Yule tidings of a culture war

George BUSH wasn’t the only guy who walked away from the last election believing he had a mandate.

So along with the carols, fruitcakes and other signs of the season, we’re all being treated to a preview of what a faith-based, value-conscious society might look like. It isn’t pretty, but certain aspects of it are all too familiar.

Thursday, for example, the Parents Television Council and the National Religious Broadcasters released a study of prime-time television, which they said found that shows produced by Hollywood have “virtually no respect for religion.”

That’s hardly surprising, since Hollywood, by and large, has no respect for women, families, minorities, intelligence or anything else, except ratings and the increasing number of awards it seems to give itself each year.

More interesting -- and revealing -- was the reason for this disrespect, according to L. Brent Bozell, president of the parents’ group. “Is it because Hollywood is Jewish and taking care of its own?” he rhetorically asked during a conference call with reporters. “No, I don’t think that. In the general public and in Hollywood, there is an understanding that respect is owed to Jews. It’s as simple as that. That same respect ought to be paid to other faiths as well.”

In other words, Bozell doesn’t want to say it too clearly, but the Jews control Hollywood. Or as Bozell, a Catholic, subsequently told The Times’ Lynn Smith, that’s what “many would say.”

Really?

“Many” is debatable, but, as Eric Boehlert pointed out in a piece for the online magazine Salon this week, quite a number of right-wing controversialists emerged from the recent electoral campaign so intoxicated by success that they’ve decided to carry the culture war into this Christmas season. What’s fascinating is how frequently their crusade takes the same nasty turn as Bozell’s.

Earlier this month, for instance, Fox news personality Bill O’Reilly told his radio audience that the “secularists” would like to “cancel Christmas.... The small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so vicious, so dishonest and has to be dealt with.”

And who might that small minority be?

Well, when a listener called in, identified himself as Jewish and raised questions about religious celebrations in public schools, O’Reilly replied that “overwhelmingly, America is Christian. And the holiday is a federal holiday honoring the philosopher Jesus. So you don’t want to hear about it? Impossible. And that is an affront to the majority.” Later in the exchange, he told the caller, “Come on, if you are really offended, you gotta go to Israel then.”

One might recall that, earlier this year, when he was shilling for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” O’Reilly ascribed reservations about the film to the fact that “the major media in Hollywood and a lot of the secular press is controlled by Jewish people.”

Meanwhile, back on the Christmas front, William Donahue of the Catholic League for Civil Rights recently told an MSNBC interviewer that “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without Nativity scenes.”

There you go, the real enemy -- secular sodomites.

Thugs in the slipstream

It’s fairly easy for all but the willfully obtuse to recognize for what it is the sort of rhetoric into which Bozell, O’Reilly and Donahue seem to slip so naturally. Sadly, the Jew-baiting bully boy is, by now, a familiar Western archetype. (We’re currently undergoing a crash course on Islamic counterparts, but that’s another topic.)

There’s little doubt, though, that the thuggishly inclined recently have gained ground by intellectually slip-streaming behind those thoughtful, socially conservative religious believers who are completely untainted by -- and indeed abhor -- any hint of anti-Semitism, but are convinced that American civil society and its popular entertainments are in thrall to a coercive secularism.

It’s been 20 years since a then Lutheran minister, Richard John Neuhaus, published what is essentially this movement’s ur-text, “The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America.” Recently, First Things -- the magazine published by Father Neuhaus, who subsequently converted to Catholicism and was ordained a priest -- conducted an anniversary symposium on the book’s influence.

One of the commentators was Mary Anne Glendon, who is the Learned Hand professor of law at Harvard University and president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. She summed up the current situation this way: “There is limited room in the American public square for conversation, contention and compromise among a wide variety of moral actors. State-sponsored secularism, legally tightening its control, is ever more openly intolerant of rival belief systems.... If present legal trends continue, it is not fanciful to suppose that the situation of religious believers in secular America will come to resemble dhimmitude -- the status of non-Muslims in a number of Islamic countries. The dhimmi is tolerated so long as his religion is kept private and his public acts do not offend the state religion.”

Somehow Glendon’s public professions of faith don’t seem to have denied her the elite appointments to which her formidable scholarship entitles her. But, more to the point, is she really describing the country in which we now live?

Are religious believers really being hounded into silence?

Are we really ruled by some sort of Godless judicial Taliban?

Please.

This country is awash in a kind of public piety unseen for decades. You hardly can spit without hitting one or another God-bothering pol invoking divine blessings, intervention or protection for everything from Little League baseball to the war in Iraq. Professional athletes cross themselves and point to heaven more often than they scratch their genitals.

In the national election just past, the incumbent’s fervent Evangelical Protestantism or the fact that Sen. Joe Lieberman keeps kosher were matters of little interest. By contrast, Howard Dean’s apparent lack of formal religious belief and the question of whether John Kerry’s Catholicism is sufficiently orthodox were major issues.

Does anyone really think an atheist could be elected president today?

Still, it may be that one reason the bullying intolerance of people like Bozell, O’Reilly and Donahue finds so little traction in our public square is precisely because so many Americans do hold religious convictions. Instinctively, they’ve arrived at a kind of credo for a civil society -- a gloss on Lincoln’s famous antislavery dictum: Just as I would not be coerced, so I would not coerce another.

That’s the spirit that allows millions of Americans to go to church on Sunday morning and watch “The Sopranos” on Sunday night. And, in this holiday season, that somehow seems a tiding of comfort and joy.