Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. James Davison Hunter is the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory at the University of Virginia, where he also serves as Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture. He received his baccalaureate degree in sociology from Gordon College, Master of Arts and PhD in sociology from Rutgers University. It is his most recent book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, that book is the topic of our conversation today. Professor Hunter, welcome to Thinking in Public.
James Davison Hunter:
Thank you very much. So happy to be here.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I’m kind of in the unusual position of saying that we’ve been in conversation for the last 40 or 40 plus years, but it’s really been mostly one way with you writing the books and then me greatly appreciating your writings and frankly engaging with so many of your ideas. I think back to 1983, your first book, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity. And I was a doctoral student at the time, and I have to tell you, I was deeply grappling with my own version of the quandary of modernity, and ever since then, quite frankly, you’ve been one of the most, I think, catalytic minds in American intellectual life. So I just want to say thank you.
James Davison Hunter:
Well, thanks. That’s very generous coming from you. Thank you very much.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I think through categories that you have given Americans in terms of intellectual categories and such as cognitive bargaining, which we’ll talk about at some point, because even as I was working in theological method, that’s exactly what I was seeing, and I think that really came out pretty clearly in your second book about younger evangelicals, but you rocked the intellectual world in the United States with your book entitled Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, which was 1991. And so you are one of the few people to have coined a term such as culture war, and now in your latest book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, in one sense, I think you’ve come back to ask some of the most important questions and in some cases to ask them again. Is that fair to say?
James Davison Hunter:
It is, yeah. This new book is a bookend to the earlier book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. It’s in part because so much has changed since the early 1990s when I published the book in late 1980s when I was researching and writing it. But also my thinking has, I think, become a little bit more sophisticated. I was a younger man when I wrote that first book, and I have continued to read and continue to learn, and I wanted to bring that to bear on providing what I think is, and I hope is a more nuanced understanding of the very complicated challenge that we face.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I was involved in a good many conversations prompted by the culture wars book in 1991. One of the first things that happened, I was in a symposium at Emory University and then at the Chautauqua Institution and other places because you really set the conversational flame pretty high there. And by the way, what you described in that book is what I was seeing and experiencing, but the other thing I experienced was the blowback to your book with people saying that you were imagining something that wasn’t there, this basic divide at the most fundamental level of morality and frankly, reality, ontology, metaphysics, that separated Americans, you were really charged back in the early 1990s with exaggerating and quite frankly bringing kind of an unnecessary belligerence to the cultural equation.
James Davison Hunter:
Yeah, well, yeah, no, I think the first 15 years after that book was published, I was I in an ongoing debate with my colleagues in political science, sociology, political theory, and elsewhere, did this thing exist, did it not? And I came to the conclusion that, actually the very first public presentation, it was an author meets critic event, and a very senior social theorist from very sophisticated man said, there is no culture war. It’s a mopping up campaign. And it was off from there. And I came to the conclusion that the denial of the culture war, the denial of something that was just so really apparent to almost everyone else except for many of those in the social sciences, that the denial of the culture war was in fact an act in the culture war. To deny the culture war is to essentially say that the other side doesn’t matter.
Albert Mohler:
Right. That’s exactly what I felt in particular when I spoke in the context of the Chautauqua Institution. That’s a pretty liberal audience and that’s an understatement, but I was the only contributor to that conversation invited to be there who had any connection to a conservative side of the culture, and they treated me as if I were a National Geographic specimen. And you speak of the mopping up operation. I can just tell you that was one of the first times I was in a cultural context, and it was in the early nineties. it was the first time I was in a context in which it was clear that the folks who were presenting with me didn’t even find the discussion interesting it was just so over. And I don’t know how they have rethought the equation, some of them are probably old enough, they haven’t much, but your thesis has not only not been disproved, I mean obviously you would probably modify it now in many ways that’s why you wrote this book, but I mean no one can really deny there has been a culture war in this country for the last generation or more.
