The Culture War is Killing People
Francis Collins has walked the minefield of faith and fact before. A scientist, geneticist and medically trained he was lauded and praised by evangelicals because he is one of them. They used him to “prove” the Bible is consistent with science, that reason is friends with evangelicalism. I would use him as an example of compartmentalization: the ability of people to hold contradictory beliefs by putting them in different categories.
Now, he has issued a challenge to his fellow evangelicals about the culture war they so love to wage — a war aimed at wiping out the social freedoms of others — especially the myriad groups of people they despise.
In the bluntest terms he has used to date Collins said: “The culture war is killing people.” This is true, especially in the case of Covid-denialism and anti-vax nonsense, which is what he was referring to, but the “culture war” has been killing people all along. One difference in the Covid war is many of the victims are culture warriors themselves who imagine themselves saints, patriots and martyrs. While I don’t wish death on anyone if they follow their impulses and die I won’t mourn, but it does upset me that they spread a virus that is killing others.
Collins pulled one tactic that is a favorite of evangelicals, portraying them as victims when they are not allowed to victimize others. Collins claimed evangelicals have been “victimized by the misinformation and lies and conspiracies that are floating around, particularly on social media and some of it in cable news.” The problem is evangelicals are often the people who put it there. While dishonest “news” sites, such as Fox, may push this nonsense, so are thousands and thousands of evangelical pulpits. This sort of bullshit is coming out of the churches and many on the far Right take their cues for crazy from evangelicals.
It wasn’t the Republican Party that took over evangelicalism and imposed their beliefs on them, it was evangelicalism that took over the GOP and made them their loyal servants. As for the alt-Right and the sheeted bigots, they were on friendly terms with many an evangelical church from the very beginning.
The concept of a “culture war” was enunciated by the far Right Patrick Buchanan and introduced to the then generally secular Republicans. He told a GOP convention, “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” Buchanan told them “we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” Republicans have been saying the same thing, like a broken record, for the last 30 years. The difference was when Buchanan said it he was on the fringe, today such rhetoric is the Republican mainstream and those who still cling to a concept of actual constitutional, limited government, are considered heretics.
The idea of a culture war came from evangelicals first. Buchanan arrived late in the game. Jerry Falwell and his “ministry” issued a “Declaration of War” for a “Holy War” that said it would go after women’s reproductive rights, erotica, gays, an alleged assault on “the home and family,” and against socialism — as if that is somehow linked to their moral agenda.
In fact, one of the great ironies is the fallacy of socialism thinks a complex economic structure with millions of actors, and trillions of economic choices can be centrally planned. No one person can possibly know enough to centrally plan something where the knowledge needed to plan is diffused throughout the country — and the world. But a similar premise hides inside evangelicalism’s desire to plan and control the private lives of 332 million Americans.
They are going after the most personal aspects of people lives and saying the state should centrally control it. Economic needs are at least relatively consistent for all — but the social lives of people is what makes them individuals, their very identity is wrapped up in those choices. You can say these are the aspects of life that come from the very soul of people — which makes evangelicals socialists of the soul. I would also note, that in order to control people social lives, they would ultimately have to assert control over markets and abolish free exchange. After all you can’t have “morality” if people are free to view sinful things on the Internet, or read banned books. To control people social existence you must ultimately take control of their economic life as well.
Right now God’s Own Party is waging a war on LGBT kids in a range of laws across the country that would increase social isolation for these children and subject them to greater state control. While religious conservatives are screaming ONLY parents should have the right to decided if their children should wear masks at school, they are also pushing laws to forbid parents to offer medical supervision and care for their transgender children. Parents may decide masks — which protect others — but the Republicans are criminalizing medical care for trans kids — which hurt no one and saves lives.
Studies show young people who receive medical and emotional support when they come out as trans have lower suicide rates. As NBC reported, a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health, found “Gender-affirming hormone therapy is strongly linked to a lower risk of suicide and depression for transgender youth.”
More than 20 states have considered bills aiming to ban gender-affirming health care for transgender minors this year alone. Only Arkansas has passed a law completely banning access to gender-affirming health care, including puberty blockers and hormones, for trans minors, but a judge blocked that law from taking effect in July pending the outcome of litigation. Tennessee enacted a more limited law that bans doctors from providing gender-affirming hormone treatment and surgery to prepubescent minors.
These are measures pushed by Republicans and endorsed by evangelicals who regularly ridicule and demonize trans kids. But to be quite honest, many evangelicals don’t care, quite the contrary, they want LGBT people dead! In many a pulpit they have preached gay people are “worthy of death.” My high school principal, one of the founders of the Moral Majority, told them “I know what you and I feel about these queers, these fairies. We wish we could get in our cars and run them down while they march.” He reminded evangelicals they could use anti-gay hate to rally people to their culture war.
In a radio debate I had with the Vice President of the Moral Majority, Greg Dixon, he said he supported putting gay people to death but it wasn’t possible to get that sort of law passed at the time. But at the very least, he said, “I believe that homosexuals ought to be in jail, I certainly do.”
We should also be clear that it was the socialists of the soul who started the culture war, not their victims. I heard conservative Richard Ebeling argue gays started the culture war and after his speech I ripped him a new one. He tried to backtrack but his strategy was to blame the victims for the war that was waged on them!
Women who had their reproductive freedom stripped from them and then fought to regain that right where said to be in a “culture war,” but those who attacked those rights in the first place go unmentioned. Ebeling blamed gays for resisting what social conservatives had done to them. Fighting lobotomies, prison sentences, incarceration in mental asylums, electroshock “therapy,” and inequality of rights is a “culture war” but torturing, imprisoning and deny rights in the first place apparently was not.
Social interventionists, led by evangelicals for well over a century, have tried to control the highly personal, private lives of people. That war on social freedom repeatedly led to tragedy and death. Dr. Collins is correct, the culture war in regards to Covid is doing just that on a grander scale, but the premise of letting people die in the name of “saving the culture” has been around longer than any one of us, and from the beginning evangelicals have been among the most fervent advocates for this war.
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