There is no doubt that profanity is enjoying a friggin renaissance these days. It’s a prime feature of The Daily Show with John Stewart (where its bleeped out), Real Time with Bill Maher (where its not), and above all Penn and Teller’s Bullshit (where Penn called the scriptures the “damned Bible”). South Park is renowned for its vulgarity. Sex and the City may have tried, but Deadwood must have set the small screen record for use of the term “fuck.” Foul mouths are not just a cable thing. I’ve heard the word screw used as a term for sexual intercourse on the network primetime dramas Cashmere Mafia, and on Desperate Housewives in the 9:00-10:00 slot on a Sunday evening. Sitcoms kids say penis. Also allowed these days on broadcast primetime are bitch, son of a bitch, bastard, crap, feces, ass, anal, poop and pee. The Ken Burns PBS documentary on WW II broadcast the correct wordage for SNAFU — it is not “situation normal, all fouled up.” When CBS aired the documentary 9/11 on the anniversary of the event in 2002 and again in 2006, the network deliberately did not bleep out the stream of fucks and shits that emerged from the mouths of the firemen as they faced the worst catastrophe in their lives. The last point brings out a telling point. By no means is ready profanity a feature limited to the liberal elites like Joe Bagaent. Obscenity bleeps grace the conversation of the working class blokes featured on the cable channel programs like Ice Road Truckers, American Chopper, Deadly Catch and Axmen. For all the talk of the right wing Christianizing of the US military, it remains a bastion of profanity, to the extent that American troops have often antagonized Iraqis with their hard-core language. These days smutty talk is as American as apple pie.

Which has O’Reilly and company tearing their hair out. Back in 2004 — when after their seemingly splendid election victory the conservative elite met in Washington DC to discuss how to at long last kill off the damn counterculture and win the culture back for all that is good and American — Linda Chavez complained about how, while waiting at a red light, she was assaulted by someone else’s vehicular boom box blasting out “an incredibly vile rap song, I couldn’t avoid hearing simulated sexual intercourse.” Linda went on to demand that a way be found to put a stop to such cultural depravity. The chief organization fighting foul mouths is the Parent’s Television Council, established by Catholic L. Brent Bozell. When CBS refused to announce that it would defuck 9/11 the PTA went ballistic with a campaign to get the network suits to change their mind. Didn’t work.

The right has had some success in their cultural campaign. The FCC has long banned George Carlin’s seven dirty words and other naughty items from the broadcast networks. But even in the opening stages of the Bush II administration the exclusion seemed to be slipping, with sexual profanities spontaneously uttered in a nonsexual context tacitly being allowed. But folks started to complain, and the 2004 Super Bowl/Janet Jackson clothing glitch inspired a FCC crackdown, with the government censors throwing newly authorized megafines at the TV and radio networks and their affiliates for their broadcast transgressions. Howard Stern was driven off broadcast radio into a multi-million satellite deal. The networks have not, however, rolled over in supine submission. This is not the 1950s when primetime married couples were shown sleeping in twin beds (except, for some reason, on the Donna Reed Show, and that couple was hot). It is the early 2000s when the networks are engaged in a no holds barred ratings struggle for their very survival.

Here’s the thing. O’Reilly railed against Jane saying a slutty sex word over on NBC. That shot is as easy as it is cheap. The arch-Christian Bill should remember the Bible inspired passage about those living in glass houses chucking stones at others. Bill (Fox News) O’Reilly works for News Corporation, which is owned by fellow Christian Rupert Murdoch. Here is where we come down to brass tacks. As far as I know, the man of unwavering principle has not been directing his holier than thou societal ire at his own boss. Murdoch’s $60 billion News Corp also includes Fox Films and FOX Broadcasting, neither of which even tries to be culturally chaste. The once upstart and now dominant FOX network gained notoriety — and the big ratings — by pushing the broadcast sleaze factor. Of the networks FOX is the one that the PTC is most up in arms about. Among the broadcaster’s salacious primetime fare was the reality program Married By America. One 2003 episode featured digitally obscured nudity and whip cream covered strippers — i. e. your typical bachelor party. The FCC thought it was worth $1.2 million in fines from the network and its affiliates. The penalty was recently reduced to a mere $91 K, a few minutes worth of advertising time. Did a chastened Murdoch apologize and cough up the money to help atone for his sins?

