Ben Sasse: belief

Transcript context

…Well, thank you for giving me lots of room to talk. I wrote on the realignment of domestic politics, 1950 to 1980, in light of the Cold War. The title is something like “The Anti-Madalyn Majority:” (named from Madalyn Murray O’Hair) “Secular Left, Religious Right, and the Rise of Reagan’s America.” The realignment of social conservatives and a lot of old Democrats into the Republican party, particularly in the South and in the Midwest, had many, many factors that drove it. If you listen to academic historians, usually, the story is very quickly reducible to one factor and one factor alone and that’s backlash against the civil rights movement. There’s a whole bunch of structural and personal racism in America that needs to be confronted, and some of the realignment does relate to backlash of civil rights movement, but the story is actually lots more complicated than that. I don’t think we’ve done a good job of understanding our present moment and how we got to this place by understanding that, in the Cold War, grassroots America looked at Soviet communist expansionism as a threat, not just because of centrally planned economics, but because of a fear that Soviet atheism was going to be enforced in certain kinds of ways that might expand into the world and, ultimately, forcibly secularize lots of different institutions in American life. For instance, one of the chapters in my thesis is about a letter-writing campaign to the FCC in the 1960s and 1970s that is arguably the largest letter-writing campaign in the history of the English language, that almost nobody knows anything about. More than 30 million people — Americans — wrote letters to the FCC to protest the fact that Madalyn Murray O’Hair was going to get religious broadcasting declared illegal in America. There was actually no such effort. There was no Madalyn Murray O’Hair. The FCC was never considering making religious broadcasting illegal, and yet, the ways that people came to believe that that might be true and the way this conspiracy theory took root and led 30-plus million people to write letters, relates to the way school prayer prohibition came about in the Supreme Court decisions of 1962, 1963, and that has to do with a different interpretation of the Establishment Clause than the way Americans had understood the Establishment Clause if you read First Amendment before the 14th Amendment tries to incorporate it, not just against “Congress shall make no law,” but states and localities and local school districts can’t as well. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that happened in American life in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s that’s really quite interesting and was scary to lots and lots of people. And I personally have no interest in prayer to the unknown God in schools in the 1960s for theological reasons, particular commitments that I have. nteresting and was scary to lots and lots of people. And I personally have no interest in prayer to the unknown God in schools in the 1960s for theological reasons, particular commitments that I have. Abstractions about that don’t interest me very much, but I have lots of sympathy for why people thought forces well beyond their control were making decisions that affected the local. So I think the realignment that ultimately came to full fruit in 1980 has lots of variables that we have to understand against the backdrop of international understandings the Cold War brought home to local communities in the US. You also show a lot of that realignment had come as early as 1972. So the Southern Strategy, Catholics lining up behind the Republicans, and that year Nixon, that was earlier than people thought and that was tied into religious issues.…

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