TCP Blog

The human imagination is a powerful thing. When the Bible says that man is made in the image of God the implications for human nature are profound. The beauty, complexity, expanse and literally breathtaking nature of his creation are analogous to a human being’s ability to create works that can inspire, inform and take breath away as well. Thus people are more apt to be moved by a story than an argument, by their emotions rather than their intellect (Indeed the Bible is made up mostly of stories). The right has had this backward for 50 or 60 years, and most of them still have it backward. But there is hope.

There are many examples of right-minded individuals who understand the power of the imagination to move people, and who are working to expose the tyranny of the left’s vision of the world. Part of the mission of The Culture Project is to identify and promote the work of such visionary and creative people.

One of those is Gary Wolf, a New Mexico author who has self-published several books of what he calls hallucinatory reality. We learn from his website that he has “authored a series of futuristic novels that have incorporated themes from the contemporary meltdown: political correctness, multiculturalism, the victim industry, declining standards, affirmative action, feminism, post-modernism, scientific hoaxes on a global scale, and the rest of the intellectual decadence that is reducing the greatest civilization of all time to a state of mental cacophony.”

As he puts it, he is basically “updating Orwell for the era of political correctness.” It should be noted that political correctness isn’t just PC. Those letters sound so harmless, and in effect make light of a very dangerous mindset that is absolutely inimical to liberty. What Mr. Wolf does is take via story this mindset to its logical and ultimately destructive conclusion. We won’t see movies of his books in Hollywood anytime soon, but I’m naïve enough to believe one day it will be common to see in our entertainment industry the shibboleths of the left mocked with the same alacrity currently and almost exclusively inflicted on the right.

The first book I read by Mr. Wolf is the entertaining Workshop of the Second Self. It won’t be the last. Set in any city 2030, the protagonist Clifton Pembroke is a young professional with a promising career in the field of “disability advocacy.” What he does for a living sadly doesn’t appear all that hallucinatory if you are at all familiar with present day Western culture. He helps people raise their disability profile—a single index that encompasses every variety of injustice that may befall an individual.

Oh but what to do with all that crushing injustice? There are an array of benefits that come from embracing your inner grievance, including subsidies and preferential treatment. But for some that just isn’t enough. Their very birth was an injustice, a fundamental travesty that can only be remedied by becoming a different person. They even know who that other person is, and they intend to receive their just compensation—by obtaining the legal right to seize the other’s identity.

Through well-developed characters, believable dialogue, and good descriptive writing Wolf gives us a sense of what a world would be like with all the “good” intentions of leftists fully realized and taken to their logical conclusion. Clifton slowly realizes there is nothing good about a society where perceived injustice becomes an absolute right. Through works that nobody but a small remnant reads anymore he is exposed to ideas that liberate his true self. But as the story unfolds we see that it takes no small amount of courage to stand against the prevailing wisdom of the day. That is no less true in the fictional world of 2030 as it is in our day. Just ask Carrie Prejean.

Ever since I moved to Florida, I've been wondering why my electric bills have been so high. The costs have more than quadrupled from what I was paying in Michigan. Well, it turns out that this is because the local power company is replacing coal power with solar power, possibly illegally. In a state where electric bills are already very high because of the need for year-round air conditioning, and where a lot of people are unable to pay their mortgages, this kind of mismanagement of utilities is simply criminal.

This is a story that shows us the need for The Culture Project and other organizations that know we on the right need to do more than talk and complain about the left’s cultural hegemony.

Yesterday my precocious seven-year-old son came home from his first grade class with a question: “Daddy, is the earth getting warmer?” My 17-year-old daughter often comes home from high school with tales of the pap and left-wing inanities she gets from her public school teachers, but when my first grader did, it went from annoying to disturbing.

I awoke this morning thinking that I need to make an appointment with the principal of the school and tell her I don’t appreciate my son being indoctrinated into global warming groupthink. But there was something I needed to consider. My wife works as a fifth grade teacher’s aid at the elementary school my son attends. I asked her if she would be uncomfortable if I talked to the principle about this.

