When I met James Davison Hunter it was 2016. I asked him about politics. He waved me off and told me to think less about the weather and more about the climate. I’ve never forgotten the lesson.
In his newest book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, Hunter gives us a climate report that explains why our weather has been so severe. He offers a detailed exploration of the “deep structures of culture,” by which he means the “tacit assumptions and latent frameworks of meaning embedded within the structures of social life.” He contends that we don’t share common political ground because we no longer share a common view of a good society.
We don’t have the cultural resources to work through what divides us, Hunter warns. The left says they want justice. The right says they want a return to greatness. But their intensity of longing for an ideal world “is redirected into fury against the present, a fury channeled into the demand to purge, dismantle, deconstruct, and negate.” The only moral authority left is rage against injury and its perpetrators. So we end up locked in a never-ending “culture war,” a term Hunter popularized 30 years ago.
Hunter joined me on Gospelbound to see if in this environment we can still hope against hope.
The Gospel Coalition