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. Moral concerns that once felt pressing – abortion and same-sex marriage, with drugs also in the mix – are decidedly marginal conservative talking points today. Newer issues, such as immigration, cultural cohesion, and domestic manufacturing of goods enjoy pride of place. There’s overlap, of course – political leaders on the right still give the nod to Christianity, and the threat of radical Islam remains – but the sense of theological urgency has decidedly waned. We are well on our way, it would appear, to what the columnist and writer Ross Douthat has memorably described as the “post-religious right.”

In June 2022, the New York Times published a lengthy guest essay chronicling this change, wondering quite explicitly, “What Comes After the Religious Right?” In its author Nate Hochman’s telling, theological grammar no longer suffuses the political right, with its leaders no longer feeling pressure to invoke God or scripture in civic life. (In the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination in September 2025, there was briefly an uptick in public theological language on the right, but that seems to be dying down.) According to Hochman, the leaders were responding to a voter base not particularly hostile to traditional belief, but not particularly drawn to it – yet decidedly opposed to any creed perceived as hectoring or moralistic. The new conservative coalition might be reflexively anti-progressive, but that did not make them faithful churchgoers.

All photography by Yalim Vural. Used by permission.

Hochman left his reflections open-ended, musing that “while the old religious right will see much to like in the new cultural conservatism, they are partners, rather than leaders, in the coalition.” But he concluded on a note of optimism: perhaps “the new cultural conservatism may protect the embattled minority of traditionalist Christians,” even without restoring “them to their pre-eminent place in public life, as the old religious conservatism hoped to do.” And, Hochman speculated, this new coalition – unlike the old Moral Majority – “may have an actual chance at winning.” In many ways, it now has.

Hochman’s essay evokes a particular narrative of religious decline – one in which, under the pressures of modernity, faith recedes from public life in Matthew Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” Left behind is a people that, over time, forgets that it has forgotten religion. The immanent world is felt to be sufficient to itself, driven by mundane concerns such as border policy and getting the bills paid on time. But the years since Hochman’s essay suggest a different trajectory.

The essayist Wesley Yang once characterized the cluster of progressive ideas now widely described as “wokeness” as liberalism’s “successor ideology” – a novel, relatively cohesive intellectual project that dare not speak its own name, lest self-definition trigger a backlash. What cannot be named, after all, cannot be coherently opposed. And yet that “successor ideology” was, in fact, something identifiable, and new.

Ample evidence now suggests that post-religious conservatism is producing its own “successor ideology.” It manifests in divergent forms – from a technological maximalism that demands ever-greater transcendence of the body, to a primitivism fixated on physical strength, various imputed statistical differences between races, and (not quite ironically) phrenology. Its metrics are sets and reps, per capita statistics, and the marks on calipers. Its trajectories are complementary: they are grounded in a dawning conviction that human politics and society are fundamentally defined by biology and its resultant hierarchies. Rebelling against the body’s limits, or fixating upon them, both treat the body – rather than the immortal soul – as the primordial political term. And these moves follow organically from the dechristianization of the right.

The post-religious right will have its own creeds, however implicit. And it will inevitably find itself at odds with the Christian humanist tradition whose mantle it still claims.

By world-historical standards, American conservatism has been strikingly egalitarian in character. To many, that claim may sound outrageous, given America’s history of chattel slavery and mistreatment of Native American tribes. But by the standards of the left-right binary first formulated around the time of the French Revolution – with “left” meaning a taste for equality, and “right” an affinity for hierarchy – the American conservative experience looks decidedly nonhierarchical.

America imported no rigid system of social class from Europe. Its leaders did not, as in France, justify their rule by recourse to a sacred bloodline. Its founding authorities did not enshrine a metaphysical caste principle, along the lines of India’s ancient Laws of Manu. But Americans who claim the mantle of “conservative” – a term of preservation and stewardship – cannot escape the reality that the American tradition they conserve is bound up with the Declaration of Independence’s searing maxim: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Just who are all these men who are created equal? For many in the founding generation, black Americans, Native Americans, and others didn’t qualify. But attempts to enforce biopolitical hierarchies were always profoundly unstable. Whether consciously or not, slave owners were trapped in a paradox, committed to asserting the subhumanity of their slaves as the justification for their oppression while simultaneously living in perpetual fear of a freedom-seeking revolt – the very act of human self-determination epitomized by the Revolution itself. In time, and after much bloodshed, the logic of the Declaration won out. Those originally excluded from the American project of self-government on racial grounds proved entirely capable of being due, demanding, and receiving the rights enumerated in it.

