It is tempting to think that nothing ever changes in America. A nine-year-old girl firing an Uzi machinegun at a practice range kills her instructor; the nation grimaces and yawns and turns away. A cop kills a black man in the street and there are weeks of riots and soul searching; the nation grimaces and yawns and turns away. The United States is meant to be a rootless place, a nation created in a self-conscious belief that ideas and a sense of the possible should shape society rather than history and custom, but often it looks oddly static, impervious to change, stuck in historical ruts.
How odd, then, that a huge social change has taken place in recent years that no one saw coming and no one can fully explain. A change that has an impact on US politics, but more interestingly for us, on the nature of the place, and the closeness of ordinary Americans to a European way of thinking.
You could call it the strange death of socially conservative America. Or, more precisely, the death of the religious right as a political force.
It is possible to be precise about the moment that social conservatism reached its high-water mark. It was eleven minutes past one on the morning of March 21, 2005.
President Bush had been woken, as he had commanded, to sign a bill that Congress had just passed, intended to keep a single American woman alive.
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Her name was Terri Schiavo and she had been in a persistent vegetative state for many years after a heart attack. Her husband wanted her to be allowed to die; her parents wanted her kept alive. It would have remained a deeply sad private matter but the assertive folks on the religious right saw it as a potential game-changer: an issue that their man Bush could make his own, an issue they could use to change the thinking and the practices of a nation.
It was a disaster. The bill gave federal courts the power to hear her case in the hope that they would side with the religious right. But instead they followed the advice of doctors and decreed that the death should be allowed. In the end the poor woman’s feeding tubes were removed. And the opinion polls suggested that most Americans believed that the courts were right. Ethical behaviour was more complicated than the Bible-bashers suggested.
Since then the religious right has been on a downward spiral. They are scattered now, like medieval footsoldiers after the loss of a battle. Some lie wounded and confused, some have given up, some march on, perhaps not realising the game is up.
But it is up. Part of the reason was simple disappointment that the movement was not as popular as they had hoped. They helped to deliver a couple of narrow Bush presidential victories, but got precious little in return. A tad more aid for Africa, a ban on federal dollars for most stem cell research, but not on privately funded use of discarded embryos. They had not come into politics to compromise and found the need to accept small victories dissatisfying and cheapening. Barack Obama overturned the embryos legislation and the nation sided with him. Many on the religious right gave up.
They were also forced out of the Republican party by a competing ginger group on the right — the Tea Party. These people are God-fearing, to be sure. But God is telling them that governing the sex lives and ethical choices of Americans is less important than cutting the national debt. Tea Party people have a libertarian streak that energises the modern Republican party and leaves the social conservatives hammering in vain on bedroom doors.
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It is true that abortion splutters along as an issue, but it is essentially local — closing clinics in Texas or the Dakotas — and there is no nationwide groundswell to restrict it. Some aspects of Obamacare were contested as well, in particular the provision of contraception in the new insurance deals, but again only inasmuch as some institutions in some places wanted an opt-out. The wider battle against contraception, once a real possibility, was never fought.
Does any of this mean that religious people are marginalised in modern America? Actually, no. In fact you could argue that religion as a motivator is more alive than ever, and — freed from a political programme for which modern Americans felt no affection — more potent than ever. Religious purpose sends selfless missionaries to ebola-stricken west Africa. It persuades people in North Carolina to hold Moral Mondays in which they get themselves arrested to protest about injustice. It still invigorates much of American life.
But it knows its limits. Religious Americans these days tend to lead by example. They let their actions speak for them. Politics, they leave to the politicians. And the nation appreciates it.