Thread by @DouthatNYT

I agree that the great conservative dispute is confusing but I think this distillation from @davidfrum is mistaken; however I will test my sense of things with a poll.
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Prior to the Supreme Court's 1962 school prayer ruling in Engel v. Vitale and sundry subsequent legal and cultural developments, was the United States a (Protestant) integralist society?:

If you answer "yes" then Frum's distillation of this debate to "integralism" makes some sense; if "no" it mostly does not.

Here is how I think about it. Prior to the 1960s the U.S. had a Protestant religious semi-establishment that it gradually incorporated Catholics and Jews; it cracked up with the sexual revolution, secularization and the Mainline's decline.

The religious-conservative project from, let's say, 1980-2008 envisioned creating a new semi-establishment that would be Catholic-Evangelical-Jewish instead of Protestant-Catholic-Jew. That project did not succeed.

Its failure left conservative Christians as a clear minority in a country with no religious establishment, and a religious center best defined as Gnostic/Prosperity-Gospel/Pantheist. (Or Oprah/Osteen/Tolle.)

A lot of smart Christians in the 2010-2018 period assumed that this failure required cultural retreat (BenOp!) and creative-minority attitudes and support for pluralism. But then the West seemed to enter into a social/political/metaphysical (?) crisis ...

... and suddenly the range of cultural/political possibilities seemed to widen. And so some conservative Christians decided that maybe retreat + pluralism wasn't the only option, even as hardening liberal attitudes made them fear that option wouldn't work.

Thus the @SohrabAhmari et al impulse toward counterattack. Contained within that impulse, definitely, is a new interest in radical/post-liberal ideas. But the big driver is still the old socon desire to rebuild a conservative religious center that informs culture and policy.

Which is why, with due respect to integralists and anti-integralists alike, if you don't think the old Protestant/Judeo-Christian America was integralist, it doesn't make sense to describe whatever Ahmari is channeling that way either.

As a coda, a concession; this passage from the original Ahmari blast definitely evokes the integralist mode of rhetoric, at least: