Religious Extremism Lost the Battle in the Marketplace of Ideas

I don't normally go in for this kind of thing—I don't believe in evangelicalism, the manosphere, or conservatism—but this NY Times piece is well written, and its subject, Aaron Renn, is an interesting case.

I'll need to read Renn's book before firming up my opinion, but it strikes me that the phenomenon he names by saying that this historical period is “negative world” for conservative Christianity is just the demographic decline of Christianity and conservatism, seen as surprising by people who were culturally dominant for so long.

Non-Christians, women, non-whites, non-cishet folks, immigrants, et al., have been living in a "negative world" for ages in the U.S. It is painful but not new for us, so we don't react to it as the mostly-white-male Christian right is doing now, as if someone stole their lunch money.

Part of what their privilege has made it impossible for them to see is that losing cultural hegemony is not in itself an “attack” on a demographic group. Likewise, they haven’t understood the fact that when not everyone agrees with their opinions, that is not equivalent to an attempt to suppress their beliefs. People give good reasons for why they disagree with extremist conservative interpretations of Christianity. Losing an argument does not mean your views have been suppressed.

The decline of Christianity is a simple consequence of religious conservatism having lost the battle in the free market of ideas, despite them having rigged the system in their favor for decades. They used huge amounts of dark money and hidden influence to create think tanks and lobbying companies, to pack state houses, courts, and school boards—all to try to dig in for a last stand. Even with all that, they are still losing ground. Right now they are loud, but that is because they are losing. (The pause in the decline of people claiming Christian religious affiliation is just because of this political moment, I’d aver. Anyway, the number of self-reported Christians in America is still lower than at any point in American history before 2021.)

Before you tell me that Christian Nationalists won the 2024 election, note that big parts of the MAGA coalition are not there fore the religious extremism (even DJT himself seems to use it as a tool more than believing it himself) but for lower taxes for the ultra-rich, for an end to restrictions on tech companies, for the ability to commit environmental destruction in the name of profits, to try to own the libs, and so on. Only about one-third of voting age Americans voted for DJT. (The third of the population who sat out the election are a big problem for the health of democracy, but that’s a different post. The point for now is that nearly two-thirds of Americans did not vote for the current administration.)

The religious right lost in the free market of ideas because their position is badly supported and often morally wrong. More people see that the evidence for theism is sorely lacking. More people see that oppressing others for who they are or how they choose to live their lives is dead wrong. Once the scales have been lifted from your eyes on these topics, it is nearly impossible for anyone to convince you to backslide into your old ways, even with an argument that their religion says you should. Most of us intuitively know that any religion that oppresses others is a bad religion.

Contrary to their rhetoric, it is not the “secular elites” who are rejecting the false and bigoted religious extremism that conservative evangelicalism has become. It is ordinary people who—in droves, for decades now—have stopped attending church and have consistently supported women’s rights, antiracism, economic equality, and non-traditional marriage. Many of those ordinary people are also religious believers, they are just not extremists.

The Christian Nationalist attempts to use the law to impose their will on the rest of us is proof that they know they have lost the battle of ideas. They know their arguments are too weak to persuade us. I’m not sure they can really even convince themselves: Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

An inevitable consequence of a globally connected, technologically leveraged society is that we are exposed to many more ideas and perspectives than humans ever have been in the entirety of our species’ existence. For many of us, this has expanded our thinking and expanded our circle of concern to include more people who are not “like us.” It is no surprise that views formed thousands of years before the scientific revolution, in an utterly different social and political environment, do not work for us today.

One important thing to notice in work like Renn's (or in Project 2025, or any of the other major conservative movements) is that evangelicals and conservatives are strategizing about how to maintain or restore their cultural dominance. That’s how they have managed to achieve political power despite being in the minority. Those of us who accept the cluster of views (consensus is too strong a word, perhaps) called “liberalism” or “progressivism” are too diverse, and often focused on pursuing justice in our own particular part of the cluster of views, to have doctrinal unity. We are therefore largely not strategizing about how to fight back against the reactionaries. It is time we did that more effectively, together.