Today’s culture wars over marriage, abortion, and domestic religious freedom seem terribly tame compared to the supreme culture war over slavery that concluded with Civil War. Even before the war, abolitionists, including Seward, often risked mobs and lynching, even in the north. In the interest of social harmony, should they have relented?

Many young evangelicals today shun conflict — a posture at odds with evangelical history.

A new generation of evangelical elites is imploring evangelicals to step back from the culture wars. Mostly they want to escape polarizing strong stances on same-sex marriage and abortion, and perhaps also contentious church-state issues, like the Obamacare contraceptive mandate.

Purportedly the evangelical church is failing to reach young, upwardly mobile professionals because evangelicals, who now broadly comprise perhaps one third of all Americans, are seen as reactionary and hateful. On their college campuses, at their coffee shops, and in their yoga classes, among other venues, some outspoken hip young evangelicals want a new public image for their faith.

One such prominent voice is Jonathan Merritt, a progressive Southern Baptist and son of a former Southern Baptist Convention president. His new book, A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars, has earned him many recent bookings on cable talk shows.

A popular young evangelical blogger echoing Merritt’s theme is Rachel Evans, who conveniently grew up in the Tennessee small town famous for the Scopes Monkey Trial. Her 2010 book was Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions. “We are tired of the culture wars,” she explained in a recent interview. “We are tired of politics.” Lamenting the church’s preoccupation with “shame and guilt,” she urged evangelicals to reconsider their opposition to same-sex unions.

Other young evangelicals complaining about culture wears don’t go so far and remain faithful to historic church teachings while still yearning for new emphases that they think would earn evangelicals a helpfully upbeat persona.

Most of these young evangelicals, and many of their older supporters, often seem to forget that culture wars are not new for Americans or its churches. America has had dozens of them, all of them with intense religious involvement. And some of them have exemplified some of religion’s finest moments in shaping America. Across several decades, the Civil Rights Movement, led primarily by clergy, was intensely gut wrenching and sometimes precipitated violence. Some churches, black and white, lost members over it. The push for women’s rights of the 1960s and 1970s that closely followed was also deeply controversial and was at least initially often rooted in faith before secular feminists took the fore.

Prohibition was one of America’s most intense culture wars, pitting mostly Anglo Protestant small town and rural America against more ethnic and Catholic urbanites. Churches were its chief champions. Women’s Suffrage, closely aligned with Prohibition, and nearly as divisive, was also touted by many Protestant churches and leaders, such as the Methodist suffragist Anna Howard Shaw. And during Reconstruction and afterwards, many northern church activists tried to help southern black freedmen, often amid violence, with even many northerners preferring to avoid the struggle.

Early in the republic, frontier evangelical religion aligned with Thomas Jefferson against the Federalist Party and its East Coast supporters in the established churches. Some feared the transition from Federalist to Jeffersonian rule might lead to war. Later in the mid-19th century, many Protestants mobilized against Catholic immigrant influence through the Know Nothing movement.

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