Anything Could Become a Battleground | Los Angeles Review of BooksAnything Could Become a Battleground<br>Isaac Butler’s new book mixes history and personal testimony to examine the ‘culture wars’ that shaped the 1980s—conflicts that differed in striking ways from the ones we’re witnessing today.<br>By Paul ElieJuly 30, 2026<br>Cultural Studies

Politics

Art & Architecture

The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars by Isaac Butler. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026. 384 pages.Buy on Bookshop.org

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A GRATING JOURNALISTIC CLICHÉ just now is the overuse of the notion of “era.” The headlines tell us we are living in the Trump era (or second Trump era); New Yorkers are living in the Mamdani era; we witnessed the climax of the Messi era during the World Cup. As Carlos Lozada observed in The New York Times about the first of these examples, “the compulsion to zero in on Trump alone keeps us from understanding the era fully, and from glimpsing what it might become.” And yet naming spans of time is natural and useful (as in Eric Hobsbawm’s “long nineteenth century” or Tony Judt’s “postwar”), and the work of cultural history depends on “periodicizing”—distinguishing one span from another and identifying distinctive characteristics of each.

How, then, to do it authentically, especially when one’s own lifetime is involved? One way is to ground the effort in personal background and preoccupations, so as to keep from generalizing recklessly. In my case, writing a book about the 1980s meant drawing on my experience as a Catholic college student in New York during those years, which in turn involved complicating the notion of a “Reagan era” dominated by the political and religious Right. In the book, I sought to capture the variety and complexity of the decade, especially where religion was involved—how the rise and fall of the “televangelists” coincided with the hardening of Catholicism under Pope John Paul II and the apogee of progressive Catholic activism in Latin America, how the Pope’s aggressive promotion of traditional Catholic sexual morality fractured because of the crises of AIDS and clerical sexual abuse, and how post-sixties immigration quickened the religious diversity of the country as a whole. And I sought to spell out how the complexity of the moment called forth “crypto-religious” work—from Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” in 1979 to Sinéad O’Connor’s Saturday Night Live appearance in 1992 where she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II, and including U2’s and Leonard Cohen’s hymns to “the future”; Madonna’s hits, as well as Prince’s; and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988).

Isaac Butler, the author of The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, came of age a few years later. As a young teenager in Washington, DC, in the 1990s, he was a professional stage actor, first in Falsettoland, “a musical about the American family and the AIDS crisis,” and then in Quilt: A Musical Celebration, which told “the (largely fictional) stories behind a dozen or more panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.” He viewed the quilt himself, joined other cast members at an ACT UP protest, and marched in the parade for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration. From Butler’s adolescence, then, the conflicts involving art and culture centered on the nation’s capital and the principle of free expression—whether in art or in life—as rooted in larger American ideas of freedom. Accordingly, The Perfect Moment treats a span of time roughly from 1985 to 1995, and it emphasizes the civic and legislative conflicts over free expression more than the longer and deeper forces—artistic, cultural, religious—that shaped the artists and their adversaries alike.

Butler, following a precedent set by the sociologist James Davison Hunter in 1991, sees those conflicts as “culture wars,” and he applies the metaphor enthusiastically. His book “is in some ways a military history, of a war fought by other means. Through politics. Through religion. […] It’s the story of two sides—American artists and the religious right—who viewed their opponents as existential threats to their way of life.” And the two sides’ visions of life are rooted in rival versions of freedom. “[B]y the late twentieth century, anything from paintings to ads for jeans could become a battleground,” he observes.

Regardless of what form they took, the real substance at stake in these fights was the nature, meaning, and limits of freedom in America. Does blasphemous art curtail religious freedom by making society more hostile to religion? Does hate speech do something similar to...