Please, please do not make me laugh.

News Corp. and FOX have fought the FCC from the get go and refuse to pay anything. Why? For the same reason that O’Reilly says he opposes profanity. Principle. The corporation calls the FCC actions “patently unconstitutional.” News Corp. is also refusing to go along with the FCC fines for the utterance by Sher and Nicole Rickies of “fuck” and “shit” respectively during their appearances on the Billboard Music Awards on FOX in 2002 and 2003. The Supreme Court has agreed to take up that case this coming fall. It is not just FOX fighting the censors, so are the other networks. That is one reason why CBS broadcast 9/11 undeleted in 2006. They wanted to establish the principle that in some cases explicit vulgarity is part of the story. There are other practical problems as well. Such as when the FCC said it was all right to broadcast Saving Private Ryan unbleeped because of the historical context of the work.

It is grand fun getting after the sanctimonious, self proclaimed man of principle O’Reilly for his habit of beating up on those who dare define the culture downwards — except when it comes to his boss whose media fortune was built in part on sleaze all the way back to his tabloid days, and when even the news network he works for is prone to the salacious tabloid journalism documented at Foxnewsporn.com. But for all the amusement there is a larger point to be made.

The traditionalist right claims that they want to remake the culture by returning it to the more genteel times when public discourse was not nearly so crude. Never mind that those days were when church-going folk were torturing and lynching blacks in obscene public spectacles. In any case, the anti-vulgarity project provides the right with an ideal wedge issue, one that never ends because the task is pretty much hopeless. Popular profanity is here to stay for two main reasons.

First, the pertinent corporations are pro-profanity. It is an extension of the argument I made in “Buckley’s Big Mistake.” It is in the interest of the media to promote profanity. It is all part of the Darwinian competition for greater audience share, especially among the much coveted youth market. Once upon a time the big networks could get away with being verbally chaste because there was no competition. Now they are locked in a bitter struggle against cable and satellite for viewership, and they are not winning. One of the big advantages enjoyed by cable/satellite is that it is private commerce, so the producers can supply their clients with anything they want, all the way to the hardest core porn. This freedom is giving cable/satellite a big ratings leg up over broadcasters, especially among the youth cohort the media craves most of all. On broadcast radio the fucks are being digitally deleted out of the first rock hit to incorporate fuck into the lyrics, The Who’s “Who Are You?.” That makes the social conservatives happy, but it does not do much for the broadcasters who are losing audience to satellite and especially the web where the hard hitting word is left in its proper places. As for television, as long as pay-to-view media can say whatever it wants to, the networks have no choice but to do all they can to keep up in this piece of the capitalist game of survival of the fittest. Which brings us to the second reason that the right has no realistic prospect of actually winning their war on crudity. The public likes it.

Murdoch knows his audience. There’s lots of money to be made in the profane. It’s the foundation of his wealth. Pop culture always tends toward the vulgar, the only way to suppress it is to beat it down with a big stick and even that does only so much. A very large portion of the American population, perhaps a majority, enjoys being able to cuss now and then. They want to be able to hear their pundits, rappers, rockers, bloggers and comedians let the expletives fly. Its fun. It’s liberating. Sometimes a good fuck or shit is just what the situation calls for. What lots of folks do not want is that return to the delicate days or yore when propriety ruled. One of the standing jokes of FOX television’s fantastically irreligious The Simpsons is that the born again Ned Flanders and his godly boys are terrified of any hint of crude language (to the degree that gosh and darn must be excised from Hardy Boy novels), quite unlike the cool bad boy Bart. Let’s face it. O’Reilly, Chavez, Bill Bennett, George Will, Shawn Hannity, John Gibson, Glenn Beck, Chuck Colson, Phyllis Schlafly and the like are a dull and prissy lot of square stiffs. They cannot compete with the hip sensibilities of the modern culture.

