hostile culture, getting squeezed towards annihilation, or at least second-class status.
Here’s an alternative explanation: There’s no question America is less religious and less Christian than it used to be. A lot of popular movies, music, and television mock or oppose religious values. But socially conservative Christians retain immense power. Part of what they’ve lost is the ability to impose their beliefs on others — as Ahmari wants to — and to publicly criticize people they don’t like without facing similar public criticism themselves.
Essentially, conservative Christians have gone from the unquestioningly dominant faction in American society to a large and powerful one within it. They used to control the public space, and now they have to share it. They’re weak in some parts of the public sphere and strong in others — just like everyone else.
A shared public space has to be inclusive. That means, as per Popper’s paradox, that the one thing it cannot tolerate is excluding classes of people. To the extent Ahmari’s and similar complaints come down to LGBT equality, LGBT people’s right to equal treatment outweighs religious conservatives right to deny it to them. Publicly expressing distaste for gay and trans people is not such a core tenet of Christianity that one cannot be a Christian without it.
Conservative Christians might respond to this alternative explanation by pointing to the ways that religious conservatives have been marginalized in academia, popular media, and, more recently, in the corporate world. Some argue that the LGBT rights movement has shifted from a defensive cultural and legal posture to an offensive one, moving from protecting and lifting up an oppressed minority to punishing those at odds with the new mainstream cultural consensus.
Social conservatives do have people who hate them, as every prominent group does. But the Ahmari/Dreher/Domenech framework of impending “utter and total destruction” is paranoid delusion; and French’s framework of “immense threat” is exaggerated. The political — and, yes, cultural — power of social conservatives ensures their prominent place in America for the indefinite future.
Social conservatives currently control, or are at least very influential with,
the White House,
Senate,
Supreme Court,
many federal and state courts, and
a majority of both governors and state legislatures.
This alone makes claims of impending annihilation ludicrous.
However, the main conservative Christian fear isn’t about politics, but about culture. As Andrew Breitbart put it, “politics is downstream of culture,” and that’s where Christians are getting squeezed.
There’s some of this, especially in acceptance of LGBT equality, but the annihilation warning doesn’t stand up to empirical scrutiny here either.
On a basic level — and maybe it’s hard for Christians to see this, in the same way it’d be hard for a fish to explain water — the idea that Christianity is weak in American culture is absurd. I’m Jewish, and I know about the Last Supper, the Sermon on the Mount, the Good Samaritan, Revelation and the Rapture, “love thy neighbor” and “turn the other cheek.” I can sing, or at least hum, Christmas hymns. I recognize the Lord’s Prayer. I know how to cross myself. These things are pervasive in American culture.
We get your holidays off. Most TV shows have a Christmas episode. I’ve heard about “the spirit of Christmas” more times than I can count. There are churches everywhere. The most-watched news network and some of the most popular websites denounce “happy holidays” while issuing fever dream warnings of Sharia law. Visit Israel or a Muslim country and you’ll see what it looks like when Christianity is culturally weak.
But that’s not the type of power culture warriors and defenders of conservative Christianity are talking about.
To get to the supposed crisis, we have to dismiss a lot of political and cultural power. Even then, examining specific instances of encroaching secular culture shows that “no longer dominant in every area, but still powerful overall” is more accurate than “under immense threat and headed for annihilation.”
The Actual Threat
There are, of course, incidents of religious Americans facing discrimination. There are also incidents of non-religious Americans facing discrimination. The question is not “do religious conservatives face any opposition?,” but whether that opposition is so powerful, and conservative Christians so weak, that the threat is existential.
Consider some of the most prominent cases:
Universities and Free Speech
David French cites a lawsuit in which he defended “a conservative Christian professor who was denied promotion because of his faith.” That’s wrong — it’s religious discrimination — and he won in court. There are many universities where no professors were denied promotion because of their religion, and others, such as Bob Jones in South Carolina, that are allowed to utilize religious criteria.
