Immoderately Moderate or Moderately Immoderate
By Joseph Knippenberg
Last week, the good people at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press issued a report based upon an opinion poll conducted in mid-July. Asking questions about gay marriage, gay adoption, abortion, stem cell research, and other vexed and vexing social issues, they provided much grist for the mills of people who like to think about religion, politics, and social, moral, and cultural issues.
From the perspective of the report’s authors, the big take-away lesson is that talk of a culture war is overblown:
Despite talk of “culture wars” and the high visibility of activist groups on both sides of the cultural divide, there has been no polarization of the public into liberal and conservative camps.
The people, they reassure us, are all over the map: a little conservative in their approach to gay marriage and adoption, a little liberal in their approach to stem cell research, and looking for a middle ground on abortion.
What’s more, despite all the ink that has been spilled on these issues, and all the shouting across the barricades, public opinion has been remarkably stable over the years. For example, between March, 2001 and July, 2006, the percentage of those sampled who favored gay marriage ranged from 29 to 39, beginning and ending the series at 35. Roughly the same goes for abortion. Over the past ten years, the percentage of the respondents favoring abortion on demand has ranged from 30 to 35, settling now at 31; the percentage opposed to abortion in most or all circumstances has basically been in the mid forties (it’s now 46).
To be sure, there has been some movement on civil unions and stem cell research, with solid majorities currently favoring both, 54 – 42 in the former and 56 – 32 in the latter. In both cases, there has been a roughly ten percent shift in the past few years.
Anyone who has been following public opinion polling on these issues can guess in most instances how the opinions break down demographically. On abortion and gay marriage, the most liberal groups are seculars and mainline Protestants, followed closely by college graduates. The most conservative on abortion are white evangelicals and black Protestants. (Catholics are split in ways that track closely the national breakdown.) White evangelicals are the only group in which a majority opposes embryo-destroying stem cell research, though even there the trend lines seem to be going in favor of the research.
Seculars are the only group that favors gay marriage, though white mainline Protestants are pretty evenly divided. Seculars, mainline Protestants, and Catholics all favor civil unions, with white evangelicals and black Protestants opposed.
On these issues, folks in the South and Midwest—flyover country—tend to be more conservative that their coastal brethren. Being college-educated also tends to be associated with increased liberalism. (The poll of course doesn’t tell us whether that’s the result of increased enlightenment or political correctness. You be the judge.)
The Pew analysts constructed a conservatism scale based on attitudes on five issues—abortion, the morning-after pill, stem cell research, gay adoption, and gay marriage. They found that 22% of their respondents took consistently liberal stances on all these issues, while 12% took consistently conservative stances. Another 16% (each) took largely conservative or liberal stances. A third of the respondents straddled the middle, holding conservative views on two or three of the five issues.
This way of describing the data, together with the fact that 66% of the respondents agreed with the proposition that “the country needs to find a middle ground on abortion laws,” is the basis of the argument that there is no general culture war.
Leaving aside the fact that I’m not persuaded that inconsistency is the same as moderation, or that “moderation” born of inconsistency is a virtue, I think that it’s premature to announce that, despite the best efforts of “extremists” on both sides, the culture wars aren’t now happening and/or never will happen.
In the first place, I suspect that stem cell research is one of the great sources of inconsistency among folks who are generally conservative on social issues. Part of that inconsistency may be an artifact of the way the pollsters ask the question:
All in all, which is more important, conducting stem cell research that might result in new medical cures, or not destroying the potential life of human embryos involved in this research?
There is an incentive (“might result in new medical cures”) attached to the pro-research statement and a discounter (merely “potential life”) attached to the anti-research statement. The former enlists our hopes, the latter diminishes our scruples. A different, more neutral way of asking the question might have produced somewhat different results.
Then there’s the fact that the question doesn’t distinguish between adult and embryonic stem cell research. While it’s possible to argue that the controversy—and hence the question—is all about the latter, there is enough ambiguity to have confused some respondents.
It’s also the case that much of the public information that’s available oversells and overpromises the as-yet uncertain benefits of embryonic stem cell research, while diminishing the concrete benefits of adult stem cell research. The more you hear, the more you (think you) know, the more you favor the embryo-destroying research.
While I’m skeptical about this public misinformation being corrected—scientists and their political supporters have been successfully peddling hope for generations—I’m also not convinced that this is a hot-button culture war issue. Yes, there are people on both sides who get very exercised, and occasionally (as now in Missouri) it can be a major election issue, but it’s not one that’s going to bring lots of people to the barricades.
If we omit this issue from the Pew scale, I’d bet that you’d find many more consistently conservative people and fewer in the middle. The same, I think, goes for the morning-after pill, about which (according to the poll) 75% of the respondents have heard little or nothing at all. Opposition to the morning-after pill tracks opposition to abortion moderately well, but still more than 25% of those who oppose abortion in most instances would offer relatively free access to this pill.
If we stick with the three hardy perennials of the culture war—abortion, gay marriage, and gay adoption—I suspect that we’ll find significantly more consistency and hence more polarization. Yes, 66% of the respondents say they want to find a middle ground on abortion, but is it the “safe, legal, and rare” locution favored by the Clintons or a much more restrictive regime, with exceptions only for rape, incest, and protecting the life of the mother? There’s a world of difference between the two, and much about which to argue.
Another factor to take into account is that there does not seem to be widespread support for treating these issues on a state-by-state basis. Only 39% of the respondents said that it should be up to the states to decide how to regulate abortion, while only 26% favored the state option for stem cell research. More striking still is that only 44% thought it should be left to the states to decide whether “creationism” (another loaded term, indeed an odd choice, given the fact that the current dispute seems to be about intelligent design theory) should be taught along with evolution. (After all, curricular decisions have traditionally been the preserve of states and localities.) Opinion on gay marriage was a little more closely divided, with 48% saying that the issue should be settled nationally and 46% preferring state-level resolutions.
In other words, there isn’t at the moment a widespread willingness to agree to disagree, letting red states adopt red policies and blue states adopt blue policies. People seem to want uniformity and they clearly don’t agree on what the rules should be.
What’s more, a political response is virtually guaranteed because those unable to get their way through elections or legislation have proven very willing to use the courts as their main vehicle of change. Just as the contemporary pro-life movement arose in response to Roe v. Wade, so did the federal Defense of Marriage Act, its state counterparts, and the manifold state constitutional amendments defining marriage arise in response to judicial decisions (first in Hawaii and then in Massachusetts).
In our culture war, battle fatigue has yet to set in. Stay tuned for the upcoming skirmishes.
Joseph Knippenberg is a professor of politics and associate provost for student achievement at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. He is a weekly columnist for The American Enterprise Online and a contributing blogger at No Left Turns.
