From the presidential election of 1980 through 2008 it was relatively clear what role American evangelicals played in our nation's political life: They were an active and influential bloc within the Republican party, sharing influence within a coalition that also included foreign policy hawks and pro-business libertarians. This meant that while the evangelical coalition didn't get everything they wanted, they really did have genuine power and influence over Republican policy and really did get some recognizably Christian policy wins through that influence.
Those victories would include explicit support for a ban on abortion in the Republican platform until 2024 when it was stripped away by President Trump. The GOP also included language concerning natural marriage in its platform for many years. Other victories for the evangelical conservatives within the GOP would include things like the Presidential Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), funded through USAID. As with the victory on life issues, this victory has also been expunged by the Trump administration.
Understanding this point is important, for it will help us understand the transition that took place in the elections after the strange 2012 campaign and where things are likely headed next in American politics.
As already noted, President Trump's coalition has never been particularly pro-life, he has actually been the most pro-LGBT+ of any Republican presidential nominee, and, of course, he has not been supportive of international philanthropic work such as PEPFAR. And that has always been fairly clear to those who were not actively working to not see it. Even so, it takes time for political changes to work themselves out and become sufficiently clear. So in the 2016 and 2020 elections there was still a vestige of the old 80s, 90s, and 2000s era coalition supporting President Trump; it was simply supplemented by the new blocs that Trump's campaign brought in.
In this context, the "Christian nationalist" movement could understandably be regarded by many as a kind of successor to the Religious Right. Expressed in its most simple form, its objectives sounded very like the objectives of the religious right. Additionally, the term was subject to the same sort of misleading charges from left-wing media that were once visited on the old religious right. And so ordinary evangelical voters could easily see the Christian nationalist movement as a continuation of the religious right, but recalibrated for the Trump era.
That said, this framing of our moment is now being repeatedly contradicted by the facts on the ground. Some of those I have already mentioned—the repudiation of many of the religious right's signature triumphs by the Trump administration. There are other problems, however. Whereas the more extreme attacks against the old religious right were often overheated and exaggerated, the similar charges against the Christian Nationalist movement are... broadly accurate. Additionally, the Christian Nationalist movement is now, even according to some of its own members, fragmenting.
Finally, it is becoming increasingly clear that evangelical Trump voters are, by and large, not abandoning Trump's GOP for any reason. This means, as I have said before, that their views and policy priorities simply can be ignored by the real leaders of the current GOP because there is no reason to concede anything to people whose vote you will have no matter what.
Thus we have arrived at a new Republican coalition that looks like this:
- The tech right, which is essentially a weirder and more evil upgrade of the pro-business libertarians
- The barstool right, which is a genuinely new constituency made up of hedonistic anti-woke libertarians that has replaced the Christian conservatives
- The neo-conservative foreign policy hawks, who are the weakest member of the coalition, but can still get what they want on certain issues, as seen with the attacks on the Houthis as well as the saber rattling regarding Greenland
In other words, the Christian influence on actual Republican policy items and their political vision is going to be exceedingly negligible going forward. Sure, Vice President Vance will make an appearance at the March for Life. President Trump will show up to the National Prayer Breakfast. But even when he does acknowledge a Christian event, it often will come loaded with hatred and vile self-aggrandizement, as seen yesterday:
And ultimately when push comes to shove on the policy level, Christian concerns will always be backgrounded or eliminated relative to the priorities of the three above groups, as we have already seen on abortion, marriage, and PEPFAR.
The religious right is dead; the religious left has never really (really) been a thing. Now we find ourselves in a moment where the number of Nones seems to have plateaued, where many are reporting higher engagement in church, and Bible sales are trending up. We seem to be entering a moment of heightened openness to Christianity precisely as the political influence of Christians in America diminishes sharply.
Where does this leave us?
The framework in which American evangelicalism has operated for most of the past 50 years does not make sense in the current environment. The Religious Right has been supplanted in the GOP coalition, as already explained.
Meanwhile, on the ecclesial side the attractional model is also dead for a variety of reasons. It often reduced church down to nothing more than content and experience, both of which are losing fights for us in our technological moment. Also, it often elevated unqualified leaders and placed them in positions without any accountability or structure, which led to corrupt and brittle churches and poorly formed church members.
What is needed, then is a recalibration in both spaces.
Ecclesially speaking, the challenge for pastors will, I suspect, center around shepherding congregants away from politicized religions that might appropriate Christian concepts when convenient but actually have no use for actual Christian thinking about political life and policy.
Stepping back, however, the broader challenge is to shepherd people toward depth, slow and stable spiritual growth, and a rightly ordered sense of their loves and responsibilities. Realistically, individual Christians, even when mobilized as a voting bloc, will have very little actual political power in the future. Recognizing this and encouraging congregants to draw their eyes more locally—to the opportunity to feed and clothe the needy in their own home or neighborhood, to love their coworkers well, to care for their employees well by paying them fairly... these are the opportunities most of us will have going forward.
