Commentary: Was there ever a middle?

A number of books and articles have appeared in the last year or
so either claiming that America has a large ³middle² that agrees on
most things, or lamenting that the ³middle,² which characterized
most of the history of the Republic, has disappeared just in the
last decade or so. In the former category is ³One Nation after
All,² by Alan Wolfe. Wolfe book is an optimistic presentation of
the results of various polls about political, religious and
cultural issues.
According to such polls and Wolfe analysis, a large majority of
Americans agree that abortion is the taking of human life, but that
a woman should have the right to choose; marriage is the union of a
man and woman, but same sex couples should have equal rights; poor
people of color are executed in overwhelmingly disproportionate
numbers and are sometimes found to be innocent when it¹s too late,
but capital punishment is still necessary in some cases; and
religious commitment is an important part of our national life, but
moral judgments based on religion should be kept out of public
debate. Wolfe finds such generalities to be a hopeful indication
that we are, well, one nation after all. It would be equally
possible to interpret them as schizophrenic and therefore incapable
of translation into public policy or legal statute. When it comes
time to vote for candidates or on ballot propositions, one has to
choose. The voter is either pro-life or pro-choice, pro marriage or
pro gay rights, for capital punishment or against it, in favor of a
voice for religion in the public square or not, you can¹t be on
both side when it¹s time to vote.
In the category of the lament that the ³middle² has disappeared
in recent decades is Jimmy Carter¹s ³Our Endangered Values.²
(Before commenting on Mr Carter¹s analysis, I wish to say that I
think he has not only been a great ex-president, I think he was a
good, if not great, president.) I agree with many of his comments
in this heartfelt and sincere book, especially with regard to
economic justice and human rights at home and abroad, the priority
of diplomacy over unilateral military action, and the moral
imperative of caring for the environment. What I disagree with is
his basic premise which he states in the first chapter of his book.
He asserts that our country is more politically divided than at any
time in living memory. Throughout the book he blames religious
conservatives for this unprecedented division. To the contrary,
political division, often quite extreme, has marked our history
from its beginning and these divisions past and present are not the
result of religious conservatives any more or less than of
religions liberals, or, for that matter, liberals and conservatives
who aren¹t particularly religious. Within my living memory, the
civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam not only divided the
nation but tore it open. The strongest agitators for civil rights
were mostly religious, some liberal and some conservative. The same
is true about the opponents of the war in Vietnam. The principal
organizer of the 1968 march on the Pentagon, in which my wife
Bonnie and I participated, was Clergy and Laity Concerned, which
was actually accused of being a Communist-front organization, but
it included not only liberal Protestants but conservative Catholics
and Evangelicals. Of course the greatest division in the history of
our nation was the Civil War. Almost all the abolitionist were
deeply religious Christians. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the sister of
the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, wrote ³Uncle Tom¹s Cabin² as a
religious tract against the inhumanity of slavery. Abraham Lincoln
reportedly greeted her when they met at the White House by saying,
³So you¹re the little lady who wrote the book that started the
war.²
I finally got around to reading Joseph Ellis¹ ³Founding
Brothers.² Ellis describes the friendships and animosities that
animated and effected the relationships between the founders. The
first chapter is ³The Duel,² an account of the events, political
and personal, that led to the fatal duel between Aaron Burr and
Alexander Hamilton. As Ellis describes the events, this was not
just a personal feud. These two founders, the vice president and
the secretary of the treasury, had such divided views of what the
revolution meant and how it should develop that they really
considered each other to be traitors. Another chapter describes the
on- again, off-again friendship between John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson. If Ellis¹ presentation is correct, and I think it is,
these two likewise considered each other to be virtually traitorous
to the ideals of the revolution.
Rather than saying that we are really not that divided, or
saying that we are divided but it didn¹t use to be that way and
that our divisions are the fault of this particular group or that,
I observe that we¹ve always been a divided nation and sometimes,
not always but sometimes, our greatest achievements have arisen out
of the conflicts surrounding our deepest divisions.
Canon Marvin N. Bowers is the Rector of St Paul¹s Episcopal
Church in Healdsburg.