There is a hushed silence as a dozen of us, bleary-eyed, trickle in for Matins. It is 7:30am on a Wednesday. Few seem to pay much heed to the vaulted stone ceiling above, the stained-glass windows, the intricately carved memorials and paintings on every wall. The service begins almost imperceptibly, as a black-cassocked priest, sitting quietly in the back row, starts to lead his tiny congregation through the prayer book. For the next 20 minutes, we murmur liturgies and psalms, and listen to Bible readings and canticles. At the end of each section, we recite in unison: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now and shall be for ever. Amen.” And then it’s over, and we file back through the cathedral and out into the brightening morning, a single bell pealing high above us.

That afternoon, David Monteith, the dean of Canterbury and one of three priests to join the worshipers during Matins, tells me it was an unremarkably normal service of morning prayer, a service which has taken place every day at Canterbury Cathedral for nearly 1,400 years. This daily rhythm, which winds through a lunchtime communion and ends with choral evensong in the evening, is what Monteith calls the “heartbeat” of the institution. It might seem quaint, even banal, reading out the same words, day after day, to much the same tiny group of people. But for Monteith, it’s precisely this “tried and tested means of prayer” that “sustains you for the long haul”.

We may soon discover if he’s right. For today, the cathedral’s stone-flagged floors will go from empty to heaving, as thousands attend the enthronement of Sarah Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a historic moment for the C of E, which for the first time ever installs a woman as its chief priest. Yet more than her sex, Mullally will ultimately be judged on whether she can steady the listing ship that is her Church. She takes over an institution reeling from years of abuse scandals and dangerously low on trust from the nation it claims to serve. And even if she can begin to turn things around, it will count for little if she cannot also find a way to resolve the bitter internal conflict between liberal and conservative factions, still at each other’s throats over gay marriage. And then there’s perhaps the biggest question of all: can Mullally find a way for this ancient institution to survive in modern, secular Britain, all without losing its soul?

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If all eyes are today on Mullally, Canterbury owes its fame to another woman. Back in the 6th century, a Christian Frankish princess called Bertha married the pagan King Æthelberht of Kent. When, 17 years later, the Pope asked Augustine to re-Christianize the English, the monk headed straight for Bertha as one of the few known believers in this godless land. Augustine  ended up founding the cathedral and becoming the first ever Archbishop of Canterbury, in a line which now stretches all the way to Mullally. Bertha’s own personal chapel still sits just beyond the ancient city walls, and indeed remains the oldest active church anywhere in the English-speaking world.

Canterbury’s close association with the Church has not always been easy. In 1647, townsfolk revolted against the Puritanical abolition of Christmas and attempts to confiscate their much-loved festive treats, storming the cathedral in what are now called the Plum Pudding Riots. But this was nothing compared to the turmoil of 1170, when four knights hacked Thomas Becket, one of Mullally’s more ill-fated predecessors, to death with their swords.

Mullally will no doubt be hoping for a less tumultuous reign. But the former chief nurse is taking over the C of E at a profoundly challenging moment. Perhaps the most urgent item in her in-tray is safeguarding. Wracked by never-ending abuse scandals, England’s national church has lost the trust of the nation. At the depths of the crisis last year, after Mullally’s predecessor Justin Welby was forced to step down in disgrace, accused of failing to report an abuser, a poll revealed just one in four people had a favorable view of the Church. In the 18 months since he left, meanwhile, there has been a cascade of new revelations, notably when the Bishop of Liverpool was accused of sexual harassment by one of his peers.

Mullally herself has skeletons in her closet. Some abuse survivors distrust her because during her time as Bishop of London, there was a case which saw a retired (and blameless) vicar kill himself during a botched safeguarding inquiry. Even since she was named as Welby’s successor in October, she’s faced fresh complaints about her handling of separate abuse allegations. “I can’t pretend that those shadows aren’t real and aren’t pressing,” Monteith admits. He himself has been called a “paedo” while walking down Canterbury High Street in clerical garb.

All the same, he sometimes feels as if the Church is “carrying the can” for all of society’s failures. The Bishop of Dover, who acts as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s deputy running the Diocese of Canterbury, says much the same. Sitting in her office nestled up against the cathedral, Rose Hudson-Wilkin accepts that the “furor” around abuse is reasonable. Even so, she fears it wrongly gives the impression that today’s C of E is mired in corruption and cover-up. Instead, she argues, these old cases are emerging precisely because the Church is getting its act together.

Perhaps. But I can’t help but feel like Monteith and Hudson-Wilkin both seem oddly relaxed about the crisis their Church has just weathered. To be sure, they represent a view common within the C of E establishment: that this is primarily a PR problem, and that a handful of high-profile failures don’t speak to a deeper issue. And it’s also true, of course, that crimes have been uncovered everywhere from the BBC to the NHS. But it obviously angers the public much more when the Church — supposedly a paragon of morality and involved in the education of millions of children — is revealed to be as riddled with abusers as anywhere else.

