When the culture, weary of chaos, begins to grope back toward its outer-boundary natural law violations, evangelicalism will fumble unless we relearn the value of nature. We must be able to affirm the goodness of maleness and femaleness, the goodness of hierarchy and authority, the goodness of limits, the good of the family, the good of conscience and moral law.

There’s a quiet irony unfolding in the evangelical church today. After decades of lamenting cultural decay, many Christians like me are watching with fascination, and some degree of caution, as the broader culture shows signs of a rightward shift after the 2024 election.

This week, Axios put out what I can only call a stunning article on the abysmal state of the Democratic Party. That article follows from an interview the New York Times’s Ezra Klein did with Democratic pollster David Shor, revealing the same trend: a general cultural rejection of progressivism that appears to be happening at virtually all levels of American life, especially among Gen Z, which is forecasted to become one of the most conservative generations on record. This is particularly true of younger men, who are decidedly more conservative.

There are many possible explanations for what is happening in the culture. One reason is that progressivism went too far. It assumed that everyone would accept social progressivism’s fascination with identity, inclusion, and political correctness or simply overwhelm the opposition owing to the cultural majority that elites enjoy. Another possible explanation is that liberalism misread the field. After all, most Americans do not have college degrees. It’s insane to assume that highly educated New Yorkers’ social dogmas are amenable to the values upheld by farmers in Nebraska. Or maybe the explanation for Gen Z’s rightward trajectory, in particular, is that it is the generation that grew up under the most stifling regime of woke progressivism, a constellation of ideas that viewed society through the lens of oppressor and the oppressed, with white men as the arch-scapegoat to assuage progressivism’s wrath.

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