Now here’s a dirty little secret. A lot of conservatives like their profanity too. Whatever Ann Coulter may be, she’s not unhip. In her Godless: The Church of Liberalism, she attacked evolutionary science with the statement “do whatever you feel like doing — screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child — Darwin says it will benefit humanity” (emphasis added). The 2005 cover Time article on Ann claims that “she’s not one of those conservatives who won’t say “f___” two or three times over dinner.” Remember during the 2000 campaign when Bush Jr. told Cheney that a New York Times reporter was a “major league asshole?” Rather than chastising George on the use of an inappropriate word the future veep heartily agreed. Hardly surprising, since Dick later threw fuck at a Democratic member of Congress on the Senate floor (the Washington Post story that covered the event printed the whole word, which is still posted on their website; the paper has not maintained this tradition). When a nice elderly Republican voter asked John McCain how best to defeat the “bitch” Hillary most conservatives seemed to treat it with the amusement the candidate did. Rather than righteously condemning their heroes’ and their supporters’ verbal transgressions in order to save the culture from going potty mouth, traditionalists widely accepted the verbal taunts as understandable and feisty reactions to liberal perfidy that show how manly conservative men and women can be when a few choices words are called for.

That the right has already lost this piece of the culture war is confirmed by how many conservatives are willing if not eager to abandon the alleged principles in order to appear on The Daily Show and Real Time in order to tap into their large, youthful audience that cheer the well placed curse. Murdoch specifically and the corporate media in general have too much invested in the profane culture to abandon it. If Rupert gave orders to his Fox entertainment empire to clean up its act he would lose audience share in the competition against the other broadcast and especially the pay-to-view networks. He and the other network CEOs and suits won’t do it because they know that the public in the main prefers to keep their freedom to swear. Even more than rock and roll — which, of course, is slang for screwing — profanity is here to stay.

But if the free market should rule medical care, then why not police and fire protection as well? Why should any American have to pay taxes to a government run police monopoly for the protection of their own bodies and those of their precious family? There are constant complaints of poor police response time and the follow up investigation, as well as brutality. So why can’t a good American citizen be freed of confiscatory taxes, and instead use the money to provide their own protection? After all, it’s the American Way. Want to protect your home? Get some guns, a dog or two, and an alarm system. For professional help, contract with a private security company that provides the highest level of service for the least lucre. Worried about being mugged while out on the town? Hire personal protection for the evening through your friendly neighborhood Rent-A-Bodyguard Inc.

Same thing with fire protection. It’s an socialistic outrage that taxpayers are forced to cough up part of their hard earned income to pay a government dominated fire department whose services may or may not suit a person’s needs. It should be a matter of personal responsibility. Don’t think you need professional help? Or can’t afford it? Buy a bunch of fire extinguishers, install a sprinkler system, and hope for the best. It’s your choice. Worried that fighting a fire on your own might not be prudent? Contract with the privately owned and operated fire company that provides the best cost/service ratio.

Here’s the thing. Once upon a time in America we actually did have a free market for fire protection! So why was it socialized? Because the private system didn’t work out very well. So many were unable or unwilling to pay for protection that structures were left free to burn, often bringing down surrounding apartments and buildings. Whole cities were put at risk. Besides, how does one compare service/cost ratios when it comes to fire protection, or that matter police work? It is not like buying a car or a computer. The private fire prevention system was so ineffective, and downright dangerous, that eventually it was abandoned in favor the far more efficient, communalistic arrangement we have today.

Aside from a libertarian fringe, conservatives are not clamoring to privatize the fire and police departments, even though these are exactly the kind universal, socialistic systems that conservative claim to despise on principle. Instead, the right lavishes praise and admiration on these premiere examples of successful socialism (they do the same thing with another prime example of federal socialism, the armed forces). By no means is this the sole example of cynical conservative hypocrisy. The same conservatives who denounce government subsidies for green energy sources are happy to see billions of your tax dollars poured into the coffers of the nuclear power and oil industries. Likewise most conservatives who attack welfare for the poor favor corporate welfare and bailouts in its many guises. When your average conservative claims that they are opposed to universal health care because they are opposed on principle to socialism, they’re lying. And they are lying when they assert the superiority of America medicine.

