Banned books, shocking art & the birth of the culture wars

Fresh Air

This episode explores the origins of America's culture wars through pivotal moments in the 1970s–90s, focusing on book bans, controversial art, and religious right activism. Isaac Butler traces how evangelical campaigns

Key takeaways

• Book bans began as grassroots evangelical actions

Transcript preview

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. The culture war never seems to end. My guest Isaac Butler takes us through part of its history in his new book The Perfect Moment, God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars. Butler says the conflict had a transformative effect on him because at the same time the culture wars hurdle toward their climax, Art saved his life. His new book begins in 1974 in West Virginia with the banning of many books. and a county's new school curricula with the power of the Christian right behind the ban. There were also behind the attacks on Martin Scarsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ and the taboo breaking artwork of Robert Maplethorp and David Voynirovich, who were accused of creating pornography, and Andre Serrano who was accused of creating blasphemous art. The story continues with attacks on the NEA's federal funding for the arts. Isaac. Isaac Butler is the author of the previous book. the world only spins forward about the play Angels in America and the method about the history of the acting technique known as the method. We recorded our interview last Thursday. On Friday the Texas Board of Education approved a new curriculum for students grade K through 12 mandating each grade to have at least one Bible passage as required reading. Many parents and teachers are alarmed as the culture wars continue. Welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you Terry. It's great to be here. So one of the main characters in your book is one of the leaders of the attacks on the artists who are in your book and I'm thinking of Donald Wildman and he's one of the leading figures behind the first attack where your history begins. So let's start with who was Donald Wildman. Donald Wildman is a really fascinating eccentric character who unfortunately died right as I was starting. you know doing my interviews for the book so I didn't get to talk to him which is which is unfortunate but Wildman was a pioneering you know media advocacy activist and he was a evangelical Christian Reverend in Tupelo Missouri who kind of found his calling that's how he describes it in his memoir in trying to make American culture less blasphemous and less sinful 70s this looked like leading boycott campaigns against these conglomerates because at that point you know like TV studios and movie studios were owned by these companies that also owned department stores and tin mines and literally coffin manufacturers and stuff like that so he would do these consumer boycotts to get companies to either stop advertising on shows that he disliked or to pull shows or change the content of shows that he disliked that was that was where he started and he was very successful it and was very successful at it and built a really a really really huge mailing list. And in the 80s he and a sort of coalition of other evangelical Christians take on Martin Scorsese's last temptation of Christ and they pivot from that to taking on, you know, often quite unknown American so-called high art. That's not really a division I believe in, but you know, American high art because it was funded by the government and that created an opening for them to say essentially you know you're wasting our taxpayer dollars. on blasphemy and sin. Well let's go back to 1974 in Kanawa County, West Virginia where there was new school curricula from the school board and there was one person who held out on some of the books on many of the books that were in this new curricula. Her name was Alice Moore. She was married to a Church of Christ minister and she also opposed sex education. So she's one person on the board. Donald Wildman enter the act. Well, Alice Moore is a really also a really fascinating figure. You know, the Kanawa County textbook war, which is what it sort of came to be called, was the thing I just discovered during research and it blew my mind because all of the factors in, you know, what was going to become the culture war are present there. You have an evangelical Christians, you know, using direct action and organizing and stuff like that to really change the direction of the government. In this. it was a legal mandate that curricula had to be diverse and reflect diverse perspectives on American life and they were going to approve a new you know K through 12 curricula for the public schools to do that and Alice Moore who as you said had been elected to the school board on an explicitly anti sex ed platform got them to delay that vote and while they delayed that vote a number of Christian organizations and churches both within the county without came and lent their support. And so there's, you know, sort of evangelical, the evangelical movement really comes into West Virginia and they, the situation spirals really far out of control over the course of the year. I mean to a point where people are starting to try to bomb schools to keep schools from opening, you know. And the end result is they actually wind up kind of, you know, vetoing this