Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (43 page)

Though polls in the 1990s continued to indicate that virtually all Americans believed in God, they also revealed that most people—especially young people—were disposed to be tolerant of the private behavior of others and that they were uneasy about forceful religious intervention in political matters. A good deal of conservative political activism in the 1990s, moreover, arose from secular, not religious, sources. Leading conservative newspapers and magazines—the
Wall Street Journal
,
Human Events
,
The Public Interest
,
National Review
, and the
Weekly Standard
—focused more on economic and foreign policy issues than on moral concerns dear to deeply religious people.

To be sure, many members of the Christian Right continued to champion theological positions that differed sharply from those of more secular Americans. It was surely inaccurate to maintain that the United States had become an overwhelmingly secular nation in which religion was no longer important. While Catholic advocates of public funding for parochial schools were quieter in the 1990s than they had been in the past, they believed as strongly as ever—as did Protestant evangelicals—in the virtues of religious instruction in the schools.
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Religious conservatives, moreover, remained a significant cultural force in the United States. Though battles over the content of textbooks tended to abate by the mid-1990s—by then, many history texts had become multicultural, featuring not only the Founding Fathers but also Sacajawea, César Chávez, Frederick Douglass, and Malcolm X—conservatives continued to fight against sex education in schools and Darwinian messages in biology texts and courses.
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Crusaders such as these found numerous ways of spreading their gospels. Cable TV at the time made Pat Robertson’s Family Channel available to some 50 million homes. James Dobson’s daily radio show,
Focus on the Family,
which was carried on 4,000 stations, attracted an estimated 5 million listeners. It was estimated that there were 399 full- or part-time Christian radio stations on the air in the late 1990s.
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As Pat Buchanan’s visibility suggested, conservative Christians also retained political muscle in the 1990s and in 2000. They were strong enough to drive GOP candidates, Bush included, to the right during presidential primaries and at quadrennial party conventions. In some areas, notably in the Sunbelt, they had the numbers and the zeal to affect electoral outcomes. In the off-year congressional elections of 1994—when turnout was otherwise low—their activities, efficiently organized by the Christian Coalition, helped enable the GOP to win a number of races in the South and thereby to construct a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954. Culturally conservative Republican representatives and senators, having gained control in Congress, were thereafter in a better position to press for their goals, such as restrictions on abortion and gay rights, and the appointment of conservative federal judges. In close presidential elections (as in 2000 and 2004), they were among the many blocs that could help to make the difference between victory and defeat. In both these presidential races, a majority of white Catholic voters, too, supported the GOP.

But some worried liberals overreacted. As earlier, people associated with the Religious Right disagreed among themselves. The Christian Coalition, having revealed itself in 1994 to be a politically savvy religious lobby, ran up $3 million in debt and fell into disarray. Shortly after Reed left it in 1997, it virtually imploded. So within a year did the Promise Keepers, which also suffered from poor financial management. Other major organizations representing the Christian Right, notably the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, continued to thrive, but they faced determined counter-organization, especially from liberals in urban areas and on the east and west coasts. Later, in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, it was clear that these and other groups within the Religious Right had become vital assets to the GOP, mainly in the South. But in the late 1990s, with Clinton still in the White House, the full political power of Christian conservatism remained to be demonstrated.
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Sensing their political limitations, a number of religious conservatives in the late 1990s grew pessimistic. Neither Reagan nor Bush, they recognized, had truly advanced their agendas. None of their major goals—regarding abortion, prayer in the public schools, or pornography—had been met. Liberals remained powerful in universities and in the media. Discouraged, some advocates on the right wondered if their causes, struggling against the ongoing secularization and commercialization of American culture, might be declining. Himmelfarb, writing in 1999, observed glumly that the United States had become less religious than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Only 58 percent of Americans, she noted, told pollsters in 1998 that religion was important in their lives—compared to 75 percent who had said so in 1952.

The sociologist Alan Wolfe (not a religious conservative) had reached similar conclusions in 1998. Most middle-class Americans, he wrote, distrusted televangelists and other proselytizing religious leaders who tried to impose their ideas on people. Americans, he said, practiced “Quiet Faith.” They were “free-agent churchgoers” who signed on for “short-term contracts” with a series of congregations. David Frum, a conservative journalist, agreed, writing in 1994 that the number of white Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, and charismatics was “not large”—perhaps 15 million people (of a total population at that time of 276 million) spread over thirty states. They were a “dispersed, poor, relatively uneducated group.” Refuting liberal fears about the power of the Religious Right, Frum concluded that there was “no vast theocratic menace out there.”
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Some of the social problems that had especially alarmed conservative Americans, though remaining more serious than they had been in the 1960s, also seemed to become a little less fearsome later in the decade. Rates of teenage pregnancy and births, and of abortion, which had soared in the 1980s, decreased after 1991—the result, it was believed, of AIDS prevention programs, increased use of condoms, and new methods of birth control.
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Crime rates dropped at last. The murder rate, having peaked in 1980 at 10.2 per 100,000 of population, declined dramatically, to 6 per 100,000 by 2000. By then, American rates of property crime, notably larceny and theft, had fallen below those in Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, and Britain.
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Thanks in part to rising prosperity in the late 1990s, and in part to a major overhaul of welfare policies after 1996, welfare rolls plummeted.
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The incidence of cigarette smoking, though high among teens, continued to fall. Drug and substance abuse appeared to be a little less serious in the late 1990s than it had been during the 1970s and during the crack cocaine epidemic that had peaked in the 1980s. For all these reasons, the cultural despair that had afflicted many urban areas, such as New York City after the blackout of 1977, began to abate. (In New York City, even the subways had become clean.) All these changes slightly allayed the fears of conservatives who had waged culture wars earlier in the decade.