As for what’s next, Hudson-Wilkin parades a number of improvements, notably outsourcing safeguarding to an independent charity. That’ll suit Mullally just fine. A dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat — long years in the NHS guarantee that — her response to the abuse crisis will be administrative rather than charismatic. Instead of grand gestures, she’ll likely get stuck in with regulation, seeing salvation for the Church in enforcing best practice and ever more bureaucracy. The problem, though, is that the C of E is drowning in procedure already, and all the red tape in the world does little to stop flesh-and-blood humans from flouting the rules. If, then, Mullally can reclaim the bedside manner of her nursing days, giving the Church a softer public image than the sometimes-abrasive Old Etonian Welby, it’s distinctively unclear if managerialism can bury the abuse scandal once and for all.

Certainly, managerialism seems hopeless for the other big item on Mullally’s agenda: the simmering tensions over gay blessings. First announced in 2023, after years of agonizing consultation and spearheaded by Mullally herself, these services have sparked a civil war within the Church. Despite her evangelical background, Mullally has carved out a cautiously progressive approach, pushing for the blessings but refusing to chart a path to full-fat gay marriage. Conservatives have fought a ferocious rearguard action against these so-called “Prayers of Love and Faith”, succeeding in limiting much of the reforms. Initially invigorated by the reforms, their liberal opponents have themselves become disillusioned at the lack of progress, as embittered against their bishops as their traditionalist opponents.

The hierarchy tried to draw a line under the conflict at the synod in February, formally ending the 9-year project. But unwilling to entirely abandon the idea of gay marriage in church, the bishops immediately launched a new working group on the issue. Ever the consensual team player, Mullally won’t pursue anything she fears could lead to further splits, particularly when her bishops are almost as divided as the rest of the Church. It’s more likely, then, that the Church will head for the safety of the long grass, delaying a final decision on gay marriage still further. But this essentially bureaucratic approach again comes with risks. Liberal congregations — including Canterbury Cathedral, now led by its second dean in a row to openly live with their civil partner — will gradually feel their way towards something more accommodating. Yet all the while, conservatives will continue to drift the other way, even if a formal schism currently seems unlikely.

Yet if Mullally’s cautious liberalism just about holds the center in England itself, she’s also the unofficial head of the global Anglican Communion, a family of 42 independent Churches spanning a huge spectrum of convictions. Canterbury itself may be relaxed about gay relationships, but there are Anglican Churches in Africa which vociferously back the criminalization of homosexuality; in 2023 Welby chastised his Ugandan counterpart for backing a bill that imposed the death penalty on gay people. Further complicating the uneasy post-colonial position of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Communion is the fact that it’s these same deeply conservative Churches in Africa and Asia which are growing fastest — while their liberal Anglican cousins in the West dwindle away. One renegade movement called Gafcon has already denounced Mullally as an unacceptably liberal Archbishop, pledging to boycott official Anglican institutions in protest (though they recently scrapped plans to anoint one of their own as a kind of Anti-Mullally).

Besides, even if Mullally can somehow tempt Gafcon back into the fold, it will count for little if she can’t keep the show on the road closer to home. What, to be blunt, is the use of being “first among equals” in global Anglicanism — if there are no Anglicans left in England? In this, the final issue for the new archbishop to grapple with as she settles into Lambeth Palace is surely the most existential. For generations, the C of E has died before our eyes. Church attendance in 1980 was about 1.5 million. Despite significant population growth, last year it had more than halved to 700,000, with the decline only accelerating during Covid.

Fewer and fewer bums on pews means less money in the collection plate, crumbling buildings going unfixed, and less to pass on to regional dioceses (most of which are now in financial crisis and running up multi-million pound deficits). There are also fewer clergy than ever before, forcing bishops to spread their vicars thinner and thinner: most now look after at least two or three parishes at once. In rural areas, it’s not uncommon for as many as 10 churches to all share the same stressed and overworked cleric.

In the face of this crisis, the church is trying to reinvent itself for the 21st century, and find new ways of bringing the English back to their national religion. The Diocese of Canterbury, like most, has an ambitious target to start 200 new types of church by 2030, one for each of their traditional parishes.

Less than a mile north of the cathedral’s Gothic arches is a shabby and unremarkable place called All Saints. Once the garrison church of the local army barracks, it’s an unpretentious and tatty building, full of peeling paint and flanked by a scrubby car park and blocks of postwar council flats. This is Ignite, which runs most Wednesday afternoons both in Canterbury and five other locations across Kent. Plasticky folding tables have been laid out across All Saints’ faded carpet, and about 30 locals are tucking into baked potatoes smothered in chili con carne and cheese.

