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Americas culture wars are an export the rest of the world doesnt thank you for especially we Britons, whoare now saddled with a living embodiment of those wars in the figure of Meghan Markle.

By sending her our way, American culture has fired a woke missile right into the heart of the British establishment. Shesa one-woman family destroyer, only in this case, the family in question happens to form one of Europes most venerable and ancient institutions.

For years, Markle has had virtually no relationship with any of her own family.It seems that she wants to ensure that her husband, Prince Harry, similarly has no relations with his. She has sought to sever his blood ties through the medium of Oprah Winfrey.

During their interview, Markle showed herself to be a far better actress than her minor TV career might ever have suggested.In her two-hour special, she posed, preened, emoted and made constant unsubstantiated claims.Worst was her claim that someone in the family had asked Harry what he thought their first-born might look like.This was immediately asserted by both Meghan and Oprah to be an example of racism.

Was it?I very much doubt it.If one of the royals had said anything actually racist, then Markle would have used it to get another wheelbarrow of cash in another of her high-profile attempts to avoid the limelight.As it was, she relied on innuendo.

The royal question could have been most likely was an entirely innocent inquiry, made in what we used to call private (the Duchess will have to look up that word).Prince Harry is ginger-haired.It is conceivable that a family member asked whether he thought the baby would have ginger hair. Given that the babys mother is black, the questioner likely wondered, might the baby come out as non-pasty-white?That is the most likely human explanation.

Did the unnamed royal-family member express disgust at the idea of a mixed-race baby?Of course not.Which is why all Markle offered were teary-eyed non-specifics. Later, she implied that her son wasnt given the title Prince because of his race. In fact, a great-grandson of the Queen is never titled Prince, unless he is the son of the heir to the throne, which Archie isnt.

But Markle in her mansion implied that she never heard anything so racist orwicked. Ignorant as swans and as malevolent to boot, the millionaire Markle simply emoted to the billionaire Oprah about how uniquely unfortunate and bullied she is.And so the oldest institution in Britain, the monarchy, is now on the defensive, with Buckingham Palace having to release a statement expressing concern.

Sothe Queen and her 99-year-old husband, who fought the Nazis in World War II, have to watch their grandsons nightmare of a wife try to destroy everything they have worked for through these bogus 21st-century racism accusations.

And things are getting worse.The atmosphere in Britain is toxic.Toxic like everything that Markle touches.To even say that you doubt Markle is to risk the whole stupid spirit of our age come crashing down upon you.

One of Markles claims to Oprah was that she had mental-health problems brought on by marrying into the royal family.Her hardships?She didnt know she had to curtsy when meeting the Queen.She also didnt know that the British tabloids wouldnt fawn over her.Had she even heard of the royal family before directing herself straight at the unsuspecting Prince Harry?Of course she had.Cansomeone as wily as Markle not even use Google?

Still, express doubt over any of this and you risk losing everything.Piers Morgan not generally my cup of tea was one of the very few Brits who expressed doubt over Markles account.The result?Markle complained to his bosses, who promptly defenestrated Morgans career.

To deny that the British monarchy is racist, when it presides over one of the most diverse group of nations on earth, the Commonwealth, is to attract the same ire.

Well, to hell with these divisive, race-baiting, self-pitying, self-advancing furies.And to hell with those who demand that we all say only one thing and look at the world through only one lens.We have the right to doubt a Duchess. You Americans do, too. Indeed, your nation was founded upon that right.

Douglas Murray is the author, most recently, of The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, now out in paperback.

Twitter: @DouglasKMurray

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Meghan Markle is a US culture-war missile aimed at the heart of Britain and Europe - New York Post

The question of gender identity is perhaps the most explosive issue of the culture war. While all right-thinking people must vigorously oppose discrimination against trans people, what is striking is just how quickly some of the most radical claims of the trans movement have spread.

The mantra that "trans women are women"expresses a view that was fringe only five or six years ago. But despite no changes to the law, it is an assumption that has seeped into a whole host of institutions, including schools, the police, prisons and medical services.

Womens prisons have hosted trans prisoners on the basis of their identified gender alone. Police have arrested members of the public for the non-existent crime of "misgendering". Schools are encouraged teach pupils that gender exists in your brain and is independent of your biolgical sex. Some NHS Trusts have adopted gender-neutral language for their maternity services. "Chestfeeding", "human milk" and "birthing parent"are suggested as alternatives to "breastfeeding","breast milk"and "mother".Even conservative institutions like the Church of England and the Tory Party want to be on "the right side of history"when it comes to trans issues. And then, of course, theres the ONS tacitly encouraging self-identification.

Whether the people running these institutions personally buy into gender self-identification is an open question. The cost of raising critical questions is so enormous, and many who might have doubts might understandably opt for a quiet life. Gender-critical feminists like the campaigners challenging the ONS run the risk of losing their jobs, being censored on social media, and, in some cases, being arrested for expressing views which were once taken for granted.

The lesson is this: you might think you can sit out of the culture wars. But it wont be long before the culture wars come for you.

