the culture war is always about children
not a culture war post
The culture war is always about children.
Every culture war. All culture wars. Whether one ongoing war in which partisans are continuously amalgamated into one of two blobs, or multiple wars in which partisans find enemies becoming allies and allies becoming enemies, depending on the topic.
All these wars are about children.
I mean that simply, in the sense that the hottest fighting takes place around the intersection of these topics and children. I mean that in practical terms, in that the aims of the movements all seemingly revolve around policies related to education and public safety.
I don’t think this is a right-wing talking point; that is, my saying the culture wars are about children. “Protect Trans Kids” is as defining a rallying cry as anything across the aisle.
Surprisingly, though, I am not writing any of this so that I can resolve these often intractable issues in a 500-word newsletter. I also don’t think the issues are all equally pressing or equally insipid, or that all sides are equally at fault. I’ve become more and more curious, though, as to why issues regarding male, female, and nonbinary gender roles in society; pornography; vaccines; abortion; social media; AI (or AGI), etc. are overwhelmingly proxy wars for, or are at least downstream from, what people believe about children.
If we date the current iterative structure of the culture wars from the 1960s, we can see the germ of this phenomenon. Segregation was an issue throughout all of society, harming the young, middle-aged, and old alike. But a bedrock of the Civil Rights movement, and one of the most enduring images of the Civil Rights movement, involves the integration of schools.
Pro-life, or anti-abortion, as it exists today grew out of the 1960s movements, and is perhaps the epitome of the culture war in that it’s a debate about what literally is or is not a child.1
Is your blood pressure up? I think I’ve stepped on almost every landmine possible so far.
But I’ve been thinking about this issue—the way in which so many hot-button topics are tied in definitive, if not absolute, terms to the welfare of children—because years ago, I was almost a culture warrior. A child culture warrior.
Many people are embarrassed by who they were as children. Again, I think this is an interesting commentary on childhood. They’re too hard on themselves, in my view. Children are moral agents and, especially in the teens years, have to deal with the lifelong consequences of their behavior. Being a bully shapes oneself, and might haunt oneself. But for most of us, it’s a little too easy to remember our childhood blunders and resent ourselves for being less than we are now, usually stupid or willful. But we were less developed than we are now. We were younger.
Anyway. I wasn’t a bully. I was much worse. I believed literally that the earth was 6,000 to 10,000 years old. I’m not really embarrassed by the fact anymore. The smartest men and women I knew—who were and are genuinely intelligent2—often believed the same. I’m sometimes embarrassed by how I acted upon this belief, but by the end of high school the fever had pretty much passed. Ironically, I gave my opinion less air when it became more palatable, so I didn’t even derive social benefit from my evolution.3
My history goes deeper, unfortunately. I knew who Roy Moore was before he ran in a special election for the Senate during Trump’s first presidency. The former chief justice for Alabama, Moore’s campaign disintegrated under robust accusations that he sexually assaulted younger women. That was all news to me. But I recognized his name from a Focus on the Family story that I’d read freshmen or sophomore year of high school. The article billed him as a defender of the faith because he wanted the Ten Commandments to be memorialized at the Alabama State Courthouse in the largest, gaudiest way possible.
In essence, what I learned early is that my sense of justice is easily co-opted by passionate, and sometimes legitimate, causes of public debate. Everyone, I hope, has learned this in the last five to eight years. You really believed you might stop police violence one month after hearing about it for the first time by putting a black square on your Instagram. That’s okay. Mistakes happen. I once read an article about Roy Moore on purpose.
Interestingly, one of Christ’s harshest words of warning is about leading children astray. “It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to sin.”
As a former child myself, and as a current parent, all these tidal forces feel appropriately powerful. Our public push and pull on many pressing, moral questions are only able to be ignored for so long. That these are often social questions, and even sometimes social questions that touch on the most Christian of issues—wealth, poverty, charity—means they often come rolling into our lives with or without our invitation.
More to the point, they necessarily splash at the feet and knees and perhaps even threaten to submerge our children, because the upbringing and educating of children is the last place we almost universally recognize a need for some strain, however thin, of moralism.
In A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor spends a good portion of the end of the book discussing legalism and moralism. “Why can’t our moral/ethical life ever be adequately captured in a code?” The answer is, for the purposes of this stub of an essay, “lots of reasons.” Let me quote him anyway:
We can’t live without codes, legal ones which are essential to the rules of law, moral ones which we have to inculcate in each new generation. But… it is terribly important to see that that is not all there is, that it is in many ways dehumanizing, alienating; that it often generates dilemmas that it cannot see, and in driving forward, acts with great ruthlessness and cruelty. The various modes of political correctness, from Left and Right, illustrate this every day.
