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By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
During the 2016 Republican campaign, watching Donald Trump shoulder his way past his more pious rivals for the nomination, I remarked on the platform then known as Twitter: “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”
This apothegm has often been quoted back to me, and this month Compact magazine’s editor, Matthew Schmitz, quoted it in order to offer a critique. My one-liner “captured a widely shared assumption” that Trump’s rise signaled “the birth of an irreligious right animated by white racial grievance,” he wrote. But that’s not how history has played out, Schmitz said:
It is clear now that this assumption was wrong. The old religious right may have suffered a fatal blow in 2016. But what succeeded it was not a post-religious racialist party, as some feared and others hoped. On the contrary: Donald Trump attracted higher rates of support from minorities than had the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. As the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini has noted, between 2012 and 2020, Hispanic support for the G.O.P. increased by 19 points, African American support by 11, and Asian American support by 5. Since Trump’s emergence, the parties have become less — not more — racially polarized.
Meanwhile, religiosity has become a more powerful predictor of voting habits. Evangelicals, Catholics, and Black Protestants all supported Trump at higher rates in 2020 than in 2016, even as Trump’s support fell among atheists and agnostics. Pundits who once warned that Trump’s G.O.P. was preparing to establish white supremacy now are more likely to denounce its ambitions as “Christian nationalist.” Whatever else one makes of this charge, it implies an acknowledgment that a post-religious right has failed to materialize.
All this is drawn from a First Things profile of J.D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, whom Schmitz portrays as a potential spokesman for a new religious populism, distinct from the George W. Bush-era religious right but no less influenced by Christian faith.
I recommend the piece, and I entirely agree with Schmitz that Trump-era conservatism can have a religious face and that relative to expectations in 2015 and 2016, the white-identitarian side of Trump’s political pitch has ended up having less influence on American political alignments than the pan-ethnic and class-based aspects of his appeal. And Trump’s transactional approach to culture-war issues ended up delivering more for the religious right than might have been expected, yielding the stronger alignment in 2020 (and probably 2024) that Schmitz describes.
But when Schmitz says a post-religious right has “failed to materialize” I have to strongly disagree. There are various forms of post-Christian conservatism that are clearly more potent today than they were 10 or 20 years ago — as you would expect in a nation where Christian affiliation and observance have substantially declined and where the Republican Party has been dominated for almost a decade by a man whose personal faith a perspicacious writer once described as a form of Norman Vincent Peale-ian positive thinking in which the Christian residue has “curdled into pagan disdain.” (That writer was Schmitz.)
Here are a few ways that you could categorize those forms. First you might simply note the growing share of nonchurchgoers in the ranks of American conservatives. The unchurched were a big Trump constituency in the 2016 primaries, and they’ve become an increasingly important part of the Republican coalition overall: As Ryan Burge points out, in 2008, 29 percent of Republicans reported that they “seldom” or “never” attended church; by 2022 it was 44 percent.
True, many of these nonattenders are still culturally Christian; Republicans do increasingly well, for instance, with voters who say that religion is very important while rarely showing up on Sunday. And cultural Christianity is not the same thing as paganism or unbelief.
But even there the trend clearly matters: We have a lot of post-1960s experience with the multigenerational conveyor belt leading through nominal or nonpracticing Christianity to “no religious affiliation,” and if your conservative coalition includes fewer and fewer practicing religious believers, you’re witnessing de-Christianization even if not all the nonpracticers have fully left the faith.
A second category is what Matthew Walther, the editor of The Lamp and a contributing writer to Times Opinion, has termed “Barstool conservatism.” The label is a reference to Dave Portnoy’s “Barstool Sports” media mini-empire, and it’s meant to capture the phenomenon of voters moving toward the G.O.P. coalition because they recoil from the moralism of contemporary progressivism, while retaining the liberal-to-libertine personal values that also made them recoil from the moralism of conservative Catholicism and evangelical Christianity in the past.
In Walther’s portrait, the Barstool conservatives are anti-left and anti-woke without being socially conservative by any definition. (“Whatever their opinions might have been 20 years ago, in 2021 these are people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling and whatever Gamergate was about.”) This category might include, for instance, the kind of Midwestern voters who swung to Trump in 2016 over immigration or trade but who would never vote the pro-life side in a referendum — or in 2020, those Hispanic men who swung to Trump out of enthusiasm for his businessman’s persona and rebellion against liberal politesse.
What I’ve just described are broad demographics, but the emerging post-Christian right is also a phenomenon of ideas and influencers and the intelligentsia. You can see this especially among the guru class, the diverse group of right-leaning (and mostly male) media personalities who have built big brands and audiences in the YouTube and podcast era.
