Big Sort: Seeds of the New Partisanship

(Link to Part 4)

In the fall of 1974, a war broke out in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Not a shooting war exactly, but certainly a major conflict. Schools were shut down, and people went to jail for conspiracy to blow up school buses and burn down schools. The issue? Textbooks.

Fundamentalist pastor Marvin Horan led a crusade against what he saw as the local school district's attempts to use anti-American and anti-religious schoolbooks. Scholars researching the events discovered that there was more to this conflict than met the eye. Those who favored the new schoolbooks broadly shared similar views on a lengthy checklist of issues ranging from education, social services, the role of government, national security, and school prayer. Those that opposed the textbooks shared opposing views. The most telling finding? When asked to rank a list of values, those that favored the textbooks ranked the importance of a "saved, eternal life" at the bottom, and those that opposed the books ranked it at the top.

Bill Bishop uses this incident in The Big Sort to illustrate the emergence of the new partisanship. He writes about Martin Marty's observation on how America became divided between two types of Protestantism.

Private Protestants promoted individual salvation and promised that personal morality would be rewarded in the next life. On the other side of that great divide was "Public Protestantism," a conviction that the way to God required the transformation of society. The latter laid the foundation for Democratic liberalism. The former provided the moral footing and rationale for Republican conservatism. (110)

Bishop sees the Kanawha County episode as an initial flashpoint of Private Protestants re-entering the arena to battle with what they saw as their oppressive dismissive treatment at the hand of the dominant culture, with the Mainline denominations as its handmaiden, and its New Deals, New Frontiers, and Great Societies. Values, particularly religious values, emerged as the dividing line for partisan identification. As that division intensified over the years, people in our highly mobile society began to seek out (consciously or not) others who shared their views on life and sorted according to those values.

Bishop points out that conservative political activists didn't create the Kanawha uprising, but they did see an opportunity. They could create a potent political force by marrying this new activist distrust of intrusive government by Private Protestants with small-government, free-market advocates. The rest is pretty much history. I think one of Bishop's most important observations on this topic is as follows:

Democrats tend to blame the division of Jerry Falwell, Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Karl Rove. Republicans tend to blame it on the 1960s, welfare, drugs, Jimmy Carter and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Looking back at the split between Public and Private Protestants and the Kanawha County textbook strike, one can see that the divide Francia uncovered wasn't foisted on Americans in a conspiracy of the right or the left. The conservative movement of the 1980s and 1990s was successful because it orchestrated – then amplified – the politics emerging from communities as different as Orange County, California, and Kanawha County, West Virginia. Polarization did not come from politicians or the media. Indeed, according to Francia, "elites may be responding to the polarization that exists within the electorate rather than the other way around." It's just that in the past three decades, Republicans responded better than Democrats. (126-127)

A final side observation. Bishop points out that regular churchgoers vote conservative in large majorities in the U. S., but it is not only in America that we have seen the alignment of regular churchgoers with conservative politics. Bishop says studies show that every industrialized nation shows the same phenomenon. However, in highly agrarian societies, the relationship is reversed. Bishop answers Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter With Kansas? In the 1890s, Kansas was agrarian. Today it is not. Bishop does not explain the relationship, but I would expect that agrarian societies (using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs) are more preoccupied with economic outcomes, while industrialized post-materialist societies are focused on identity and values.

[Continued] [Index]

Comments

[ceemac]

I would find it hard to beleive that Kanawha Cty W Va. was a hotbed of "Berkely Radicals" in 1974. I would imagine that many of those favoring the new textbooks were fairly conservative folks themselves. They would have been whatever the W Va version of "country club republican" was. In some ways this fight must have looked like one in the long line of W Va. union vs management fights.

[ceemac]

I seem to recall learning that for the most part the "elites" of W Va. were not folks with deep roots in the state. They were outsiders who bought or stole (depending on who you ask) the mineral rights and came to the state to run the mines and chemical plants.

[Michael W. Kruse]

"I would find it hard to beleive that Kanawha Cty W Va. was a hotbed of "Berkely Radicals" in 1974."

I think Bishop would agree and that is an important point. The textbook advocates weren't radical by the standards of what was becoming mainstream culture. It was the perception by the protesters that mainstream culture had become radical that prompted the rebellion.

[ceemac]

This was also a time when a large number of these private protestants had begun to share in the "American Dream." for the 1st time. The combination of their piety and the arrival of good jobs (often government related in areas like defense) had turned them into property owners and tax payers.

It's been a long while but I remember an article back in the 80's that told of the challenges being faced by pastors in the holiness style traditions. It's much easier to preach/teach against fancy clothes and houses when the folks in your congregation cannot afford that stuff.

[ceemac]

Or another angle. From 1970-1990 in how many small towns across the south and midwest did the Assembly of God go from having the dumpiest church building in a bad part of town to have the finest church facility around on the outskirts of town.