The Declaration’s logic, notwithstanding Thomas Jefferson’s own dubious orthodoxy, is profoundly Christian in its orientation. The proclamation that all men are created equal is a decidedly transcendental claim, one that seems to defy the basic data of biology. After all, aren’t some people stronger, and some weaker? Some beautiful, and others deformed? Yet they are equal in a more fundamental way: the undeveloped premise of Jefferson’s argument is that, in their humanity, all people are equal relative to a Power beyond themselves, before whom all stand similarly dependent. As Lincoln would later put it, in an 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas:

There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.… In the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

In recent years, some scholars have alleged that American conservatism – of all varieties – has always been racist to the core. They claim that familiar conservative values like limited government or religious freedom have all been fig leaves masking a deeper commitment to white supremacy. Racial animus, though, was never a facet of the conservatism with which I was raised. Growing up, we thrilled to the remarkable life story of Clarence Thomas, pored over the economic theories of Thomas Sowell, and celebrated the civil rights movement. Perhaps in one sense that was an end-of-history naiveté, masking the reality of unresolved questions. But we still thought that racial differences didn’t count for much; such distinctions were always enfolded within a deeper common humanity before a Creator God. We understood that partisans of slavery and abolition alike had both looked to the Bible as an authority, but we didn’t conclude that the Christian tradition was ultimately ambivalent on the question: a truly robust theological logic ultimately cut against biopolitical hierarchies.

Today, it’s a mainstay of some liberal commentary that Christianity is a reactionary creed, used to justify authoritarianism and oppression. But many genuine reactionaries have taken precisely the opposite view: Christianity embodies the sentimental, moralistic Western ethos they deplore. Friedrich Nietzsche’s diatribes against Christian “slave morality” are the best-known versions of this critique, but they are nearly ubiquitous on
the far right.

This criticism is not merely an attack on Christians’ perceived pious detachment from the world. It is a root-and-branch challenge to the basic structure of Christian thought. In a certain sense, Christian faith necessarily levels and equalizes; by positing a transcendent God and a kingdom of heaven open to all, by positing a single human race descended from one pair of parents and made without exception in the image of one God, it unsettles claims to sacral kingship and renders any hypothetical biological inequalities irrelevant.

Far-right writer Sam Francis – who has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance among the online commentariat – went so far as to declare in a 2001 Chronicles essay that, because of its leveling and universalizing tendency, “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.” And it was not only contemporary Christianity that he rejected: he regarded Christian anthropology in its original form as a delusion, its vision of transcendental justice and universal human value a hobble on the white race, preventing them from grasping the biological reality and material power that would bring America to his vision of greatness. “The religious orientation of the Christian Right,” Francis argued in Chronicles in 1994,

serves to create what Marxists like to call a “false consciousness” for Middle Americans, an ideology that appeals to and mobilizes a sociopolitical class but which does not accurately codify the interests and needs of the class and in the end only deflects its political action and works to buttress and reinforce the dominant regime.

This vision he shared, by his own account, with the majority of the figures on the pre-Buckleyite American Right: “Prior to World War II,” Francis wrote,

hardly any major figure on the American right was religious at all, and some were more or less outspoken enemies of religion in general and Christianity in particular. H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, and most of the group that Justin Raimondo identifies as the “Old Right” of the anti-New Deal, anti-interventionist orientation were not in the least concerned with religion except to mock it. Robert A. Taft, who generally shared the political views of this movement as he led its political efforts, himself seems to have lived and died as a thoroughly conventional Episcopalian, a calling almost indistinguishable from outright heathenism. The considerably less libertarian persuasion grouped around the racialist right, including Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, was explicitly anti-Christian, while the “American fascist” Lawrence Dennis (as well as Ezra Pound) was also either uninterested in religion or hostile to it. Even in the 1950s, the founder of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch, was a professed atheist and admirer of the Transcendentalist shaman Ralph Waldo Emerson, while Welch’s one-time colleague, the late and brilliant Revilo P. Oliver, was as well-known for his bitterness toward what he called “Jesus juice” as he was for his animosity to Jews and their supposed conspiracy.

