The Rise of the Republican “Nones”

For decades, the United States has become more secular and less churchgoing. Sociologists and demographers talk about the rise of the “nones” — the dramatic increase in the number of people who claim no religious affiliation whatsoever. They may be atheist, they may be agnostic, but they are decidedly not Christian. “Nones” are more likely to be male than female, especially those who identify specifically as atheists (64% are men). Atheists are young (around 70% are under 49 years old). They are highly educated (nearly half have a college degree, in comparison to 34% of respondents overall). And not surprisingly, they are overwhelmingly liberal (78% lean Democratic).

Yet the scale of secularization has not eluded the Republican Party. In fact, in some ways, the rise of the nonreligious right is the story of the Trump coalition. According to the conservative columnist Timothy Carney, in the 2016 Republican primary Trump “got an easy majority (55 percent) of those Republicans who ‘seldom’ attend [church services], and a full 62 percent of those who never attend.” Political scientist Geoffrey Layman points out that even among Trump’s supposed evangelical base, he did best among those who don’t actually go to church. Carney concludes, “Every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support.” Further, some of Trump’s most visible celebrity supporters — from Kanye West to Dave Portnoy — have openly and loudly eschewed the pieties of the religious right.

A few stats show how quickly the moral majority has frayed. In 2011, only 23% of conservatives supported gay marriage — by 2021, 55% did. When it comes to faith specifically, the shifts are no less substantial. In 2016, roughly 63% of Republicans believed that “being a Christian” was an integral part of being an American. But in 2020, that number had plummeted to 48% — a 15-point drop, and during a Republican administration. Even self-identified Christians seem to be losing key tenets of the faith. A recent poll of American evangelicals found the number of respondents who agreed with the statement “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God” rose from 30% in 2020 to 43% in 2022.

Trump, as much a reflection of his movement as the leader of it, has taken surprising steps to moderate the Republican platform on key moral issues. The emphasis on abortion has been greatly downgraded, to the alarm of conservative pro-lifers. Gay marriage hardly figures in the 2024 platform. And while it would be hypocritical for Trump to complain about no-fault divorce (once a hobbyhorse of the religious right), the much more important fact is that it would be totally uninspiring for his base.

In fact, today’s Right, far from being censorious scolds, embodies a kind of effervescent transgression. “Triggering the libs” has now firmly established itself as a pastime of right-wingers. This is not just so in the United States but also abroad, especially where secularization has gone furthest. In Germany, where 27% of the country is nonreligious, it is the Alternative für Deutschland that comes off as the party of TikTok transgression. While in France, where “nones” make up 40% of the country, the massive social media wing of Rassemblement National is driven by young influencers willing to skewer liberalism’s sacred cows. Outrage politics, once the province of the culturally disobedient New Left, has migrated to the “dissident right.”

In some ways, the secularization of the Right might be greeted with open arms by progressives. After all, aren’t impious Barstool bros an advance over the sanctimonious Reagan-Bush-era moralists? Maybe. On the other hand, it’s a mistake to assume that the dethroning of the religious right means a cease-fire in the culture war. Much the opposite has occurred. As the influence of Christian crusaders has waned, a more aggressive and nasty form of political warfare has replaced it.

In the era of what Anton Jäger has called “hyperpolitics,” the loss of faith on the Right seems to have only supercharged cultural conflicts and further polarized the country. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo — who rarely, if ever, mentions faith or God or Christian values — warns instead of “civilizational suicide,” while a professor at the archconservative Hillsdale College complains that the Left is full of “incompetent diversity hires” and “overweight, ugly, mentally unstable, cross-dressing, low-IQ people.” Meanwhile, during the Democratic National Convention, right-wing activists mercilessly mocked Tim Walz’s “stupid crying son” as a “puffy beta male” and a “blubbering bitch boy.” The 17-year-old Gus Walz has a learning disability.

