A Cathedral Beyond Belief

Are We Progressing Past Progressivism?

The Cathedral following Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Most Americans don’t know the term “the Cathedral,” but they’ve seen its catechism on lawn signs. College-educated knowledge workers may not go to church, but in this house of non-worship, they believe:

• Black Lives Matter

• Women’s rights are human rights

• No human is illegal

• Science is real

• Love is love

• Diversity makes us stronger

• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

• Etc, etc

Etymologically, orthodoxy means “right belief” in Greek. Here then, is progressive orthodoxy in the literal sense. At first glance, it doesn’t seem so objectionable. We might quibble that scientific studies have found that ethnic diversity decreases social trust, so if “Science is real,” then “Diversity makes us stronger” is questionable. But who can object to a tautology like “Love is love”? Surely only a racist would hesitate to proclaim, or better yet, to repeat like a rosary, that “Black Lives Matter!” You don’t want to be racist—or sexist, or homophobic, or a transphobic, or any other cancelable offense—do you? So just nod along and use the right pronouns.

Over time though, the list of required beliefs grew longer and more strident. This house began to believe that there’s no such thing as biological sex, that words can be violent, that equal outcomes matter more than equal opportunity, that oppressor vs oppressed is the only real binary, etc, etc. Congregants listened to the sermons, especially when mandated by corporate HR. But though most didn’t object publicly—who wants to be branded a heretic?—terms like DEI and woke began to carry the same connotations as inquisition and Puritan. Preference falsification hid the extent to which the true believers were an unpopular minority. But the 2024 presidential election, in which Donald Trump ran and won against “No human is illegal,” was the Big Reveal. As Gregory Conti writes, Trump harnessed an “anti-clerical coalition” that combined entrepreneurs and tech barons with the majority of non-college Americans against “our modern clergy, the professional-managerial class and the HR departments, the professors and nonprofit workers, the press and ‘public-interest’ lawyers, and the regulatory apparatus.” Instead of defunding the police, voters disempowered the thought police.

Why Does Any Life Matter?

Perhaps the message here is not that Americans reject the Cathedral’s values, but that they reject the way those values were imposed.

Ross Douthat

writes that “in a society like contemporary America—pluralist, individualist, decentralized and vast—any hegemony can only work if it stays soft.” Thus Trump’s re-election and the attendant vibe shift are a reaction to progressive overreach. For Douthat, had “early Obama-era Hope and Change” set the tone, not “peak Great Awokening,” then the Cathedral might have had “more staying power, disarming opposition and preempting backlash, balancing its power and its society’s pluralism sustainably rather than risking a crackup for the sake of inquisitorial control.” Big-name Trump endorsers like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan formerly backed Obama, so Douthat surely has a point. He also observes that “No existing version of conservatism seems ready for its own form of hegemony” as “populism is a blunt-force weapon that lacks the requisite seductive power.” Thus, after the inevitable anti-MAGA backlash, the Cathedral is primed for a Second Coming.

In the short term, Douthat is likely right. Insofar as populists adopt some of the same tactics (or worse) as the hard left—like anti-woke speech policing or identity politics for ”Heritage Americans”—they invite the same “Don’t tread on me” reaction from the silent majority. Sheer incompetence and corruption may be enough to doom the movement. But in the long run, we may yet see a new orthodoxy emerge. After all, though they may appeal to the eternal, even religions can go extinct. Rome was solidly pagan until it became officially Christian in only a few short centuries. America itself had a Protestant establishment before its current gnostic hegemony (to use Douthat’s phrase) gained the ascendancy. The pressures that may topple the Cathedral are not MAGA-driven, but structural. Conservatives have more children than liberals, with the fertility gap widening over time.¹ Declining shares of Americans say they trust largely liberal institutions like the media and higher education, with newspapers losing readership and humanities programs losing students. Based on current trends then, the Cathedral may see its pews empty out and its papal bulls go unheeded. Even immigrants, the supposed “replacement” congregation, are often socially conservative.

