If Donald Trump made a concerted effort during his first administration to appeal to evangelical Christian nationalists—attacking the Johnson Amendment, formally recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and giving the commencement address at Liberty University—Trump’s second administration has replaced these largely symbolic gestures with a different strategy: laying waste to the federal government. On February 3, 2025, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts referred to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a group of “government arsonists” and introduced an amendment to keep them from accessing treasury payment systems. The theology underpinning Trump 2.0 is less the dominionist theology that characterized his first administration and more a distinctively postliberal theology that is more concerned with ending the liberal democratic order as such.
Postliberalism is a complex family of ideologies that share a commitment to antiliberalism: the belief that “the many obvious flaws of liberal societies today are due to genetic defects in liberalism itself, not to a failure to realize liberal ideals in practice” (Holmes, “The Antiliberal Idea”). More than a practice of illiberal politics—which are often found among those who espouse liberal ideals—antiliberalism is a theoretical position about the errors of Enlightenment liberalism as such, especially the liberal emphasis on individualism. Against the notion of individual civil liberties and the natural rights of the individual, antiliberalism sees human beings as fundamentally defined by communal social bonds. The individual is subordinate to the larger community, culture, people group, and nation to which they belong by nature. Christian antiliberals typically view this community as the church, whereas other antiliberals, Christian and otherwise, might view this larger group in racial terms as the White race or in political terms as the American nation. These categories, of course, are not mutually exclusive and frequently blur together as antiliberals pick and choose which communitarian aspect to emphasize. Postliberalism is the broad family that includes these various antiliberal conceptions of communal belonging.
The key proponents of postliberalism in the Trump Era have been the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, First Things editor R. R. Reno, Compact founding editor Sohrab Ahmari, American expat and Hungarian Institute of International Affairs president Gladden Pappin, and the Harvard legal theorist Adrian Vermeule, who has also been a vocal advocate for Catholic integralism, the belief that church and state should be integrated under a Catholic moral order. Most of these political postliberals, as I call them, are associated directly or indirectly with the Catholic Church. J. D. Vance’s turn to Roman Catholicism in 2019 brought him into the orbit of the Catholic postliberals, who provided Vance with a militantly antiliberal politics. While Vance’s network of postliberals have received a substantial amount of attention, what has received much less discussion are the theological roots of this antiliberalism in the postliberal theology of the 1980s and 1990s, where theologians at institutions like Yale Divinity School formulated an antiliberal ecclesiology that provided an intellectually respectable case for illiberal political activism.
The theological postliberalism of George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, Robert Louis Wilken, Richard John Neuhaus, Avery Dulles, and others is not typically viewed in political terms, and when it is seen as political, as in Hauerwas’s work, it is usually associated (wrongly) with the political left. Second-generation postliberals like John Milbank and Adrian Pabst made the politics more explicit and militant, but the early postliberal theology provided many of the root ideas that blossomed into the postliberal agenda of the 2020s. In this paper, I focus on two organizing principles of postliberalism: (1) the opposition to apologetics and cultural translation (i.e., antipluralist intratextualism), and (3) ecclesiocentric politics (i.e., anti-individualism). Intratextualism is the notion that truth is culturally located and is not accessible outside of the right cultural and communal framework. This belief denies universal human rights and provides the basis for conspiratorial thinking. If true knowledge cannot be attained by human rationality, then we have no reason to trust scientists and other experts regarding matters such as climate change. Ecclesiocentrism is the view that the Christian church is the center of human existence and ought to be the defining context for each person’s identity. When operationalized in politics, ecclesiocentrism becomes the basis for opposing individual liberties, including the right to an abortion and marriage equality. The pro-family politics of the New Christian Right is fundamentally an ecclesiocentric politics. Together, these two postliberal principles construct a consistently antiliberal and antimodern ideology, in which it is not enough to make the liberal state officially Christian; instead, the goal is to destroy the liberal state and establish a postliberal order.
This paper will analyze how the early postliberal theologians provided the theological foundations for today’s postliberal politics. The work of Lindbeck, Hauerwas, and Neuhaus, in particular, developed a discourse coalition that provided the seedbed for the militant rhetoric of Deneen, Pappin, and Vermeule. If we want to understand the ecclesiology of Project 2025, we would do better to look less to the Calvinist Christian Reconstructionists and Christian nationalists and more to the ecumenical Protestant-Catholic coalition of postliberalism. The “resident aliens” of Hauerwas’s youth have become the “resident arsonists” of today.
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.