Our Divided Political Heart (17 page)

This dichotomy created a “
double crisis
”—a crisis for the individual “who must carry on a balancing act between the demands of the two spheres,” and a “political crisis” because the large structures, including government itself, “come to be devoid of personal meaning and are therefore viewed as unreal or even malignant.” The individuals who handled this crisis more successfully were those who “have access to institutions that
mediate
between the two spheres,” thus “mediating structures.” They wrote:

Such institutions have a private face
, giving private life a measure of stability, and they have a public face, transferring meaning and value to the megastructures. Thus, mediating structures alleviate each facet of the double crisis of modern society. Their strategic position derives from their reducing both the anomic precariousness of individual existence in isolation from society and the threat of alienation to the public order.

Berger and Neuhaus focused on four key mediating structures—neighborhood, family, church, and the voluntary association. They noted that such organizations had been blessed by the traditionalist intellectual heroes of the past, Burke and Tocqueville, and also by Nisbet, who, they noted, had “
persuasively argued that the loss of community
threatens the future of American democracy.”

Intriguingly, in light of the harsh ideological polarization that came later, Berger and Neuhaus were critical of
both
liberals and conservatives for their lack of interest in—and even hostility to—these vital social institutions. “
The concrete particularities of mediating structures
find an inhospitable soil in the liberal garden,” they wrote. “There the great concern is for the individual (‘the rights of man’) and for a just public order, but anything ‘in between’ is viewed as irrelevant, or even an obstacle, to the just ordering of society.” The rationales for the institutions that lie “in between” were often dismissed, they wrote, “as superstition, bigotry, or (more recently) cultural lag.”

But on the right, they also found “
little that is helpful
.” They observed that “what is now called conservatism in America is in fact old-style liberalism . . . the laissez-faire ideology of the period before the New Deal, which is roughly the time when liberalism shifted its faith from the market to government.” (They had probably read their Hayek.) Conservatism, they argued, “typically exhibits the weakness of the left in reverse: it is highly sensitive to the alienations of big government, but blind to the analogous effects of big business.”

For good measure, they added: “
We believe it proper and humane
(as well as ‘human’) that there be areas of life, including public life, in which there is not a dollar sign on everything. It is debilitating to our sense of the polity to assume that only private life is to be governed by humane, nonpecuniary motives, while the rest of life is a matter of dog-eat-dog.”

It’s hard to imagine words of this sort issuing from a conservative think tank in the Obama era, given the hegemony of individualist thinking and a heightened reluctance on the right to criticize business. Indeed, Berger and Neuhaus were addressing both the left and the right in their polemic—a rarity these days in publications from ideological think tanks. They certainly influenced more communitarian liberals, and it’s easy to hear echoes
of Berger and Neuhaus in Barack Obama’s “Call to Renewal” speech. When they wrote that “
liberalism has a hard time coming to terms
with the alienating effects of the abstract structures it has multiplied since the New Deal” and suggested this “may be the Achilles heel of the liberal state today,” they were offering a view that many liberals had come to share. “The idea is not to revoke the New Deal,” they wrote, “but to pursue its vision in ways more compatible with democratic governance.” This was not a position held by the economic conservatives of their day, and it would be anathema to much of today’s Tea Party, many of whom insist on the urgency of revoking both the New Deal and the reforms of the Progressive Era.

But if the mediating structures proposal began as an idea that bridged concerns on the left and the right—in part by criticizing both—it hardened over time into a concept used by conservative communitarians to distinguish themselves from their liberal counterparts. Liberals could and did speak a great deal about community, acknowledged William Schambra, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a leading interpreter of Nisbet’s thought. But they envisioned “
a great American
national
community
,” which they saw as “vastly superior to the cacophony of petty
local
communities hitherto created by churches and voluntary associations.” Tracing the national community idea back to Herbert Croly, the early twentieth-century thinker who provided the intellectual spark for Theodore Roosevelt’s brand of Progressivism, Schambra argued that “
the sense of community, belonging, and purpose
that had once been supplied at the local level by Tocqueville’s townships and voluntary associations . . . would now be centralized and nationalized.” It would fall to the “federal government, and above all the American presidency,” to “summon citizens out of their self-interested, parochial concerns, demanding that Americans instead commit their lives to the service of a larger national ideal: a noble, comprehensive national oneness.”

Schambra, it should be said, is a serious conservative communitarian who grew frustrated with aspects of the Tea Party’s politics, including its opposition to the Corporation for National and Community Service, a national enterprise that he believed
did
strengthen local community organizations. And his article chiding liberals for their efforts to create what he puckishly called “national oneness” also included a sharp warning to conservatives
about the cost of indifference to local community-building efforts among the poor. “
If conservatism’s only idea of a civil-rights program
is opposition to affirmative action, and if its only idea of a poverty program is opposition to welfare spending, then inevitably Americans will conclude that conservatives simply don’t care about minorities or the poor,” he wrote. “And if one critique of conservatism since the New Deal has proven to be particularly damaging, it is the proposition that conservatism is exclusively identified with the interests of the wealthy.” It was just that criticism that the Occupy Wall Street protesters brought home.

Nonetheless, the energy of Schambra’s critique was directed against liberal efforts to build community on a national level. This, he said, had “
drained the strength and moral authority
from local community institutions,” while empowering “scientifically credentialed professionals and experts.”

