The politics of the last quarter century in the United States cannot be fully
understood without reference to cultural–religious issues such as abortion,
prayer in the state schools, school curriculum including sex education and
teaching the biblical account of creation, gay rights, gun control, the
death penalty, and the proper roles of men and women. Cultural–religious
conservatives defend traditional values such as patriarchy and sexual
abstinence for the unmarried, while cultural–religious liberals challenge
them. For example, the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment
(ERA) objected, not to its guarantee of formal legal equality which was
uncontroversial, but rather to it potentially changing gender roles. While
the New Deal party system had been founded on a conflict between
economic liberalism and economic conservatism, recent contemporary
US politics also contains an explicit cultural–religious dimension.
Although they have not replaced the older economic issues associated
with the New Deal party system, cultural–religious issues coexist with
them and have transformed the contemporary US political agenda by
disrupting older coalitions and creating new coalitions and cleavages.