Culture Wars

The phrase culture wars refers to the conflicts between individuals or groups who see themselves as either preserving or, in some measure, changing fundamental cultural understandings and practices. These conflicts play out in the political arena and in the battle for public opinion. The earliest use of the term culture war, or cultural struggle, was in the context of Otto von Bismarck's unification of modern Germany in the late 19th century. At that time, Kulturkampfwas deployed approvingly by liberal, largely Protestant forces to describe a variety of legal efforts aimed at separating church and state and limiting Roman Catholic clerical power. The phrase is now most often associated with U.S. cultural controversies, gaining popular currency in the United States in the 1990s. It is, however, occasionally applied to such controversies in other developed countries. In the United States and elsewhere, the culture wars are a main locus of social and political tension.

The issues implicated in the U.S. culture wars are many, including abortion, artistic and personal expression, crime and punishment, education, ethnicity, family relations, gun ownership, immigration, language, media bias or objectivity, medical ethics, national identity, popular culture, race, religion, and sexuality. Both sides in the culture wars tend to identify the mid- to late 20th century as the time of important changes in popular attitudes, legislative constraints, and political consensus on each of these issues. The preservationists generally see this as change for the worse. In this sense, they seek to retrieve and preserve what they claim to be an earlier U.S. cultural consensus, which they often see as rooted in unchanging moral, theological, and political truths. Meanwhile, advocates of change tend to argue for continuous evolutionary progress toward new understandings that they claim are more consonant with contemporary mores.