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FPUScholarWorks “Withdraw from Babylon and worldly Egypt”: America’s cultural wars, Michael Sattler (ca. 1490-1527), and the radical otherness of Christian identity. Author(s): Darin D. Lenz. Source: Pacific Journal 15 (2020): 99-126. Publisher: Fresno Pacific University. Stable URL: http://hdl.handle.net/11418/1316 FPUScholarWorks is an online repository for creative and scholarly works and other resources created by members of the Fresno Pacific University community. FPUScholarWorks makes these resources freely available on the Web and assures their preservation for the future. “Withdraw from Babylon and worldly Egypt”: America’s Cultural Wars, Michael Sattler (c. 1490-1527), and the Radical Otherness of Christian Identity DARIN D. LENZ I. Introduction – Cultural Dissonance For the last several decades America’s culture wars have raged and brought to the forefront competing visions of what America was, is, and ought to be.1 In the 1980s scholars began to map the battlefield,2 but it was sociologist James Davison Hunter’s 1991 book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, that most thoroughly articulated the phenomenon.3 In the book Hunter ob- served, “this is a conflict over how we are to order our lives together. This means that the conflict is inevitably expressed as a clash over national life it- self.”4 For Hunter, every aspect of American life that was being debated at the time, from the family and approaches to childrearing to gender roles, sexuality, education, media, law, and politics, was marked by deep divisions that were not easily reconciled.5 Hunter’s depiction of the struggle came to define the 1990s when one of the 1992 presidential candidates, Patrick Buchanan, popularized the notion of America being in the midst of a culture war with his speech at the Republican National Convention.6 The idea that America was irreparably divided into warring camps has become part of the ongoing national political dialogue for ordinary Americans ever since.
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