Thomas isn’t saying abandon efforts to change government, he’s just (very wisely) saying to abandon efforts to use it to directly engineer culture. What’s needed is to stick to secular, concrete issues when working to influence government. Property rights, cutting taxes, RKBA — these are the areas where a solid majority can be built, but only if social/religious issues are taken off the table. And when people have more control over their money and property, they are better able to live their lives and raise their children according to their own beliefs.
The RKBA issue, for example, would have been definitively won decades ago, if conservatives had not been consistently packaging the issue in candidates who were simultaneously ranting against abortion and gay marriage. Hordes of radical feminists and gays would have gotten on board, with RKBA dovetailing perfectly with their internal political rallying point of “we’re constantly victims of violence”. Once that issue is won, there is inevitably a subtle shift in worldview, away from “government needs to take care of me”, to “I can and should take care of myself”.
Respectfully, I don’t see most of what you wrote here within the body of Thomas’s article. What’s RBKA? Thomas does not mention it. You outline a strategy here that makes sense to you and involves “taking the relgious issues off the table”—but it seems to be your strategy, not Thomas’s.
I was responding to Thomas. He does seem to be arguing for a withdrawal that I think is inappropriate.
You have a different agenda from Thomas. It needs to be dealt with on it’s own merits. You seem to think that “concrete” = “secular” and that being secular and concrete rather than religious will work politically. Sorry, but the religious issues are on the agenda because the Left put them there by attacking them.
You cannot have any politics devoid of religious issues because culture is a tissue of religious, language, history, sociology etc. Secularism of the right will not work. The religiously naked public square was forced on by the Left but we cannot win space in the public square simply by offering a conservative secular public square.
But even that’s beside the point. The single most conflicted issue, even among conservatives (libertarians versus social-religious conservatives) is abortion and IT IS NOT A RELIGIOUS ISSUE but rather a justice issue. If the unborn are innocent human individuals, then killing them is unjust.
From that perspective, framing the debate as a question whether “religious issues” should be “taken off the table” already gets us off on the wrong foot.
And that’s where I would also fault Thomas. “The Religious Right” is a label forced on that movement by its enemies. Thomas should not even be framing the issue as “religious.” Because what launched the so-called “religious right” in the 1970s was Roe V. Wade, which was not about religion but about plain justice. True, it was primarily religious people who rose up against the plain injustice of RvW, but that does not mean it was a religious issue. Framing the debate as a religious issue was the first great victory of the pro-aborts.
I do agree about your point that it’s not wise to try to use the government to directly engineer culture. But I think Thomas went farther than that. And while I do agree that it is foolish to use the government to engineer culture, we are forced, by necessity, to resist Leftist efforts to engineer culture because those efforts are killing our culture. If not resisted, by political means, they will eventually destroy us. We cannot withdraw from the political struggle. No, the political struggle if seen solely as a technique-political struggle rather than arising from the broader conservative culture, will fail. But even as we try to “grow the culture” we have to take concrete political defensive positions, using the levers of government recourse that are available to us. And religious issues necessarily will be part of that because the Left has used government power against our religious beliefs. There is no such thing as a purely secular political struggle.
Gay marriage is indeed a distraction, but abortion IS a secular, concrete issue. It is no more "religious" in character than any other form of homicide. And what you are saying is analogous to telling 19th century abolitionists, "Quit harping on this slavery issue, so we can make progress on other areas like railroad taxes."