Her answer hit me in the gut. She basically said it won’t do any good. All the textbooks are filled with the environmental religion, and all the teachers basically believe it. This is what we’ve come to in America circa 2009: any semblance of ideological or philosophical or worldview balance doesn’t exist. And why would it, when the overwhelming majority of textbook writers, generally professors at left dominated universities, and publishers and teachers are products of the left.

Whether we call ourselves libertarians or classical liberals or conservatives, this is what we get for ignoring cultural influence professions these last 50 years. And we daily see the very dangerous results in our politics and public policy. Oh yes, there has been plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the right about culture over the years, but how many organizations are actively recruiting young right-minded people into these professions? Sadly, not very many. That had better change, before average middle of the road Americans who don’t care much for politics completely forget what made this country great.

Back to our story. Fortunately my three children question everything that comes out of the mainstream, be it media, entertainment or education. Most of their peers are not so fortunate to have parents who teach them that just because something is said by a teacher, or some “expert” on TV, or in a movie or documentary doesn’t make it the truth. As the old bumper sticker said that used to adorn the bumpers of our progressive friends' cars, “Question Authority.”

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P.S. Via Big Hollywood I saw an interview with the author of the #1 selling book in America, Mark Levin. The message is getting out, but talking about getting more right-minded folks into the cultural influence professions is not enough. We need mechanisms and strategies and programs to make that happen. Nonetheless, it is important that we are seeing more and more influential conservatives who get it:

A lot of conservatives are saying one area where we'd like to push back against the statists is the schools, Hollywood, and the mainstream media. How do we do that? What's the best way conservatives can start pushing back in those areas and start to level the playing field a little bit?

The way we do that is to start becoming part of those institutions. You know, the statist doesn't have a birthright ownership to Hollywood or the media, generally speaking, or the school system and, you know, we conservatives for a very long time believed in "live and let live" and that's completely understandable.

We believed in doing the best you can for yourself and your family and going to church and synagogue and being a good citizen and that's very, very important. But now, I think we have to extend that being a good citizen means being open to being a professor or schoolteacher or an editor or reporter or a director or assistant producer in Hollywood -- and there is no reason why we need to feed forever these very crucial institutions to the statists.

We need to fight back on all levels. We need to become smarter and more numerous. We need to explain to our children and our grandchildren, regardless of what they learned from television and their schools, that America is a magnificent place -- that when we wake up every morning, we should thank God that we're here and that unlike the statists, we are here to preserve and better our society -- not to destroy it and then transform it. These are the over-arching principles that we need to spread. We need to spread the word about the greatness of America. We need to start in our homes and in our own communities.

By now most everybody knows that Miss California did the unthinkable in polite politically correct society: She expressed her biblically based belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman. This was in a beauty pageant and she likely didn’t win the competition, coming in second, because she didn’t give the "right" answer.

The question posed to her came from a professed homosexual, “celebrity blogger” and pageant judge Perez Hilton. He asked the following question:

"Vermont recently became the fourth state to legalize same sex marriage. Do you think every state should follow suit? Why or why not?"

As a Christian she gave the only answer she could honestly give, that marriage should be between a man and a woman. How dare she! Oh the controversy of it all. Hilton lambasted her; calling her at one point another word for a female dog.

It would be easy to write this off as the ravings of a lunatic (watch an interview of the guy with Matt Lauer and you’ll see why), but this one man’s idiocy is indicative of the left’s objectives in their drive for same sex “marriage.” As Frank Rich did last Saturday in the New York Times, all who dare stand up for marriage between a man and a woman are considered by the rabid left as bigots akin to racists.

This episode is an object lesson in what would happen if they got their way and their distorted version of marriage was codified into law. They do not care about marriage. What they care about is forcing Americans to agree with them that homosexuality is the moral equivalent of heterosexuality. If you don’t agree you must be shut up or shouted down, and if necessary have the harsh hand of the law force you to alter your beliefs. I trust before it comes to that, that the common sense of the American people will see through the charade of people like Perez Hilton and their manic desire to change the fundamental building block of society.

