Part of their vision is correct. A more fully Christian politics would be a powerful witness for the faith. Political power can lay the social foundations for religious growth. And a healthy church inevitably generates a “cultural Christianity” that draws in cynical and halfhearted figures as well as true believers.

But when the church itself is unhealthy or poorly led, a plan to start its revitalization with secular political actors and cultural Christianity — with Donald Trump and Eric Zemmour, presumably — seems destined for disappointment.

And here I think the analogy to the new progressivism especially fails. What gets called “wokeness” is particularly powerful among elites, yes, but the shift in attitudes on, say, racism is broader than that; if similar numbers of previously secular Americans were suddenly endorsing Christian doctrine we would rightly call it a revival. Well before it began to impose itself on the doubtful and reluctant, the new progressivism ascended — first within the church-like structures of academia, and then in liberal culture more broadly — precisely because it had conviction on its side, as against the more careerist and soulless aspects of liberal meritocracy.

Social justice activists did not triumph, in other words, by first getting an opportunistically woke politician elected president and having her impose their doctrines by fiat. Their cultural advance has had political assistance, but it began with that most ancient power — the power of belief.

Which is also how Christian renewal has usually proceeded in the past. The politically powerful play a part, the half-believing come along, but it was the Dominicans and Franciscans who made the High Middle Ages, the Jesuits who drove the Counter-Reformation, the apostles and martyrs who spread the faith before Roman emperors adopted it.

It’s been that way from the very start. Kings eventually bowed before the crucifix, but in the worlds of the wisest Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, “the most efficacious argument” for Christ’s divinity is that “without the support of the secular power he has changed the whole world.”

This is completely correct, in my view. If you’ve been reading me for long enough, you know that around 2005, when the newly re-elected Evangelical Republican president and the GOP majority in Congress could not get through the Senate and send to the states an amendment that would enshrine traditional marriage (that is, one man + one woman, exclusively) in the Constitution, even though the pro-trad marriage position was popular at the time (59 percent opposed same-sex marriage) — well, that’s when I knew that the cause was lost. Elite culture, even elite Republican culture, had already flipped to the pro-gay side, and the propaganda was unstoppable. It was around this time that I had a conversation with a young, churchgoing Republican colleague at the Dallas Morning News, who said that I was wrong to complain that our newspaper was biased in its coverage of the same-sex marriage issue. Of course we were, he said, and that’s a good thing.

“If we were in the Civil Rights era, would you expect us to give fair and balanced coverage to the KKK?” he asked. He wasn’t kidding. This was also a turning point for me, because I knew that the fix was completely in on the media side, and that it would not be possible for trads to get a fair hearing, or even to be treated as people who were wrong, but who had a point worth discussing.

Back then, I wrote a lot about how Christians should read the signs of the times, and forget winning this war, instead focusing all our time and resources on building strong religious liberty defenses around ourselves and our institutions. A lot of fellow conservatives called me a cheese-eating surrender monkey over that. Hadn’t I seen the polls? they would say. Our cause is popular! Yes, it was popular, but it didn’t take a prophet to recognize how shallow and weak that popularity was. Same-sex marriage became the law of the land in large part because its advocates correctly grasped that they were appealing to what Americans had already come to believe about marriage, about the human person, and sexuality. The battle for traditional marriage had been lost during the Sexual Revolution; it took fifty years, though, for the effect of that loss to shatter the glass barrier protecting traditional marriage from the revolutionaries. Now the revolutionaries were like my Millennial colleague: normie Republicans who go to church.

Today, 70 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, favor same-sex marriage. It’s not even a meaningful political issue anymore. I would not figure a politician’s position on same-sex marriage into whether or not I would vote for him, because that issue is settled. I am more interested in the politician’s view on transgender rights, and on their view of religious liberty when it conflicts with LGBT rights claims. Marriage is over. I wish it weren’t the case, but we have to deal with reality.

Same-sex marriage triumphed because America is a less Christian nation than it once was. Put another way, we get the politics we have now because the faith has been in decline for decades. Sociologist of religion Christian Smith, back in 2005, published his first book about the woebegone state of Biblical and traditional Christianity, which he argues had declined in favor of a pseudo-Christianity he christened “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”. MTD rejects dogmatic Christianity in favor of a touchy-feely, vague sentimentality that teaches that God wants us all to be happy, so whatever makes you happy is fine, as long as you are nice.