It couldn’t feel further from the reverent glories of Matins in Our Lady Martyrdom. And as I sit down for lunch, it becomes clear the people at Ignite are not your usual C of E types either. There are immigrants and the elderly, the disabled and people on benefits. Some are confident Christians, but others are unsure; one man describes himself to me as a “pragmatic spiritualist” (though the vicar later says he’s in fact Ignite’s most faithful attendee). Whatever they are, they very much are not plugged into the agonies of the institution this meeting is technically part of: one person on my table hadn’t even heard there was going to be a female Archbishop of Canterbury.

The service, such as it is, is a far cry from Anglicanism’s prayer book traditions too. The vicar, Patrick Ellisdon, dressed in a jumper and jeans, begins with some ice-breaker games. The heart of today’s event is a five-minute reflection on how Desmond Doss, the pacifist war hero of the film Hacksaw Ridge, tried to live for God. It ends with a contemporary soft rock worship song, with lyrics projected onto a screen: “I fall on my knees and I fight like a warrior, I call on the name of the One who is conqueror…”

After the service, Ellisdon explains that Ignite — which he pioneered with his wife at their previous ultra-deprived church in Margate — was designed to appeal to those on the margins with no religious background: unlike the overwhelmingly middle-class parishes of the C of E. He calls it “drip-feed evangelism”, giving hints of Christianity in accessible language and style for people who would never cross the threshold of an ordinary Sunday service. It may seem like another world to the worship up the road at the cathedral, but it has been backed with a £1 million grant from the C of E’s national endowment fund, allowing the Diocese of Canterbury to hire a handful of staff to roll Ignite out across Kent.

Hudson-Wilkin is unapologetic about her diocese’s hopes to transform the face of Anglicanism for the 21st century. But the main challenge, she suggests, is not about finding the right evangelistic strategy: but rather reinspiring hope and enthusiasm. Far too many churchgoers cringe and hide their faith out of embarrassment, lacking confidence in the gospel they’re supposed to be proclaiming. “If we don’t sing the song of joy and peace and love and forgiveness, then we may as well pack our bags up and hang our dog collars up.” Her people are “holding up and holding on”. But, Hudson-Wilkin says, it’s time to go on the offensive again.

More than that, Hudson-Wilkin says she can spot signs of a turnaround. This is the so-called “quiet revival”, after a 2025 survey by the Bible Society claimed that churchgoing was rocketing among the young. Albeit in a different way to All Saints, even the venerable cathedral has been trying to tap into this trend, offering silent discos and graffiti installations to tempt younger folk. But whether any of this actually works is another question entirely. A slew of social scientists have expressed doubt with the Bible Society’s figures, noting that more rigorous surveys have shown only a continued decline in churchgoing, including among the supposedly faith-curious young. And there is more than a hint of the cringe-inducing “trendy vicar” trope here too — are Gen Zs really going to be drawn back to Christ through graffiti and discos?

Some think the Church shouldn’t even try, and instead more keenly look backwards. “The good thing about a place like this,” says Monteith, gesturing through his office windows to the hulking 1,400-year-old cathedral next door, “is that I’m reminded that all things pass.” He believes both old and new are attractive, pointing to hundreds attending a Latin mass he lately put on for Ash Wednesday. Even Gen Z, Monteith says, finds the “solemnity and gravity” of traditional church worship appealing. Relatively speaking, cathedrals seem to thrive because they invest in high-quality music, liturgy and preaching, mixing transcendence with a down-to-earth cheeriness.

Yet though it’s true that cathedrals have escaped the collapse of country parish churches — we’re still not talking about large numbers. The total weekly attendance from Exeter to Ely only comes in at roughly 17,000. And though it’s true that a handful of Anglo-Catholic churches have found success in tradition, this feels more like the exception that proves the rule. The fact is that most twenty-somethings are spending Sunday evenings scrolling TikTok in their overpriced flatshares, not at choral evensong.

What, then, of the future? Rosie Duffield, the independent local MP and an occasional worshiper at Monteith’s cathedral, says it would be a tragedy if the C of E withered away to nothing. The cathedral isn’t just a heritage site for Canterbury — it’s “our beating heart and our soul”. “Just the idea that it would turn into a museum would rip the soul out of what we are.” Besides, Duffield argues, the wider church is still a bulwark of stability and moral guidance in a confused and volatile world, harking back to a now famous sermon Welby gave from the cathedral’s pulpit in 2022, decrying proposals to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda as un-Christian.

