AND HOW COULD I EVER REFUSE? I FEEL LIKE I WIN WHEN I LOSE. Like all culture warriors, Ross Douhat likes to bitch about smutty pop art ("the next thing you know Aniston is parading naked through the apartment, showing off her waxed . . . well, you know... I think we're crossing a pretty significant threshold with the waxing phenomenon"). But he also has the temperment of a consensus builder, and takes pains to find anti-waxing allies among liberals, as when he praises Thomas Frank and "a left-wing assault on thongs and other pieces of slut-wear."

Working the other side of the street, Douthat is slightly more interesting. To his rightwing brethren, he has even made the sensible suggestion that "cultural conservatives would do well to roll up their sleeves and start writing some entertaining television shows and movies and books of their own. People will watch them, read them, love them, be changed by them..."

Alas, perhaps sensing that such an outcome is unlikely -- at least until the AEI starts giving grants to stand-up comics and playwrights -- Douthat devotes most of his choir-preaching to celebrating signs that the filthy-dirty culture yet contains nuggets of conservative truth, as when he posited "Sex & The City" as a testimony to "the resilience of poor battered old heterosexual monogamy." (One wonders how this revelation would impact Sex & The City tourism. Not much, I expect.)

This is Douthat's approach in his recent essay for the religious-conservative First Things. Rather than summon the faithful to develop conservative cable-TV shows, he tells his readers, first, to admit defeat in the small battle over nudity and obscenity:

Today those battles are all but finished, and the religious side has lost...

The result is the unrestrained and unrestrainable popular culture of today, where every concept, no matter how lowbrow or how vile, can find a platform and an audience...

Small wonder that America’s movies and music and television shows make us enemies in traditional societies around the world—and small wonder, too, that many cultural conservatives, despairing of their country’s future, embrace withdrawal from the world into a narrow, well-defended Christendom, where their families and their faith can be protected from the lowest-common-denominator swill that washes against the walls outside.

But hold, hold, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, for even among the swears and tits Douthat knows that his Redeemer liveth:

For all its profanity and blasphemy, the new culture arguably takes religious issues and debates more seriously than it used to in a more decent, less decadent era...

True, God has to compete with Paris Hilton and Family Guy for attention. But at least He’s in there fighting.

Thence comes -- along with citations of Samuel Huntington and the Holy Bible -- a rundown of TV shows that Douthat expects to please his co-religionists because they are, in his estimation, morally tethered. For example:

The Sopranos dares instead to explore the terrible banality of evil, depicting ordinary people held prisoner by their habits and appetites who choose hell instead of heaven over and over again, not with a satanic flourish but with an all-American sense of entitlement... The show offers a vision of hell as repetition, ultimately, in which the same pattern of choices (to take drugs, to eat and drink to excess, to rob and steal and bully and murder) always reasserts itself, and the chain mail of damnation—in which no sin is an island, and gluttony is linked to violence, sloth to greed, and so on—slowly forges itself around the characters’ souls...

As far as it goes, this analysis is not objectionable. But why, despite Douthat's use of loaded terms such as "heaven," "hell," and "satanic" (why the small "s"? Doesn't Douthat believe in Satan?), could it not be shared by someone who doesn't go to church, but still believes in right and wrong? What makes it an argument against a John Edwards Presidency -- or anyone else's? What is "The Sopranos" position on abortion, evolution, gay marriage, or anything else that interests the readership of First Things?

I should be giving Douthat consensus-building credit for expanding the definition of "cultural conservatives" to mean "everyone who likes popular TV shows." Only I expect that Douthat has it backwards -- that he takes "everyone who likes popular TV shows" to be "cultural conservatives," and that he also believes that these shows are part of Divine guidance toward a new Great Awakening.

As I have repeated unto tedium, the problem with ideologues who engage the arts is that they do not know what art is. They're like the Six Blind Men of Hindustan: they "see" it as a hammer for smashing their enemies, a barometer for judging the political climate, etc., and their interpretive ecstasies prevent them from appreciating its simple and essential blessings.