The hottest issue among politicians and religious leaders is the “culture war”– a supposed crisis in moral and religious values that is ripping at the fabric of the nation.

A scholar from the University of Michigan School of Business is jumping into the fray. But he is not armed with another bombshell. Instead, sociologist Wayne Baker is waving a white flag at all sides in this conflict.

“We need to think about this in a new way. I believe that this culture war is a myth in this country,” Baker said Thursday as he gave dozens of other scholars in the business school a first glimpse at his research. “We think we’re divided — and we’re really not.”

The widespread panic has been driven largely by political and religious activists hoping to whip up support for their causes, Baker said.

“There’s a whole cottage industry of people selling this idea that there’s a crisis, and that we’ve lost our values, and that we’re deeply divided as a nation over that,” he said. “It’s not true.”

Before going public with his findings, Baker spent nearly a decade examining surveys and other social research data, gathered since 1981 in countries around the world.

“If we group together traditional values about God, country and family, including the importance of God and patriotism … it turns out these values are widely shared by Americans, and they’ve been solid over the last 20 years,” Baker said.

“That’s different than the picture in Europe, for example, where these values are not as important. But, in this country, we’re a very traditional society.”

Comments from scholars in the audience seemed to support Baker’s conclusions, which are summarized in a new book, America’s Crisis of Values.

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