No advanced democracy is stupid enough to allow a free market of police or fire protection to operate without the involvement of a universal government system. Nor is any 1st world nation stupid enough to allow a free market for medical care — except of course for ours. It is important to understand that universal health care is not necessarily socialized health care. The latter is true only when most or all medical facilities and caregivers are government owned and employed, as in England. In many countries, such as France, the state provides the basic funding through taxes, but much of the infrastructure and personnel are private. Also variable is the degree of supplementary care that citizens can pay for outside the universal system, it can range from none to whatever citizens are willing to pay.

Relation of % of GDP to Health Care to Life Span and Infant Mortality (Data for plots from UN)

America’s privatized health care system is a Byzantine, Rube Goldberg complex that has proven no more successful than the privatized fire protection system we used to suffer under. It is well known that about a third of Americans lack adequate insurance, but that just scratches the surface of the problem. Among western nations only the Irish and Danes live shorter lives, and the US has the highest juvenile mortality rates in the first world. We are killing off our kids nearly twice as fast as the Swedes and Japanese, and about as rapidly as some developing countries such as Malaysia and Cuba. This shockingly poor performance is true even though medical costs soak up a stunning 15% of the American economy, compared to just 6-11% in all other western democracies. Our arrangement is so inefficient that we are wasting, for absolutely no gain, literally well over half a trillion dollars a year. The damage this fantastic squandering of money — we might as well be shooting the stuff into the sun — cannot be exaggerated.

Dwarfing the money being spent on Iraq, it rivals in scale the entire budget of the Defense Department. This colossal wastage is probably the most serious unnecessary loss to the American economy, yet it goes largely ignored. This is a grave mistake, the financial depletion is one of the reasons why we are hard pressed to maintain our deteriorating infrastructures. Think of what would could be done with that half trillion. For one thing, a portion could be used to develop the new generation of antibiotics that are desperately needed to combat the wave of drug resistant bacteria that are making going to the hospital dangerous again. More money could go into taking all we are learning about genetics and cellular biology to effectively deal with cancers — which is vastly greater threat to our well being than Iraq ever was. We would not have a Medicaid funding crisis.

On an individual basis Americans pay from half to twice as much per person for health care than do citizens of any other western nation. With medical expenses rising much faster than inflation in general, it’s one of the reasons why most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. Half of the millions of individual bankruptcies that occur in a given year involve massive medical expenses not covered by insurance. It happens all the time. A typical nuclear family has the nice house and cars, cable on their plasma TV, and pleasant vacations. Without warning the breadwinner, through not fault of their own, loses their job, and with that goes the health insurance. A member of the family becomes seriously ill, medical expenses amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars pile up, the health providers require the family to charge it on their cards piling up high interest debt, and soon the family has lost it all. As Michael Moore’s Sicko exposed, even those who think they are well covered often are not.

Rationing of care is rampant in America, only the wealthiest can afford to acquire whatever procedures and treatment they can get. Critics of universal care point to Canadians crossing the border to get specific treatments (a result of overly strict socialization not found in even better run systems). They do not mention that some Americans are traveling all the way to India to undergo vital surgeries they cannot afford in the states. Studies and surveys show that in exchange for all they spend on health care, Americans are actually getting lower levels of basic service than are their western counterparts, who report higher levels of overall satisfaction. We even lag well behind other advanced nations in using the hi-tech information technologies — computerized patient data and prescriptions and the like — that improve patient care while minimizing the dangerous errors that plaque the American system.

But liberals too are making a mistake, and blunder that when one thinks about it is rather bizarre. The left is fond of getting after private companies for not providing adequate health care coverage for their employees. Wal-Mart is a favorite target. Nuttier still is corporate America, which has traditionally opposed universal health care. What are all you folks thinking?! Why in the world should any non-medical company be involved, or want to be involved, in the health care business? Why do companies that are having a hard enough time making cars have to deal with this problem? Or retail chains? Or the owner of a corner bookstore? That management and labor have to repeatedly engage in bitter battles over health care compensation is social and economic madness. No other advanced democracy is dumb enough to allow this sort of thing. The involvement of general business in the health insurance business in the first place is an accident of our nation’s history. After WW II, when the rest of the west was well on its way to universalizing health care along the lines of fire and police protection, the US decided to dump the bulk of health care costs on business. This was when medicine did not cost that much, and American doctors were opposed tooth and nail to “socialized medicine.” If not for that error we would not be in the mess that we are now.