The important carve out in this whole section, and in the above quote, is “We can’t live without … moral [codes] which we have to inculcate in each new generation.” Taylor argues for a kind of virtue ethics as realized by the transcendent life of Christ. Sort of. A Secular Age is an 800-page philosophy book. There’s no adequate summary.
But where he finds moralism necessary, if still in qualified terms, it’s regarding our need to instill in our children a sense of the transcendent logic that virtue ethics and the life of Christ (not only Christ, but especially Christ) demand. I teach my children right from wrong in basic terms so that when they are old enough not only to be forced into adulthood, but hopefully old enough to begin sorting the greater nuances of social living, they will yearn for and seek what is good, beautiful, true, loving, empathetic, etc.4
They have a sense of right that they must transcend in the name of pursuing what is right. The rub for all of us in these various battles of values is that we must decide which codes we’re going to instill either as parents or as support from the sidelines. Sometimes the very argument is about which responsible adults should be trusted with instilling (teachers, parents, priests, doctors, etc.). We have to argue over some of these issues, and in the name of public education, usually, or public spaces, generally, we have to descend into the most vulgar positions of black and white thinking.
The bathrooms in elementary schools must be labeled one way or another, and especially because we’re dealing with children, the moral stakes feel higher. They probably are. But we all recognize that a code is being supported or rejected, that support in a fundamental way is being offered or re-routed.
Legalistic inculcation is far from the full picture. We can return, if nothing else, to the home of the fundamentalist 1990s Christian for this fable. Any of us in these circles know countless peers who’ve left the church, the values of their parents, and any outward signs of their previous faith behind. Poof. They’re secular.
That’s one of the paradoxes of these hot-button issues, perhaps. The fact that we must dabble in moralism for the sake of imparting a sense of a higher ethical framework in our children—to say nothing of public safety, which I’ve largely ignored—is no excuse for us to become moral simpletons.
How you answer questions from your feminine son; how you prepare and react to your pregnant teenage daughter; how you walk with your children through poverty-stricken streets; how you explain war; how you use “infant” or “fetus”; how you handle medical decisions—all of these will require concrete instructions or decisions, including the choice to be apathetic or distant, that will inform a child’s sense of right or wrong. Inform, to repeat: not determine.
Such situations will also be a test of our own moral orientation, our own virtue pressure chamber. Parents must somehow both give their children a solid foundation from which to seek a moral life, and live in a morally mature, a spiritually receptive, way that upends the temptations of moralism. Sometimes the decisions we make in the name of our children are more black and white than the world in which we live because they are being made for children, thus demanding courage as well as discretion. Sometimes not.
I’m not sure how that translates into the world and politics and more. But for years now, I think we’ve seen code enforcement continue to escalate, and given the focus on children, I think its possible the fallout only worsens.
Either way, we cannot escape some of these conversations, some of these decisions, and we shouldn’t. The nine-year-old doesn’t need an iPhone or an iWatch or an iPad and giving her one is imprudent, if not immoral, in the same way smoking might be. Let’s talk about it. Let’s challenge each other. But, to end what is basically a simple blog in the most simplistic terms, it will matter vitally how we use our own phones even if we protect our children from the worst exposures of social media.
Maybe that analogy is inapplicable to all other hot-button issues.5 All I feel confident about—some days, at least—is that we are at risk of inculcating a sense of moral despair in much of the next generation. Our society is addicted to code enforcement, to winning the battle of norms by any means, and one result may be, and perhaps already is, that older forms of casual evil will find themselves resurgent.6
I love you all.
If it’s not obvious by now, I’m not even remotely pretending to give a comprehensive summary of any position.
What Phil Christman puts so perfectly in How to Be Normal more or less applies here: “What growing up fundamentalist helped me learn early on, is how terribly wrong you can be while thinking very hard.”
[Actively using my Dad voice with a wink]: “…evolution.”*
*Sub-footnote: I’m sometimes still a magical baboon on this topic, in many ways. Don’t box me in!
In other words, for those of us who are so inclined, to seek what is holy. But I think the formulation holds without this explicit belief, too.
Maybe this is relevant to my point, maybe not, but here’s an article in the New York Times that both takes our medical-industrial complex’s failure at the point of death seriously while still coming down firmly against MAiD-type legislature. I don’t think I’m really making an argument at all in this post—describing, rather than diatribing, for once—but the Times piece is a good example of how we might approach these moral dilemmas without losing either one’s spine (e.g. “Maybe everyone is sort of correct?”) or by mistaking vitriol for zeal (e.g. “All doctors who support this are murderers!”).
Or not! I don’t know anything. And sometimes things go well without apparent reason (grace).