Culture wars

“What is certainly true,” Dominic Sandbrook says, “is there are moments in history when disputes about history, identity, symbols, images and so on loom very large. Think about so much of 17th-century politics, for example, when people would die over the wording of a prayer book.” The same applies, he believes, to any number of periods, including the arrival of the permissive society in the 1960s, in which there is an attempt to establish new mores. (Along with his fellow historian Tom Holland, Sandbrook co-presents a podcast, The Rest Is History, which recently looked at the history of culture wars.)

Certainly if we look at America, where the modern incarnation of the culture wars was first identified, the conflicts over abortion and gay marriage have been fought, at least by one side, from an explicitly religious perspective. The US sociologist James Davison Hunter gave popular currency to the term in his seminal 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.

Everything you wanted to know about the culture wars – but were afraid to ask by Andrew Anthony, The Guardian