Culture wars renewed: 25 sources ahead of the 2024 elections

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How we identify — according to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion or gender — is at the heart of hundreds of bills in legislatures across the country. And as U.S. voters across the political spectrum gear up for the 2024 presidential cycle, debates are intensifying about how to define the nation’s values around these issues.

Just weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will hear arguments on the constitutionality of state bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The issue has emerged as a big one in the past few years. While transgender people have gained more visibility and acceptance in many respects, half of U.S. states have instituted laws banning certain health care services for transgender kids.

In recent years, voters have been particularly fired up about the lessons and books that should, and shouldn’t, be taught to children about their bodies or the nation’s past. But those culture wars have also come to corporate America and college sports.

These renewed culture wars have take over everything from local school board meetings to state legislatures and the U.S. Capitol.

In this edition of ReligionLink, we orient you to the contours of the current culture wars and provide background and in-depth resources, as well as a selection of relevant stories and sources to turn to.

Background: A brief history of America's culture wars

Culture wars are nothing new. Conflict between social groups and the struggle for their values and practices to dominate have raged for centuries, from pagans clashing with Christians over statues and shrines in the Roman Empire to movements for liberation and change in the 1960s being met with a conservative backlash.

In the U.S., culture war flash points have shifted over the years, including everything from abortion to pornography, homosexuality to multiculturalism. The front in this election year’s conflicts over values, morality and lifestyle has coalesced around issues related to gender, race, sexuality and the extent religious freedom especially as they are taught or represented in schools, libraries and other public institutions.

In 1990, sociologist Robert Wuthnow famously observed that American religion had undergone a seismic shift in the decades after World War II. In The Restructuring of American Religion, he wrote that as allegiances to specific denominations — whether Methodist or Roman Catholic, Jewish or Presbyterian — waned, religious allegiances realigned around conservative and liberal poles, which cut across denominational affiliations. In other words, whereas to be Lutheran meant one thing in the early 20th century and Baptist another, in the post-WWII U.S., there were now liberal and conservative Lutherans, traditional and progressive Baptists split along more political lines. 

Twenty years American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbelllater, Robert Putnam and David Campbell focused their attention on the last 50 years, when, they believe, there were further tectonic shifts — what they called “a shock and two aftershocks” — that shook up the American religious landscape.

The shock came during the so-called Long Sixties, as a revolutionary youth culture altered just about every institution and sector of society, including our notions of conventional religion and morality. Marginalized groups gathered together within powerful coalitions and movements (e.g., Civil Rights, Black power, Chicano, feminist and gay rights), demanding equal rights and challenging “normative American culture,” as historian Andrew Hartman calls it.

The first aftershock was a counterreaction to this seismic revolution in U.S. culture and religion. Most visible in the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and ’80s, this conservative backlash featured a coalition of evangelicals and fundamentalists advocating for social and political conservatism, chafing against the separation of church and state and desiring a return to what they imagine as the United States’ racial, moral, sexual and cultural “status quo.”

It was shortly after, in 1991, that sociologist James Davison Hunter introduced the notion of “culture wars” (from the German Kulturkampf) to describe the realignment of U.S. politics and culture after the shock-and-aftershock of the previous decades. Just a year later, Pat Buchanan’s speech at the Republican National Convention helped lock it into public consciousness. Polarizing around hot-button issues such as abortion and race, homosexuality and gun politics, a post-Cold War America featured prominent evangelical voices that transferred the perceived threat of communism to what they saw as the domestic evils of shifting notions around gender roles and sexuality, as outlined by historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez in Jesus and John Wayne. 

The second aftershock — a reaction to this counterreaction — featured the dramatic rise in the “nones” and the “spiritual-but-not-religious” since the 1990s. As part of their shift away from traditional religious institutions, the increasing number of people who claimed “no religion” also drifted toward more progressive positions on gender, race, culture and education. They supported transgender and gay rights, advocated for racial justice and wanted to see more representation for such subjects in school curricula, publishing and popular culture. There were numerous political gains for these groups over the last 10 years of the 20th century and the initial decade-and-a-half of the 21st, including the election of America’s first Black president in 2008 and  the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down all state bans on same-sex marriage, legalizing it in all 50 states, in 2015. 

