REVIEW: Still the Jeremiad

James Davison Hunter turns to ‘culture’ for hope. Can it deliver?

Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis by James Davison Hunter. Yale University Press, 2024. 504 pp., $40.00

James Davison Hunter is one of the most significant public intellectuals of the past forty years. His 1991 work Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America has provided an enduring template for debating the nature of domestic politics in America since the end of the Cold War. Through his writing and service as executive director of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, Hunter has spent most of his professional life trying to show a way out of the culture wars by fostering a kind of reasoned intellectual debate capable of forging the common ground needed to advance the common good. His latest work, Democracy and Solidarity, finds him considering the possibility of common ground in a post-Trumpian political landscape. Insisting on hope against despair, he writes to warn us that the hour is late.

The book will certainly induce many late hours for those up to the daunting task of working through its 380+ densely packed pages of American history and political theory. Those who do so will be richly rewarded. A work of synthesis, heavily indebted to the work of others, the book is the single best starting point for those wishing to understand the history and present state of the culture wars. Scholars and other veterans of this discourse will also have much to learn from the book. Few intellectuals have Hunter’s range, so the scholar who might move quickly through topics in their own field will soon slow down as Hunter moves on to other disciplines and specialized topics. 

American historians will be particularly pleased by Hunter’s treatment of the historical roots of the culture war. Too often sociologists and political theorists write about contemporary politics and culture with little or no historical perception; when they do venture into history, so much the worse. Hunter acknowledges his debt to the work of Daniel Walker Howe, David Brion Davis, David Hackett Fischer, and T. J. Jackson Lears, and he offers perhaps the best example of the application of American history to political theory that I have ever read. Between roughly fifty pages of laying out his theoretical framework and a final 100 pages surveying the contemporary scene, Hunter offers a rich, 250-page account of the history of American political culture from the Founding to the present day: a culture ever changing, always contested, yet until recently capable of containing conflict within a shared framework of values and commitments. 

Hunter captures the essence of this shared political culture through the concept of “America’s hybrid-Enlightenment.” The contours of this culture may be familiar to historians, but Hunter’s naming of that culture is timely given current debates about the Christian and/or secular nature of the American Founding. To the disappointment of both sides, the Founding was neither secular nor Christian but, as indicated, a “hybrid” of both. Great Britain’s distinct religious, political, and intellectual history enabled a relatively harmonious relation between Christianity and the Enlightenment unlike that experienced in France. By the time of Independence, most educated Britons shared a rough agreement on the existence of God, the general adequacy of the Christian account of God (in all its various denominational and deistic expressions), the reliability of reason to apprehend truths about the natural world, and knowledge of the universal moral code necessary to maintain social order.

This basic framework went through many variations over the next two hundred years. At the Founding, it tilted in the secular direction; with the Second Great Awakening, it tilted more toward the Christian. Hunter expresses a bit of disappointment of the “widening” of the culture’s “religious tributaries” at the expense of America’s “secular, deistic, and free-thinking tributaries.” So too, he expresses some concern over the “out-sized” influence of Protestant Christianity in nineteenth-century America. In Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War-era writings, America’s religiously inflected hybrid-Enlightenment found its greatest rhetorical expression. Hunter nonetheless judges that the war discredited biblical faith as the basis for public culture: Since both sides claimed that the Bible was on their side, the Bible itself could no longer provide guidance to the nation as it sought to heal the wounds of war. 

After the Civil War, Protestant Christianity of some sort retained its public standing, yet it increasingly functioned as the moral handmaid to science. Here Hunter follows a standard secularization narrative in which John Dewey emerges as the hero of a new, more secular version of America’s hybrid-Enlightenment. Subtle and nuanced in his treatment, Hunter acknowledges the persistence of older Christian traditions despite the rising secularism of intellectual elites. At the same time, he nuances this secularism by taking seriously Dewey’s efforts to retain some connection to religion through his well-known work A Common Faith (1934); he takes Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realist critique of Dewey seriously as well. Hunter sees this debate as a prime example of how America’s hybrid-Enlightenment could allow for serious debate and disagreement within a common culture. That culture endured through the Civil Rights Movement, but the life and death Martin Luther King, Jr. marked “the end of solidarity . . . as reflected in the commitment to an ethical framework for working through difference.” 

