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Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America
A riveting account of how Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have joined forces in a battle against their progressive counterparts for control of American secular culture.
First published January 1, 1991
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About the author
James Davison Hunter
46 books46 followersJames Davison Hunter is the Labrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia and Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
September 25, 2020
For a book that released in 1990, it's striking how relevant this is. Underscores how the dynamics of American life that we take for granted were not always so and have only intensified in large part due to Internet news media and social media. I wished there had been more engagement on issues of race, and some of the descriptions of progressives and orthodox (the two warring camps in Hunter's estimation) seem outdated or simplistic. But this is certainly a worthy read in our culturally wartorn time.
December 22, 2018
Although written over a quarter of a century ago, this book is a classic, an indispensable guide written by a fair and thoughtful sociologist that demonstrates why the United States (and much of the West) is polarized between two competing moral visions. Hunter traces the origins of the culture wars in America, noting that the push to the opposite ends of the moral spectrum began escalating after the Second World War, and focuses largely on the key battlegrounds where conservatives and liberals fight: the family, education, media and the arts, law, and electoral politics. These battlegrounds are significant because they wield symbolic value in the eyes of the general public. Hunter examines how conservatives and liberals define these social institutions; for instance, conservatives deem art to be that which speaks to transcendent notions of beauty, truth, and goodness, whereas liberals demur, asserting that art is only that which is designated as such (usually by experts), that is novel, and that it is free to transgress the boundaries of moral niceties (as exhibited by the photographs of the late Robert Mapplethorpe).
This book was written at the beginning of the 1990s and much has changed (this book was released BEFORE Fox News launched, let alone other right-wing media such as The Federalist and InfoWars), but it is still well worth reading. Hunter enthuses about the role of direct mail in stirring the soldiers of the culture war, but its format would now be in email (and indeed, while Hunter notes how vital the knowledge industry is in our culture, he wrote this book before the advent of the Internet age which has dramatically transformed society by providing platforms for marginalized groups to find each other - think of how Tumblr has become a haven for the LGBTQ community). Debates about the Equal Rights Amendment and the legitimacy of same-sex relations have given way to intersectionality and transgenderism but debates and political machinations are still waged over abortion; what has not changed is the competition to frame the USA according to the conservative and liberal moral visions. In many respects this work reminded me of Jonathan Haidt's excellent book "The Righteous Mind."
This book was written at the beginning of the 1990s and much has changed (this book was released BEFORE Fox News launched, let alone other right-wing media such as The Federalist and InfoWars), but it is still well worth reading. Hunter enthuses about the role of direct mail in stirring the soldiers of the culture war, but its format would now be in email (and indeed, while Hunter notes how vital the knowledge industry is in our culture, he wrote this book before the advent of the Internet age which has dramatically transformed society by providing platforms for marginalized groups to find each other - think of how Tumblr has become a haven for the LGBTQ community). Debates about the Equal Rights Amendment and the legitimacy of same-sex relations have given way to intersectionality and transgenderism but debates and political machinations are still waged over abortion; what has not changed is the competition to frame the USA according to the conservative and liberal moral visions. In many respects this work reminded me of Jonathan Haidt's excellent book "The Righteous Mind."
January 5, 2017
The term "culture war" is much used, even tired today, but Hunter actually coined the term himself. And while the book was published 25 years ago (1991), the book deserves an audience, particularly in light of the most recent election. In fact, at points Hunter is eerily prescient (I'll share more on that below).
Hunter defines a cultural conflict as "political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding" (42). According to Hunter, the culture war in America revolves around different worldviews, "our most fundamental and cherished assumptions about how to order or lives - our own lives and our lives together in this society" (42). The contemporary culture war is "a struggle over national identity - over the meaning of America, who we have been in the past, who we are now, and perhaps most important, who we, as a nation, will aspire to become in the new millennium" (50).
While the culture war is being battled by the elite and in ivory towers, the war also flows into the everyday lives of Americans.