Fraser Myers is assistant editor of Spiked

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Sex, gender and the Census: how the culture wars affect us all - Telegraph.co.uk

Reading the news the last week has made me feel like I was five years old again.

I remember reading Dr. Seuss books in preschool and at home, just before The Muppet Show came on Channel 2 after the news.

Then I would see the Mr. Potato Head commercial come on and then I would think, Should I nag my dad about buying a Mr. Potato Head, or just stick with plan to get a bicycle?

Life as a kid was great, but for some strange reason, all this is back in the news, and for all the wrong reasons.

Look, I get it. I loved being a kid in the late 1970s. But its 2021, and times have changed.

Those Dr. Seuss books with the cartoonish drawings of Asians and Africans, those arent acceptable anymore. And only, like, six books have them, so classics like The Cat in the Hat, Hop on Pop and Green Eggs and Ham, theyre still around.

But turn on Fox News or check in on some conservative radio show or on Twitter, you would think that the end of the country as we know it is coming soon, and the main sign is that Mr. Potato Head is going gender neutral, or theres a warning about sensitive subject material at the beginning of the streaming of old Muppet Show reruns on Disney+.

Really? We still are in a middle of a deadly pandemic, were investigating a seditious riot at the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead, and us Texans are still trying to get back to normal after a rough winter storm left millions without power and/or water and 30 dead? And were talking about Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss?

Yeah, I know, cancel culture.

Never mind the conservatives that are now screaming about cancel culture are the same ones that tried to cancel the Dixie Chicks, Janet Jackson, Kathy Griffin, The View and Colin Kapernick.

This is why I hate the culture wars that are blasted on television news and on social media.

These things, that may be nostalgic to some, but have little importance on your life at this moment.

It seems like conservative media is determined to try to distract you from so many big issues going on right now, like getting the vaccine, or how do we rebuild our economy, or how schools are handling the virus.

And thats because they have no easy answers to give their audience.

Which is what everyone wants, right? A simple, no nonsense approach to tough questions.

But thats not how the world works.

You have to have more nuanced answers to tough questions, and not be afraid to tell the truth, even if it is unpopular or against someones beliefs.

Instead, we get angry over cultural topics that have little to do with our lives right now.

But even worse, we let simple things get politicized. Like wearing a mask in public to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Its a shame that a mask has the same kind of cultural trigger like a gun or a Planned Parenthood storefront.

Instead of educating the public about how much a mask can help a person stop spreading the virus, we read on social media about how a mask doesnt work (which is false), or how it is a weapon against free speech (which is stupid since people can hear what you are saying through the mask).

But no, culture war gets ratings, retweets, likes, all that nonsense.

Can we just agree that America has many different cultures that there is no need for one dominant culture in this country, and trying to cancel people that you dont agree with is not only dumb, but also counterproductive?

Good. Now lets all watch and enjoy the Muppet Show in peace. Its time to play the music.

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Culture wars are ruining our memories and our politics - Fort Bend Herald

No one is trying to cancel Green Eggs & Ham. No one is trying to cancel Dr. Seuss. If either of those things were happening, that would certainly be a big story, bolstering the narrative being pushed by those obsessed with illiberalism on the left. Instead, Dr. Seuss Enterprises is updating its standards in a way that has long precedent. The estate of the Belgian cartoonist Herg, for example, did the same thing with some of his works, most notably the infamous Tintin in the Congo. (And if thats your thing, you can still buy it online!)

What principle is at stake here? It is still not clear. Yascha Mounk conjured a good-faith argument out of thin air, claiming that there was an actual furordriven by people upset that some books of one of Americas most beloved authors will no longer be published and that these fans were genuinely upset by this news. But again, these are books selling in the hundreds of copies, competing with other, more popular Dr. Seuss titles that litter every childs bedroom in this country. If people were outraged, it was based on the suggestion that all of Dr. Seusss works were being pulled from circulation.

People like Mounk want to elevate this controversy to Fahrenheit 451 levels, making it a question of intellectual freedom and censorship. But the actual argument, as far as I can tell, boils down to this: that racist caricatures of nonwhite people are not a sufficient justification for ceasing to produce new copies of a book.

This is all reminiscent of another very dumb recent controversy. Last week, the right erupted over news that Mr. Potato Head would now be simply a gender-neutral Potato Headyet another example, the usual suspects shouted, of the left imposing its values on everyone else. Never mind that Mr. Potato Head is gender neutral by designyou can make it look however you want! Never mind that the allegation also wasnt trueHasbro was still making Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads, it had just changed the name of the umbrella brand. And never mind that, in the end, its a toy potato.

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Dr. Seuss! Mr. Potato Head! Why the Culture Wars Have Never Been Dumber - The New Republic

Whatever we once were, then senator Barack Obama declared in 2006, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. The statement was both descriptive and aspirational. Because the United States has many varieties of Christianity and many religious minorities, Obama argued, democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. Democracy itself unites Americans of all faiths and those of no faith.

Obamas invocation of both religious diversity and democracy resonated with many Americans, but it also met with pushback. During the 2008 campaign, John McCain gingerly but repeatedly described the United States as a Christian nation. In the years that followed, conservative Christians sought a political savior who would preserve freedoms they insisted were under assault.

