News and commentary on Religion, especially Southern religion.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Remember the culture war (it isn't over>

Frederick Clarkson cogently argues that the so-called Culture Wars not only aren't over, they've been institutionalized. He calls the culture war:

It is a one sided war of aggression against the civil rights advances of women and minorities and the rights of individual conscience that we generally discuss under the rubric of religious pluralism and of separation of church and state. For these political aggressors, war is not merely a metaphor or the equivalent of a sports analogy. It is far more profound and stems from the conflict of “world view,” usually described as a “Biblical World view” against everything else. It is explicitly understood by its proponents as a religious war and waged accordingly on multiple fronts, mostly in terms we have come to define as “cultural.” How the conflict plays out takes on political dimensions and sometimes physical conflict. This war is theocratic in nature, and seeks to roll back decades, and depending on the faction, centuries of democratic advances.

Can you hear in that definition the sound of Richard Land's unapologetically counterfactual "Obama policies are the end of civilization" argument/screed in Louisiana?

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