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I'm going to sketch out a pretty broad and thin theory here, about Christianity and how the Protestant Reformation has had downstream effects on American politics for a while. Please feel free to poke holes in this, I'm really just spitballin'.
My basic idea is something like this: the Catholic church in Western Europe went way too hard enforcing the persecution of heresy, especially against mystics and those practicing contemplative-style prayer outside of monasteries, where they could be easily controlled. You see this especially in the persecution of the Cathars, which while their gnostic ideas were obviously wrong, I think the Catholic church made a huge mistake by not incorporating the obvious need for more direct mystical and experiential understanding of the faith amongst the laity, and disaffected factions.
Fastforward a few hundred years, and you have the Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation, and all the wars. Christendom in the West is basically fractured entirely, with the Protestants generally attracting folks that are more into mysticism, experiential acts of faith, and contemplation. Whereas the Catholic church tended to keep those focused on structured, ordered discipline and an explicit, rational understanding of the faith.
Ok, this is where the theory gets a bit out there. Personally I believe this split has continued into the modern day, with the modern progressive and conservative movements. I think that by and large the spirit of Protestantism has shifted away from explicit religion and into the more progressive, ideological wings of especially American, and increasingly world society. People on the left are by and large much more focused, in my experience, on experiential states, following the heart, and of course contemplative, mystical spiritual practice.
Because of the fact that the conservative branch of Christianity (even many Protestants, like the extreme Southern Baptists) continued to be staunchly against mysticism, ultimately they acted as a foil to the Protestants who wanted more of this mystical, experiential relationship with God. This is why the New Age/Buddhist/Eastern traditions are so appealing to folks on the left, because they are able to indulge freely in their mystical experience, without having any mean conservatives telling them they need to you know, get a job, and raise kids, and generally have structure in their lives.
Ultimately I think this is a major issue, and one at the core of the modern 'meta-crisis.' Taking a page out of Jordan Peterson's book, I think that much of especially human society can be seen as a dialectical tension between chaos and order. I think that the left I've broadly sketched here represents chaos, and the right represents order.
We desperately need both in various ways - we need order for structure, discipline, and to ensure the trains run on time, so to speak. We also need chaos for renewal, for fun and play and joy, and to make sure that authority doesn't get too corrupt, that people have a direct line to God, or if you're more secular, at least to a deep range of authentic human experience.
Overall I don't see the culture war rift being healed until we are able to conceptualize this breakage that has it's roots far in the past, and try to bring the two sides of the culture together. To help progressives understand that they need conservative structure, discipline and order, but also to convince conservatives that we need renewal, revitalization, and a check on corrupt authority.
As to how to do this, well, that's the million dollar question. I'm definitely curious if anyone has thoughts!
I agree with the general thesis on the need for balance between chaos and order. I disagree with your framing of it stemming from Catholics and Protestants as its source. I think it's a fundamental variable of human psychology: some people have more affinity/preference for order, some people have more affinity/preference for chaos, and Christianity is just one of the many many ways this conflict has played out throughout history. The Catholics did not inspire order within humanity, but simply took the half of humans who wanted order and united them around itself, while the other half rejected it. The issue is not that a religious schism has propogated itself through our culture and caused the modern rift, the issue is that people are fundamentally different from each other and have different preferences. If we have to share a society, they're going to disagree about how to run that society. The only possible resolutions are
-Oppression: one group gets what they want, the other doesn't.
-Genocide: one group eliminates the other and then lives in peace (this isn't really possible here because chaos/order affinity is only slightly genetic, so conflict will pop up again every generation)
-Compromise: each group only gets part of what they want
In most types of conflicts there would be a fourth option: Segregation and local politics, where each group can go live among each other and do things their own way in their own spaces, having minimal interaction with the others. But that's not an option here because the Order people explicitly want to control everything in society, not keep to themselves, so localized politics IS compromising with chaos.
The culture war can't be healed unless both sides can regain enough respect and compassion for each other that they genuinely want compromise instead of always attempting Oppression. The only compromises we get are unintentional out of strategic necessity, not because anyone is genuinely trying to make both sides happy. Unless that changes we're going to keep getting conflicts.
I don't think the US culture war is Law vs Chaos - the "Red = Law, Blue = Chaos" and the "Red = Chaos, Blue = Law" narratives are roughly equally easy to write. "The real problem is that the Blues want total control of everything down to your kids' innermost thoughts while the Red just want to grill" seems to be the most common narrative on the Motte and is of the Red=Chaos variety.
The Blue tribe has room for the hippies and the HR ladies, with which of those groups is winning the intra-Blue conflict switching from decade to decade. Similarly the Reds have room for the Gadsden-flag waving hillbillies and the father-knows-best authoritarians. In both cases homo sapiens hypocritus leaves space for both in the same person depending on which is convenient.
In so far as there is a deep underlying conflict behind the US culture war (mostly, it is pure tribalism), it is elves vs dwarfs. Reds think that wealth comes out of the ground and that cities are parasitic on farmers and miners, Blues (and Greys, who are just dissident Blues) think that wealth comes from the application of human ingenuity and that rural areas are parasitic on productive cities.
That's on the surface Blue=Law, Red=Neutral. Although when you combine it with "Blues want to allow trans-and-minority criminals to prey on people while Red wants them in the sex-(not-gender)-appropriate prison", you realize that no, it's not; Red sees it as being about Anarcho-Tyranny vs Ordered Liberty, and Blue does also. (Both are wrong, but IMO Blue is much wronger)
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