God Save Us From Our Latter-Day History Professors

Civitas, 10 November 2004

George Bush’s electoral victory last week has shaken the predominantly left-leaning Anglo-American intellectual elite to its core. How, they collectively have wondered, could the American electorate have been so stupid? And, more pointedly, what do the Democrats have to do to ensure such an electoral debacle will never be repeated in future?
The answers to these questions currently favoured by this elite go as follows. The Republicans won because the American heartland is so heavily populated by bigoted, ignorant Christian fundamentalists. The Republicans were able cleverly to exploit this electoral constituency to its to own advantage by being able to appeal to ‘flag, faith, and family’ in a way in which Democrats did not.

To secure victory next time, the Democrats have to prevent the Republicans from assuming sole occupancy of the moral high ground. To prevent them doing so, Democrats must offer the American electorate a vision of their country as a moral community, that is more enlightened because wholly secular. By so doing, they will be able to exploit and turn to the electoral advantage of the Democrats the altruistic and communitarian values many Americans have.
A graphic illustration of this proffered explanation for Republican victory and prescription for future Republican defeat was provided in last week’s Sunday Times in the form of some reflections on the outcome of the election given by the celebrated historian, Simon Schama.
Although born and educated in England, Professor Schama has, for many years, resided on the east-coast of America at premier universities. Commenting on the outcome of the election, Professor Schama claimed himself to belong to a worldly elite that is ‘horrified’ by the Bush vote. In Professor Schama’s view, all Europeans belong to this elite, or at least all Sunday Times readers do, in contradistinction to those inhabitants of America’s heartland who voted for Bush. He writes, ‘You and I – like anyone in Western Europe – live in a world where Christian belief is marginal.’ By contrast, the ‘Bush heartland is … an America that’s as remote to us as Shi’ite Islam.’
Given such an electorate, Professor Schama suggests, to secure victory next time, Democrats must ‘create the political equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting’ which provides voters with a vision of America as a genuine but all too often benighted community as a result of rapacious Republican policies. Democrats can thus appeal to the altruistic values of their compatriots by providing them with a genuine alternative moral vision to the inferior one to which the Republicans successfully were able to appeal in the absence of any alternative. As Professor Schama puts it, ‘[T]he Democrats … need to tell stories about Sid and Jane out on the prairie, people who can’t afford prescription drugs, whose gas is $3 a gallon, who’ve got a kid in the National Guard. The[y]… have to make a moral connection… [and] … appeal[s] to a very deeply lodged sense of moral community in America .’
How sound is this explanation of the Democrats’ defeat? And how sound is the associated prescription of Schama’s for securing Democratic victory next time? Neither seem plausible for the following reasons.
First, if, as John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, has done, the exit profiles for last week’s election are compared with those for 2000 in which the margin of victory was more slender, it turns out that it was those who seldom or never attend church rather than regularly attend church among whom support for Bush chiefly grew.
Second, as Hood also points out, approximately as many American voters supported civil unions for gay couples, but not marriage, as were opposed to both. Yet, majorities in both groups of voters preferred Bush to Kerry.
These facts suggest that the concerns of voters that secured President Bush electoral victory were more mundane than those the likes of Professor Schama would have us believe.
The decisive electoral concern seems to have been foreign policy, especially the War in Iraq and the War on Terror. Of those polled after voting in the 2000 election, 12% considered “foreign affairs” the most important issue. By 2004, that figure had risen nearly three-fold to 34%. In both cases, a majority of these voters voted Republican.
As well as having exaggerated the importance of religious values in determining the outcome of last week’s election, Professor Schama would also seem to have exaggerated how much more religious the American electorate is in comparison with their British counter-parts. A report in today’s London Times states that as many as a third of Bush’s supporters never go to church, and that as many as two thirds of Kerry’s supporters never do. This means nearly a half of American voters never attend church, a figure very close to the percentage of British voters who never do.
Not only has Professor Schama exaggerated how much more religious in outlook Americans are by comparison with their British cousins, he, and they who think like him, seem equally to have exaggerated how secular in outlook the British are. Over half the British electorate are reported as attending church at least a few times each year, and nearly one fifth of them attending church at least monthly. This hardly makes the British inhabit ‘a world where Christian belief is marginal’, as claimed by Professor Schama. Religion assuredly plays little part in the life of British intellectuals like him, but the same holds true of their American counterparts.
The truth seems to be that the outcome of the American election was not decided by religion – or at least not by any religion practised outside the caves of Afghanistan. Nor are the British any less religious in outlook than their American cousins, although British intellectuals wish they were, sometimes to the point, like Professor Schama, of seemingly labouring under the illusion they are. The last word on this latter issue is best left to an earlier historian of England whose grasp of the realities of English life seems firmer than that of his latter-day ex-patriot counterpart.
Writing in 1956, Sir Arthur Bryant once remarked:
‘England is a Christian land, and only by contemplation of her long Christian history can one comprehend her. … That is why, to any lover of England and her history, … her cathedral and parish churches matter so much…. [O]ur civilisation was made by these churches… and, when they crumble or are destroyed, will perish with them…. They knit us together as a people… [and] without them ours would be a raw materialistic polity of concrete factories and offices and purposeless urban populations fast receding into barbarism.’
Perhaps, the present Labour Government would do well to take Sir Arthur Bryant’s remarks to heart before seeking to replace England’s traditional skyline dominated as it is by church steeples with one dominated by the flashing neon of casinos, and replace Christian worship and instruction in schools by multicultural secularism.