This is the third entry of my series based on my latest book entitled What Motivates Cultural Progressives. Just a reminder that this book contains research gathered from open-ended questions in an online survey sent to members of organizations that have as part of their purpose opposition to the Christian or religious right. The basic argument I forwarded in the first two entries is that cultural progressive activists shaped a movement that meets the needs of the people in the movement, who tend to be white, male, wealthy and highly educated. The social movement led by cultural progressives, like other social movements, develops in ways to serve the individuals in the movement. In my first entry I pointed out that a key value in this movement was the desire to keep religion from mixing with politics. In my second entry I discussed the value of rationality as a theme cultural progressive activists use to legitimate their movement.
In this entry I will look at the theme of progressive politics. It is not surprising that cultural progressives are more liberal than conservative. After all we already know that they have progressive political ideology on cultural issues due to how they position themselves opposite the Christian right. But to have a progressive political ideology on cultural issues does not automatically mean that one is politically progressive on all issues. A good many individuals are culturally progressive but are conservative in economic and/or foreign policy issues. Such individuals are not commonly present among my respondents. They tended to be progressive in all dimensions of their political ideology.
It is not an accident these activists embrace a progressive philosophy in all areas of their political lives. These respondents envision an overall progressive political philosophy as being rational as evident in this quote.

In a perfect world, my neighbors would all be interesting, well-informed, atheist, and college educated. They would be concerned for the environment, interested in preserving bio-diversity, reasonably anti-war and concerned about human-rights. They would not impose their moral beliefs on others – they would be supportive of two gay friends getting married, or of a lesbian couple having a baby. They would be supportive, and never judgmental, of a woman contemplating abortion. They would want only science taught in science class. They would not force their atheism on others with symbols or monuments on public property. Such would be my perfect neighborhood(male, aged 46-44, Bachelor Degree).

Cultural progressive activists generally believe that if a person is rational then he/she is automatically going to conclude that a progressive stance on all political issues should be adopted. Acceptance of political progressive ideology is a marker for intelligence. Consequently, the opposite is true for these respondents as well. Those who accept a conservative political ideology must not be very intelligent or are being misled.

The Christian Right appears to be composed mainly of lower-middle class, blue-collar Caucasian workers with limited formal education who use their limited mental abilities to come up with illogical arguments, and then angrily enforce their positions with fear and intimidation (male, aged 56-65, Master Degree).

Texas, and other states dominated by the “Christian” Right, must wrest control of education and social welfare from these rigid, irrational hands. Texas in about 15 years will be a third-world country — uneducated and unhealthy (female, aged 66-75, some college).

Acceptance of an overall progressive political ideology is not merely an agreement among cultural progressive activists, but it is a value that they use to assess morality. Quite simply, cultural progressives perceive those who adopt political progressive ideas as good and those who accept political conservative ideas as bad.
Political ideologies in the United States are not necessarily tied to a consistent philosophical pattern. In reality they are socially constructed. For example, the Sandra Flock episode indicated that many progressives emphasize a value of a publically funded choice as it concerns supporting a woman’s right to an abortion. But these same individuals would not support publically funded choice as it concerns a woman’s right to send her kids to a religious school. Conservatives emphasize a value of life as it concerns abortion, yet they ignore that value as it concerns capital punishment. Political ideologies are really not about a consistent ideology of publically funded choices or life, but rather they develop to serve the interests of certain social groups. It stands to reason that political progressive ideology serves the social interests of individuals who tend to be cultural progressive activists. Those activists tend to enjoy majority group status in our society. How progressive political ideology serves such individuals is a major research question beyond what I am prepared to discuss with this blog. But it is a question that should be addressed by future research.
Values in social movements also are important for creating the identity of those in the movement. This was clearly a theme among many of the respondents. They perceived themselves as political progressives and were proud of that perception.

The Republican is less desirable. I am a Christian, but I am involved politically. I am not a fundamentalist and I am proudly a liberal Democrat (female, aged 56-65, Master Degree).

Ours is the only yard on our street with campaign signs for progressives come election season, but here in Texas supporting progressives (even if there is one on the ballot) is kinda futile, but we still try (male, aged 46-55, some college).