James Davison Hunter:
Well, I think it’s not unlike the great secularization theory about the with modernity comes a decline in religion. And I think that was wishful thinking for many, many generations of secular scholars. There’s some empirical validity to the argument, but in its nuance, but this general notion that religion is simply going to disappear and we’re going to live in an uncomplicated secular world, it’s taken a long time for secular scholars to realize it’s not going away. And I think in the same sense, the culture war has only intensified. It has, the animosities are deeper, and I think the main problem is that I would say most are not grappling with the nature of the culture in culture war deeply enough to understand why it is that it’s now within our DNA as a nation, and that it’s not going away, this is not simply happening. I oftentimes use the metaphor of the weather and the climate. This is not just happening in the patterns of the weather. This is deeply climatological and it will continue, I’m sure, for generations to come.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I’m convinced you’re right. I want to go back to the late eighties when you’re doing this research and the early nineties when it landed because it kind of sets the stage for our conversation to follow. What were you seeing in the culture that led you to appropriate the German noun kulturkampf from Wilhelmine Germany and say, well, that’s what’s happening in the United States. And I’d ask you at the same time, explain why now your use of modernity is absolutely crucial here I think. So why in the United States and why now?
James Davison Hunter:
Well, that’s a very big question. So I was a student of the great Austrian Emigre scholar, Peter Berger, and I was trained in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, the sociology of culture was not really named that at the time, and there’s a lot I could say, Peter was one of the most brilliant people I had ever met and great fun to work with, but Peter didn’t really have a theory of power. He had a theory of legitimation. He was brilliant in so many ways, but large scale, cultural, religious conflict really wasn’t part of the matrix of his thought. And in Freudian language, we kill the father, we find out what in our mentors paradigm is missing and you want to fill the gap. And part of this is also, I think on the heels of my having written two books on American evangelicalism and trying to figure out how it is that against the supposed backdrop of secularization, how is it possible that a religious orthodoxy not only survives, but thrives? How in the world, how does that make sense and how do we make sense of that?
And what happened in the late 1980s is that I was doing a research project on religious authority, and it involved a big survey of elites, business elites, media elites, academic elites and religious elites in Germany, England, and the United States. And when I was beginning to analyze the data, I found that Orthodox Jews, conservative Catholics, and evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants had more in common with each other than they did with those in their own tradition but on the other side of the cultural divide. And this happened about the same time that I read a story in the New York Post about a protest at an abortion clinic, I think a Planned Parenthood clinic, in midtown Manhattan, in which an orthodox rabbi and a couple of congregants along with a group of nuns, priests, a monsignor and about a dozen or so evangelical ministers, and were protesting together side by side, arm in arm. And were arrested together at that protest. And if you know anything about the history of western civilization, you know about the prominence of antisemitism and anti-Catholicism, the 19th century and the United States was rife with anti-Catholicism, and yet here they are standing shoulder to shoulder and being arrested together in common cause. What is the dynamic that’s making this historically unprecedented gathering possible?
And it was again, reinforced by the data that I was analyzing. And of course, I found that it was true on the other side of the cultural divide that progressive Catholics, liberal Protestants, and reform and secular Jewish elites were also forming alliances that were stronger with each other than they were with their members of their own religious tradition and theological tradition. So this was historically unprecedented and it traced back to the issue of the good, which is the heart of culture itself. What is the good and how do we know it? And what the conservative leaders of these different traditions all shared in common is the belief that we know the good through transcendent sources. It could be the magisterium, it could be the authoritative scriptures, or it could be Torah, but these are not constructions of our own. We don’t just make these things up. They are objective truths as they’re experienced and seen. And on the other side, all of the sources of authority that were shared in common were an understanding of the moral good of truth, and so on from worldly, whether science or subjective experience. So that’s how I knew that this was not going away. Anything that touches on cultural authority, even if it’s never articulated fully, it was going to have staying power. It was not just ephemeral political action on the part of some hotheads on either side of the cultural divide. This is pointing to something deeper and more enduring.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. When I talk about these things with graduate students, I often say that all you have to do is look at the 1960 and the 1980 editions of the two party platforms, and you’ll see the conversation has shifted from marginal tax rates to the meaning of life.
James Davison Hunter:
That’s right.
Albert Mohler:
And something had to have happened between 1960 and 1980.
James Davison Hunter:
Well, that’s exactly right. As I’ve often said, most of the political conflict of the 20th century happened along a continuum that was mainly defined by the terms of political economy. It was about corporations versus labor unions. It was about the managerial class and the working class. It was about the way it was constructed, oftentimes, the wealthy versus the poor. And that really defined the terms of being left or being right, how you positioned yourself. Well again in this period of the late 1970s into the 1980s, but certainly with roots that are earlier than that, the very meaning of the words left and right, conservative and progressive, were changing to reflect these cultural dynamics rather than the dynamics of political economy.
