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IMO there's a valid take that looks like this that I sometimes embrace: Kulturkampf is fundamentally bike-shedding and the narcissism of small differences writ-large. The things we spend so much time and effort arguing about are, at the end of the day, fairly trivial issues on the grand scale of geopolitics and human endeavor. We're discussing whether
divine preordination and free will can coexistFirst Amendment creative freedom weights against civil rights accommodation law require expressions the creator may disagree with, or about the impacts of marginal changes to tax policy.To defer to the canonical example, we spend so much time and effort debating the color of the bike shed at the nuclear power plant because everyone understands (or believes they understand) a bike shed. Nuclear safety requires experts and in-depth engineering, so between the smaller constituency (which is made further homogeneous because of the smaller education pipeline to such expertise) doesn't get as much debate. Voters don't care about "positive void coefficients" until an accident makes them, and often even then it gets reduced to "nuclear unsafe."
The Culture War is almost entirely defined by issues in which the general public at least feels an expertise: with very few exceptions, everyone has been in a classroom, everyone knows both men and women, has opinions on spiritual beliefs, and has opinions about their local environment. And so these are the things we argue about.
In the end, will Culture War issues be the things that really matter? I often doubt it, unless we let it tear us apart from the inside. It's a bit harder to decide what will write history, but, for example, whether or not the folks at Lockheed wear Pride-themed socks while assembling Tools for the Continuation of Pax Americana and broader Liberal Western Hegemony seems unlikely to be a deciding factor.
I sometimes look at the year of general unity following 9/11 as an example of what happens when we have reason to stop debating trivialities and find ourselves united by a common enemy: the differences between the median Red and Blue voter are pretty small compared to their differences to, say, the politics of Russia. I'm not going to suggest there isn't a legitimate case to keep each other honest sometimes, but I think there's something to the claim that politics is the real mind-killer.
In a Christian society this really matters, though. It determines whether crimes are people’s fault or not, whether people deserve rewards and praise for their achievements or not; it percolates all through society. The reason it looks trivial now is because Christianity ceased to be the core of our society and the implications of theology no longer mattered. For exactly the same reasons, details of left-wing woke culture that were considered trivial are now matters of life and death, sometimes literally.
(I don’t disagree with the broader point, it’s possible that society takes an unexpected turn and I too would like to hear more positive visions.)
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Those aren’t necessarily trivial issues though. Free speech is a fundamental right, and the ability to say what you want to say — and to be allowed to be heard — are critical in any sort of democracy. If I cannot say what I believe to be true, then there’s no possibility of debate, reason, or compromise. If I’m compelled to speak, it’s the same thing, dissenters are forced into participating in things they find odious and thus the ability to be creative in service to your own ideas is compromised because the state wishes to force me to say things I don’t believe.
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