Resident Arsonists: The Postliberal Ecclesiology of Project 2025

While much has been made of the New Apostolic Reformation and its dominionist theology of the Seven Mountain Mandate, the actual policies of the second Trump administration are better understood through the lens of postliberalism—a family of ideologies that share a commitment to the belief that the manifest flaws of liberal society are the result of liberalism itself, and thus the goal should be the replacement of the modern liberal state with a new postliberal society. Key proponents of political postliberalism include Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, Sohrab Ahmari, and Adrian Vermeule, but not enough attention has been given to the theological postliberals of the 1980s and 1990s—George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard John Neuhaus, among others—who helped lay the groundwork through the principles of (1) antipluralist intratextualism and (2) ecclesiocentrism. The “resident aliens” of Hauerwas’s youth have become the “resident arsonists” of today.