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Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life. By James Davison Hunter and Alan Wolfe. The Pew Forum Dialogues on Religion and American Public Life. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006. xii + 118 pp. $18.95 (paper).
At the 1992 Republican National Convention, conservative pundit and onetime presidential candidate Pat Buchanan summoned the faithful in his party to wage "a cultural war" for the salvation of their nation's soul (p. 1). Although Buchanan's speech brought widespread attention to the culture war question, the idea had already been introduced in academic circles by sociologist James Davison Hunter. In his book, Culture Wars: The Stniggle to Define America (1991), Hunter examined the battles he saw raging between "orthodox" and "progressive" Americans over moral issues such as abortion and homosexuality. Hunter was also one of the first observers to note how theological differences, which had once bitterly divided American religious bodies against one another, were becoming far less significant than disagreements within the churches and denominations themselves. Thanks to the burgeoning culture war, socially...