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On issues like gay marriage and birth control, cultural warriors haven't changed their mindsthey just want to be left alone.

Lauren Giordano/The Atlantic

It's a semiannual tradition in America: the culture-war debates. Is there a culture war in America, ask pundits and professors and journalists, or isn't there? And if there is one, is it over yet?

As with any tidy narrative, the culture war can be somewhat shape-shifting, invoked in ways that diverge from how the sociologist James David Hunter first wrote about it in 1991. But the gist is this: In debates over social issues like abortion, homosexuality, and birth control, American culture and politics is divided into two camps: the orthodoxor traditionalists, or conservativesversus progressives. Often, these issues are discussed in terms of religious values and religious freedom. Accurately or not, "the culture wars" are often referred to in terms of religious America vs. secular Americaand, sometimes, the Christian right vs. everyone else.

As Pat Buchanan said in his speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, "There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." But today's culture war, if there even is one, doesn't seem to be about winning America's soulit's about people's right to live their lives according to their beliefs.

The past year saw a renaissance in culture-war thinkpiece writing, with the fight being declared over and not over and over again in many turns. That's because many of 2014's big news stories touched on culture-war standards, like gay marriage, public prayer, and birth control. This year's list of Big Issues could have easily been from the 1980sthe heyday of the Moral Majorityinstead of 2014.

But the fascinating thing is that these issues of culture-war vintage have played out in distinctly un-culture-war-y ways. Unlike the alleged culture wars of yore, these legal battles aren't about shaping culture and laws in favor of one side or anotherthey're about individual conscience.

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Gay marriage, for example, has been a long-simmering, divisive political issue. Same-sex marriage is now legal in 35 states, and in nearly a dozen others, court decisions for or against same-sex marriage are pending. In November, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld same-sex-marriage bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, which will likely lead to a Supreme Court review of the issue.

Arguably, the many court decisions that overturned same-sex-marriage bans last year were enabled by shifts in public opinion, which has steadily moved in favor of gay-marriage legalization over the last decade. Yet, as I pointed out in March, a slim majority of Americans still think gay sex is morally wrong. What can be made of this apparent contradiction?

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