April 2017.

     This is the first of several failures to connect.  It is also my maiden effort to send something to a magazine, The Atlantic.

     The letter addresses an article by Peter Beinart, a moderately conservative writer.  Mr. Beinart, it seemed to me, was suffering from a malady common to Never-Trumpers following President Two Corinthians’ electoral ascent.  Horrified by the incivility of it all, he was grappling with how to account for the ugliness of the politics without implicating movement conservatism as a culprit.  This is a quintessential grasping-at-straws project.  Mr. Beinart landed on cratering attendance at churches and burgeoning secularism as his analytical magician’s wand.  The intersection of religion and politics fascinates me, so I dashed off a response.

     The critiques to level against Mr. Beinart’s analysis are legion; the letter hits some high points.

Here’s Peter Beinart’s article:

Peter Beinart, “Breaking Faith,” The Atlantic, April 2017, 15-17 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/breaking-faith/517785/).

Here’s the unpublished letter:

     Peter Beinart’s fascinating analysis of the political effects of declining church attendance and growing secularism leaves many germane issues unaddressed.  He identifies a coarsening of political impulses but offers no solution, unless one infers a “re-churching” of America as his tacit wish; however, it should not be assumed willy-nilly that even ugly, high-volume political dialogue is a problem or even especially aberrant across the nation’s history.

     Mr. Beinart concedes many evangelical voters’ animus toward African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and the LGBT community, but needs to explain the grand value of those attending church being slightly less intolerant than evangelicals outside church.  He might also consider whether non-churchgoing evangelicals were already more intolerant than their regularly attending brethren.  Mr. Beinart, moreover, ignores another source of the vitriolic intolerance found in corners of the right:  the GOP’s progressive stultification of its voters through rejection of every inconvenient fact and its playing of culturally charged, dog-whistle politics since the late sixties, tactics employed particularly to motivate evangelical voters.  The GOP’s seemingly calculated failure to fulfill promises to evangelicals makes locating a wellspring of unreasoning anger unchallenging.  Mr. Beinart should also remember that political incivility flows top downward as easily as bottom upward.  Has either major party been a paragon of civility in recent years?  How many political norms can Mr. Beinart name not yet violated by the country’s elected officials?

     Like many right-leaning commentators, try as he might, Mr. Beinart seems unable to resist drawing a fallacious equivalence between the “insurgencies” of the left and the right.  A long-persecuted minority culture’s drive to embrace and preserve its identity cannot be equated with a majority culture’s sense of entitlement and prejudice.

 Mr. Beinart finally must explain why voters across the political spectrum should not gravitate more toward “revolution” than “reform” when confronted by two corporatist parties awash in donations, neither seeming responsive to the individual voter’s travails.  Mr. Beinart seems nostalgic for a mythical past during which politics was played by Marquess of Queensbury rules when in fact, across its history, America’s political game has often been, sometimes by necessity, a freestyle cage match.