Clash of cultures

A week before he announced, Texas Gov. Rick Perry held a prayer rally in Houston, open only to fellow Christians, to beg God to help America: “You are our only hope,” he intoned. The week she won the Iowa straw poll, Michele Bachmann went on “Meet the Press,” and said that, if elected, she would repeal the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Sarah Palin, still flirting with a run, often speaks of those “real Americans” who would like to take their country back.

Barring another terrorist attack — and assuming the bulk of the Northeast exists after this weekend — the 2012 presidential election, as we all know, will come down to the economy. Just this week, the Congressional Budget Office released a report estimating that unemployment will be at 8.5% by the fall of 2012, and will remain at that level through at least 2014.

So why are the Republican Party’s biggest stars reviving the culture wars? While Perry and Bachmann, et al., are also talking foreign and fiscal policy, why get in the muck on abortion, evolution, gay marriage, when most Americans care mainly, and desperately, about keeping their homes, their jobs, what’s left of their 401(k)s?

“Let’s focus on what got us elected,” says Christopher Barron, political consultant and chairman of the activist group GOProud, which represents the conservative LGBT community. “The 2010 elections were laser-focused on the size of government and fiscal issues.”

Barron was one of sixteen Tea Party leaders to recently sign a petition imploring Mitch McConnell and John Boehner to focus solely on the economy. “This election was not a mandate for the Republican Party, nor was it a mandate to act on any social issue,” it reads.

Still, Rick Perry currently has a double-digit lead over presumptive nominee Mitt Romney. So it’s working. Sort of.

GOP candidate Jon Huntsman — like presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, a Mormon — has distanced himself from Perry’s stance on both evolution and global warming as theories. “I think when you find yourself at the extreme end of the Republican party,” he said this week, “you make yourself vulnerable.”

Huntsman, like Romney, is playing the long game. “People who care about social issues really care about social issues,” says John Green, senior researcher at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. “Those groups tend to be very well-organized, and candidates really respond to them. But overall, social issues don’t tend to rank high among average voters.”

It was during the 1950s and ‘60s, when the civil rights movement began to foment, that social issues became interwoven with political discourse. Yet we’ve always been fighting culture wars: The founding of this nation was spurred by one.

“Culture wars exist in every developed nation on Earth,” says Adam Arenson, author of “The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War.” “Unless you think of Lyndon LaRouche and Ron Paul as major players, the US traditionally fights about fewer, minor things than they do in Latin America or Europe.”

In the mid-19th century, America’s culture wars were motivated by the left, which sought to dictate the way people worshiped and behaved. Northern evangelicals mobilized the anti-slavery movement, but it was also northern evangelicals who demonized Catholics and immigrants.

“The extreme left of the 1850s has much in common with the extreme right of 2011,” says historian David Goldfield, author of “America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation,” which posits that the war was a clash of values that could have been resolved politically.

Here, however, he’s talking fervor, not philosophy. “It was the same idea then: ‘By golly, we are going to create a better world,’” he says. “Evangelicals even went to Lincoln and demanded that he add a preamble to the Constitution, to declare the US a Christian nation.” (He declined.)

Counterintuitive as it sounds, most historians agree that the culture wars are truly waged when the nation is in deep crisis. It manifests itself pop-culturally, too: One of the best-selling books in the country since its publication last December is “Heaven Is For Real,” marketed as a nonfiction account of a 4-year-old boy’s trip to heaven and back. One of the largest and most profitable branches of Christianity today is the so-called “prosperity gospel,” which teaches that God — despite current and abundant evidence to the contrary — wants people to be rich.

“When the culture wars really began, with the Civil Rights Movement, people were really afraid,” says historian Garfield. “Part of culture wars feed on that fear.”

The Obama team is well aware. After all, 2012 may be all about the economy, but they’ve already signaled their attack plan should it be Romney, and it has nothing to do with Romney’s own universal health care plan as governor of Massachusetts or his record as a businessman. It is, of course, that he’s “weird.”