This will require encouraging people to detach themselves from their phones and the various forms of content they are likely addicted to as well as the false gods that those devices commend to us. It will also require holding out a vision of life that in many ways seems unimaginable at first glance but is actually healthier and better than the life that our tech-facilitated individualist culture can offer.
There is also a lane here for healthy Christian advocacy in the political arena. But it requires thinking from a higher level about the kind of society we wish to pass on to future generations and the specific role that political institutions, policies, and norms can play in promoting such a society.
Some of what is happening now in the UK may be instructive for us here: Amongst both the actual Christian converts of the UK (Paul Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mary Harrington) and the people closely adjacent to them (Tom Holland, Louise Perry) the common thread one can detect is a sense that our current social order is poisonous, that it needs to be heavily reformed, and that Christianity offers resources that help us get there.
The accent varies from person to person. For figures like Ali and Holland, the concern centers around liberalism and the rule of law; it revolves around notions of human dignity and an aversion to moral and political anarchy. For Perry and Harrington it is a recognition that we have created a gender hellscape and actually the structure and rules provided by Christianity can rescue us from it. For Kingsnorth and Shaw, it is centered around technology and their desire to preserve a way of life more open to the beauties of nature and willing to accept creaturely existence rather than seeking to transcend or escape it through technology.
Even so, the thread that links all these distinct people together is a sense that society isn't functioning as it should and addressing the problems will require stepping back, reassessing, and returning to Christianity or, at least, returning to Christian principles to govern common life.
In the American context, much of this work will happen in churches, which will be far better positioned to address Perry, Harrington, Kingsnorth, and Shaw's concerns especially. However, the Ali and Holland critique is something that is likely best addressed by Christian media and academics since it requires addressing issues that aren't really in the ordinary scope of a pastor's work. The need, then, is for both Christian pastors and Christian intellectuals (and, yes, sometimes the two overlap) to work in connection with one another, building up the church and presenting a clear and compelling account of Christian truth.
In other words, Christian intellectuals of both the formal academic variety and the popular media variety can do the sorts of things in our context that Holland, Ali, and Glen Scrivener are doing so well in the UK. The political chaos of our moment is not going anywhere, sadly. If anything, the lawlessness is likely to escalate over the next several years, at least if the events of recent weeks are anything to go off of.
So the role that Christian writers and academics could play, if we want to, is to preserve the memory of what made the old post-war system work, particularly as it related to things like the rule of law, liberal rights, and care for the disadvantaged. At its best, that system is a model of what John Inazu has called "confident pluralism." While conditions and circumstances change and the way we articulate ideas and make arguments will inherently change in response, it does not follow from that that the older model was, itself, altogether wrong or worthy of sweeping rejection.
Here we simply need to read and learn from the example of our fathers and mothers in the faith—figures like Niebuhr, Maritain, de Lubac, Gilson, Pope John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and so on. (James Davison Hunter's work likely belongs here as well, actually. Perhaps Hunter is the last of the post-war Christian intellectuals.) The examples of Richard John Neuhaus, Charles Colson, James Sire, Harold Ockenga, and Carl Henry would all also have much to teach us, I expect, though I do not know their work as well as I know that of Niebuhr, Gilson, Hunter, John Paul, or Benedict.
The work for Christian writers in ideas journalism as well as Christian elected officials, Christian public servants, and Christian nonprofit leaders is likely to be doing the hard work of reminding people of why free speech is good, why freedom of association is valuable, why the rule of law matters, and so on. The work for these people, then, is going to look different from much of the popular Christian writing on politics in the past 25 years. For the past quarter century, most writing on these matters fitted into one of these categories:
- Quasi-Anabaptist signaling that has no real political meaning
- Moral scolding
- Searching after truth by moderating the positions of the two dominant parties
- Narrow arguments for supporting one party because of their stated policy on a narrow number of issues
Basically, what we've had is either inadequate theoretical work, empty moralizing, or policy advocacy of wildly varying qualities. The need going forward, as our churches hopefully fill with new believers and our politics grow increasingly lawless, will be more foundational. We must help people become rooted in the truths of the faith in their personal lives and then, when we turn our attention to common life, help people recognize the difficulty and opportunity presented to us as we live in a radically pluralistic world and on this side of Christ's return where all our endeavors are subject to the vexing power of sin.
What is needed is clear communication of the core Christian ideas from which basic liberal rights and values have been justified traditionally as well as a plain willingness to speak in defense of these norms and policies without feeling the need to ingratiate oneself to one party or the other. We have lost all that. Which is bad in as much as the moderating influence Christianity might exert on our increasingly lawless and revolutionary parties is bad. But also once you've lost your influence with such institutions, you no longer need to speak as if they are your primary audience. They are not.
Rather, our audience is anyone who will listen and is keen to preserve the neighborliness and broadmindedness of post-war Christian liberalism at its best and healthiest. We are not seeking to work with the parties as they currently exist.
Rather, we are attempting to articulate an idea that is itself compelling and to do so in a way so striking and interesting that we will aid in the rebirth of solidarity. We are not trying to earn a seat at the table with either party. We are attempting to present a vision of the world so compelling that we acquire a moral authority that those parties cannot ignore.
That is the opportunity before us now.
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