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WASHINGTON The old culture war politics is dying but new culture wars are gathering force. The transformation of the battlefield will change our public life.

The idea of a "culture war" was popularized by Pat Buchanan in his joyfully incendiary 1992 Republican National Convention speech, but it was introduced into the public argument a year earlier by James Davison Hunter, a thoughtful University of Virginia sociologist.

In his 1991 book "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America," Hunter described a raging battle between the orthodox, committed to "an external, definable and transcendent authority," and progressives, who could be "defined by the spirit of the modern age, a spirit of rationalism and subjectivism."

It was a fight, in other words, between those whose deepest commitments were to God and the sacred, and those who believed that human beings evolved their own value systems through a process of steady enlightenment. The first group feared we were moving away from commitments that made us decent and human. The second welcomed more open attitudes on questions ranging from sexuality to racial equality to women's rights.

This culture war created the religious right and also a backlash among more secular Americans who happen to be one of the fastest growing groups in the country. Their skirmishes focused especially on the legality of abortion, society's view of homosexuality and, more generally, the public role of religion.

That this culture war is receding is most obvious in our rapidly changing responses to gays and lesbians. The turnaround in public opinion on gay marriage is breathtaking. According to the Pew Research Center, only 27 percent of Americans favored gay marriage in 1996; by 2014, that proportion had doubled, to 54 percent.

Not for nothing did President Obama declare in his State of the Union address last week: "I've seen something like gay marriage go from a wedge issue used to drive us apart to a story of freedom across our country."

Abortion is a different matter because public opinion on the question has been quite stable. Over recent decades, Americans have generally supported abortion rights by margins of between 5-to-4 and 3-to-2. And many hold somewhat ambivalent views, resisting black-and-white certainty. Rachel Laser, a close student of the issue, has called these middle-grounders the "abortion grays."

But the politics of abortion have become more complicated for its opponents. This was evidenced by the decision of House Republicans to pull a bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks because the exception for rape victims it required them to report the crime to the police was seen as far too onerous. A group of House Republican women forced the bill off the floor.

Notice, however, that House Republicans were able to pass without much difficulty a remarkably restrictive bill that would overturn Obama's executive actions on immigration. It was aimed not only at his measures to keep families together but also at a highly popular provision for the "Dreamers" brought to the United States as children.

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E.J. Dionne Jr.: Culture wars, old and new