The Augustinian State of Social Conservatism 

It may sound absurd to suggest that social conservatism is in a stronger position in 2026 than, say, in 2010. 

No observer would, after all, look at our present moment and say that social conservatives won the culture war or are culturally ascendant. There are too many trendlines about American demographic decline, spiraling addictions in the form of online gambling, and the hollowing out of civil society to believe we are on the cusp of a social conservative renaissance. Nor is America more pious (though encouraging demographic data suggest that secularism’s acceleration is waning and that a potential surge is underway among individuals returning to, or considering, faith). But from where I sit, and compared to when my career first launched, social conservatism is in a markedly stronger intellectual and cultural position than at any point in the last twenty or so years. And this is so without scores of victories to notch on our belt. 

In this essay, I argue that there are genuine reasons for optimism about social conservatism today, unlike in decades past. At the same time, the movement faces deep obstacles that will make any lasting renewal difficult and contested. The moment is more promising than many realize. It is also more fragile. To borrow from Ross Douthat’s analysis, religious conservatism (of which social conservatism is a necessary species) remains “confident and dynamic” compared with what Douthat names as progressivism’s “profound internal crisis,” that “a secular, hyper-individualist, utilitarian ethos,” is not capable of “inspiring humans to the most basic task of reproduction.” To this view, there is an Augustinian hue to our current moment—a moment of optimism offset by ever-present challenges of living in a contested era of redemptive history. 

Five arguments reinforce this thesis: 1) The progressive left’s overreach, particularly in the domain of gender ideology and sexuality, forced many otherwise normal citizens to question the viability of the broader progressive project; 2) social conservatives strengthened their arguments, which forced progressivism to reconsider its stridency toward its opponents; 3) the arguments social conservatives make are not confined to any one political-cultural setting but are grounded in timeless natural law principles; 4) social conservatives face a turbulent future as the forces of social progressivism will no doubt mount a counterattack, especially as inroads are made to normalize elements of social progressivism within the Republican coalition; and 5) how elements of the secular right, postliberalism, popular support for abortion, and the uncertain longevity of the “vibe shift” challenge the viability of a socially conservative vision for America. 

To establish the baseline, let me return to the 2010s and progressivism’s overreach. Readers may recall the vicious, offensive campaign waged by cultural elites to cast opponents of same-sex marriage as on the “wrong side of history.” Denouncing social conservatives was a cause du jour of mainstream progressivism. According to the progressive mindset, social conservatives need not be argued with—only sidelined and scoffed at. Consider how a figure like Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was forced to resign after it was disclosed that he had donated to organizations opposing same-sex marriage. Or Harvard professor Mark Tushnet likening social conservatives to Nazis. Ryan T. Anderson, Eric Teetsel, and I were even profiled in the New York Times in 2013 as a bizarre set of millennial holdouts who refused to go along with the cultural trajectory of our enlightened betters. Conservatives like George Will told us that all opposition to same-sex marriage was literally dying out. Christians like florist Barronelle Stutzman and baker Jack Phillips faced intense legal scrutiny for refusing to use their creative talents for same-sex wedding ceremonies. 

I could list many, many more high-profile examples of the attempt to purge social conservatives from polite society. All told, traditional marriage proponents were cast as hateful bigots, and a massive campaign was undertaken to banish said troglodytes to the catacombs where they deserved to languish in irrelevance. Among many other things that could be said about progressivism’s approach to the culture war, one thing is certain: The zealotry by which its arguments were made, arguments that required everyday Americans to accept patently absurd claims for fear of cultural banishment, exceeded the reality of where America actually was on certain issues. “Love is love” quickly morphed, in time, to “here, kid, take these hormones.” When having “genital preferences” was marked as “transphobic,” it was not hard to enlist those sitting on the sidelines of the culture war as active combatants. Yet a challenge remains. James Wood has spoken of “reality respecters”—persons mugged by the zanier excesses of transgenderism. The challenge is that these “respecters” are more akin to “reality reactors,” when what we really require is true reality respecting, which requires questioning dogmas like no-fault divorce and the broader sexual revolution. Until these pathologies are questioned, social conservatism will remain only partially activated. 

Second, declaring social conservatism in a stronger position requires articulating how that renewed strength is measured. Though not by the metrics I would prefer—a higher marriage rate, fewer divorces, outlawed abortion, higher church attendance all around—there is one key metric I’ve observed that explains why social conservatism has renewed vigor: The neutralization of strident opposition. One important caveat, however: Even if social conservatism is in a stronger position, it would be an error to believe that the playing field is now even. A cautious observer may comment that the silliest elements of wokeism are merely in a temporary hibernation owing to the supposed “vibe shift” brought about by a second Trump administration. 

