We waged war rather than pursued peace and now our children are reaping a bitter harvest in which tomorrow’s foe is today’s closest ally.
Walk on to almost any college campus and talk to about any student and you’ll soon conclude that the Right has lost the culture war. And this isn’t simply a campus phenomenon. Political scientist Ryan Burge writes
Well, I’ve looked at the data from the General Social Survey and it’s clear to me that Christian conservatives failed miserably in this endeavor. On every single social issue, the average American is more liberal today than they were just two decades ago.1
The overall trend in America is also seen among Orthodox Christians a majority of whom support same-sex marriage (54%) and are at least moderately pro-choice (53%).2
Walk on almost any college campus and talk to about any student, and you’ll also discover that winning the culture war hasn’t done much good for the Left. Douglas Belkin in the Wall Street Journal writes that well before the October 7 atrocities committed by Hamas, “College campuses … hosted heated debates about the Israel-Palestinian conflict.” What is worrying today is that political debate is morphing into “anti-Jewish antagonism.” On many campuses “Antisemitic incidents have increased, and a growing number of campus groups bar students who support Israel from speaking or joining.”
Hostility, including vandalism, threats and slurs toward Jewish students on college campuses increased more than threefold to 155 incidents in 2021 from 47 in 2014, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish civil rights organization which has tracked reports of such behavior since 2014. The group counted 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. overall last year, up 34% from 2020 and the highest number in its records dating to 1979.3
Whether or not House GOP members are correct in their assertion that DEI is the cause of campus antisemitism,4 we have seen an uptick in antisemitism on the Right, that mimics the identity policy rhetoric of the Left.5
We are also seeing an increasingly hostile attitude toward free speech not only on university campuses but the media, business, and society more generally. At least in the American context, the Church faces a situation that is not only a threat to basic human rights such as free speech but also the ability of the Church to preach openly the Gospel and minister to the faithful.
Let’s pause here for a moment.
Rather than try to decide culpability for this situation or to discern the relative merits of one side or the other—that is to say, relitigate the culture war—let's ask a different question. What did the combatants leave as their cultural bequest to the two generations who grew up during this era?
G.K. Chesterton wrote that “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.” The American, political creed is
...set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things. 6
In principle, the Church can—and in practice, does—support the American Creed.
Separation of Church and state, under different forms, has replaced the ancient alliance. This separation, at first imposed by force, has been accepted by the Orthodox Church also, for it corresponds with its dignity and its vocation. <. . .> The liberty <. . .> is now the regime most favorable to the Church, most normal for it; it frees the Church from the temptations of clericalism and assures it development without hindrance.
At the same time, such a political
system is valid only provisionally, depending upon its historic usefulness. <. . .> New dangers, new difficulties arise in this way, analogous to those which existed at the time of the alliance between Church and state. The Church may be led to interfere in party politics: the latter, in its turn, may divert the Church from its true path. But an essential advantage remains: the Church exercises its influence on souls by the way of liberty, which alone corresponds to Christian dignity, not by that of constraint.7
In other words, like its religious analog, while a political creed can unite, it can also divide. This is especially the case when, as in America, the faithful fall short of the faith they profess. What 30 or so years started as a debate about the practical implementation of the American creed has become a war. Yes, this was (and is) a culture war of words and policies rather than of armed conflict but it is a war, nonetheless.
And, as in all wars, it’s important to name the enemy and (hopefully) defeat him.
And just as in an armed conflict, once I come to see my neighbor as my enemy, I open myself to justifying all manner of injustices committed to defend my creed. In The Social Concept of the Orthodox Church,8 the bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church put the matter this way:
Among obvious signs pointing to the equity or inequity of a warring party are its war methods and attitude towards its war prisoners and the civilians of the opposite side, especially children, women and elderly. Even in the defense from an aggression, every kind of evil can be done, making one's spiritual and moral stand not superior to that of the aggressor (VIII.3).
This is where we find ourselves today on college campuses, in the workplace, in the media, in the wider society, and even in the family. Increasingly, combatants in the culture war have come to see themselves as spiritually and morally superior to those on the other side.
The culture war, like all wars, corrupted not only those who fought but also resulted in collateral damage. Those who saw the major battles and minor skirmishes alike came to see society as dangerous and disagreement as sinful. And how could it be otherwise?
The culture war, like all wars, corrupted not only those who fought but also resulted in collateral damage. Those who saw the major battles and minor skirmishes alike came to see society as dangerous and disagreement as sinful. And how could it be otherwise?
Even if the culture war was launched “with righteous indignation,” over time “maliciousness, greed, and last (1 Jn. 2:16) and other fruits of hell” came to dominate (VIII.3). Like all wars, the culture war can only
be correctly assessed ... after an analysis is made of the moral state of the warring parties. «Rejoice not over thy greatest enemy being dead, but remember that we die all», Holy Scriptures says (Sirach 8:8). Christian humane attitude to the wounded and war prisoners is based on the words of St. Paul: «If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good» (Rom. 12:21-22).
And so, to return to where we began, we have all of us lost the culture war. We lost on the Right because we fought; we lost on the Left because we won.
By fighting, the Right (and especially the Christian Right) revealed the poverty of our faith. We sought to impose the Gospel and its moral demands by force of law not the moral integrity of our works. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16, NKJV). We worked so hard in so many ways to “win” that along the way forgot that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12, NKJV).
On the Left, we lost because we won. It wasn’t enough for us to secure justice for the oppressed. We went on to punish those who disagreed with us and so the very thing we fought against. Especially for the Christian, the proclamation of justice necessarily comes with the offer of mercy and forgiveness:
And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Highest;
For you will go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways,
To give knowledge of salvation to His people
By the remission of their sins,
Through the tender mercy of our God,
With which the Dayspring from on high has visited us;
To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,
To guide our feet into the way of peace (Luke 1:76-79, NKJV).
We have raised not simply two generations of those scared by war but “child soldiers” for whom civil and religious society is not a body with many parts working in harmony guided by reason but a battleground in which there are no neighbors only enemies.
All of this, our hatred of each other, our pursuit of power, and above all demands on both sides for justice without mercy or forgiveness, were passed on to our children. We have raised not simply two generations of those scared by war but “child soldiers” for whom civil and religious society is not a body with many parts working in harmony guided by reason but a battleground in which there are no neighbors only enemies.
We waged war rather than pursued peace and now our children are reaping a bitter harvest in which tomorrow’s foe is today’s closest ally.
Ryan Burge, “Liberals Have Won the Culture War,” www.graphsaboutreligion.com, August 28, 2023. Accessed December 21, 20023.
“Religious Landscape Study,” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, 2014, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/religious-tradition/orthodox-christian/#social-and-political-views. Accessed December 21, 2023.
Douglas Belkin, “Antisemitism Is Rising at Colleges, and Jewish Students Are Facing Growing Hostility,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/antisemitism-is-rising-at-colleges-and-jewish-students-are-facing-growing-hostility-11671027820.
Katherine Knott, “House Republicans Blame DEI Programs for Rise in Campus Antisemitism,” Inside Higher Ed, November 15, 2023, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/2023/11/15/house-republicans-blame-dei-programs-campus-antisemitism.
Cressida Heyes, “Identity Politics,” Plato.stanford.edu, July 16, 2002, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/identity-politics/.
G K Chesterton, What I Saw in America (London, 1922), 7, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27250/27250-h/27250-h.htm.
Sergeĭ Nikolaevich Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 162–64.
“Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church» Background Information» OrthodoxEurope.org,” Orthodoxeurope.org, 2023, http://orthodoxeurope.org/page/3/14.aspx.