Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America

Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America is a book written by James Davison Hunter and published in 1991. It concerns the idea of a struggle to define American public life between two cultures: the progressives and the orthodox. The book illustrates its framework of historical analysis through several of the contemporary issues of the time: abortion rights, school prayer, gay rights, and more.[1]

Progressive and orthodox views are primarily systems of moral understanding. He identifies orthodoxy as a viewpoint through which moral truth is static, universal, and sanctioned through divine powers; contrasting progressivism, which sees moral truth as evolving and contextual. These two groups are locked in an everlasting "culture war"[2] to assert dominion over the various institutional and systemic entities influenced by contemporary cultural praxis, most visibly the governing branches of America.[3][4]