It must have been one of this author’s first English lessons at school. The infamous Mr Z drew two circles on the blackboard, barely touching each other. “This is your personal space, and this is your neighbour’s,” his voice rattled through the classroom. The lesson was simple. Your freedom ends the moment you step into another person’s space and start dictating how they should live, what they should think and what they must not do. In today’s societies this trespass has become the norm, which is why we will examine culture wars and how they are corroding our Miteinander (ger. for social fabric).
It is time to rethink how we read the cultural shifts defining our era. That said, cultural history tends to swing as a pendulum, where every dominant culture eventually breeds its counter. Over the past two decades, a brand of progressive liberalism emanating from America’s coastal tech hubs spread through the educated capitals of the world. It successfully proliferated vital rights for minorities and marginalised groups but eventually overextended itself, policing language, dietary choices and the boundaries of acceptable humour. There is a meaningful difference between expanding a society’s moral imagination and dictating its terms. When movements blur that line, they do not lose the argument but they manufacture the opposition that will eventually beat them.
That backlash has now arrived with considerable force. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement draws its energy from neglected industrial regions and a deep disillusionment with the American Dream. Strategists at the Heritage Foundation, most visibly through their Project 2025 blueprint, have fused this grievance with evangelical nostalgia to reassert American cultural hegemony. The traditionalist facade of family values belies a sophisticated pursuit of power, where pulpit and policy paper are drafted by the same hands. Grievance, wrapped in faith, is the oldest mobilisation tool in politics, and it does not need to be subtle to work.
This is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Political Islam operates on the exact same architecture of control. Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, the Diyanet, runs a budget of roughly 3.5 billion dollars and oversees nearly a thousand mosques in Germany alone, with hundreds more across France and the Netherlands. Qatar has channelled an estimated 102 million dollars into roughly 140 European mosque and school projects over the past decade, much of it through networks aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. Western investors are now adapting this very playbook for a digital age. The Hallow prayer app, a Catholic devotional tool backed by Peter Thiel and Vice President JD Vance, has crossed twenty million downloads and become the most successful religious technology product ever built. The mechanics remain identical whether the vehicle is a state funded minaret or a Silicon Valley algorithm. Both monetise the human craving for meaning to consolidate political and economic influence.
The instrumentalisation of faith extends well beyond mosques and apps. Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir invoke the biblical names ‘Judea and Samaria’ to justify the annexation of the occupied West Bank. Smotrich’s current plan would absorb eighty-two per cent of it. In Myanmar, the Ma Ba Tha movement of extremist Buddhist monks blessed the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. Yet a pragmatic counter-trend is visible elsewhere. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, after decades of exporting Wahhabi orthodoxy, are now actively suppressing domestic religious extremism. Riyadh has scaled back the powers of the religious police, opened cinemas and stadiums to mixed audiences, and reframed Vision 2030 around tourism and technology, while Abu Dhabi has built itself into a global hub for capital and conferences. Even theocratic power, it turns out, bows to the balance sheet when ideological purity threatens GDP.
The mechanism driving all of these cases is far older than any modern regime. Religion has historically provided essential moral guardrails and a profound sense of communal belonging. Yet major faiths have always managed that belonging by strictly defining the outsider. Islam designates Christians and Jews as Ahl al-Kitab, People of the Book, while those outside this circle occupy a more ambiguous theological space. Judaism distinguishes Jews from gentiles, with the Noahide Laws establishing the minimal moral code expected of the latter. Christian scripture oscillates between universal salvation and exclusive dogma, with passages such as Romans 2 hinting at a moral law written on the hearts of all. In their pure form, all of these traditions leave room for the outsider as righteous, redeemable or simply other. In practice, religious authorities have wielded these distinctions as instruments of power, sorting humanity into those who belong and those who must be kept at the gate.
Today, digital platforms have industrialised that sorting at unprecedented speed and scale. Recommender systems feed us exactly what confirms our existing beliefs, replacing the village square with an echo chamber engineered for engagement rather than understanding. We spend our days consuming content curated to reinforce what we already believe instead of speaking to our physical neighbours. Those who seek to control populations understand this architecture intimately. The internet has become the most efficient pulpit ever constructed, and unlike the village mosque or parish church, it never closes.
Why is it so difficult to meet in the middle? The historical record offers a direct answer. The religious wars of the seventeenth century, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, killed as many as eight million people and reduced parts of Germany’s population by half before exhausting Europe into the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. That exhaustion forced the birth of secular statecraft and laid the intellectual groundwork for the Enlightenment. Society learnt, at extraordinary cost, that survival required separating personal conviction from state power. Your freedom firmly ends the moment it begins to curtail the freedom of another. The lesson is on the historical record. We do not need to relearn it the hard way.
The way forward is clear:
Think for yourself and actively challenge your own preconceived views before defending them.
Refuse to be instrumentalised by news outlets, religious leaders or your community.
Deliberately seek out the strongest version of the opposing argument rather than the weakest, and engage with primary sources rather than commentary on them.
Demand structural secularism, ensuring religious ideology never dictates state policy, while protecting the right of individuals to practise their faith freely.
Recognise culture wars for what they are: geopolitical power grabs dressed up as moral crusades.
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