Shading the Religious Left

The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond boldly recasts late twentieth-century US religion and politics in light of primetime television. Placing a spotlight on Norman Lear and his iconic sitcoms, L. Benjamin Rolsky draws attention to the “spiritual politics of the Religious Left” and its understudied role in shaping the culture wars. It is a timely book with insights into the recent past that could reverberate through many of the questions and concerns found in current liberal circles. It should be read as an antidote to popular articles inviting readers to click further into overly simplified narrations of a so-called “God Gap” between political parties, an ostensible “emergence” of a Religious Left with current 2020 political candidates, or explanations of how unthinkable it may be for a former reality television star to be president of the United States. Even though explaining these concerns is not the purpose or scope of this book, Rolsky’s analysis of Lear and the Religious Left demonstrates the presence and power of a Religious Left in the latter half of the twentieth century, even as its presence and power unfolded in American life in unexpected ways.

The Rise and Fall documents a well-known turning point in American religious history in a new way, redirecting the emergence of the culture wars from “traditional” politics to popular culture. This occurs in three important ways. First, Rolsky focuses on Hollywood writer and producer Norman Lear, a historical figure many may consider unconventional for a study of religion and politics. Even so, Rolsky maintains a cast of characters familiar to scholars of the era (most notably, conservative figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson) at the same time he gently expands the conversation to include new figures shaping the culture wars, including American religion historian Martin Marty. The result is to turn the narration of the culture wars on its head and inside out with scholarly inquiry being directed at fellow academics and their public scholarship in addition to entertainment icons and religious leaders. Rather than present one side “winning” when another side “loses,” The Rise and Fall demonstrates how cultural victories may be the aim of religio-political movements, but actual outcomes are much more complicated. Second, Rolsky draws attention to television and popular culture as a field of politics, location of the culture wars, and site of liberal religious activity. He effectively demonstrates how primetime television, especially in the form of family sitcoms and variety shows, was “political territory” in the 1970s and 1980s. Third, Rolsky emphasizes the role popular television played in shaping the political discourse of the era in a number of ways, including setting the literal and figurative terms of public debate and establishing the formal and informal standards found in both federal regulation of television programming and national cultural norms. Consensus-based, “public interest” discourse and television programming were never a neutral cultural or legal standards regulating the airwaves. Rolsky shows how it was a distinct religio-political frame governed through federal regulatory powers, written and produced by Hollywood insiders like Lear, and consumed by the American public through the “electronic church.” As a result, primetime television was not mere entertainment but rather a powerful constellation of political and religious interests, organizations, and individual figures shaping the development of American families every evening by bringing relevant, “public” interests and concerns into the “private” world of American homes.

While each of the five chapters of the book focuses on Norman Lear, The Rise and Fall is not about Lear per se; instead, according to Rolsky, “Lear’s career in media is representative of a Religious Left understanding of American religion and politics” (186n7). Lear and his career were both a reflection and product of multiple liberalisms—theatrical, Jewish, and religious liberalism—explored in the first chapter. As a writer and producer of popular primetime television intentionally crafted with a religio-political message, Lear sought to influence the American public. The content and methods of Lear’s influence built off of the early-twentieth century forms of liberalism shaping his own understanding of American life even as he also supplied liberals of various and multiple stripes with new rhetorical tools to wield in the emergent culture wars setting the development of American politics and culture. Rolsky describes Lear as a “particular type of postwar liberal—one who combined the rigors and expectations of public reason and civil religion with a profound sense of empathy for religious and political difference in the public square” (7). And yet, like other liberals before and after him, Lear was a person who, as a result of his liberalisms, could not empathize with or even understand conservative arguments in the public square. “Tolerance and toleration of difference,” Rolsky explains, “worked in two directions—anyone could enter the public square, but only those who played by its rules were left alone by the state and its powers of public reason. Those who possessed overly provincial or inaccessible grounds of argumentation, such as religious ‘fundamentalists,’ were required to translate their claims into ones equally accessible by all” (8).

