Letter: How do we share a city and foster community when our sincerely held moral frameworks clash so fundamentally?

🎧 Battle Ground’s Culture War: What Should City Hall Do?

Silas Matson says Battle Ground’s City Council should step out of the culture war and return to the objective work of local governance

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com

The heated debate over the Battle Ground City Council’s recent proclamations highlights a profound civic dilemma, one I believe the separation of church and state was intended to solve.

Silas Matson

Advocates for previous progressive proclamations (e.g., Pride) acted on a desire to ensure marginalized citizens felt safe, while opponents felt the proclamations indicted their sincerely held religious beliefs. Current council members champion proclamations for traditional families and public prayer to secure a stable community, while opponents feel those proclamations implicitly condemn them as aberrant. Both factions use City Hall to promote what they view as a moral good, resulting in mutual alienation.

This highlights the dilemma: How do we share a city and foster community when our sincerely held moral frameworks clash so fundamentally?

The answer requires recognizing what City Hall is actually equipped to do as an administrative body: collect taxes, improve infrastructure, and protect citizens from objective harm. Because of this, it cannot avoid making moral judgments altogether. By enforcing laws against theft, fraud, and violence, the city enforces a minimalist civic morality – a baseline framework focused on public safety and preventing measurable harm.

However, City Hall has neither the mandate nor the machinery to audit the moral purity of a household, adjudicate sexual ethics, or act as the town’s spiritual leader. If a government actually possessed the tools to measure and enforce the spiritual health of its citizens, it would not be a municipality; it would be a theocracy. These domains belong to a maximalist cultural morality – frameworks that establish ultimate meaning, theological truth, and what constitutes a virtuous life. When the government issues proclamations to put its thumb on the scale of these culture war issues, it steps beyond its objective administrative duties to perform cultural and theological validation.

Conservatives, who rightly note that “politics is downstream from culture,” should recognize the category error. You can’t use a downstream bureaucratic tool (a government proclamation) to manufacture your desired upstream cultural reality.

If you grant City Hall the authority to validate your maximalist cultural morality today, you create precedent your opponents will use to invalidate it tomorrow.

We do not need the council’s ceremonial signature to legitimize our faith, our identities, or our families. The council should step out of the culture war and return to the objective work of local governance. Maintain the civic infrastructure so free citizens can live out their values upstream in the private square, leaving the culture war to institutions that rely on persuasion rather than state power.

Silas Matson
Battle Ground

Silas Matson says Battle Ground’s City Council should step out of the culture war and return to the objective work of local governance

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