This is concerning. The youthful, exuberant, and forward-looking conservatives of tomorrow have cranked up the zealotry while abandoning even a nominal Christian commitment to compassion and love of the victim, the neighbor, the immigrant, and the poor. As Ross Douthat ominously warned in 2016, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”

Amoral Altruism and Nietzschean Perverts

Simone Collins and her husband, Malcolm, have made their names as “America’s premier pronatalists.” The tech start-up power couple sees a real problem, the collapse of birth rates across the world, and aims to fix it. Their solution, however, is not big investments in social policies that make family life more attractive to more people but conservative policies like deregulation and cultural injunctions that “good people” — elite people, high-IQ people, these people — ought to have more kids. A lot more. The Collinses want to have between seven and twelve.

Their desire for children is, strikingly, not born out of love but out of the cold calculus of the effective altruism movement. And they’re not alone. Elon Musk shares their dispassionate desire for kids (he has at least eleven), as do a number of other billionaires and tech-world philanthropists. These pronatalists don’t seem to enjoy family life as much as they feel that large broods are simply necessary to save civilization. “This is a numbers game, focused on producing the maximum number of heirs — not to inherit assets, but genes, outlook and worldview,” writes journalist Jenny Kleeman, who spent time with the Collinses in their home. Moreover, their pronatalism has nothing to do with the Christian belief in the profound miracle and sanctity of human life. The Collinses, recognizing some goodness in the practice of religious traditions, have replaced Christmas in their household with Future Day, a day where kids can get their toys if, and only if, they make some specific promise about how they will make the world a better place in the next year. “What does Christmas teach them?” Simone complained. “Get random toys if you’re vaguely good?”

Sure, the Coca-Cola-sponsored Macy’s Christmas season is designed more to boost toy sales than to impart lasting universal truths, but whereas an older conservative movement decried the commercialism of Christmas, today’s cutting-edge right has decided to simply throw out Christianity altogether. By doing so, they have opened the door to a much darker worldview.

Three of the most viral anti-Christian rightists — Curtis Yarvin, Richard Hanania, and Costin Alamariu (better known by his pseudonym, Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP) — all evince a disdain for the Christian emphasis on care for the weak, universalism, and equality. Far from endorsing Christofascism, some of the most influential figures of the hard right seem to hate Christianity. For Alamariu, whose book Bronze Age Mindset has become an underground bestseller, Christianity is a relic that has “degenerated into group vanity, pretense and mere hysteria.” The sooner it’s destroyed, the better. Hanania, a self-described Nietzschean liberal, adopts a similarly anti-egalitarian atheism. “Egalitarian ideology,” he writes, is “primarily driven by ugly instincts, namely envy and feelings of inferiority.” His successful Substack blog is read by many of the leading figures and funders of the dissident right, including billionaire GOP donor Marc Andreessen. Meanwhile, Curtis Yarvin, the Peter Thiel–sponsored monarchist notorious for his sneering dismissal of left-wing “bugmen,” describes himself as “unforgivably materialist and completely soulless.” No less a figure than J. D. Vance himself has cited Yarvin as an influence.

These are not marginal figures. And more importantly, as the non-Christian wing of the Trump coalition grows, these irreligious voices will continue to shape conservative thought. Indeed, in the coalition between gleefully chauvinistic Chads and conservative religious “trads” — an alliance perfectly reflected in both the Trump-Pence and Trump-Vance tickets — the Chads are the future. Trump himself seems to realize this. Recently, when asked what he made of Democrats’ charge that Republicans are “weird,” he threw his running mate under the bus. “Not about me,” Trump retorted. “They’re saying that about J. D.” — an admission that Vance’s Catholic social conservatism is not the kind of baggage Trump wants to carry around.

Consciously or not, the new thinkers of the dissident right are channeling older anti-egalitarians: obviously Friedrich Nietzsche but also the “superfascist” Julius Evola, German philosopher Oswald Spengler, and, of course, Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, all of whom concluded that any ultrareactionary project ought to be very suspicious of Christianity. Follow the reactionary road long enough, and it always leads to ancient Rome, not Damascus. Consider the late Sam Francis, a more immediate predecessor to today’s irreligious right, who wrote in 2004 that “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.” It is this civilizational and racial anxiety that animates so much of the postreligious right today. And without Christian appeals to goodness, love, and equality to temper conservative impulses, an icy nihilism takes hold — because the hard right’s rejection of Christianity is not only a rejection of certain Christian virtues but the dismissal of a deeper understanding of humanity.

