Politico: “In 1991, with America gripped by a struggle between an increasingly liberal secular society that pushed for change and a conservative opposition that rooted its worldview in divine scripture, James Davison Hunter wrote a book and titled it with a phrase for what he saw playing out in America’s fights over abortion, gay rights, religion in public schools and the like: ‘Culture Wars.’ Hunter, a 30-something sociologist at the University of Virginia, didn’t invent the term, but his book vaulted it into the public conversation, and within a few years it was being used as shorthand for cultural flashpoints with political ramifications.”

“Instead, 30 years later, Hunter sees America as having doubled down on the ‘war’ part – with the culture wars expanding from issues of religion and family culture to take over politics almost totally, creating a dangerous sense of winner-take-all conflict over the future of the country. What changed? In the latter half of the 20th century, the culture war was, on some level, a ‘cultural conflict that took place primarily within the white middle class,’ says Hunter, who now leads the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. But, today, as that conflict has grown, ‘instead of just culture wars, there’s now a kind of class-culture conflict’ that has moved beyond the simple boundaries of religiosity. ‘The earlier culture war really was about secularization, and positions were tied to theologies and justified on the basis of theologies,’ says Hunter. ‘That’s no longer the case. You rarely see people on the right rooting their positions within biblical theology or ecclesiastical tradition. [Nowadays,] it is a position that is mainly rooted in fear of extinction.'”