There is a discernible identity cultural progressives gain from political progressivism. It is a value system whereby, for some, the more progressive an individual is the higher level of morality that person possesses. Progressive ideology is a mechanism by which cultural progressive activists make assessments of what is good or bad in our society.
I have already shown how cultural progressive activists tie the value of political ideology to the value of rationality. Indeed all three values are related to each other in the minds of such activists. It is not an accident that those high in religiosity are less likely to accept a politically progressive ideology as it is fair to argue that progressives are less accommodating of traditional religious values than conservatives. Political progressiveness matches well with the value of keeping church and state separate. In my last entry I discussed the match between rationality and the ideals of church/state separation. These three values mingle together to create the ideology that motivates cultural progressive activists. They are values that create an identity for advocates forwarding a cultural progressive agenda and these values serve the social needs of such individuals.
Even though I have discussed the values of cultural progressive activists, there is still a need to comprehend their motivations and approaches towards social change. These values are related to the motivational and diagnostical frames they use but the values, in and of themselves, do not completely explain those frames. In the next, and final, entry to this blog series I will explore these frames in more depth.

               Two weeks ago I started this series based on my latest book entitled What Motivates Cultural Progressives. The research is based on open-ended questions from an online survey to members of organizations that have as part of their purpose opposition to the Christian or religious right. My basic argument is that cultural progressive activists have shaped a movement that meets the needs of the people who inhabit the movement, who tend to be white, male, wealthy and highly educated. Thus the social movement led by cultural progressives, like other social movements, develops in ways to serve the individuals in the movement. In my last entry I pointed out that a key value in this movement was the desire to keep religion from mixing with politics. While that was an important theme I found in the data, it was by no means the only theme.
                In this entry I will look at the theme of rationality. The value of rationality is one that many of the respondents enunciated. The respondents generally argued that the Christian right is irrational.

The Christian Right appears to be composed mainly of lower-middle class, blue-collar Caucasian workers with limited formal education who use their limited mental abilities to come up with illogical arguments, and then angrily enforce their positions with fear and intimidation (Male, age 56-65, master’s degree).

I fear their influence in our government, our military and society as a whole. They are … unable to think rationally (Male, age 66-75, some graduate training).

For these respondents, the Christian right’s irrationality leads to poor decisions for our society and our government. They argue that we need a rational way of making decisions instead of relying on superstition and religious beliefs. Many respondents are irritated that religion is a political factor because they see religion as irrational.
                Values do not happen in isolation from each other. The desire to avoid mixing politics and religion I discussed in the last entry fits well with the concern of the respondents for rationality. They fear that religion is irrational and mixing it with politics will lead to our government becoming irrational. These values are not mutually exclusive, but rather they reinforce and support each other.
                The respondents do not just perceive those on the Christian right as irrational. The respondents also perceive themselves as rational. One respondent illustrates this by stating that “more education and a greater variety of experiences change how you perceive the world.  It also showed me how a science education allows you to make more sound decisions based on empirical data and helps you recognize irrational decisions based purely on emotion (or faith)” (Male, age 46-55, doctorate).  This respondent understandably links education to having a rational perception of reality. Given that we have a well-educated sample, the idea of education generating rationality would reinforce the values of their higher educational level. Thus our respondents can perceive themselves as the rational, educated team fighting against the Christian right who make up the uneducated, irrational team.
                Rationality is a major way the respondents justify their political and social stances, allowing them to dismiss the concerns of the Christian right as irrational. This also helps fulfill the need for cultural progressive activists to gain an identity from their social movement. They can see themselves as the most rational members of society. This is reinforced by the fact that they are in an advantaged position in society with their wealth, education and racial/gender status. It is easy to see how cultural progressive activists would see themselves as having knowledge and training others do not have which convinces them that they are more rational than their political opponents.
                Whether cultural progressives are more rational than others in society is a question beyond the intentions of this study. Rationality is a socially constructed concept and how we understand what is rational is shaped by the social situation we find ourselves in. Another study I am working on suggests that atheists, a staple of this sample, are no more likely to engage in critical thinking than Christians. Perhaps in a future blog, I will discuss that study. But for now it is not really that important whether cultural progressive activists are more rational than those in the Christian right. My argument as a result of this study is that the value of rationality characterizes cultural progressive activists, not actual rationality. Whether the solutions advocated by cultural progressive activists are truly the most logical steps for society is a debate worth having but not one I can add to at this time. They honestly believe themselves to be more rational than their counterparts and because of that belief can assert that they have the best plans for our society. Cultural progressives conceive their plans as being well thought out instead of based on the emotional fears of the Christian right. This image of rationality is a key to why cultural progressive activists are certain that they are correct and the Christian right is incorrect.
                The ideal of rationality does not only provide an identity for cultural progressive activists but it also meets some of the social needs of the type of individuals attracted to this social movement. The education and income level of individuals involved in this movement provides for them the ability to paint themselves as rational. One can easily envision how educational credentials buttress claims of rationality. One can also imagine that wealth used in media and through political organizations can also link the ideal of rationality to certain social and political positions. If rationality, instead of faith or tradition, is the source of our decision making then such individuals are in a better position to leverage their superior education and income for more societal influence.
                We now have a good sense of some of what motivates cultural progressive activists. In my next entry I will complete the picture with my description of the values that drive the members of this social movement. After that, in my final entry in this series, we will be in a position to understand how these values frame the type of solutions cultural progressives see for our society.