Albert Mohler:
So you wrote the book, you declared the reality of the culture war, explained it within the intellectual context and the cultural context of such rapid change in the second half of the 20th century, and then ensued some controversy. You kind of doubled down in 1994 with your book Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture War. And I remember a line from that book going all the way back to the 1990s. You said that not all culture wars turned into shooting wars, but virtually all shooting wars begin as a culture war.
James Davison Hunter:
Yeah, for sure. That’s still true.
Albert Mohler:
Spell that out a bit for us. In other words, I think most readers are going to be able to say, okay, I see that in general, but how does that play out in terms of the culture wars here?
James Davison Hunter:
Well, first of all, the basic proposition I think is undoubtedly true, culture wars precede shooting wars. And that doesn’t mean a shooting war will inevitably come about, but you never have a shooting war without a prior culture war. And for the very simple reason that culture provides the justifications for violence.
Albert Mohler:
Right, war is conflict over something.
James Davison Hunter:
That’s right. And its meanings and the meaning that we impute to our interests, to our ideals, to the things that we’re fighting over. And from 1830 to the early 1860s, there was a 30 year culture war over the meaning of black humanity. And in a nation that was not only divided theologically and culturally over black humanity, but also regionally, and there’s much to say about that. But in a nation that was divided over something as deep as this, there was several attempts to achieve a compromise, which each time made matters worse, not better. Then the Supreme Court in 1857 ruled that in a majority decision written by justice Roger Taney, that in fact the founders of the republic intended black humanity to be less than white humanity. It affirmed the legitimacy of a slave regime. It was an attempt to impose consensus through the power of the state. And the result was three years later we were at war.
And war essentially brought about another consensus through the power of the state, and obviously in my opinion, the right side won. But it came at an extraordinary cost and it was far less effective than anyone imagined. There are two points I want to make here. One is that culture wars tend to be bloody, they tend to become violent when we see the other side as less than human when our conception of the other side is that these people are not members of the political community and worthy of its protections as well as its privileges, then it seems to me the other side or whoever’s in power has the justifications for doing whatever they want to the other side. I mean, this is of course what happened in the 1930s in Nazi Germany. The first step toward the Holocaust was simply denying Jews citizenship and the rights and privileges and protections that citizenship provided. Then it was possible to essentially do whatever you wanted.
So when there is, and by the way, you see this in the Bosnian conflict, you’ve seen this in African conflicts, when the culture war finally settles on who is a member of the community and worthy of its protections and who is outside of the boundaries, that’s when things get awful. And during the 1990s, I think part of the reason why people weren’t worried was because it was mainly a white middle class conflict. The economy is doing pretty well people, it is a middle class conflict, some class divisions, but not much. But it was contained by those things. All of a sudden in 2008, there was now a class dimension and the life chances of one side of this cultural divide were threatened. And I am quite sure that that’s one of the reasons things intensified at that moment.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, it’s interesting you make that point because I have not only been in intellectual engagement with your works, but I also over the years have ordered and read every symposium I’ve seen on your thesis on culture war. And I think there was one, I believe it was the Brookings Institution, it’s been a while, but there was a chapter, I think by Alan Wolfe in which he basically said, if there was a culture war, it’s over. And looking back at it, you can go, wow, how can you miss, and I respect Professor Wolf, I am just saying it is one of those things, you just look at it and you go, so how could you see that? From where I live, it would’ve been impossible to say that the conflict is receding rather than advancing. And so, it’s kind of a humbling thing to read because I thought we’re inhabiting two different worlds here.
James Davison Hunter:
We were at an event sponsored by the late Mike Cromartie. I don’t know if you knew Mike, wonderful, wonderful man. And the debate was in front of a group of about 25 different journalists. And so Alan and I went head to head on it, and we made our cases, eventually it became published as you know. But in the context of that debate with all of these journalists, there wasn’t a single journalist there who is taking Alan’s side. They were seeing it day to day, they were writing about it. That was my perception. But Alan is a thoughtful man, but we were very on different sides of that one, and I think I came out on that one.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I think undoubtedly, but I do appreciate the fact that there was a conversation like that because quite frankly, in that kind of context, that dynamic, you have arguments refined. And it’s also important for me to know and for listeners of this program to know that there are people, and I don’t mean this dismissively, but elites in the culture where quite honestly, they don’t meet anyone who isn’t in basic agreement with their worldview, and they don’t understand what it is like to be on the underside of these changes. Which means if you have the Supreme Court and the Roe decision legalizing abortion, and you’re on the conservative pro-life side, and then you have the Obergefell decision in 2015, so far as one part of our society is thinking, well, this is just inevitable, this is progress, Hegelian unfolding of history and spirit. On the other hand, there’s a sense, okay, our challenge is greater than we ever knew, but I appreciate those on the other side of the conflict who quite frankly are engaged in honest conversation. And I’ve had the privilege of those conversations, but I think it’s very unbalanced in the sense that I have to be very familiar with their stuff and read it constantly. They really don’t need to follow our stuff very much in the world in which they live.
