Andrew Hartman’s War for the Soul of America is a welcome and long overdue analysis of the 1980s and 1990s culture wars, a series of conflicts over gender, race, religion, and education. The phenomenon was first theorized by James Davison Hunter in 1991 (Culture Wars. The Struggle to Define America). It was then decried by Morris Fiorina (Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America), and Alan Wolfe (One Nation After All), among others, who considered that the majority of Americans were moderates and that, therefore, the culture wars were marginal. Hartman’s thorough examination not only proves these culture wars’ debunkers wrong, but in questioning Hunter’s religious-secular dualism, it also offers a new perspective on this debate.
Hartman sees the 1960s as pivotal in the emergence of the culture wars. The decade “ushered in an intense new form of polarization that hinged on the very question of America and its meaning” (10), and the various liberation movements that arose “shook up...
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