Walter Russell Mead has been sparring with Andrew Sullivan on the subject of “Christianists,” and he makes an important point that social liberals often miss:

On a couple of issues — abortion comes to mind — the social policy consensus is creeping a bit to the right, but generally speaking the Christian right today stands for positions that were considered fairly liberal not all that long ago. Liquor by the drink, gambling, lesbian and gay equal rights, premarital sex, birth control, pornography, interracial marriage: on a whole variety of issues, some noble and important, some hedonistic and perhaps a bit more questionable, the United States has moved steadily and inexorably toward a more permissive and open stance.
The Christian right has often fought that trend, but over time the right moves left as the center moves on. Divorcees were once shunned outside a handful of big cities in this country and many states made divorce very difficult to get; these days, the right worries about keeping its own marriages intact more than about interfering with other peoples’ lives.
The Left has been winning most of the cultural arguments, but its fear of the Right grows even as the country continues by and large to move culturally toward tolerance and acceptance of diversity. My guess is that this is due to the country’s equally pronounced drift toward the Right on a number of political and economic issues. New Deal values and suspicion of unfettered free markets were much more widespread in those far off halcyon days when I first attended the still-segregated Pundit Elementary School: this was a much more collectivist country in 1958 than it is today.
If anything, what we are seeing is the continued triumph of individualism in American life — a force before which both the Christian Right and the Secular Left must bend. The Right sees the advance of individualism and fears that all is lost, that the socialists are about to take over; the Left sees the rise of libertarian individualism in economic life and policy and fears that this is part of an impending total triumph of the Right.
The biggest victory for the Right in the culture wars has been the fight over guns and gun control: the libertarian principle won out there, as it wins out in the gay rights question. But where the Right or the Left seeks to limit individual autonomy in either economic life, sexual expression (among consenting adults), thought or the arts, the cause of liberty tends to win.
Like virtually everyone in the United States, I find that this national tendency toward an ever greater, ever more radical individualism is not without problems. Even as I revel in some aspects of our increasingly free social life, other aspects of it give me pause. But this great human movement toward less external constraint on individual freedom seems to be the essence of American life. It is the mighty Mississippi River flowing down our national history, fed by tributaries from its right and left banks, gathering force and volume in its irresistible progress from colonial times right up through the end this very week of DADT. That river will roll on, swamping teacher unions trying to prop up the old school bureaucracies, drowning religious groups fighting issues like gay rights. The trend toward greater individual choice is too deep, too strong, too wide to be dammed (or damned, for that matter).

One might disagree with some of the particulars of Mead’s telling of recent American social history, which closely resembles that of Brink Lindsey in his excellent The Age of Abundance, but I think that there’s a lot of truth in it.