Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture War.

THIS extraordinarily important book, following up on the author's Culture Wars of 1991, reflects an understandable reluctance to say straight out what some Americans are beginning to suspect is the case: cultural warfare may be on the edge of turning into civil war. That's the meaning of the book's title. The author's ambivalence about that ominous prospect is reflected in the uncertainty about the subtitle. In the advance proofs first provided to this reviewer, the subtitle on the cover was Searching for Democracy as the Culture Wars Rage. Inside the cover was a different subtitle: The Rise of Irreconcilable Differences in American Public Life. The first subtitle was considerably more hopeful than the second. The book itself replaces "culture wars," plural, with "culture war," singular. That is in keeping with the evidence examined. The lines of warfare are clearly drawn, and there is one war going on, not several. Meanwhile, the second subtitle's accent on the irreconcilable is in keeping with the book's concluding call for a renewal of "substantive democracy," a call issued in tones ever more wan and wistfull as the author realizes that the likelihood of its being answered continues to diminish.

James Hunter, professor of sociology and religion at the University of Virginia, wants it understood that, as a scholar, he is "neutral" in the culture war. He stands in the sociological tradition of Max Weber, espousing the virtues of reason, objectivity, and self-restraint. He is appalled by the current academic trashings of that tradition, by the deconstructionisms that reject objectivity and reason and turn all scholarship into no more than an exercise of the "will to power." As much as possible, Mr. Hunter wants to stand above the fray, helping the belligerents to understand the nature of the conflict in which they are embroiled, and urging them toward a discovery of "common ground" by which civil war might be avoided. There is a hint of desperation in Mr. Hunter's urgings. "Before the Shooting Begins" does, after all, suggest that the shooting is about to begin.

"It's the economy, stupid," should perhaps take the prize as the dumbest political slogan in recent American history. Although he's too much of a gentleman to call anyone stupid, the truth to be derived from Mr. Hunter's work is: "It's the culture, stupid." He does not put it quite this way, but politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion. The complicated linkages between politics, culture, morality, and religion are as evident on one side of the culture war as they are on the other. The conflict is often described in terms of the religious versus the secularist, but the secularist is as inescapably religious as his opponent. That is, he too, and however unreflectively, subscribes to a belief system by which he determines what is fair, what is right, what is just.

Mr. Hunter describes culture this way: "Culture is, first and foremost, a normative order by which we comprehend ourselves, others, and the larger world, and through which we order our experience." Everybody lives in a culture, which provides the terms for deciding what is right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what is good and what is evil. Every counter-culture is itself but a rival culture. Our present circumstance in America is one of cultures at war. Some years ago Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in After Virtue that, in a society where people cannot engage in reasonable moral reflections, "politics becomes civil war carried on by other means." Mr. Hunter's study raises the question of whether that civil war will now be carried on by means more conventional to civil wars.

There are many issues being contested--abortion, euthanasia, multiculturalism, homosexuality, sex education in the schools, arts funding, crime and punishment, immigration policy, population control, teenage pregnancy, welfare dependency, quota systems, and on and on. All are unavoidably moral questions in that they invoke the "oughts" of life--how we ought to live and what kind of people we ought to be. The argument supported by Mr. Hunter's careful analysis of massive survey data is that these issues are but different fronts in the culture war, singular. And the issue around which the opposing forces are arrayed is abortion. Both conceptually and by virtue of the sociological dynamics, the other issues of the culture war are inextricably entangled with the question of abortion. Most politicians wish this were not the case. But Mr. Hunter dispels any illusion that there is some way around the conflict over abortion policy.

For any political strategist with the wit and the nerve for it, Mr. Hunter's fourth chapter (written with Carl Bowman) is a mother lode of fact and analysis for constructing new and more effective approaches to the abortion question. Building on work previously published in First Things, this chapter, titled "The Anatomy of Ambivalence," is a model of sociological sophistication. Examining "the structure of American ambivalence toward abortion," the authors employ six categories: consistently pro-life, privately pro-life, conveniently pro-life, reticent pro-choice, personally opposed pro-choice, and consistently pro-choice. The polls show 33 per cent of Americans are consistently pro-life, believing abortion is morally wrong and the unborn child should be protected throughout pregnancy, while 16 per cent are consistently pro-choice, believing abortion is permissible throughout pregnancy. The 19 per cent who are privately pro-life do not want to be identified with the pro-life position and often identify themselves as neutral; the 14 per cent who are conveniently pro-life believe abortion is wrong but would consider it in their own case or that of someone close to them. The personally opposed pro-choice 8 per cent are pro-choice in politics but pro-life in personal practice, while the reticent pro-choice 7 per cent approve of abortion (at least up to viability) but think too many people are having abortions.

What it comes down to is that 66 per cent of Americans are on the pro-life side of the ledger, while only 31 per cent are on the pro-choice side. The disparity is even more dramatic when one takes into account that the personally opposed pro-choice and reticent pro-choice confess a moral uneasiness about abortion. Put differently, only 16 per cent (the consistently pro-choice) are morally comfortable with and supportive of current abortion law and practice. But can this possibly be true? One immediately thinks of all those polls that suggest there is something like an even split between those who oppose and those who support Roe v. Wade and subsequent abortion rulings, with most Americans waffling in the middle.

Such polls are not entirely inaccurate. The overlooked factor is that there is a colossal ignorance about existing abortion law. Only one in ten Americans knows what Roe mandated. Large numbers think abortion is legal only in the first three months, and then only for reasons of a serious threat to the mother. Fully 43 per cent say they don't know what the law is, but 80 per cent disagree (65 per cent strongly disagree) with the statement that abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy. What they know not to be true is, of course, precisely the law according to Roe.

There are other findings that violate conventional wisdoms. For instance, women are more pro-life than men. In addition, on abortion and a host of other controverted issues in the culture war, the most important single variable is religion--with, for example, evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics being dramatically more likely to be pro-life. This finding is not new with Mr. Hunter, but he helpfully refines its significance. Even more important than religious affiliation is religious participation. Even Protestants in the liberal old-line churches and Catholics who identify themselves as liberal tend, if they are actively involved in their churches, to be pro-fife. It is involvement in religion-or, as Mr. Hunter puts it, in "communities of moral conversation"--that is the strongest determinant in how people align themselves on the issues joined in the culture war.

A deeply troubling question: How can it be that, after more than twenty years of public agitation over the most fevered question in American life, the great majority of Americans are colossally ignorant about abortion law and practice? Mr. Hunter addresses that question with searching examinations of media bias, the politicizing of professional associations (e.g., the American Bar Association), and what can most charitably be called the moral corruption of much of the academy.

For perfectly understandable reasons, most people do not want to think about abortion, and that disinclination to think about it plays into the hands of those who are just as happy if people do not know what is happening. In addition--and this is the really insidious factor--most Americans are exceedingly reluctant to impose their "values" on others. Although they are not philosophers, they have internalized the divorce between fact and value. They are practitioners of what Mr. MacIntyre calls "modern emotivism," the doctrine that, at the end of the day, morality is a matter of taste. This explains why the term "choice" has been such a remarkable talisman for the pro-abortionists.

The conclusion, however, is that the present situation almost certainly cannot be sustained. Finally, the state cannot be neutral in matters pertaining to the public good, especially when the good is so elementary as human life, and the question so basic as who belongs, and who does not belong, to the protected category called "the public." As Mr. Hunter writes, "To come down on either side of [the abortion question] is to make a statement about who is qualified for inclusion in the human community, and thus who is worthy of our care and protection." There is, it would seem, no way around that. In the Casey decision of 1992, the Supreme Court fretted out loud about the moral legitimacy of the Court and why that legitimacy required upholding Roe. Mr. Hunter contends that what is at stake is the moral legitimacy of law and, indeed, of this constitutional order. He knows that will sound alarmist, and so he is almost excruciatingly temperate in tone, going to great lengths to offer nuances and qualifications, but the alarm sounds nonetheless.

Many politicians, perhaps most, tend to view the pro-life and pro-choice positions as the extremes, and then try to situate themselves somewhere in the middle. The social realities so lucidly set forth by Mr. Hunter make clear that there is no middle. The activists of the 16 per cent who are consistently pro-choice adopt a hard-line position of don't-give-an-inch. To declare oneself pro-choice is to be politically locked in to the directions of a small, albeit influential, sector of the American elite. As Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania and other politicians have brilliantly demonstrated, the pro-life position is much more capacious. To be pro-life means to subscribe to the goal that every unborn child should be protected in law and welcomed in life. How to get to that goal is a matter of prudential judgment about political possibilities. And since the current law is that of an unlimited abortion license, any change is by definition a movement in the pro-life direction. Waiting periods, regulation of abortion clinics, parental consent--these and other measures, for which there is some leeway in the rulings of the Court, already have strong public support.

Before the Shooting Begins is written by a moderate who earnestly urges upon us a moderation of polarized passions in the hope of saving this democratic republic. There is no reason to doubt that he intends to be neutral, but of course he is not. That is to say, he is not neutral in the eyes of those who benefit from public ignorance, who do not want a democratic deliberation of questions that they believe should be settled by the courts, and who are nothing less than terrified by the suggestion that religiously based moral judgment has a legitimate and necessary part in the making of law and public policy. For the rest of us, Before the Shooting Begins is a lucid guide to understanding the war in which, like it or not, we are embroiled, and a bountiful source of fact and analysis for prosecuting it more effectively. One of the more effective ways to prosecute it, as James Davison Hunter demonstrates, is winsomely to invite one and all to a civil conversation about how we ought to live together.

Father Neuhaus is editor-in-chief of First Things: A Journal of Religion and Public Life, and an NR contributing editor.