Culture wars are plex with overlapping conflicts that are often confused and conflated, says John D. Wilsey in this week’s Acton Commentary.

For the past five decades, Americans have waged what has monly referred to as a “culture war.” A number of authors have examined the culture wars from philosophical, historical, and sociological standpoints, especially since the early 1990s—Charles Murray, Robert Putnam, James Davison Hunter, Philip Gorski, and Andrew Hartman to name a few. It is tempting to see the culture wars as being the defining characteristic of American history since the 1960s. How central are the culture wars to American life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and is there anything unusual about the presence of cultural conflict in America when we think historically about the subject?

The full text of the essay can be found here.