Driving for Dominance; Fleeing for Purity

Second Quarter 1999

Paul Weyrich, President of the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C., is the one who coined the name "Moral Majority" for the Rev. Jerry Falwell in the late 1970s. A leading architect of the conservative revolution that helped elect Ronald Reagan president in 1980, Weyrich has suddenly changed his tune. Earlier this year he declared, "I no longer believe that there is a moral majority." "I believe that we probably have lost the culture war." His declaration came in a letter to friends and supporters and subsequently in several newspaper articles.

According to Weyrich, the strategy of electing cultural conservatives to Congress and the presidency won some major victories. But the goal of turning America around through that strategy was not reached. Why? Because, says Weyrich, those who "accept and live by the old rules of Western, Judeo-Christian culture" are losing the war. "The culture has continued to deteriorate." The ideology of political correctness is winning the day.

All or Nothing?

Weyrich's apparently sudden awakening came when the Senate proved unable to remove President Clinton from office. The conservative political drive to dominance had run out of steam. There is, he believes, a lesson to learn from this. The time has come "to separate ourselves from this hostile culture.... We need some sort of quarantine." Conservatives should turn off their TVs, tune out the degrading noise, drop out of the dominant culture, and turn instead to the building of "new institutions for ourselves: schools, universities, media entertainment, everything—a complete, separate, parallel structure."

What shall we make of Weyrich's call to flee for purity? If the dominant culture were controlled by (and reflective of) cultural conservatism, there would be no need to flee. Those at odds with such a culture would simply have to go along, or keep to themselves. On the other hand, if, as Weyrich now believes, the majority culture is antithetical to cultural conservatism, then his minority's acquiescence to it by going along with politics as usual would give support to the enemy. That is what Weyrich wants to avoid.

Weyrich thus thinks within an all-or- nothing, win or lose, framework. The majority is apparently immoral, not moral. He must either acquiesce or drop out. But he does not want to drop out of society altogether, only politically. Educationally speaking and in other non-political ways, he wants to engage anew by establishing counter cultural institutions. The moral minority may have lost political America, but it can try to regain its own soul. It is precisely as a demoralized minority that Weyrich is challenging his friends to go forward with cultural reconstruction. In other words, he doesn't propose to drop out of life altogether simply because "cultural Marxists" dominate politics and the culture which supports that majority.

But for what purpose, toward what end, does Weyrich want to rally the moral minority for cultural renewal?

His approach mirrors the counter cultural movements of the 1960s. They saw themselves as a minority challenging the dominant conservative society. Eventually, their efforts produced many majority results and eventually, as Weyrich now sees it, won the day. So the moral majority that Weyrich thought existed until very recently was actually being whittled down or converted away by an anti-conservative cultural movement. Cultural conservatives, therefore, need to recognize themselves as a minority counter culture and build up their numbers until they become a majority again. At that point they will be able to give up fleeing for purity and drive once again for dominance. Cultural reconstruction, in other words, is a means to the end of saving America.

Politics and Culture

What is wrong with this picture? Weyrich's simple "all or nothing" doesn't capture reality or do justice to politics. Moreover, it ties the success or failure of Judeo-Christian culture to whether the majority of Americans owns that culture. One fact that Weyrich seems to overlook is that millions of Americans who share his moral commitments have been building alternative institutions for decades. Long before the growth of the home school movement, which he lauds as a separationist model, there existed Christian and Jewish day schools, CBN, Christian radio stations, and burgeoning new churches. If these institutions are what Weyrich has in mind for development during the period of retreat, why does he overlook them in his call for new institutions? If these institutions do not represent what he wants, and if that is why he believes he must start from scratch to build new ones, how could he have believed that true cultural conservatives ever constituted more than a small minority of America's citizenry?

Regardless of Weyrich's judgment about Judeo-Christian cultural institutions, his earlier political strategy appears to have been built on sand. Yet his new strategy does not seem to be any better grounded than the old one. It is simply another means to the same end: conservatives trying, through alternative institutions, to reconstitute themselves as the rightful majority in order to come charging back to save America. But what if this is the wrong kind of politics for dealing with a highly diverse society that has no cultural majority?

Principled Pluralism

In our view, Weyrich needs more than a new strategy. His basic assumption, shared by many American Christians, is wrong. America never was and is not God's "new Israel." There is not an "elect" majority to whom America properly belongs. Our republic—a political community—is not a single moral/cultural community. As early as the Puritan's half-way covenant, by which they tried to come to grips with the fact that not all citizens were church members, the struggle over cultural/religious diversity has been alive. The proper political question is how to do justice to all citizens, whether or not one cultural group constitutes the majority. Yet this question has seldom been focused sharply in public discussion because Americans still tend, like the Puritans and Thomas Jefferson, to believe that the United States as a whole is represented by the majority, or at least that the majority culture has the right to define the whole of American public life. All or Nothing.

In face of America's cultural diversity, we ought instead to relinquish the win-everything/lose-everything politics of cultural majoritarianism, which leads to perpetual oscillation between driving for dominance and fleeing for purity. The Christian thing to do is to help make the United States a genuinely pluralist republic. Every group should be free to build homes, schools, colleges, and entertainment industries as well as to participate in the shaping of political life.

There ought to be equal public funding of diverse school systems, including Catholic and Protestant schools. This is the just alternative to pitting home-school separatists against a government-monopoly school system. The phrase "public education" ought to come to stand for universal public support of diverse schools and school systems freely chosen by parents without financial discrimination.

There ought to be equal opportunity and public funding for religious as well as secular social service agencies. The law of Charitable Choice in welfare reform is already helping to bring about this transformation. It mandates that government's funding of social services should flow in a variety of directions, to a wide array of religious and non-religious organizations serving the poor. Public funding and sup-port are general and nondiscriminatory while the means of service are multiple and diverse.

We also need a new electoral system that establishes proportional representation for multiple parties. This will overcome winner-takes-all elections and help mitigate the crass partisanship of so many legislative battles. Today, in each electoral district, those who vote against the winning candidate are nonetheless represented by the winner. Fifty-one percent of the votes wins all. A proportional system would give each party only the percentage of seats it has actually earned. A party that wins 60 percent of the votes would win 60 percent of the seats, not all of them. And a party that wins 20 percent of the votes would win 20 percent of the seats, not none of them.

Both Weyrich and his opponents need to adopt a new, more humble, and more just vision of the republic as political community. Christians in particular should relinquish the civil-religious ideal—the almost ecclesiastical idea—of the United States as a mono-cultural, mono-moral 'City on a hill' and help build a republic that gives equal treatment to all faiths and cultural communities. Rather than driving for dominance or fleeing for purity, every minority and majority should be able to participate steadily in public life all the time on the basis of its own deepest convictions.

—The Editors