November 5, 2024
by W. James Antle III
Former President Donald Trump had a message for women ahead of the today's presidential election. He would be “great” for them and their “reproductive rights,” he vowed in a social media post.
The statment came after Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination for the third time, tying Richard Nixon (who, unlike Trump, did not do so consecutively) and one more time than Ronald Reagan, who lost on his first serious try in 1976. The convention where Gerald Ford fended off Reagan marked the first time the Republican platform took a stance against abortion, however equivocally. That position was gradually strengthened over the years — until this year in Milwaukee, where forces loyal to Trump once again watered it down.
This was supposed to be the year social conservatives took their rightful place at the top of the Republican Party. There was heady talk of a realignment in which people of faith, especially strong professing Christians, were recognized for their contributions to the electoral coalition of the Right.
Instead, the 2024 Republican platform treated abortion as an issue to be dealt with by state governments. “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights,” the document states. The word “abortion” is only mentioned once. “We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments),” it says. Many pro-lifers oppose IVF because it frequently involves embryo destruction, among other ethical grounds. Some would therefore ban the practice. Trump has recently promised to make sure either the federal government or private insurance pays for IVF treatments, framing it as a pro-family and pro-baby—and therefore pro-life—position.
By comparison, the 2016 Republican platform mentioned the word “abortion” 32 times. Its language on the issue was also stronger from a pro-life perspective. “[W]e assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed,” the previous GOP platform asserted. “We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to children before birth.”
Similarly, the 2024 Republican platform drops any overt opposition to same-sex marriage and reduces mentions of the word “marriage” from 19 eight years ago to just one this year. “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage, the blessings of childhood, the foundational role of families, and supports working parents,” reads the Milwaukee platform. The pro-marriage line is just a few paragraphs ahead of a promise to “ensure Federal Buildings and Monuments are well-maintained.”
The 2016 platform explicitly defended “natural marriage” and “traditional marriage,” which it described as “the cornerstone of the family” and defined as “the union of one man and one woman.”
“For that reason,” the 2016 Republicans continue, “as explained elsewhere in this platform, we do not accept the Supreme Court's redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states.” Eight years later, the platform mentions none of this.
Trump and his running mate, rising conservative star Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), have supported access to the abortion drug mifepristone. The former president and 2024 Republican nominee has attacked legislation passed by GOP-controlled legislatures and signed into law by Republican governors banning abortion earlier than 15 weeks, calling Florida’s six-week ban a “terrible mistake.”
“Absolutely no one is thinking, ‘I’m this close to voting for Trump. If he makes one more pro-choice post, I am IN!’ I promise,” wrote the conservative Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey. “Winning no one and losing enough for it to matter.” Trump later reversed course, announcing that he would oppose a ballot measure to reverse the ban. But the damage to his reputation among social conservatives was done.
What happened? We were assured a new political coalition was being born, shorn of the libertinism of past variants of American conservatism. God (mentioned twice in the 2024 platform, just one more time than in the Democrats’, down from 16 times in 2016), the family, and the common good were supposed to take precedence over unfettered, atomistic individualism and “free-market orthodoxy.” Yet the opposite seems to be the case, with slippage on social issues compared to Reagan-era Republican Party and conservative movement. In the moment of their apparent success, social conservatives seem less powerful than they have been in decades.
Rise of the Values Voter
In some ways, these debates are not new. Twenty years ago this November, President George W. Bush secured a second term in the White House on the strength of what political analysts described as the “values vote.” Exit polls found a slim plurality of voters listed “moral values” as their number one issue in determining their presidential vote. Bush won them by 80 percent to 18 percent.
Gary Langer, ABC News’ director of polling at the time, derided this conventional wisdom in a New York Times op-ed. Langer complained that a "poorly devised exit poll question and a dose of spin are threatening to undermine our understanding of the 2004 election.” Others pointed out that the economy and jobs were only 2 percentage points behind moral values, while combining terrorism and Iraq into one issue made it the top one (though large majorities these two groups of voters actually supported different presidential candidates, seemingly undermining the logic of lumping them together).
"While morals and values are critical in informing political judgments, they represent personal characteristics far more than a discrete political issue,” Langer protested. “Conflating the two distorts the story of Tuesday's election."
The phrase “value voter” as a term for social conservatives was soon retired due to overuse. But the rightward march of millions of voters who cited morals and values as a top political priority had been going on for decades by this time. The Moral Majority had long ago come and gone, but its issues were now a perennial part of the public discourse. The recognition of social conservatism’s contribution to Republican electoral strength, often in excess of the party’s fiscal and foreign policy positions, has only grown in the last two decades.
