On the march with the MARs Conservatives

Brandi Love, a legit porn star, reportedly bought tickets to Turning Point, USA, a conservative youth rally of sorts, but was turned down when she attempted to attend. Ms. Love, says Nate Hochman in yesterday's NY Times, calls herself a "sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll conservative." She was angry, claiming her rejection was "the worst example of cancel culture." If the goings on at Turning Point, she said, represents the future of American conservatism, then the future is run by 'puritanical, fanatically devout Christians who will demand compliance or else.'”

Hochman's op-ed is a contribution to dialogue about politics and culture that is, to me, at least, quite new. Hochman, a bona fide Trump conservative, is a rarity in the Times' opinion pages. He's there because his analysis offers a fresh perspective. Whether he's right or just plain "out there" is yet to be decided.

Hochman uses the Brandi Love story to illustrate something he says is happening in the conservative movement. He claims the strained marriage between political conservatives and religious conservatives is ending. It was the evangelicals who wanted an end to abortion, he says, and not the new conservative voices whose enemy is "wokeness" and a public education system that teaches it. Furthermore, what he calls MARs (Middle American Radicals) believe in a kind of nationalism that evangelicals only tacitly accept (some may call it "white nationalism"). He says the "humanitarian" impulse of Christianity itself and Christians specifically is old-fashioned and of little matter to the Ron DeSantos types. DeSantos is, at best, he says, a nominal Catholic. Tucker doesn't really care about prayer in public schools.

Trump was no pillar of righteousness, but evangelicals believed they could hitch their wagon to that star, pack Supreme Court, and reverse Roe v. Wade. They were right. But their passion and Trump's conservatism always was an odd alliance.

Hochman says that particular relationship is over because the religious right is dying. It's got no power because it ain't no more. A steep decline in church attendance illustrates demise among even its major fellowships. The Southern Baptist Convention is losing members. More and more of the church are nones.

The MARs conservatives simply no longer need evangelicals; in every way, those old Puritans are old fogies, and anyway few of them are left. Hochman calls reversing Roe v Wade "the dying gasp" of the old religious right, because the new conservatives don't really care about your abortion or mine: "Instead of an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality, the new coalition is focused on questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation."

Although the new conservatism enjoys the support of most Republican Christians who formed the electoral backbone of the old Moral Majority, it is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, driven by issues of race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.

That those political issues--"race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history"--have no real currency among evangelical conservatives may be the kindest thing Hochman says about evangelicals.

What's in it for the new conservatives? Hochman says those new issues make for a much bigger tent since it's clear that significant numbers of minorities believe that trans men shouldn't compete in women's sports, that a baker can choose not to bake a cake for a gay couple, and that there's entirely too much critical race theory taught by liberals in America's public schools.

The reality is a new playing field for conservatism in what Hochman calls "secular America." The new MARs conservatives have already won several battles; after all, 17 states (including Iowa in a bill championed by my own state rep) have passed legislation opposing "critical race theory, and another fourteen (including Iowa) passed legislation barring trans athletes from competition.

Is Hochman on to something? I don't know, but it's a new appraisal and, for those of us who make up the Christian church, its own kind of obituary. In a way, it's not surprising, Trump being, well, who he is, and "woke" being what it is.

But then a basic tenet of the Christian faith we carry is the necessity of being "born again." Dying shouldn't be, and isn't, an end.