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Yet again, though, there are risks here for the Church here, as it tries to project relevance and weigh in on contemporary politics. For every Duffield delighted by Welby’s condemnation of the Rwanda scheme, there was a Conservative MP castigating the prelate’s intervention as symptomatic of a Church gone woke. Four years on, the country is even more divided, as Reform top the polls and the Greens win by-elections.

Debate over how England’s established church should respond to the recent surge of Christian nationalism has also reached East Kent. Monteith says that nearby coastal towns Whitstable, Sheerness and Margate are full of those sympathetic to Tommy Robinson’s newly Christianized far-Right. The dean, for his part, is open to building bridges rather than dismissing it all as racist bigotry. But Hudson-Wilkin — the first black woman to become a bishop in the C of E — scoffs at what she calls the “disingenuousness” of activists waving crosses while protesting Islam. The Church, she insists, isn’t dying because of Muslim immigration. It’s dying of neglect because white Britons who claim to be believers are staying at home. This is probably true, but also the kind of hectoring unlikely to nudge apathetic agnostics off their sofas and into church. The constant tension facing today’s genteel and overwhelmingly middle-class C of E is that the liberal centrism its current worshipers appreciate — and which Mullally herself epitomizes — is precisely what puts off an increasing number of would-be parishioners.

And on the Matins go. For 1,400 years Anglicans have been intoning that same liturgy: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now and shall be for ever.” But can this really go on forever? Will there still be people murmuring these ancient words inside Canterbury Cathedral, let alone All Saints down the road, on into the next century? These are questions that would daunt even a Becket or an Augustine — let alone a Mullally.

Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty once boasted the world’s finest erudition — Erasmus, Archbishop Whitgift, and the “greatest scholar that England or perhaps that Europe ever bred”, Richard Bentley. Now it’s the kind of institution that “challenges itself… to think more deeply about race and to learn from those who have been marginalized”. A few years ago, Jordan Peterson was offered a visiting fellowship; a gaggle of students and academics ensured that this was abruptly rescinded. When Peterson was re-invited to Cambridge some time later, a group within the faculty, calling itself “Divine Dissent”, resolved to expose the “alt-/far-Right influence” in their midst. They doubtless had a particular character in mind.

James Orr, Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty, is best known to the world as JD Vance’s “British sherpa“. He has recently acquired a further title: Nigel Farage’s Svengali. He has been dipping his toes into turquoise waters for some time: his think tank, the Center for a Better Britain, is housed with Reform HQ at Milbank Tower, and has been busily supplying the intellectual foundations for Farage’s wider project. Orr might be to Farage as Keith Joseph was to Thatcher, or Anthony Giddens to Blair. As Farage’s senior adviser, Orr’s principal task is to prepare for government.

The Britain which Farage and Orr hope to inherit has, it would be fair to say, seen better days. It is plagued by sporadic bouts of violence; its social contract seems to be falling apart; there is little economic growth to speak of, and even less any notion of national ambition or self-belief. The British people are responding to the hanging sense of gloom in various ways: some by throwing their lot in with Zack Polanski or Zarah Sultana; others, who made their presence felt at the Unite the Kingdom rally, by committing themselves to a renewed kind of Christian nationalism. Orr is convinced, like many, that Britain’s present crisis is fundamentally spiritual. Who better to cure the nation’s souls than a Cambridge divine?

Orr has already been engaged in some soul-curing closer to home. Not far from Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty is Orr’s sprawling estate. The Catholic writer Rod Dreher once excitedly described it as a “form of the Benedict Option”, putting into practice his recommendation, in his book of that name, for Christians to retreat from the world and form communities of their own. Orr, for his part, jokes that Orr’s home is a “Right-wing Mecca”. The whole place sounds almost like a Cambridge college, perhaps even a “safe space”: somewhere for young people of a particular disposition to rub shoulders and nourish their minds, far away from the Harry Potter shops and Progress Pride flags that have taken over the city center. Clearly it is not quite Benedictine: it’s more like a Cambridge Asturias, preparing for an anti-woke Reconquista. Half the Right-wingers at Cambridge seem to have moored themselves there at some point or other, lodging in huts in the garden like a revolving cast of Catholic gnomes.

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Orr is very much a man of the establishment. Like Boris Johnson, he grew up in Brussels and read Greats at Balliol; in the intervening years, he was the year above Rishi Sunak at Winchester. He is a devout follower of Sir Roger Scruton, whose bust watches over his home and whose Legacy Foundation he helps to run. What sets him apart among Scruton’s many scions on the conservative landscape is his fluency in both languages of the contemporary Right. Here his middle-agedness is an asset. With the old Tory patricians, he can harp on about faith, family, flag, freedom, and “common sense” — although, since his jump to Reform, he has been able to speak about the “dinosaurs” more freely. He is equally in his element with the younger, hard-edged “new Right”, which is laser-focused on immigration and views all else as a frivolous sideshow. When interviewed by Steven Edginton on GB News, Orr is at ease in such “very online” matters as “Yookay Aesthetics”. He endears himself to his interviewer with his knowledge of Lee Kuan Yew quotations and his roster of statistics about demographics. It’s hard to imagine a “postliberal” of the old school launching into the conversation with such gusto.

