Ending the Culture Wars

E.J. Dionne has an interesting column this morning about an effort of moderate Democrats to end the Culture Wars:

You know the religious right is in trouble when some of its leaders threaten to bolt the Republican Party if it nominates a candidate who supports abortion rights.

But the well-publicized warning directed against Rudy Giuliani this month is decidedly not the most important sign that religious conservatives are facing the disintegration of their movement.

What matters more is that a new generation of evangelical leaders, tired of the rancid partisanship, is breaking away from the culture wars. The reach of this new evangelical politics will be tested with the release tomorrow of a statement under the very biblical title "Come Let Us Reason Together." The question for the future is how many in the evangelical ranks will embrace this call.

Organized by Third Way, a group that is close to many leading moderate Democrats, the statement calls for "first steps toward bridging the cultural divide between progressives and evangelicals."

Third Way's effort is not happy boilerplate about how religious Americans and liberals share a concern for helping the poor, protecting the environment and reaching out to the victims of HIV-AIDS -- although these areas of agreement are important and too often overlooked.

Rather, the statement, co-authored by Robert P. Jones, a progressive religious scholar, and Rachel Laser, director of the Third Way Culture Project, takes a step toward religious conservatives by acknowledging the legitimacy of many of their moral concerns. For example, while not backing away from Third Way's support for stem cell research, the statement urges a series of restrictions to prevent the sale or manipulation of human embryos and reproductive cloning.

"Americans have a deep faith in science but also worry that scientific advances are outrunning our best moral thinking," Jones and Laser declare. Worrying about ethical issues raised by science is not the same as being anti-science.
The statement identifies other areas, including abortion, gay rights and strengthening families, where progressives and religious conservatives might continue to disagree but still make progress.

One passage nicely summarizes the possibilities of a less polarized, post-Bush future: "The differences in how evangelicals and progressives see government's role in affecting social change -- one of changing hearts, the other building institutions -- need not be in conflict." Social improvement requires both.

Now, declarations and manifestoes come and go in our nation's capital with the speed of the news cycle. What matters is whether they can catalyze action.

Laser, who sets herself only a modest goal -- "We want to end the culture wars," she says firmly, but with a smile -- knows this, which is why she worked to win support for the statement from evangelicals who can fairly be regarded as conservative.

Read it all here.

I will eagerly review this document. While I do agree that there is common ground between even secular progressives and conservative Evangelicals on many issues, I think that the Culture Wars will continue unabated. Why? Bwecause there are real differences on issues such as gay rights and abortion that can't or won't be glossed over even when we find common ground on other issues.