Now we are witnessing what might be deemed a third aftershock in the wake of more progressive policies around race and issues of sexuality and gender during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the Obama era. A movement more than 60 years in the making, contemporary culture warriors have met what they see as a further, secular disintegration of traditional American values with anger and backlash, feeling like politicians and the nation itself no longer represent their values and worldviews.

In this third aftershock, the key battleground remains the schools, what Hartman called in his book A War for the Soul of America “the institution most counted on to ensure the reproduction of American norms.” Grassroots conservatives have fought to reclaim control over local school boards, shape state curriculums and ban books at the community libraries. At the same time, higher education has also come under fire, with conservatives decrying what they see as universities overrun by elites pushing a “woke” agenda of affirmative action (including diversity, equity and inclusion — or DEI — programs), moral relativism, critical race theory and antisemitism.

Are the culture wars *the* religion angle in this year's elections?

As journalists cover this election cycle’s culture war conflicts, they might also consider how their reporting may make the culture wars’ importance appear overblown or manufactured.

Since Davison Hunter first applied the term to U.S. cultural and political life, many have wondered whether the “culture wars” were real or not. And, contrary to the popular opinion that fealty to a political party or religious adherence dictated opinions on culture war topics, a meta-analysis of opinion data between 1992 and 2012 in the American Political Science Review concluded the opposite — culture war opinions lead people to revise their political party and religious orientations, as we have seen with those “who feel drawn to evangelicalism because of what that term has become in the Trump era.”

Nonetheless, it will still be vital to cover how religious actors are part of the push for anti-transgender policies or banning “woke-ness,” DEI programs or critical race theory. But reporters should be careful that in doing so, they not treat culture war issues as the religion story of the year, losing sight of other important religion angles that may influence the outcome of the vote (e.g., immigration and foreign policy, climate change and crime).

Furthermore, by putting too much focus on the culture wars, reporters can take partisan divides for granted and blind themselves to the more complex dynamics of faith and politics. As a result, we often overlook the broader role religion plays in U.S. politics, especially as a complicating factor in the culture wars narrative. In your reporting, be sure to explore the contingencies, ironies and surprising alliances that feature just as often in the story of religion and politics in U.S. elections as polarization.

Religious actors have different reasons for forming political alliances. Be sure to cover the breadth and depth of those alliances and the various places they come from. Culture war coverage too often focuses on more conservative voices, marginalizing religious actors advocating for progressive change. Or it can silence voices from Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and others who hold complex views on the various issues involved. You might also explore issues related to the “undecided” religious voices in the U.S. political scene, such as how the political alignment of Latino megachurches is anything but settled or how Muslims are often torn between conservative social values on the one hand and support for progressive policies related to racial justice and religious discrimination.

Related stories

Relevant sources

  • Montse Alvarado

    Montse Alvarado is a former vice president and executive director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, through which she represented a wide variety of religious ministers, schools, prisoners and hospitals before the Supreme Court. She is now president and COO of Eternal Word Television Network’s news division, EWTN. Contact is Michelle Laque Johnson, director of communications at EWTN Global Catholic Network.

     

  • American Jewish Committee

    The American Jewish Committee is an international think tank and advocacy organization that works to identify and fight antisemitism and bigotry, protect human rights and protect Israel and Jewish life everywhere. Its executive director is Ted Deutch. Contact via Jon Schweitzer, managing director of marketing and communications.

  • Laura Ansley

    Laura Ansley is senior managing editor at the American Historical Association. In that capacity, she has published articles on the history of the culture wars in Perspectives on History. 

  • Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty

    The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty is an umbrella organization of 15 Baptist bodies that work to promote religious liberty. They advise member denominations on religious liberties issues. It is based in Washington, D.C. Its executive director is Amanda Tyler, with J. Brent Walker serving as a consultant to the organization.

  • Jacques Berlinerblau

    Jacques Berlinerblau is professor of Jewish civilization in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His books include Secularism: The Basics, and he has written numerous other books and scholarly articles on the topic. Berlinerblau can be reached via email or through his publicist, Kelly Hughes.