About one-third of votes for Republican presidential candidates are cast by white evangelicals. Factor in Catholics, Mormons, and members of other faith communities and a majority of the party’s voters can be broadly described as religious conservatives. Even the party’s more secular constituents are often drawn to the cultural conflicts that so often define contemporary politics.
It’s understandable, then, that social conservatives grew tired of being taken for granted. They are a major part of the conservative coalition and are ready to exercise political power in proportion to their place in the Republican Party and the modern Right.
But only by avoiding overreach and not rendering unto Caesar what is God’s can they succeed. As Trump embarked on what was originally supposed to be a rematch with President Joe Biden before the Democrats replaced him with Vice President Kamala Harris, some would like to see social conservatism go from one pillar of the “three-legged stool,” an overworked metaphor for a postwar modern American conservative movement consisting of economic, social, and national-security conservatives, to the seat of honor. Despite their numbers and success as activists, social conservatives are still not a majority among Republican voters–let alone the electorate as a whole. They will accomplish less if they demand more than their numbers or influence can justify.
The Case for Realignment
Yet defying these apparent limits is exactly what some advocates of political realignment demand.“Yes, the old conservative consensus paid lip service to traditional values,” wrote some fifteen notable socially conservative intellectuals in a 2019 treatise published by First Things. “But it failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else. It surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness. It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism.”
The realigners often contend that social conservatives knock on doors, stuff envelopes, and turn out to vote in large numbers but in return for their efforts get tax cuts, deregulation, and foreign wars once their preferred candidates are safely in office. Here Bush is an instructive example. Reelected with the help of state ballot initiatives withholding recognition from same-sex marriage, Bush immediately vowed to spend his “political capital” on a partial privatization of Social Security rather than the social conservatives’ preferred constitutional amendments on the marriage issue.
Bush’s Social Security plan went nowhere, despite Republicans holding a majority in the House and 55 seats in the Senate. These majorities were wiped out two years later in large part due to public discontent with the Iraq war. Then came the financial crisis and Great Recession, which ushered in unified Democratic control of the federal government’s elected branches, briefly including a filibuster-proof Senate majority. It would seem, the argument goes, that the values voters got little of value for their votes.
Bush was, like many of these voters, an evangelical Christian. His commitment to their values seemed for the most part perfectly sincere. Trump was much less overtly religious, though he did have some experience attending church and now has his own endorsed brand of the Bible. The thrice-married, twice-divorced playboy’s personal sexual morality was for much of his adult life closer to Bill Clinton’s than Billy Graham’s. He was convicted in New York on charges related to paying hush money to a porn star with whom he is said to have had sexual relations. Whatever the facts or legal merits of the case, it comports with his wider known sexual history.
Trump had no serious record of social conservatism prior to running for president, though his attendance at Graham’s 95th birthday party in 2013 was perhaps an early sign he was trying to get to know these voters. Even so, Trump has often been described as running a more secular version of Pat Buchanan’s campaigns. (It was in a short-lived campaign against Buchanan for the 2000 Reform Party presidential nomination that Trump uttered most of his public statements in favor of legal abortion.) Leaders of the organized religious right generally supported Ted Cruz in the 2016 GOP primaries.
Yet Trump’s election and possible reelection, more than Bush’s, revealed that economically liberal but socially conservative voters are a real swing vote, especially in the industrial battleground states key to either party’s Electoral College majority. This runs counter to the belief, common among political journalists and operatives, that it is socially liberal but fiscally conservative voters who are the most politically homeless given the current composition of the two major parties. This misdiagnosis may be why centrist projects like No Labels, seeking to provide a “just right” alternative to too-left Democrats and too-right Republicans, have failed to get off the ground.
What has instead taken flight is the number of significant public intellectuals whose social conservatism has made them question or even recant their economic conservatism. “It's an unsettling place to be in,” writes Sohrab Ahmari, who is a prominent example. “While ferociously conservative on cultural issues, I'm increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the Left—figures like Sens. Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, who, unlike the vast majority of leaders in American politics, and especially those on the right, are willing to tackle the corporate hegemony and Wall Street domination that make daily life all but unlivable for the asset-less many.”