It is election time again. Once every four years we go through our ritual of deciding who is going to be the “leader of the free world” for the next four years. Of course there are a variety of special interest groups doing their best to help determine who that is going to be. One of the groups a lot of scholars and social commentators generally pay attention to is the Christian right. Indeed, this group has had its share of victories and defeats over the last couple of decades and deserves attention. But what about those who fight against them? Those fighting the Christian right have attracted little academic interest. But recently I have conducted research on such individuals who I will call, for lack of a better name, cultural progressive activists, and some of that research is in my latest book, What Motivates Cultural Progressives. My next four blog entries will report on some of my findings.
In my research, I asked open-ended questions with an online survey to members of organizations that had as part of their purpose opposition to the Christian or religious right. Demographic information on the members of this group revealed they are relatively likely to be white, male, wealthy and highly educated. These qualities suggest a group that enjoys majority group status in a number of ways. Since I do not have a probability sample, it is tricky to generalize this finding. But when you have a sample that is 93% white, 64% male, 52% making more than 75K, and 43% with graduate degrees, then it is hard to believe that this is not true to some extent in the general population. Cultural progressive activists do quite well.
My general theoretical framework is that cultural progressives are part of a social movement, and we should think of them as such. Social movements should be understood as ways to meet the social needs of a particular group as well as provide members of that group a social identity. So to understand cultural progressive activists, we need to understand their social movement. Cultural progressive activists have developed a social movement with certain values that meet the social needs and provide a social identity for those who enjoy majority status in our society. Over the next few blogs I will explore those values in an attempt to better comprehend cultural progressive activists.
This entry will focus on the fear of mixing religion and politics. This was a consistent theme in the answers of my respondents. They often commented on the importance of separation of church and state. What that phrase meant varied among the respondents but this was stated as a common value. It is similar to the fact that “biblical values” is a common value among Christians, but what it means can vary among Christians. Cultural progressive activists may see church/state separation as a way to justify exclusion of religious individuals from governmental service, to prevent religious individuals from influencing educational curriculum, having Christians leave them alone in their personal lives or taxing churches and synagogues. But separation of church and state was the common ideal that cultural progressives used to justify their requests.
This fear of mixing religion and politics should be seen as a reaction to the possible Christian influence in our political world. A quote from the literature I read in one of the organizations represented this fear well. “A well-organized and well-funded campaign is under way to undermine the separation of church and state in America’s public schools. Aggressive religious pressure groups are pushing school boards nationwide to change the curriculum to their doctrines.” For cultural progressive activists, fear of religious groups is theorized to be remedied by keeping churches separate from the state. Cultural progressive activists justify a great deal of their political demands by valuing the separating of religion from the government. For example, they can demand that religion should not prevent women from getting an abortion or individuals marrying someone of the same sex. This allows them to demand abortion and same-sex marriage on the basis of maintaining a secular government free of religious influence.
The fear of mixing religion and politics also applies to their attitudes towards educational institutions. Since our educational systems are run by the government, many of these activists also fear an intrusion into our education system by Christians. Our educational system is also important because of the role it plays in socializing the next generation. One of the respondents stated of the Christian right that “They are eager to impose shoddy sex education and Creationism on all children.” The fear of Christians taking over the education system and indoctrinating children with religious values drives many of the respondents. They perceive science and education as ways to develop a more progressive and tolerant civilization. Christians who want to take over or maintain control over these areas of our society are seen as roadblocks to a better society for all.
Most cultural progressive activists in our sample are not highly religious. In fact more than three fourths of them are either atheists or agnostics. This indicates why they may have this fear of mixing religion and politics. They want a government concerned with their desires instead of the desires of religious individuals. Separation of church and state meets a real need for these respondents since it puts them in a position to advocate a secular government based on their values rather than the values of highly religious Christians. Thus, the concept of church/state separation provides them legitimacy to oppose most, if not all, of the Christian right’s political desires by arguing that we should not shape a government based on religious values.
The desire to keep politics and religion from mixing is also important in shaping the social identity of cultural progressive activists. Cultural progressive activists see themselves as individuals grounded in secular reality rather than religious superstition. As such, they want governmental and educational institutions to match that secular perspective. Cultural progressive activists very much see themselves as secular individuals and even those who attend religious institutions likely envision themselves as secular in that they live in the real world instead of the ethereal world of those who take religion too seriously.
In the next three blogs I will look at other values I found in the themes of my respondents and how those values motivate them. I will also discuss how those values meet their social needs and help create their social identity. Hopefully, this discussion will lead to more understanding of an important special interest group, one that is as important as the Christian right group they are battling.