Just as Lear found the politics of the Right inaccessible, illegitimate, and warranting satire, Rolsky points out, “Lear’s spiritual politics was virtually unintelligible as a form of religious practice in the public square beyond the familiar accusation of ‘secular humanism” for the Religious Right (9). In order to understand the contours of the “Religious Left,” Rolsky demonstrates, the shadow of the Religious Right must also be visible. There was, and is, shade, between the two as culture wars took shape, defining the features of each side. That shade, however, does not detract from the substance of the Religious Left, or Right. Indeed, Rolsky is careful to present Lear in particular and the Religious Left more generally as having substance rather than reducing the Left as the inverse of the Right. The Religious Left, Rolksy contends, includes both distinctive ideas and strategies distinguishable from the Religious Right and from other religious groups and movements in America more generally. Lear in particular possessed a “civil religious vision” that “saw religious pluralism as a foundation of liberal democracy” (5). Lear’s career demonstrates key features of “liberal religious mobilization” or the “spiritual politics of the Religious Left” through sitcoms like All in the Family, which “communicated a consensus-values-driven project” later extending to his nonprofit organization, People for the American Way, and its programming (5). This use of popular media and nonprofit organizations as the site of religious and political activity was not new to religious liberals but rather “a culminating one as liberal religious sentiment continued its migration beyond institutional church walls…” (177). Part of what makes Lear such an interesting and salient figure with which to reevaluate religion and politics is his location outside of the conventional institutional settings for both “religion” and “politics.” This location is also one of the reasons why Lear is representative of religious liberals more broadly because, as Rolsky asserts, “one of the most understudied ways in which religious and spiritual liberals have enacted their politics in public, for better and for worse, is through various artistic and cultural productions—especially on prime-time television” (175). As neither an elected official nor a formally trained or popularly recognized religious leader, Lear—and Rolsky’s analysis of Lear—provides readers with an opportunity to shift their perspective and recalibrate understanding of both.

In this effort, Rolsky neither defends Lear’s religious liberalism as legitimate or worthy of admiration nor advances Lear as a model religious liberal in need of imitation; instead, Rolsky demonstrates how Lear as an object of study clarifies important religious and political phenomena of the era and why the scholarly parameters of the “culture wars” have been shortsighted. For example, just as the study of American religion has expanded well beyond the walls of places of worship, Rolsky asserts the study of American politics must expand well beyond the walls of formal seats of power and the policies emanating from them. Television, Rolsky asserts, is an especially salient site for reconsidering these popular and academic frames because in the latter half of the twentieth-century television “achieved much of its social power” across all spectrums of political, social, religious identification and ideology, from primetime sitcoms and variety shows to televangelism. In this period television became a new medium for and arena of cultural contestations in its various forms, with Lear in particular emerging as a leader in shaping the national norms for using television specifically for religio-political ends. Lear’s “relevance programming…mediated much of this [religious and political] conflict” in post-World War II America where American Christianity became, as Robert Wuthnow argued, “restructured” (15). He managed to turn primetime television into “a makeshift civics classroom” (13). Lear was successful because he could—and did—align his religio-political position with new federal policies regulating primetime television. In this effort, he, and other religious liberals, could better translate their religious and political norms into secular language, which further translated into a cultural power that “wins” cultural war battles in the public square. These victories, however, come at a price: first, narrowing the the location in which liberals were (and perhaps are) strongest to entertainment and other sites of culture rather than conventional sites of political power, like elected positions; and, second, limiting liberals ability to understand and empathize with conservative positions because the alignment of liberal and secular frames delegitimizes conservative ideas as inherently oppositional to consensus and “public interest.” Despite all his rhetoric and efforts to build toleration, Lear also possessed an “inability to seriously engage either the sources or content of arguments authored by conservative political elites and populist heroes alike” (5).

Rolsky argues “political and spiritual liberals like Lear have shaped the terms of these culture wars…due to their familiarity with various forms of popular culture and their ability to politicize a given social subject or issue for public consumption” (13). These contributions did not occur in spite of or in lieu of those made by conservative counterparts, but rather, as Rolsky explains, alongside and in reaction to them. “These representations did not simply reflect the ephemeral world of the popular; instead, these debates contested many of the fundamental assumptions guiding the relationship between religion and politics in American public life and the appropriate grounds for voicing “private” morality as “public” deliberation” (16). As a result, a key part of Lear’s distinctive approach was backlash against the religious right. Rolsky insists this motivation and religio-political positioning cannot be overlooked and must be reconsidered, perhaps even with the “self-examination” found in liberal political and religious circles (194n8). Without reconsideration of backlash as producing legitimate religio-political content, then neither scholars nor members of the Religious Left can see how the desire for greater religious and political pluralism “functioned multivalently as both the content of its own spiritual politics and a rhetorical weapon in the defense of the public square over and against the largely imagined Christian Right” (179-180). The “spiritual weapons” of the Religious Left take different forms than those utilized on the right, but that makes no less remarkable as weapons. Militancy and its metaphors may not be as familiar to liberal audiences, but the aim to defeat opponents is no less present. And, in the case of Lear’s primetime television satire aimed at conservative figures was key. In other words, laughing at conservatism and conservatives became a key ritual and religio-political value in performing and promoting liberalism in the public square.

