This panel examines postliberalism as a contested site of future-making in the United States. While right-wing movements have mobilized postliberal critiques of liberal modernity—particularly regarding neutrality, individualism, and pluralism—for authoritarian projects, postliberal thought also informs competing visions of anti-nationalist and anti-capitalist futures. Through papers on neo-Reformed Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, domestic reform, and left-leaning postliberal political theology, this panel reframes postliberalism as a contested religious-political imagination through which people interpret theological and historical traditions to envision life after liberalism. The papers offer different genealogies of postliberal thought and examine how postliberal thought circulates across ecclesial, academic, and digital spaces, shaping narratives about community, authority, and moral order. In doing so, the panel highlights how the ways different strands take up postliberal critique reveal struggles over the nation’s future—the future of religion, politics, and democracy.
This paper examines how neo-Reformed pastors Joel Webbon and Andrew Isker mobilize postliberal critiques of liberal modernity to imagine a Christian nationalist future through print and digital media. In their books, they argue that liberal societies erode communities, traditions, and divinely ordained social hierarchies. As an alternative, they support forming insular Christian communities organized around heteropatriarchal families and shared religious commitments—which they are attempting to do in Texas and Tennessee. Drawing on Rod Dreher’s “Benedict option” and interpretations of Alasdair MacIntyre, Webbon and Isker frame withdrawal from liberal society as recreating a heteropatriarchal past and preparing a future Christian nation. Through social media posts, testimonials, and images of congregational life, their digital content presents their communities as previews of this future. Digital media thus circulates a localized Christian nationalist future to national and global audiences, visualizing it as attainable and desirable.
This paper turns to a set of sources by white women engaged in domestic reform to propose an alternative genealogy of American liberal critique and Christian postliberalism; in them are Christian idioms of mastery that are feminine in perspective and deeply creative in the ways they imagine the family-state dyad. By refocusing on a genre and demographic not commonly engaged in postliberal discourses, this paper brings a different picture of the postliberal state into view with two key features: that the family has always been a malleable, mutable figure in critiques of the individual, and that women are architects of Christian nationalisms that do not require their subjection.
Recent work on U.S. antiliberal Christian politics has emphasized Christian nationalism, a movement often depicted as growing from Evangelical and ministerial contexts. This presentation (1) traces and (2) analyzes another trend in U.S. Christian antiliberalism, one with a unique view of the nation’s future: Catholic integralism. Tracing this trend reveals that integralism has uniquely thrived primarily in Catholic academic and political contexts. I show how it has spread through elite institutions within the conservative intellectual movement—culminating in an integralist becoming the Vice President of the United States. In analyzing integralism, I argue that its contribution to politics is a self-authorizing political theology of prophetic violence. By reading integralists' own words, I show that integralism combines Carl Schmitt and a branch of Thomism to formulate a politics that licenses violence not only against existential threats, but any discursive opponents to the conceptual moral order that must come to be.
In this paper, I reflect on the significance of white Christian nationalism’s postliberal inheritance for the field of political theology. While scholars of white Christian nationalism have increasingly recognized the impact of postliberal thought on far-right Christian political movements, this same genealogy of political and philosophical critique continues to animate the more normative fields of political theology and Christian ethics, which themselves tend towards anti-capitalism and anti-nationalism. Rather than contest which political expression represents the ‘true’ or more faithful inheritance of postliberal thought, this paper asks how the political success of white Christian nationalism calls into question optimism about the efficacy of postliberal politic thought for a leftist politics.