Hunter demonstrates that the inflammatory rhetoric used by those on the extreme ends of the culture war debates serves to harden the other side in their respective positions and is a recipe for disaster. Writing in 1991, Hunter could not have imagined, of course, the rise of echo chambers not only in talk radio and on television, but also on the internet.
Among his many eerily predictive moments, Hunter says, "By its very nature, the libertarian impulse in progressive moral philosophy is to 'invent rights, ever more rights.'" He continues "A strong tendency on the progressivist side of the cultural divide, then, is to defend moral pluralism as a social good and to encourage a corresponding expansion of toleration. The tendency on the other side is to reject moral pluralism as a social evil and to do whatever possible to inhibit its possible expansion. Such fundamental disagreements poignantly signify a loss of the unum, the 'center,' the moral consensus in American public philosophy" (311).
Hunter defines a cultural conflict as "political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding" (42). According to Hunter, the culture war in America revolves around different worldviews, "our most fundamental and cherished assumptions about how to order or lives - our own lives and our lives together in this society" (42). The contemporary culture war is "a struggle over national identity - over the meaning of America, who we have been in the past, who we are now, and perhaps most important, who we, as a nation, will aspire to become in the new millennium" (50).
While the culture war is being battled by the elite and in ivory towers, the war also flows into the everyday lives of Americans.
Hunter demonstrates that the inflammatory rhetoric used by those on the extreme ends of the culture war debates serves to harden the other side in their respective positions and is a recipe for disaster. Writing in 1991, Hunter could not have imagined, of course, the rise of echo chambers not only in talk radio and on television, but also on the internet.
Among his many eerily predictive moments, Hunter says, "By its very nature, the libertarian impulse in progressive moral philosophy is to 'invent rights, ever more rights.'" He continues "A strong tendency on the progressivist side of the cultural divide, then, is to defend moral pluralism as a social good and to encourage a corresponding expansion of toleration. The tendency on the other side is to reject moral pluralism as a social evil and to do whatever possible to inhibit its possible expansion. Such fundamental disagreements poignantly signify a loss of the unum, the 'center,' the moral consensus in American public philosophy" (311).
April 6, 2025
I can't say it's a great book, but I can say that looking back on reading it, it was a good book. I think the format didn't help that much with reading the book. It was a bit different from the normal fonts that Kindle offers, and also it made sometimes reading it a bit tedious. The book is well written, but sometimes I did find myself drifting off at some points. But overall, it does do its job in informing you on how the culture wars we have today evolved from the Moral Majority and so on. Most of it deals with religion and how they started the culture wars of today. However, it is an old book (If I remember it was written in the 90s) and doesn't address the culture wars of today, which I honestly thought the book would. But as said, it addresses the start of the culture wars and how it affects us today.
December 11, 2010
If you want to know why some, perhaps most, of the current political issues and events are so rancorous and uncompromising, this is the book to read. Bypassing the superficial, media sound bite comments and grandstanding demagoguery that is prevalent in today's public discoursee, Hunter looks at the fundamental differences in worldviews, motives, and methods between what he calls the Orthodox and the Progressives as each tries to define--and control--society. Hunter fleshes out his observations in the current battlegrounds of family/marriage, education, law, politics/policy, and art. Giving equal attention to both sides of the argument, this book is thoughful and insightful rather than a one-sided a polemic. An excellent and informative read.
April 23, 2012
I think it is a solid thesis--who can *really* claim that a polarisation of public discourse doesn't exist in the US, and increasingly in Europe? I think the critiques have been off topic at times. But, obviously the emergence of social media in the last 20 years has changed the field massively which makes the reading interesting but definitely outdated in many respects. The book (because it is written for a popular audience, after all) is also very wordy. The basic idea could have been presented in much less space.
September 1, 2023
This is the book that popularized the term "culture wars", now ubiquitous in American political discourse. Readers may be surprised that Hunter uses the term in a fairly specialized way: "culture wars" doesn't simply mean wars over symbols and media, but definitions of what is "sacred" maintained by religious conservatives and secular liberals -- roughly, whether meaning given is to our lives by a transcendent authority above us (eg God), or by our everyday interactions and exchanges with one another in "the real world". The book is quite repetitive and one often gets the sense Hunter is trying to inflate the word count; and race, which is ultimately the material basis of these ideological struggles, is left out completely.
