The intensity of current political fights over parental rights in public schools, free speech on college campuses, abortion, and other culture-war touch points is, in Nate Hochman’s analysis, a product of “the decline in organized religion.” Pointing to a drop in church membership among Republicans that appears to have coincided with the rise of Donald Trump’s political fortunes, Hochman suggests that the former president tapped into a grassroots “energy” that was “primarily a reflection of the nonreligious right.” The future of American conservatism, he argues, may in part depend on how much the religious right, which came more slowly to support Trump, is willing to concede to its secular partners.
Today’s culture war is being waged not between religion and secularism but between groups that the Catholic writer Matthew Schmitz has described as “the woke and the unwoke.”
Rather than invocations of Scripture, the right’s appeal is a defense of a broader, beleaguered American way of life. For example, the language of parental rights is rarely, if ever, religious, but it speaks to the pervasive sense that American families are fighting back against progressive ideologues over control of the classroom. That framing has been effective: according to a March Politico poll, for example, American voters favored the key provision of Florida’s hotly debated Parental Rights in Education law, known by its critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, by a margin of 16 percentage points.
Support for the initiative crosses racial lines. In a May poll of likely general election voters in six Senate battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the conservative American Principles Project found that Hispanics supported the Florida law by a margin of 11 percentage points and African Americans by a margin of four points.
The upshot is that this new politics has the capacity to expand the Republican tent dramatically.
Read more on New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/opinion/republicans-religion-conservatism.html