James Davison Hunter is a renowed sociologist at the University of Virginia. He’s the person who coined the term “culture war” in an English language context in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America. If you read this book, you’ll get a sense of how his framing has really shaped how we understand cultural conflict today. He also wrote Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture War and To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late-Modern World.
A lesser known work is his excellent Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation, which although written in 1987 still has relevant insights today. I’ve referred to it multiple times in various articles.
Hunter has a new book called Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis.
This is a very important book. It’s not a light read, but it is an insightful and compelling one. I will probably be writing something about it later this week. But I recently was able to interview Hunter about the book for this week’s podcast. Here is the video of our conversation.
Russell Moore also has a good interview with Hunter if you are interested. And David Brooks wrote a column about the book.
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