By midnight tonight, if the Lord tarries, Amy Coney Barrett will be the newest justice on the US Supreme Court. God knows I’m grateful, especially given my conviction that the federal judiciary is going to be the last line of defense for religious liberty and other First Amendment freedoms in next couple of decades, as the country turns left on social issues, and secularizes.

It’s important, though, not to overinterpret this. Ross Douthat tweets:

He’s right about that — and that’s a truth that so many of us on the Right do not want to hear.

It is really quite something, the pushback I get from my fellow conservatives, especially religious conservatives, when I tell them that voting conservative matters far less than they think it does. Some of them freak out, as if I’m telling them not to vote, which of course is not true. If Trump had not won, and Republicans had not held the Senate, we would likely not have three SCOTUS justices from the ranks of the Federalist Society. That’s not nothing.

But Ross is right: for social conservatives, what has having the GOP appoint fifteen of the last nineteen Supreme Court justices won us? The country has moved massively to the Left on social issues, and the Court has been there to both ratify and advance these changes. The Reagan appointee Justice Anthony Kennedy was the avatar of liberal Republicanism in judicial power. But we should keep in mind that if things had gone the other way on, for example, Obergefell, the decision that found a right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution, all that would have meant is that states would have retained the power to legislate marriage rights. By now, 2020, nearly all states would have gay marriage, I feel certain — if only because the power of Big Business to compel legislatures to make it happen would have been felt.

Besides, for better or for worse, most Americans support same-sex marriage rights. Unlike in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court, in its Obergefell decision, was only slightly ahead of the national consensus on this contentious social issue. The thing that the socially conservative Right cannot bring itself to reckon with fully is how all those years of Republican victories did nothing to create a socially conservative nation. As I wrote in The Benedict Option:

Not only have we lost the public square, but the supposed high ground of our churches is no safe place either. So what if those around us don’t share our morality? We can still retain our faith and teaching within the walls of our churches, we may think, but that’s placing unwarranted confidence in the health of our religious institutions. The changes that have overtaken the West in modern times have revolutionized everything, even the church, which no longer forms souls but caters to selves. As conservative Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner has said, “There is no safe place in the world or in our churches within which to be a Christian. It is a new epoch.”

Don’t be fooled by the large number of churches you see today. Unprecedented numbers of young adult Americans say they have no religious affiliation at all. According to the Pew Research Center, one in three 18-to-29-year-olds have put religion aside, if they ever picked it up in the first place. If the demographic trends continue, our churches will soon be empty.

Even more troubling, many of the churches that do stay open will have been hollowed out by a sneaky kind of secularism to the point where the “Christianity” taught there is devoid of power and life. It has already happened in most of them. In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton examined the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers from a wide variety of backgrounds. What they found was that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a mushy pseudoreligion the researchers deemed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD).

MTD has five basic tenets:

• A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
• God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
• The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
• God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
• Good people go to heaven when they die.

This creed, they found, is especially prominent among Catholic and Mainline Protestant teenagers. Evangelical teenagers fared measurably better but were still far from historic biblical orthodoxy. Smith and Denton claimed that MTD is colonizing existing Christian churches, destroying biblical Christianity from within, and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is “only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.”

MTD is not entirely wrong. After all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.

As bleak as Christian Smith’s 2005 findings were, his follow-up research, a third installment of which was published in 2011, was even grimmer. Surveying the moral beliefs of 18-to-23-year-olds, Smith and his colleagues found that only 40 percent of young Christians surveyed said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible or some other religious sensibility. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the beliefs of even these faithful are biblically coherent. Many of these “Christians” are actually committed moral individualists who neither know nor practice a coherent Bible-based morality.

An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism. An added 30 percent expressed some qualms but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”

Read it all in The Benedict Option.

You cannot build a meaningful social conservatism on that kind of society. Christian Smith’s survey (the one I quoted there at the end) was taken a decade ago, and there is no reason at all to think conditions have improved. Indeed, we now know that Generation Z is the least conventionally religious generation in American history — which is not to say that they don’t have spiritual longings. It’s just that they are channeling them into left-wing political engagement. 

This represents a catastrophic failure of conservative religious and social power, regarding shaping the next generations. If this is not a rebuke to the strategy of “vote Republican, and the culture will take care of itself,” I don’t know what it would take.