Some of these figures are Christian but the most influential ones are more like Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan — interested in biblical religion, but as part of a Jungian or supernatural panoply — or else in the territory you might call neo-Nietzschean, which runs from Andrew Tate at the lowbrow end to our old friend Bronze Age Pervert on the highbrow flank. Like the Barstool conservatives, these kinds of influencers are on the right because they’re anti-woke, anti-liberal and anti-establishment; whatever their attitudes toward Christianity, hostile or curious, theirs is not a religious conservatism under any reasonable definition of the term.
Then, somewhat distinct and somewhat overlapping, there’s what you might call the proto-neoconservatism of the Trump era, involving the various dissidents from progressivism who came out of mainstream liberal institutions, academic and journalistic, and still see themselves as defending some sort of liberalism against enemies to their left and right alike.
This group is big, diverse and complicated. Some of its members will never be right-wing while others are basically already there. (You can identify that line of tension by reading Thomas Chatterton Williams’s profile of the novelist and critic Walter Kirn in The Atlantic; both profiler and subject belong to this broad protoneoconservative camp but Chatterton Williams is critical of just how populist Kirn has gone.) Likewise, some are hostile to organized religion and some are friendlier. (That tension was usefully illustrated at last week’s “Dissident Dialogues,” a New York conference featuring many protoneoconservative figures, which finished up with a debate on religion between the inveterately atheistic Richard Dawkins and the newly Christian Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)
But generally this protoneoconservatism includes a lot more respect for religion as a social technology than it does openness to actual belief, and its members would have a long way to travel to constitute anything like a religious conservatism in the pre-Trump meaning of the term.
Finally, looming over all these debates you have the rightward wing of Silicon Valley, embodied by Elon Musk above all but also Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and others. Thiel is a heterodox Christian but generally this part of the right is the farthest from religion. Yes, it tends to share with religious conservatives some sort of belief in human exceptionalism, at least relative to the more fully transhumanist ideologies on offer in greater Cupertino. But the Silicon Valley right is ready to use just about any means to further the dynamism it desires (e.g., solving the birthrate crisis with polyamory and artificial wombs), with few of the moral constraints that even a pro-growth Christian would regard as necessary.
I think it’s fair to say that Musk and Trump are the two most important figures on the contemporary American right-of-center, and between their respective personae you can see some of the shapes that a fully post-Christian right might take. Which is not to say that we’ll get there: I expect American Christianity to be resilient even in a reduced form, especially resilient as a force within the conservative coalition, and it’s entirely possible that some of what I’m describing as post-Christian or post-religious turns out to be pre-Christian or pre-religious instead — where Hirsi Ali’s conversion is a harbinger, where there’s a “surprising rebirth of belief in God” (to quote the title of a recent book) among heterodox intellectuals, where not just Peterson but even Musk or Rogan or Dawkins himself (why not?) end up swimming in the sea of faith.
But pending that eventuality, you can expect religious conservatives to be constantly negotiating their relationship to the factions I’ve described, dealing with dilemmas like the one they’re currently facing with abortion (where their political leader cannot really be taken seriously as a spokesman for the pro-life cause) and facing various temptations to mute or sacrifice their convictions for the sake of anti-left solidarity.
The point of identifying a post-religious conservatism, then, isn’t to necessarily mark the end of the religious right. It’s to clarify the novel alternatives to liberalism on offer in the current political marketplace and the novel dilemmas that religious conservatism faces in the age of B.A.P. and Rogan, Musk and Trump.
Paul Kingsnorth on the end of England.
Dmitri Alperovitch on why and when Beijing wants Taiwan.
Park MacDougald on the progressive money behind the campus protests.
Matt Zoller Seitz on the genius of Palpatine.
Fintan O’Toole on Henrik Ibsen’s “Jaws.”
Conor Fitzgerald and Aris Roussinos on the return of an Irish right.
— Freddie deBoer, “Progressive Attitudes Towards Sex Are Pretty Damn Incoherent Right Now” (May 6)
I just find it so bizarre, where we are as a culture when it comes to sex — there’s a lot of explicit “sex positivity” married to a society full of people who find sex scary, in a way that’s connected to a broader fear about human experience and its many risks. The result is a culture where a young woman starting an OnlyFans on her 18th birthday and immediately filming herself performing sex acts for cash is seen by many as a matter of feminist empowerment, but where there’s perpetual controversy about whether it’s OK to talk to a stranger on the street. (You know, the reason a lot of us exist, because our parents or grandparents struck up a conversation on the street.) This publication from the University of Pennsylvania reports on “a pervasive shame that straight Gen Z women feel about being attracted to men.” They’re not gay, they’re straight, they’re not rejecting someone else’s attraction, they’re rejecting their own. The mere act of being attracted to the gender to which they are attracted fills them with shame. But also it’s totally not shameful to get into a 50-person orgy with all the members of your extended polycule. Nothing having to do with sex is shameful but sex itself. Desire is shameful. Everything is permitted, except simply existing as a human being with the same carnal desires we’ve shared for 350,000 years.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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