So, what of it? All things pass; Hunter’s historicist, anti-essentialist rendering of America’s hybrid-Enlightenment suggests as much. But it suggests more as well. For all his emphasis on process and change, Hunter spends the first fifty pages of his book laying out a theoretical framework for the hybrid-Enlightenment as a substance, a “culture,” a “deep structure” capable of providing and sustaining something he calls “solidarity.” In Hunter’s narrative, culture functions as a kind of permanence amidst change, a natural, non-metaphysical foundation for a common life. 

Despite ample citations of the work of previous scholars, Hunter writes as if he has discovered something new, “a different take on culture,” one that is “stronger and deeper” than those that have come before. But if his turn to culture is understandable as a kind of antidote to what he identifies as the “nihilism” of our age, it is hardly novel. As someone who has written a couple of books on the history of the idea of culture in American intellectual life, I see Hunter instead as in a tradition stretching back at least to the 1930s, when anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead invoked culture as a “pattern of values” deeper than political and economic institutions and capable of uniting Americans facing the collapse of those institutions during the Great Depression. Drawing on the ideals of stability and coherence anthropologists found in “primitive” cultures, Benedict and Mead argued that America had such resources within itself, with freedom being the core value that unified the pattern of modern American culture. As I argued in Conspicuous Criticism, this definition carried a core contradiction, as the American value of freedom persistently worked against the coherence and unity “culture” was supposed to provide. Ultimately, American intellectuals sought in culture a unity free from submission to any authority that could restrict individual freedom. This same dynamic appears in Hunter’s account of America’s hybrid-Enlightenment: God, reason, and morality all underwrite freedom. 

I have argued that the specter of Catholicism (and anti-Catholicism) hangs over this American, secular Protestant discourse on culture and authority. Here, too, Democracy and Solidarity reflects the tradition. Hunter repeatedly insists on the need for some kind of authority to bind people together in solidarity, yet repeatedly warns against the dangers of authoritarianism, most often represented by the Catholic Church. Sensitive to the ways all cultures draw boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, his first illustration of the often brutal nature of “boundary work” is telling: “One thinks of the 1486 Catholic theological treatise, Malleus Maleficarum—the ‘Hammer of Witches’—which . . . endorsed the torture and extermination of witches as the most effective remedy for witchcraft.” Acknowledging the many blind spots of exclusion that accompanied the Founders’ affirmation freedom and equality, he nonetheless defends their achievement as progress compared to alternatives of the day, such as the “totalizing vision of the Roman Catholic Church.” 

Hunter criticizes the exclusion of Catholics (along with Native Americans, African Americans and Mormons) from the antebellum “mythos” of America. But he uncritically accepts the anti-Catholicism foundational to the narrative of that mythos, which presents the Reformation as the starting point of modern American freedom. American Catholics constructed a more Catholic-friendly version of the mythos, but most Protestants continued to regard them as un-American until, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, they abandoned the ideal of Catholic difference in public life. 

Hunter admits contemporary Americanist Catholics such as Richard John Neuhaus and Nancy Pelosi into the hybrid-Enlightenment, but he sees in the more distinct Catholicism of a figure like Adrian Vermeule nothing less than priestcraft. His discussion of Vermeule comes in the context of his critique of the technocratic alternatives to democracy proposed by Vermeule and Cass Sunstein, a secular technocrat. While Hunter gently chides Sunstein for his elitist presumption that the ignorant masses need intellectuals to guide or “nudge” them to make the right decisions, he sees in Vermeule’s elitism “a severe Catholic political theology that stressed the authority of an elite priesthood over the passing whims of the laity.” He adds, without qualification: “It is not a coincidence that anti-Catholicism played a central role in the political rhetoric of the early American Republic.” 