I would like to live in a conservative society, but we cannot have that kind of society if the people don’t broadly share conservative virtues. You cannot vote that into existence. I would also far, far rather lose elections but see my kids, and grandkids, keep the faith, than win elections but watch them all lost to the faith. We have a situation on the Right in which more than a few of us have de facto made a religion of politics. It’s easy to find conservative Christians panicking over the possibility of a Trump loss, but a lot harder to find them expressing the same level of concern about the loss of the young generations to the Christian faith.

It’s not an “either/or” situation — either you can be concerned about politics, or you can be concerned about faith. That’s a false choice. You should care about both — but it’s a matter of priorities. If you, as a religious believer, don’t make the practice of the faith and passing it on to your children your most important concern, you are making a big mistake. One of the most important things you can read is this 2004 essay by Robert Louis Wilken, the historian of the early church, in which he warns that the demise of Christian culture is leading inexorably to the demise of Christian faith. Excerpt:

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture. The unhappy fact is that the society in which we live is no longer neutral about Christianity. The United States would be a much less hospitable environment for the practice of the faith if all the marks of Christian culture were stripped from our public life and Christian behavior were tolerated only in restricted situations.

If Christian culture is to be renewed, habits are more vital than revivals, rituals more edifying than spiritual highs, the creed more penetrating than theological insight, and the celebration of saints’ days more uplifting than the observance of Mother’s Day. There is great wisdom in the maligned phrase ex opere operato, the effect is in the doing. Intention is like a reed blowing in the wind. It is the doing that counts, and if we do something for God, in the doing God does something for us.

We Christians like to sneer at the phrase “cultural Christianity,” because it carries with it the sense of just going through the motions, of substituting the outward forms of the faith for an inward encounter with God. There’s something to that, but people (like me) who fall back on that critique tend not to see that a culture that is Christian makes it more plausible to engage God on that deeper level. At the moment I am deep into the Sigrid Undset novel Kristin Lavransdatter, set in medieval Norway (you have to get the 2005 Tiina Nunnally translation — it’s important). It is a strange and wonderful feeling to enter into a world so fully imagined as a Christian culture. Of course people still sin, and sin boldly, but their understanding of who they are and what they are to do is framed by their Christian culture, and the Narrative that it proclaims in their holidays, their feasts, their fasts, their rituals, their way of speaking — all of it. Reading Kristin Lavransdatter is to understand the truth of what Prof. Wilken says in his essay.

It is also to force one to face how radically post-Christian, indeed anti-Christian, late modernity is. There’s a fantastic book coming out next month, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, by the contemporary church historian Carl Trueman. I cannot say enough good things about this book, and I don’t want to down that rabbit hole in this blog post, which is already too digressive. The point I want to make is that Trueman’s book explains how we got to this point with great lucidity. If you want to know why the ostensibly conservative political party can have appointed fifteen of the last nineteen Supreme Court justices, and yet in that same time have seen the country move hard to the social left — well, Trueman’s intellectual history of modern times will clarify.

Back to Douthat’s tweets. How is it, do you think, that the Great Awokening, which began around 2013, accelerated massively under Donald Trump’s presidency? How is it that Big Business, heretofore understood as a pillar of political conservatism, has gone all-in on social progressivism under Donald Trump (nota bene, it started before Trump, but has been pedal-to-the-metal since his election)? If Trump is re-elected, we are going to see all the institutions of soft power in America go even more fanatically to the left.

And so we arrive at a Catch-22 for social conservatives: vote for Trump, and watch the left’s soft-power triumphs accelerate throughout the culture; vote for Biden, and watch the left’s power accelerate through the executive branch. Either way, the battle is going to intensify, and the odds are very much against us. Only too late are we learning that politics is downstream from culture.

Listen, I get it. I get why my fellow conservatives don’t want to hear this. It’s a miserable place to be in! But we need to face reality with clear eyes, not blinded by false optimism. I am thrilled that Amy Coney Barrett is going to be a Supreme Court justice by day’s end, and I’m grateful to President Trump for nominating her. But let’s not lose sight of the immensity and the complexity of the challenges ahead for religious and social conservatives. Most of the power in American life resides outside the political process. If conservatives these days make too much of politics, it’s because that’s the only realm of power in which we stand a chance at winning.

(Say, readers, Disqus has been more unstable than usual. I’m finding that if I approve the newest comments first, the system is more stable. I hate that, because they appear out of chronological order, but it seems to make it more likely that they will appear at all. Please bear with me as I try out this new system.)