It is this Old Right that Francis missed, and that he sought to revive. That attempt was, in the decades in which the American right was guided by the Catholicism of William F. Buckley, the Evangelicalism of Billy Graham, and the mainline Protestantism of George H. W. Bush, ­unsuccessful. It had to wait for its time. That time, it seems, has come.

As I’ve previously written in these pages, the force of this right-wing attack is rooted in a straightforward claim: that “to live in accordance with the terms of Christian morality is to abandon other dimensions of human excellence altogether.” This culminates in the further claim that biological difference is, in fact, meaningfully mediated neither bycommon descent nor common image-bearing nor ethnic-division-­overcoming brotherhood in Christ. Such difference counts for a great deal, says the argument, so it’s simply better for everyone to keep to his own kind, whether through geographic separation or (as Francis and some of his recent appropriators have advocated) a de facto racial dominance hierarchy.

In this view, Christianity’s moral and metaphysical universalism is a ridiculous mythical straitjacket that arbitrarily restricts what can be done to preserve one’s way of life. Better to be done with the contemptible idea of equality, and chase greatness instead.

This is a natural trajectory of “right-wing” – hierarchical – thought, shorn of a Christian mooring. Today, at the dawn
of the post-religious right, that trajectory has become increasingly visible. Thus far, two distinct but complementary intellectual instincts have characterized the emerging post-Christian right. One might describe these as posthumanism and atavism.

In recent years, much has been made of the American tech sector’s shift, at least rhetorically, to the right. Increasingly, pro-tech policies are justified through the language of national dynamism, risk-taking, and mastery, which echo common tropes of American conservatism. This repositioning is a natural extension of the industry’s present trajectory: its engineers were never all that interested in DEI, but in charting new futures. And what new futures might those be? Elite billionaires now regularly speak of “life extension,” but what kind? Judging by their remarks (and investments), many seem rather less interested in the survival of human bodies than in the survival of human consciousness – whether or not that consciousness is embodied.

Peter Thiel, the heterodox but professedly Christian venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur, has notably echoed these posthumanist themes in a recent series of lectures in which he argues for a drastically more technologically ambitious culture – he regards the present one as technologically stagnant, though he makes an exception for AI, in which he places a good deal of hope. Thiel’s vision of Christianity and science bears a strong resemblance to the immortalist theology of Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov, forerunner of the “Russian cosmist” philosophers who sought to bridge the gulf between science and mysticism.

Most famously, Fedorov argued that a quest for biological immortality – achieved through scientific means – was, in fact, at the esoteric heart of the Christian message. As Thiel remarked in a recent interview with Ross Douthat, this ambition has been shared by certain Western thinkers, including the seventeenth-century British statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon. Bacon was the author of the proto-science fiction novel New Atlantis, published posthumously in 1626, as well as works dedicated to promoting experimental science as the sole legitimate method of apprehending reality and improving the human condition.

Bacon saw man as interrogator of a reluctant nature. His overarching metaphor of scientific experimentation is, notoriously, the torture chamber, in which nature must be “wrought upon, and tortured, by human means,” so that the experimenter may come to an overmastering understanding of nature which will allow him to command her:

And that method of binding, torturing, or detaining, will prove the most effectual and expeditious, which makes use of Manacles and Fetters; that is, lays hold and works upon Matter in extremest Degrees.

According to Thiel, Bacon and later philosophers of science like Condorcet “thought we would have radical life extension. Immortality was part of the project of early modernity.… Maybe it was anti-Christian, maybe it was downstream of Christianity. It was competitive. If Christianity promised you a physical resurrection, science was not going to succeed unless it promised you the exact same thing.”

Here, science and faith seem to coincide. But in Thiel’s interpretation of the Christian promise, eternal life is not the province of God alone. Hope lies in technological progress – perhaps encouraged or directed by Providence, though he does not mention it, but fully taken in hand by man. Perhaps, just as Fedorov argued, human beings ought to undertake the “Common Task” of achieving immortality and godhood through technological accelerationism. Anything less than that is decadence, a dystopian anti-technological primitivism.

Thiel’s vision of Christianity locates the classic Christian promise of resurrection and eternal life through God’s grace – of the sharing in God’s nature known as theosis – to the place where Bacon, Condorcet, and Fedorov looked for it: radical, species-altering technological progress. This is, in Thiel’s view, the kind of cooperation with God to which humans are called – rather than the traditional Christian vision of a modest technological meliorism and the charge to tend the living world to bring it into greater fruitfulness in accord with its own nature and the sustaining will of God.

