The Left Took Over the Churches, and the Right Never Fought Back

Other motives drove the left, too.  The left's slavish obedience to the shifting standards of peer convention combined with the left's refusal to hold any time-honored standards as sacred does not offer people strong odds for fulfillment.

Robert Oscar Lopez   "Amid so many historic aspects to the 2020 election, one bit of important history may be getting lost.  While Trump has ushered in a whole new era in politics, changes to American church life during the last four years have been sweeping.  This essay will provide an introduction to the church's present battles, for readers who may not have been following Christian media or who find the situation confusing.

Toon added by TD

"Church, state, and culture

"In my first academic book, Colorful Conservative: American Conversations with the Ancients from Wheatley to Whitman, I examined the origin of the present-day "conservative" mind.  I did not follow the familiar methodology of Russell Kirk, but tried to look at literature.

"I see increasingly that the core of American conservatism blends traditional and unconventional thinking.  (I went over this in detail in this column.)  While many conservative writers like to trace everything back to Burke, I argue that Burke was both traditional and conventional; this left out a huge bloc of the American right that was irreverent, pugnacious, or defiant to everything that came with contemporary conventions: peer pressure, intellectual fads, condescending pronouncements from experts, arrogant social experiments.  Burke took peer pressure seriously but wanted to balance it with longstanding cultural prejudices (he did not see prejudices as a bad thing).  Burke could explain the existence of the National Review, but he could not explain phenomena like MassResistance moms risking their safety to blockade drag queen story hour.

"The heart and soul of American conservatism consisted of two powerful elements: the preference for ancient social mores and bold resistance to peer pressure.  In three waves, the traditional-unconventional conservatism of America evolved to become a societal mainstay." . . .