UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Vinnie Rotondaro | Aug. 9, 2014 NCR Today
Few Americans knew much about (or had even heard of) Burwell v. Hobby Lobby before the Supreme Court ruled June 30 that the religiously devout owners of the Oklahoma-based arts and crafts retail chain didn’t have to pay for four kinds of contraceptive care for female employees under the Affordable Care Act.
In the end, what the Supreme Court dropped was a culture war bomb. America has been in the throes of the culture wars since 1970s, says Vince Miller, the Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton. NCR interviewed Miller to learn more about the culture wars and the effect they have on American society.
NCR: What are the culture wars, and how do they work?
Miller: Culture war politics focuses on what can divide groups, polarize them and then mobilize them against each other. Part of what defines the culture wars is rhetoric: using language that portrays the opponent as not simply wrong, but morally depraved. Politically, it seeks policies and legislation that do not appeal to the majority. It aims to mobilize the base, but not broad coalitions. It’s always about getting 51 percent. …
What have the culture wars done to Christianity?
The religious right was enormously well organized and enormously well funded. And for my entire generation, they were the public voice of Christianity. For people whose access to Christianity is largely what they see on television or in the news or in the paper, they got to define the public face of Christianity. And study after study has shown that the millennial generation has gotten that message loud and clear, and they don’t find it interesting at all. They find it repugnant. In 2007, a Barna study showed that among non-Christians under 30, only 15 percent had a positive view of Christianity. When they were asked to describe Christianity, the words they gave were judgmental, hypocritical, old-fashioned, and too political.
I’m 32, and sometimes when I mention I’m Catholic, I get a look.
Right, and if people don’t know that there’s something else that Catholicism represents — if they don’t already know about Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, or Sr. Dorothy Stang, about the church’s concern for justice and peace — then there’s no way they would ever learn about any of it in the broader media.
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