Way back in the early 2000s, coming of age as a young conservative meant joining a sort of holy war. Ever since I could remember, faith and freedom and conservative politics had been wrapped up together in a seamless web. The terrorist attacks of September 11 stood for – in Samuel L. Huntington’s famous formulation – a clash of civilizations, pitting Christian culture against an existential foreign threat. The New ­Atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the rest, were a fifth column in the West betraying our Christian heritage. I can still recall sitting on my bunk at Summit Ministries’ “worldview camp,” poring closely over the pages of Ann Coulter’s Godless: The Church of Liberalism. This was the moral matrix – however faulty, flawed, and naive – that once formed the spine of American conservatism, at least as I remember it. But the web no longer hangs together so seamlessly.

What will our politics look like after Christianity?