French also cites the work of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which he used to lead. I share some of their criticisms regarding campus censorship — see, for example, my article on free speech — but it hardly amounts to social conservatives’ impending annihilation.
As an example of threats to free speech on campus, FIRE maintains a database of disinvitations, in which activists tried to prevent someone they dislike from speaking. From 1998 through 2019, FIRE identifies 427 incidents. Of these, 257 cases involve protests coming from the speaker’s left (not all of which involve religion). That means an average of 11.68 cases per year over 22 years. With about 5,300 colleges and universities in the United States, about 0.2 percent see a disinvitation attempt prompted by the left in a given year.
That’s not the only illiberal activity on campus — and I think many of them deserve criticism — but an existential threat it is not.
Hobby Lobby
Obamacare required health insurance plans to cover contraception, and the owners of Hobby Lobby, a privately-held chain of stores, objected. They’re conservative Christians, and argued that being forced to pay for contraceptives violated their religious freedom.
But they weren’t forced to pay for contraceptives. They compensated their employees with health insurance, and then, if the employee chose to buy contraceptives, the insurance company paid for it. Millions of employees spend their paychecks on things their employers disapprove of, but the employers can’t stop it. There’s no reason non-cash compensation should be different.
What the owners of Hobby Lobby wanted is the type of power Ahmari craves — the ability to impose religious beliefs on others. No one forced them to use contraception. No one even forced them to buy someone else’s contraception. But the possibility that employees might choose to use their health insurance for something the employers didn’t like was too much.
In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby. As a result, if you work for a private company, and the owners are religious, they can tell you what you can and cannot do with some of your compensation.
You may be more sympathetic to Hobby Lobby’s position than I am. Either way, no existential threat here.
Gay Wedding Cakes
The 2015, 5–4 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage in the United States. That’s probably the biggest example of social conservatives losing the power to impose their beliefs on others. However, while no church has to perform a gay wedding, and no one has to attend any wedding if they don’t want to, legalization created some situations that impose on religious Americans.
Should religious wedding vendors have to sell to gay couples? It’s a fascinating question, because two fundamental rights come into conflict: equal protection for the couple; freedom of religion for the vendor. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court ducked the larger question, deciding 7–2 that the Commission displayed religious animus in its treatment of Masterpiece.
For me, it comes down to what the vendor’s being asked to do. Refusing to sell a standard product — something off the shelf they’d sell to other couples — is blatant “we don’t serve your kind here” discrimination, like banning black people from the lunch counter at Woolworth’s. But if it’s a custom product — something not unreasonably called art — then the government making the vendor do it is coerced creative labor. (I tackled this in greater detail here).
Brett Kavanaugh The 2018 fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s conformation to the Supreme Court looms large in social conservative narratives of existential threat. For Ahmari, it’s proof they “face enemies who seek our personal destruction.” Dreher says it “radicalized” him. French agrees that it shows conservative Christians under threat, but argues that Kavanaugh’s confirmation demonstrates why the principles of classical liberalism, such as due process and presumption of innocence, are the best response. (As I said, their debate’s primarily over strategy, not the threat’s existence).
Underlying all of these claims is a staggering presumption of bad faith. Ahmari, Dreher, French and many other conservatives don’t consider the possibility that at least some of the opposition to Kavanaugh might’ve been opposition to Kavanaugh himself, not to American Christians in general.
To get there, you have to assume Christine Blasey Ford was lying, deluded, and/or put up to it, that people who say they believe her allegations of sexual assault are also lying, and that the women who poured their hearts out over their own sexual assaults were crisis actors out of Alex Jones’ imagination, or at least manipulators exaggerating how they feel because of their secret anti-Christian agenda. And you also must dismiss concerns from Americans who think Kavanaugh’s previous experience as a partisan operative isn’t a good fit for the nation’s highest supposed-to-be-impartial body.
