It is a story well known within conservatism. In his autobiography Witness, Whittaker Chambers recounted that staring at his infant daughter’s ear while feeding her one morning provoked a crisis, ending his atheism. The ear, Chambers reflected, evidenced a design that a materialist worldview such as communism, the worldview that was his own, could not explain. The appearance of design sparked his consideration of a designer: God. Chambers, at the time a spy for the Soviet Union and later a contributor to National Review, would eventually become a Christian.

It is no coincidence that his turn toward theism coincided with his abandonment of communism. Chambers, with his first-rate intellect, had to have understood the clashing irreconcilability of opposites and recognized that the logic of religious conversion was also a prelude to his conversion to conservatism. This episode is significant not only in highlighting communism’s defects and demise but also in explaining the relationship between God and conservatism.

For Chambers and countless others fascinated by the theo-political question of relating God to political order, Christian dogma is suffused with political consequences. If we are not self-creating creatures, we cannot create ourselves or society in our own image but should act to align ourselves with the Creator’s intentions. We are called to recognize, protect, and honor God’s creational design. “Aware that they are created, people should acknowledge that they owe their very being and everything they have to the Creator,” philosopher and theologian Germain Grisez observed. “So, they should be grateful to him. Harmony with this transcendent source of meaning and value is one of the basic human goods.”

If our existence is due to divine forces outside of ourselves, autonomy is not humanity’s greatest political need. Instead, self-ordering and political ordering around the divine constitute the summum bonum of human existence. While conservatives disagree with one another on the extent to which the government is responsible for directing man to his ultimate good, a failure to recognize the spiritual nature of man will leave humans destitute and bereft of the life-giving, life-sustaining, and life-directing purposes for which they were created. Chambers’s realization is one that contemporary conservatism must not forget if it wishes to remain true to its history: Theism is at the core of the conservative vision, and modern conservatism must champion the necessity of God as the foundation for political reflection.

Religion, then, is necessarily personal and political. Communism could not explain the complexity of the ear, while theism and Christianity, for Chambers, could. They could also explain the phenomenological experiences of existence and account for cosmic justice, truth, and order — all necessary political ingredients that find historical resonance in the conservative tradition. Christianity provides the social order with what someone like the non-Christian political theorist Václav Havel longed for but could not find — a “cosmic anchoring,” the notion of an ultimate foundation that orders existence and that political orders cannot supply on their own. Conservatism has never been synonymous with Christianity alone, to be sure, but conservatism’s insistence on what Thomas Sowell calls a “constrained” understanding of the universe, one according to which reality is not endlessly malleable, has given conservatism a religious predilection.

It hardly needs rehearsing just how central the notion of the divine is in the history of conservatism. The central tradition, after all, is roundly theistic. Russell Kirk stated that the first canon of conservatism was the “belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead.” To summarize another Kirk comment, man’s chief problems merely surface as political dilemmas. Underneath political externalities and contingencies are questions of a spiritual substratum: Who are we? What is true, good, and beautiful? What is the goal of the civitas? Conservatism has answered by insisting that the spiritual nature of man requires not merely the external adornments and temporal fixations of political order but the interior renovation of the soul. Transcendence and the natural law are thus the foundations of any individual or institution that would don the label “conservative.” We are, after all, trying to conserve something — the truths that anchor the soul and build civilization.

If demographics are destiny and America is growing more secular nationally, however, what does that portend for conservatism more narrowly? It cannot be anything good for the nation or conservatism. The husk of conservatism will not survive if the kernel of transcendence is eclipsed by the temporal and material alone.

Consider the release in 2023 of the essay “Freedom Conservativism: A Statement of Principles.” Billed as an heir to the 1960 Sharon Statement (an effort spearheaded by William F. Buckley Jr.) and as an alternative to the rise of “national conservatism,” the statement adumbrates an approach that sounds more libertarian than historically conservative. It is worth stressing that the statement is, in many ways, laudable. But what it says is not as problematic as what it omits. Whereas the Sharon Statement grounded its political convictions in “eternal truths,” the Freedom Conservatism Statement makes no mention of any divine foundation for the truths that it posits. It asserts many moral truths and moral oughts apart from any theistic foundation that would make them obligatory.

The problem is that without God, blunt assertions of obligation are just propositions. God is ultimately necessary to give those assertions the sort of directing authority that makes them truly intelligible, binding, and good. Of course, human beings are free to reject God. For this reason, the Freedom Conservatism Statement must be seen, at best, as a step-heir to the Sharon Statement. To borrow Heinrich Rommen’s description, the statement appears intentionally “metaphysicophobic” — it avoids matters of ultimate reality. Admirations aside, an allergy to transcendence in the name of conservative coalition-building is not sustainable in the late hour of modern American decadence. Nothing short of civilization’s acknowledgment of God will cure us of our vapidity and debauchery. Eventually, a nontheistic conservatism that exists in midair and by its own lights will yield to every moral demand that progressivism makes. This is already under way.

If God does not play a more prominent role in our conservatism, the Republican Party’s platform in 2044 will resemble the modern-day Democratic platform. Shorn of transcendence, secular conservatism is progressivism driving at the speed limit. All coherent and consistent limiting principles are gone. If modern conservatism understands the human person no differently than the typical Darwinist does, we will have ceded questions of the soul, dignity, and rights to the decaying forces of materialism and, later, barbarism. None of this should suggest, of course, that the mere presence of theism resolves all political problems or prevents abuses in God’s name from occurring. Nazism’s commingling with theology is proof enough that God’s invocation in political debates does not restrain evil. Theists should guard against the temptation to reduce God to the whims of nationalist and tribal impulses.

The precincts of conservatism are many, but there is no coherent or consistent conservatism without theism. Beyond internecine debates about conservatism, how much does nontheism affect questions of civilizational order more broadly? Political philosophies are reducible to two: Vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people as the voice of God), or Vox Dei (the voice of God itself). Either these will be harmonized — as when the American founding and the conservative tradition ingeniously intertwined them into a regime of ordered liberty — or they will be set in contrast, resulting in what Edmund Burke evocatively called the “dust and powder of individuality.” Human society will be built from the assumptions and will of either demos (the people) or Theos (God). The tyranny of individual impulse can be just as authoritarian as any collectivist regime. We will be either Burkeans, who appreciate and appropriate the givenness of order for rewarding ends discerned through custom and tradition, or Rousseaueans, who insist that the “general will” of human consent is the essence of public order. One cannot exist without supplanting the other. Conservatism must choose wisely. A theistic conservatism can acknowledge the role of custom, prudence, and tradition as each is worked out according to timeless principles and eternal truths.

Without God as the authorizing force, how can political communities account for what is required for their survival and thriving? Where can an account of morality, origins, and destiny come from, apart from God? It requires God. We will be a people who choose to be ruled by a righteousness that emanates from outside ourselves, or we will be ruled by raw majorities, changing conventions, and, inevitably, force. As Alexis de Tocqueville so rightly foresaw looking at the American experiment: “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”

So much of the intellectual energy in conservatism nowadays is coming from religiously accented corners. Though there are significant questions and qualms about the resurgent interests in Catholic integralism and Protestantism’s “Christian nationalism” (depending on how they are defined), both movements correctly see the need for political orders to ask more-profound questions about their purpose — something deeper than debates about tax brackets and educational choice.

I write as a Christian theologian and know that the audience for this essay likely includes those who do not share my own convictions. American conservatives can debate the identity of the God we believe is necessary to secure our liberties; what we cannot do without impaling conservatism’s future viability is dispute God’s existence and relevance.

God is essential to account for conservatism, but conservative principles about God’s existence do not, then, give us license to displace all those whose views about God do not agree with our own. Belief in God must be buffered by our own finitude. The existence of God and the identity of God in modern conservatism are separate questions that disparate traditions will answer differently according to their views on revelation. We should call for a theocentric conservatism but do so with humility, which is why the First Amendment’s commitment to religious liberty matters as much for conservatism as it does for America more broadly. The theocons should not be looking to displace the irreligious conservatives even as we challenge the consistency of their worldview.

Nevertheless, we should be clear-eyed about the risk of sounding tendentious: Atheistic conservatism will never suffice in reconciling political order with the foundations it needs for long-term stability. The threats facing our civilization require a solution that the Constitution and libertarianism cannot provide alone. Americans do not need additional liberties or greater trust in the rule of law to understand that the problems in America are problems of the soul. Consider the new social taxonomy referred to as “deaths of despair.” In 2023, the U.S. surgeon general released a report warning of the social costs to America’s “loneliness epidemic.” So miserable are Americans that we are dying not only from disease but from the loss of meaning. Mental-health challenges at a historic level beset our nation, alongside an epidemic of opioids that numb us to the ephemerality of our pleasures and to the feeling that our existence is banal. The family is in a state of free fall, while the sexual revolution metastasizes into a cultural catastrophe the likes of which we have not seen since Roman antiquity. As Louise Perry deftly observed in a recent essay in First Things, Western culture is repaganizing, and one marker of paganism is the degradation of the human person. If the only answer that secular conservatism can provide is enhancement of speech protections and the slashing of marginal tax rates, not only should we expect to lose citizens to ideologies that promise escape from despair or inordinate preoccupation with “identity,” but we will deserve to lose, too.

Conservatism is ripe for a religious awakening. It is happening, too. Conservative intellectuals such as Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, and Jordan Peterson are all increasingly speaking the language of faith, even if not yet proclaiming a personal commitment themselves. Most recently, famed writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced her conversion to Christianity from atheism because of its ability to reconcile what she sees as the most urgent need of the hour: the unity of the personal and the political. “I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive,” she poignantly wrote. “Atheism failed to answer a simple question: What is the meaning and purpose of life?”

Hirsi Ali’s testimony is fascinating because it reveals a person who understands that while human nature provides useful guideposts to live by, without transcendence, a nihilistic impulse exists that can lead one to conclude that those guideposts are, ultimately, futile. An admission such as this captures what Kirk said about humanity’s greatest need being spiritual in nature. As Augustine taught, the human person by nature is religious, Homo religiosus, and our religious nature cries out for satisfaction — even in those who do not consider themselves religious. Humans seek after the arrangements that complete them. They will arrive at those truthfully or through counterfeits. Fundamentally, politics must seek arrangements that honor a true account of human nature. Faith is resilient and always will be despite the cultured despisers’ insistence that America’s future belongs to secularism.

As progressivism continues to hollow out and desecrate individuals and civilizations through its lies and purposeless haze, I expect more conversions to occur. Despite our hyperconnectivity and material plenty, raw, secular rage creates an atmosphere in which individuals are confronted simultaneously with abundance and emptiness.

But even more practically, I have never seen someone who converted to Christianity, genuinely converted, and became a progressive. A friend of mine once recounted how her non-Christian days were marked by feminist putsches and ardent pro-choice activism. Her conversion made her love the natural complementarity of husband and wife as well as the dignity of the unborn child. Her Christianity made her a conservative because Christianity champions metaphysical order. The converse is also true: While I am content to see atheists considering themselves conservative, they should be confronted with the stark reality that there is inconsistency and contradiction in their choosing to self-identify as they have.

In an address in 1983, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn attributed the bloodshed of the Russian Revolution and its 60 million deaths to one monocausal reality: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Let that not be said of conservatives, that we forgot Him, only to forget ourselves, too.