James Davison Hunter:
The world of higher education is for the most part, a monoculture, and it’s not uniformly so. There are lots of people who are, I mean, I would say the majority of scholars in the world I inhabit are honest, hardworking, and truth seekers. But there are very powerful scripts that dominate the space that we live in. And I think it is often dangerous for people to offer an alternative perspective if they want to enjoy the benefits of career mobility. There’s a certain kind of conformity that’s expected.
Albert Mohler:
When there was that first round of pretty massive conflict on the campus of Columbia University going back nearly 20 years ago, and a prominent Jewish family put together a program and a fund. They’ve been in headlines recently on the same campus because of similar reasons. I was one of the persons invited to be a part of that symposium there in Low Library at Columbia. The president of Columbia very skillfully supervised the discussion and the symposium. And at the end of it, I all of a sudden realized, again, I am stepping into a world where honestly they never hear anything like this from on campus. And I say that because that’s what they said. That’s what they said to me.
James Davison Hunter:
They don’t know anyone like you. Someone like you are just not part of the diversity that they want, and I’ve heard that frankly many times and frankly from both sides.
Albert Mohler:
Sure.
James Davison Hunter:
Which is part of the problem we’re facing right now.
Albert Mohler:
Right, thus your book. But your latest book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. I have to say, I picked it up wondering what you were going to do. And I have to tell you, it was an incredibly satisfying engagement when I sat down with your book. And I think perhaps particularly important to me because I do go all the way back to 1983 in your American Evangelicalism project and follow through. And so I want to say first of all, just as a statement of academic amazement, I don’t think there’s really anyone who’s written anything important about this that you haven’t engaged. And so I’m one of those rare people that just cannot read the book without reading the footnotes.
James Davison Hunter:
Well good for you.
Albert Mohler:
I was going back and forth the whole time and making all my marks. But I’m going to suggest to you, I came to the conclusion in reading your book that what you have done here is to take the culture wars thesis, and it’s not just expand it and reflect upon it. It seems to me you’ve dug underneath it, excavated a bit, and pointed to something perhaps even more foundational than you saw with the culture wars book in 1991. Is that fair?
James Davison Hunter:
That is completely fair and it’s a great metaphor. So thanks for that, but I might use it Al. But yeah, I did. Again, just to go back to the distinction between the weather and the climate, we are generally focused on what has happened this week or today or the past month, and we engage public issues in that way. And yeah, I wanted to dig even deeper, and I know this is fairly esoteric for the average reader, but you would appreciate, I think that this rather bold statement, which isn’t made in academic social science, I don’t think ever, but that implicit within every institution, every society, every civilization, are answers to the question, what is real? What is true? How do we know who is a member of the community and worthy of its protections? How do we treat other people? And what is the point of it all? Where is it all going? And these are all proto-philosophical questions that no one ever fully articulates. And may not, I would say 99% are not even aware that they’re answering these questions, but they are there. And when you start digging it into the substructure of American civilization, you find that there’s this rich complex and story that’s unfolding. And that’s really the story I’m trying to tell of how we went to, from a rather opaque consensus around those kinds of questions, to a place where it seems like we’re giving up on those questions altogether. And we are now just engaged in a kind of competing will to power. It’s just about who’s going to win this. People are giving up.
Albert Mohler:
I’m tempted to jump to the end of the book, but I’m not going to do that. Let me just walk through it a bit here. You use some categories you’ve used before, such as cultural logics. And so in summary, are these always conscious or are these logics largely unconscious? What makes this society work? And I appreciate the fact you’re pressing back to say, okay, so how in the world does this happen? How does this idea emerge?
