American Civil War talk is all the rage this New Year.
No, not that war, the one that cost 620,000 lives and was evoked by President Biden to castigate Senate Democrats and Republicans who are blocking passage of new election-ballot rules. Rather, The Guy refers to the drumbeat of warnings that the disunited United States may in the near future face an internal legal and economic cold war or some kind of hot war.
National Public Radio's Ron Elving reports that "not long ago the idea of another American Civil War seemed outlandish. These days, the notion has not only gone mainstream, it seems to suddenly be everywhere." He summarized anxiety-producing polls that show a polarized nation, and noted that 434,000,000 firearms are in civilian hands.
Then there's New Yorker Editor David Remnick's article "Is a Civil War Ahead?" New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg likewise wonders, "Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?" A Times op-ed by former National Security Council staffers Jonathan Stevenson and Steven Simon offers "the worst case scenario" in which "the United States as we know it could come apart at the seams" with "insurrection, secession, insurgency and civil war."
New January books include "The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future" by novelist Stephen Marche, who sees virtually inevitable doom, and the slightly more upbeat "How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them" by Barbara F. Walter of the University of California San Diego. (Is it mere coincidence that The Atlantic's London writer Tom McTague is just out with "How Britain Falls Apart"?)
One typical forecaster is all the more interesting because he's Canadian. Thomas Homer-Dixon of Royal Roads University issued a New Year's Eve alarm in the influential Globe and Mail. He believes that as soon as 2025 "American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship."
Outlandish? Perhaps, but these earnest utterances from the cultural elite obviously invite journalists' Big Think assessment. The Guy reminds media that religion is always central to what occurs in culture and suggests ideas to run past good non-partisan sources. After all, that “JesusLand” cartoon, and variations on it, have been around for a decade or two.
Religious currents often anticipate subsequent socio-political events. The leadup to America's Civil War included William Lloyd Garrison's first abolitionist speech, delivered in 1829 at Boston's Park Street Church. Soon Charles Finney and less celebrated evangelists were promoting the cause.
By 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of a noted pastor, electrified Christian passions with her "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Well before the Confederate secession, the slavery issue produced southerners' 1844 walkout from the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Southern Baptist Convention split with northern Baptists in 1845.
There's no simple parallel today. (For simplicity's sake, The Guy here omits U.S. Catholicism, which reporters will want to pursue.) Would experts say Protestants have never been more divided?
Today's contest between "Mainline" and "Evangelical" believers is broader than the "Fundamentalist-Modernist" rancor of old. Meanwhile, evangelicalism is rattled internally over sexual scandals, women's role, race relations and grass-roots Trumpism. Many African-American Protestants remain alienated from White evangelicals who share their beliefs.
Then this. A great American religious depression began around 2000 with simultaneous societal polarization. Is this coincidence or cause and effect? Do observers think previously thriving religions contributed to a sense of American calm, cohesion, well-being and stability?
Homer-Dixon figures lower church involvement plus the relative decline of the white Christian population lets "right-wing ideologues" inflame "fears that traditional U.S. culture is being erased and whites are being 'replaced.' " New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic, says "with organized Christianity's decline" the country became polarized in metaphysics as well as politics the past 20 or 40 years. Countless citizens feel liberal cultural elites disdain their religious faith and worry about trends away from old-school First Amendment protections.
Is this whole discussion overblown by those Chris Stirewalt of TheDispatch.com, calls "democracy-is-dead alarmists"?
The 2022 civil war jeremiads come from liberals, especially because they assert Donald Trump's claim to have been robbed of re-election by fraud, with wide Republican support, undermines the credibility of U.S. democracy.
Yet, if one backs up a year or two, a major originator of this civil war chatter is the political and Christian conservative, David French (reachable via press.inquiries@macmillan.com), a #NeverTrump evangelical who wrote 2020's "Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation." Click here for a tmatt “On Religion” column about that book and its author.
French contends the nation is more divided than at any point since the (actual) Civil War, and sees no important religious, legal or other cultural force "pulling Americans together more than it is pulling us apart." He'd be interesting to hear out on the religious factor in polarization and what churches and preachers should be doing to help.