Culture Wars? Insights from Ethnographies of Two Protestant Seminaries

Late- or post-modernity has fostered competing religious and moral visions in American society. Two recent and widely discussed works, Robert Wuthnow's The restructuring of American religion (1988) and James Davison Hunter's Culture wars (1991), discuss these competing visions. Among the important issues involved are questions of the sources of truth and interpretive authority. In this paper, we present case studies, based on extensive ethnographic research over a three year period, of the culture of two U.S. theological schools. In these schools, one liberal Protestant and the other conservative Protestant, questions of truth and interpretive authority are articulated and negotiated in strikingly different ways. Indeed, since these are institutions that educate religious elites, the cases offer important insights into broader cultural dynamics.