Culture Wars: New Opportunity for the Right

At first blush, Indiana’s 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) seemed like an uncontroversial initiative. Nineteen other states had passed similar religious-freedom bills in previous years, largely without incident. But when the Hoosier State RFRA incurred the ire of LGBT activists and a left-leaning national media, powerful business interests began to threaten boycotts. In the face of that pressure, the Republican legislature and then-governor Mike Pence reversed course: Rather than protect the conscience rights of its religious population, Indiana went so far as to explicitly write sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) into state anti-discrimination law. The “fixed” RFRA sailed through the Republican-supermajority legislature and was signed into law by Pence.

For many social conservatives, the saga pointed to the decline of the religious Right. In First Things, Patrick Deneen argued that the Indiana RFRA’s defeat signaled the rise of a new “power elite” — a class of political and corporate leaders with a marked hostility to traditional cultural views: “The response to Indiana’s RFRA law shows very clearly that corporations have joined forces with Republicans on economic matters and Democrats on social ones,” he wrote. Since then, the culture war “has moved from a combat phase to a life-under-occupation period,” Rod Dreher wrote in a pessimistic 2019 retrospective. “Big business stayed out of the culture war for half a century, reckoning sensibly enough that political controversy is bad for sales. But in 2015, that changed radically.”

About the Author

Nate Hochman

Nate Hochman was a staff writer at National Review.

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At first blush, Indiana’s 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) seemed like an uncontroversial initiative. Nineteen other states had passed similar religious-freedom bills in previous years, largely without incident. But when the Hoosier State RFRA incurred the ire of LGBT activists and a left-leaning national media, powerful business interests began to threaten boycotts. In the face of that pressure, the Republican legislature and then-governor Mike Pence reversed course: Rather than protect the conscience rights of its religious population, Indiana went so far as to explicitly write sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) into state anti-discrimination law. The “fixed” RFRA sailed through the Republican-supermajority legislature and was signed into law by Pence.

For many social conservatives, the saga pointed to the decline of the religious Right. In First Things, Patrick Deneen argued that the Indiana RFRA’s defeat signaled the rise of a new “power elite” — a class of political and corporate leaders with a marked hostility to traditional cultural views: “The response to Indiana’s RFRA law shows very clearly that corporations have joined forces with Republicans on economic matters and Democrats on social ones,” he wrote. Since then, the culture war “has moved from a combat phase to a life-under-occupation period,” Rod Dreher wrote in a pessimistic 2019 retrospective. “Big business stayed out of the culture war for half a century, reckoning sensibly enough that political controversy is bad for sales. But in 2015, that changed radically.”