James Davison Hunter:
Well, surface and depth, weather and climate are related to each other. So we can understand the cultural logics of a group or of a party or of a faction, to use the old fashioned language by virtue of what they say, the patterns of what is said again and again and again. But culture is not just about the text that we can read or see or observe. It’s also about the context and the subtext. And so part of what I’m trying to do in understanding the implicit cultural logics is to try to understand the subtext.
I’ll just use an example of conspiracy theories. I find it almost hilarious at this point and privately hilarious when the Washington Post or the New York Times lists, the long list of lies that President Trump has uttered. And then they provide documentation for why they are lies and how they’re untrue, and the evidence that would demonstrate all of that. And I suppose that’s a worthy exercise. We should be held accountable to the things that we’re saying. But at the level of a cultural logic, a cultural logic is not a philosophical or scientific logic. A cultural logic is about the meaning that we make. Cultural logics are primarily about meaning. So a conspiracy theory or the kinds of things that a president will say that are wildly inaccurate aren’t so much about accuracy, as they are about a narrative of what is meaningful to his audience, his or her audience. So yeah, truth has actually very little to do with it. It’s not the text, it’s the subtext. So it’s important to sort of read things at different levels.
Albert Mohler:
I appreciate that. And I think it’s applicable actually to trying to understand any cultures, actually pretty necessary. And it might be easier to see in cultures of which we’re not so much a part than the ones of which we are.
James Davison Hunter:
Yeah, that’s right.
Albert Mohler:
Just because we swim in this water. About, I don’t know, a hundred pages in your book or so you’re really dealing with the secular reality and the shift, and so you do several things. You have these big concepts that I think are so important, and you also have a narrative and you come back to it and I’ll say, you punctuate the narrative with the conflict. You make me want to see a debate between Richard John Newhouse and Laurence Tribe, so far as I know it never happened except in your book, but I would love to have seen it. Richard John Newhouse was a friend.
But going back to this just a few chapters into your book, you deal with the shift into a more secular context in the United States, and you use a couple of categories I found very interesting, and one of them may be attributable to Henry May, you speak of ideas understood religiously. And later you talk about the secularization of Protestantism and the Enlightenment in which you say that the synthesis was basically doing the work of religion. And I found those two sentences very powerful because I think that’s exactly the way I see what took place, especially in the late 19th, early 20th centuries.
James Davison Hunter:
Well, this American society at that time was a time when its elites in particular less ordinary citizens, but it’s certainly, its elites were secularizing very, very quickly. Religion as a source of authority, especially over issues of public policy, had lost a lot of ground. And of course, the interactions between the United States and England, France, Germany in the intellectual realm, there’s so much stimulating thought and influences just swirling around. And I would say that because the deep structures of American civilization had been so suffused with religion that as our society is making this pivot toward a secular society, its intellectuals are still wanting to address, they understand that the religious questions are still there, but they are somehow unable to address them religiously or through explicit theological language. So they are in a way providing answers to these questions because they know that those questions are still being asked. They are still part of the web and the fabric of the civilization, and that they, ordinary people want answers to that. So there’s enormous pressure.
I mean, just a very quick illustration, American sociology versus say French sociology, French sociology becomes, and German sociology, becomes very, very secular very quickly at the end of the 19th and early part of the 20th century. But in the United States, sociology is mainly in those early decades, is dominated by the sons of ministers who are wanting to address the problems of poverty and of drunkenness and of immigration. And they are doing it in ways that are just very religiously oriented. They want to solve problems. But anyway.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I don’t come to this question as a sociologist, but as a theologian. And so I want to ask the sociologist, so is it possible to pivot a society that was so suffused with religious meaning? And not only that, as you’re honest to say, it’s basically Protestant, the fusion you talk about is a fusion between Protestantism and the Enlightenment. Is it possible for that pivot to be made, I guess first of all without massive conflict, and then secondly, and there remained continuity with the society as it began? I mean, obviously I’m a theologian. My answer to that is no, but I’d be curious how the sociologist would answer this.
