In his best-selling book Culture Warrior, Bill O'Reilly sets out a potentially more useful division between traditionalists and secular progressives.

Culture Warrior
by Bill O'Reilly
published by Broadway (September 25, 2006)
Hdbk., 240 pgs.
ISBN: 0767920929 

The world today seems to be divided along several axes. The two most widely discussed here in the United States are the Liberal-Conservative divide and the Islamic-Western one. Bill O’Reilly’s recent best seller, Culture Warrior, sets out a potentially more useful division between traditionalists and secular progressives. While O’Reilly’s actual division appears less theoretically or conceptually rigorous than it ought to be to actually have the intended effect — to wit, to awaken Americans to the assault on its national existence by America’s enemies from without and within – withal, the popular television and radio pundit’s intent and effect is a good and valuable one.

O’Reilly defines a traditionalist or “T-Warrior” as follows: (a) He believes the US is essentially a good country seeking to do good in the world. While he admits to flaws and mistakes, he nonetheless unqualifiedly defends his country. (b) He believes in a “Judeo-Christian philosophy,” which O’Reilly distinguishes from religion per se or theology. The traditionalist explicitly welcomes Muslims and “all religious beliefs and one with no religious beliefs” so long as they don’t try to destroy the traditional founding beliefs of the country. When asked to define this “philosophy” or to describe “the traditional founding beliefs,” it appears to be a belief in private property, limited government, and the Golden Rule.
A secular-progressive, what O’Reilly terms in shorthand an S-P, believes that this country is fundamentally flawed and that it must “progress” to a more “enlightened” plane of existence. Essentially, what O’Reilly is getting at with this notion is the Elite’s hatred of America and Western nation-states simply and a desire to establish a kind of liberal, multi-cultural One World State. O’Reilly insists that not all liberals are S-Ps, although it would seem that the modern liberal-conservative divide is mostly at work.

To get a better flavor of how O’Reilly applies his archetypes we have the advantage of his Traditional/S-P test as an application of the paradigm. Yes = S-P; No = T-Warrior:

1. Do you believe in "income redistribution" — that is, the government taxing affluent Americans at a higher proportional rate in order to fund entitlements to the less well off?

2. Do you believe the definition of marriage should include homosexuals?

3. Do you think suspected terrorists captured overseas are entitled to Geneva Convention protections — that is, the same rights that military people are afforded?

4. Do you believe that the USA, in general, is harmful to the world?

5. Are you against states legally mandating that parents be informed when their underage daughters have abortions?

O’Reilly contends his divide does not follow a conservative-liberal axis, and he suggests this is demonstrated by his including Senator Lieberman and former Presidents Kennedy and Clinton among the traditionalists.

The advantage of O’Reilly’s Culture Warrior analysis is in a language that begins to get at the real threat to our survival. The shortcoming of his paradigm is that it lacks any sustained integrity of thought or of application. Thus, on the plus side of the ledger, the secular and progressive adjectives go to the heart of what it means to deny national existence simply and America’s greatness. A secular person rejects the Judeo-Christian principles and understanding of the world that was the bedrock of this country’s approach to the establishment of a nation, the ties that bound neighbors and fellow citizens as one people, and the foundation of its laws.

The secular, however, is of the view that freedom of thought and action is what made this country great and that religion, certainly organized religion, and this includes the Judeo-Christian varieties, are all to be removed from any and all aspect of political or public life. Morality for this crowd is a wholly civil affair devoid of truth and determined by preferences.

A progressive, accordingly, embraces first and foremost science because it is the progress of the modern scientific age which informs his view that History now occupies the place of the Transcendent in man’s affairs. Man is able to study his Beginning and his End with a certainty and clarity only science and the new age of scientific reason can supply. That is, man can know nothing and experience no truth of the Beginning or the Beyond not objectified by the methods of science. A man might have a belief or personal faith in some religious view of his world, but it is mere belief and lacks the certainty only science provides.

The progressive is certain that America’s now ancient and primitive past, including the original meaning and intent of its Constitution, is to be advanced and rectified along a linear line, if not exponential curve, toward an existence that knows absolutely no distinction among men and things in the world not verified by science. This view incorporates by necessity a radical egalitarianism and move toward internationalism and the One World Order quite simply because science does not recognize nations or peoples as anything but artificial and socially constructed prejudices. (Libertarians also fit the S-P mold with but the amendment that no political entity is to be trusted, preferring instead some version or degree of anarchic capitalism; this preference is driven as much by their own peculiar version of secular progressivism as in the case of the big government liberals.)

What O’Reilly terms an S-P, we have referred to as the Elite. In truth, the S-P nomenclature is probably a better one. It is here that O’Reilly has really hit on something. But, the fundamental shortcoming of O’Reilly’s analytical divide lies in the fact that he does not take it seriously. A more serious and precise approach to and understanding of the secular progressive would include most everyone today who adopts the science-certainty/democracy-uncertainty reciprocal – likely a majority of Americans.

