Once the issue of trans identities arose, an openness to traditional Christian accounts became more costly….The social costs for progressive non-Christians of simply expressing an openness to or curiosity about traditional forms of Christian belief became much higher.

When I first started writing online in the early 2010s, most of what you might term the evangelistic openness I saw in media culture was coming from the political or cultural center-left.

A columnist at the New York Times came to faith.

A religion writer from Vox did as well.

Additionally, there were editors at both Vox and the New Yorker who were part of PCA or ACNA congregations. A number of other prominent writers in elite media seemed open to faith.

I remember hearing one such figure, now at the Times with quite a large platform, interview all three of Rod Dreher, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Patrick Deneen within about a 12 month stretch in the late 2010s. Hearing some of his questions, particularly in his conversation with Dougherty, had me genuinely wondering if he was close to conversion.

This was also, of course, the tail end of Tim Keller’s ministry at Redeemer. Given Keller’s success as a church planter and ecosystem builder in New York and given New York’s significance culturally, much of this era may well be tied up in Keller’s presence and Redeemer’s ministry.

Yet if you look around today, something has shifted: To my eyes there is very little evangelistic openness in the center-left world. There are still plenty of Christians to be found, but virtually all of them that come to mind for me are not adult converts and came from Christian backgrounds.

But if you look at the right or the reactionary ends of the political horseshoe where right and left begin to converge, the picture is quite different: Jordan Peterson’s wife is now Catholic. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a one-time new atheist who did events with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, is a Christian. So is Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw.

Meanwhile, figures like Tom Holland and Douglas Murray and Bari Weiss all seem, to varying degrees, interested in Christian faith in a way that goes beyond mere intellectual curiosity.

Moreover, as younger Americans politically polarize by gender, with men tending toward the right and women toward the left, those trends seem to also align with young men going to church in growing numbers even as young women continue to dechurch.

It would be a mistake to suggest this is happening because Christianity itself is “right wing.” In the first place, defining “right wing” is itself a fraught project—is it the “right wing” politics of Dwight Eisenhower or Mussolini? The politics of Reagan or George W. Bush or the politics of Orban or Meloni? Or should we range further afield—what about the “right wing” of D’Annunzio or Disraeli? “Right wing” conceals as much as it reveals in such conversations.

In the second place, one can easily think of any number of political positions one could plausibly assign to the right that do not align at all with historic Christianity. (Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism is the essential book to read on this.)

So what accounts for this shift and how should Christians respond?

The answer to the first question might be surprisingly simple: The shift dates back to the growing awareness, acceptance, and promotion of transgender sexual identities in mainstream American culture. This shift, dating to the mid 2010s and probably peaking in the early 2020s, did two things that fundamentally changed the evangelistic landscape for Christians in America. (I know some will argue that the real shift has to do with “wokeness” more than it does trans issues specifically. I don’t find this altogether persuasive both because I think one can disambiguate the different parts of the “woke” package and because I think issues of sexuality strike at the vitals of Christian belief and practice in uniquely complicated and challenging ways.)

The Mid 2010s Evangelistic Shift

First, as acceptance of transgender identities became a litmus test for the American left, the conflict between left wing political ideology and Christianity was redefined and intensified. A left wing media figure in 2015 might be able to signal friendliness to conservative post-liberals, for example, both as a sign of sincere desire to understand the appeal of Donald Trump and as an openness to alternative theories of American social collapse. Social breakdown was, after all, a long-standing concern of many on the American left dating back decades and certainly well-established by the early 2000s when works like Nickel and Dimed and Bowling Alone hit American bookstores.

But once the issue of trans identities arose, an openness to traditional Christian accounts became more costly: Christianity was no longer seen as a plausible conversation partner with left-wing political concerns around public justice. Instead, it became regarded as a threat to the lives of transgender individuals that made it impossible for trans people to publicly exist as their authentic selves. The social costs for progressive non-Christians of simply expressing an openness to or curiosity about traditional forms of Christian belief became much higher, in other words.

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