Ahmari and many of the other writers who share this perspective are probably more extreme examples than the typical Obama-Trump voter, though Trump likely received more support from Sanders voters in the Rust Belt in his winning campaign than his losing one. If Trump returns to the White House, conservative-leaning nonwhite voters’ abandonment of the Democratic Party will be a big part of why. Some of their concerns are economic, such as inflation and high interest rates, while others are cultural—many Hispanic and black men are considerably less “woke” than college-educated white liberals.
Social liberals may be overreaching. The general public does not appear ready to accept the notion that biological sex is somehow arbitrary and should be replaced with more fluid conceptions of gender identity. This is especially the case when this involves biological men competing in taxpayer-funded school sports with young women or life-altering surgeries for minor children. Abortion is increasingly being defended as a positive good rather than something that should be “safe, legal, and rare” as most congressional Democrats, the last genuine pro-lifer among them under indictment, back federal legislation that would wipe away most regulations of the practice.
The crisis at the southern border at least partially reflects the uneasiness of a part of the Democratic coalition with serious immigration enforcement. While Biden defeated several candidates who wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings, he also distanced himself from former President Barack Obama’s pursuit and removal of illegal immigrants, even if intended to establish the credibility needed to enact legislation liberalizing immigration policies. This issue might be the most obvious example of wokeness to break free from the classroom or corporate HR department.
There are emerging signs that Republicans and whatever number of swing voters they still may be able to attract in a polarized political time period want leaders who will seriously confront many of these trends. The culture war, fought judiciously, can at times be an asset to conservative candidates and causes.
On the other hand, conservatives should not misread these developments as indicating that voters want a comprehensive realignment, especially one closely associated with religion.
New Republican voters might not love abortion or multiculturalism. But they also don’t love government telling them what to do, including in what they understand as matters of individual choice such pornography and drug use. Ever attuned to the opinions of his voters, Trump recently announced his support legalized personal use of marijuana (while endorsing restrictions on public consumption). This is a kind of realignment, but not exactly the one social conservatives hoped for.
Who Are the Social Conservatives?
To understand the potential and limits of social conservative movements, we have to understand their precursors. ? Moral reform movements, often explicitly religious in character but sometimes not, in the United States predate the Constitution. Many of them resemble what we have for the past several decades called the religious or Christian right. In some cases, specific organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union might be redolent of the Moral Majority but many of their prohibitionist allies were quite progressive.
What we typically mean when we speak of modern social conservatism sprang up in resistance to legal and cultural trends that began or accelerated in the 1960s. The Supreme Court in 1962’s Engel v. Vitale ruled that certain forms of sanctioned school prayer in public schools violated the First Amendment. Other similar mandatory religious activities, such as Bible studies, were banished in 1963’s School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania v. Schempp. What some hailed as an innovative application of the establishment clause others condemned as kicking God out of the schools.
More “social issues” soon became hotly contested, with millions taking the conservative side. Some, like abortion and homosexuality, had significant religious implications. Others, like crime, forced busing to achieve racial balance in the public schools, objections to the 1960s counterculture more generally, and later immigration evoked the passions of those with a wide variety of religious beliefs or none at all, though it should be noted that that the variety of such beliefs was a whole lot less wide 50 to 60 years ago than today.
The increased salience of such issues gradually unraveled the New Deal coalition that had dominated American politics since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt just as surely as the emergence of inflation and introduction of welfare programs benefiting people who did not work. Richard Nixon spoke of a “Silent Majority” that was both more religious and patriotic than the prevailing political establishment, though both sentiments could at the time be assumed as much as directly invoked.
Nixon’s acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican National Convention contained no mention of the word “God,” but his “forgotten Americans” were in his telling “not racists or sick; they're not guilty of the crime that plagues the land; they are black, they are white; they're native born and foreign born; they're young and they're old.” They sound much like the “conservatives of the heart” longtime Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan referred to in his “culture war” speech at a GOP convention 24 years later.
Nixon was appealing more to revulsion at crime and protests in the streets, a sense that social disorder at home was undermining American leadership abroad in a time of war, than the religious character of America. But his successors over the course of the 1970s and 1980s would take up this challenge head-on. Trump has managed to channel both. While the image of Trump holding up a Bible outside a burned church—albeit a liberal mainline one where he would not have been welcome—during the George Floyd riots was widely mocked, but to a certain kind of voter it was highly effective symbolism.