As an aside, if sexual attraction is the equivalent to skin color, as the California Supreme Court said when they declared marriage as we’ve known it forever wasn’t good enough, the argument could be made that those who think it morally deviant are bigots. But people turn from the homosexual lifestyle all the time. Check out “Luca Was Gay” by Italian singer Giuseppe Povia. The lyrics are a fascinating and powerful testimony to the influences that affect a person's sexuality. If you read the attending article you’ll see that Povia experienced the wrath of homosexual activists, including death threats. Just further evidence that that hate and bigotry on this issue reside on the left.

I was supposed to head to the Chicago "Tea Party"yesterday, but unfortunately I was out of town on business. I wondered how the mainstream press was going to cover all these parties, and it was clear they were something that could not be ignored. Some of these photos in the Chicago Tribune are priceless. These events give us hope, if I may say so, that many Americans feel very strongly that the ever growing, ever encroaching hand of government will not be tolerated forever. Here is one of my favorites:

Here is my new Internet atheist friend replying to my missive. I'm working on a reply to her reply.

Hi Again Mike
 
You make some really interesting points.
 
First of all let me thank you for saying you disagree with me rather than that I am wrong. Many Christians who write to me are not as respectful as you are right off the bat. So to me, your email may be a good sign for the future.
 
I am an optimist. I think things can always get better. As for your supposition that I don't know many Christians, that is incorrect. Many of my close friends here in Brooklyn are church-going, and consider themselves to be Christian. They are not evangelical, however, and many go to rather progressive churches. Also, I am related by marriage to some very devout Christians. And part of the reason I write about belief and non-belief is my relationship with them. Although it is better now, we have had a rocky past. They told me I was wrong, and I was really unhappy with that...anyway - the story is in my book, Nothing. My husband's family has many conservative Christians in it, and I am very close with some and at odds with others...but then, that is the way families go I suppose!
 
I find it interesting that you feel attacked by the secular society and I feel beset upon by religion. And many atheists feel under attack by the Christians who want to tear down the very carefully constructed wall between church and state. Our founding fathers were certainly Christian, but some were very remotely so, and Jefferson would not speak much on his faith - although I think he was pretty much a non-believer, and certainly a non-believer in a personal god. I also have strong suspicions that Ben Franklin was not a religious man in the sense of the word we would use today. Of course, John Adams was very devout...so I think in fact it ran the gamut.
 
I also think that we should all live and let live...but how can we do that if you want to pray in public school and I do not? Or you want to live and let live but not let gay people get married? I am not going to defend gay marriage. I am for it, because I do not see it as immoral and I do not have the same issues you have with the definition of marriage. But I think that marriage should be the done in church and civil unions should be the what the gov't can do...that way I would have a civil union as I was not married in a church. But all the government laws about the two would have to be the same, tax laws, inheritance laws, and other rights - and THAT would be tricky! That is alot of laws to rewrite to include the language of civil unions, but then the religious people might be less upset.. That said,  I do understand what the issue is doing to our country as a lighting rod for debate about faith and how that faith should or should not be applied to the larger society, and I think it is like jumping into the deep end of the pool. We very well might sink.
 
I think that you should read Austin Dacey's book called The Secular Conscience. He fully addresses your concerns about the religious conversation in the public square, and he feels that the conversation should be public, but not dominated by the religious- there is a strong secular tradition as well as a religious one in this country - and I think we need to acknowledge both sides. I also do not like the word DEBATE - as I think that is not a good idea, we do not need debates, we need conversations.
 
I did not see Religulous...and although I have read many of the new atheist books, I have also read Tim Keller's books and some of Rick Warren too.
 
There is plenty of spite, distrust and anger to go around. But I remain hopeful that we can somehow agree to differ as people in one great nation and live in peace and harmony...really, I mean that! Somehow, though, we might all have to find ways to feel less persecuted for what we are and what we feel. That might be the real trick, but email exchanges like this one do add up to something important.
 
Cheer!  And I hope you have a  Happy Easter!
 
Nica
 

I came across an op ed piece in USA Today by a Nica Lalli called “No Religion? No Problem.” It is an interesting attempt to bring some mutual respect to the ongoing culture wars. But as you’ll see from my reply below it falls short.

