This leadership deficit has focused some Christian intellectuals — especially in the “new right” that I wrote about last week — on the idea that help can come from outside, that the energy of culturally conservative politics can be used to save the church. (For instance: If the Catholic hierarchy of France is pushing through a banal modernization of Notre Dame, why shouldn’t the French people elect a right-wing president who will intervene instead?) And they regard the recent ascent of progressive ideology as a model for Christians to study — as a worldview with clear religious energy and strong dogmatic beliefs that’s become dominant first by gaining elite power rather than through some surge of mass conversion.

Part of their vision is correct. A more fully Christian politics would be a powerful witness for the faith. Political power can lay the social foundations for religious growth. And a healthy church inevitably generates a “cultural Christianity” that draws in cynical and halfhearted figures as well as true believers.

But when the church itself is unhealthy or poorly led, a plan to start its revitalization with secular political actors and cultural Christianity — with Donald Trump and Eric Zemmour, presumably — seems destined for disappointment.