At one point in that interview, Orr laments that Cockney English is in decline. His affection for Cockney may help explain his improbable friendship with Tom Skinner, who describes Orr as “one of the most educated geezers” he knows. Orr’s mission in Reform is to bring in talent, and Skinner has been touted as a potential standard-bearer, even perhaps a London mayor. Interviewing Matt Goodwin on his podcast, First Light, Orr worries that Reform has a personnel problem, and urgently needs to attract bright young things to prepare for government. One wonders whether there will be any Orr-backed alumni on the ballot in 2029.

But strange things are afoot on the religious Right, especially on the younger end. The self-declared “Reactionary Catholic Zoomer” Connor Tomlinson, who is close to Liz Truss and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and boasts almost 100,000 followers on X, questions whether those adhering to “any faith other than Christian”, or belonging to “any ethnicity besides British”, should be allowed to hold public office.

Then there’s the Reverend Calvin Robinson, who, like Tomlinson, is an affiliate of the Lotus Eaters podcast, and who has spent the last few years jumping from one Christian domination to another. Earlier this year he was defrocked by the Anglican Catholic Church in America for doing what appeared to be a Nazi salute at the National Pro-Life Summit. Tommy Robinson, meanwhile, loudly proclaims that he has found God, and what remains of UKIP marches under the Cross. In reaction, perhaps, to rising sectarian politics under other guises, Christian nationalism is now finding form on the fringes. Fearing that Reform might follow suit, Neville Watson — until recently the party’s only black branch chair, and himself an evangelical Christian — has decided to quit.

Towards the end of his conversation with Edginton, Orr expresses some reservations about the more radical elements. He is eager to disavow any conspiratorial thinking about mass migration. Nor, he maintains, did it ever occur to him or his fellow Wykehamites in the Nineties that the teenage Sunak was anything other than English. In response to Edginton’s insistent call for mass deportations — he tends to close his interviews this way — Orr insists that Farage has to “broaden out” and can’t “keep throwing red meat to the base”. The Caerphilly byelection has since proved the point: Reform must be careful not to frighten too many people into tactical voting. Part of Orr’s task will be to rein in the overexcitable youngsters, for pragmatic as well as conscientious reasons.

Orr might, however, compound Reform’s problems. Farage’s closeness to the Trump administration is already a millstone around his neck (he will be painfully aware of what happened to Pierre Poilievre in Canada): 55% of British voters dislike the American President. Orr’s buddy Vance is running at net disapproval even among Reform voters; of those who supported the Conservatives last year, 68% views him negatively. Nor will Reform be much helped by Orr’s views on social policy. His opposition to abortion under all circumstances is shared by only 6% of the public — hardly the stuff of a populist mass movement.

American conservatism is off-putting to the British mainstream in part because of its religious style. The gaudy enthusiasms of the evangelical Right are liable to produce an aesthetic revulsion in the British observer; something of this was conveyed even by Orr himself, when he remarked, of Charlie Kirk’s memorial extravaganza, that it was “not quite how we do things in Britain”.

Ultimately it would not be in Reform’s interest to become, or to be seen as, a “Christian party”. Indeed, the nonreligious currently outnumber Christians among Reform voters. The politics of the established church, meanwhile, are far more “Divine Dissent” than Orr: observe the recent furore over graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral, criticized by JD Vance, and Farage’s quarrel with the Archbishop of York. Britain’s actually-existing Christian politics, then, it is not one that Right-wingers tend to care for.

Orr is but the latest conservative Christian public intellectual to find himself swimming upstream in this manner. As another resolutely Right-wing Cambridge don, Maurice Cowling, once recognized, “the habitual sensibility in contemporary England is post-Christian or anti-Christian [and] it will require both intellectual effort and an effort of the will if it is to be modified”. Cowling was hopeful on this score, but it must be admitted that it hasn’t happened yet for a reason. There is plenty of effort and plenty of will coming out of Orr’s farm, but their fruits will find little appetite among the secular British public.

After all, it came just three days after Politico published a report pointing to a Christian nationalist faction of conservatives that is preparing to “to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in [a future Trump] administration”. For detractors, such as Atlantic writer Tim Alberta, this is an attempt to establish “far-Right religious dominion over the government”; for its leader Russell Vought, former Office of Management and Budget Director under Trump, it is a positive step towards “preserving our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage”.