Even so, if you pay close attention to the most pitched debates of the 2010s, namely, issues of sexuality and gender, you will observe much less bravado coming from the progressive mainstream these days. Reality has mugged many mainstream liberals—Gavin Newsom and Bill Maher among them. Perhaps this détente stems from progressives’ considering these issues now settled and moving on. Still, I hardly ever hear accusations of bigotry and hate from the progressive left as in the past. This is surely not because they agree with us on these issues—hardly. But still, it is easy to detect on social media, especially from figures like Matt Walsh, a renewed confidence in making socially conservative claims boldly and unapologetically. What accounts for this renewed confidence aside from progressive overreach? 

What has happened over the last six to eight years is what I will call the resurgence, nay, the revenge, of reasonableness. In short, our arguments have proved to be sounder than progressives originally considered. “Reasonableness,” as I use the term, refers to whether one has a rational basis for the position one holds. It asks a simple question: does the person have a sound reason for believing what they do? Is it a position that can be established by way of reason, evidence, and argument? Progressives of yesteryear were quick to challenge the reasonableness thesis. Today, I sense much greater caution in declaring the views of social conservatives beyond the pale of polite discourse. The fatigue of cancel culture may also explain the move away from unremitting condemnation. My preliminary thesis is that the post-COVID cancellation era reached epidemic levels of exhaustion and unsustainability even in many mainstream corners. 

A recent conversation I had illustrates this shift. I recently sat down with a law professor friend who happens to be very progressive; we each laid out our cases for what we believe about marriage. A decade ago, my friend may have been among those who threw around terms like “bigot” and “hate” to characterize the motivations of social conservatives. But when I laid out my argument for what marriage is—a comprehensive union of male and female oriented to reproduction and ordered by the norms of permanence and exclusivity—my friend replied simply: “well, that’s entirely reasonable.” I was nearly dumbstruck by this admission. For more than a decade, others like me were hectored and belittled as hateful throwbacks. My friend does not share my position on marriage, but he sympathized with my argument. In our cultural climate, I consider that a win, because it forces my friend to consider the depth of my argument rather than simply dismissing it with a simplistic denunciation. 

Add to this the role that transgenderism has played in causing no small percentage of the American population to recoil at its claims; they are awakening from their progressive slumber to see that sex-denying ideology was a bridge too far even for a laissez-faire culture like America’s It has led to a broader questioning of some of progressivism’s extreme tenets. 

Consider another telling facet of this debate that, I think, proves my case: The Human Rights Campaign’s equality index has much less cultural sway. According to their own report, they have seen a 65 percent decline in the number of corporations participating in their LGBT equality index. Part of this is likely because of the LGBT movement’s general overreach, born of their belief in inevitable cultural victory. It does, though, testify to the reality that corporate America has observed what has occurred in the last decade and decided that acting as vanguards of cultural progressivism was not the boon they thought it would be. Is it any surprise, then, that we see corporate titans like Nike running wholesome, family-friendly ads featuring Scottie Scheffler holding his son on a golf course, declaring he’d “already won” by simply being a father? Several mainstream corporations have returned to family-friendly marketing. Perhaps that’s a cynical ploy just to get more money; yet it does signal America’s return to some level of cultural sanity, a sanity that makes the arguments of social conservatives seem far more reasonable once the excesses of progressivism had washed over America’s shores. 

Third, all these cultural signals draw on the arguments social conservatives have always made. Perhaps at first, the pace of cultural acceleration caught many religious and social conservatives off guard. Many faithful believers had never before had their convictions publicly challenged and their persons vilified. That allowed progressives to frame the arguments of social conservatives as little more than the decorative pieties of finely dressed bigots. But as time wore on, the arguments social conservatives made grew stronger. Consider how the argument for marriage, at first dismissed as a product of hate, was rigorously articulated by Ryan T. Anderson, Robert P. George, and Sherif Girgis in an original journal article that, in time, became a book. Sophisticated and clear arguments on the nature of our embodiment and marriage became more common: that our nature as human beings and what constitutes a marriage rely on anthropological, biological, ontological, moral, sociological, and political truths. 

