This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mueller, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

James Davidson Hunter is the Lebras Levenson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia, where he also serves

as executive director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He received his

baccalaureate degree in sociology from Gordon College, Master of Arts and PhD in a on the cultural roots of America's political crisis,

that book is the topic of our conversation today.

Professor Hunter, welcome to thinking in public.

Thank you very much.

So happy to be here.

Well, you know, I'm kind of in the unusual position of saying that we've been in conversation

for the last 40 or 40 plus years, but it's really been mostly one way with you writing the books and then me greatly appreciating your

writings and frankly engaging with so many of your ideas I think back to 1983 your first book American

evangelicalism conservative religion and the quandary of modernity and I was a

doctoral student at the time and I have to tell you I was deeply grappling with my own version of the

quandary of modernity and and ever since then quite frankly you've been you've been one of the most I think catalytic minds in American intellectual life so I just

want to say thank you.

Well thanks that's very generous coming from you thank you very much.

Yeah I I think through categories that you have

given Americans in terms of intellectual categories and such as cognitive bargaining, which we'll talk about at some point because even as I was working in

theological method that's exactly what I was seeing and I think that really came out pretty clearly in your second book about younger evangelicals.

But you know, you rocked the intellectual world in the United States with your book entitled

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