Such accounts would suggest that Christian nationalism is a novel, ascendant force on the American Right. Yet politically vocal Christians have been a part of the Republican coalition for decades: from the days of the Moral Majority to Trump’s successful courting of the Evangelical vote. Vought’s fiscally hawkish brand of “Christian nationalism” is not, therefore, a catalyst for radical change — but rather a device for the old Republican political class to insulate itself from drastic reform. In fact, Vought embodies the striking ideological continuity between the pre-Trump and post-Trump Republican Party.

Vought began his political career at the turn of the millennium as a staffer to Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and later to then-Representative Mike Pence of Indiana. The two figures reflected Vought’s own mixture of social conservatism and devotion to fiscal austerity, at a time when the Reaganite gospel of cutting taxes, slashing regulations, and unleashing the free market was the unchallenged dogma of the Republican Party. Vought later made a name for himself as a policy wonk in the House Republican Study Committee, where the main priority was finding ways to cut entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, before joining the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, the most prestigious think tank in the conservative firmament, in time to fight the battles of the Obama years. This era was the high tide of the “fusionist” creed of conservatism, which saw no contradiction between hard-line Christian moral conservatism and free-market fundamentalism.

Besides his expertise in shrinking government, Vought became known for his aggressive personal style. When Trump emerged as a presidential contender in 2015, Vought became a convert to the nascent MAGA cause — though his affinity with the Republican standard bearer was more stylistic than ideological. This is because Trump ran the first time around against the GOP’s fusionist sympathies: he promised to tax the rich and defend popular entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, while expressing a nonchalant stance toward Planned Parenthood and transgenderism. In many ways, this early incarnation of Trump was the opposite of Vought: a most un-Christian social liberal with a penchant for redistributive economic populism.

It speaks to his sheer tenacity that Vought, on joining the Trump administration in 2018, thought that he could bend the president to his vision of traditional fusionist conservatism. In the White House, an interesting dynamic emerged between the two men, one that perfectly encapsulates the push-and-pull dynamic between the pre and the post-populist versions of the GOP. As a former senior Trump administration official told The Washington Post: “[Vought would] take these dream budgets in to Trump, and Trump would say, ‘I don’t want these cuts; don’t make these cuts. I don’t want to touch social programmes. I don’t want to touch entitlements.’ And he’d back down… It would drive Russ crazy, because he wanted to make actual cuts.”

In spite of Trump’s populist instincts, the conservative establishment, working through operatives such as Vought, largely succeeded in turning the Trump administration into a platform for realising a slate of pre-Trump fusionist priorities. They ensured the passing of a giant corporate tax cut, the appointing of a social conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and, of course, entitlement cuts in the White House budget proposal. Meanwhile, funding for Trump’s wall was voted down by the House Republican majority.

Once Trump had left office, Vought did what any out-of-work Washington operative with access to donor money would do: he founded his own tax-exempt think tank as a means to further entrenching his policy agenda in the DC Swamp. The priorities of his Center for Renewing America are remarkably consistent with longstanding fusionist goals — restoring “fiscal discipline” and fighting “Big Government Socialism” while doubling down on social conservatism — with a patina of anti-woke, America First rebranding. In the CRA’s case, appeals to Christian nationalism are once again bound to small government orthodoxy.

Vought’s mission seems to be to preserve as much of the fusionist programme as possible within the Trump era. For instance, he’s switched from advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which Trump has defended, to proposing axing Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and other federal programmes. In doing so, he has sacrificed some of his economic principles: other budget experts have pointed out that Social Security and Medicare are the biggest impediments to the dream of perpetually balanced budgets, unless conservatives are willing to raise taxes. Vought has also sought to make Trumpian immigration restrictionism another leg of the fusionist synthesis, but his attempts to justify restrictionism in the name of Christianity have come across as confused and convoluted: after all, Trump did it in 2016 without any reference to Biblical teachings.

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In light of these continuities, one wonders what Vought’s “Christian nationalism” is beyond an opaque rhetorical device to give the impression of a seismic philosophical shift while masking what is essentially a self-perpetuating conservative ideology. Indeed, Vought’s involvement with the fusionist flagship Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, a plan to re-staff the federal government with conservative apparatchiks with Reaganite pedigrees, should be viewed as a fulfilment of pre-Trump conservatism, with its desire to smash the administrative state.

Yet beyond the Republican elite, Vought’s worldview has never been so unfashionable. Polling data shows that ordinary Americans are moving further away from the fusionist orthodoxy that he is trying to uphold. His fiscal hawkishness around federal programmes, including Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, have consistently proven to be broadly unpopular with the American public. And the social conservative component is also proving a hindrance, with 61% of voters disapproving of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe. The continuing stridency of the pro-life movement has become an electoral liability for the Republican Party — as we can see from the appalled response to the recent Alabama IVF ruling — and ordinary Americans appear to be far more comfortable with the socially liberal, economically populist Trump of 2015-16.

