Back in 1988,

almost no one had seen the film, the last temptation of Christ. But even so, by the time

Martin Scorsese's film hit theaters, it was already a national emergency, denounced

from pulpits, picketed in the streets,

condemned on radio waves across the country. The people leading the charge hadn't seen the movie

either. They didn't need to. The outrage was the point. That's the story Isaac Butler tells in his

new book, The Perfect Moment, God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars.

It chronicles the origins of the culture wars and why we're still fighting them today.

The grievances, the moral panics, the persecution narratives, the outrage machine, those were built

decades before Trump rode down the golden escalator. Trump is less a maverick than a craven opportunist who leached

into a system that was already cracking. To understand how we got here, we need to go back to 1988,

the final year of the Reagan presidency. The Cold War was winding down, and as it did, Butler argues,

many of the institutions that once gave Americans a shared sense of

identity and meaning, the church, the family, the workplace, were entering what he calls a period

of profound, overlapping crises. The religious rights saw an opening to seize power inside the

Republican Party and across the country, and the machinery to do it was already in place.

Back in 1979, the televangelist Jerry Falwell founded the moral majority, the organization that

turned conservative Christians into one of the Republican Party's most powerful voting blocks

and helped propel Ronald Reagan to the White House in the first place.

Its mission was simple and nationwide return to what it called traditional family values.

At the same time, Donald Wildman, a Mississippi minister and founder of the Conservative

American Family Association, was perfecting a different weapon.

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