Ideological lines in U.S. politics are shifting and blurring rapidly: The rise of Donald Trump, the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the resurgence of libertarianism prove at least that much. It’s reasonable to assume that religious conservatives, too, are rethinking their role in American society and politics.

That rethinking probably began in earnest with Richard John Neuhaus’s book “The Naked Public Square” in 1984. Neuhaus, acknowledging pluralism as a hard reality rather than condemning it as a temporary deviation, nonetheless sharply criticized the idea that the public sphere can have nothing to do with religiously informed principles and arguments. In 1990, he founded the influential magazine First Things, in which Catholic, Protestant and Jewish intellectuals reflect on the role of religion in America’s rapidly fragmenting society.

More recently, Notre Dame historian George Marsden — a self-described “Augustinian Christian” and so something close to an evangelical, whatever that still means — has argued in his book “The Twilight of the American Enlightenment” that religious traditionalists and secularist liberals can avoid a great deal of acrimony by defenestrating the midcentury idea of a “neutral” public sphere and instead adopting what he and others have termed “principled pluralism.” More recently still, in his new book “The Fractured Republic,” the scholar and journalist Yuval Levin, a Jewish social conservative, has counseled both religious conservatives and secularist liberals that they can repair our dysfunctional politics by comprehending the implications of this one essential truth: that American society is no longer the consolidated unit it once was but a diffuse assortment of subcultures.