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Josiah Lippincott, a Hillsdale college alum and former page for Devin Nunes, has written a deeply compelling piece titled “Conservatives Lost the Culture War and the Trump Agenda Is the Only Path Forward.” The essay delivers a powerful message, and it might be the most important article you’ll read this year.
The essay is important because it makes the case the Republicans on the national level need to focus on questions of national survival—immigration, trade, foreign policy, and crime—instead of focusing exclusively on culture war issues or economic issues which are big political losers on the national scale. If we don’t fix the problem of national survival, then culture war issues don’t matter—we’ll continue losing culture war issues and our nation just like we have for the past fifty years.
The issues of national survival are of primary importance. There is no point in fighting a culture war if we don’t have a country in which this war can take place. Conservatives do not have a viable path to political power any other way.
The Paul Ryan strategy of calling for lower taxes and deregulation is yesterday’s failure. Voters don’t have enough skin in that game to care. Calling for entitlement reform, i.e, cuts to social security and medicare, is political suicide. And as the 2022 midterms showed, campaigning on social issues like abortion is also a losing gambit.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the culture war is over and conservatives lost . . . at least for now. Trying to rehash these old battles in the present political moment, when institutional Christianity no longer has any meaningful political or cultural clout, is a waste of time—at least at the national level.
The culture war problems that our nation faces have to do with a spiritual and moral rot at the heart of the nation and can’t be fixed at the national level by some GOP talking points.
America is awash in men’s groups, Bible studies, discipleship training, women’s seminars, and worship conferences. Yet divorce is through the roof, abortion is common, and homosexuality lauded from the very centers of American financial and political power. Whatever utility all this frenetic religious activity has had for the private faith lives of ordinary Americans, it is abundantly clear it has not had any real benefit for the moral and spiritual health of the nation as a whole.
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The spiritual crisis that afflicts the West runs far deeper than most social conservatives want to admit. They don’t understand how bad things really are, which is why they stand around, mouths agape, as they try to figure out what a “furry” is or why U.S. military officers dress up in leather “pup play” fetish gear while they sodomize each other in uniform and then post photos to social media.
The best we can do is fight against abortion and transgenderism and fight for traditional moral values at the state and local level like DeSantis in Florida.
Right now, conservatives in deep red areas can still fight cultural battles at the local and state levels. Even some purple states, at the local level, still provide a way to maneuver against the Left’s cultural hegemony. Everywhere else, and at the national level especially, conservatives must sideline the cultural battles in favor of the issues of national survival.
Even worse, focusing on culture war issues which are unpopular at the national level *at the expense* of issues of national survival just guarantees we lose in the electoral college, and the culture war keeps being lost.
We need to fight culture war issues at a moral and spiritual level, and at a local political level, until we gain the strength necessary to take these issues national. That is where conservatives and Christians today need to develop the force of will to impose their social morality on the Left, instead of the other way around.
America has a moral majority, all right. It’s just liberal. The Left controls every institutional power center in America. Wall Street, the media, the universities, Hollywood, the military—you name it—everywhere the liberal consensus reigns supreme. There is not a single Fortune 500 company in America, not one, that would denounce transgender surgery for minors.
Those institutions shape the public consciousness in a way social conservatives simply cannot. Manufactured consent is real and all around us. A large portion of Americans simply accept whatever their televisions and cellphones tell them to believe no matter how perverted, wrong, or harmful. Even many of those who do not agree with it, at least bow to the moral consensus. Think of all those many millions who got vaccinated, not because they wanted to, but because their “job required it” or because they couldn’t “travel without it.”
Conservatives and Christians are losing the cultural war because we lack the will and the know-how to impose our morality on the Left.
Lippincott says the only way we can win is if Christians are willing to strongly condemn immoral, sinful, and perverse behavior (and model proper behavior). Christians should be shepherds who protect their flock from cultural decay. Instead, we’re standing on the sidelines, watching the sheep get slaughtered—probably because conservatives are terrified of being called “racists” and “bigots” and as a result, we’ve become hostages of our own misguided virtue.
Deploying more 10,000-word essays on teleology and the new natural law isn’t going to solve the social issue problem either. Millions of Americans didn’t start shoving dildos in orifices, guzzling sex change hormones, and consuming billions of hours of pornography a year because they read an article or heard an argument. These sexual and social perversions spring from a much deeper source, one that isn’t going to be solved by policy wrangling in D.C. think tanks.
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At some point, every political regime must put its foot down. Some people think cannibalism is wrong, others think that it is right. If the former are to prevail politically they must be willing to use force against the latter. In the end, this is what morality requires. This is what morality is.
Conservatives and Christians today simply lack the force of will to impose their social morality on the Left. That is why they lose cultural battles and the Left wins. Conservatives aren’t even willing to mock their enemies. If you want to make “respectable” social conservatives and Christians uncomfortable, call a prostitute a “whore” in their presence. Mock OnlyFans as a den of “sluts.” Express deep revulsion at sodomy. Watch them writhe in psychic pain.
Such firm moral condemnation, I am frequently told, is “judge-y” and “un-Christian.” “We” need to “watch our tone” as “we” seek to “draw others to the faith.” As their flock comes under attack from wolves, the shepherds condemn those who would fight back. There are many such cases.
And where are the shepherds? Our spiritual leaders aren’t leading:
America’s pastors and priests couldn’t stop this decline. And, for the most part, they didn’t really try or seem to want to. Aside from a few metaphysical niceties and theological quibbles, I can detect no real difference in the innumerable sermons and homilies I’ve heard in my lifetime. The modern pastor wants little more than to issue platitudes and collect the tithe.
The vague admonitions to “have faith” and “follow Christ” that pepper the Sunday morning pastoral exhortations from America’s pulpits generally lack any practical core. America’s pastors, with few exceptions, shy away from fighting for the faith they supposedly love. They lack the sternness and fidelity of their forebears. Compare a St. Augustine to a Pope Francis or a Martin Luther to a David French. Our Christian forebears had iron in their souls. The modern pastor is generally soft.
Nobody on the right actually wants to really put their foot down and do what’s needed to cleanse the body politic. We’ve done enough to decry liberal hypocrisy and “owned the libs” with “facts and logic”; now is the time for political leadership to actually do something about it:
The Matt Walsh’s of the world won’t want to hear this, but trying to fight the Left on gender with desiccated Socratic arguments (“What is a woman?”) is a losing battle. Owning liberals with facts and logic is mostly a waste of time. Political power doesn’t flow from scoring debate points in the “free marketplace of ideas.” It comes from the willingness to impose one’s beliefs on others and possessing the resources to do so.
All morality requires enforcement.
This brilliant and powerful essay highlights the need for conservatives to be better fighters who demand more from their leaders, even when the left calls us “un-Christian” or “racist.” President Trump says what many of us are thinking but are afraid to say out loud, and that’s why the left wants to remove him. Just imagine the impact we could have if more people spoke their minds unapologetically, just like Trump.
It’s time to embrace honesty and speak up and demand the local and statewide political and spiritual leadership that’s needed to rescue this country. In the meantime, President Trump showed us how to actually win nationally by focusing on the national survival issues that are of paramount importance:
Trump showed that even in our degraded moral culture, a huge percentage of Americans still want the nation to survive. They don’t hate themselves despite all the propaganda to which they’ve been subjected. The old pre-World War II conservative consensus in favor of protectionism, non-intervention, and immigration restrictions is still enormously popular.
If we win on those fronts and secure a future for our country then, and only then, will we have a chance to fight once again for the family, for our faith, and for a return of moral decency.
Read the rest of this powerful piece here at American Greatness…
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