As a result, The Rise and Fall suggests the shade and shadows looming over the Left are of its own creation, consistently undermining any cultural or political successes. How can liberals be successful in the culture wars without necessarily winning elections (to paraphrase Stephen Prothero’s book title)? In short, they can more successfully operationalize secular norms for liberal spiritual ends. They can translate their spiritual politics into the shared language of American democratic norms and values, thus speak in the register of federal standards and regulation, which provided an upper hand in political domains ranging from courtrooms to soundstages to dinner tables. The battles of the culture wars, then, are less about the merits of opposing values or ends (and, who’s ultimately “right” and who’s “wrong”) but rather who best understands the game and terms on which it is being played. Rolsky convincingly demonstrates Lear understood the game well, especially as it pertained to the arena of the entertainment industry, popular or mainstream culture as narrated from the vantage point of prime-time television, and federal regulation of mass media. He presented a substantive vision of America over and against that of the emerging Religious Right as led by Jerry Falwell, but his innovations lay less in the content (however award-winning it may have been) but in its strategy. Lear’s culture wars were a war of attrition, marshalling the resources of prime-time television and its newfound role in shaping the American public in terms of both consensus-driven democratic liberalism and a burgeoning “electronic church.” Ironically, however, these tactics did not weaken Lear’s or the Religious Left’s opponents; instead, it made them stronger and savvier in the public sphere.

Rise and Fall should garner a wide and varied audience, and it appears intentionally so. It is self-consciously and transparently situated, adeptly self-described in relation to a number of subfields, scholars, and paradigmatic shifts. The text and footnotes reflect an impressive synthesis of fields and literatures. In this sense, the book reflects its subject matter: the author helpfully and precisely frames his own book about the role of ideological and analytical frames shaping what Americans consumed from their television screens. Within the broad spectrum of American religious history/studies, Rise and Fall engages in culture war studies, which has generally focused more on the rise of the Religious Right and white liberal Protestants rather than the broader array of religious liberals. Rolsky situates his contribution as closing the distance between these two subfields by focusing on “the spiritual counteropposition” to conservative Christians and thereby giving needed attention to “liberalism as a form of religious establishment” (12). Rolsky draws attention to different registers of “American public life”—powerfully asserting primetime television as political territory while also recognizing its distinctions. He expertly weaves together scholarship across a number of subfields without losing his own authorial voice or diminishing the contributions of previous scholars. The Rise and Fall offers a compelling, thought-provoking analysis of recent past in terms of both its historicity (“what happened” and in what ways for what reasons) and inquiry of dominant frames. For example, in this work, “progressives” reveal themselves to be more reactionary than conservative figures who developed new, modern modes of expressing their religious and spiritual concerns in public life.

A strength of the work—and potential source of continued scholarly conversation—is its emphasis on religious liberals as “custodians” of culture both for the literature it draws upon and the implications it suggests. The “custodial” language tethers The Rise and Fall to the existing literature on white Protestant liberalism it simultaneously challenges. In so doing, Rolsky draws much needed attention to the role of elite social networks encompassing liberal Protestants, non-Christian liberals, and interfaith movements operating in a variety of fields, ranging from Hollywood sets to the ivory tower. Rolsky’s analysis begins and ends with how scholars are intimately connected to these movements through personal and professional relationships. The conclusion is written specifically to scholars cast in American Religious History or American Religious Studies, while throughout the body of the book Rolsky speaks more generally of–and sometimes perhaps directly to–the Religious Left, leaving open the to interpretation whether these audiences distinct? As a whole, The Rise and Fall points toward an overlap that existed in the 1970s and 1980s through, at minimum, American Religion scholar and voice of the Religious Left Martin Marty who not only was friends with Lear but also served as an advisor to his nonprofit organization People for the American Way. It seems possible given increased professional attention to and participation in “public” scholarship as well as the importance of “relevance” to teaching university courses that the academy may also rise and fall alongside the Left. In this way, Rolsky’s work is a useful guide to where we’ve been as well as where we might be going; it encourages us to think about what kind of consensus we may be building, and who we might be including and excluding, along the way.