Nevertheless you can learn from looking where Hunter goes wrong. Not only does the book cast the struggle in purely ideal terms, it also tries to dispel the conflict by insisting, more or less, that both sides have become particularistic "special interests" who have given up on listening to one another, must change their ways and become reconciled in the universal community of the state. Yet, as he basically admits near the end, the state itself is the root of the problem, and "both sides" are codependent within it. In a system based on the exchange of private property, which Hunter presupposes, the "free" exchanges prized by secular liberals (whether material or subjective) require authority from above (ie the state) to secure; and authority from above requires "freedom" of exchange for its legitimacy. But the result is always the mutual alienation of these co-constitutive spheres, as those who seek their "freedom" (liberals) end up denying it by reducing the world to mere reified facts; and those who seek to be defined by a higher power (conservatives) end up denying their own particularity and universalizing themselves.
To gloss an older example used by Marx: the abolition of property qualifications for voting secures the "freedom" to vote for the unpropertied -- the freedom to exert power over the propertied -- but only on the condition that they must regard the votes of the propertied as legitimate, and therefore accept the power of the propertied, leaving them defined by a legal relationship based in property. Conversely, when these rights are exercised at the ballot box, where we determine the basic ordering of society through the state, we do so as "equal citizens", in an arrangement that ignores and disavows the differences we have just fixed in place by these rights.
This is indeed a very old problem. One century before Hunter, Hegel systemically outlined and praised this arrangement in his "Philosophy of Right", and Marx wrote about this in "On the Jewish Question" in the form of a truncated critique (where the above example comes from). Without fully understanding what he did, Hunter has provided a rich set of examples of this conflict for our time, as it has assumed a totalizing form and we struggle to break free from it.
Nevertheless you can learn from looking where Hunter goes wrong. Not only does the book cast the struggle in purely ideal terms, it also tries to dispel the conflict by insisting, more or less, that both sides have become particularistic "special interests" who have given up on listening to one another, must change their ways and become reconciled in the universal community of the state. Yet, as he basically admits near the end, the state itself is the root of the problem, and "both sides" are codependent within it. In a system based on the exchange of private property, which Hunter presupposes, the "free" exchanges prized by secular liberals (whether material or subjective) require authority from above (ie the state) to secure; and authority from above requires "freedom" of exchange for its legitimacy. But the result is always the mutual alienation of these co-constitutive spheres, as those who seek their "freedom" (liberals) end up denying it by reducing the world to mere reified facts; and those who seek to be defined by a higher power (conservatives) end up denying their own particularity and universalizing themselves.
To gloss an older example used by Marx: the abolition of property qualifications for voting secures the "freedom" to vote for the unpropertied -- the freedom to exert power over the propertied -- but only on the condition that they must regard the votes of the propertied as legitimate, and therefore accept the power of the propertied, leaving them defined by a legal relationship based in property. Conversely, when these rights are exercised at the ballot box, where we determine the basic ordering of society through the state, we do so as "equal citizens", in an arrangement that ignores and disavows the differences we have just fixed in place by these rights.
This is indeed a very old problem. One century before Hunter, Hegel systemically outlined and praised this arrangement in his "Philosophy of Right", and Marx wrote about this in "On the Jewish Question" in the form of a truncated critique (where the above example comes from). Without fully understanding what he did, Hunter has provided a rich set of examples of this conflict for our time, as it has assumed a totalizing form and we struggle to break free from it.
March 4, 2025
I picked this up based on the table of contents and the reviews on the back cover and thought this was going to be focused more on the divide between education and hedonistic pop culture. When I got home I saw that Goodreads sums up the books as follows: “A riveting account of how evangelical Christians, orthodox Jews and conservative Catholics have joined forces against their progressive counterpoints for control of American secular culture.” Oh, boy, what have I gotten myself into?
