After the recent Indiana and Arkansas controversies, it’s no surprise that we’re once again hearing about culture fatigue.
Of course, given how long this rhetoric has been hanging around, it may be worth treating it with a bit more skepticism than we often do. After all, Richard John Neuhaus was still alive and wrote a response when a major anti-culture war manifesto was published almost 10 years ago and Newsweek (of course) said the evangelical right was in disarray way back in 2008.
There is good reason, then, to be a bit more skeptical of these culture war fatigue narratives than we often are. They’re still popping up on a regular basis (see this Molly Worthen piece that alludes to fatigue published in 2012 and this more recent Ruth Graham piece) and yet for all the noise the classic culture war issues keep popping up–Chick-fil-a in 2012, Hobby Lobby in 2014, the Indiana religious freedom law this year.
That said, on an anecdotal level anyone who has spent much time amongst younger evangelicals probably understands where these continued reports of fatigue from the culture wars are coming from.
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