Cultural Influence, Political Decline

No prizes for discerning the religious publishing trend of Fall 2024. Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith; American Christian Nationalism: Neither American Nor Christian; The Crisis of Christian Nationalism; Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America. And—though this would presumably be bad news for the market in scaring the pants off progressive-minded book-buyers—How to End Christian Nationalism. 

First Things readers will already know, from Kenneth L. Woodward’s demolition job in the May issue, just how scant is the evidence for a Christian-nationalist fifth column. But what’s also striking about this ongoing panic is that it ignores the terrain where Christianity actually is advancing. As religion loses its political influence, it has gained in intellectual and cultural salience. If you are alarmed that Christianity is “taking over,” you should look everywhere except the ballot box.

At the turn of the century, sensible politicians at least paid lip service to Christianity. You had to worry about the bishops. John Paul II was loved for defeating communism or hated for denouncing condoms, but nobody doubted his influence. Barack Obama opposed gay marriage “as a Christian.” When President Bartlet put those Bible-bashers in their place in the first episode of The West Wing, it was, like the rest of the show, a cathartic fantasy: At last, we can just shove those awful people aside and get on with governing! 

In the end, it wasn’t even that hard. This year’s presidential election pits a leading harasser of the Church against a man who talks to Christians as though they were kindergarten pupils. My own country has just elected its first openly atheist prime minister without anyone particularly caring. 

But look at another timeline. Fifteen years ago, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a Bertrand Russell-reading atheist, Paul Kingsnorth was an anti-capitalist campaigner with only the mildest stirrings of curiosity about the supernatural, JD Vance was an expert in “all the ways in which C. S. Lewis was a moron,” and Matthew Crawford was the guy who had written a smart book about working with your hands. 

What’s noticeable isn’t just that these figures have converted, but how publicly they have done it. Instead of mumbling about their “personal faith,” they have frankly come forward with their stories, inviting an argument. 

And the argument has not really come. For at the same time as Christianity has gained in intellectual confidence, non-Christian voices, from the highbrow to the populist, have found themselves looking on with a certain envy. The communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek now advocates “Christian atheism.” The socialist quarterly Jacobin devotes an almost reverential issue to the theme of “religion.” The historian Tom Holland finds his skepticism rather shaken after being cured of cancer through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The onetime atheist Joe Rogan tells his listeners that the world “needs Jesus,” while Elon Musk turns out to be a “big believer in the principles of Christianity.” As Francis Young recently noted, even academia is conquering its squeamishness about supernatural thinking. 

Some of this is a response to a new insecurity about the West. The stunning advances of The Thing, the repeated failures of radical politics, and the fragmenting global order force even the secular-minded to look for something to hold onto. People watched Notre-Dame in flames and saw their civilization in the balance. Holland’s Dominion, by tracing modern values to first-century Palestine as opposed to eighteenth-century Paris, made the point in style.  

Of course, intellectual revival is the easy bit. The half-century before Vatican II produced a colossal harvest of Catholic theologians, philosophers, activists, journalists, architects, poets, and novelists. But the sixties earthquake revealed just how little they had managed to secure the foundations of the faith. 

Vance himself illustrates both sides of the story. Nobody honestly doubts his intelligence. His conversion story is a formidable challenge to secular assumptions. Yet in politics he has to carefully downplay his weird theological preoccupations (being opposed to killing babies, for instance) in order to get anywhere.  

Should it make one optimistic to see Christianity gaining cultural influence while losing political power? I don’t know. But it should do wonders for one’s faith. When I was growing up, belief still looked like an intellectual sideshow. If there is a true religion, it is one that even after two thousand years can still spring an almighty surprise. 

Dan Hitchens is a senior editor at First Things. 

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Image by Milliped, provided by Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.