What Is the Future of Social Conservatism?

L ast week, I published a long guest essay in the New York Times arguing that the American Right — following the broader trends in the rest of the country — is secularizing, replacing “an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality” with “questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation.” This ascendant genre of right-wing politics, I wrote, “is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, revolving around race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.” And while — from the traditional social-conservative perspective, at least — there are real concerns to be had about this development, I argued that it also “has the capacity to dramatically expand the Republican tent,” appealing “to a wide range of Americans, many of whom had been put off by the old conservatism’s explicitly religious sheen and don’t quite see themselves as Republicans yet.”

There have been a few understandably critical responses from the Left — most notably, a polemic from the leftist writer John Ganz on his Substack (a version of which appears to have been reprinted in the New Statesman). Ganz’s piece raises a number of worthwhile points but intersperses them with odd pseudo-psychoanalytic hand-waving (“Hochman is probably embarrassed [to] speak about the centrality of these lurid myths on the right”), throws in a funny reference to “young Mr. Hochman in his blazer over there [at] The National Review” (I’m from Portland, Ore., and don’t fit the bow-tie-wearing College Republican prototype), and concludes an otherwise thoughtful essay with a head-scratcher of an “actually, it’s really all just fascism” paragraph.

Ganz’s piece merits a more serious engagement at some point. But I want to focus on the conservative responses today. My colleague Kevin Williamson published an essay that broadly agreed with my analysis of the situation but added a more critical account than the one I offered: The phenomenon I was describing is “a model of emerging right-wing politics that is, after all these years, almost everything that left-wing caricaturists hoped it would be,” Williamson writes. “It offers bigotry for religion, propaganda for education, ‘tradition’ that is only pious camouflage for the political-power-seeking of a self-interested class that understands itself in largely (though not exclusively) racial terms.”

I’m not so sure. I share a lot of Williamson’s misgivings about the moral shallowness of a secular social conservatism, but not on the grounds that the irreligious Right is necessarily bigoted. My impression is that many of the secular right-leaning voters who are flocking to the GOP are motivated by an entirely legitimate set of grievances with the contemporary Left’s assault on American history and culture. The more serious issue, I think, is the possibility that this new cohort’s opposition to so-called “wokeness” is more of an irritable mental gesture than a fully formed political philosophy. As I wrote in the Times:

The disaffected recent converts in the conservative coalition often object to the new left-wing puritanism for the same reason that they objected to its old right-wing counterpart: It prevents them from doing and saying whatever they please, free of social repercussions. That is its own kind of libertinism. Social conservatives, in contrast, do not oppose the enforcement of social norms as such; they oppose the enforcement of left-wing social norms on the grounds that they are the wrong norms.

Rich Lowry’s thoughtful response on the Corner made some clarifying points about the limitations of my analysis, most of which I more or less agree with. He pointed out that old avatars of the religious Right, such as Phyllis Schlafly, “would presumably be largely comfortable with today’s less religiously social conservatism,” and that “evangelicals remain absolutely essential to the conservative coalition,” all of which squares with my understanding of the situation. He went on to write:

Another complication is that some of the architects of the main new post-Trump intellectual current, national conservatism, want to return to the old religiously oriented social-conservative issues and believe that they weren’t fought hard enough, or at all, the first time around.

That makes sense to me — I addressed the so-called “postliberal” intellectuals in one of the closing paragraphs of the piece. But as I argued, this particular cohort is actually out of step with the grassroots energy that I was attempting to describe:

Some have pointed to a new strain of Catholic thought known as postliberalism, championed primarily by Catholic academics such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, as one promising alternative path for the New Right. Thinkers in this tradition want to implement a specifically — and sometimes explicitly — Catholic political order. But the relationship between these intellectuals and the grass-roots energy has always been uneasy. Insofar as there is crossover between the two forms of conservatism, the Catholic postliberals could be understood as intellectual fellow travelers in the Trumpian culture war. But they do not define its ethos, and in some ways, they are at odds with it.

Finally, Hugh Hewitt published a response in the Washington Post arguing that my view of American Christianity was too narrowly political:

What Hochman missed is that religious expression in the public square has been loud for brief and intense periods, but it comes and goes and never approaches a constant. I don’t believe anyone got into their pew or left it because of politics, or vice versa. There is very little consensus within American Christianity on much of anything! Any attempt to impose a political order on the spiritual landscape is doomed; we are a country that tends to splinter. Too often, we over-generalize — currently, the fashion is to call any Christian who is not a Democrat a “Christian nationalist.” That lens is grossly distorted. It doesn’t even work on a grossly simplified basis.

Hewitt goes on to say, “If you are a close observer of both faith and politics, try your best to understand that these two realms are different worlds and the crossover you see because of some very rare voices is an exception, not the rule.” That’s well said. But I don’t think those nuances change the fact that Christianity and movement conservatism have been inextricably tied to one another for at least a half century — and that the untying of the two will inevitably change the political landscape on the right. And contrary to Hewitt’s suggestion, conservative Christian denominations have been subject to political pressures in ways that have driven some congregants from the pews. Interestingly enough, some studies suggest that the political mobilization of the religious Right actually helped drive the GOP base’s secularization: In 2017, researchers found that the “politics of the Christian Right have driven up rates of exit from organized religion and reduced levels of religiosity.” But “instead of driving out Democrats across the board,” the researchers wrote, “we find that the Christian Right drives out those who disagree with the movement and are likely to experience disagreement in their congregations — that is, evangelical Republicans.”

This issue, and its various implications, won’t be disappearing anytime soon. Regardless of specific disagreements here and there, I’m humbled by the thoughtful responses to my piece — particularly as so many of them have come from conservative thinkers whom I have long admired.