If they were in their right minds, all Yankee capitalists and investors (outside the insurance industry) would be begging the feds to please, please take this financial gorilla off their backs. Because health care costs are so outrageously high, American products are overpriced compared to their foreign competition, contributing to the trade imbalance and the debt load, while suppressing job creation. That employees are fearful of losing their health insurance if they quit their jobs impairs the job mobility that is supposed to be one of the positive freedoms of the modern economy. The sky high insurance premiums paid by the self employed (many thousands of dollars per annum for a healthy person in their fifties) if they can get it in the first place discourages people from striking out on their own to set up the single person and small businesses that are supposed to be another benefit of the 21st century economy.

Right wing “thinkers” like Newt Gingerich love spinning out one pet theory after another on how to adjust the free market — and tax breaks that do the lower classes little good because they don’t pay taxes anyway — to supposedly make health care more accessible and affordable. Cooking up novel but not necessarily practical ideas gives them something to do, it’s intellectually entertaining. The conservative ideologues will never stop concocting such schemes, which are nothing more than band aids whose actual effect is to perpetually put off what has to be done. Doing the latter is academically rather dull because little innovation is called for, instead it means picking out and applying the best aspects of what has already proven effective in western nations. The medical portion of the economy is well on its way to engulfing a full fifth of the gross national product as it bankrupts the middle class, and leaves the lower class with out proper access to the care they desperately need. Things are so bad that even the corporate powers are starting to discard the old knee jerk ideological rejection of progressive medical coverage as they cry uncle. As for McCain, he does not have a clue; his election will bog down progress on the problem for yet more years.

The following is a modest proposal on how to reduce bitter left versus right ideology in favor of a more bipartisan approach that voters will support. First, emphasize the savings to be made by switching over to a more progressive, universal arrangement in which every American has full access to good solid health care simply by being a citizen. The savings amount to trillions for the economy as a whole over the span of a few years. For each person it is over couple thousand of dollars each year, or well above a hundred thousand over a lifetime. No citizen will receive a bewildering flurry of co-payment bills after receiving care. No American will ever go bankrupt due to overwhelming medical expenses. It cannot be overemphasized how imperative it is to get across how a universal system will actually benefit the entrepreneurial free market by reducing the burden of medical expenses, and by encouraging self-employment and small businesses. Above all else, get the big corporations to see the big advantages of getting out of the business of health coverage. Explain that universal health care makes as much sense as socialized police and fire protection, except that there is no need to adopt a fully socialized system in which the entire medical complex is nationalized.

Do that, and the USA will finally be a first world nation with a first world medical complex. One can only hope.

McCain is not the sort of devout, church going creationist many Republicans are looking for, and he even believes in global warming. But don’t go thinking that the GOP has suddenly gotten its act together when it comes to modern science. For years the senator has been waging a personal mini-war on science. It was exposed in a 3/10 Washington Post article titled “While McCain Sees Pork, Scientists See Success.” Over the years he has targeted a series of federally funded science projects for criticism by poking fun at them. About a $5 million study of grizzly bear DNA he said that “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money.” McCain has also gone after the $2 million Groundfish Disaster Outreach Program in Oregon, and research into the influence of methane emitted by cattle on atmospheric ozone. Of the latter McCain said that he “always wondered about the testing procedures used to determine those effects on the ozone layer.”

To be fair, bashing science is not just a conservative Republican thing. Liberal Democratic Senator William Proxmire made a political career out of it. And when pressed on the issue straight talking McCain will retreat into the claim that he is criticizing pork science, projects that were not properly vetted through the peer reviewed process. He may well have a point there. Here is where the problem lies. According to a McCain aide interviewed in the Post article, the senator did not “question the merits of these projects, it’s the process he has a problem with.”

