The past year saw a renaissance in culture-war thinkpiece writing, with the fight being declared over and not over and over again in many turns. That's because many of 2014's big news stories touched on culture-war standards, like gay marriage, public prayer, and birth control. This year's list of Big Issues could have easily been from the 1980s—the heyday of the Moral Majority—instead of 2014.

But the fascinating thing is that these issues of culture-war vintage have played out in distinctly un-culture-war-y ways. Unlike the alleged culture wars of yore, these legal battles aren't about shaping culture and laws in favor of one side or another—they're about individual conscience.

Gay marriage, for example, has been a long-simmering, divisive political issue. Same-sex marriage is now legal in 35 states, and in nearly a dozen others, court decisions for or against same-sex marriage are pending. In November, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld same-sex-marriage bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, which will likely lead to a Supreme Court review of the issue.

Arguably, the many court decisions that overturned same-sex-marriage bans last year were enabled by shifts in public opinion, which has steadily moved in favor of gay-marriage legalization over the last decade. Yet, as I pointed out in March, a slim majority of Americans still think gay sex is morally wrong. What can be made of this apparent contradiction?

The answer doesn't fit neatly within a typical culture-war framework. Unlike Buchanan's 1992 battle cry, many of today's debates over social issues imply a respect for people's private lives. In a March poll of public opinion on gay marriage, 53 percent of respondents said they support gay marriage, while only 43 percent said they morally approve of gay sex. The gap in these numbers—presumably, the 10 percent of respondents who are fine with gay marriage but not fine with gay sex—suggests an interesting posture doesn't quite square with the two-camp logic of the culture war: People can support a law without agreeing with what that law allows.

There's a version of this dynamic at work in another yet-to-be-resolved controversy related to gay marriage: A number of people who bake cakes, cut flowers, and provide other services at weddings have refused to work at same-sex ceremonies and celebrations. It seems likely that many of these people do not support gay marriage at all, but that's actually somewhat irrelevant. This issue is specifically about people's private lives: Should people be required to do work in service of something they disagree with?

This is similar to the central question of last summer's debates over the Supreme Court's decision in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, which prohibited the federal government from requiring closely held private businesses to provide birth-control coverage in their employee insurance plans. Proponents of birth-control access were outraged at the decision. But as John J. Dilulio Jr., the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, wrote at Brookings, "love it or loathe it, the Hobby Lobby decision is limited in scope." Although the case touched on many culture-war themes, including female sexuality and access to contraception, it was really a decision about whether companies can be required by the government to pay for birth control if the owners have a moral objection to it—not whether taking birth control is, itself, right or wrong.