James Davison Hunter:
Well, I think the pivot took place first among elites. It did not take place among ordinary citizens. Ordinary citizens in the early part of the 20th century, right through the early post World War II period, are still going to church in massive numbers. They are still, if not creedally bound, they are culturally bound to the traditions of a Jewish and Christian worldview. But that’s just harder and harder to sustain. And I think sort of what’s happened from the 1960s is that a larger, higher education became a carrier of secularization. So in the post-World War II period, as much larger numbers of the American population are going to colleges and universities getting their degrees at the same time that they’re getting credentialed, they’re also becoming much, much more secular in their orientation. But I think all of the questions that theology asks are questions that are at the heart of every civilization, whether they are answered in a religious voice or a secular voice. And those very hard questions are, what is the meaning of life? How do I make sense of suffering? Is there a point to human action or is it all meaningless? These are theological questions, philosophical questions, obviously too, and those don’t go away once a pivot has taken place. So even in the early decades of the 21st century, we are asking those questions.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. Well, as I look at the three books, Culture War, 91, Before the Shooting Starts, I think 94, or Before the Shooting Begins, and then your latest work, which is 2024, I look at it and I want to say, okay, in this book, the third in that series, you write with some very real concern about how in the world this experiment in the United States can continue. And so I think one of the very helpful things you do is, for instance, put side by side a Richard John Newhouse, whom you see as kind of a threat from the right, particularly in the first thing symposium.
James Davison Hunter:
That particular symposium. Sure.
Albert Mohler:
Right, right. In other words, it’s questioning whether democracy…
James Davison Hunter:
I don’t think him personally, I think some of the things that were there, right.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, he was a dear friend. So I did not mean that in a personal sense, but I mean, and then Lawrence Tribe and then eventually Richard Rorty with the complete denial of natural law and frankly, denial of ontology in one sense. I guess the question I want to ask is if you go back to 1991, did you see things headed at such a fundamental level? You were writing before most Americans were talking about postmodernism, anti-realism, et cetera, but boy, we’re in the thick of it.
James Davison Hunter:
Look, I think that the interesting story is a story that’s told at the level of our DNA, and that’s really what this concept of the deep structures of culture is trying to get at. And I think if we understand something about the DNA and how that DNA is being modified or changing, it seems to me that we can, we’re not going to be able to make any specific predictions by a long shot, and sociologists have a terrible record at predicting the future. But I do believe that if we understand something about the DNA, we will understand how these cultural logics will unfold. And I think that the cultural logic right now is not drawing so much from the hybrid Enlightenment cultures like everything else, its more a vacuum. And I think what has filled the vacuum are the cultural logics of nihilism.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. So you surprised me with where you go with that. I’m going to tell you how you surprised. So I’m not at all surprised that in the last third of the book, you would get to the grave threats facing our social experiment, our constitutional republic. And you identify threats on the left and you identify threats on the right, and then you have this unexpected section on the dangers from America’s deep structures. That I did not see coming. And I appreciate it because I understand what you’re doing there, I think. But I mean, these are questions that continental intellectuals were asking in the early 19th century about the United States.
James Davison Hunter:
Right. Well, part of it just came from observations made years and years ago, decades ago, early in my career, when I realized as I was watching, especially on the left, the movements of social and political movements on the left, that the idea of Puritan perfectionism had survived its secularization. And as it turns out, they continue to be true. There are purity tests that we see not only on the right, in the ways that are Christian forebears have been mocked and derided, but we see purity tests on the left just as much. The idea of a kind of America as a city on a hill has survived its secularization. And I think perfectionism, if I can use an eschatological, I mean a theological term I think is dangerous, eschatologically, insofar as we human beings live on this side of the veil, any press toward perfection or at least expectation that we could achieve perfection is bound to be disappointed.
Albert Mohler:
So now what? And you come to the concluding section of your book, and I just wish we could walk through so many of the dimensions of your analysis, but just to kind of summarize them. Okay, now we come to the end and you didn’t write this book merely as a dispassionate observer. You obviously care deeply. So now what?
James Davison Hunter:
Yeah. Well, I believe that the culture war is at a point where, as I would describe it as warring hegemonic projects, the culture war is now about domination. It is about coercing solidarity unity rather than achieving it democratically through serious substantive engagement with the other side. Every institution, every society, a family as the most basic institution requires some basis of agreement, some solidarity. And if it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed coercively by force. And I think that’s really where we are right now as a nation. I believe that at the extremes of the culture war, people have given up debate, they’ve given up the process. I mean, look, at the end of the day, and I’ve said this for many years now, whatever else democracy is, it is an agreement not to kill each other over our differences, but rather talk those things through. And even if we don’t get what we want, we will find ways to compromise with each other, but no one’s interested in compromise right now. I also think that in addition to the activists in this culture war, essentially no longer interested in debate, dialogue, engagement, I also think that at the extremes we have seen an evolution of the left and the right in ways that no longer, are less recognizable to their historical roots.
