This started off as a response to a comment in my previous diary, "Karen Armstrong On Bill Moyers Journal", but after posting it, I realized that it deserved more prominence, not least because of the fact Chris has been hammering home for years on end--the religious pluralism (including atheism, agnosticism and secularism) of the progressive coalition.
There is a strain of atheism, represented by folks like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which sees religion as a threat to be attacked in the name of science. This is, I would argue, a form of secular fundamentalism that misunderstands almost as much as religious fundamentalism does.
Science and religion are two quite different things, and trying to judge them both by one standard is guaranteed to produce all sorts of confusion. On the flip, I'm reproducing part of an article from Science magazine that indicates a different way--it's a brief passage dealing with a scientific approach to understanding how religion functions in human society, based on our evolved biology. It clearly recognizes that the purposes and methods religion employs are quite different from those of science, and thus it's easy, in light of this approach, to see how foolish it is to judge religion in terms of science, as simply an inferior form knowledge-gathering.
I have long been deeply skeptical about some of Barack Obama's core political assumptions revolving around the culture wars-that they are a more or less symmetrical, irrational distraction from real, pragmatic problem-solving perpetrated by left as well as the right, which are rooted in the 60s and the Baby Boom generation, but have no real relevance to the problems of today.
Having lived through the entire period from the 1960s onward, it seems quite clear to me that the 1960s represented a fundamental rupture with the past, in which fundamental and pervasive institutionalized forms of prejudice-most notably against women, blacks and other racial minorities-were dramatically challenged, morally delegitimized, and largely dismantled. In response to this, political conservatives organized a sustained backlash, and used it to attack not just the breakthrough advances of the 1960s, but a wide range of New Deal political advances and their extensions as well, which largely benefited the working class whites, and helped to create the modern middle class. As such, there was never any sort of symmetry between the sides in the culture war, nor was there anything irrational in fighting against the politics of reaction. Finally, given that the 1960s saw the fall of age-old structures of race and gender oppression, it was quite clear that culture wars didn't start in the 1960s, except in the terms of "bully logic"-"It all started when he hit me back!"
The main thing I'd ask you to take from this is that conservativism and liberalism exist at a fundamental level of human brain function. They are facets of ingrained human psychology and not pure constructs of thought and rationality. You cannot discuss the roots of these two ideologies (separate from others IMO) without looking at human evolutionary psychology.
