Sully: World-wide Red vs. Blue

Citing political conflicts between progressives and fundamentalists in Pakistan, Nigeria, Iran, Turkey, Israel and Egypt as well as America, Andrew Sullivan makes the case that the culture wars have gone global in The Daily Dish.

In America, violence, mercifully, is held at bay in these struggles, but the political system has effectively ground to a halt under their weight. Despite getting fewer votes than the Democrats for president, House and Senate, the Republicans are using their gerrymandered majority in the House to block even executive branch appointees from approval. They are determined to destroy universal healthcare.They are launching a national campaign to shut down abortion clinics. They deny climate science. They voted against tax cuts – purely because a Democratic president proposed them.

My view on this is that our division is not really about politics or even ideology. Ideology is an often ill-fitting misnomer for something much more powerful – deep cultural alienation between the two parts of America. That alienation, in my view, is at its core the same alienation we are seeing in countries as diverse as Turkey and Egypt and Iran and Israel. It’s about the response to modernity – a choice between fear/rejection and relish/adoption. It’s between a red world and a blue world. Or rather an increasingly blue world in deadly conflict between an increasingly red one.

Interestingly, Sullivan's prescription for this impasse is reform of religion rather than politics.

The only way through this impasse is through religious reform, in my view. This may take more than my lifetime. But proving the ineptness of theocracy, exposing the fallacies of the fundamentalist psyche, while treasuring varieties of religious experience that include within them a toleration of the conscience of others, is surely the only way forward. It will not be easy getting to a more purple world. But if it is not possible, then we face a century of warfare and social dysfunction. The unanswered question, to my mind, is whether this dynamic has so purged religious institutions of free thinkers and writers and theologians and saints that it has sealed its own – and everyone else’s – demise. As a Christian I refuse to believe that. But as a writer and observer of the world, it becomes harder each day.