The culture wars are a framework for understanding the enduring conflict in American public life over values rather than economics: over abortion, religion, sexuality, guns, family, and what schools teach. The sociologist James Davison Hunter gave the idea its influential form in 1991, arguing that Americans were dividing into two moral camps, which he called orthodox and progressive, that cut across the older lines of denomination and class.
There is no logical reason that a person's view on abortion should predict their view on guns, or on prayer in school, or on how a nation's history gets taught. These issues share no common principle. A library book and a rifle have nothing to do with each other. And yet, across American politics, they came to move together, as if pulled by a single hidden magnet. Tell a pollster where you stand on one, and you can often be sorted, with unsettling accuracy, onto a whole team. The puzzle is what that magnet is, and whether the war it implies is really fought by most Americans or only declared in their name.