SOURCE: Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe. “Just Say No.” Commonweal 127, no. 5 (10 March 2000): 34-5.

In the following review, Whitehead offers high praise for One Nation, Two Cultures, calling it an elegant, economical, and persuasive work.

Recent events—such as last fall's furor over the publicly funded exhibit of a portrait of a dung-daubed Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum; the defeat of state gambling in Alabama; the support for teaching creationism by the Kansas School Board; the popular outrage over Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura's attack on religion—focus fresh attention on America's culture wars.

Yet some question the very existence of the culture wars. In One Nation, after All (Viking, 1998), sociologist Alan Wolfe argued that such highly publicized controversies over cultural issues do not reflect the concerns of the middle-class suburbanites he interviewed. Quiet faith, and tolerance for almost everything, characterize their cultural outlook and, he implied, the outlook of most...