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The Culture War is the name given to conflict over moral or religious values typically between mainstream American political thought and liberals.

European culture wars historically pitted Catholics against Protestants, from the extraordinarily violent Thirty Years War of the 17th century to the nonviolent Kulturkampf in Germany in the late 19th century when Bismarck's German Protestant government sought and failed to suppress Catholicism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries the great battles were over cultural and ethnic nationalism, as well as political contests between clerical and secular forces, especially in France from 1789 to the early 20th century.

Just as violent were the occasional conflicts between Christianity and Islam that led to dramatic battles such as those at Tours (732), Kosovo (1389), Constantinople (1453), and Lepanto (1571). Terroristic Similar outbursts occurred in Chechnya since the 1990s, and in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Bali and elsewhere after 2001.

In Canada, mostly nonviolent cultural tension between English and French ethnic groups has simmered from 1760 onward. Finally in the 1990s Canadians opted for a multicultural compromise that downgraded British heritage and Canadian nationalism in general. The There remain, nonetheless, active Quebec separatists, hovering just short of a majority, groups continue to that seek independence and reject multiculturalism. among Francophones and some native peoples.

Since 1789 there has been a persistent global cultural war between the forces of modernization, secularization, and globalization on the one hand, and traditionalists on the other. The latter expressed itself among Roman Catholics in the 19th century, and Islamists, Hindu nationalists, and Christian evangelicals in the 20th and 21st centuries. In class terms, the upper middle class has typically been the proactive modernizing force, with the peasants and working classes (often joined by the aristocracy) acting in reaction.

Massive great violence accompanied culture wars in Mexico from 1810 to the 1930s that saw clerical/conservative alliances battle anticlerical modernizing forces.

In American history culture wars have seldom escalated into violence. In general the groups at swords point in other lands coexist in America. The rare exceptions were tensions between Catholic and Protestant Irish in the 19th century that erupted in riots in New York (1871) and, Philadelphia (1844) and elsewhere, though these were quickly quelled. More violence and hatred has surrounded racial tensions between blacks and whites (and between whites and Chinese in the late 19th century, and blacks and Koreans in the late 20th century).

The most important culture wars in America have involved questions of morality. The abolitionist movement was one such expression. Before the 1830s many national leaders, North and South, considered slavery a social evil that should be gradually abolished. During the Second Great Awakening, religious evangelicals in the North began preaching that slavery was a personal sin which slaveowners must immediately repent. The novel and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) became a best seller in America and Britain, driving home the horrors of slavery. Across the South those suspected of harboring abolitionist thoughts were driven out. More generally the South feared various Yankee "isms" (abolitionism, feminism, and reformism) that threatened to destroy the traditional lifestyle of both subsistence yeoman farmers and slave plantations. The North meanwhile was modernizing rapidly and building an educational system that provided the intellectual and interpersonal skills needed for an upwardly mobile middle class to flourish. The South was nearly as rich the North in 1860, but its wealth depended less on intellectual skills than on the luck of land speculation, gambling, European demand for cotton, and weather. After slavery ended in 1865 and cotton prices plunged, the South fell behind economically and intellectually until it finally broke with cotton and began urbanizing in the 1940s, and abandoned segregation in the 1960s.

The Second Great Awakening (1800-1840) created a series of reform movements that generated culture wars. In addition to abolition there was the Prohibition movement, which moved liquor from a social nuisance to a personal sin in the minds of many pietistic, low-church, revivalist Protestants, and motivated their efforts to destroy the liquor trade and saloons. The robust resistance provided by Catholics and liturgical, high-church Protestants such as Episcopalians and German Lutherans turned liquor into an ethno-religious issue that polarized the political parties along parallel lines.

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