Donald Trump won reelection this week. A major facet of his electoral coalition was a shift towards the Republican presidential ticket among young men between the ages of 18 and 29, of all races. Statistics on the religious commitments of voters are nigh impossible to render accurately—one thinks of the impossibly fluid definition of “evangelical” used to describe conservative white voters in the Republican coalition—but it is likely that many of these new young men fall in to the category of Barstool Conservatives popularized by commentator and Spectator editor Ben Domenech. “Stuck-up old visions of rich conservative white men as representative of conservatives are being replaced by a more economically and racially diverse working and middle class.” Left unsaid, but just as significant, is the fact that these young men are considerably less religious than previous generations of conservatives. [1]
Religious conservatives accustomed to dominating conservative politics find the prospect of learning to politically coexist with irreligious (and to many Evangelicals, immoral) young men daunting and even distasteful. Rev. Dr. James R. Wood, professor of religion and theology at Redeemer University, sees a unique opportunity for Protestants like himself in the conservative turn in young men. Many are for the first time exploring Christianity, even if only for the cultural and social treasury Western Christianity has stewarded for nearly two millennia. This phenomena isn’t limited to Barstool conservatives. Intellectuals are undertaking similar journeys. Wood notes that British historian Tom Holland “became convinced that most of our cherished values in the West are indebted to Christianity” as he researched his bestselling Dominion. Holland recognized “that in his ‘morals and ethics’ he is ‘thoroughly and proudly Christian.’” Wood argues that there is real potential for proselytizing these newfound cultural Christians. Young men taking up conservative politics “recognize that the cultural revolutionaries’ projects to rewrite reality are destroying civilization. These refugees crave clarity about basic moral realities because of how much confusion the negative world has produced. They are looking for voices who stand up to the civilizational destroyers—maybe even voices who boldly proclaim supernatural truths.”[2]
Wood’s analysis is not sensational wish-casting. There is historical precedent to correlate an embrace of more conservative conceptions of political authority with an accompanying an increase in piety, and vice versa. A symbiosis between conservative politics and more substantive Christian piety typified the Réveil, a religious and in some ways political revival movement that swept France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and parts of Germany in the second and third decades of the 19th Century. Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, a rising Dutch politician, became a passionate devotee of orthodox Dutch Reformed Protestantism after being exposed to the preaching of Swiss divine Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné, who served as court preacher to King William I of the Netherlands. As he became a more openly pious Christian—something that did him few favors at court—Groen van Prinsterer also became a ferocious monarchist committed to influencing the Dutch nobility towards greater piety and a firm commitment to the monarchist socio-political order. French politician François Guizot, a committed liberal, grew increasingly appreciative of conservative monarchy when he recommitted himself to his childhood French Reformed faith during the tumult of the 1848 revolutions that overthrew Louis-Phillipe. Guizot’s rediscovered piety, and his conservatism, made it impossible for him to serve either the republicans or Bonapartists that dominated France in the subsequent decades. [3]
Similar narratives can be found in the religious lives and politics of French cleric Adolphe Monod, and Swiss Réveil luminaries Frederic Rougemont and Henri-Louis Empaytaz, the latter of whom deeply influenced Tsar Nicholas I of Russia and the founding of the conservative monarchist Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The phenomena was not limited to the continent. Scottish Free Church divines James Bannerman and Thomas Chalmers grew more politically conservative as their ministries deepened. Women like Barbara von Krüdener exhibited vibrant Protestant piety interconnected with a distinct conservative political disposition. Von Krüdener, a Baltic German noblewoman and pietist Lutheran, controversially defended the monarchy of Alexander I fiercely to the point she sometimes seemed her contemporaries a medieval mystic than the 19th century Evangelical Lutheran that she was.[4]
Protestants of the Réveil understood the consequences of political revolution. Most of them knew family and friends who lived through the iconoclasm, terrorism, and en masse political violence of the French Revolution and Europe’s Revolutionary wars of the 1790s. Guizot was old enough to have spent his boyhood escaping the Terror. The devotees of the Réveil believed their Protestant Christianity contained spiritual salvation. They also saw it as an essential and conservative civilizational bedrock in a time of dangerous social change. Like today’s young men, they looked for voices who stand up to the civilizational destroyers, voices that, as it turned out boldly proclaimed supernatural truths.
[1] Ben Domenech, “What does ‘Barstool conservative’ even mean?” The Spectator World (10 Aug 20203).
[2] James R. Wood, “Evangelicals Must Stop Their Preferential Treatment of the Left,” First Things (18 July 2024).
[3] JL Van Essen, “Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer and His Conception of History,” Westminster Theological Journal 44 (1982): 205-49; Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Christian Political Action in an Age of Revolution (Moscow, ID: Canon Press); E.L. Woodward, Three Studies in European Conservatism: Metternich: Guizot: The Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Archon Books, 1963); Aurelian Crăiuțu, Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lexington Books, 2003), 136–7; Francois Guizot, Memoirs of a Minister of State, From the Year 1840 (London: Richard Bentley, 1864); Francois Guizot, Memoirs to Illustrate the History of My Time (London: Richard Bentley, 1858).
[4]Timothy CF Stunt, From awakening to secession: radical evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815-35 (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000), 30.
*Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
