Dwight & dog whistles

Last updated on: July 6, 2007 at 9:57 am by Fred Clark

Dwight & dog whistles 2007-07-06T09:57:15-04:00 Fred Clark

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Years before Jeff Foxworthy became a millionaire from his “you might be a redneck” schtick, my friend Dwight Ozard used to play the same game about evangelicals. As in:

If you feel really, really guilty about not keeping up with your Daily Quiet Time …

If you use the word “Lord” at least three times in every sentence when you pray …

If you went to Bible College because seminaries can’t be trusted …

If you think Amy Grant sold out after Age to Age …

If you consider drinking and dancing a sin, so you never dance and never drink in public …

If you don’t go to movies, but you’ll rent them from Blockbuster …

… except not R-rated movies, unless they’re rated R for violence and not sex, because that’s OK …

If you have ever “gone forward” to “rededicate” (or re-rededicate, or re-re-rededicate) your life to Christ …

… then you might be an evangelical.

Dwight’s point was that attempts to create a theological or doctrinal definition of evangelicalism were doomed to fail because the boundaries of the thing itself were not primarily theological or doctrinal, but cultural.

Dwight was raised in an evangelical/Pentecostal subculture and then went on to work in a mainline Protestant setting, which made him a shrewd observer of the unspoken cultural signals and distinctions between the two. He was also a Canadian, which I think gave him a bit of an outsiders’ perspective when he came to work here in Philadelphia. All of that led him to argue that a “definition” of evangelicalism was bound to be misleading, and that what was needed, instead, was some kind of DSM-style diagnosis, with a long list of potential cultural indicators. The idea wasn’t that evangelicalism was a mental disorder (although we joked about this), but that the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual’s approach of diagnosing based on whether a patient exhibited a threshhold number of potential symptoms provided a good model for assessing the extent to which a given individual or congregation tended to be evangelical.

This approach works for any subculture — goths, parrot heads, trekkers, rednecks, Cubs fans (the latter two examples suggested in comments to the previous post) — and creating such diagnostic lists can be a lot of fun (as Foxworthy figured out). I’ll point out again that (contra my initial misreading/misrepresentation) this is what Mark Elrod was up to in positing a list of Church of Christ credentials for alleged CofC member Fred Thompson.

As much fun as this can be it’s also, for some people, a profession. Pollsters like The Barna Group and more rigorous scholars of American religion have all developed their own shorthand diagnostic methods for identifying evangelicals and quantifying/measuring evangelical opinions. The introduction or preface of every book on the subject includes a passage like this one:

The greatest conceptual challenge in a discussion of this sort is to say what evangelicalism is. The issue can be clarified by asking whether evangelicalism is not a kind of denomination. Evangelicalism is certainly not a denomination in the usual sense of an organized religious structure. It is, however, a denomination in the sense of a name by which a religious grouping is denominated. This ambiguity leads to endless confusion in talking about evangelicalism.

That’s from George Marsden’s 1984 book Evangelicalism and Modern America, but similar passages can be found in similar books. Marsden goes on to say that:

… the word is surrounded by a haze of vagueness and confusion. In part, this haze is an inescapable characteristic of just such a loosely organized and diverse phenomenon.

He goes on to discuss how this vagueness, diversity and loose organization is sometimes exploited by leaders who aspire or claim “to speak for the broader grouping” or to “unify the diverse movement by fiat.” Consider the name “Moral Majority,” for example.

The late Rev. Jerry Falwell loved to go on TV claiming to act as a spokesman for the entirety of the diverse community of American evangelicalism. Falwell’s approach worked spectacularly with the TV hosts who uncritically accepted his claims to speak on behalf of this supposedly unified community. And both Falwell and these compliant hosts succeeded in convincing many others that his status as leader and spokesperson was legitimate. But within evangelicalism this claim was not uncontested.

Think again of how this would play out in other subcultures, of how the diverse membership of those loosely organized nongroup-groups would respond to any self-appointed media representative claiming to speak for all of them. The Falwell model may fool outsiders, but it doesn’t work for insiders. Insiders don’t tend to appreciate self-appointed spokesmen and their attempts to unify “by fiat.”

Here we come to the real genius of the “dog-whistle” rhetoric employed by President Bush. Speechwriters like Wheaton-grad Michael Gerson cannily recognized that cultural indicators of the sort Dwight described could be far more effective than top-down, Falwellian attempts to dictate unity. Gerson seasoned Bush’s speeches and statements with allusions to these cultural indicators — references that would go unnoticed by outsiders, but which would resonate with insiders.

So Gerson would write, and Bush would say, “There is power — wonder-working power — in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people.” Hearing that, millions of evangelicals would recognize the phrase from the hymn they’d sung in church, and receive the impression that Bush is, like them, an insider.

Bush never explicitly claims this insider status, and he never has to — the implicit claim doesn’t even need to be true for it to be effective. The allusive, elliptical approach of dog-whistle rhetoric avoids the need such direct, explicit claims, and thus avoids the inevitable challenges that such direct claims would provoke.

The direct claim of insidership in any subculture tends to be suspect — whether it’s Fred Thompson’s assertion of CofC membership, or Mitt Romney’s claims to be a hunter.

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