The culture war as an analogue to the enlightenment?
The left cares about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The right cares more about the Constitution. One pursues the telos of the American spirit while the other aims to protect the Constitution.
The left supports trans rights, gay rights, universal healthcare, and drugs. Because all men are created equal, any differences in populations are signs of injustice in the system. The left takes American ideas and extrapolates to laws.
The right takes the laws as gospel. They believe that the founding fathers have created an everlasting document that is unlikely to be matched by anything we can produce today.
The culture war reminds me of the split between science and religion at the turn of the enlightenment. The two used to be linked in a common project. At some point, the sciences were strong enough to stand independently of religious institutions. I see the left as being the “science” of political reality. At some point it could speak entirely in non-religious language and not invoke God for anything.
If Christians are right that it’s their religion that makes democracy workable, and as some of the founding fathers have stated, then we shouldn’t expect democracy to succeed as it has in the West. If it really is Christianity holding the political system together, non-Christian would have a hard time establishing democracies.
Christianity serves the role of Game B. Believers become compassionate and they’re discouraged from defecting under even the most dire of circumstances. Christ carrying his cross would be equivalent to a man asked to polish a gun that would be used to shoot him. It’s no wonder that Nietzsche saw Christianity as a slave morality.