But Senator McCain did not just criticize the vetting procedures, he went right after the quality of these research projects by ridiculing them. That too would not be a fatal defect if they deserved the derision. For instance, taking on how medicines kept getting approved, pushed by massive ad campaigns, and then withdrawn after they killed off a portion of the patients would be a good idea. But what about the projects McCain derides? The state of the ozone layer is no joke. If it goes then UV radiation has a free ride to the surface of the earth, and that would be very bad. The high altitude ozone that screens us from most UV rays is a delicate thing, easily degraded by chemicals emitted into the air. Because there was a dispute over whether the fluorocarbons used in industry, air-conditioners and aerosol products was really what was doing a number on the ozone layer, it was necessary to find out if something else was contributing to the problem. Methane and ozone do not get along, the former destroys the latter. Each cattle churns out an astonishing amount of methane as it ferments its food during its lifespan, and there are a whole lot of the beasts wandering about the planet from the streets of New Delhi to the high plains of Wyoming. It would have been embarrassing if after banning a widely used set of chemicals it turned out that something else was causing the problem in the first place. So someone had to do the measurements and crunch the numbers to find out what was going on. It’s called scientific research. In the end it was determined that banning the industrial chemicals would do the trick, which is has. That too was science.

As for the bears, the grizzlies that once ruled the west are now rare and under the protection of the Endangered Species Act. Problem was that up in northwest Montana where the grizzlies still roam no one knew how many there actually are. So the highly respected biologist Katherine Kendall came up with a method that is considered scientifically brilliant. In a large scale project covering 12,000 square miles the DNA of the bear population was examined by testing the over 33,000 hair samples they left behind at specially prepared sites. The results showed that the hundreds of grizzlies in the region are doing better than earlier, less accurate estimates predicted. Now biologists have the data they need to better mange the bear populations. More good science.

If McCain really were just going after the way Congress funds a lot of science that would be OK. Instead he cannot resist casting rhetorical scorn upon good science done by excellent researchers. By doing so he is — for personal political gain — unnecessarily contributing to the poor opinion that many Americans hold concerning science and scientists. It is the sort of yahoo anti-science attitude that the nation does no need. There is growing concern that the United States is slipping in the international science competition. In part, this reflects the rise of science in a fast developing world, but there is also a decline in interest in science among Americans. We have to import scientists from India and China to compensate for a lack of sufficient researchers coming out of our own education complex, and doing that is getting harder as those nations offer increasing opportunities for their own scientists. Increasing numbers of evangelical kids are being home educated by parents whose views on science are not all that much better than those of Bryan. That can’t be good.

So what can be done about McCain? Matthew Chapman is a filmmaker who happens to be a descendent of Charles Darwin; he wrote a book about the Dover trial in Pennsylvania where the creationists got their anti-evolution butts legally kicked. He has mounted an effort to dedicate one of the upcoming presidential debates solely to the subject of science. You can check it out at sciencedebate2008.com. Whatever form the debates take, it fortunately will not be the epic contest between the pro-evolution Dem and creationist Repub that was once feared. That’s a dose of progress. But it offers the opportunity to call the man from Arizona on the mat for picking on good scientists.

The Bible was written by Bronze and Iron Age peoples who had little concept about modern free enterprise. Nor did Jesus talk about stock options or hedge funds. Many early Christians lived in communistic communities where property was considered sinful. The fundamentalist Protestant William Jennings Bryan used to rail against the secular forces of capital. The Roman Church Buckley belonged to has always looked askance at capitalism. Yet, especially since World War II, the bulk of the conservative Christian cause — mainly evangelical with a number of Catholics going along for the ride — have embraced free wheeling, deregulated, laissez-faire, corporate capitalism as though it is God’s way for his human creations to manage their large scale economics.

What explains this peculiar and unprecedented amalgamation of economic modernity with social and religious traditionalism? Obviously corporate capitalism has become the modern American Way, and is a source of pride for most on the right. It is equally obvious to these people that God is pro-America, so it follows that God must think that free enterprise the best way for his creations. Intellectual justification for this notion derives from Buckley’s argument that individual free will is critical for human salvation, another innovation that would perplex traditional Christians. The Christian right goes on to imagine that the free market of commerce and ideas will somehow return the nation to the traditional religious culture they crave. The ultimate expression of this world-view is found in Protestant, Charismatic Prosperity Christianity, the self-help megachurch phenomenon in which self-aggrandizing ministers contend that the Lord wants all of his followers to be as rich as possible.