Just as conservatism more broadly comes in varying stripes, so too does its social variety. Some have cast themselves as defenders of virtue, seeking to remoralize or even re-Christianize society. Jerry Falwell’s organization memorably wedded calls for upholding public morality with Silent Majority sentiment, prompting the once-popular liberal bumper sticker in response: “The Moral Majority is neither.” (Whether true empirically, far more clever than “Hate is not a family value.”) D. James Kennedy’s Center for Reclaiming America for Christ kept its evangelistic objectives as front-facing as its evangelical inclinations.
Other social conservatives emphasize carving out space to practice their values free of government interference. Ralph Reed’s current organization is called the Faith and Freedom Coalition. It was started to connect evangelical voters with the Tea Party, which was a comparatively libertarian and anti-statist populist uprising on the right that frequently concerned itself with high levels of federal spending and debt. Reed’s political strategy dating back to the 1990s was to work in tandem with other parts of the conservative movement.
Still others seek to shape policy on issues ranging from abortion to family formation in purely secular terms. Their leaders and activists may not be particularly religious, though they frequently are. But they do not rely on any theological commitments in making their arguments or building effective political coalitions. Less well represented in the activist class, there is also a nontrivial number of voters who are secular or only nominally religious who nevertheless are resistant to the prevailing liberal cultural tide.
These variations make it hard to speak of social conservatives as a whole. Still, one one generalization can be offered.Few important conservative thinkers or activists have in recent decades called for the U.S. government to promote specific sectarian beliefs or practices, much less the creation of a confessional state, though most social conservatives, no matter how secular, stand so accused. R.J. Rushdoony’s Christian reconstructionism, which envisioned civil government enforcing Biblical laws, was for some time the closest such thinkers came to mainstream social conservatism. Rushdoony had significant influence on Howard Phillips, the longtime conservative activist, and the conservative columnist John Lofton. But few found Rushdoony’s ideas about stoning to death homosexuals and adulterers plausible or desirable.
Certainly, social conservatism has been bound up with some nostalgia for a previous era of American life. But even that doesn’t lead toward a radically different kind of society. The United States of the 1950s was not, by historical standards, properly understood as a theocracy. At that time, abortion was broadly illegal, anti-sodomly laws were being enforced, pornography was restricted, and blue laws protecting Sunday as a day of rest were common.
But it should also be noted that these laws reflected an existing moral consensus, one that was already fraying (which is why none of these policies were long for this world in many parts of this country). They did not try to create that consensus. Social conservatives have been most effective when they’ve stood up for what pluralities or majorities of Americans already believe. They’ve had much less success, if any, creating a new public morality.
From Conservatism to Integralism
The historically “conservative” element of social conservatism is why the rise of Catholic integralism and its Protestant equivalent Christian nationalism, an offshoot of the Reformed political-theological tradition that spawned Rushdoony, is noteworthy. How numerically significant any of these phenomena are is highly debatable. Social media amplifies voices that may be marginal in a country of 342 million people, yet can still attract many thousands of followers.
The tendency remains for progressives to dismiss any serious social conservatism as functionally integralist. Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla famously said on MSNBC that the belief rights come from God rather than government—espoused in the deist-written Declaration of Independence—is Christian nationalism. Overused as they might be, it is nevertheless true that thinkers who to varying degrees meaningfully reject the liberal separation of politics and sectarian religion are more adjacent to mainstream social conservatism than in the recent past. At the same time, the most important intellectuals associated with these currents, such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, claim to ground their arguments not in revelation but a publicly accessible common good.
Some of this is an inevitable consequence of the aggressive secularism of the modern left. If, to cite just one example, church teachings about homosexuality come to be viewed as morally equivalent to racism, there will be a push to make such beliefs as marginal as racial bigotry. We have seen small Christian bakers and photographers face a steady stream of lawsuits. Catholic Charities had to suspend adoption services in Boston. An NFL kicker’s opinions about women, family, and marriage set off a national firestorm.
Disagreements over whether a gender-neutral understanding of marriage is compatible with Scripture and tradition, much less sound public policy, has torn apart churches. The conflict becomes even more intense once the wider society is involved. In this atmosphere, some traditionalists believe that they need something stronger than viewpoint neutrality to securely live out their faith.
But it also suggests that a social conservatism untethered to political reality is likely to fail. Just as public sympathy for a strong national defense didn’t long protect national security conservatives from the backlash against the Iraq war and support for work and basic fiscal discipline doesn’t translate into a desire for deep cuts to Social Security or Medicare, an affinity for traditional values doesn’t mean that voters will back whatever social conservatives want to do.