rule. They manage to cause. a fuss that to get it to go away, the county and the school board eventually agree to not have these books come in and to change the rules about what books will be adopted and within a few years there's creationist textbooks in classrooms in Kanawa. So it's this, you know, that really created a kind of template that religious right figures like Donald Wildman would use again and again and again. So if they created a template, what was the template? it starts with a really intense sense of grievance or performance of grievance that other people expressing their rights essentially other people's speech is oppressing you that other people's point of view that you're you know Alice Moore says this flat out it's not that I don't want my child learning x y and z I don't want my child to even know what they are you know it's this idea that's really key to the parents rights movement that you know parents have absolute control over their children and to teach them things that they don't want is a form of discrimination against those parents so you start with that kind of grievance and then you move there to you know organizing these direct action campaigns with petitions and letters and stuff like that the end goal is to capture a kind of non- board or a regulatory committee or whatever it is, and staff it with people who will then use it to perpetuate your ideological goals. So that's what they're always moving towards, is capturing these, the decision makers, or pressuring the decision makers and threatening the decision makers in such a way that they are going to help you pursue your ideological goals. So what were some of the books that were removed from the curricula as a result of this pressure campaign? I mean it's there's hundreds of them right and it's it's everything from you know essays by James Baldwin to there's a picture book of jack and the beanstalk that someone objects to because there's a you know a black kid and a white kid playing together on the cover so it really runs the gamut it's it's hundreds of books that they pull anthologies especially of poetry and essays that are meant for you know the equivalent of like AP or baccalaiate doing adult level English literature work, that kind of stuff, often has a lot of adult themes, right? And so a lot of those books wind up getting pulled. Some of which are books we might take for granted today, like the autobiography of Malcolm X. You know, that was one that got a lot of strikes against it. Do you see similarities between this 1974 case and what's happening now with the banning of books and don't say gay? Yeah, I absolutely do. The difference now of course is that they're in charge. You know, Ron DeSantis and the Republicans have a firm grip on the government in Florida. They have gotten those school boards staffed with people who are ideologically in lockstep with them. So it's much easier. You just have to pass a bill, right? But it's absolutely the same stuff, which is that we don't want our children to have to learn that there are other ways of looking at the world. That's what's really at the heart of it. the other ways of looking at the world that they don't want their children to learn about, of course focus on sex, gender, and sexuality. So let's jump ahead to the late 80s and early 90s when transgressive art was very popular and it was very unpopular on the religious right and Donald Wildman again becomes a main character in this story. So let's start with Andre Serrano who is best known for his photograph, Piss Christ. and it was a part of a series that he called immersions in which the images were based on body fluids either from animals or from people and it could range from blood to milk in this case urine. So I want you to describe the image and then we'll hear an excerpt of my interview with Andrei Serrano in which he talks about it. The image, if you didn't know the title of the image you would just think it was sort of this beautiful, holy tribute to Christ and Christ's sacrifice. It is a crucifix that is angled a little bit towards the viewer, so the end of one of the arms is sort of disappearing into nothing. And it is in this murky kind of field, visual field. It's not even clear that it's a liquid when you first look at it. And it's backlit. So it has this kind of spectral, kind of holy power to it. And I think part of what caused all the controversy, is so beautiful and so holy seeming and then you know it's contrasted with this title that is extremely blunt and potentially although that is not how he intended it blasphemous and so it's those two things happening at once that I think help give the work of art its power. There's something almost celestial about it because there's no ground there's no sky it's Christ like on the cross kind of blurry who seems to be like on the cross kind of blurry who seems to be like floating in this ethereal space and it's very unearthly looking. It's almost as if like Christ is rising on the cross and is kind of celestial looking, especially like if you don't know how it was made. Yeah, I find the photograph unbelievably moving even knowing how it's made and you know like I'm a Jew I still think that that photograph is unbelievably moving. beautiful and you know Serrano was raised Catholic considers himself you know a Christian he met Pope Francis you know he he is he is wrestling with his faith and