The Imaginative Conservative has excerpted an essay on the mid-20th-century conservative intellectual Richard Weaver by the late John P. East, a professor of political science at East Carolina University and author of The American Conservative Movement: The Philosophical Founders. Weaver, East writes, perceived relativism–the abandonment of scientific and philosophical universals–as a threat to the religious, political, and rhetorical integrity of the United States. Weaver saw the piety of the Old South as a bulwark against what he called “nominalism.”
East hastens to point out that the Old South is not fit for emulation in all respects. “The Old South may indeed be a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live,” he writes, quoting Weaver, “but from them we can learn something of how to live.” East’s point is that Southerners, as heirs to the Platonic-Christian heritage, tend to accept universal values intuitively, grounded as they are in Judeo-Christian Scripture and the ethics of agrarianism. According to East, they’ve internalized theological checks on their own depravity and are therefore inimical to external coercion, pursuing meaning within established parameters.
More problematic than the writers’ dalliance with the Old South is the lack of examples provided in East’s essay. Latter-day bloggers have met this need. Two in particular have chronicled how progressives have abandoned universal standards of political and religious freedom in a quest to promote diversity.
Rod Dreher has discussed Democratic Representative Sean Patrick Maloney’s recent failure to extend certain provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the military’s relationship with independent contractors. Maloney’s amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would have prevented military chaplains from doing business with suppliers whose religious beliefs corresponded to their denominational views. Muslim chaplains, for instance, would not have been able to purchase prayer mats from suppliers who held conventional Islamic views about gay marriage.
Unsurprisingly, Dreher objects to the measure. (At the last minute it was defeated by a vote of 213-212.) First, he believes it infringes on religious liberty. Second, and more pertinent to East’s essay, Dreher believes the amendment would have criminalized common sense notions of whether or not traditional guarantees of religious liberty should yield to the demands of a faction. “It is now close to impossible to deny that there can be any complication, any complexity, any reason to dissent in the least way from what the LGBT movement demands.” The ground for reasonable (and lawful) disagreement, Dreher argues, has shrunk because of the recalcitrance of a minority.
Matthew Cochran compares the progressive reaction to North Carolina’s recent decision to bar transgender men from women’s bathrooms with Winston Smith’s ordeal in 1984. He insists that “Big Names, Big Business, and Big Government” are foisting the assumption that sex is not determined by external biological factors on an incredulous majority. (I believe Bruce Springstein canceled a concert in North Carolina and issued an open letter decrying the state legislature’s actions.)
Cochran’s article, like East’s, would have benefitted from more specific examples of progressives bending reality to suit ideology. Both he and Dreher are self-consciously alarmist. I don’t expect people who oppose their views to understand their anxiety. However, Cochran makes one point in passing that has a tremendous amount of merit. “Today’s leftist indictments,” he writes, “increasingly gravitate away from actual wrongdoing and toward attitudes, opinions, and other mental states.” The Left’s gospel of oppressive social structures and its “horizontal segmentation” of religious traditions has displaced the dictates of Scripture, and moral judgments–not to say legislation–are formulated on the basis of inferences about prejudice, not the principles of republican government.
The Southern Unionist 