Most of you are not going to read the whole thing. I don’t blame you. The New York Times recently published Elisabeth Zerofsky’s sprawling piece, “What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right”, about the ideological civil war consuming the organization behind Project 2025. It is important reporting. It is also the kind of article where you read for twenty minutes, glance at the scroll bar, and discover you have somehow advanced three millimeters.

I didn’t particularly want to read the whole thing either. So I did.

This is a read-through of one deeply reported Times piece, not a comprehensive survey of the New Right. But underneath the Project 2025 fallout, Tucker Carlson drama, and ideological purges is a bigger story:

The American Christian Right is changing.

And Trump may be less the destination than the bridge.

This Isn’t Your Parents’ Religious Right

The Religious Right I grew up around was mostly evangelical. The pitch was simple: America was a Christian nation, America had wandered away from God, and Christians needed to take it back.

So elect Republicans. Ban abortion. Fight gay rights. Get prayer back in schools. Put conservatives on the courts. Save America by making America more Christian.

For all its contradictions, that movement still mostly accepted the basic American arrangement. Evangelicals wanted more Christian power inside the system.

What’s emerging now is different.

A growing part of the New Right is asking whether the system itself is the problem.

Enter the Converts

This is where the Catholic and Orthodox converts matter.

Again, not Catholics or Orthodox Christians generally. I’m talking about a specific younger political subculture drawn to older forms of Christianity because they offer something evangelicalism doesn’t: hierarchy, tradition, authority, and order.

Evangelicalism gave America megachurches, celebrity pastors, worship bands, and forty thousand denominations because apparently one Body of Christ needed franchises.

Older Christian traditions offer something sturdier. They come with built-in authority and a vision of society that existed long before American democracy.

The megachurch gave you a worship band and a men’s breakfast.

The post-liberal imagination can give you Christendom.

And some of these converts aren’t simply asking, “How do Christians win elections?” They’re asking whether individualism, secularism, feminism, and liberal democracy helped create the culture they hate.

This is where terms like post-liberalism, National Conservatism, and integralism show up. They aren’t interchangeable, but they share a suspicion that modern liberal society gives individuals too much freedom and religion too little authority.

Translated from Think Tank into English:

Maybe freedom isn’t the highest good. Maybe government should tell us what the good is.

The Common Good Has a Fine-Print Problem

The “common good” sounds lovely until somebody gets to define it.

If government is supposed to steer society toward what is good, someone has to decide what good looks like. Which marriages count. What women should do. Which religion gets to shape the rules.

And this isn’t theoretical.

The Times piece describes Heritage’s Scott Yenor as believing women’s suffrage was a mistake and that healthy societies require patriarchy. People inside Heritage reportedly discussed whether voting should be limited to male heads of households.

That’s a long way from James Dobson telling women to stay home with the kids.

We’re talking about whether women should have equal political power.

Religion Is Moving From Decoration to Architecture

For decades, Republican politicians used evangelical Christianity as electoral infrastructure. Candidates showed up at churches. Pastors prayed over them. Somebody quoted 2 Chronicles 7:14. Everybody knew the deal.

Christianity blessed the politics.

The newer project is more ambitious.

Christianity helps decide what the politics should be.

An internal Heritage complaint alleged increasing Catholic influence inside the organization, including opposition to IVF and contraception, along with preferential hiring of Roman Catholics aligned with Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s agenda. Those are allegations from an employee, not independently established facts, but they reveal the kind of fight happening inside the institution.

This isn’t just Christianity becoming more conservative.

It’s Christianity becoming more interested in governing.

Then There’s the Extremist Problem

The old conservative movement at least pretended there were people too far out to invite to dinner.

William F. Buckley spent part of his career trying to keep antisemites, conspiracy theorists, and John Birch Society types outside respectable conservatism. The walls leaked, but there were walls.

Those walls are coming down.

Former Heritage staff describe younger employees debating Holocaust revisionism, embracing arguments associated with Nick Fuentes, and rehabilitating figures like Pat Buchanan.

One former Heritage analyst summed it up better than I can. These people had always existed, the analyst said, “but they never seized main institutions before.”

The fringe doesn’t need to become the majority.

It just needs access to the building.

Which Brings Us Back to Trump

Trump isn’t much of an ideologue. His political philosophy tends to be whatever benefits Donald Trump in the moment.

But he blew up the old conservative rulebook. Free trade became optional. Expertise became elitism. Institutions became enemies. Character became something Republicans suddenly remembered was complicated.

Most importantly, Trump proved that Republican voters weren’t nearly as attached to old conservative doctrine as conservative institutions thought they were.

Heritage president Kevin Roberts openly talks about what happens after Trump leaves office in 2029. Heritage has cultivated JD Vance, and figures in the National Conservative and post-liberal world increasingly see him as the obvious vehicle for whatever comes next.

Trump broke the old consensus.

Other people are trying to write the replacement.

Evangelicals Built the Machine

I have a memory that keeps coming back while reading all of this.

July 3, 1996. I was a teenager at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, Georgia, and the Speaker of the House came to do our Fourth of July weekend. Newt Gingrich, at the height of his power, in an election year, standing in a Southern Baptist sanctuary.

Nobody in that room found it odd.

That was the arrangement working exactly as designed.

White evangelicals spent decades building the modern Christian Right. They organized voters, captured Republican politics, reshaped the courts, and eventually helped elect Donald Trump. They wanted Christian influence inside American institutions, and politicians understood exactly where to show up to receive the blessing.

Having spent decades insisting that America required Christian political power, evangelicals may now discover that other Christians have somewhat different ideas about what Christian political power should look like.

There’s also one strange historical footnote to my Gingrich memory: after decades as a Southern Baptist, Gingrich converted to Catholicism in 2009. As accidental bookends go, it’s almost too tidy.

The evangelical Religious Right spent decades trying to take America back.

Some of its younger allies appear interested in something more radical:

What if we don’t take America back? What if we replace the parts we think were wrong from the beginning?

For decades, evangelicals wanted a seat at the table.

A growing faction of the New Right seems more interested in redesigning the table, deciding who gets to sit there, and perhaps reconsidering whether women should get chairs.