When you hear someone start talking about America and our torrid "Culture Wars," what do you think?
You probably think of headlines like this one: "Disney doesn’t want to offend anyone. But it’s getting caught in the culture wars."
Or here is another one from a current search in Google News: "Constitutional fluke gives rural states extra clout in the culture wars."
OK, here's one more captures the legal side of so much of this coverage: "How Due Process Became a New Front in the Culture Wars."
So "Culture Wars" equals political battles over, well, cultural issues, things like abortion, gay rights, textbooks in Texas, sitcoms that mention Donald Trump, "liberals" shutting down free-speech forums and so forth and so on.
The problem is that very few of these "Culture Wars" stories have anything to do with the actual ideas in the classic 1991 book "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America" by sociologist James Davison Hunter. To be specific, new journalists ever get around to explaining Hunter's definition of this term.
So before we get to this weekend's "think piece" -- a Wall Street Journal (beware, high paywall) piece entitled, "The Man Who Discovered ‘Culture Wars’ " -- let's flash back to my 1998 "On Religion" salute to Hunter's book. The key is that Hunter declared that:
... America now contains two basic world views, which he called "orthodox" and "progressive." The orthodox believe it's possible to follow transcendent, revealed truths. Progressives disagree and put their trust in personal experience, even if that requires them to "resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life."
I noted that this has become a fault line that "runs through virtually every set of pews in contemporary religious life." There is way more to this than political conflict: