James Davison Hunter is one of those rare scholarly giants who is also a Christian but who does not specialize in theology or biblical studies (Hunter and the late, great Timothy Keller were both members of the "Dogwood Fellowship," a select group of Christian clergy, academics and businessmen who read landmark books by the likes of Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, etc...). Hunter coined the term "culture wars" (which is also the title of his most famous book) and he has written perceptively about the USA's evolving sociocultural landscape, including in 'Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis.'

In this book, he looks further back than he has before, chronicling how from its founding and throughout its history, the USA was marked by a "hybrid-Enlightenment" that mixed reason, pragmatism, and democracy alongside enduring qualities derived from (largely Protestant) Christianity. America's aspiration to be a diverse nation (exemplified in the motto "E pluribus unum) has largely been just that - aspirational - because throughout its history the USA has marginalized Native Americans, blacks, women, and sexual minorities. But in recent decades this hybrid-Enlightenment has been dissolving, so much so that Americans with vastly different beliefs are finding it increasingly impossible to come together to dialogue around contentious political, moral, and cultural issues.

As Hunter journeys from America's founding to the early twenty-first century he draws upon key figures who articulated public philosophies and shaped the culture around them, such as Lyman Beecher, Phoebe Palmer, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Rorty, Richard John Neuhaus, Cass Sunstein, Adrian Vermeule, Chantal Mouffe, and others.

This tome offers an abundance of insights and its difficult in a review to capture all of them. Hunter's coverage of American politics in the early twenty-first century, specifically the Trump era, is quite cogent (though as Rod Dreher commented somewhere on Twitter, Hunter is soft on the media; the pundits today who look back fondly on Mitt Romney and John McCain as genial conservative standard-bearers excoriated them in their heydays). Hunter points out that part of the working class' shift to the populist right is due to the fact that the Democrats' base has also changed from organized labour to college/university-educated upper classes who imbibe left-wing tenets from liberal academia; a working-class Italian Catholic teamster in Boston no doubt sees the world in very different ways from a secular non-binary gender studies major at Berkeley.

Anything James Davison Hunter writes is worth reading but 'Democracy and Solidarity' really seems like a capstone to a "trilogy" that began with 'Culture Wars' in 1991 and which continued with 'To Change the World' in 2010, especially for Christian audiences. This book will be one to study and engage with as America slouches towards yet other divisive election and an uncertain political future.