Some hope that transgender issues will reopen other debates over gender and sexuality that had been presumed closed. This could be the case. There has been a modest uptick in opposition to gay marriage in reputable public opinion polls for the first time in years.
But the same-sex marriage debate is a cautionary tale. When courts started ruling that gay couples had a right to marry, mainstream Democrats like Biden and Bill Clinton balked. In 1996, only 28 percent of Americans supported same-sex marriage. By 2022, 71 percent did.
What looked like a spectacular overreach by social liberals, one that was not really driven by their elected officials but by activists and the courts, became the conventional wisdom in a generation. Outside the church, traditionalists lack comparable power to sway public opinion. And political conditions can change rapidly.
In the culture wars, the electorate often punishes the side viewed as the aggressor. That can be either the Left or the Right depending on the circumstances. Both the Woke Left and the Religious Right are associated in the public mind with censoriousness and scolding. Whichever faction is most obnoxious at any given time risks marginalization and defeat.
After Dobbs: The Case for Realism
Despite nearly a half century to prepare, social conservatives were not ready for Roe’s reversal. Ballot initiatives enshrining access to abortion have been as successful in a diverse set of states as anti-gay marriage referenda were 20 years ago. The pro-life movement faces a whole new set of challenges: abortion opponents cannot let up on national politics if they wish to preserve Dobbs’ gains, but must participate in state politics as never before while also redoubling their efforts to bolster a network of crisis pregnancy centers, which now also find themselves under unprecedented political attack.
A Democratic White House, Senate, and House of Representatives could, if the filibuster is eliminated, usher in an abortion regime worse than Roe, at least in its post-Casey iteration. It would be easier for pro-lifers to repeal than Roe was. But what about the Obamacare experience should give them confidence Republicans would successfully do so? And there was a period of time when Republicans won elections in connection with their Obamacare opposition, while they currently believe they are losing them over abortion.
None of this is to argue that social conservatives shouldn’t seek to play a bigger role in the GOP coalition. But it is to say that even moral reform movements need a certain realism: about what is politically feasible and what can actually even be achieved through politics or government itself.
American Compass executive director Oren Cass picked a provocative venue, a First Things lecture, to state this thesis: “The traditional account of conservatism as built on religious morality is not working very well in America today.”
Cass is not a libertarian, much less a libertine. He has called for a rethinking of conservative economic policy in ways that are more in line with certain Catholic and Protestant social teachings. But he argues that making such arguments in explicitly religious or theological terms in an increasingly secular society, much less an “effort to restore Christian morality by fiat,” will fail.
Abortion has remained hotly debated in part precisely because opposition to the practice can easily be stated in secular liberal terms: the right to life, something that can plausibly trump the freedom of choice. The pro-life movement has stumbled post-Dobbs as it has needed to rely more heavily on Christian sexual morality to ground stricter abortion laws in practicality.
Opposition to same-sex marriage collapsed as the only intuitive arguments against it, the type that can fit on a bumper sticker, became religious. The secular case against gay matrimony or for a more heteronormative sexual ethic in general could not compete with or be so succinctly stated as “Love is love.”
As is his wont, Cass goes too far. Religious conservatives are indispensable to the success of the movement as a practical matter. Religious arguments also matter a great deal in principle, both to a politics of virtue and how people of faith understand human flourishing. This commitment cannot lightly be abandoned.
But the seemingly ascendant strain in religious conservatism overstates its numbers within the country and the Republican Party. Its allies also exaggerate the ease with which they can replicate social liberalism’s advance of once- (and in some cases still) unpopular causes and whether the Left’s means for accomplishing this are even available to them. The New Right in general has an excessive faith in political power, the efficacy of government, and the moral value of essentially coerced virtue.
In public arguments, excessive appeals to religion can stack the deck against one’s cause. It requires first convincing the audience that God exists; then that the specific religious tradition or interpretation of Scripture is true; then that it is constitutionally permissible and legally appropriate for religion to decide public policy questions. These arguments are much more effective when these basic premises are already accepted.
That doesn’t mean such should never be attempted. God is a sturdier source of and justification for human rights and dignity than ephemeral secular governments. But social conservative polemicists need to appreciate their limits.
Social conservatives still need the rest of the Republican coalition to govern or discover a new coalition in a country where they face substantial hostility. More fundamentally, social conservatives need to wrestle with the balance between liberty and virtue that has been at the center of the conservative movement’s struggles—and its successes—from the beginning.
W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner magazine's executive editor.