The greatest culture war in American history led to its most destructive war.  Or so argued James Davison Hunter in Before the Shooting Begins, the 1994 follow-up to his provocative and influential book Culture Wars (1992).  “Culture wars always precede shooting wars,” he wrote, “otherwise, as Philip Rieff reminds us, the latter wars are utter madness: outbreaks of the most severe and suicidal efforts to escape the implications of any kind of normative order.  Indeed the last time this country ‘debated’ issued of human life, personhood, liberty, and the rights of citizenship all together, the result was the bloodiest war Read more