It also seemed that many among the youngest generation of Americans—so-called Millennials born after 1982—were rejecting in the late 1990s the behavioral excesses, as these young people saw them, of the boomers and of their children, the so-called Generation X. While these young Millennials were hardly enrolling in large numbers behind conservative crusades against sex education, abortion, or gay rights—like their parents, they grew up in the more liberal, permissive culture of the era—they seemed to be acting more responsibly in sexual matters, drinking less, and avoiding drugs. Most of these Millennials said that they believed in God and loved their country.
⁴³

Whether such generational generalizations held water was hard to say: Diversity within age cohorts remained enormous in America’s multicultural population. Were “generations” easily definable? But broad and deeply pessimistic assertions about national decline in the 1990s did seem misconceived. It also remained debatable whether community involvement—grass-roots organizing, volunteering, philanthropic spirit—was truly in decline in the 1990s or whether, instead, it just seemed that way to nostalgic Americans who cherished rose-colored memories of neighborhood cohesiveness in the past.
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T
HE SECOND OBSERVATION TO BE MADE
about late twentieth-century social and culture wars is that liberals were winning a great many of them. As in the 1970s and 1980s, more and more Americans in the 1990s, especially younger Americans, were demonstrating by their beliefs and their behavior that they were tolerant of liberal mores. Defying their elders, the young persisted in dressing, wearing their hair, and—by late in the decade—piercing and tattooing their bodies as they pleased. Regarding a range of more important personal matters—sexual practices, marriage and divorce, and family life—Americans were becoming less censorious about the behavior of other people. By the 1990s, the rising cultural permissiveness that had shaken traditionalists in the 1960s and that had spread over the years seemed virtually unstoppable.

A number of behaviors that had become more common since the 1960s, notably cohabitation and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, continued in the 1990s to be widespread and to arouse conservative complaints. During the presidential campaign of 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle touched off a headline-stealing row when he criticized the TV character Murphy Brown (played by Candice Bergen in a popular sitcom of that name) for bearing a baby without getting married and for indicating calmly that the father’s identity did not matter. Quayle, slamming the show as well as the liberalism of the medium that aired it, exclaimed that Murphy Brown’s behavior could not be defended as “just another lifestyle choice.” Critics of Quayle leapt happily into the fray, ridiculing him as a prig and branding him an enemy of free expression. Writers for
Murphy Brown
responded cheekily by including his criticisms in later episodes, whereupon the show’s ratings increased.

Advocates of traditional family patterns such as Quayle did manage to hold their own in a few of the culture wars of the 1990s, notably those concerning abortion. Though the Court did not overturn
Roe v. Wade
, many states enacted laws calling for parental notification or consent before minors might get one. Between 1988 and the early 2000s, twenty-one states approved legislation that mandated waiting periods before abortions. Another twenty-eight states limited or cut off public financing for abortion. By 2000, NARAL Pro-Choice America (the new name for the National Abortion Rights Action League) grudgingly recognized that laws such as these were likely to remain on the books.
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As the enhanced popularity of
Murphy Brown
suggested, however, conservatives otherwise had little success in their efforts to reverse long-range cultural trends in America. By 2000, 69 percent of all black babies and 27 percent of all white babies were being born out of wedlock. Thanks mainly to increases in out-of-wedlock births among whites during the 1990s, the overall percentage of such births in 2000 was a record high of 33, up from 27 in 1990.
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Though abortion rates declined a little in the 1990s, these, too, remained far too high to placate conservatives—at a ratio of roughly one for every three live births in 2000. A majority of Americans at the time, as earlier, said either that they approved of
Roe v. Wade
or that they favored the protection of choice with modest limits.
⁴⁷
Roughly 40 percent of marriages still ended in divorce. Attitudes toward gays and lesbians were slowly liberalizing. And nothing that traditionalists could say or do prevented steadily higher percentages of women from working away from the home. The comic strip character Blondie, who had long been a housewife, started a catering business in 1991, as if to keep pace with the many millions of women who had joined the civilian labor force by that time. As earlier, the percentage of such women kept increasing, to 60 among women sixteen and over by 2001.
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Ongoing trends in family patterns also continued in the 1990s. By then it was becoming obvious that high divorce rates, later-age marriages, greater sexual freedom, cohabitation, and rising female employment had combined to make the traditional family—married couples with children—just one of a variety of family styles. There was no longer an obvious cultural norm. The census of 2000 reported that 23.9 percent of America’s adult population (over eighteen) had never been married. This compared to 20.3 percent that had never been married in 1980. The census further indicated that married couples headed only 53 percent of American households (55.3 million of the total of 104.7 million). Female householders living without spouses but with their own children under eighteen years of age numbered 7.6 million in 2000—22 percent of all families with children of that age. Only 60 percent of American children in 1995 lived in the same residence with their two biological parents.
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