Just over two decades ago, James Davison Hunter published his Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, a book that defined the struggle in which the nation found itself. Noting the vitriolic nature of contemporary social debate, Hunter diagnosed the rhetorical “war” as a conflict between two opposing and broadly religious sides, which he termed the “orthodox” and the “progressive.” In the years since, these factions have re-fashioned themselves — and importantly, each other — into the “religious right” and “secular left.” Widely understood as polar opposites in a zero-sum contest, these constituencies vie for control of American culture, maneuvering their armies across a range of notable fields, including abortion, same-sex marriage, and school prayer. At stake in each battle is a larger dispute about the nature of religious belief in public life.

In Beyond Religious Right and Secular Left Rhetoric: The Road to Compromise, Karin Fry seeks to defuse the conflict by infiltrating the two sides, tracing out their respective positions, and identifying things that they hold in common. There are many of these, Fry argues, certainly enough to dispel the popular misconceptions that keep people at odds. Across three focused, cleanly-arranged chapters, Fry makes the case that the fighting can stop.

In Chapter One, Fry considers the formation of the religious right in opposition to an ominous “secular humanism.” Though it is true that secular humanists exist, and that a small collection of them signed a pair of “humanist manifestos” during the 20th century, religious right activism arose in response to a much-inflated caricature of this group. First popularized by Christian intellectual Francis Schaeffer, this secular humanism accounts for practically every immoral and godless development in American society. Cast as the devil figure in an American Jeremiad, secular humanism provides a basis for religious and political action. Insisting that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation,” religious right figures argue that current social problems are attributable to the secularizing forces of modernity. Critical of the metaphorical “wall” of separation between church and state, they argue that the Founders wanted to protect church from state, but not vice versa. The misuse of this concept has triggered a moral breakdown that demands reversal. Because this understanding pits faithful conservatives against secular liberals, Fry argues, it has left many on the Christian right with an inaccurate understanding of their — largely religious — opposition. At the same time, it has allowed critics to malign Christians as aspiring theocrats, which most are not.

In Chapter Two, Fry turns to the other side in the conflict, exploring how the American left has ceded its claims to religiosity. Here she notes that critics of the religious right have tended to align themselves with Enlightenment values such as “reason,” situating themselves in opposition to those who claim to legislate on behalf of God. This opposition comes in at least three varieties. First, there are the “New Atheists,” who decry all religious influence in public and take an aggressive posture toward religious citizens. Second, there are political pundits and commentators who advocate left-leaning positions without any particular religious focus. And third, there are Christian academics and advocacy groups who favor religious participation in public life, but who remain skeptical of much religious politics. Generally associated with the first two types, this third group often receives the derision of conservative Christians, who see liberal Christianity as essentially secular.

In her third and final chapter, Fry performs a careful examination of the respective arguments, dispelling misconceptions and tracing much of the disagreement back to positions the sides previously held in common. On the separation of church and state, in particular, Fry identifies room for compromise. In other areas, she notes that culture warfare is largely the product of movement elites generating controversy to mobilize their constituencies.

In detecting the weaknesses of the right-left scale, Fry's appraisal occasionally becomes implicated in them. Much like the journalists who cover political issues in the fair-and-balanced era, Fry's commitment to impartiality sometimes lends itself to false equivalence of the “right does x, but left does y” variety. Commenting on the dangers of “echo chamber” news consumption, for instance, Fry writes, “On the right, pundits like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck claim the Christian origin of the nation and attack ‘secular liberal’ values. On the left, atheist Sam Harris announces that religion is an irrational myth that leads people to violence” (4). But as Fry notes elsewhere in the book, this type of presentation implies a symmetry that does not really exist. O'Reilly and Beck are both major celebrities in command of media empires, and each comments on a wide range of political issues. Harris is famous, too, but with a much smaller audience and a much narrower focus. Often speaking for a particular brand of atheism, he does not claim to represent “the left,” and his attacks on Islam have actually made him a pariah among multicultural liberals. For these reasons and others, Harris does not offer a useful foil for the likes of O'Reilly and Beck. Fry's treatment of the political right as a cohesive entity is more compelling than her treatment of the left, if only because the right is more cohesive. Her acknowledgement that much of the “secular left” isn't even secular prompts the question of whether it is even “left.”

Overall, Fry's book is a concise and accessible primer on the state of contemporary culture warfare in the United States. Her chapters are thorough and well-sourced while remaining admirably clear. For interested citizens, they may even provide a road map to compromise. But as Fry notes in her conclusion, there is at least one major obstacle to be overcome, an obstacle that cannot be addressed by thoughtful deliberation alone. For the political elites who engineer polarization in the United States, compromise and conciliation are simply not desirable. Ending the culture war may mean finding a way to incentivize them.