Stupid is as Stupid does. I have to thank Forrest Gump for that line. Over the past couple of weeks I have had a couple of occasions to remember this line.

First there was Adam Smith. No I am not talking about the famous economic philosopher. I am talking about the former CFO at Vante. You may know him better as the Chick-Fil-A bully. Here is one report about his antics and subsequent firing http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/adam-smith-chick-fil-a-drive-bully_n_1735357.html.

Now I have to say to myself – what was this guy thinking? He obviously planned on harassing the worker. I remember seeing the lines at Chick-Fil-A that day. He waited probably half an hour to order water and act rudely. Then he decided to record it. Did he not reconsider during that entire time he was waiting in line that this may not look well for him? Finally he decided to put this on Youtube. He must of thought about doing that while driving home. Did it not hit him while he was driving home and logging on to his computer how bad he would look? Did he think he would be seen as a hero? Did he think that he looked brave picking on some defenseless fast food worker? Did he think he was “helping his cause”? How could he not realize how much of a jerk he would look like? What drove him along the process of deciding to harass a worker, film it and post it? The only thing I can think is “stupid is as stupid does”.

But if that was not enough stupidity, I have NBC. Perhaps you have seen this story on a video that the company recently pulled from its website. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/10/nbcs-bodies-in-motion-video-backlash-objectifying-female-athletes_n_1764876.html. When I saw the story of this I had to think about some executive who greenlighted this terrible project. Did that executive really think that this would help NBC look good? I wonder how that conversation went when a producer came up with the idea of this video.

Producer: Hey I got a great idea for a video that will feature the athleticism of women Olympians. We can call it “bodies in motion”.

Executive: Sounds great. We can feature all the sports, basketball, volleyball, tennis, weightlifting ….

Producer: Whoa. Have you seen the bodies on those weightlifting women? Let’s stick with sports where the women are toned and curvy…ah…fit and easy on the eyes.

Executive: Well okay. I guess that makes sense. What kind of video shots should we use?

Producer: Well we need to slow it down at a lot of points so that we can really appreciate their…ah…form.

Executive: Okay. Well do you have any idea of music we should put to it. Maybe classical music or inspirational or jazz or…

Producer: Well I heard a song the other day while I was watching “Debbie does Everybody” and it really fits with this spot. Just trust me on this one.

Executive: Man this sounds great. I do not know if we can fit it into the on air program but we can for sure put it on our website. Get to work!!

Okay so maybe the conversation did not go precisely like that but at some point someone decided to put this video on the NBC website. Did that person not think about the consequences of doing so? Had that person not heard of feminists or conservative Christians, groups that normally do not work with each other but both are sure to be up in arms about such a video, and consider their reactions? At some point the executive has to realize that this is a rotten idea for the video especially in the way it was executed. All he (and yes for obvious reasons I am assuming it was a man who greenlighted this) had to do was at some point along the way think ahead to all the trouble this video would cause and then he could have the foresight to pull this insulting project. I guess once again – stupid is as stupid does.

Now I know that I am not the smartest person in the world. But I think that if I ever lose my mind and decide to film myself berating a fast food worker or put a semi-porno on the web that I will be smart enough to stop at some point along the thought process and consider the stupidity of what I am about to do. I guess I am not surprised at the actions of Adam Smith since I have known hateful people before or the actions of the NBC individuals since I expect some men to act like that with beautiful women. But in both cases you would expect people to think about the consequences of their actions and abstain from that lunacy. You would think that they would take 15 seconds to think beyond the initial emotional enjoyment of their actions and reconsider what they are about to do. But these episodes show that we do not always think about the long term effects of our actions and warn us about the consequences of not doing so. If we do not take such warnings seriously then we may be forced to remember one day: Stupid is as stupid does.