Dear Friend,

I'm Maggie Gallagher, and I've won a few impossible victories in my time.

I'm asking you to do one thing for me this week: click here to receive your free subscription to my new weekly newsletter: How to fight and win the culture war.

Can we achieve victory in America's "culture wars"?  Can we stand-successfully-for life, for marriage, and for religious liberty?

I think so.

If you are reading this letter, you think so too.

Thank you for clicking here to join the Culture War Victory Fund (CWVF). Each week I will ask you to do two things: to think and to act.

Bringing together thought and action is CWVF's unique contribution.

I've been on the front lines of America's culture war over marriage.  The attacks on Dan Cathy and Chick-Fil- A are just the tip of a very large iceberg.

You know me. In the 90s I participated in a great national debate over family structure: are rising rates of fatherlessness and family fragmentation a good thing, as progressive elites then so self-righteously proclaimed?

Or do children long for the love of their mother and father united in marriage?

The answer now seems obvious, but it was a long hard fight to win social respect for the view that marriage matters for children.

I've been a syndicated columnist and have authored three books on marriage, including "The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better-Off Financially" (co-authored with University of Chicago Professor Linda J. Waite).

My latest book, Debating Same-Sex Marriage, is just out from Oxford University Press, which I coauthored with Prof. John Corvino (a gay marriage advocate).  This is possibly the only book in the history of the world that was endorsed by both Dan Savage and my hero, Sen. Rick Santorum.

Rick says about Debating Same-Sex Marriage:

"Maggie Gallagher is a hero to many of us who care about life, marriage and religious liberty. She is lucid, honest, compassionate, fearless and above all relentlessly reasonable in making the case for marriage as the union of husband and wife. Read this book to learn more about marriage, and about the views of millions of Americans who understand this is one fight we cannot duck."
 (You can purchase a copy of Debating Same-Sex Marriage from Amazon here.)

During the Bush administration, I had a front row seat over debates regarding the Federal Marriage Amendment-and I could see the need for a single-issue national activist organization to do the hand-on political work of fighting for marriage and religious liberty-especially in blue states.

So I founded one: The National Organization for Marriage (NOM).

Not all by myself of course.  Brian Brown, Princeton Professor Robbie George, and a whole host of impressive people came together.  In just a few short years, the National Organization for Marriage has become what even the Washington Post called the "pre-eminent national organization" fighting to protect marriage as the union between  husband and wife.

In early 2008, NOM helped get Prop 8 on the ballot in California. We changed history.

I recall vividly how I was told by fellow conservatives a victory for Prop 8 would be literally impossible.

They said:

"It takes $2 million to get a proposition on the ballot in California, you cannot possibly raise the money, you will raise part of the money and leave the donors hanging, if by some miracle you succeed you will lose at the ballot box because the culture has shifted."

Here's the thing I want you to notice about this story.

First, the people who were telling me that success was impossible were people who agreed with me that gay marriage was a civil wrong, not a civil right.

Secondly-and this is the most important thing-none of it turned out to be true.

In six weeks, we raised the crucial seven figures needed to succeed in getting Prop 8 on the ballot. During the election, 7 million Californians voted to overturn their state Supreme Court and affirm marriage as the union of husband and wife.

I learned an important lesson from that great victory and I want to share it with you: Despair is the most powerful weapon our opponents have. And despair is a self-inflicted weapon one they can have only if we voluntarily hand over to them.

In this respect a culture war is like any other war. When is a war over?

The answer is not when one side or the other is literally annihilated-but when one side loses the will to fight.

That's why the "argument from despair" is our opponent's most powerful weapon.

The first step to victory is believing victory is possible.

But the second crucial step is understanding the nature of culture war.

The inventor of the term "culture war" is Professor James Davison Hunter.  In 2002, he delivered an absolutely brilliant, groundbreaking, original address "To Change the World".  (Professor Hunter also later published a book by the same title, which in my humble opinion, sheds less light, partly because Hunter gets distracted by airing his criticism of the Religious Right's political models-more on that theme in a moment).

Professor Hunter criticizes the common view of culture-that it consists somehow additively in the "values" that inhere in individual hearts and minds.  This leads too many social conservatives to the proposition that personal moral evangelization-changing individual hearts and minds-is the key to changing culture.

"Here, let me be blunt," he writes, "if one is serious about changing the world, the first step is to discard this view of culture and how cultures change, for every strategy based upon it will fail-not most strategies, but all strategies."

Evangelization is the task and duty of every believing Christian, in my view, but Prof. Hunter is right: this is not the right model for understanding how culture-or the culture war-works.

Cultural power, Professor Hunter teaches us, is the power to name reality.

"Like money, accumulated cultural capital translates into a kind of power and influence. But what kind of power? What kind of influence? It starts as credibility, an authority one possesses which puts one in a position to be taken seriously. It ends as the power to define reality itself. It is the power to name things."

Think for a moment, at the deepest level about our current struggles over life, marriage and religious liberty:

Is that thing in the mother's body just a few unimportant clumps of cells or is it a human life, sacred to its Creator, worthy of public respect?

That's the culture war over abortion.

Are two men pledged in a sexual union really a marriage?  Or is there some reason virtually every known human society has recognized that an enduring union of husband and wife in which each is pre-committed to being responsible for the children their bodies may make together-really is different and sacred, and necessary to the whole tribe in a unique way?

That's the culture war over marriage.

Is standing up for the great truths of Genesis an exercise in freedom, or an example of discrimination?

That's the emerging culture war over religious liberty, and it's very serious.

Culture war is not about individual hearts and minds, not about "values"-it's about the nature of reality itself and who is authorized to speak on its behalf.

Culture has a center and a periphery-it is created by elites.  And the key actor is not the individual genius, it's the network that spreads ideas.

That's why it takes something like 150 million voters to balance the faculty of Harvard law school.

(By reading this far into this letter, by the way, you are demonstrating your desire to be part of a new elite network of people who care about the foundational ideas of America.)

What is the place of politics in winning a culture war?

Here is where I think Prof. Hunter makes a serious mistake.

"Politics will never be a solution to the challenges we face," he boldly declares, "The work of the political Left and the political Right-even, if not especially, the Religious Right-often makes matters worse."

Of course politics is not "the" solution.

A sophisticated view about the role of politics in a culture war requires starting from this proposition:  Politics is not an alternative to culture, it is one potent expression of it.  In particular, in the United States politics offers a constraint on the ability of highly-credentialed "progressive" elites to impose new norms on the American people, without our consent.

The political process makes it harder for the culturally powerful unilaterally to de-legitimate alternate views as "outside the mainstream."

Fifty years after Roe v. Wade transformed abortion from a crime to a Constitutional  right, abortion remains a live, heated, moral and political controversy in America, and the prolife position is gaining, not losing, adherents.

True, an enormous amount of "cultural production" went into sustaining the prolife vision and cause, by religious leaders, intellectuals, and even the rare artist.

But it is hard to imagine that we would have a vibrant cultural prolife movement without a political wing.

The political struggle has had enormous cultural implications.

Why did Bill Clinton adopt the mantra "maximum feasible accommodation" with religion as an alternative to "separation of church and state"?  Why did he call for abortion to be "safe, legal and rare"?

Because he and other Democratic elites were tired of losing political elections on "values" issues.  They sought to moderate their expression of views in an effort to win more votes and in the process inevitability legitimized "anti-abortion" views as a reasonable position, not a morally extreme view.

This process is part of what has opened up the new prolife surge in the larger culture.  In the struggle to "name reality" intellectual elites cannot simply shut down important public debates, because our political process won't let them.

Ironically, we can thank the progressives of the 1920s for this fact: The American system of open primaries is the most open and democratic in the world.

Because the people choose party nominees in an open election, political leaders in the U.S. cannot simply get together and decide to take certain issues "off the table" as they often do in parliamentary systems.

So, for example, despite an August 2011 poll that shows the majority of British oppose gay marriage-all the major political parties support redefining marriage.

Similarly, after the courts in Canada imposed gay marriage, the leaders of all the major parties decided to support gay marriage.  That consensus among leaders effectively blocked off any public visible political reaction to same-sex marriage. A top-down imposed silence replaced a free and fair public debate.  Which in turn has made it easier to create a Canada where opposition to same-sex marriage is considered bigoted and "beyond the pale."  Ask Damian Goddard, who was fired from his sports broadcasting job in Toronto the day after he tweeted he supports "the true and authentic meaning of marriage." (You can see Damian tell his story at www.marriageada.org.)

As long as Americans keep voting against gay marriage and for marriage as the union of husband and wife, alternative views cannot be totally de-legitimized.

Politics can affect culture by raising the costs to elites of de-legitimizing others' point of view, and by making visible public opposition to the elite cultural consensus.

The same culturally powerful elites now pushing for gay marriage would have, if they could, shut down life issue. They could not, in part, because the American political system did not grant them that power.

The religious right emerged and took political form not because of some false theories of culture, but because in the United States, the political system is the hardest part of society for elites and their consensus opinions to shut down.

It is true (as I said) that it takes approximately 150 million ordinary American voters to counterbalance the entire faculty of Harvard.

But you go to culture war with the army you have.

And then you figure out the strategies and resources you need to lead to victory.

Politics is only one tool in a culture war, not the be-all or end-all, but it is too important a tool to surrender, unilaterally.

That's why each week at the Culture War Victory Fund I am going to ask you to do two things: to think and to act.

The most hopeful lesson we can learn from the prolife battles is this: truth matters.

The first step to winning this culture war is simply to stand up and not only proclaim but ACT on the great truths:

That which a mother carried within her body is not a clump of cells, it's a human life, worthy of respect.

The unions of husband and wife really are different than other relationships-we need them, children need them, in a unique way.

An American civilization that attempts to redefine the great truths of Genesis as irrational bigotry is not going to be recognizably American, any longer.

The great lesson of Communism is that systems of thought, even powerful systems of thought created by elites that are not grounded in human nature-will eventually fail.  The faith wish we share is simple: hope is stronger than fear.  Love is more powerful than hate.  Truth in the end will prevail over falsehoods and prevarication and ideological commitments.

Thanks for caring about the things that really matter.

I look forward to this great conversation continuing each week, another chance to think and to act, together on behalf of the principles we hold dear, the truths to dear to surrender.

Can you do me one favor?  Can you pass this letter on to one other person whom you think shares our commitment to life, to marriage and to religious liberty?  And to the great principle that truth and love will prevail!

Yours, in gratitude and in good faith,
Maggie

P.S.  If you value my work and want to know how to fight for life, marriage and religious liberty-and win, click here to subscribe (free!) to my new weekly Culture War Victory Fund newsletter.  Each week I want to share with you insights from my front-row seat in America's ongoing culture war-and tell you what you need to know to win this fight for America's soul!