A religious person who says that homosexuality is immoral lobbies for the right to be able to discriminate against homosexuals

I absolutely disagree. I believe that homosexuality is immoral and I will lobby for their right to not be discriminated against. I am not going to discriminate against someone, just because they are straying from God’s example in a different way than I am.

There is also the more subtle self-selection going on as described above. In my area, the two locales where the church is growing fast and wards are being divided also happen to have the largest early-morning seminary classes and nearby “good” high schools. These areas even get frequent move-ins of families that will be in town 2-5 years and do not have any kids older than young elementary school. Some wards have a Mormon population density that is triple or more the state average (this is not an area close to Utah). In other areas, I have seen ward boundary gerrymandering in order to match strong-member neighborhoods with poor areas because of the tremendous self sorting by area.

I’d image that the so-called social justice puritanism on campuses and to a lesser extent among elites at certain businesses (like Silicon Valley) is again a group of elites typically on the outside fighting to get in. That’s why those elites focus on glass ceilings and the like against established elites but less often on advancing the place of non-elites. While they are the polar opposite of Trump in most ways, one can see them as functioning in a similar fashion.

An obvious way to solve this is to break government a bit more away from current state boundaries so that cities and rural areas are more independent. There are of course lots of problems with that. Not the least of which that in the United States it’s basically a non-starter constitutionally. But beyond that you have the traditional problem that money tends to flow out of cities to heavily subsidize rural regions (even if those non-urbanites like to ignore this).

Regarding the military, there was a study that there was a bit of a rural divide over the military. For instance 35% of casualties were from rural towns while only 25% of the country was. Full urban areas (as opposed to suburban) are the most underrepresented group. More interestingly for our discussion both poor and rich are underrepresented as well. The military draws disproportionately from the middle class. Significantly so.

The best hope for breaking the rural divide was a new population boom moving to rural areas as telecommuting allowed. Yet the hope of telecommuting never really materialized for a slew of reasons (lack of good internet being only one problem among many).

The urban rural divide an excellent point. We need more interaction across these lines. I think centralized religions have some potential here. You have people interacting at higher organizational levels which span urban – rural divides. Mormonism is pretty good here.

In this light, groups that are able to span the urban-rural divide (for whatever reason) are likely to be the most fit. Many of the left’s protest movements seem able to do this. The synergy of social justice quasi-religion makes it able to do this (for the moment at least..). I’m not sure what significant interaction structures the political right has in this regard. The NRA might be one, but it doesn’t have too much of a community building focus. Trumpism enables some rural-urban interaction, but only if it turns into a “protest-like” community movement. The military, which is predominately politically right, is probably the best coherer. However, I’m not sure how many veteran-based community groups are going right now. I’d doubt not too many that span urban-rural lines. Thus it mainly functions for active duty personnel.

University is another major coherer. Its structural biases and increasingly polarizing function, however, doesn’t bode well for its role as a major societal coherer. Plus, it only hits about 20-30% of the population max. But its loss could prove to be a tipping point….

In Europe the battles were much more complex and were related much more to ideological battles over marxism and capitalism. Capitalism eventually one but one could argue that it took until the 1980’s and was largely due to the failure of marxist policies across Europe. The result was a weird mixing of social welfare programs (a large safety net) with more neo-liberal economic policies. The level varied of course. France kept a much more constrained economic system whereas the Scandanavian countries and England moved to a much more open system.

Today, as you note, the battles are over nationalism or a kind of homogeneity and cultural traditionalism. I’m not sure that makes it worse though for a variety of reasons. But there definitely is a reshifting of political boundaries. When this happened last in the late 60’s the changes really took until the late 90’s to complete in the US. It is true though that there really wasn’t the type of polarization as today. (The parties were quite diverse) Likewise today there’s not only polarization but worse the polarization is highly correlated to location. And not just state location. It tends to be the cities versus the rural and suburban areas. That could make it worse simply because there’s no shared experiences or even common ground. The needs of the city and the needs of low density areas are simply radically different.

Groups will be much more decided based on who will fight for you rather than whose views match up with you. Because of this I’d expect interaction and service to be the major factors at play. This produces all sorts of odd alliances. Just take a look at some of the weird political alliances that are now emerging – gays for Trump? Gay libertarians against the Oregon cake ruling? Neo-cons for Hillary?

I suspect Federalism is one solution but there are some inherent problems there due to the limits on state governments especially with regards to deficit spending. This makes for instance subsidized health care very difficult to do in a state during a recession since it’s counter-cyclic spending. Ditto for man welfare programs which is the main reason why I think liberals haven’t embraced Federalism. Likewise many of the policies they seek they seek because they find them inherently moral issues. Thus it’s immoral (from their perspective) to not have the whole country follow them. (At least that’s been my experience with many liberals who honestly can’t fathom federalism as a value — although maybe Trump will come to change that)

Q (20) There’s no doubt that social conservatives have exaggerated many problems. They’re of course not alone in that. That earlier distinction I made between honoring vs. promoting values/rules is helpful. Those who think honoring values is most important tend to focus on violations of the honor and put them into very black and white terms. You see this on the left as well where pretty minor issues become seen as key violations. A good example where both sides do this is the recent battle over transgender respect and bathrooms.

That said I also think one has to recognize a lot of diversity within movements as well as the traditional problem of just having bad information due to the media consumed. (I think the so-called ground zero mosque is a good example of that)

But I fully agree with you that if the majority had focused on pluralism more when they had the choice there wouldn’t have been quite the degree of conflict. Of course that goes both ways. It’s just that the other side isn’t (yet) a majority or even a plurality. The former majority is now at best a plurality and is struggling to deal with it. But when you move from the national view to say smaller views such as say college campuses often the majority are from the other side and you see them making pretty similar structural mistakes to what the religious did prior to the 21st century.

Other Clark (19) I think this is important to keep in mind. Even if we are reaching out much more, just our time commitments at Church makes us more insular. After you’ve done your callings, gone to Church, and done your required home duties there’s not a lot of time left. I used to swear up and down I’d not be one of those people who disappeared after getting married. Yet the reality is I lost nearly all my free time. The occasional blog comment is the best I can manage.

So, for me, your question boils down to what sizes and types of groups can we expect?

State rights enables lots more options here than federalism. I suspect this is really the only option left to keep the country together. For “moral safe spaces”, the smallest stable unit I can imagine is the city, county and university. These have just enough enforcement control to bias self-selected residency. As many simulations from the 70’s on show, it doesn’t take much bias nor much time to produce extreme temporal polarization.

Thus, I’d expect these units to determine how far larger state & federal law can intrude. As per San Francisco’s likely pilot, we’ll probably see to what extent federal purse strings can stem the tide of (localized) popular morality. My guess here is that many purse strings will be cut and larger scales government will increasingly be perceived of and function as old tribute collectors: “protection money” will seem a worthwhile price to pay to keep localized sacred values.

These communities may be somewhat homogenous by general religion type, but my guess is practice will be much more significant than theology.

A “tribute” dynamic is probably stable in the short to mid term. In the long term, it almost guarantees that someone will push too hard. Conflict is inevitable. But it does give a chance for things to settle down and for the inevitable confrontation to be solved by one or two high-profile cases.