Vought is right, however, when he claims that ordinary Americans oppose “woke” elites. But, beyond the Evangelical minority, they do so out of a “live-and-let-live” attitude closer to “Barstool conservatism”: in other words, they are not likely to want to overturn wokeism only to see it replaced by another moralistic creed that judges their personal lives. Still, “Christian nationalism” could perhaps be one way for Vought and his ilk to mobilise and consolidate the country’s shrinking share of Evangelical voters on behalf of an intellectually decrepit Republican Party, which hides its unpalatable policy agenda behind culture war crusades and incessant professions of loyalty to Trump.

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Yet Vought is not the only Christian nationalist in town. Another faction of Christian political thinkers is represented by intellectuals Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and Sohrab Ahmari, as well as, to varying degrees, by Senators J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley. This group is just as militantly social conservative on issues such as abortion and LGBT identity as Vought. But, unlike him, they have sought to refashion conservative governance in response to the material failures of the Reaganite consensus. They have introduced the tenets of Catholic social teaching and something akin to European Christian Democracy into American political discourse, and offer Christian-inspired defences of the welfare state, industrial policy, and the New Deal — a direct rebuke to the small government fanaticism of the fusionist camp.

And while this tendency remains a minority on the Right, it likely represents the most serious long-term threat to Vought’s Christian nationalist vision. For, if it ever succeeds in displacing fusionism, it would invalidate the very terms of their political existence, namely the symbiosis between political Christianity and free-market economics. Such a vision of Christian statesmanship would still encounter challenges in a secularising post-Christian America, but it would, at least, be responsive to the severe conditions of economic inequality and social dislocation that afflict Americans in ways that Reagan-era conservatism just can’t be. That free markets have often been the scourge of traditional values is a possibility Vought simply will not consider and therein lies the limit of his imagination — and his usefulness to any future Republican administration.

Peters is one of a growing number of “MAGA-preachers” who use the pulpit to deliver hellfire warnings about the state of the nation. A rising star in the amped-up evangelical world, the founder of the Patriot Church became infamous as one of the preachers who addressed angry protesters in Washington D.C. on January 5, 2021. Convinced that President Trump had the election stolen from him — from them — these protesters would go on the next day to storm the Capitol.

The January 6 committee has already heard that the attack was the “culmination of an attempted coup”. While the congressional hearings are covering a lot we already knew — President Trump became detached from the reality of his election loss and surrounded himself with yes men; his key adviser Rudy Giuliani was hammered on election night — they have featured harrowing new testimony from people at the riot about the level of organisation and violence on display.

One police officer attacked by the rioters told the committee that the building was a “war zone” and said that she was “slipping in people’s blood”. Footage and testimony from a filmmaker on the scene said he saw hundreds of far-Right Proud Boys walking away from President Trump’s speech towards the Capitol, with the committee inferring that they may have been scoping out security weaknesses for an organised attack. This would imply that January 6 was not the result of the spontaneous actions of lone wolves — nor a false flag operation — as Trump supporters would have us believe.

On the surface, the storming of the Capitol might show how a man nakedly obsessed with winning chose to incite his febrile supporter base and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. But on closer inspection, the events of that day tell the story of the troubling rise of Christian Nationalism that is gaining pace in the United States.

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Christian Nationalism is the idea that America is defined by Christianity. This idea has been around as long as America itself, but until the mid-20th century, many evangelicals saw themselves as being above, or at least separate to, mainstream society. The desire to penetrate politics has steadily picked up pace since the Fifties, with the dial being firmly turned in the Reagan-era and again since the 2008 financial crisis and election of Barack Obama.

Proponents of this ideology — the 29% of Americans who believe that “the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” — aren’t seeking a Taliban-style theocracy. Rather, they propose using traditionally American means, from their own stockpiles of arms to a rigged Supreme Court, to impose a muscular set of values on Americans that are equally informed by culture and faith.

Needless to say, the God of Christian Nationalists is not Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, but a gun-toting, gas-guzzling, straight, white, native-born kinda guy. He looks and sounds a lot like the people who stormed the Capitol. Researcher and journalist Teddy Wilson mapped more than 850 individuals who took part in the Capitol riot, along with their stated motivations and affiliations. He found that: “Christian Nationalism, more than any other ideological beliefs, has played the most significant role both in the motivations of the defendants, the performance of the attack, and the attempt by the Right to rewrite the history of January 6th.”

Advocates don’t tend to use the term themselves, preferring words such as patriot and MAGA, but spotting their beliefs in action isn’t difficult. Uniting the adherents from the rural South to New York City, they target causes perceived to be liberal or progressive — and are employing increasingly violent ends in opposition to them.