The question of whether national and local community-building efforts are at odds is central to our current debate. By ruling out the legitimacy of federal efforts to promote community, Schambra inadvertently undercuts the very national service programs he supports. They are, after all, much in keeping with America’s Progressive tradition, as we’ll see in more detail later. There are few clearer instances of how the federal government can support and strengthen
local
community groups. For all its failures (both perceived and real), the Community Action Program of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty did succeed in expanding organizing in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods and creating a new cadre of leadership, particularly in African American and Latino areas. The political scientist Theda Skocpol pointed to a long list of cases, going back to Civil War veterans groups, in which “
popularly rooted voluntary organizations
have often grown up in a mutually beneficial relationship with federal policies, including federal ‘tax-and-spend’ programs.”

Where the politics of community is concerned, what’s worth noticing is that while talk and argument about both national and local community continued on the left, the grand old idea of republicanism as enveloping the nation as well as the neighborhood was receding on the right. Schambra’s rejection of the idea of building national community, which has won a wide hearing on the right, is antithetical to the conservatism of Alexander
Hamilton or Henry Clay—and to many of the achievements of the last three-quarters of a century of American life. “The domain of citizenship, which had expanded in the post–World War II years to bring in, for the first time, broader and broader ranges of Americans, began to shrink,” wrote the historian Daniel T. Rodgers. “
Talk of a social citizenship as extensive as the nation
itself was less and less often to be heard.”

Rodgers observed this phenomenon on the left as well as the right, but the redefinition of “virtue” was largely a conservative project. “
For those working within the tradition of civic republicanism
, virtue’s essence was the sacrifice of the self for the public weal,” he wrote. “In much of the conservative lexicon, the word ‘virtue’ simply became a synonym for ethical certainty, a slogan with which they set out to inject harder-edged morals into the schools [rather] than mere values clarification and to enlist families and teachers in pushing back the moral relativism of the times.”

Rodgers noticed something else as well: the rise during the 1970s of a new metaphor that in ensuing years was invoked to explain practically every aspect of human life—the metaphor of the marketplace. Once we turned to religion, history, science, or philosophy to understand reality. But with ever growing confidence, advocates of the market claimed that rational economic choice could explain practically everything. “
Most novel about the new market metaphors
,” he wrote, “was their detachment from history and institutions and from questions of power.” We came to envision the world as “a socially detached array of economic actors, free to choose and optimize, unconstrained by power or inequalities, governed not by their common deliberative action but only by the impersonal laws of the market.” In our ongoing conversations about politics and society, he wrote, “one heard less about society, history, and power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice.”

But if conservatism was becoming more individualistic, more focused on the local than the national, and ever more entranced with the market metaphor, how does one explain the rise of the religious right, which certainly has a profound and authentic connection to America’s biblical tradition?

In fact, the most important impact of the religious right on politics may have been less its ability to swell the Republican vote in specific elections—though it certainly did so—than its influence on Protestant evangelicalism more broadly.

For much of American history, evangelicalism was associated with movements of social reform, from the anti-slavery cause to William Jennings Bryan’s Populism. But a funny thing happened to evangelicalism as the twentieth century dawned. Large parts of the Social Gospel movement, which inherited the evangelical reformist tradition at the turn of the last century, adopted increasingly liberal theological views that were, quite literally, heretical for traditionalist Christians. For the traditionalists among the evangelicals, the Social Gospel was more Social than Gospel, more interested in pursuing social reform than in spreading the Good News of salvation through Jesus Christ. In reaction, many evangelicals proudly adopted the label “fundamentalist” to highlight their defense of what they insisted were the “fundamentals” of Christian faith. Over time, many fundamentalists became what we now call evangelicals. The latter are often more relaxed in their theology than fundamentalists, but most remain far more conservative than the old Social Gospelers and their more liberal Protestant heirs. And with the rise of issues such as prescribed prayer in public schools, abortion, and the more diffuse question of “permissiveness” in the popular culture, these evangelicals and fundamentalists drifted further rightward, put off by what they saw as the liberals’ embrace of less rigorous standards for private behavior.

The new evangelicalism also focused less on the prophetic aspects of the Christian faith and far more on personal—and thus individual—salvation. Their concern was less with the Sermon on the Mount or the Beatitudes than with the promise of eternal salvation to
individuals
who made highly personal decisions to embrace Jesus as their Lord and Savior. Their preferred passage in the New Testament is John 3:16: “
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son
, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” This is a Jesus who changes personal lives, not the Jesus who judged the rich, spoke up for the poor, and threw the moneychangers out of the Temple. This developing conservative evangelical faith focused more on “how Jesus changed my life” than on “how Jesus changed the world.”

Not all evangelicals separated the two, of course, and one of the striking developments of recent years is the return of a prophetic sensibility among religious conservatives, particularly in the Millennial generation, which in turn has made younger evangelicals somewhat less conservative politically. But the long-term emphasis on an interior faith meant that in the main, outside their witness on abortion—which, again, had a close link to personal behavior and personal virtue—Christian conservatives developed a great deal more in common with libertarian individualists than their forebears would have imagined possible during William Jennings Bryan’s era.

The effect was to further marginalize the traditionalist conservatives whose idea of faith, as Schambra pointed out, was quite different from the highly expressive and personally transformative religion of the evangelicals—and more different still from the spirited witness of the Pentecostals. It wasn’t, as Schambra observed, “
the sort of faith with which most traditionalists are comfortable
.”

For those of the Russell Kirk persuasion [Schambra continued], religion tends to be a sober, staid, institutional affair; its value is not so much personal salvation as social stability. Religion is what ensures allegiance to permanent truths and established, quasiaristocratic forms, thereby fortifying society against the onslaughts of radical innovation and democratic excess. In
Conservatism: Dream and Reality
, Robert Nisbet described the traditionalist posture toward faith this way: “Religion . . . was preeminently public and institutional, something to which loyalty and a decent regard for form were owing, a valuable pillar to both state and society, but not a profound and permeating doctrine, least of all a total experience.”