If you want to see a conservative version of MTD at work, listen to the rambling mess of a talk Donald Trump gave at First Baptist Dallas yesterday. They were thrilled to have him. He began by saying he wasn’t going to read the speech prepared for him, but that he preferred to speak “from the heart.” He went on to speak about how unfair the media was to him, and about MAGA. In other words, he spoke about his true god: himself. Then he made a stab at reading from the prepared text, which had a few words in it about Jesus. Watch for yourself; I’ve cued it to the beginning of Trump’s speech:

Now, I don’t have any problem with Christians voting for Trump as a matter of self-protection, given the alternative. But come on, can anybody really claim that Trump’s presidency brought more Americans to the faith, or to a stronger Christian commitment? If the next GOP standard-bearer is a saintly man or woman, I still don’t think that it will make a meaningful difference one way or the other to the faith. Who looks to politicians as examples of religious leadership?

Hungary’s Viktor Orban is a practicing Calvinist (20 percent of Hungarians are Calvinists), but he has a much more realistic concept of the relationship between politics and faith. I can’t find the source for the quote, but I read an interview with him in which he said that the best a political leader can do is to create the conditions under which faith might flourish — but he can’t make it happen. This seems wise. I believe Orban is doing as good a job as can be expected, trying to protect religious belief from the forces that undermine it, but this is not something that can be commanded or legislated. As Douthat points out in his column, wokeness triumphed because a sufficient number of people believed in it, or at least had lost real faith in the principles that would have given them the courage to stand up to it. The churches — all of them — have done a poor job catechizing and discipling their people over the last fifty years. Among US Catholics, for example, about 70 percent don’t believe that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist — which is staggering! If people have lost the faith, how can they be commanded, or even just nudged hard, by the state to believe again?

Don’t misunderstand me: I would vote, and will vote, for the anti-woke politician in any given election. But I don’t believe that will have much to do with whether or not the Christian faith flourishes, except in the narrow case of not persecuting churches and religious schools. That’s not nothing! But it’s not remotely enough to pull Christianity in the West out of its decline.

Leaving aside the situation Douthat observes with regard to the feeble state of the churches of the West, there is also the matter of a Western public that doesn’t want to hear what those churches have to say. I don’t believe this is entirely the fault of the churches, and probably not even mostly their fault. Most people today have an approach to faith that is highly individualistic and emotivist. This is how American culture is today. I’ve been reading Iain McGilchrist’s new book lately, and to use his conceptual framework, the idea that the state could command people to believe in Christianity, even indirectly, is a very left-brained mistake to make. With this new book I am now working on, I will explore right-brained ways to make the faith new — starting with Benedict XVI’s idea that the best arguments the Church has for the faith is the art it produces, and the saints it creates.

To recap: I believe that politics has to play a role in defending the faith, but I think it is folly to believe that that role could or should be primary. Religion doesn’t work that way, and neither does politics. I back the Benedict Option because I see the primary role of religious people now is to build strong communities of faith and practice, capable of riding out the disintegration of our society. Our society is not coming apart because we have bad politics; it is more the case that we have bad politics because our society is falling apart. The Benedict Option is a strategic retreat, like Ernst Junger’s “Forest Passage”, and its purpose is to keep the faith alive for a time when the world is open to it again. Chesterton once wrote that St. Benedict emerged in a time of great spiritual scattering, after Rome’s fall, and founded a way to slowly re-gather western Europe’s spiritual energy. St. Francis and St. Dominic emerged centuries later, to scatter what Benedict had saved, when the time came for it. This is how I see the Benedict Option. 

I will vote for political candidates who do the most to protect religious liberty, and who, in my view, do the most to promote the common good. But I do not have any expectation that politicians can or will solve the crisis of belief that is eviscerating American society.

By the way, the excellent Marion Maréchal, who, I hope, will become France’s president one day, agrees that culture precedes politics. Excerpt:

Change has to be made from the top down, but it will never succeed if we don’t create islands of resistance from below that persist even when the government changes. It is necessary to build islands of resistance in society; it is through them that we will win. I often quote Gramsci, but it was not only Gramsci who said this: political victory comes only after a cultural victory. There are no political victories without cultural victories.