For the modern, the mathematical certainty of science is a given. And, this mathematically driven certainty occupies the only sphere of human knowledge which can claim certainty. All else of man’s affairs, including his political experience as a nation and people, is founded upon subjective belief which can only be governed through a procedure or method which embraces the notion of a radical uncertainty. We call that method democracy.

In other words, there is no truth in human affairs, only the method of deciding between and among ever-shifting beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. And, because there can be no truth in democracy, the losing minorities in the voting process are granted “rights” so as to guarantee there to be no loser in a political world that knows neither truth nor order.

But this description of the secular progressive includes just about everyone. Many religious Americans will accept the conclusion that their religious faith is mere belief. Truth is only available to science in its mathematical method. While a man might accept a Christian faith, there is no truth in his faith beyond his own “belief” or “opinion.” To stake out a position of a participatory truth of existence in a Judeo-Christian world would be to exile oneself to the land of religious fanaticism – a political fate worse than that suffered by those who publicly acclaim America’s undoing.

This is why O’Reilly’s application of his own terms is so wishy-washy and why he has been accused, properly so, of creating an artificial divide. As it turns out, even O’Reilly is a secular-progressive. A traditionalist, if he were truly a man of tradition, would reject the implication that undermined the most basic concepts underlying America’s founding. Those concepts included the understanding that while representative government was a legitimate system of governance, it must be carefully guarded by restricting the political franchise to the men who represented a People. In other words, representation works if there is some unique and defined People to represent. If a country claims to represent everyone, all religions, cultures, races, creeds equally, then it represents no People only “all things to all people” everywhere. This is precisely the undoing of Peoplehood and of national existence.

So it was that at America’s founding and for more than a century thereafter that only male, white, land owners voted. The only “popular” vote allowed at the national level, again of white males and predominantly Christians, was for the House of Representatives, the least important of the representative bodies. Local governments and their legislative enactments were very much tied to the dominant religious affiliation of the common folk. Marriage, relationships, work, commerce, and legal holidays were all subject to laws that reflected the local Christian understanding of the world. At the founding and for many years thereafter a majority of the states had established churches. Political power was local and ordered and meant to reflect this truth of existence met by one’s participation in America’s political order.

Today, all of this is gone. The constitutional republic has been replaced by an Open Society, multi-cultural democracy driven by daily polls and surveys and virulently opposed to any political recognition of America’s Christian foundings. Men and women of all creeds, colors, and loyalties have been granted the franchise to participate in governance. The idea of an American People is no more or less than mere legal citizenship and even that limitation is under assault by the Open Borders crowd.

Today, to be a “traditionalist” in any true sense is either to be condemned as a fascist or racist. To avoid this condemnation, O’Reilly sets about to rather arbitrarily redefine a traditionalist into a 20th century traditionalist. What this means is that what O’Reilly calls an S-P is anyone who doesn’t agree with O’Reilly’s personal view of which secular and progressive changes are good and which are bad. O’Reilly is popular precisely because he understands that most Americans today are S-Ps and if he can arbitrarily redefine the terminology so that a traditionalist amounts to a kind of blended post-Civil Rights era conservative, he can still capture quite a big market for his brand of patriotism. O’Reilly is a populist, not a traditionalist and not strictly speaking a conservative.

To translate Bill O’Reilly is to explain that he most certainly accepts the understanding that science is certain and that all else is mere belief. This is why he purposefully defines the Judeo-Christian worldview as a “secular” philosophy and not a religious understanding. He wants to provide his Judeo-Christian worldview with a form of modern scientific rationalist glow. This is also why he is not prepared to condemn Islam even though the evidence is clear that Islam, historical and traditional Islam, is an enemy of America and the West. And, this is why he would condemn a return to an America that had not “progressed” into the 20th Century and provided African-Americans and women the right to vote. While he opposes same-sex marriage, he is not prepared to embrace the Judeo-Christian condemnation of homosexuality, and certainly not for purposes of establishing a political or legal framework which might punish such behavior. The list goes on.

Notwithstanding the obvious shortcomings, O’Reilly’s book, Culture Warrior, is a good start because it is a popular book written by a conservative-leaning populist. By creating the semantic divide between secular-progressives and traditionalists, he has allowed a broader discussion and critique of the real divide undoing America’s national existence. For that, we applaud his move beyond the Republican-Democrat or conservative-liberal divisions that have been so much a part of American political discourse. Whether the S-P/T-warrior distinction will become a useful approach depends very much on the ability of thoughtful religious conservatives to push this discussion beyond the PC discussion allowed on network or cable television.

Culture Warrior is available on Amazon.com.