  • Kate Bowler

    Kate Bowler is an associate professor of the history of American Christianity at Duke Divinity School, an author and a podcast host. Her books include The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities, which explores how evangelical women build successful ministry careers despite being barred from the pulpit. She has also written on the political outlook of Latino megachurches. 

  • Anthea Butler

    Anthea Butler is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought and chair of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A historian of African American and American religion, she specializes in the history of Pentecostalism and is the author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.

  • Center for American Progress

    The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan institute that promotes freedom and justice in a wide variety of issues. Daniella Gibbs Leger is the executive vice president of communications and strategy.

  • Angela Denker

    Angela Denker, a veteran journalist and Lutheran pastor, is author of Red State Christians: A Journey Into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind.

  • Darren Dochuk

    Darren Dochuk is the Andrew V. Tackes College Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Dochuk’s research emphasis is on the intersections of religion, politics and the rising influence of the American West and Sunbelt Southwest in national life.

  • Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission

    The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission is the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Hannah Daniel is the commission’s director of public policy.

  • Andrew Hartman

    Andrew Hartman is a history professor at Illinois State University and the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015.

  • Heritage Foundation

    The Heritage Foundation is a nonprofit think tank devoted to conservative public policies. Noah Weinrich is director of media and public relations.

  • Shirley Hoogstra

    Shirley Hoogstra is president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. She has argued that expanding nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community without expanding religious freedom protections would threaten the future of religious schools.

  • Jewish Council for Public Affairs

    The Jewish Council for Public Affairs (formerly the American Jewish Public Affairs Committee), based in New York with offices in Washington, represents the organized American Jewish community, particularly in protecting the rights of Jews everywhere and in supporting a just and pluralistic American democracy.

  • Robert P. Jones

    Robert P. Jones is president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI. He has written several books, including White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award.

  • Jes Kast

    Jes Kast is a minister in the United Church of Christ, a relatively small, progressive denomination with a little less than 1 million members. Kast serves on the clergy-advocacy board of Planned Parenthood.

  • Saeed Khan

    Saeed Khan is a professor teaching in Near Eastern Studies at Wayne State University. He argued in 2023 that caught between the competing narratives of ever increasing toxicity in the culture wars, Muslims need to be wary of the pitfalls of choosing sides ahead of the elections.

  • Kristin Kobes Du Mez

    Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a history and gender studies professor at Calvin University. She wrote Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

  • Joanna Malone

    Joanna Malone is a research coordinator at the LASAR (Learning About Science and Religion) research team at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her doctoral research focused on the experiences, understandings and significance of nonbelief for older adults in the U.K. Her research interests include belief and nonbelief, nonreligion and aging. Malone is co-deputy editor of the NSRN Blog and is part of the British Sociological Association Sociology of Religion Study Group committee acting as PGR/ECR liaison officer.

  • Jonathan Merritt

    Jonathan Merritt writes and speaks extensively on faith and culture and is a senior columnist for Religion News Service. Merritt’s books include A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars and Jesus Is Better Than You Imagined. He can discuss the viewpoints and concerns of young evangelicals on a range of issues, especially on sexuality and sexual identity and the environment. He lives in Brooklyn. Contact through his website.

  • Russell Moore

    Russell Moore is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. Named in 2017 as one of Politico Magazine’s top 50 influence-makers in Washington, Moore was previously president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

  • Asra Q. Nomani

    Asra Nomani is an Indian American journalist and Federalist contributor, who — among other things — is outspoken in opposing critical race theory and gender diversity in education, which she has described as divisive ideologies.

  • Sadhana

    Sadhana is a progressive Hindu advocacy organization based in New York City.

  • Tahil Sharma

    Tahil Sharma is an interfaith activist based in Los Angeles who was born to a Hindu father and a Sikh mother. After the Oak Creek, Wisconsin, shooting at a Sikh temple in 2012, Sharma became involved in efforts for interfaith literacy and social justice and has been doing this work professionally for the past seven years. Sharma serves as one of three interfaith ministers in residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and as the Los Angeles coordinator for Sadhana: A Coalition of Progressive Hindus. Sharma also serves various organizations in different capacities to educate, engage and serve various communities that promote interfaith cooperation and ethical pluralism and social and productive norms in society. Contact through the website or by direct email.

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