Horrified by the rise of the counterculture starting in the 1960s, major elements of the religious right decided to fight back by allying with the corporate interests under the aegis of the Republican Party, allowing them to leverage their political power well above their minority status. But this alliance of convenience is a deal with the corporate devil. In their incessant need to maximize the market base and profits, a fundamental aim of corporate capital is to transform western citizens into materialistic, hedonistic, sex, violence, celebrity and sports obsessed consumers whose life goals and values deviate from those associated with traditional piety. And to a large degree the population has gone along with the project even as it complains about it — people want to be free to have a lot more fun than the churches want them to.

One reason only a quarter of the public attends church on a given Sunday is because lots of busy shoppers prefer to hit the stores on Sunday — which became possible only after the retailers helped repeal the Puritanical Blue Laws. Bill O’Reilly targets secularists for waging war on Xmas in order to divert attention away from how the mercantile powers have remade the event into a shop-til-you drop secular holiday. The right once owned the culture via the oppressive Comstock Laws, and the Hayes Code that ruled Hollywood. Nowadays not a single conservative Christian themed program graces the corporate owned entertainment networks, whose programming is steeped in the salacious and irreligious. Such as FOX’s hypergraphic medical drama House which stars a proudly atheist MD. Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment empire is notorious for offering an array of irreligious TV and film product that feeds cultural secularization, while his FOX News presents conservative pundits such as O-Reilly are careful to charge the faithless liberals, not the capitalists, with coarsening the culture. Despite winning the occasional battle, the right has lost the culture war as the corporate world takes its putative religious allies for a ride.

The damage to American faith has been immense. God-fearing America is experiencing the popular secularization that has already imploded faith in the rest of the west. Church membership has been slipping from its peak in the 1950s, with men especially leaving the pews. The latter is a demographic disaster for the churches because most children pick up their non/religion from their fathers, and American youth is increasingly nonreligious. Christians as a whole are in decline as Protestants approach minority status for the first time. Until recently it was the mainstream churches that were taking it on the chin, but the evangelical right has stalled out too, and a report by the once mighty Southern Baptist church laments that “evangelistically, the denomination is on a path of slow but discernable deterioration.” Two recent Harris polls found that disbelievers have ballooned from a couple of million in the 1950s to some 60 million today, rivaling the Catholics and the evangelicals in numbers. The nonreligious doubled in just the last dozen years.

William Buckley was instrumental in shifting the American Christian right from William Bryan’s old fashioned anti-capitalism to its modern enthusiasm for mass consumerism. To be blunt about it, for all his erudite intellectualism Buckley was not socially astute; the populist Bryan had much better horse sense concerning the dangers that the capitalist world-view posed for popular piety. One has to wonder exactly how right-wingers think that they will get a traditionalist culture out of the rat-race that is the pursuit of wealth and pleasure. Instead, Buckley’s Grand Alliance has predictably backfired. The corporate-consumer culture has been a disaster for mass faith in every western democracy — that’s one reason the Vatican remains so skeptical about it. But to be fair, it is not like the religious right has much in the way of viable options. They are in a classic socio-political bind. If they break off their Republican collaboration with capital they will lose what political power they have, which is already sliding as the growing secularism favors the Democrats. Nor can the churches compete for cultural influence with commercial forces that enjoy a cash flow amounting to many trillions each year. It looks like there is little that the followers of Buckley can do to stem much less reverse the rise of popular secularism.

Further reading

In “Why the Gods Are Not Winning,” Edge (2007) 4/30; Phil Zuckerman and I discuss additional socio-economic forces that help secularize western societies. I detail some of the societal positives of popular secularism in “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look,” Journal of Religion and Society (2005), 5, (covered by Lee Salisbury, “Religion May Be Dangerous to Our Health,” Dissident Voice).