Anthropologically, males and females are sexed person differentiated at the level of their chromosomal, physiological, and endocrine systems. Biologically, reproduction requires the coordination of complementary reproductive systems that rely on the union of male and female gametes. Ontologically, a marriage is present upon the mutual joining of the affective, intellectual, and embodied elements of male and female persons within a total and comprehensive union, a union that unites male and female at all levels of their being. Morally, we regard sexual actions as licit when persons express them within the confines of the marital relationship, ordered by the realities of enduring commitment and sexual exclusivity. Sociologically, children require caretakers to attend to their well-being, and so reason tells us that those who bring a child into the world bear an obligation of natural justice to care for their offspring. Politically, civil society and government rely on the presence of human beings to populate the political community, thus making a shared, common life possible. 

While Catholicism has long drawn on the natural law tradition, evangelical co-belligerents are also sharpening their intellectual and rhetorical precision. In addition to the increased acceptance of natural law in scholarly evangelical circles, I am now regularly asked to speak about the concept in pastoral and lay contexts. This was unimaginable a generation ago, as evangelical public theology, in the mainstream, was confined to its own theological ghetto and grounded in a narrow, proof-text-based approach to public ethics. It is not hard to argue that social conservatives are awakening to the need to engage in acts of public translation of religious convictions and are in a much stronger intellectual position than they were twenty years ago. I detect a genuine maturing of the socially conservative mind in matters of public translation. 

This reality speaks to the kinds of arguments that social conservatives need to understand themselves as making. We do not believe we are making ephemeral arguments relevant only to those who sit in church pews. We are not asking for the right to hold private beliefs. Nor are they relevant only to those who believe Scripture is inspired. No, the arguments we make are tied to human nature as it is. They are the kinds of arguments that are often unpopular with the cultural trendsetters but also stubbornly accurate in their diagnosis. They speak to ordinary realities inherent in human nature: the goodness of the body, the loveliness of a time-tested marriage, and the quiet, unshakable beauty of routine family life. A decade or more ago, we were told that these arguments were not only wrong but also animated by animus. In truth, the arguments that social conservatives make are eminently reasonable: they have a sound basis in reflection on what the human person is, what marriage is, and what causes individuals and societies to flourish. Now, one may disagree with them, but to insist that what social conservatives hold dear is unreasonable is itself unreasonable. It feels, at least to me, that the average progressive now understands that belief systems stemming from millennia-old traditions cannot easily be dispatched. Hindsight, as the saying goes, is 20/20. And it is in looking backward that we see our arguments were right all along. 

The accuracy of moral propositions also requires consideration of how those propositions are communicated. It was the case a decade ago that progressives were viewed as championing persons (“love is love”) while social conservatives were stuck defending moral propositions. What social conservatives must do to stem this tide is not only to communicate the truthfulness and goodness of their convictions rationally and sociologically, but also to situate them within the domain of beauty. To supplant the regnant progressivism of modern America, social conservatives must forge a social imaginary grounded in the beauty of our claims—that a dinner table with mom, dad, and children casts a more alluring vision than the offer of childless, double-income homes. One very practical consideration for social conservatives moving forward is to ensure that our public arguments present all three domains of truth, goodness, and beauty in unison. 

To the progressives who now give more pause before castigating social conservatives, I would simply like to say “thanks” and hope they continue giving our views consideration. To the erstwhile conservatives who saw a need to pivot away from culture war issues, or to call for a “truce,” or who acquiesced fully to the demands of social progressivism in order to make themselves more palatable to the cultural elite, now would be a good time to admit you were wrong and rejoin social conservatives in our quest for grounding law and public policy in a true account of the human person. 

Lest I sound Pollyannaish, I should note that part of this argument assumes a poor baseline. That social conservative opposition to surgical and chemical castration has more purchase today is evidence enough of just how bad things really are. Regardless, the social conservative must reply that it is by pressing against the outer boundaries of our humanity that society collectively responds with a corrective whiplash. 

But for all the sea change in attitudes toward social conservatives, it is equally easy to show why social conservatism is weaker in 2026 than, say, in 2010. The future of social conservatism will be playing on a multi-polar or multi-theater field of action. 

First, social conservatives find themselves in a paradox with the modern Republican Party. The Trump administration is staffed with strong social conservatives. Even so, the Republican Party watered down its platform on abortion. And, mirroring broader public opinion—even among otherwise pro-life individuals—the Republican Party has no hesitation in advancing in vitro fertilization. President Trump and Vice President Vance appear content with the wide availability of chemical abortion. The same administration that has commendably opposed gender ideology counts unapologetic champions of open homosexuality and sexual permissiveness among its ranks. 

