H. Richard Niebuhr on what Karl Barth called “culture Protestantism”:

How often the Fundamentalist attack on so-called liberalism–by which cultural Protestantism is meant–is itself an expression of cultural loyalty, a number of Fundamentalist interests indicate. Not all though many of these antiliberals show a greater concern for conserving the cosmological and biological notions of older cultures than for the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The test of loyalty to him is found in the acceptance of old cultural ideas about the manner of creation and the earth’s destruction. More significant is the fact that the mores they associate with Christ have at least as little relation to the New Testament and as much connection with social custom as have those of their opponents. The movement that identifies obedience to Jesus Christ with the practices of prohibition, and with the maintenance of early American social organization, is a type of cultural Christianity; though the culture it seeks to conserve differs from that which its rivals honor. The same thing is true of the Marxian-Christian criticism of the “bourgeois Christianity” of democratic and individualistic liberalism. Again, Roman Catholic reaction against the Protestantism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems often to be animated by a desire to return to the culture of the thirteenth; to the religious, economic, and political institutions and to the philosophical ideas of another civilization than ours. In so far as the contemporary attack on Culture-Protestantism is carried on in this way, it is a family quarrel between folk who are in essential agreement on the main point; namely, that Christ is the Christ of culture, and that man’s greatest task is to maintain his best culture. Nothing in the Christian movement is so similar to cultural Protestantism as is cultural Catholicism, nothing more akin to German Christianity than American Christianity, or more like a church of the middle class than a workers’ church. The terms differ, but the logic is always the same: Christ is identified with what men conceive to be their finest ideals, their noblest institutions, and their best philosophy. (Christ and Culture, pp. 102-3)

It’s not hard to think of several contemporary parallels here: the fundamentalist yearning for a “Christian America,” the reduction of Christian distinctives to left-wing peace and justice sloganeering, or the reactionary Christian urge to defend “Western Civilization” at all costs (against immigrants, Muslims, etc.). Niebuhr would have no trouble spotting these as variants of the “Christ of culture” theme.