One does not have to endorse Vermeule’s Catholic integralism to wonder at the disparate treatment. I suspect that Hunter shares Sunstein’s secular vision of the common good but would prefer that it be achieved spontaneously, without a nudge from the top; I suspect he finds anything like a traditional Catholic vision of the common good distasteful. The bigotry may be soft, but the ideology is hard.

This is not the place to make the case for the Catholic social vision. In criticizing Hunter, I can only note that the very language he uses to discuss the crisis of our times—concepts such as “the human person” and “the common good”—has received more extensive treatment in modern Catholic social thought than in any other comparable intellectual tradition. Hunter senses that America’s Protestant, hybrid-Enlightenment has reached the end of its tether—but he shows no awareness of the alternative tradition that addresses many of his concerns. Catholics may, as he dismissively notes, comprise “only one-fifth of the U.S. population” (only twenty percent!), but the Catholic Church comprises over a billion followers worldwide and has been thinking about issues of the person and the common good for over two thousand years. Maybe there is something in the Catholic tradition that he would find of interest.

Most troubling of all, Hunter actually does draw on Catholic intellectual traditions at a key point in his argument. But he refuses to acknowledge them as such. Deeply concerned about contemporary nihilism, Hunter takes no less a Catholic intellectual than Alasdair MacIntyre as his guide for assessing the current state of public moral discourse. Since the publication of After Virtue (1981), MacIntyre has consistently drawn on the Catholic ethical tradition of Aristotelean Thomism to expose the incoherence of contemporary moral philosophy. His work provided intellectual ammunition for the communitarian side of the communitarian-liberalism debate of the eighties, an unresolved debate that casts a long shadow over Democracy and Solidarity. Referring back to this debate later in his book, Hunter acknowledges that he had once been more sympathetic to Jeffrey Stout, author of Ethics After Babel (1989), who argued that liberalism contains more than enough moral resources to advance a robust vision of the common good. But the subsequent course of events has led Hunter to side with MacInytre on the limits of liberalism. From MacInytre, Hunter asserts the indispensability of a concept alien to liberalism and affirmed—yet evaded—by the hybrid-Enlightenment: telos, the natural end or purpose of the human person and society. Absent teleology, ethics is babel. Hunter is happy to credit MacInytre for this insight but neglects to acknowledge the Catholic sources of that insight.

Were MacInytre to chime in on Hunter’s book, he would likely conclude that the hybrid-Enlightenment did not just fail, it had to fail. Not so for Hunter. He concludes with yet another jeremiad calling on Americans to affirm the enduring truths of the hybrid-Enlightenment: Drawing on Niebuhr, he calls for a renewed “moral imagination”; drawing on King, he calls for a “reconstituted humanism” open to all the great humanistic traditions of the world. 

It is hard to deny that such things are needed. Yet it still rings hollow coming from the perspective of Hunter’s soft Deweyan pragmatism. The modern West has long sought to establish itself as a secular Christendom; the frantic activity of colonizing the world and developing modern science, technology, and industry obscured the shallowness of its spiritual and moral foundations. The recent drift of the great modern project has revealed this lack of moral and spiritual depth.

 In the midst of the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King drew hope from his belief that “something in the very structure of the cosmos . . . will ultimately bring about the fulfillment and the triumph of that which is right.” Hunter seems to want King’s hope without the baggage of the “structure of the cosmos.” Such faithless faith and hopeless hope may sit well with intellectuals, but most people want the real thing. True solidarity demands it. 

Christopher Shannon is associate professor of history at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is the author of several works on U.S. cultural history and American Catholic history, including American Pilgrimage: A Historical Journey Through Catholic Life in a New World (2022).