The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  How Moderns Think

  Back at Bluer, John Musick and I left the church basement and walked past a hall where a Hispanic Pentecostal congregation was holding a service. The preacher was romping, stomping, and praising the Lord. "They really throw down, don't they?" Musick said with a smile. We went to a room upstairs and began talking about the church and politics with a dozen or so members of the Bluer congregation. Many of Bluer's members are refugees from strict fundamentalist congregations, and they relish the open, apolitical atmosphere of their basement services. "I grew up in an Assemblies of God church, and it was rigid," said Anna. "People were telling me how to think, how to dress, how to vote. Here I can state my opinion and not have people jump down my throat." Jason has long blond hair and a beard. He grew up as a Baptist, but, he said, "they wouldn't have me now; I'm a rocker." (His band is Fastest Turbo Fire Engine.) The Baptists were good at telling him a lot of "thou shalts and thou shalt nots," Jason said, "but I was never taught how to have a relationship." You hear that word, "relationship," quite a bit from emerging church members. "A lot of our core people have been ruined to just going to church and listening to a message, having a shallow relationship with other people in the congregation, believing what they are told," Musick explained. "They are ruined to that sort of thing. The relationship trumps all."

  The "Bible says" certainty of the megachurch and the stale rituals of traditional denominations have bred a deep questioning among emerging church members. "They are highly suspicious of institutional religion," said Eddie Gibbs, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of a book about the emerging church. "They don't want celebrities or performers. They want engagement, involvement. They want participation. They see church not as a weekly gathering, but as a community to which you belong."15 And they don't expect the church to be the source of answers about life, politics, or even faith. Church is a place to ask questions and explore. "I think there are people who just don't think like moderns think," Musick said. "A typical modern thing would be, 'You be good and you pray, and God will answer your prayers.' Now, people who have a more postmodern leaning say, 'Sometimes that may work, but you cannot say that is a rule.' We are no longer taking a formulaic approach to faith. The king has no clothes."

  The emerging church has traded in the locked-down certainty of the conservative church—the modern church—for doubt. And that doubt extends to civic life. Mike Cosper at Sojourn in Louisville talked about how ambivalent his congregation feels about questions of politics and public policy—and about the century-old division between Public and Private Protestantism. "To be honest, we're in a place where we are struggling with how to do that," Cosper answered when I asked him about politics. "The whole thing with politics anymore is that it is so polarized. And it's extremely polarized within the church. It seems to me the two streams that exist are the socially conscious stream that says the Gospel is the good news to the poor and the downhearted. The political slant becomes liberal, to support welfare and all the programs. The other slant is more fundamentalist Christian that interprets everything through the lens of morality and family values and the world's going to hell in a handbasket and we need to hold on to these values as long as we can. And what bothers us is, when we look at it, the issues seem way more gray. When it comes to politics, they seem extremely gray and extremely complicated. And we're not at a place where we feel comfortable as pastors saying you need to think this or that, vote for this person or support that. Because the issues seem so complicated."

  People who think that religion is far too certain and that it plays too much of a leading role in politics will no doubt be heartened by Musick's questioning and Cosper's caution. But neutrality has its own price. Cosper told me that Louisville had been roiled by a police shooting that killed a young man. Civil rights leaders planned a march through the city, and the religious community was asked to join the gathering. "We wrestled with marching," Cosper said. "But the choice we made was we didn't advocate it institutionally." There were people on both sides of the issue at Sojourn, Cosper said. More fundamentally, he added, on these kinds of political questions, "you can't come down on one side or another often because you don't have Scriptural warrant to ... I'm exhausted by how complex it seems. I feel exhausted by the tendency toward polarization, by things getting heated and out of control. I personally feel like I lack the wisdom." One hundred years after the split between Public and Private Protestantism, there's a third option: questioning, watching, and waiting.

  The Benefits of Apathy and the Paradox of Democracy

  There is nothing meek or apathetic about Cosper, Musick, or the people who attend Sojourn and Bluer. But one consequence of seeing both sides of an issue is hesitancy. The price of moderation in politics can be passivity. This response runs counter to our ninth-grade civics version of American democracy: as citizens come to understand both sides of an issue, they're emboldened by knowledge and set off to engage in the exciting work of self-government. That's not the way it works. Cosper had it right: hearing both sides of an issue—and seeing the gray in most questions—is the ticket to withdrawal. Paul Lazarsfeld was one of the first to notice the connection between partisanship and participation when he studied two presidential elections in the 1940s from the vantage points of small towns in New York and Ohio.16 He discovered that partisans voted with certainty and with enthusiasm, while those who were tugged by both sides were less likely to cast ballots. Political scientists have since found again and again that partisanship increases participation. Partisans are the ones who vote and who donate to and work on campaigns. Indeed, the "relationship between voter turnout and political partisanship is among the most robust findings in social science."17

