New Fronts in the Culture Wars? Religion, Partisanship, and Polarization on Religious Liberty and Transgender Rights in the United States

• Published date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18818169
• Date: 01 May 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18818169

American Politics Research

2019, Vol. 47(3) 650 –679

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18818169

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Article

New Fronts in the

Culture Wars? Religion,

Partisanship, and

Polarization on Religious

Liberty and Transgender

Rights in the United

States

Jeremiah Castle1

Abstract

Beginning in the 1960s, the United States experienced religious and partisan

conflict over cultural issues such as abortion that was described as a “Culture

War.” Recent, highly salient battles over religious liberty and transgender

rights have led the media to characterize these issues as “new fronts in the

culture war,” thereby giving reason to revisit the culture wars debate. In

this article, I test whether the public is polarized on religious liberty and

transgender rights, as well as whether these issues share the same underlying

structure of public opinion as traditional culture wars issues. Using a dataset

from the Pew Research Center, I find that a substantial subset of Americans

hold polarized views on these issues, and that religion and party are

important factors in explaining that polarization. The results suggest that the

religious and partisan divides that fueled the original “culture wars” remain

an important factor in American politics.

Keywords

polarization, religion, religious liberty, transgender rights, culture wars

1Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jeremiah Castle, Central Michigan University, 247 Anspach Hall, Mount Pleasant, MI 48859,

USA.

Email: jeremycastle15@gmail.com

818169APRXXX10.1177/1532673X18818169American Politics ResearchCastle

research-article2018

Castle 651

One of the most vigorous debates in American politics research concerns

the extent to which the American mass public has become polarized in its

issue attitudes. One widely read account claims that beginning in the 1960s,

American politics became defined by an increasing religious divide on cul-

tural issues known as the “culture war” (Himmelfarb, 2001; Hunter, 1991;

Layman, 2001; Leege, Wald, Krueger, & Mueller, 2002; Wuthnow, 1988,

1989). If this thesis is accurate, we would expect to find that the mass pub-

lic is polarized on cultural issues, and that both religion and party play an

important role in this polarization. However, a second group of scholars

argues that the mass public is not as polarized on cultural issues as the “cul-

ture wars” account suggests (Davis & Robinson, 1996; DiMaggio, Evans,

& Bryson, 1996; Fiorina, Abrams, & Pope, 2008, 2010; Lindaman &

Haider-Markel, 2002). The nature and extent of mass polarization, as well

as religion’s role in that polarization, remain controversial (Niemi,

Weisberg, & Kimball, 2011).

Recent accounts suggesting the evolution of the culture wars present an

opportunity to revisit this debate. One line of inquiry holds that the New

Christian Right is changing its style of politics, including a greater empha-

sis on the language of personal rights and liberties (Jelen, 2005; Lewis,

2017; Moen, 1994). A second, and potentially related, possibility is that the

issue agenda in the culture wars may be expanding into “new fronts.”

Observers have suggested two such sets of issues. First, American politics

has witnessed increasing conflict over transgender rights, and the media

increasingly discusses transgender rights within a culture wars frame

(Burmila, 2017; The Economist, 2017; Elliott, 2016; Scher, 2017; Schlumpf,

2018). Second, the New Christian Right is increasingly emphasizing reli-

gious liberty (Lewis, 2017), leading popular commentators to characterize

religious freedom as a part of the culture wars (Boorstein, 2014; Inzau,

2015; Koppelman, 2017; Laycock, 2014; Stetzer, 2014). To date, however,

few studies have examined whether transgender rights and religious liberty

fit into the culture wars paradigm.

In this article, I explore two related questions.

Research Question 1: Is the mass public really polarized on religious

liberty and transgender rights?

Research Question 2: How much do religious liberty and transgender

rights hold in common with traditional culture wars issues, such as

abortion?

After reviewing the literature on the culture wars and political polariza-

tion, I discuss several theoretical reasons why we might expect the issue