Two Christians Take On Postliberalism

Amere three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we find ourselves bizarrely wondering whether the winners of the confrontation are the possessors of an exhausted philosophy. Liberalism long sailed upon oceans made safer by a lingering, non-established but semi-assumed Christianity (in the American style). Within those lightly acknowledged channels of the spirit, democracy grew, individual rights expanded, and commerce flourished. ...

The famed exchanges between David French and Sohrab Ahmari proved less interesting in their substance than they did in terms of marking that a conflict had been engaged, like the crossing of the Rubicon. It seems that one of the contending parties wants to argue for the good of liberalism—thus French’s relatively unreserved applause for the drag queen story hour as part of the glory of liberal democracy, which leaves him more in the party of J. S. Mill than with Christian thinkers—while the other would take the opportunity to promote an ambitious counterproposal along the lines of Catholic integralism or Christian nationalism. Georgetown professor Paul Miller has taken up French’s side (with French writing the foreword) in The Religion of American Greatness. Punching above his weight right out of his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University is Stephen Wolfe, who offers the boldly named The Case for Christian Nationalism. (I confess that as I read it in airports and on airplanes I felt as though I were furtively viewing contraband.)