Hi Nica,

I came across your USA Today piece and thought it rather refreshing. Then I saw your Youtube interview and although I would disagree with much or most of what you say, thought that refreshing as well. I think most Christians and most atheists or nothings are inclined to get along. You will always have the absolutists on either side, like the recent rash of fundamentalist atheist books that trash religious faith, but most believers--whether they believe in nothing or something--understand we all live by faith. And our faith, yours and mine, is based on limited knowledge.

This is why I believe that all of us could use a good dose of humility. I think you get that, and I think that attitude comes out in the way you talk and write. (I think you would enjoy Michael Novak's book No One Sees God. His Christian response to the radical, and not so radical, atheists is also refreshing.) Yet what I think you don't get is that that most Christians, like my wife and I, are pretty live and let live. Given where you live you probably don't interact with a great many Christians (yes, the ones that believe in heaven and hell) on a daily basis. So I think you over generalize based on anecdote or what you see in the media, or I don't know.

It's not so much that individual Christians fear individual atheists or agnostics. It's much bigger than that. We live in a culture that is dominated by a secular oriented left. In this I mean education, the arts and entertainment, and the media. Christians, although we are a numerical majority, swim in a culture that is positively hostile to our values. If you don’t believe this or think this is overstated, look how Christian views of homosexuality are now viewed by our cultural elites. Because we believe homosexual behavior is immoral, and that marriage is not a “right” any two or more people can engage in regardless of their gender, we are painted as intolerant, hate filled bigots. When in fact the truth of the matter is that the secular left is where the intolerant, hate filed bigots reside.

All you need do is read the comments on articles about this issue. The vulgarity and bile that comes from the Christian haters is really scary to behold. Then you have so called gay marriage shoved down our throats by unelected judges who compare us to racists. And it isn’t just our sex-saturated culture that threatens our values. We are told with a straight face that our religiously based values have no place in the public square. We are simply not welcomed. If we dare speak up we are compared to the Taliban. We are told this as if all moral values are not faith based. All moral values derive from somewhere. There is no neutral place that makes one set of values somehow more pluralistic than another. (A great piece that argues this as well as I’ve ever seen is “Law, Feelings, and Religion at the Bar in Iowa.”)

If we don’t bow down at the bar of Darwin or Al Gore, we are called anti-scientific troglodytes. We are mocked and ridiculed by some entertainers who think we are the dangerous ones (see Religulous). If one of us dares pray in a public school or puts up a copy of the 10 Commandments in a courthouse we are told we are going to destroy this greatest experiment in republican liberty man has ever known (which would dumbfound the founders of America). We are told we must whitewash all vestiges of religion from the public square, and keep our religion in the closet.

Yes I generalize, but the hostility we experience as traditionalist Christians, and Jews as well, is real.  One would have to be blind to argue that it does not exist. So while I very much like your idea of bringing mutual respect for all believers—in nothing or something—I’m afraid at a national level that is not going to happen any time soon.

Who knew that Michael Kinsley would become a raging capitalist in his older age. Kinsley has been a faithful left-winger throughout his career in journalism, always ready to take the side of the statists in any argument. But for whatever reason, when it comes to the news business he is all for free enterprise. No “too big to fail’ entities there for him. A recent article by him show that his instincts are very un-left like.

But help may be on the way. Suggestions are pouring in -- sometimes with checks attached -- that newspapers should become nonprofit foundations, or that foundations should supply investigative teams and foreign bureaus and other expensive accessories. Or that limits should be placed on the nefarious practice of "aggregation" -- Web sites lifting the news, via links, from other sites. Or that customers should be forced, somehow, to pay. Two recent articles in Slate argued that newspapers (1) actually play a fairly unimportant role in our democracy and (2) are in this pickle because of financial shenanigans, not inexorable forces of technology. But let's say these are both wrong: that technology is on the verge of removing some traditionally vital organs of the body politic. What should we do?

How about nothing? Capitalism is a "perennial gale of creative destruction" (Joseph Schumpeter). Industries come and go. A newspaper industry that was a ward of the state or of high-minded foundations would be sadly compromised. And for what?