Even so, there is a critical difference between Thiel’s worldview and Fedorov’s “cosmism.” As Fedorov would have it, the theological-scientific quest for immortality is grounded primarily in duty to one’s family. Specifically, human beings are the agents through whom God would resurrect the dead of all generations – sons restoring their fathers, and so on back through the ages. As heterodox as it surely is (Fedorov avoided excommunication only by being very cautious about what he published, and his views have been declared heretical by his own Russian Orthodox confession), Fedorov’s hope centered on human lives and bodies – and it was a hope fundamentally grounded in a duty that flowed from human nature itself.

But it is human nature which Thiel rejects – arguing, in his conversation with Douthat, that there was no Hebrew concept of human nature other than as fallen, as something to be overcome.

This is not the case. In a purely technical sense, φύσις, physis, the Greek “nature,” is not used in the Hebrew Bible or in most of the Septuagint translation of those scriptures. (It is of course vividly and persistently present in the New Testament, which presumably Thiel would regard as authoritative.) The scholar T. C. Schmidt points out, however, that the idea represented by the Greek physis is present in many of the texts of the Old Testament. “Take, for example,” he writes,

the opening chapters of Genesis.… In Genesis 1:27 he makes humans according to his “image” (צֶלֶם) and “likeness” (דְּמוּת), humans who then go on to beget further humans in their “image,” apparently passing on a divine stamp of what they should be, even if marred and broken.

This set of ideas shares a very large degree of overlap with physis, even in its technical philosophical sense.

Thiel casts off Fedorov’s theological moorings in the service of something wholly novel – something deconstructive. He seems to be driven primarily by a sense that existing reality is so unacceptable that anything would be better, that we must commit ourselves to radical change brought about by technique, and it is not necessary to know what the end of that change will be. Is this really the work of God?

Douthat pushes him on this point: “Most of the people – present company excepted – working to build the hypothetical machine god don’t think that they’re cooperating with Yahweh, Jehovah, the Lord of Hosts.” While Thiel agrees, he still seems to find it easier to make common cause with non-Christian tech visionaries than with Christians whose vision savors, one might say, more of Gandalf and less of Sauron. (In 2011, in an interview with Jonathan Miles in the magazine Details, Thiel discussed his love of The Last Ringbearer, Kirill Yeskov’s novel that retells Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with Sauron as the hero: “Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war,” and “Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.”)

Thiel makes the point explicit. But similarly posthuman instincts are showing up among some on the right who might not view themselves as contributing to a post-Christian intellectual project, and might reject as heretical Thiel’s formulation of the Christian promise of eternal life and of the sharing in the divine nature mentioned by Saint Peter. At a recent closed-door event I attended on AI policy, my co-panelist excitedly contended that AI development should remain largely unrestricted because the futures it promises are inconceivable.

That is a very peculiar word choice, with far-reaching implications. Technological futures should always be conceivable, in some fashion, because they begin from a standard reference point: human beings themselves, the users of technology. Envisioning and critiquing such futures has been the business of speculative-fiction writers for centuries, who repeatedly pose a critical question: How will this technology affect human beings? A technological future only becomes “inconceivable” when the basic reference point – human nature itself – becomes contestable. If our technological future is truly “inconceivable,” it is only so because we have ceased to be recognizably human.

Or at least, some of us. Cryopreservation facilities, which hold bodies perpetually on ice in hopes of their later revivification (or the migration of minds into machines), are the province of the ultrarich. And there is no reason to assume that class divides will dissolve. If AI really does cause mass worker displacement, a two-tiered economic model seems inevitable: there will be those who own and advance the technology that does the work, and those living on a kind of dole.

In a posthuman age, the privileged few who escape the limits of the body, who evolve into dei in machinis, will find themselves immortal masters of the cosmos. Those unable or unwilling to undergo this evolution will be left behind. Here, traditional politics becomes pure ­biopolitics, the mastery of flesh over spirit. None of this is to imply that such a future is possible – from a Christian philosophical vantage, it isn’t – but all that matters to direct political efforts toward it is that enough powerful people believe it can happen.