And so what we end up with on the ends is there are illiberal progressives, and there are illiberal conservatives. There are liberal progressives and liberal conservatives in the middle, each side views the other as the extreme. So no one sees any nuance here and the middle, by which I mean not a fixed point on a political continuum, but those who are still committed to the American project and willing to have that conversation, the middle no longer has a mailing list, they’re not mobilized. And as a consequence, it is the extremes of our culture war that dominate our public debate. And of course, that’s driven even further to the extremes by algorithms and the new technologies of communication and so on. So this is a real mess. I wrote the book in part to understand the full measure of the crisis that we’re in. And until we understand exactly fully and well what the problem is, it’s going to be very hard to see an alternative way around.
Albert Mohler:
Let me press back just a bit and ask you, where is that middle? And so this is just one thing that strikes me, and I think you have to discuss this at least to some degree in 1991 in the Culture Wars book. But in this book, I came to the end thinking, we’re driven by these cultural logics. And if you have a deep ontological theological commitment on one side, and you have an opposing moral commitment, which is anti-ontological and anti-theological on the other side, and you look at a binary, and I don’t just mean in the election, I mean increasingly every country club and retailer is a part of the binary. In other words, where is that middle? I don’t think I preached to it on many Sundays. I think I used to, but I don’t think I do anymore. Does that make sense?
James Davison Hunter:
It does. It does. And I think a lot of them are simply opting out of public life, I think they’re, I think people are weary and life is complicated enough, just keeping a family together, keeping enough money flowing through to pay one’s bills, life’s just tough. And yeah, I think people are just opting out. I see a lot of that in survey data as well as in anecdotal experience, and the people who are still opting into that debate are the ones who are finding meaning in a way, in that engagement, and they’re not always the most thoughtful people. I think this is especially true within the leadership class. I think our political elites, not just the well-known representatives in the Senate and the House, but our policymakers and so on, are, it’s a kind of take no prisoners approach to these kinds of issues.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, I mean, so just to be concrete in that most members of Congress are far more concerned with being primaried than being defeated in a general election.
James Davison Hunter:
Exactly. Yeah. No, that’s right, that’s right.
Albert Mohler:
It’s pushing every argument further and further. And I don’t say that just as if it’s a part of some sinister plot, I want to say sympathetically. I think that’s a part of what happens in the pressure cooker of the late modern age when I mean, honestly, the trajectory of everything is for anyone with eyes open, pretty clear. And so you come down to fundamental issues such as the definition of marriage, the definition of life. It is really harder to imagine a consensus. I’m not saying culturally it’s impossible, but I’m saying there is no pressure towards consensus when, I mean, for instance, just you take the last to say 24 hours. And as we’re having this discussion, this is the headline news with the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision, I think what strikes me is that in the distance between Roe v Wade in 1973 and the Dobbs decision in 2022, I think far more Americans understand, okay, this is where that moral logic leads. This is where this heads, this is why this is important. And I guess in my stage of life, I just say that’s just a fundamental difference. I think America in Roe 1973 is a different America than with Dobbs in 2022.
James Davison Hunter:
I think it is. I think that’s right. And again, I think the reason why abortion has been the longest standing issue of the culture war and the most vehemently battled is precisely because it is over these fundamental proto-philosophical questions, and they won’t go away. The problem is, of course, that law can’t do the work of culture. That’s the problem.
Albert Mohler:
That’s worth repeating.
James Davison Hunter:
Okay.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, repeat it and then please explain what you mean.