Very un-Obamalike, where the mantra to any economic struggle is that “we have to do something!” As one who has been aware of Kinsley and read and seen his work for decades this is really shocking. If you read this piece you will see that his attitude toward his fellow citizens is normally what would be anathema to the average modern liberal. He actually believes that individuals should decide what is best for them, not the government or some other entity, at least as it regards news, and cars. Welcome to the club, Michael. May more of your pals on the left join the parade.

I’ve had some problems with some things Rod Dreher says as a “Crunchy Con,” (“Jimmy Carter Was Right”?) but as a self-confessed traditionalist he comes down on the same side as I do in many things. His recent article “Secular liberalism as consensus” is distressingly accurate. He does a good job of clarifying our fundamental challenge.

Liberalism depends on the modernist conviction that neither religion nor tradition nor inherited loyalties has any binding authority on us. Anything that denies equal freedom is to be condemned as oppressive and marginalized, even outlawed.

This is the road we are headed down with same sex marriage, if the courts have their way. It will not be enough to give these people this supposed “right.” Anyone who has moral qualms about homosexual behavior will be pilloried as a bigot and hate monger.

The real problem is that there is enough residue of traditional biblical based morality in the cultures of the West that the consequences of secular liberalism have not been fully felt. The reason it is winning is because the left owns the culture, and we are forced to make negative arguments against expanding more "rights" and personal freedoms. Not a good recipe for victory. We need to learn to make positive arguments for traditional morality and begin to permeate our culture with stories that make that vision attractive.

With yet another ruling today by a state supreme court imposing by judicial fiat same sex “marriage” on the citizens of Iowa, we can see the continuing effort of our cultural elites to change American perceptions of marriage and family. Maggie Gallagher, who is doing great work in this area, has an ongoing series on “The Amazing Power of Culture” at National Review Online. I’ve been alive long enough to see significant changes to American cultural perceptions of marriage. Gallagher gives a concise overview:

Between 1960 and 1980, cultural elites (those with cultural power, the power to name reality) increasingly defined marriage as the problem and family fragmentation as the solution. But between about 1980 and 2000, elite opinion on marriage did something remarkable: It changed.

In 1990, if you said, "The ideal for a child is a marriage mom and dad," many scholars, reporters, policymakers, and writers vigorously contested the idea; the counterfactual or contest response was, "Single mothers are just as good as married mothers, and the idea that marriage is special hurts women's freedom."

By 2000, if you said, "The ideal for a child is a married mom and dad," people began to say, "Duh, that's obvious." (At least, if you added, "provided that marriage is not high-conflict or violent.")

I remember very well in the 1970s and even 1980s when it was the most natural thing to see the family portrayed as a patriarchal nightmare of dysfunction. You may remember in 1992 when Dan Quayle gave a speech about the hit show Murphy Brown, and the main character having a child out of wedlock. The message was that this was basically another lifestyle choice. Of course Quayle was panned by the media, but something shocking happened in 1993. There was an article on the cover of The Atlantic magazine written by Barbara Defoe Whitehead titled, “Dan Quayle was Right.”

This started a wave of publicity about social science research proving that in tact, two parent, heterosexual families produce healthier children, psychologically, emotionally, and physically. Even though the left continues to hate the traditional, bourgeois family structure, they cannot claim that in general it is harmful. It has been gratifying to see them shut up.

But of course we are now undergoing an assault on the traditional family in the guise of the “right” for two people of the same sex to marry. The irony in this historical flow is that marriage has become such a wonderful thing that our cultural elites want homosexuals to have the “right” to it too! It wasn’t that long ago that the homosexual movement hated marriage, because it reflected traditional values that they flouted with their sexuality. No more. Now they love marriage so much they want it for themselves.

The real issue, of course, is not that they care about marriage. What they care about is by force of law making every American agree with them that homosexuality is the moral equivalent of heterosexuality. If you do not agree with this and have the gall to say so, they want you by force of law--very important point--to be branded a bigot and hatemonger akin to a racist. That is the real agenda behind the push for same sex “marriage.” Mark my words. You read it here.