This underlying biopolitical instinct can also run in a superficially different – yet ultimately complementary – direction: toward an atavism willing to treat old markers of difference, like race and sex and (dis)ability, as politically determinative. The best-known atavist figure is, no doubt, Costin Alamariu, the formerly pseudonymous “Bronze Age Pervert.” His 2018 book Bronze Age Mindset – inspired by his doctoral dissertation at Yale, later republished as Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy – frames politics not as the pursuit of some common good but as a brute struggle for physical space.

Bronze Age Mindset’s wry racialism is not a warrant for an immediate, organized fascist crusade, although that would be the political form Alamariu’s plan would take if he thought it were possible. It is a harshly nontheological metaphysics to be adopted, he hopes, by readers for their personal use. Human beings are no more than evolved muck in motion, some possessing greater excellence: physical excellence, excellence perhaps in some emergent, immanent “life force.” Those with the will and aptitude to do so should embrace the warrior spirit of the ancient Greeks, who – at least in the Iliad – seem to have no aspirations toward transcendent divinity, and instead embrace the pure pagan glories of immanence. But only a few are born with the natural physical and psychological capacities to thrive; the rest must be understood as, in his words, “biomass.”

This biopolitical determinism informs vast swaths of what’s often now called the “dissident right.” It can be found in a fixation on “race and IQ” questions, which collapses human excellence into a single contingent term. It can be found in the obsession of the online “manosphere” with sexual “body counts”; here, one finds a frantic urge to possess and retain, against all others, female bodies, to ensure that one’s own bloodline is preserved. It can be found in ever-more-strident declarations that the American food system is corrupt and polluted, intentionally rendering the population sicker and weaker. (Never mind that agricultural technologies have prevented mass famines in non-Western countries; by an atavist account, the lives of non-Westerners comprise that biomass whose overgrowth they see as a sort of sickness on the planet.) Anti-Semitism, too, follows this logic. It’s no coincidence that Jews have so often been maligned as “parasites” within the organic body of the nation – a decidedly biologizing metaphor if ever there was one. And of course it is from the Jews that we get the vexing notion that each man is made in the image of God, the irritating idea of the transcendent value of every human person.

Both posthuman and atavist currents flow from a common conviction: biology, whether we transcend it or reify it, is destiny. That conclusion follows from a rejection of Christian thought: in rejecting a genuinely transcendent Creator God, one removes the metaphysical predicate for Declaration-style pronouncements of human equality. We are equal, relative to what? It was the “freethinker” John Pettit, an Indiana senator and enemy of Lincoln, who in 1854, arguing for the extension of slavery to the Kansas-Nebraska territory, notoriously called the “self-evident truth” of human equality a “self-evident lie.” It is, he argued, “not true that even all persons of the same race are created equal.” Once that deletion is made, secular assertions of human equality become little more than mythmaking – at best, a noble lie; at worst, a psyop to hobble the strong. And in the face of statistical data and technological power, such myths are swiftly punctured.

Some Christians have found themselves tempted to ride the tiger of the post-Christian right. At least, the argument runs, these folks recognize natural law. They recognize social order, if not moral order. That’s a place to start. Perhaps, too, these rightists might be valuable cobelligerents in a supposedly existential conflict with progressives.

This is a risky bet. For one thing, the “natural law” envisioned by such philosophies shares only a name with the natural law of, for example, Saint Thomas Aquinas, or even of Plato: it is the “natural law” by which the strong rule over the weak, not the natural law in which might must be in service to right, God’s loving and self-giving nature, his reason, inscribed in ours. It is entirely possible – it is already happening in some quarters – that the ideological direction of travel will run in the other direction, with Christian theology being remade in ever more biopolitical ways, through the decontextualized retrieval of premodern texts. But such efforts at synthesis can only go so far. There is one battlefield upon which a traditional Christian ethic must finally collide, unavoidably and utterly, with the post-Christian right: bioethical questions of dependence and care.

Begin with natality. Plenty of tech icons have gestured toward the need for “pronatalism,” a conscious endeavor to raise birth rates. But pronatalism comes in many forms. Viewed through a posthumanist, post-Christian lens, this quickly becomes eugenics: the selection of genetically optimized embryos and the destruction of the less fit. Simone and Malcolm Collins, part of the Thielite wing of the pronatalist movement, have argued that conceiving children via the old-fashioned and chancy process of intercourse is in fact morally wrong, and that all children should be conceived through in vitro fertilization with aggressive genetic screening and eugenic selection of embryos. This is, at this point, a relatively common approach, with companies such as Orchid running New York subway ads which offer boutique services focusing on IQ and other qualities prospective parents consider desirable.