In the Christian story, we are all equally fallen. Our original sin unites us in a kind of negative equilibrium. By recasting Christianity as a unique perversion, a cancerous growth that destroyed the glorious Roman Empire from within (or a virus introduced by Jews, that ancient enemy of the Right, from without), reactionaries can freely reject our primordial equality to instead embrace the supposedly natural hierarchies evident in the outcome of market competition, the body-obsessed “vitalism” that privileges physical strength over the effete idealism of the Enlightenment, and also, seemingly without fail, an aggressive, unashamed form of scientific racism.

The Return of Race

Once Christian universalism, egalitarianism, and injunctions to peace and love are thoroughly discredited, the slope gets pretty slippery. If there is no appeal to goodness but instead only the cool, rational appeal to strength, if the pursuit of equality itself is seen as a distortion of human nature, if violence is recognized as the natural order of things, and if tribal nationalism supersedes the embrace of a global fraternity, then what? Well, a disturbing emphasis on heredity, genes, and race quickly takes hold.

Today, after a decade of left-wing emphasis on the evils of racism, many on the irreligious right have embraced an inverted racial narrative. For them, whites are the overclass, and that’s fine. In fact, it’s natural. Steve Sailer, a once obscure blogger and data wonk on the fringe of the far right — denounced in the National Review as recently as 2005 for “shockingly racist” missives — is now credited as “the man who invented identity politics for the New Right.” His collection of essays, Noticing, sells in a leather-bound special edition for $395, and he recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, now one of the most listened to on Spotify. Sailer coined the term “human biodiversity” as a way of linking heritable traits to myriad forms of inequality. The implication is clear: if the immense degree of inequality we witness in today’s Gilded Age is the result of natural differences in IQ, then there isn’t much to be done about it. Moreover, why should we try?

This is difficult to square with a religion that has preached, for two millennia now, that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Those words were written by the apostle Paul, who can be reasonably understood to be the godfather of universalism. Paul’s fanatical drive to preach the Gospels to people who spoke different languages, paid tribute to different gods, and swore allegiance to unimaginably different tribes helped to prove something we now take for granted — that the human capacity for reason is truly universal. Those who took that idea seriously, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Enlightenment thinkers to Marxists, have always insisted that race, nation, creed, and color are not the fundamental obstacles to human solidarity they appear to be. It is not a coincidence that in the American history of campaigns for racial equality — from abolition through to civil rights — Christian leaders and socialists play such a prominent role. Yet the hopeful light of that tradition is threatened, as it has been in the past, by the adoption of ideas that reject the possibility of worldwide fraternity from the outset.

The return of racialism is frightening. It’s aided by the collapse of a political tradition on the Left that put equality (not “equity”) at the center of its project. For a few generations, Marxism managed to carry the egalitarian torch on the secular left. Socialism expressed Christian values in a secular language and melded religiously held convictions about moral rights and wrongs with materially rooted calls for class struggle. Even nonbelievers, perhaps especially nonbelievers, in the socialist movement took the Christian belief that the meek shall inherit the earth more seriously than popes from Avignon or Rome. The residue of that tradition still provides a useful rejoinder to inegalitarian and particularist theories on the Left.

On the Right, however, there is no such tradition. There never has been. Without Christianity, ultraconservatism inevitably veers into the darkest corners of violent, naturalistic chauvinism. Nietzsche, for one, recognized the threat of the Christian idea. For him, Saint Paul “represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred.” This kind of inversion, where those who preach love really mean hate, is characteristic of reactionary theories. To the reactionary, there can be no object of goodness that exists objectively, independently of the war of all against all. Human nature is brutal and vicious. Highfalutin pomposity about equality, dignity, and solidarity is just a mask for envy and resentment. Carl Schmitt, a favorite of the dissident right, reduced all politics to just such relativism. For him, what was good was only the goodness of your side, your tribe, your friends. It could never be otherwise.

