The Campaign to De-Christianize American Public Spaces, Part Deux

A few years ago in Tablet, I wrote a piece favorably comparing the campaign to de-Christianize American public spaces to the then emerging campaign to police micro-aggressions. I pointed out that the campaign to de-Christianize American public spaces relied on legal mandarins exercising counter-majoritarian power to protect a marginalized minority -- primarily Jews and atheists -- making rights-based claims motivated largely by the pursuit of what we would today call "inclusivity" and "belonging" in ways that anticipated today’s successor campaigns to control the speech of the majority in deference to the ostensible sensitivities of minorities.

As I wrote back then,

“The minority told the majority that they weren’t allowed to do things that they had long been habituated to doing, and which they regarded as a core part of their own identity and faith. The impetus for this legal campaign, whose reasoning was judged to be sound by the Supreme Court, was of course not purely formalistic or doctrinal. It emerged from out of the status politics of everyday life—an exercise of power by a rising minority, namely Jews, to remove practices that made (some of them) feel like aliens in their own land.

The curbing of open religious displays in American public spaces was a symbolic concession to the equal dignity of the Jews sought by a faction of a group no longer content to occupy a marginal place in the life of the country. In turn, the success of the campaign helped incite the emergence in the 1970s of the Christian right, which helped bring Ronald Reagan to power, beginning a series of conservative political victories won on the basis of culture war issues that in the end proved powerless to prevent the eventual triumph of secular, liberal values, no matter how many statehouses or branches of the federal government Republicans controlled.

Both the movement against religious displays and the current campaign against microaggressions were attempts by minorities to restrict the freedom of expression of majorities. Both assailed unspoken but strongly held premises: In the case of the ACLU campaign, that America was a Christian nation, and in the microaggression campaign, that America is a white nation. Both were bold incursions on the liberty of the majority of the country.”

Having identified what these campaigns to restrict the freedom of expression of the majority in deference to the hunger for belonging and inclusion of minorities shared in common, I went on to point out where these campaigns diverged:

“The difference, of course, is that the ACLU campaign was conducted within the spirit and framework of the U.S. Constitution, with reference to its underlying principles, while the microaggression campaign seeks to bend or trash that framework in the name of some higher principle of recompense for group suffering. The ACLU campaign sought to satisfy a Jewish craving for recognition by affirming a neutral principle that would apply to all, while the therapeutic state divides the country into a class of the oppressors, whose freedom must be fettered, and a class of the oppressed, whose interests must be explicitly bolstered. To the Christian right, this was a distinction without a difference. But the terms of the Constitutional settlement have survived the onslaught of the Christian Right and become an accepted part of our understanding of our country because it was consistent with the genius of the American system. Whereas what began as a simple description of a certain kind of back-handed speech act has grown, through the slow accretion of jargon and practice, into the conceptual germ of a machinery to transform America by administrative fiat.”

The distinction between the recourse to a neutral principle, (no religion may be established by the state) versus one that calls for active measures to bolster the marginalized at the expense of the majority (all must be subject to a disciplinary apparatus charged with ensuring the psychic well-being of the marginalized) still seems vitally important to me. The movement from the former to the latter claim marks out the movement from liberalism to Successor Ideology. If I were writing the piece today I would add that the campaign to de-Christianize American public space, in addition to being facially neutral in its prohibitions, was also relatively clear in what it forbade, whereas a key feature of the micro-aggression campaign was both its tendency to expand without limit the scope of what it regulated and its complementary insistence that subjective offense was dispositive of the question of when a violation had occurred.

These new elements, derived from therapeutic culture and the therapeutic statism that emerged from it, as well as a particular strand of radical feminism that influences both, have been placed in the service of an all-encompassing identitarian monomania that conceives of the world as a matrix of interlocking oppressions that pervade every aspect of our public and private lives and our moral and intellectual inheritance. Our world must continually be “decolonized” and “whiteness” made the unmoved mover that accounts for all other ills. Institutionalize these features by hiring a whole new layer of administrators to enforce them, and you have the ingredients of ideological succession.

But I want to take a moment to glance back for a moment at the prior campaign to de-Christianize American public space as the ground from which ideological succession grew. The campaign was driven by a major non-governmental organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, which styled itself as at once the neutral and non-partisan defender of free speech — litigating on behalf of Communists and Nazis, pornographers and gun rights enthusiasts alike — and the leaders of an agenda to fetter the expression of the majority in response to the sensitivities of a minority within a minority. Here is the key point: The organization successfully portrayed two goals which are in significant tension with one another — the protection of unpopular speech and the restriction of popular speech — as one and the same goal.