The Fragile Cultural Foundations of American Democracy (An Extended Review) Part 1

Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis.

James Davison Hunter

Published by Yale University Press in 2024

504pp / $20.10 / 978-0300274370

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James Davison Hunter wants us to know things look bad because they are bad and have been so for quite some time: the United States is not only facing stark polarizations in our time, but, he argues, these polarizations are a result of the longstanding fault lines within our foundations for democracy. In this long-awaited text, Hunter makes something of a return to his Culture Wars (1991) thesis: “fault lines already established between elites and the general public and between the Left and the Right become open cleavages by the 1980s. . . .  Indeed, for quite some time, the culture that has underwritten liberal democracy in America (and in Europe too) has been unraveling.”¹

Hunter is a rigorous sociologist with an impressive command of American political history, philosophy, and culture: he offers a detailed, compelling, worthwhile account of how we got to this point of political crisis. In fact, his endnotes are so good, I wish they were footnotes; even more than that, I wish much of the rich research in his endnotes had been baked into the heart of the text. But that would make a 383-page text even longer.

Hunter contends that the “hybrid enlightenment” foundation for our democracy is waning; in its place is nihilism, “a narrative of injury that seeks revenge through a will to power” (18). It threatens to leave our democracy even more fragile, with propensities for violence even more likely.

Indeed, Hunter makes a convincing and worrisome case that hybrid enlightenment, a synthesis of Enlightenment and religious ideals, or some future comparable set of common beliefs and ideals, is fundamental to the undergirding of our democracy. Hybrid enlightenment (HE) has provided the cultural soil in which democracy could take root and grow.

This book is worth reading and its overall argument is persuasive. But I will note three primary concerns I reference throughout. First, there is an American exceptionalism presumed here. The book would have benefitted greatly from more comparison with other nations faced with such dilemmas and their varied trajectories and attempted remedies. Second, given his expertise, he offers a significant focus on culture (at times to the neglect of economics and institutions). He acknowledges this is so, but then insists those latter factors are overemphasized in the social sciences;² as a political scientist I’m still left wanting more discussion of those factors and remedies, as cultural remedies are slow to evolve. Third, he does not think it his duty to show a clear way out, but rather to show us how we got here (he’s more a prophet than a priest); here again, comparison would help. Why did many European and Latin American nations after WWII turn to Christian Democracy to deepen democracy in order to avoid fascist or socialist totalitarianism? Currently, why are some countries looking to Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, or Maoist nationalism to maintain solidarity? Alternatively, how are strong liberal democracies holding onto democracy and supporting one another in the process? Hunter can’t do everything, but after reading his tough diagnosis, I longed for more answers situated in the above.

Hunter opens the book with wonderful quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Lincoln, and this one from Frederick Douglass (July 5, 1852), which I think best captures the essence of this text: “Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.” Throughout his account of our political history, Hunter highlights key American intellectuals who have understood the way culture provides a foundation for democracy: my favorite accounts were those of Angelina Grimké,³ Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and Reinhold Niebuhr.

While Hunter paints a grim picture of our nation, I do think he holds onto hope, though I wish more was articulated in this book. He sees the potential within liberal democracy for a course correction, though in addition to his and others’ noble ideas for recovery, I wanted a comparable number of examples as to why I should have hope.

There are many culprits responsible for the decline of democracy. A common cause is the tendency of various political camps to presume an opposing camp is entirely at fault whatever the issue, and to retreat to one’s preferred media sources, which spin information affirming such self-serving thinking. Other scholars point to the loss of social capital and the weakening of civil society and participation (e.g., see Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone⁴). Solutions range from a call to renewal of such institutions, the improvement of civic education, better public policy, and even Christian revival (Hunter references Os Guinness and G. K. Chesterton, but today I’d point to the surprising suggestion of such by a secular Jew, Jonathan Rauch, previously skeptical of the utility of religion).⁵ Hunter finds these factors and remedies worth consideration but sees them as insufficient to address the problem. And trying to establish solidarity from the top down is also not viable in his estimation.

According to Hunter, our HE ideals historically gave us an indispensable means of solidarity and included the means of “working through” our contradictions and inadequate inclusion of all (ideals promising freedom, equality, justice, and tolerance). HE has been flawed, to be sure (he highlights the history of African American slavery and Native American genocide), but in addition to its noble ideals, there is within it a recognition of human limitations; power was made to check power institutionally and otherwise. His argument is that the United States worked through many of its contradictions over time with the guidance of key intellectuals like the ones he highlights, rather than the brute force of political leaders from above.

