Grievance Conservatives Are Here to Stay

Grievance Conservatives Are Here to Stay

Linda Greenhouse

What accounts for the paradox of religious ascendance over an ever more secular American society?

July 1, 2021 issue

Reviewed:

The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

by Katherine Stewart

Bloomsbury, 342 pp., $28.00

Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty?: The Unnecessary Conflict

by Andrew Koppelman

Oxford University Press, 202 pp., $34.95

Pastor Tony Spell speaking to the media after holding a service at the Life Tabernacle Church

Gerald Herbert/AP Images

Pastor Tony Spell speaking to the media after holding an evening service at the Life Tabernacle Church in defiance of the governor’s shelter-in-place order during the pandemic, Central, Louisiana, March 2020

The current struggle over the place of religion in American public life presents a paradox. At least by one measure, the country is less religious than it has ever been: Gallup reported recently that for the first time in its eighty years of opinion research, fewer than half of all Americans hold formal membership in a house of worship, and a third of the young-adult members of Generation Z—the cohort born in the late 1990s—claim not only no formal religious affiliation but no religious preference at all.

Furthermore, same-sex couples have won one of the major culture-war battles of our time, over their right to wed; the Census Bureau reports that more than a million Americans are now partners in same-sex marriages. Politically driven cases presenting religious objections to birth control ended up in the Supreme Court three times in the past seven years, but the fact remains that among people of all religious backgrounds, contraception is ubiquitous. More than 99 percent of American women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four who have had sexual intercourse have used some method of birth control, and nearly one in four American women will have an abortion during her reproductive lifetime.

Yet amid these signs of a rapidly secularizing society, the country is awash in religiosity. The Trump administration not only cultivated religious conservatives as an indispensable part of its base, it essentially handed the federal government’s policymaking apparatus over to the religious right. Of the administration’s fifteen Cabinet members, as many as eleven regularly attended a weekly Bible study, sometimes in the West Wing, organized by a conservative Christian group, Capitol Ministries. Regulations and executive orders privileging religion over other claims poured out of the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, Labor, Justice, even State.

One of the Biden administration’s early actions was to dismantle the Commission on Unalienable Rights, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had established to give priority to religious and property rights in the State Department’s annual assessment of other countries’ human rights records. “There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others,” Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in explaining why he was abolishing the commission.

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Linda Greenhouse

Linda Greenhouse teaches at Yale Law School and is a New York Times contributing opinion writer. Her book Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court will be published in November. (July 2021)

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