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Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of February 2, 2026
Contributions for the week of February 9, 2026
@clo:
Natalism & Co.
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Notes -
I think that's true, but I think with a giant asterisk.
On the one hand, I do think a lot of conservatives have just flatly given up on the idea that they can contest the morality and "normalness" of gayness in a shared public square and have any hope of winning that argument for, again, some shared American political consensus, at least in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, I have definitely gotten the impression that, for a very big subset of more traditional Christians specifically, this recognition has mostly made them read the sign of the times and recognize that broader America is overtly hostile to their values, worldviews, and especially the moral formation of their children, and that a kind of internal divorce is necessary - their immediate future, as they relate to the broader American culture, is more like the Jews in captivity in Babylon. That mindset is... not what it looks like to make peace with the new social norms. Instead, it is, I guess, exit and schism instead of voice and support.
I've recently read Aaron Renn's "Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture", Jonathan Rauch's "Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy", reread George Marsden's "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief" (specifically the last chapter of that book about pillarization), and am now reading George Yancey's "One Faith No Longer: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America", and lurking in the background of all those works is the complexities of this split; it's hard to see how, exactly, more traditional Christians can actual participate in a shared consensus whose moral self-justification hinges, at least in part, on the public moral progress that comes with confining traditional Christian sexual ethics to dustbin of history and then social raising the bloody flag, so to speak, about that victory as a constant reminder of public moral legitimacy.
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