What were we? What are we? How do we dream the landscape of American religion? asks K. Healan Gaston. Terms such as Christian, multireligious, and secular are at once descriptive, aspirational, and even coercive. Gaston excavates the history of one such dream, that of a Judeo-Christian America.

The term Judeo-Christian first gained broad currency in the 1930s, when educators, theologians, and scholars used it to differentiate the democratic West from both the Nazi and Soviet forms of totalitarianism. Today, Americans who have any knowledge of the construct tend to associate it with a midcentury movement of inclusion, with a tri-faith America in which Protestants finally extended toleration to Catholics and Jews.

The story is not nearly so simple and sunny, Gaston argues. The loose consensus that began to form around the idea of a Judeo-Christian tradition . . . masked profound and deeply political divisions. Gaston divides Americans who embraced the label into two rough camps, pluralists and exceptionalists.

When pluralists spoke of Judeo-Christian America, they leaned on civic definitions of American identity, definitions that stressed a commitment to a shared set of democratic assumptions and values. Pluralists used the term not to suggest that only Christians and Jews could be good Americans but as a shorthand way of inviting religious minorities and even nonbelievers into the public sphere.

The exceptionalists, by contrast, argued that American democracy would perish unless its citizens hewed to certain modes of Christian and Jewish faith. Few Jews found any version of Judeo-Christian rhetoric attractive, but they especially recoiled at exceptionalist critiques of secularism and attempts to undermine the separation of church and state. Jews knew that many Americans lauded Judeo-Christian values while working to make the public sphere more explicitly Christian and Protestant, not more inclusive. Indeed, many Protestant defenders of the Judeo-Christian civilization spoke disparagingly about Judaism and expressed hopes that Jews would come to their senses and convert to Christianity.

Still, the idea of Judeo-Christian America flowered during and after the Second World War. Reinhold Niebuhr and Will Herberg rarely used the exact term, but they popularized the idea that only explicit and vigorous formulations of Christianity and Judaism could underpin democracy against godless communism. As the Vatican made peace with religious diversity and the separation of church and state, increasing numbers of Catholic leaders found the idea of tri-faith America useful, especially when Protestants joined them in denouncing Supreme Court decisions that held school-led prayer and Bible reading unconstitutional.

By the mid-1960s, the fragile consensus about Judeo-Christian America broke down. Pluralists now found the constraints of Judeo-Christianity far too narrow, and they defended the place of other religious minorities and nonbelievers in American civic life. As pluralists abandoned the phrase, exceptionalists waved the Judeo-Christian banner all the more fervently.

The term was especially useful to Republican politicians courting the votes of evangelicals. In August 1980, Ronald Reagan made a campaign stop at the National Affairs Briefing, addressing an audience of 15,000 conservative Protestants. Traditional Judeo-Christian values based on the moral teaching of religion, Reagan warned, are undergoing what is perhaps their most serious challenge in our nations history. As Gaston notes, no president employed the rhetoric of Judeo-Christianity more frequently than Reagan. It lent a veneer of inclusivity to his courtship of evangelical voters. I know that you cant endorse me, he quipped at the National Affairs Briefing, but . . . I want you to know that I endorse you. (Gaston might have included the irony that Southern Baptist leader Bailey Smith told the same gathering that God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.)

By the 21st century, the idea of Judeo-Christian America was confined to one part of the American political spectrum. Less artfully than Reagan, but no less effectively, Donald Trump blended Judeo-Christian rhetoric with pandering to evangelicals. We are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values, President Trump told the Values Voter Summit in 2017. Were saying Merry Christmas again. Forget Hanukkah.

Gaston presses us to contemplate fundamental questions about American identity and democracy. Can Americans know who they are . . . without delineating who they are not? She doesnt provide definitive answers to such thorny questions, but she rightly warns us to ask how our fears and hatreds shape the way we describe the United States. In the future, as in the past, Gaston concludes, our dreams of America will powerfully shape our language and our actions alike.

Dreams or nightmares? January 2021 provided a window into some of those fears and hatreds, a toxic mixture of misogyny and White supremacy rooted in the culture wars of the past several decades. With right-wing insurrectionists pledging their allegiance to both Donald Trump and Jesus Christ while engaging in mass violence, the Cold Warera idea that secular Americans threatened American democracy seems laughable today.

Gastons book serves as both a patient prehistory of this moment and a necessary caution. Unity is elusive. All labels divide. Inevitably, some groupsfairly or unfairlyfeel unwelcome in the public sphere. While Christian nationalists represent a clear threat to democracy, the overwhelming majority of conservative Protestants do not. All Americans are prone to project their fears and hatreds onto others.

We sorely need religious and political leaders to seek common ground with all Americansregardless of beliefs and practices, regardless of party and policieswho are committed to democracy and our constitutional order. That process isnt sacred, but it is still our best civic hope, something to keep dreaming for.

A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title A Judeo-Christian nation?

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How the dream of a Judeo-Christian America shaped the culture wars - The Christian Century