But to embrace such theories is to abandon high ideals, to abandon the notion that there are human virtues that stand above partisan skirmishes, and to abandon the belief in a larger conception of the common good. The socialist has always made her case in the name of the collective achievement of that good. The racialist has always mocked her, insisting that such an ideal is impossible.

The Church and the Social

The social explanation for the rise of the noxious politics of the irreligious right, and the worrisome fact that it is probably here to stay, is simple. The same forces that have led to the massive social dislocation of the working class — deindustrialization, technological revolution, the collapse of civil society — have finally, belatedly, taken down the church.

In the mid-century, when unions were strong and acted as powerful checks on rapacious employers, when fraternal associations were broad and provided a strong sense of belonging, and when church attendance hit its peak, the social values of egalitarian Christianity were effectively cultural values. Further, churches themselves provided a bulwark against the avaricious and alienating impulses imbued by the competitive ethics of the market. It’s one reason Barry Goldwater seldom attended services. But as the market gained the upper hand in American life, religious life degenerated.

First the associations collapsed. At their peak, most Americans were members of some form of fraternal, civic, or service organization. By 1957, the growth of these groups stalled, and a period of sustained decline set in. According to Robert Putnam, “By 2016 more than a century’s worth of civic creativity had vanished.” Next the unions fell. At their height, around 35% of all workers in the United States were members of a union. After 1960, following the same pattern as fraternal groups, membership began to plummet. But while trends in associationalism and trade unionism form a nearly identical curve — peaking in the 1950s and ’60s and declining thereafter — church attendance followed a slightly different path.

In the late postwar era, church attendance slid downward, but then its decline halted. For a few decades, it seemed that churches might avoid the fate of civic associations and labor. In the early 2000s, church attendance actually increased. Yet the magnetism of the pews was ultimately no match for the socially disorganizing and individualizing tendencies of our era. By the 2010s, as if exhausted by putting up such a strong fight, church attendance collapsed in a heap, falling harder and faster than the various fraternal societies and trade unions. And in many ways, the collapse of church life, the latest in the long wave of social dissolution, is having much the same impact on the Right that the collapse of unions had on the Left.

Socialism had always relied upon the existence of a robust and democratic union movement, and the decline of labor triggered an obvious degeneration of socialist politics. The practical social experience of trade unionism informed the political appeals of socialist parties, keeping them connected to the moods and aspirations of ordinary workers. Meanwhile, the moral wisdom of crowds helped to reinforce certain universal truths — genuinely venal, stupid, or immoral ideas rarely make it out of a union hall debate. Without such a social force, all around the world, socialism stagnated into sectarianism, quackery, or worse.

On the Right, the church, as a living institution, had long played a similar role. Church attendance served as a social bulwark against certain nihilistic and antisocial impulses, because even the most hardened conservative preacher has to reckon with calls for forgiveness and turning the other cheek and the weak shaming the strong. Avoiding all that talk of peace, love, and the brotherhood of man would require radically revising Christian teachings. But no less important is the fact that simply attending church is a communal and cooperative experience. Sitting in church, week in and week out, can provide a social remedy against cynicism.

In a deracinated society, belonging becomes the ultimate desire. But ironically, its elusiveness drives us toward antisocial behaviors. Without social experience — the give-and-take of organizational life, the testing of ideas in small cooperative associations as opposed to the vast competitive ocean of social media, the small pleasures of friendship that serve as an antidote to resentment — we become distrustful, apprehensive, narcissistic, angry, and vain. When the Left lost the unions, it became more small-minded and tribalistic; identity politics, that cheap substitute for Christian charity and working-class solidarity, came to dominate and deteriorate our political culture. Now, as the Right loses its churches, the great depths of our social alienation are coming into focus. The cruel nihilism and empty chauvinism emerging will only inflict more social damage.