  Although high voter turnout had always been considered consummately good, Lazarsfeld discovered that the rigid partisanship that spurred more people to the polls was in truth a mixed blessing. "Extreme interest goes with extreme partisanship and might culminate in rigid fanaticism that could destroy democratic processes if generalized throughout the community," Lazarsfeld wrote. The political system required flexibility. It demanded both partisans to invigorate politics and moderates to heal the nation after a divisive struggle. The civics texts were right: the system needed those who felt strongly about politics. But Lazarsfeld believed that a "lack of interest by some people is not without its benefits, too." Having a good number of people who didn't care much about politics was just as vital to democratic government as having the voting booths filled with eager supporters of both sides. Indifferent citizens leavened the system, gave it suppleness, just what the partisan personality lacked. Apathy gave politicians room to maneuver, compromise, make deals, smother grease on the gears of representative democracy. Having people who didn't give a flip about politics helped hold society together and cushioned the nation from the shock of disagreement and change. A democratic government needed a variety of political appetites, Lazarsfeld concluded, a "balance between total political war between segments of the society and total political indifference to group interests of that society."18

  Diana Mutz has described this standoff as the paradox of democracy. We want citizens who are both active and deliberative. We want voters who are partisan and a society that allows compromise and conciliation. Simply put, we want what doesn't exist: reasonable citizens who are willing to listen to the other side but who are also excited about politics. Mutz has weighed the relative benefits of participation and deliberation and come down firmly on the side of indifference. There is no discernible benefit to increasing the percentage of people who vote, she wrote. Despite the commonplace admonition that low levels of voting threaten democratic government, there has been no measurable good associated with high levels of voting. But there are clear benefits to increasing conversation across ideological divides. The good produced when people stop to hear the other side is tolerance.19

  Lazarsfeld realized that the attributes of partisanship and indifference didn't coexist within the same pers
on. For that reason it was politically healthy for a society to foster a mix of people. Nothing could be more destructive than a society filled with knowledgeable, active, and opinionated "ideal citizens," Lazarsfeld warned. "We need some people who are active in a certain respect, others in the middle, and still others passive."20 The old sociologist was writing long before the Big Sort. Since the 1970s, we have been busy creating exactly the society Lazarsfeld cautioned against. More of us are partisan, and more of us are living in ever-smaller communities of interest, places that nurture our certainty and feed our extremism. Tolerance—and its progeny in the political world, compromise—were the victims of late-twentieth-century politics.

  Just Enough to Win the Turkey

  I was sitting in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., with reporters who had served time in Kentucky. We were all older, white, and male—of an age that we knew the same politicians who plied their trade in the state capital of Frankfort. We swapped stories, and when it was Bill Greider's turn, he began talking about Bert Combs. At one time, Greider was the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post and then became an author (Secrets of the Temple), but in the 1960s, he covered Frankfort for a now-defunct daily newspaper, the Louisville Times. Combs is a colossal figure in Kentucky political history. He was a squeaky-voiced lawyer born in the Kentucky mountains who was elected governor and, later, appointed by Lyndon Johnson to be a federal appeals court judge. Combs was an idealist, and he was a fixer. He built the first modern road into his beloved mountains, and he represented a coal company that ran a mine so recklessly that it exploded twice and killed twenty-six men. He shilled for industry, and he represented a group of poor schools, a case that ended with the state supreme court ordering the largest increase in spending on public education in Kentucky history. He was the classic mountain attorney, said one acquaintance: "He wants to make you cry from both eyes. One eye for the pain and the other eye on the merits."

  As Greider told the story, Governor Combs was sending an aide to Washington, D.C., to secure money for the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. The emissary asked if the governor had any last-minute instructions, and Combs allowed that he did. The governor said, cryptically, "Show them just enough to win the turkey." The man confessed that he had no idea what Combs was talking about, so the governor explained. Combs said that on a yearly trade day in one mountain town, there would be a contest of sorts. The young men would trail off behind a Main Street building and open their trousers; the gentleman with the largest display of manhood would win a live turkey. One trade day, the contest proceeded as tradition dictated. The competition was undecided until the judges reached a young man who slowly revealed his entry. The man had made only a partial disclosure when the judges acclaimed him clearly to be the most prodigious of that year's lot. The man tucked the feathered and flapping prize under his arm and walked back onto Main Street. The contest was no secret, of course, and when the man's wife saw her husband with the telltale turkey, she shrieked. How could he have done such a thing? "Don't worry, hon," the young man answered. "I just showed them enough to win the turkey." So, Combs told the aide, don't tell those people in Washington everything.

  We all laughed, which surprised Greider, who said he'd been telling the story for years at Georgetown dinner tables to listeners who were either mystified or offended, but never amused. We all appreciated Kentucky politics—or at least the culture that once defined Kentucky politics. And we all knew this was quintessential Combs, a man who revealed himself, like the man with the turkey, only as necessary, a little bit at a time.