All of this not to say that conservatism will take the place of leftist orthodoxy. Not does it mean that classically liberal values—many of which, like free speech and meritocracy, have become right-coded—will disappear. Given social liberalism’s victory in the culture wars, even most conservatives are, by and large, earlier-stage progressives. But a Cathedral that lasts the ages needs to fulfill its fundamentally religious function: to provide society with a sense of community and common purpose.² Our waning sociopolitical establishment—identitarian on the Brahmin left, libertarian on the domesticated right—increasingly provides neither. Instead, per Allan Bloom, it imagines America “not as a common project but as a framework within which people are only individuals, where they are left alone. To the extent that there is a project, it is to put those who are disadvantaged in a position to live as they please too.”³ The Black Lives Matter movement is a classic example of a progressive project for the disadvantaged. But it can’t answer, and wouldn’t even think to ask, the primary question of why any life matters. Racial activists focus on the skin—and trans activists focus on the genitals—because they don’t recognize the soul. “None of us are free until all of us are free,” goes the social-justice mantra. But free for what purpose?

Liberalism Plus or Minus

Perhaps, as

Jonathan Rauch

argues, we’re asking too much of an ideology that “can provide space for individuals, families, communities, and faiths to make meaning in their own ways, but . . . cannot, does not, and should not do that work itself. Liberalism promises the pursuit of happiness, not the actual thing.” For Rauch, the “discontent, alienation, and ennui in liberal societies . . . is not so much a failure of liberalism as it is a failure of the institutions around liberalism.” To spell out the solution he implies, what is needed is not post-liberalism, but liberalism-plus. Liberalism plus religion, patriotism, community, and other traditional sources of meaning can support a healthy society that will propagate itself. But liberalism on its own is an evolutionary cul-de-sac, destined to die out with Nietzsche’s “last men” (or Vance’s “childless cat ladies”) at the end of history. So why not just revive the Cathedral with some of that old-time religion? Why not keep what Rauch calls “the greatest social technology ever invented,” the source of our freedom and prosperity, but load it with older, purpose-generating software?

Yet is liberalism-plus tenable? Or does liberalism, at least in its dominant, progressive form, erode pre-liberal sources of meaning? Rauch opposes liberalism to wokeness, and understandably so. Traditional liberalism prioritizes individual rights; wokeness focuses on group identity. Yet wokeness emerged from traditional liberalism; or rather minoritarian liberalism minus the traditions that once supported it. Thus liberalism valorizes personal freedom. Wokeness extends that freedom to include choice of gender and pronouns, even for children. Liberalism declares the equality of man (and later woman). Wokeness demands institutions perfectly reflect that equality by mandating DEI. Wokeness was able to capture liberal institutions so easily because it spoke the liberal language. Yes, it spoke more radically, but that radicalism was alluring because it promised a purpose that boomer liberalism now lacked. The question is whether wokeness is really an illiberal aberration, or rather “late-stage liberalism”: the logical end point of a hegemony that swallowed the institutions on which it once relied. Does all that is solid melt into identity politics?

Consider liberal religion—as embodied by the declining mainline Protestant churches—which tends to wave the rainbow flag and lose members, who intuitively recognize its religious trappings as superfluous. Rauch extols liberalism’s neutrality (“liberalism was designed not to provide for our moral and spiritual needs”) but a neutrality without limits suggests its own values: that a monogamous marriage is no better than a polycule; that illegal immigrants should have the same rights as citizens; that any authority, other than that which guarantees our personal freedoms, is illegitimate. Churches that preach relativism don’t inspire popular devotion. Nor does a liberal order severed from its pre-liberal roots. In an essay on Trump’s Gen-Z supporters,

Mana Afsari

observes of her own college experience: “I had no interest in subverting things—monogamy, moral norms, courtship, the nuclear family, faith, a classical education—that I’d never had or known in the first place.” Here, in short, is the contradiction inherent in a Cathedral built on unbelief. Why have faith in institutions that don’t even have faith in themselves?

1. Obviously, conservatives can have liberal children (and vice versa). Nevertheless, most parents pass their religious and political beliefs on to their children.

2. The word “religion” likely derives from the Latin religare, to bind.

3. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), p. 85.