I didn’t realize Hunter is a professor of religion at Virginia University and has written many books on Evangelical topics. So that’s a big red flag for me. But I dove in, hoping for the best. I’m actually a little miffed at how this was marketed, with the subtitle “Making sense of the battles over the family, art, education, law and politics” when in fact this could very well be considered a history of religion in America, with a few concluding chapters discussing how current issues in law, education, and politics impact religious belief and Judeo-Christian traditions.
Even the one single page on music discusses how bad rap music is only because a single album by 2 Live Crew had over 200 expletives and Evangelicals were enraged that some radio stations were broadcasting this. No discussion of the depravity of drugs and sexual violence or the glorification of the inner-city gangster lifestyle that this music conveys. Only that Christians don’t want impressionable young children hearing all these bad words.
Tangentially, as a social conservative, I may agree with some of the issues that the author points out as being troubling, but as an Agnostic (meaning, in a practical day-to-day sense, Atheist), my reasons are worlds apart from theirs. If you are a believer who thinks that a united ecumenical front will be the best way to combat self-destructive tendencies latent in Pop Culture, then you may very well enjoy this book. I prefer to view the problems with an Enlightenment attitude and rationality – itself no doubt a lost cause. But we each follow our own drummer.
I didn’t realize Hunter is a professor of religion at Virginia University and has written many books on Evangelical topics. So that’s a big red flag for me. But I dove in, hoping for the best. I’m actually a little miffed at how this was marketed, with the subtitle “Making sense of the battles over the family, art, education, law and politics” when in fact this could very well be considered a history of religion in America, with a few concluding chapters discussing how current issues in law, education, and politics impact religious belief and Judeo-Christian traditions.
Even the one single page on music discusses how bad rap music is only because a single album by 2 Live Crew had over 200 expletives and Evangelicals were enraged that some radio stations were broadcasting this. No discussion of the depravity of drugs and sexual violence or the glorification of the inner-city gangster lifestyle that this music conveys. Only that Christians don’t want impressionable young children hearing all these bad words.
Tangentially, as a social conservative, I may agree with some of the issues that the author points out as being troubling, but as an Agnostic (meaning, in a practical day-to-day sense, Atheist), my reasons are worlds apart from theirs. If you are a believer who thinks that a united ecumenical front will be the best way to combat self-destructive tendencies latent in Pop Culture, then you may very well enjoy this book. I prefer to view the problems with an Enlightenment attitude and rationality – itself no doubt a lost cause. But we each follow our own drummer.
December 8, 2021
Published in 1993, Hunter starts by dividing the opposing sides of the culture war into two camps: the Orthodox and the Progressive.
He shows how these categories explain but also transcend the conservative/liberal dichotomy and how it's possible to have a strong alliance among segments of Catholics, protestants, and Jewish people when historically the lines have been drawn between each sect, not through them.
Hunter's observations are still relevant. As something of a product of the culture wars myself, it's helpful to read this framing of the problem because it breaks down the fundamental issues in authority, vocabulary, and communication that really haven't changed in the 30 years since this was published.
I would recommend this as a very accessible work of sociology for anyone who is trying to understand the culture war better, especially if they identify strongly with either side of the conflict.
He shows how these categories explain but also transcend the conservative/liberal dichotomy and how it's possible to have a strong alliance among segments of Catholics, protestants, and Jewish people when historically the lines have been drawn between each sect, not through them.
Hunter's observations are still relevant. As something of a product of the culture wars myself, it's helpful to read this framing of the problem because it breaks down the fundamental issues in authority, vocabulary, and communication that really haven't changed in the 30 years since this was published.
I would recommend this as a very accessible work of sociology for anyone who is trying to understand the culture war better, especially if they identify strongly with either side of the conflict.
May 18, 2023
"Culture Wars" is a book written by James Davison Hunter, a sociologist and cultural critic. In the book, Hunter examines the ongoing conflict and polarization in American society over various cultural issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and religious freedom. He argues that these conflicts are not just political or ideological but deeply rooted in competing moral and cultural worldviews. Hunter suggests that these culture wars are not easily resolved and calls for a more constructive and civil engagement to bridge the divide and find common ground.