  When I was a young reporter, I covered the explosions at the Scotia mine in 1976 that killed those twenty-six men, and I wrote about Combs as he defended the negligent coal company. The former governor did everything in his considerable power to win, and during that time, I considered him a traitor to his legacy. With politicians like Combs, however, you needed to stick around for a time to get the full story. Combs took the coal company's money, and a short time later, he resurfaced as the pro bono attorney representing public schools so poor that some of them couldn't afford to stock their restrooms with toilet paper. Combs sued the state on behalf of the schools. He demanded that the children in the poor, mostly rural communities be treated the same as their richer city neighbors. He was more successful representing kids than the coal company, but in both cases he was the insider, the fixer. Some say Combs not only represented the schoolchildren but also wrote the court's opinion. Nobody doubted the story.

  A week before Combs died—in 1991, he accidentally drove his car into a stream that had flooded the road leading to his mountain home—he called me out of the blue and began describing a case to be made before the U.S. Supreme Court. Combs thought that he could make a winning argument that would overturn the Court's ruling that states couldn't limit spending on political campaigns. There was too much money in politics, Combs creaked, and the law didn't fit the times. That was Combs, a man who bounced between amazing grace and the temptations of the purse, the middleman between the factions and economic interests that squabbled over the carcass of Kentucky.

  Our politics used to be filled with these Januses of special interests and public purpose—old pols, guys who were funny, flawed, and conflicted. America's best political novels have been about these two-tone politicians. Huey Long became Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Lyndon Johnson was the model for Arthur "Goddamn" Fenstemaker in Billy Lee Brammer's The Gay Place. Both books (and the multiple biographies of Long and LBJ) wrestled with the ambiguity inherent in their protagonists' occupation, but the fictional Fenstemaker said it best when he explained how things worked to a young, liberal politician—an idealist reluctant to raise the money from the "wrong people" for a statewide campaign: "Your job is to get elected and stay elected. That's the first consideration. When that's assured, you get good enough, mean enough, you learn enough to fend off the bill collectors. They come around wanting the moon and you give 'em green cheese and make 'em think that was what they were lookin' for all the time. That's what you do. That's what a professional has to do."21

  The political world revolved around Fenstemaker. Others—Brammer and his liberal (post-materialist) friends—lost their balance and were consumed by alcohol or despair. Fenstemaker was able to fend off the bill collectors for a time, and he served as the connection between the state's ideological factions. He was able to do some good. At the end of The Gay Place, the governor's aide, Jay McGown, finds Fenstemaker dead, in bed, having spent the night with a woman (or maybe two) who was not his wife. McGown remembers what Fenstemaker told him during an earlier campaign. "This is what you have to watch out for, Jay," the governor warned. "Remember it. You sit here in these carpets up to your ankles with a fire crackling in a corner and these black men serve you red wine and rare roast beef—and there's crepes suzettes comin' later—and tell me, now. Can you get all wrought up about the poor folks?"22 McGown knew that with Fenstemaker dead, an important part of what made self-government possible was gone.

  In the mid-1950s, an English anthropologist made a breakthrough in his discipline's understanding of politics. Max Gluckman realized that people were always in dispute. Societies were successful and long-standing so long as they could devise mechanisms that kept simple conflicts from becoming cataclysmic. Gluckman described the Nuer, a herding society of the Upper Nile. When the Nuer would fall into a dispute, the tribe would turn to a class of arbitrators known as the "men of the earth." The men of the earth had no formal powers, but they had cultural authority. When a person was killed in a village argument, a man of the earth would adjudicate compensation. When two groups of Nuer began fighting, a man of the earth could bring the factions to peace by rushing between the combatants and hoeing the soil. In modern democratic politics, Gluckman noted, we elect our men of the earth, politicians who are called upon to represent opposing factions and pressure groups.23

  At one time, the politician's profession was to have divided loyalties. Th
e conflicting desires and interests of a community were reconciled through the pol, the ward heeler. Politicians such as Combs and Lyndon Johnson were specialists in the art of showing just enough to win the turkey. With discretion and sometimes duplicity, they represented the diverse and conflicting factions within a county or a state, and through them disputes were mediated. Everyone would get angry with them, and everyone would also benefit from their work. Without them, the system, flawed as it is, has no way to reach the compromises that are fundamental to representative government.

  Gluckman learned in Africa that people needed "cross-cutting" relationships to survive. Successful societies evolved so that friends and enemies would often change places: opponents at one time would be friends later. This dynamic mixing of interests gave a tribe stability and protected it from internal warfare. Gluckman, an anthropologist specializing in Africa, was a contemporary of the missionary Donald McGavran, but as a social theorist, Gluckman was, in a sense, McGavran's opposite. McGavran said, over and over, "Men do not join churches where services are conducted in a language they do not understand, or where members have a noticeably higher degree of education, wear better clothes, and are obviously of a different sort."24 Whereas McGavran was interested in the attractive power of conformity, Gluckman studied the nature of conflict and its resolution. From his research into human discord, Gluckman came to see that normal conflict didn't escalate when people were connected to others in multiple ways, when the ties among the members of a tribe were conflicted. Societies that controlled disputes "are so organized into a series of groups and relationships, that people who are friends on one basis are enemies on another," Gluckman wrote.*25