The Religious Right Gives Way to the Nonreligious Right

The old priorities of the Christian right as exemplified by the Moral Majority–prayer in school, America as a Christian nation,  electing Christians to public office, the moral character of our leaders, reining in sexual permissiveness–can hardly be found in today’s conservatism.  Only abortion is still an issue, with Christians retreating into the defense of religious liberty.

Today’s new right is concerned instead with immigration, parental rights, patriotism, and an over-all opposition to “woke” progressivism.  But these conservatives are mostly fine with homosexuality, extra-marital sex, and pornography.  They have no interest in trying to roll back same-sex marriage.  Indeed, 55% of Republicans believe in it.  They have little interest in religion–indeed, some are militantly against it.  As for promoting moral character, the nonreligious conservatives rebel against every kind of moralism–which they associate with politically-correct, censorious, self-righteous woke progressives!

Christians may share these concerns and vote along with these new conservatives, but these issues aren’t really connected to their religious beliefs.  Hochman writes,

The conservative political project is no longer specifically Christian. That may seem strange to say at a moment when a mostly Catholic conservative majority on the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. But a reversal of the landmark 1973 ruling would be more of a last gasp than a sign of strength for the religious right. It’s hard to imagine today’s culture warriors taking any interest in the 1950s push for a Christian amendment to the Constitution, for example. Instead of an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality, the new coalition is focused on questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation. Although it enjoys the support of most Republican Christians who formed the electoral backbone of the old Moral Majority, it is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, revolving around race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.

The decline in church affiliation applies not only to Democrats but also to Republicans and conservatives.  Though Christian conservatives voted for Trump, his strongest support came from the new nonreligious right:

While President Donald Trump delivered on a number of religious conservative priorities — most notably, appointing enough conservative justices to the Supreme Court to cobble together a likely majority of anti-Roe votes — he is a lifelong pro-choicer and sexual libertine who made explicit appeals to gay and lesbian voters on the 2016 campaign trail and was the first openly pro-same-sex-marriage candidate to win the presidency. . . .

The decline in Republican church membership directly coincides with the rise of Mr. Trump. As Timothy P. Carney found in 2019, the voters who went for Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary were far more secular than the religious right: In the 2016 G.O.P. primaries, Mr. Trump won only about 32 percent of voters who went to church more than once a week. In contrast, he secured about half of those who went “a few times a year,” 55 percent of those who “seldom” attend and 62 percent of Republicans who never go to church. In other words, Mr. Carney wrote, “every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support, and vice versa.”

Meanwhile, the moral roles have been reversed, as woke progressives have become the new Puritans, and the new conservatives have become the rebels to social conventions:

Whereas the old Christian conservatism was about defending an old order, the new social conservatism is about overthrowing a new one. The transformation of the right is a direct response to a shift on the left. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the G.O.P. was the party of the traditional moral order, many individualists, rebels and eccentrics found themselves aligned with progressives. Today the reverse is true. The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of convention. Contemporary social pieties are distinctly left wing, and progressives enforce them with at least as much moral ardor as the most zealous members of the religious right.

Hochman backs all of this up with an abundance of evidence and describes the so-called “Middle American Radicals” (M.A.R.s) who have taken up the mantle of this non-religious brand of conservatism.  He says that this kind of conservatism resonates strongly with a wide range of Americans, including Blacks and Hispanics, and that it is capable of actually winning in American politics.

He regrets the decline of the Christian influence, which he said softened the hard edges of conservatism, bringing in more compassion to immigrants and the poor.  Christians will likely be supportive of the non-religious right, which might give them some victories on issues they also care about–such as religious liberty and countering “woke” ideologies about race and transgenderism–but they will be “partners, rather than leaders, in the coalition. That may be the best thing they can hope for in a rapidly secularizing country.”

What do you think of this?  Is he right?

Might this be a healthy, two-kingdoms kind of development for Christians to focus on secular issues in their politics, rather than religious ones?

Or might the dominance of the non-religious right drive Christians out of the Republican party, to political quietism or even, eventually, to a post-Roe Democratic party, where, Hochman shows, they used to be?

Photo:  Nate Hochman, screenshot from YouTube