A New Front in the Culture Wars: Public Opinion on Religious Liberty

• In Event: Religion and LGBTQI Issues

Abstract

Beginning in the 1960s, American politics saw an increase in conflict over cultural issues such as abortion, school prayer, and same-sex marriage that James Davison Hunter labeled the "Culture War." Subsequent scholarship revealed that cultural traditionalists were increasingly joining the Republican Party, while cultural modernists increasingly favored the Democratic Party, leading to polarization on cultural issues at both the elite and mass levels. In recent years, however, high profile articles have suggested that the original "Culture Wars" are dying off. The far-right seems to have lost many of the original battles: teacher-led prayer in public schools remains unconstitutional, and the courts have recognized a constitutional right to both abortion and same-sex marriage. In this paper, I argue that we are beginning to see the shift to a new phase in the culture wars in which issues surrounding religious liberty and freedom of conscience are gaining importance. This is symbolized in several recent debates about religious liberty for Christians in American politics, including whether employers have the right to refuse to cover contraceptives due to religious objections, whether businesses have the right to refuse to provide services to LGBT customers, whether religious government employees can refuse to offer marriage licenses to LGBT couples, and whether states can order transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the gender they were assigned at birth. I test my thesis using a 2014 dataset from the Pew Research Center. If my thesis is right that the recent battles over religious liberty (for Christians) represent a new front in the culture wars, principal components factor analysis should reveal that the religious liberty items load on the same factor as abortion, gay marriage, and other "first wave" culture wars attitudes. In addition, we would expect to see polarization on religious liberty along the lines of religious commitment, with the highly committed strongly favoring religious liberty and the less committed strongly opposing religious liberty. Second, we would expect this polarization to move over into party politics, with Republicans/conservatives favoring religious liberty and Democrats/liberals opposing religious liberty (at least within the context of the pro-Christian policies discussed above). Overall the data strongly support my argument that religious liberty for Christians constitutes a new front in the "culture wars." These results suggest that we are likely to see an increase in the number of conflicts over religious liberty for Christians in American politics in the coming years.

Author

• Jeremiah Castle, Central Michigan University