GPT
September 17, 2025
I was interested in reading this book initially, but I didn't realize that the majority of the book was a history lesson religion. As a result, I had a hard time focusing on the content of the book when it wasn't discussing religion. I believe there are merits to the book, but I had to take the belief that all our culture wars are based on religion or the lack of religion. I thought this book would be relevant to understand the culture wars of today but either I missed that, or it wasn't in the book to begin with. ,,,
June 9, 2025
Despite being published in 1991, large swaths of this book are incredibly relevant today. I don't think I agree on every single point, but I'd highly recommend it regardless for all its useful perspective and history.
January 7, 2024
Skimmed parts but surprising how still relevant.
March 3, 2025
I was introduced to this book and its author back in the mid-90's in a class I was auditing with John Muether at RTS-Orlando. It was a required textbook. I've read every book of his since then.
January 19, 2014
So, this review is not actually for this book, but is for Hunter's other book: "To Change the World", but unfortunately, I cannot find that book on Goodreads, so I am leaving my review for it here.
Apparently this book is somewhat controversial in that it tends to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" in its critique of politicizing topics in which evangelical Christians would like to influence the culture at large. I do agree with this critique, but more importantly, I find the book very thought provoking in new and unique ways and ultimately this is one of the main reasons I read books, so I would recommend this book despite its shortcomings.
Apparently this book is somewhat controversial in that it tends to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" in its critique of politicizing topics in which evangelical Christians would like to influence the culture at large. I do agree with this critique, but more importantly, I find the book very thought provoking in new and unique ways and ultimately this is one of the main reasons I read books, so I would recommend this book despite its shortcomings.
July 7, 2025
I skimmed through this for my thesis, so this review is only relevant for those who are interested in the relevance of this to the notion of aesthetics within the literary academy.
I think that it was useful in some ways: an overarching framework that explains the rift between conservatives and progressives. In terms of art, it helpfully points out the theology of art that has been slowly built up since Romanticism but does not elucidate the fractures within this theology, instead focusing on the ideological differences between the religious right and its conception of art and the liberal left and its notion of art.
I think that it was useful in some ways: an overarching framework that explains the rift between conservatives and progressives. In terms of art, it helpfully points out the theology of art that has been slowly built up since Romanticism but does not elucidate the fractures within this theology, instead focusing on the ideological differences between the religious right and its conception of art and the liberal left and its notion of art.
September 12, 2012
If you want to know what the hell happened in America over the last 20 years, you need to read this! Everything that is "mainstream" today that was thought socially abnormal or shameful to conservatives in the past has all been part of a plan to desensitize the American public since the late-1980s and early-1990s. I highly suggest this book!
March 28, 2024
One of the First Books to delve into the issue of the Culture Wars.
Over Thirty years after its publication, this well written book
documents the issues between secular and and right-wing Christianity.
Over Thirty years after its publication, this well written book
documents the issues between secular and and right-wing Christianity.
January 2, 2014
At one point, the author makes an equivalency between gays handing out condoms at a Catholic church with the violence perpetrated against gays by conservatives. That's right, in the author's world, handing out condoms is just like murdering someone for being gay.
April 14, 2008
cultural conflicts need to be understood for the peace of USA and the world and this book is a good start toward helping us learn about that
October 13, 2010
I don't remember getting much out of this book, though I didn't read too far past the first chapter or two.
Want to read
March 4, 2010i read this years ago, and thought it was about time for a refresher...
September 13, 2012
Hunter's book describes American cultures using a fair approach. His observations are still largely relevant in Americas cultures 20 years later.
January 20, 2015
Just as relevant today as it was over 20 years ago. Hopefully explains much of the tension over cultural ideas
December 11, 2016
An important, balanced, well-written, and, indeed, timeless book about the culture wars. I recommend it to anyone trying to figure out what the hell just happened in America.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews