Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.

• Author: Edsall, Thomas Byrne

James Davison Hunter has written a brilliant analysis of the divisive, polarizing conflicts over values and morals that have come to shape American politics and American public discourse. Culture Wars(*) is a rare book in that it succeeds in both informing the reader and enlarging a debate that has become central not only to politics, but to such fundamental matters as dealings between man and woman, orthodox and secularist, and liberal and conservative. Hunter is a professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Virginia, and if this deeply inquisitive, fair-minded book reflects the character he brings to the classroom, he must be a marvelous teacher.

Although there are substantial flaws in Hunter's larger conclusions, he has discovered an illuminating way to look at major social trends. His basic argument is that there has been a massive lessening of divisions between religious groups based on "specific doctrinal issues or styles of religious practice." These past splits often pitted upper-class Protestants against working class, ethnic Catholics, placing Elliot Richardson and Tip O'Neill on opposite sides of the fence. Now, however, basic cultural conflicts often flare up within religious denominations: between the orthodox, who are committed to "an external, definable, and transcendent authority," and progressives or secularists, who are committed to a "resymbolization of historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life."

In today's cultural wars, then, the orthodox Jew may well discover he shares more common ground on critical issues with the evangelical fundamentalist than with the reform Jew or the mainline Episcopalian. Hunter quotes Rabbi Joshua O. Haberman to convey the subtle complexity of the new realignment of moral conflict: "As a Jew, I differ with a variety of Bible-believing Christians on theology, our nation's social agenda, and matters of public policy. I am, at times, repelled by fits of fanaticism and a narrow-minded, rigid dogmatism among fundamentalist extremists. Yet far greater than these differences and objections is the common moral and spiritual frame of reference I share with Christians, including fundamentalists. The Bible gave our nation its moral vision. And today, America's Bible Belt is our safety belt, the enduring guarantee of our fundamental rights and freedoms."

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