Hunter asserts that America’s HE came out of an Enlightenment project which “drew from many and assorted sources, most prominently biblical, classical, and Whiggish, and were synthesized philosophically, in large part, by the commonsense realists of the Scottish Enlightenment” (54–55). Unlike the French experience, many of those settling in the United States were religious dissenters, shaping America’s HE to be favorable to religion. Over time, with the Second Great Awakening, Hunter asserts that power transferred from leaders to believers and reinforced a millennial understanding of the role of the United States; this was a foundation for social reform, and eventually helped expand understandings of citizenship.

As for American solidarity, Hunter tracks its evolution and considers the ways in which we are and are not defined by E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One), our national motto proposed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson in 1776 (364). We were united through both negative solidarity (reaction to a common enemy/what we are not) and by affirmative solidarity (common affections, the American creed, respect for the United States constitution) (14). Here comparison would be informative. Doesn’t the United States lend itself to greater solidarity amidst deep differences than most nations because of its creedal rather than racial/ethnic/tribal foundation? How can the United States use this reality to its advantage in recalling its roots and capacity for solidarity?

Nearly one hundred years after our founding, with the Civil War the United States did arrive at a key crisis point on many fronts, including its identity. Hunter argues, “the conflict that gave rise to the Civil War was over the question ‘Who is a person?’—made concrete by the presence of racial difference—and ‘How should human beings treat other human beings?’—rendered jarringly tangible by the brutalizing realities of slavery” (128–129).

While the outcome of the Civil War helped undo slavery, as did subsequent constitutional amendments, Hunter maintains that the cultural underpinnings for slavery remained, and thus in practice, slavery reemerged in different shape under Jim Crow laws and practices. This confirms a primary thesis for Hunter, that laws are insufficient to change society. To be sure, religion did end up helping change culture over time, as many saw the victory of the North in millennial terms, with the United States then in a better position to fulfill its destiny. But Hunter thinks this effort did not win the day. Rather, traditional religion had taken both sides in the war with vigor, and thus discredited its standing in the public arena, paving the way for modern theology and Social Darwinism that followed, and new understandings of America’s promise and standing (140–141).

For Hunter, this experience contributed to the unmaking of America’s Christian Republic. Previously, most reform movements throughout American history were rooted in religion, but with industrialization, modernization, and the civil war that foundation began to shift too.⁶

While many still saw life in religious terms (especially Blacks), our society secularized over time. University boards went from being made up of pastors to businesspeople; journalism began professionalizing and made religion less a focus; legal positivism grew; the “wall of separation between church and state rose higher” (147).

Around the turn of the century, Protestants soon split. After the Scopes trial and H. L. Mencken’s account of it facilitated the humiliation of faith in 1925, more fundamentalist Protestants withdrew until the 1960s. While liberal Mainline Protestants responded to the pressures of the day with the Social Gospel, emphasizing orthopraxis or works over orthodoxy, Hunter assessed such to be inadequate to the task.

I’d insert here that some Protestants didn’t experience this divide so sharply, maintaining a focus on word and deed (e.g. African American churches, Anabaptists, the Salvation Army). As for Catholics, some of them, challenged by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891), who called out the problems of capitalism, industrialization (and even socialism), were inspired to lean into and respond with Christian Democratic remedies, particularly in Europe and Latin America, and with union organizing and immigrant resettlement efforts in the United States. Hunter does acknowledge that John Courtney Murray helped convince the Catholic church of the need for pluralism and democracy via a natural law rationale but sees this as a repackaging of older formulations of HE; I’d consider it a more fundamental shift.

1. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (Basic, 1991), 209, 49.
2. “Culture, then, is not prior to power because it is itself a form of power, but it is prior to politics. While it is true that politics is mainly about the use and administration of power, for it to be more about power—for example, about justice or freedom or equality—it depends upon a realm that is relatively independent of polities. This is why, in the end, culture is prior to politics” (9). Just to be really clear, in the supporting endnote he adds that culture is prior to “economics and everything else as well” (390, n.18).
3. A primary example of hybrid-Enlightenment thinking and utility is that of abolitionist Angelina Grimké (who grew up in a slaveholding family in South Carolina). As Hunter highlights, she offers a “tour de force of biblical exposition” in her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836) laying out a powerful constitutional and biblical critique of slavery (119).
4. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
5. In Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale University Press, 2025), Rauch calls on all to return to a robust embrace of liberalism in America, but in particular, he encourages secular adherents to recognize the crucial role of Christianity in undergirding democracy, and encourages Christians to lean into their faith (not their politics) and provide that “load bearing wall” for democracy.
6. One key example he highlights is that of the women’s movement. Women’s suffrage had been rooted in and framed by faith (See Sojourner Truth, the Grimkés, etc.). Elizabeth Cady Stanton pushed back with her modernist Women’s Bible (1895); its critique of traditional Christianity split the women’s movement, making it hard for Quaker Susan B. Anthony to hold it together.