John Hobbins, who seems to have become a far more irascible and combative blogger than he was when my previous metacatholic identity used to interact with him, clearly believes they do, and assigns active military status to those who, in his view, are engaged with them. He tries, with some irony, to do this to me in a comment here.
As for the culture wars, it’s touching that you neither believe in them nor take part in them. I don’t think that changes the fact that they exist, and that you are willy-nilly a participant in them.
Apparently one is not allowed to engage in certain topics of debate without taking sides in this war, and if one thinks one can do so, one is a naive fool.
Well, it might be that in the United States they exist in reality, rather than as an oft repeated rhetorical device to stigmatise those who disagree with you, and legitimise a range of un-Christian and irrational tactics from careless misrepresentation to downright lies in the service of a greater cause.
I don’t know about the case in the United States. What I do know is that Americans are very good at trying to drag others into their wars, literal and metaphorical. What I also know is that (with an admittedly significant and vociferous minority excepted) this concept of being caught up in a culture war is simply not where things seem to be in the majority of places, contexts and situations in the UK, even when the same topics are debated with similar passion.
I see no reason why I should have my disagreement with John characterised as a military action.
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Is it really true that military metaphors are suspect in Great Britain? Perhaps they are now out of bounds in the religious sphere, but that might be an expression of how little people in GB care one way or the other about the religious sphere.
Are military metaphors out of bounds in the political sphere, the Ersatz religion of European elites? Maybe so, but if so, in a particular way. That is, if I google “culture war” and BBC, to judge from the top hits, it turns out that the term is widely employed for cultural-political conflict elsewhere – in the US, Canada, the Muslim world – but not in good ol’ England. That’s a little bit revealing. I sense an undercurrent of condescension.
Yes, John, military metaphors are out of bounds here in the UK, certainly in the religious sphere and to a large extent in the political one. We have suffered from two major wars in the last century, and resent being dragged into new ones, real or metaphorical, by our American “friends”. Our parents and grandparents saw and told us what war could do to a country and to the lives of ordinary people, something yours only saw from a distance. We don’t want to repeat it, in our country or anyone else’s.
“Culture” is of course what other people do. In England (I do not speak for the rest of the UK) what we do is clearly and self-evidently natural. England is, after all, God’s own country.
Read what irony you will into the previous paragraph, but consider also the extent many of us from diverse countries and cultures assume an equivalent to this as our default position!
Ah, to be aware of our default positions.
In the US the culture wars were trigged by Supreme Court decisions. You had a profoundly democratic country confronted with a very activist court. The majority of people support the majority of what the 50-70s court did, but almost all feel the court overstepped. Also the great depression was comparatively worse in the US than the UK, while the boom after the war much larger. So the Baby boomer surge was proportionately greater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uspop.svg)
There is no reason why they should exist in the UK. This is a debate among Americans essentially about how best to govern America.
The majority of the US population also agreed with what the South did during Jim Crow, too. 16 states still had miscegenation laws when they were declared unconstitutional in 1967.
I’m going to raise an additional question on this topic later in a separate post, but I hope all of you will comment there, since I think we’ve got an interesting question on the appropriateness of “culture war” language outside the US.
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