The Christian Right is frequently accused of threatening democratic values. But in The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, Jon Shields argues that religious conservatives have in fact dramatically increased and improved democratic participation and that they are far more civil and reasonable than is commonly believed. Shields interviewed leaders of more than thirty Christian Right organizations, observed movement activists in six American cities, and analyzed a wide variety of survey data and movement media. His conclusions are surprising: the Christian Right has reinvigorated American.
If one man symbolized the resurgence of social conservatism in the 1980s, it was the late Jerry Falwell. A fiery fundamentalist, Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to reassert moral traditionalism in the wake of the sexual revolution. When the New York Times reflected on Falwell's legacy after his death in 2007, it emphasized his popularity and power. The right-wing Weekly Standard went even further, crediting the Moral Majority with 'the biggest realignment in modern history.' Such claims have become so uncontroversial that they could have been lifted from the boilerplate in textbooks of American history. The Falwell insurgency, however, turned out to be a myth that persists despite a number of careful studies that have exposed the Moral Majority for what it was: a small network of independent Baptist ministers. Adapted from the source document.
In his 2000 best seller Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Civic Community, Robert Putnam analyzed the links between social capital and civic engagement. Lamenting the decline of "civic America," he called for a Tocquevillean renewal of voluntary association in the United States. In American Grace, Putnam and coauthor David Campbell—who also helped with the preparation of Bowling Alone—return to the analysis of American civil society, focusing their attention on America's changing religious landscape and its implications for democracy. Their basic argument is that while the United States is religiously diverse and pluralistic to a profound degree, and while in recent years it has witnessed growing religious polarization, it has also succeeded in muting religious tensions and hostilities. As they conclude: "How has America solved the puzzle of religious pluralism—the coexistence of religious diversity and devotion? And how has it done so in the wake of growing religious polarization? By creating a web of interlocking personal relationships among people of many different faiths. This is America's grace" (p. 550).Given the importance of religion in American life and the influence of Putnam's broad agenda on much current social science research on social capital and civic engagement, we have decided to organize a symposium around the book, centered on three questions: 1) How is American Grace related to Putnam's earlier work, particularly Bowling Alone, and what are the implications of the continuities and/or discontinuities between these works? 2) What kind of a work of political science is American Grace, and how does it compare to other important recent work dealing with religion and politics in the United States? 3) What are the strengths and weaknesses of Putnam and Campbell's account of "how religion divides and unites us," and what is the best way of thinking about the contemporary significance of religion and politics in the United States and about the ways that the religious landscape challenges U.S. politics and U.S. political science?
Talisse and Maloney seem to think that professors, not ordinary citizens, are the key to a more deliberative democracy. Yet these professors fail to appreciate the reasonableness of the pro-life activists and thinkers they disagree with. For example, they falsely charge even the most deliberative groups with resurrecting an obsolete debate and framing conversations in a fallacious way. They further place an unreasonable justificatory burden on pro-life activists and hold them culpable for framing the debate around the ontology of the embryo (even though many prominent pro-choice thinkers prefer this frame). In drawing such a hard line between academics and activists, they also miss what has been an unavoidable partnership between academics and social movements in our imperfect deliberative republic. Adapted from the source document.
