The Culture War Is Dead. Long Live the Culture War.

I finally finished reading a book yesterday that I had let sit for… well, let’s be honest, months and months. It is called Born Again Queer. I have to write a proper review this week and next, so I don’t really want to go into it at any length. And besides, in the month of paid subscription I have left of Jen Hatmaker’s substack, I wanted to work out a thought I had about the latest personal revelation she made over there. And the two, I think, sort of go together.

Born Again Queer is an angry PhD dissertation, the historical (I can’t decide whether or not to put that word in scare quotes) narrative of how wicked evangelicals in the 1970s nefariously prevented affirming theology and biblical exegesis to come into major evangelical publications, conferences, and institutions. Beleaguered and badly used gay and lesbian activists tried their best to be accepted by Christianity Today, but in the end, they were rejected and forced to wander off into the mainlines. Or, in the case of the Metropolitan Community Church, eventually become obsolete because that particular ideological agenda vanquished almost everything and everyone.

It is a bit crazy to read a book like this, at this late cultural hour, when literally every institution has given way to the acronym, and the church has been so violently sifted over the last ten years. What are you talking about? I kept muttering, making notes in the margins. Your lot won absolutely everything. Victims thou no longer can claimest to be.

In the last section of his aggrieved tale, the author, William Stell, explains that—and this might be a bit confusing, so attend carefully—the real war was inside the churches, but the people in the churches didn’t want to admit it. Instead, they made up something called—you might have heard of it—the “Culture War.” And then, having made up this “culture war,” they blamed the problems inside the church on it.

What war, you ask? The long raging theological battle that’s been going on for a hundred years at least about how to read the Bible. Does the Bible uniformly and coherently condemn same-sex sexual practices? Or does it think that “love” is “love,” as long as it is not exploitative? Also, is the Bible the inherent and infallible word of God? I mean, according to Dr. Stell, it very much isn’t, and people who say that they believe that it is are the bad ones. How could they believe such a thing? Still, even if they thought there were biblical reasons to hold the position against homosexuality that they did, they should have abandoned those thoughts. Why should they abandon them? you ask. Well, because it was really hard and sad for people who wanted to be accepted in orthodox evangelical spaces and yet still identify themselves along the acronym and have sexual relations with people of their same sex.

Upon finally finishing the book, and not wanting to be idle or anything, I wandered over to Jen Hatmaker’s latest post. It happened to be about how she took a really long time to break up with her book publisher and agent “After making everyone cataclysmic over the gays,”—that’s how she put it. Her publisher wanted to “curtail” the two book contract she had in the aftermath of her big brave announcement. She ended up accepting a really bad deal. And the reason she accepted this deal is… hang on, I’ll let her explain it in her own words:

Without question, what I despise most about my patterns is conflict avoidance. It borders on pathological. It freezes me and robs me of sleep. Whatever conversation is needed grows into an outsized catastrophe in my mind I have a disproportionate and unreasonable sense of loyalty, and staff changes feel like failure. I am MOST worried about hurting someone’s feelings and being experienced as a b*tch. So instead, I am experienced as the absolute bottleneck in the business and the unfortunate rock in the river everyone else has to figure out how to flow around.

If she had just had the hard conversations right away, she wouldn’t have wasted years of misery. And, for real, I know how she feels. I also hate conflict. The thing is, I don’t think that those of us who hate conflict should blame ourselves. The reason we hate conflict is not because we have the wrong enneagram number (she says it’s because she’s an 8). Conflict is The Worst because the stakes of every single encounter are too high. Back in the day, like when Hatmaker and I were running around as little kids in the 70s and 80s, there was still some solid ground under the existential foot. It was eroding, sure, because some people were shoveling it into the sea as fast as ever they could, but it did exist. That’s not the world we live in anymore. This world is one of negativity, of deep total disagreement about what it means to be human and how one ought to approach God. In this toxic brew of relational discord of course we each shy away from “conflict.”

Which brings me back to Dr. Stell’s boogey culture war. There certainly was a real culture war that raged both in and outside of the church. The church was caught up in the fray because a lot of people back then were church goers, and a lot of public Christians picked up their Bibles and joined in the melee. It is too simplistic to say that the war was only outside of the church or that it was only inside and the Christians were blaming all their hot mess on some imaginary war. No, the whole culture swayed and rocked like a ship tossed upon violent ideological and technological waves, the church right along with everyone and everything else.

And here we must be perfectly honest. The culture absolutely won. Orthodox evangelicals seemed to win for a while, but in the reckoning as it stands now, they did not win. The church tried to remain a participant in the war for whatever the culture would be, and eventually they were very much left behind—to quote a really popular series of books you probably have never heard of.

And the way we know the culture won is because people like Jen Hatmaker saw which way the sea was tossing and made the temporally sensible choice. No one wants to be a loser, especially when no one can remember what the original fight was about. No one wants to experience the shame of being on the “wrong” side of history.

What the “culture war” even was has quickly been forgotten. Let me remind us. The war was about the moral and existential boundaries of what had been a common life that is now left in total ruins. Should women be permitted to do away with their children before they are born? Should two married people be permitted to divorce each other just because they feel like it? Should two men be permitted to openly and publicly pursue a romantic “relationship” and, in these latter decadent days, buy children for themselves? A long and rich civilization endured upon the Christian answers to these questions. And this civilization was beneficial even to the people who felt its strictures were intolerable, who ultimately succeeded in tearing it down. It was beneficial to them because they were able to use its categories and assumptions to bring about their desired end. Hang on, let me find a visual aid (available for purchase if you click on the pic):

The much maligned “Culture War” is over and the Christians lost. That’s what happened. And it was lost, I think, in part because other really essential realities and assumptions had been relingquished long before the real battle was engaged. The Bible as a comprehensible authority had disappeared into the vapor. The person as a spiritual being was already gone by the 70s. What did anyone expect would happen?

I think Dr. Stell and Jen Hatmaker must make sorry company for each other. Having won everything, Dr. Stell is yet still angry on behalf of those who brought about this victory. Meanwhile, Hatmaker is trying to think of every different way she can talk about her own journey so as to keep herself in the public eye, which she has been doing for almost 25 years now. Neither one asks what is true and if its possible to know the truth.

But, you know, at least we’re all feeling guilty about how terrible we are at resolving our conflict. So that’s something.