The poll numbers keep supporting this headline: Liberals have won the culture war

Anyone remember Pat Buchanan?

He was a far-right conservative who ran an insurgent 1992 campaign against George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination. When Bush announced his desire to run for a second term, it was assumed that he would have no real challenger in his own party. But Buchanan was a bomb thrower and excoriated Bush for being too moderate. America needed a strong voice that didn’t want to compromise on core issues.

Buchanan actually had a strong showing during the primary, despite the fact that he was facing an incumbent president. He earned 38% of the votes in New Hampshire, just 15 points behind Bush. In most early states, Buchanan received 25-30% of the vote and hung around for a lot longer than many would have assumed.

Once Bush locked up the nomination, he did the traditional party building gesture of inviting his opponent to speak at the Republican National Convention. On August 17th, 1992, he delivered a speech that will be remembered for decades. Buchanan stated:

The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs.
…[M]y friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.

This was quickly dubbed the “Culture Wars” speech and set the tone for electoral politics for three decades. Buchanan (a Roman Catholic) gave that speech right as Protestant evangelicalism was hitting its peak in terms of both raw numbers and political influence. It seemed like every discussion was about abortion, homosexuality, pornography or the role of women in a changing society.

Buchanan and his supporters wanted, at a minimum, to stop the leftward drift that they believed was happening in the United States on social issues. If not push the country in a more conservative direction. 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.

Double-thinking about atheists: What's up with their role in America's hot public square?

I live in Southern Appalachia, which is in Bible Belt territory on anyone’s map of America.

Then again, I live near the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — a place where the nerdy PhD’s per-square-foot count is the same or higher than, well, the California Institute of Technology or the University of California, Berkeley. In other words, it’s surprisingly easy to run into local atheists and agnostics just about anywhere one engages in conversation (take the gym, for example).

Are these unbelievers hostile? Let’s just say that the real people I meet in this niche religious group (#ducking) are different from those I encounter in cyberspace. Maybe there’s something about the Southern Highlands that attracts friendly atheists-agnostics?

I thought about this phenomenon when I saw this recent Graphs about Religion headline from political scientist (and GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge: “Just How Much Do Americans Dislike Atheists?”

This new Burge piece reminded me of his earlier piece: “No One Participates in Politics More than Atheists — Even White Evangelicals.” Remember these reflections on the Cooperative Election Study question: “Have you done any of the following activities in the previous month?”

The group that is most likely to contact a public official? Atheists.
The group that puts up political signs at the highest rates? Atheists.
HALF of atheists report giving to a candidate or campaign in the 2020 presidential election cycle.
And while they don’t lead the pack when it comes to attending a local political meeting, they only trail Hindus by four percentage points.

Anyway, I stashed these Burge URLs in my growing “Thinker piece” file — along with a very interesting (and I would argue, related) Pew Research Center post with this headline: “One-in-six Americans have taken steps to see less of someone on social media due to religious content.”

Let’s try to connect a few dots.