You could argue that the defining issue in the culture and political wars that dominate American life isn’t health care or big government or religion. It is whether small-town is smarter than urban, or vice versa. And that makes Andy Griffith, who died Tuesday at 86, a pivotal figure in those wars. Not for the man he was, but for the character who made him a fixture in American living rooms: Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry.

Sheriff Taylor, among the most popular and enduring characters television has produced, came along at a time, 1960, when things weren’t looking so good for the rural-is-smarter argument, especially as it pertained to the South. News coverage was making the whole country aware of the ugliness of racism there, an impression that would only grow stronger over the next few years with clashes over school integration and the murder of civil rights workers.

A stereotype defined by ignorance and bigotry was becoming codified in popular culture as well, especially in relation to Southern characters: the obvious miscarriage of justice in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” published in 1960; Rod Steiger’s good-ol’-boy police chief from “In the Heat of the Night” in 1967. Mr. Griffith himself nudged that archetype along with the 1957 film “A Face in the Crowd,” playing a Southern drunk who accidentally ends up in the fame-making machine and turns into a demagogue. That same year, a lighter but still unflattering counterpart turned up on television in the sitcom “The Real McCoys,” about a backward family of farmers from West Virginia who relocate to California. If such stuff was representative of small-town America, yeah, better bring in some Ivy League brains to set things straight.

But hold it, as Andy was known to say. While the urbanites were ascendant, characters like Atticus Finch in “Mockingbird” and Sheriff Taylor of “The Andy Griffith Show” were keeping the flame of Main-Street nobility and wisdom alive. In Andy’s town, the fictional Mayberry, a place modeled on Mr. Griffith’s real hometown, Mount Airy, N.C., slick, eggheaded urban types didn’t generally swoop in and solve problems. More often, they were the problem.