Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America

Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America is a book book written by James Davison Hunter and published in 1991. It concerns the idea of a struggle to define American public life between two cultures: the progressives and the orthodox.

Overview

The book illustrates its framework of historical analysis through several of the contemporary issues of the time: abortion legalization, school prayer, gay marriage, and more.

Progressive and orthodox views are primarily systems of moral understanding. Hunter identifies orthodoxy as a viewpoint through which moral truth is static, universal, and sanctioned through divine powers; contrasting progressivism, which sees moral truth as evolving and contextual. These two groups are locked in an everlasting culture war to assert dominion over the various institutional and systemic entities influenced by contemporary cultural praxis, most visibly the governing branches of America.