There’s another side of the coin: atavist logic supports widespread abortion. Why not decrease the surplus population of the genetically suboptimal? In the words of the Bronze Age Pervert himself: “Abortion should be mandatory in a number of cases: birth defects, rape, incest, miscegenation unless under approved aesthetic ‘alchemical’ combinations capped at certain percentages, parents’ IQ less than ninety unless can prove countervailing advantage, and many other.” His “classical” approach to eugenics reflects the practice, which he discusses extensively and approvingly in his doctoral dissertation, of the post-birth exposure of “unfit” infants. The older (and newer) Christian ethic – children as gifts of transcendent worth, knit together in their mothers’ wombs, worthy of life and destined for union with God – can never reconcile itself to this, and has never been able to. Christians were, after all, known as those who unaccountably picked up those Roman infants exposed on hillsides, and raised them as their own.

An even more pressing clash is coming over the treatment of the elderly. Consider the facts: low birth rates in the Western world will lead to economies with fewer and fewer young workers and an ever-larger pool of retirees. Advancements in medical technology allow, in principle, for far greater longevity, even if radical life extension is still a long way off. But that care costs money – money that will come from the savings accounts, investments, and home equity of retirees, thus draining assets once handed down to the next generation. Those without assets will look to the state to provide – and, as a larger voting bloc than the younger working public, are likely to prevail.

This is a recipe for the widespread economic immiseration of the young: a sentence to work more and more, for less and less return, because their efforts must subsidize the care of the old. These conditions set the stage for the rapid mainstreaming of voluntary – or even involuntary – euthanasia of the elderly.

In his 1907 dystopian novel Lord of the World, the Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson traces an end-times scenario following precisely this course. As Benson has it, the global faith propagated by the Antichrist is an immanent creed, centered on the value of humanity. Its ersatz godhead comprises the principles of “Maternity,” “Life,” “Sustenance,” and “Paternity.” And yet at the heart of the Antichrist’s world order is a new clerisy, committed to a new sacrament of assisted suicide. Mabel, Benson’s tragic protagonist, agonizes over “the taking of her own life, in a great despair with the world,” seeing it as “an escape perfectly in accord with her morality.” In the Antichrist’s new order, “the useless and agonizing were put out of the world by common consent; the Euthanasia houses witnessed to it.” In a post-Christian biopolitics, weakness is the unforgivable sin.

This logic perfectly – even uncannily – aligns with the biopolitical ethos of the post-Christian right, whether posthumanist or atavist. Those who can pay to have their bodies frozen, their minds uploaded, let them. Why should the young and hale be sacrificed for the old and infirm? None of this, as Benson foresaw, can be squared with Christian commitments – or for that matter, even older pre-Christian understandings of pietas, filial piety. No dissident-right Aeneas would bother to bear his father on his back: let old Anchises die, burned along with his defeated Troy, that the young one might found Rome. In a bitter irony, the progressive logic of absolute autonomy, and the post-Christian rightist logic
of biological determinism, end up in the very same grave.

The challenge of the post-Christian right is not that its ideas are incoherent and confused, born of healthy instincts which simply need to be channeled in a sounder theological direction. The challenge is that these ideas are in fact deeply coherent – and, taken together, represent a seductive alternative to a faith perceived as too anemic to withstand the coming technological and social storm.

Decades ago, Stanley Hauerwas memorably remarked that Christians will have done well if, in the centuries to come, they are known as “those peculiar people who don’t kill their babies or their old people.” For years, Hauerwas’s comments have been invoked as a battle cry against secular humanism, against any progressivism that would deny the unique worth of human life.

But today, years on, there’s a sharper edge to Hauerwas’s words. The possibility that Christians may stand alone in the future – accepted by neither right nor left, a peculiar people indeed – no longer seems far-fetched. Any victory for “conservatism” won through forfeiting the Christian ethic of active love will prove a pyrrhic one.

There are other paths, and other strategies. Perhaps “knowing what time it is” means choosing life, and mercy, and the possibility of forgiveness. We can still choose to see, in the eyes and hands of all of those who share our nature, the image of God.