James Davison Hunter:
Sure. Law cannot do the work of culture. There’s a culture war that preceded the Civil War. Neither the Supreme Court nor the Civil War settled it. And as a consequence, the slave regime was reproduced under the name of the KKK, Jim Crow, Code Noir, lynching, and the like. It was simply reproduced because law didn’t touch these questions at a deep cultural level. The same is true with Roe versus Wade. A consensus was imposed upon the, in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision for a nation that had not talked about it, worked it through, sorted it out, and really had serious and substantive engagement with each other. And as a consequence, the pro-life movement came to life, started looking for workarounds, and 50 years later, it’s overturned with another Supreme Court decision. And what are Progressives doing? Exactly the same thing, looking for workarounds, because law cannot do the work of culture. We think it’s going to solve things and it won’t.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, that gets to the whole…
James Davison Hunter:
And one of the things I think would’ve helped the pro-life movement is, and this is something I suggested even in a book I wrote called To Change the World, legal strategies are fine, they’re democratically acceptable and legitimate, but why not take some of the resources in a state like Illinois or New York or California, really solidly pro-choice states, and get a petition with 10,000 families willing to adopt a child of any race, ethnic background ,capacity, and then announce on at the state capitol that there are no unwanted children in the state of Illinois or New York or California. Instead of the coercive power of the state, the pro-life movement would be leading with an act of sacrificial love. And I think more of that would’ve changed in a way, the temper and tone, it might have, changed some of the temper and tone. I don’t know.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I hear that. I had the opportunity to, with some others, respond to your book To Change the World. I did not appreciate that one as much as the others, partly because I am involved in these issues, including in the pro-life movement. And I just want to say I was on the board of an organization, national organization, that sought to do exactly what you’re discussing, not either or. And we got basically shut down by the bureaucracies in those states who frankly, I hear that word, I just want to say that I think here’s the wonderful thing about Christians. I find that Christians are generally very ready to do the right thing if they have the opportunity. But even as recently as this very day, I’ve been in a conversation in which that particular issue, that specific issue, has gone very badly because of, quite frankly, government interference. But the point is…
James Davison Hunter:
I don’t doubt that either. I don’t doubt that.
Albert Mohler:
I appreciate the point you’re making as being a very legitimate word. And that sets me up to want to conclude by asking you to go back to 1983, not just to 1991. And so obviously you didn’t stop thinking about and caring about American evangelicals and the quandary of modernity. We’re in a deeper quandary now, and as someone who’s president of an evangelical institution and for whom the evangelical world is my people beyond Southern Baptists, I just want to ask, okay, so what would you say to us now? Because I think you had your finger on the pulse of what was then the coming generation, that generation’s grandparents now, so how would you update that argument?
James Davison Hunter:
Well, I would argue that what I didn’t quite see then in 1983, I was a 20, well, I had written that as my dissertation, and I was about 25 years old at the time, so I’m going to give myself a little bit of a break there. I didn’t see it then. I see it clearly now that the ground underneath our feet as a nation, certainly as a developed world, and certainly as a people of faith, that ground has shifted underneath our feet. And most people don’t understand the nature of the changes from a period of high modernity, which was a confidence in reason, confidence in science, confidence in progress, to a late modern moment in which truth has been deconstructed and ethics has simply been relativized, where we can’t even answer the question of what is true, right, real good. And no one can make those claims with any authority anymore in ways that would be accepted by a plurality.
So that means that if we are a new world, if we are, in a way, many Christians want to believe, we are still in a largely Christian inflected world. And I think that we’re not only in a post-Christian world, we are in a post-liberal and post-enlightenment world. I think we are seeing the contours of a Nietzschean world. That’s my fundamental conviction. And it seems to me that the cultural logics of that world are so deeply embedded in the culture forming institutions of our society. And that’s a really important statement because the dominant cultural forming institutions are not moving backward. And really the only resources that cultural conservatives have left are political resources. And that’s why Governor DeSantis intervenes at the University of Florida and in the area of the arts most recently, and so on. It’s because these are resources available to conservatives. But influencing elite higher education is just, that’s the project of 150 years, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon. So there’s no going backward, and I think, so we have to come to terms, believers have to come to terms with a post-Christian, post-liberal, postmodern world. And it seems to me, in a way, it’s still trying to fight the battles of modernity and high modernity rather than the new ones that we’re in right now.
Albert Mohler:
Well, that is a chastening word, a humbling word, a clarifying word, and probably where we need to bring this to a conclusion. But I just want to say thank you for the conversation. And again, I want to tell you, you’ve been very much, not only on my bookshelves, but in my mind, and as a theologian speaking to a sociologist, I want to thank you for your contribution and for your honest engagement on these issues.
James Davison Hunter:
It’s my pleasure. At one point, at not too distance future, I’m hoping to write a follow up to To Change the World. Maybe we can come back and talk then too.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and maybe we need to have that conversation mind to mind, understanding that that is still one of the rare privileges of our age, and as Christians, we esteem it as a privilege indeed.
Albert Mohler:
Professor James Davison Hunter, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
James Davison Hunter:
You’re welcome, my pleasure.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Professor James Davison Hunter for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab Thinking in Public. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking.