There have been many ebbs and flows in conservatism over the last six and one-half decades, many passages through optimism and despair, but one great constant has been the sense that the Right is losing, or has lost, what we now call the “culture wars.” This sense of failure refers to many different kinds of battles, from the legal struggle over so-called social issues to conflicts within the academy to shifts in how Ameri­cans mate and marry and have kids. But seeing the root of “culture” in “cult” is a useful way to get to the root of what conservatives feel themselves to have lost across the last three generations: an American society that for all its debates and disagreements — even unto civil war — assumed a shared biblical vision, a Christian common ground.

National Review was founded just as that common ground began to collapse, in the last days of the post–World War II religious revival, when phrases such as “Judeo-Christian” and “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” de­scribed a religious center that had expanded beyond its Protestant origins while retaining, seemingly, a certain coherence and culture-shaping heft. The subsequent rise of movement conservatism proceeded in parallel with the crack-up of that center’s still-Protestant core — in part under blows from the secular clerisy, notably the Supreme Court’s decisions on school prayer, but mostly from internal problems, a crisis of Protestant belief.

The best book to read on that crisis is a work of fiction rather than theology or sociology: Martin Gardner’s 1971 semi-autobiographical novel The Flight of Peter Fromm. Its titular protagonist grows up as a Pentecostalist in Oklahoma and comes as a seminarian to the University of Chicago, where he gradually loses his faith as he moves through different theological way stations — a flirtation with Catholi­cism, engagement with the Tillichian and Niebuhrian forms of mainline Protestant­ism, and finally a crisis as he realizes how completely evasive mid-century Christian theology has become on fundamental questions such as the divinity of Jesus. (The protagonist on Niebuhr: “He tapped his finger on the book’s brown cloth cover and said angrily: ‘Can you imagine this? There are six hundred pages here. It’s a full statement of the theology of America’s most famous Protestant thinker. How many references do you suppose there are to the Resurrection of Christ? . . . Not one! Not a single one!’”) In the end, Fromm retains a religious impulse, a theistic belief, but his practice of Protestantism evaporates — much as it did all across highly educated America in the span of just 20 or 30 years.

Its place was filled by what we call “cultural liberalism” — which is less a clearly defined worldview than a shifting set of commitments, ranging from Hefnerian libertinism to moralistic feminism, from liberal and radical refashionings of biblical religion to hard-Darwinian materialisms to pantheistic spiritualities, that are united mostly by not being traditional Christianity or traditionalism in any form.

Meanwhile, what vitality re­mained in the remnants of the Christian or Judeo-Christian consensus was in groups that had been on its fringes, partially integrated after spending many years as the subject of mainline Protestant persecution or dis­dain: conservative Catholics, Evangeli­cal Prot­es­tants, Conserva­tive and Orthodox Jews, Mormons, and even Anabaptists.

So one way to see the culture wars that followed is as an attempt by people on the edges of the previous consensus to construct a new one in its rubble — Catholic-Evangelical-Jew instead of Protestant-Catholic-Jew; right-leaning instead of centrist or liberal, but capacious enough and appealing enough to displace cultural liberalism, either by building a counter-establishment or by retaking the great institutions of American culture from within.

This project succeeded in preserving conservative forms of religion: American faith, even after so many waves of secularization, still retains large numbers and a zealous core. But as a project of expansion and reconquest, it conspicuously failed. After an arguable high tide in the years of John Paul II Catho­licism and George W. Bush’s Evangelical presidency, the project’s more ambitious goals collapsed, its beachheads in elite culture weakened, its own institutions fell into scandal or theological civil war, and the country moved in a more overtly post-Christian direction overall.

Meanwhile, out of the complex currents of cultural liberalism, a more intense form of anti-traditionalism has recently emerged — itself a sort of successor to the lost Protestant establishment, with the Christian doctrine shorn away but with a renewed moral zeal, an extremely detailed blueprint for social and political relations, and a revival of the old establishment’s hostility to more-disreputable (meaning Catholic and Evangelical and even Jewish) forms of faith.

This new, “awokened” progressivism has not yet won the culture war itself: Its power is still concentrated in the intelligentsia, its worldview has all kinds of incoherencies, and it risks alienating many of the groups it purports to serve. But it already enjoys a cultural influence and institutional power that over decades of effort has always been outside religious conservatism’s reach.

You can see the great intra-Christian debate on the right during the Trump era, the famous Sohrab Ahmari–David French battle, as an attempt to figure out how to deal with this reality — with Ahmari counseling a renewed attempt to use government’s power over culture to seize the ground that the prior iterations of Catholic-Evangelical-Jew failed to claim and hold, and French offering the alternative hope of pluralism and peaceful coexistence in a country without any clear religious center, any culturally established faith.

The problem with French’s prescription is that pluralism depends on decentralized institutions, and the centralizing forces in American institutional life right now — in media, education, politics — are extremely difficult to resist. Meanwhile American social life is atomizing in many ways, and local life especially — and that pull and push means that structurally the country almost seems to want a new religious center, a magnet to pull our lonely individual selves back together, to forge community and a sense of the common good in the only smithies still in operation.

But the difficulty with Ahmari’s prescription is that most of the people who work in those national smithies simply prefer woke ideas to traditional religious ones, or at least still tilt away from anything resembling cultural conservatism when pressed to choose a side. I find traditional Christianity more coherent and plausible and belief-inspiring than secular liberalism or woke-progressive zeal. But I have also seen enough in my career as a professional arguer to doubt that the more-effective use of judicial or admini­strative power will in­duce a critical mass of culture-workers and culture-shapers to see the world my way.

Ultimately, conservatives can’t hope to win the culture war until large numbers of elites begin to make the Peter Fromm movement in reverse, abandoning the certainties of progressivism and growing frustrated with the high agnosticism of liberalism, and finding in the old-time religion made new a place where they can rest. And to the extent that conservative arguments about the culture war seem polarized between Saint Benedict and Constantine, be­tween the mona­stery and the crusade, perhaps the synthesis, the change of fortune, will arrive when God sends America a Saint Paul.