A FIELD GUIDE TO THE CULTURE WARS pdf download

A Field Guide to The Culture Wars the Battle Over Values

A FIELD GUIDE TO THE CULTURE WARS

For a generation, the United States has been embroiled in culture wars—over patriotism and women’s rights, abortion and homosexuality, Darwinian evolution, and the public expression of religion.

Religion, in fact, has been central to them all. In each case, a traditional religious point of view seems pitted against the progressive, the modern, and the secular.

And as in the nineteenth-century German Kulturkampf that gave us the term, the cultural warfare has been conducted along partisan political lines.

 To be sure, religiously inflected culture wars are not a new thing in American public life. In the early days of the republic, Thomas Jefferson was attacked as an atheist and a libertine, and Alexander Hamilton gave some thought to creating Christian clubs to bolster the fortunes of the Federalist party.

On the eve of the civil war, Protestant anxieties about Catholic immigration led to the creation of the American (or Know-Nothing) Party;

 the long struggle over alcohol consumption in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, in part, a struggle of Protestants against Catholics.

 But never in American history have culture wars so consumed public discourse over such a long period of time, or become so engrained in partisan politics, as they have in our time. For that, the Republican Party is largely responsible.

By the 1970s, white southern voters had for the most part stopped voting Democratic in presidential elections because of the national Democratic Party’s embrace of the cause of civil rights.