Most importantly, you have to ignore the recent Supreme Court confirmations of Neil Gorsuch (conservative and Catholic, like Kavanaugh), Samuel Alito (conservative, Catholic), and John Roberts (conservative, Catholic), none of whom faced accusations of sexual assault. You have to concoct a story where the left wasn’t angry during Gorsuch’s nomination in 2017 — even though they were openly furious that the Senate blocked Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland — but developed such fury over the subsequent year that they decided to invent and then pretend to care about accusations of sexual assault.
A lot of people care passionately about the Supreme Court, with many on the left strongly opposed to right-wing positions on abortion, prayer in schools, and other issues involving religion. And there’s no doubt some political operatives oppose every Supreme Court nomination from the other party and will latch onto whatever they can to fight it. But this does not add up to Christians under existential threat.
The Kavanaugh case reveals the fuzziness of the distinction between cultural and political power. According to right-wing culture warriors, winning elections is not a sign of lasting power, because it’s political, not cultural. However, nearly losing — but still winning — a Supreme Court seat is a sign of cultural weakness so menacing that Christians must adapt a crisis mentality.
Chick-fil-A Social conservatives worrying about cultural annihilation may find all the above examples unconvincing. They all involve institutional power — court rulings, Senate votes — and one of the cultural warriors’ arguments is that conservatives must do anything to hold institutional power as a bulwark against the cultural threat.
Consider, then, the case of Chick-fil-A.
In 2012, the family-owned fast food chain came under fire when the chief operating officer publicly opposed same sex marriage, and it came out that the family’s foundation donated millions to organizations fighting against legalization. In response, LGBT rights activists called for protests and a boycott..
So it went out of business, right? Or if it didn’t, it’s because a court came to the rescue?
Nope. Conservatives rallied to the restaurant’s defense. Sales rose 12% in the aftermath of the controversy, and the chain has continued expanding, growing larger than Burger King or Wendy’s. Activists fought the expansion — here’s one warning of “Chick-fil-A’s creepy infiltration of New York City” — but failed.
It’s Not a Crisis
The Chick-fil-A case encapsulates my argument. Social conservatives face motivated opponents that have some cultural power. But religious conservatives have quite a bit of cultural power too. Plus a lot of judicial and political power. Ahmari’s frame of existential danger is divorced from reality. French’s “immense threat” is overstated.
There’s no question that Christianity is weaker in the United States in the 21st century than it was in the 20th or 19th. Mainstream movies, television, and pop music often portray social conservatives negatively (if at all), and portray things social conservatives disapprove of positively. But what this all adds up to is competing in American society as a large, powerful bloc — not impending annihilation.
The slope isn’t slippery.
Conservative Christians hold the keys to statehouses, House and Senate seats, electoral votes. There’s a friendly majority on the Supreme Court, and friendly judges throughout the system. Christianity has an enduring cultural power, because it’s deeply embedded in American life, and because millions of Americans practice various versions of it every day.
The narrative that religious conservatives face cultural apocalypse is one of the most toxic in American politics. It is one of the biggest causes — not the only cause, but a big one — of zero-sum, no-compromise, fight-over-everything hyper-partisanship. Because after all, if you’re facing extermination, you have no choice.
This logic bears enough resemblance to racist theories of “white genocide” that it should give social conservatives pause.
But it’s also good for political mobilization and media consumption. And a lot of people seem to like thinking of themselves as victims. So I wouldn’t expect it to stop.
Throughout Thursday’s Senate hearing on Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual-misconduct allegation against Brett Kavanaugh, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee claimed that they had tried in vain to secure more information about other accusations made about the judge. “We were moving heaven and earth and even moving the schedule to get to the truth,” Senator Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, said.
Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, the chairman of the committee, said, about an allegation of sexual misconduct raised last week by a former college classmate of Kavanaugh’s, Deborah Ramirez, “My staff made eight requests—yes, eight requests—for evidence from attorneys for Ms. . . . Ms. Ramirez.” He added, “The committee can’t do an investigation if attorneys are stonewalling.”
.. On Wednesday, several conservative-media outlets published leaks of some of the e-mail correspondence between Ramirez’s team and Republican committee staffers, which appeared to back up Grassley’s characterization. But a fuller copy of the e-mail correspondence between Ramirez’s legal team and Republican and Democratic Senate staffers shows that a Republican aide declined to proceed with telephone calls and instead repeatedly demanded that Ramirez produce additional evidence in written form.
.. Clune proposed a phone call several times, Davis repeatedly insisted that Clune answer two questions: Did Ramirez possess evidence in addition to what was in the New Yorker article? And was she willing to provide testimony to the committee’s investigators?
.. “As you’re aware, Ms. Ramirez’s counsel have repeatedly requested to speak with the Committee, on a bipartisan basis, to determine how to proceed. You refused. I’ve never encountered an instance where the Committee has refused even to speak with an individual or counsel. I am perplexed as to why this is happening here, except that it seems designed to ensure that the Majority can falsely claim that Ms. Ramirez and her lawyers refused to cooperate. That simply is not true.”
.. “Almost immediately in our correspondence, they became less interested in hearing from her and more interested in discovering what witnesses we could bring forward. Since it was only the majority staff that made these demands, as the minority staff questioned those demands as unprecedented, we became suspicious that any disclosures we might file would be shared inappropriately with Judge Kavanaugh or others to prepare and attack Debbie’s account,”
.. Since Debbie’s interest was in an F.B.I. investigation where Judge Kavanaugh could be questioned under oath, we didn’t feel comfortable releasing this information without their assurances. We continued to attempt to negotiate in good faith by submitting a lengthier letter providing more information as well as Debbie’s request for investigation.
.. It is remarkable that the committee admits they had enough information to question Judge Kavanaugh under oath on Debbie’s statements in The New Yorker, yet that very same information was insufficient for Debbie’s counsel to earn even a phone call.”
.. “The imposition of aggressive and artificial deadlines regarding the date and conditions of any hearing has created tremendous and unwarranted anxiety and stress on Dr. Ford.”
.. “many aspects” of the terms under which she would testify “are fundamentally inconsistent with the Committee’s promise of a fair, impartial investigation into her allegations, and we are disappointed with the leaks and the bullying that have tainted the process.”
Three named women have now accused Brett M. Kavanaugh of committing serious sexual misconduct as a young man. At Thursday’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, we will hear the testimony of only one of those three women.
And we will not be hearing from Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s high school friend, even though two of those women have also charged that Judge was an accomplice to Kavanaugh’s alleged misconduct.
This is because Republicans don’t want to hear from any of those additional people.
.. Reopening Kavanaugh’s FBI background check would provide lawmakers with a wealth of such independently gathered information, which would enable them to better assess what they hear from Kavanaugh and Ford. The American public would also be in a better position to assess that competing testimony. It is obvious on its face that this would be better for our “discourse” than what we are now seeing. Today’s proceedings appear almost deliberately constructed to ensure that half the country believes the outcome of this confirmation battle — whatever it is — is deeply unjust.
Barring a reopened FBI background check, Republicans could subpoena Kavanaugh’s high school friend Judge, who according to Ford participated in the alleged assault. Michael Avenatti’s client Julia Swetnick has now claimed she witnessed repeated efforts by Judge and Kavanaugh to inebriate women so that they could be gang-raped. Judge could testify to — and be cross-examined about — all of this.
.. a genuine, impartial fact-finding effort would buttress confidence that there is a workable process in place for clearing up such “character assassinations,” which might make “good people” more prone to public service, not less.
.. Blumenthal points out still another problem: Each senator will have only five minutes to question Kavanaugh.
“He has been well prepared to filibuster,” Blumenthal said of Kavanaugh. “Do we cut him off and appear disrespectful? Or do we in effect allow him to squander our time?”