Contrast this with the astounding growth of more conservative churches. During equivalent time periods, the Church of God in Christ grew 1,194 percent, my denomination (the Presbyterian Church in America) grew 790 percent, the Assemblies of God grew 490 percent, and the Southern Baptist Church reversed its liberalizing momentum and grew 46 percent from 1965 to 2013 — from 10,770,573 to 15,735,640. New churches grew out of almost nothing to become larger and far more culturally potent than the declining mainline.

And this growth corresponded with, first, the creation of a separate religious conservative movement (the Moral Majority; the Christian Coalition) and then, second, the integration of that movement into the Republican party — the only party not to wholeheartedly join the sexual revolution. And we witnessed an interesting evolution in Republican presidential candidates as well, from fields where the “religious-right candidate” was obvious and abortion was a matter of heated debate to entire slates of candidates who express uniformly pro-life views.

The Left, of course, pushed forward with its own cultural agenda, but aside from its current success in same-sex marriage, it has suffered loss after loss on matters of life and liberty. Pro-life legislation proliferates, abortion clinics are closing, and the state of religious-liberty jurisprudence is vastly preferable to where it was in the 1970s, when it was an actual open question whether Christian groups could meet in empty public-university classrooms.