Ken Peters is currently being sued by Planned Parenthood for holding services outside abortion clinics, with the one in Knoxville being shot up weeks after the church’s inaugural service on the 48th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision (Peters denies inciting the shooting and no one has been charged). Pastor Greg Locke, who joined Peters in preaching to thousands of would-be insurrectionists the night before the Capitol riots, delights his 2.2 million Facebook followers by conducting mass burnings of “demonic” Harry Potter books.

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The movement isn’t only being organised in traditional churches. True believers are being radicalised by extreme online preachers, and mobilising to take over school boards. Meanwhile, self-described “Christian Fascists” and patriot groups have tried to storm gay events across the country for Pride month. Preachers such as Peters and Locke are enjoying their newfound status as patriotic heroes, but their ideology is expanding their following beyond the pews and into partisan politics, fusing faith and the Republican Party in a way that makes the George W. Bush era look comparatively secular.

While the Christian Nationalist movement to date has been characterised by marches with tiki-torches and Viking hats to try to overturn the election, this is far from a fringe carnival for cranks and loners. For starters, many who participated in the Capitol riots weren’t cabin-dwellers or wannabe TikTok stars. They were self-styled prophets, tech CEOs and real estate agents who chartered private jets to the event.

They are very much the face of the modern Republican Party. Nearly half of today’s Republicans consider themselves born-again, a figure up from 37% in 1988. Yet between 2008 and 2019, the number of self-described evangelicals who attend church each week has decreased from 59% to 52%. In the same period, those who never or seldom attend church has grown 50% to almost one quarter of evangelicals. These changes are being mirrored by those they call “Godless Democrats”. In 1972, just 5% of Americans said that they had no religion, but in 2018, that number rose to 23.7%.

Being an evangelical has shifted from a practice of deeply-held beliefs to a political identity that is riding vibes. As political scientist Dr David Smith puts it, “the average evangelical is Homer Simpson, not Ned Flanders”. One way of looking at this phenomenon is that as America becomes more secular, its evangelicals are becoming more committed. Fuelled by conspiracy and feeling besieged by what they perceive as a liberal world closing in on them, America’s political Right and religious Right are morphing into one. Even those who we might call “cultural Christians” are embracing Christian Nationalist ideas — the kind of self-described evangelicals who don’t go to church but are happy to use biblical justification to crush their opponents.

That’s because they know that they have lost the democratic battle and the demographic battle. Republican power in the United States is largely gained through archaic, unrepresentative institutions such as the Electoral College and Senate, political appointments to the courts, and the gerrymandering of electorates. In a fair, democratic system, they aren’t winning, and would be forced to moderate their ideas to appeal to a wider slice of the electorate.

Not only is Christian Nationalism changing politics, it’s changing theology too. Three doctrines have become popular among the radical Right in recent years, shaped to appeal to people coming to Christian Nationalism from all angles.

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Joel’s Army merges religion, conspiracy, and patriotism, appealing to angry young men with the idea that their mission to rule over their countrymen is preordained. The Seven Mountain Mandate encourages believers to reclaim the seven spheres of influence on earth — including government, entertainment, and education — ahead of the End Times. For those invested in QAnon and other conspiracy movements, Spiritual Warfare holds that demons and evil spirits are present and intervening in our daily lives. Here, the Democratic Party, Joe Biden or the LGBT community don’t simply have policies you oppose — they are possessed with spirits; they are evil personified.

The theological shift is reshaping the Christian narrative from offering justice and salvation to one of conquest. In turn, this incendiary language is being picked up and amplified by Fox News hosts and Republican Party candidates — its God-given “mandate” helping to suppress doubt, and to inspire violence and fanaticism.

The changing nature of how faith is consumed is contributing to the rot, too. In the past, a small-town preacher might see congregations voting with their feet and wallets to leave hate-filled political sermons. But the ability to stream church services online — and the social media incentives to be polarising — has put an end to the idea of churches as throwing open the doors to all comers. Last weekend, Ken Peters boasted that the Patriot Church was expanding its house church network for people who can’t find “churches like ours” and don’t want to be a part of “woke church”. Like-minded folks gathered around YouTube in their living rooms will help spread the Patriot Church like “brushfires”.

Of course, divine rule looks a lot like power in the here and now. Beyond the outcome of the January 6 hearings, it is clear that Christian Nationalism is morphing into the unifying ideology of the right of the Republican Party, with or without Trump. As Ken Peters himself openly put it in his weekend sermon: the state can’t interfere with them, but they can interfere with the state. This might be placing Christian Nationalists in a minority in the United States, but they don’t care. They no longer believe that the ballot box is the source of power and authority.