The religious right proved too conservative and parochial (and scandal-plagued) for a diverse and liberalizing country, and it cracked up with George W. Bush’s presidency. The liberal Christianity of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, while in certain ways better suited to hold the religious center, lacks internal vitality and is easily subsumed into a mixture of pantheism and gnosticism, with its moral vision supplied by a progressive activism that’s intolerant in its own distinctive way. These failures have left us with a spiritual competition between an ascendant wokeness and a resentful Christian nationalism, which isn’t likely to supply unity or solidarity to anyone.

But notably, throughout these culture wars, liberalism’s inner party, its intellectual elite, has retained a conception of itself as resolutely secular, persistently imagining a perfected, post-religious liberal order that can establish solidarity and purpose without any of the old American appeals to Providence or nature’s God.

It will be a sign that liberalism is ready to confront its present challenges, all the unhappiness of its citizens and children, when that illusion is finally and irrevocably put away.