The Culture Wars 1983-2010

I date the beginning of the Culture Wars on March 8, 1983. The occasion was a convention for the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida and the speaker was President Ronald Reagan. The speech would come to be known later as The Evil Empire speech. In it, Reagan declared the Soviet Union to be an evil empire. He went on to lament the "watering down of traditional values" and efforts to undermine religion.

Reagan was subsequently derided by the mainstream press for this referencer to the Soviet Union. The fact that this even made news was startling. For generations previously, Americans had accepted this as fact. It wasn't an accepted fact anymore - the Culture Wars were underway.

By Culture Wars, I'm referring to a society-wide attempt to undermine traditional values; an attempt to make all values relative and therefore flexible to the situation at hand. I suppose you could make an argument that this process really started with the hippies in the 1960's, but that movement was more about re-interpreting traditional values, than it was a re-definition of our entire value system. The Culture Wars will shape the future of our nation by changing our very perception of Right and Wrong.

Prominent conservatives have written about the culture wars too. Some have even gone so far as to declare that they are over and conservatives have lost. I think such declarations are premature. The battle for traditional values is far from over.

Several factors have contributed to a new vitality. The popularity of talk radio and "balanced" news outlets like Fox News, the use of the internet as an alternative news source, and a new breed of politicians and others not afraid to publicly address these issues in a straight forward way. In the era before widespread availability of cable television and before the soaring popularity of the internet, the three big networks seemed to have a stranglehold on the dissemination of information. Now that's no longer true. Society has many disparate ways of receiving and interpreting information.

Yet, there are still struggles that remain. The most recent example concerns Lt. General William Boykin, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. General Boykin made the mistake of actually letting his religious views be made public. In speeches given to religious audiences, he made references to the devil as our true enemy and related his belief that the only true God is the judeo-christian God. He asserted that our battles aren't just with flesh and blood, but against more sinister forces of a spiritual nature. The mainstream press and the liberals are outraged. How dare someone presume to actually know Truth?

However, what the General said is not outlandish or evidence of fanatical beliefs. Recent surveys point to the fact that a large percentage of Americans hold these same beliefs. It is only the liberals who see these statements as evidence of some fiendish right-wing plot.

It is encouraging that members of the administration have come out in defense of General Boykin. Still, they need to be more aggressive in their defense and others need to speak up as well. The future of our nation rests on the fact that there is such a thing as right and wrong and that those concepts aren't malleable but are actually written on stone.

Ann Coulter recently did a column on General Boykin. Check it out.