What Motivates Cultural Progressives – Part 1 (George Yancey)

Black, White, and Gray: What Motivates Cultural Progressives – Part 1 (George Yancey)

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. …

… 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….