Second, add to the mix the rise of the so-called “Barstool Conservatives” who are championing pornography, fornication, ubiquitous online gambling, and general crudity, and there is an open question about what the future coalition of the Republican Party will look like in opposing progressivism. Perhaps the laissez-faire libertarianism of the Barstoolers is less likely to regard social conservatives as unreconstructed bigots, but the tension will persist. Closely related to this more libertarian approach are the vanguards of the “Tech Bro” center-right that are effectively transhumanists. 

Third, postliberalism (and how we define that is open to discussion, since many reading this may sympathize with its various pillars) is aided and abetted by many precincts on the political right. My comments here are not aimed at people like Patrick Deneen, whose postliberalism is far less radical than other proposals currently being floated. These more radical voices look askance at the Constitution, question America’s founding, challenge core civil liberties (such as religious liberty and women’s right to vote), and now embrace in varying shades a blood-and-soil/throne-and-altar ethnocentrism with troubling fixations on race. The challenge of the postliberalism vector is that most, if not all, postliberals embrace social conservatism. While the tenets of postliberalism are indeed a challenge to a vision of social conservatism defined within the American tradition, the overarching problem is not any near-future enactment of its proposals (there is virtually no actual political will wishing to repeal or revise the First or Nineteenth Amendment) but postliberalism’s awful branding—provocative and often fringe voices offer edgelord proposals attractive to few outside its small chorus of online echo chambers. 

Fourth, we must also question how long this “vibe shift” will persist. Ben Shapiro has predicted that once progressives come back to power, it is likely that the country will swing back to the left. Whether institutions like Harvard have truly learned their lesson in promoting intellectual diversity and opposing antisemitism remains an open question. 

Here, then, is the climax of my argument: Social conservatism finds itself in an Augustinian moment. By “Augustinian,” I mean a fragmented and tension-laden state buffeted, simultaneously, by optimism and challenge. 

An Augustinian reading of the present moment would help social conservatives resist both triumphalism and despair. The renewal and invigoration now visible among many social conservatives may be a genuine mercy: a sign that the moral imagination—worn down though it is by the exhaustion of ambient progressivism—has not been entirely extinguished, and that many still perceive the disorder produced when freedom is detached from truth, embodiment, family, duty, and the created order.  

But Augustine would also warn that cultural permissiveness is not merely a political problem “out there”; it is the public expression of disordered loves that also tempt the conservative soul. It is a sustained assault on—and amplification of—the fallen self’s disordered loves. A society that prizes autonomy, appetite, and self-invention is not simply confused at the level of policy; no, it is seeking rest in the self rather than in God.  

Yet the conservative response can itself become another form of the same disease if it is ordered merely toward resentment, power, nostalgia, or total conquest (which Christian eschatology should warn us against). The conflict is finally not between “our side” and “their side,” but between rival loves: the love of God that orders freedom toward truth, sacrifice, and rightly ordered desire, and the love of self that turns liberty into license. Thus, the task for social conservatives is to labor for cultural renewal with courage; to defend moral order without imagining that politics can redeem the human heart; and to remember that the deepest crisis of permissive culture is not that it loves too much, but that it loves lesser things (and wrong things) as though they were ultimate. 

What stands as a present opportunity is seeing how progressivism actually vindicates the claims of social conservatives. The excesses of progressivism often function as unintended confirmations and vindications of social conservative claims. We judge a worldview not only by whether its propositions are true, but by what happens when those propositions are rejected. False worldviews create false worlds. And over time, the disorder they produce becomes evidence for the truths they try—futilely, we should note—to suppress. The unknown at present is whether a society so lamentably far adrift can don the requisite ears to hear and eyes to see at this present civilizational moment. And so, I join in agreement with Douthat’s view that amid this “fractured group of rivals … there’s absolutely no reason to think that religious humanism can’t contend equally for influence.” At this late hour, secular progressivism lacks the internal resources to sustain itself as a social ethic, and so social conservatives have a unique opportunity to reassert the timelessness of a Permanent Things conservatism. 

As time has worn on, though, what social conservatives warned about has come home to roost. And this explains why social conservatism is neither culturally ascendant nor entirely vanquished. Marriage and fertility rates have fallen to historically low levels. Abortion remains strikingly popular in public opinion (even among churchgoers). Even so, the arguments that social conservatives make remain as true as ever. And that, oddly enough, explains the role of social conservatives in American culture: To be mocked, and then vindicated. That vindication arises not from a settled confidence that we are guaranteed victory in the present. It is understood through an eschatological horizon in the likes of G. K. Chesterton’s quip: “The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle—and not lose it.” 

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