Moral minority

During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a political philosophy called “fusionism” dominated the Republican Party. In broad strokes, fusionism consisted of an interventionist foreign policy, free market economics, and Christian social morality—with an emphasis on being pro-life and opposed to gay marriage. President Donald Trump killed fusionism when he adopted a noninterventionist foreign policy and imposed tariffs on the entire world. But what of the Republican Party’s morality?

Many of Trump’s votes in 2024 came from a group sometimes called “Barstool conservatives,” basically nonchurchgoers without much of a political creed beyond their hatred of wokeness. But non-Christian thinkers are also reaching the party’s more high-brow audience.

“They provide an alternative intellectual, moral superstructure for the right,” said Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Reformer. “It’s a rival set of ideas that are non-Christian. These groups, although they’re small, provide an alternative ideology that people can very easily understand and adopt.”

The extent of this influence can be hard to discern. Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) calls secular and neo-pagan influences indirect, seen mostly through MAGA influencers on social media. “The problem is that many conservative Christians, who see ‘the left’ as the only threat to Christianity, open themselves to malevolent influences on the right,” Tooley says. “They falsely assume that any force on the right must be a friend to Christianity. They also forget that sin is universal and not confined to the political left.”

In the past, many conservatives who didn’t claim Christianity still operated under its umbrella, Tooley adds. Now, they’re more comfortable with publicly expressing their secular beliefs.

As an example of this trend, Matthew Walther, editor of the Catholic literary journal The Lamp, points to the Republican National Convention in 2024 when virtually all of the anti-abortion language was stripped from the official platform. “If that could be accomplished so quickly, you have to ask yourself, how many of the people who had signed off on this previously really believed any of it?”

Here are four of the non-Christian philosophies creating ripples in conservative circles.

Barstool Conservatives

The conservative showdown of the year in 2023 involved a company called Conservative Dad’s, which brews Ultra Right Beer, launching a calendar that featured attractive women in skimpy outfits. On the cover: Riley Gaines—a former collegiate swimmer who campaigns against men in women’s sports—wearing a red, white, and blue bikini. Conservative Christians reacted with disgust. Barstool conservatives loved it.

The controversy over “Calendargate” grew so heated that mainstream media outlets covered it. They understood it encapsulated the tension between the Christian conservatives ascendant under fusionism and the Barstool conservatives who voted for Trump.

Matthew Walther coined the phrase “Barstool conservative.” He says this group is the new voting base of the Republican Party. Barstool conservatives are the millions of Americans who smoke weed, engage in sports betting on their phones, and watch pornography. They don’t attend church much, but they also aren’t hostile to Christian values. And that’s a significant difference between them and the political left.

Barstool conservatives tend to have little intellectual interest in the non-Christian philosophies reaching a more high-brow audience. Above all, Barstool conservatives resent the “woke scolds” who tell them what they can or can’t say. That’s why they voted for Trump.

“Yarvin to my knowledge is fashionable only among a libertarian tech elite that promotes an oligarchy of high-IQ tech geniuses who think they should rule the world.” Curtis Yarvin / Portrait by Jonathan Bruns

Curtis Yarvin

It’s a freezing Thursday afternoon, three days after President Trump’s inauguration. At a café in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle sits a man named Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer and author of the Substack “Gray Mirror.” He flew in from California for the week’s events.

Yarvin is holding what he calls “office hours,” like a college professor. A stack of three books and a pair of reading glasses almost fully occupy his table. He invited his Substack subscribers to sign up for 30-minute sessions to meet him. When I arrive, Yarvin is wrapping up a conversation with a starstruck young man in a tweed coat who gazes at him, leaning in to catch every word.

Yarvin’s influential conservative fans include Vice President J.D. Vance. In a 2021 podcast interview in which he was asked about how to reduce the size of the federal workforce, Vance said, “There’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who’s written about some of these things.” Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and major donor to conservative candidates, invested in Yarvin’s tech startup.

While Yarvin’s café office hours seemed professorial, they might better be called royal audiences. One of Yarvin’s key ideas is that American democracy has failed and should be replaced by corporate monarchy. He also thinks the government bureaucracy needs to be gutted. Rather than trying to reform a broken agency, “you should just shut it down and create a new one,” he tells me.

From 2007 to 2014, Yarvin blogged under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and posted content some considered racist, sexist, or fascist. When his identity was revealed, he was disinvited from public events connected to his computer programming work and lived out of the public eye until 2020.

He’s come a long way since then. At the café in Washington, Yarvin is sporting the same black leather jacket he wore for an interview with The New York Times Magazine published one day before the inauguration. The magazine took him to task for some of his previous statements, including this one: “It is very difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves.” He has also suggested moral equivalency between Anders Breivik—the Norwegian mass murderer—and Nelson Mandela.

A key part of Yarvin’s rebranding was to advocate for monarchy instead of dictatorship—as he did when he wrote as Moldbug—and avoid discussions of racial issues.

Trump’s critics have made much of Yarvin’s influence on the administration. But Kevin Slack, a professor of politics at Hillsdale College, thinks Yarvin’s reach is limited: “Yarvin to my knowledge is fashionable only among a libertarian tech elite that promotes an oligarchy of high-IQ tech geniuses who think they should rule the world.”

Yarvin readily tells me he’s an atheist. But he has plenty of advice for Christians engaged in politics. For example, he thinks Christians should turn their local public schools into Christian schools. When I suggest a court would strike down such an effort, Yarvin says, “What is a court? Judges are actually people. They’re just wearing an unusual costume. You can get the same costume at Halloween party stores.”

He waves off concerns that his ideas might lead to violent revolution with a comparison to the Jan. 6 riot. “Look at the J6ers and their weird attempt to LARP [live action role play] the storming of the Bastille.” He notes sarcastically that the violence that day was minimal compared with the start of the French Revolution in 1789. “They literally took the governor to tear him limb from limb.”

Yarvin believes men have lost that capacity for violence, but he doesn’t see it as a good thing. He laments about “dehumanized men,” and even connected that to America’s declining birthrate. “They don’t know how to fight,” he concludes.

BAP is explicitly hostile toward Christianity, a position he takes from Nietzsche. “He thinks it promotes ‘slave morality’ that undermines the kind of ethos he advocates for.” Costin Alamariu (BAP) / Portrait by Jonathan Bruns

Bronze Age Pervert

Yarvin is just one of many thinkers on the political right who are concerned about low fertility rates and a perceived lack of masculine strength. But in 2018 one particular book crystallized these frustrations. A pseudonymous author named Bronze Age Pervert (usually abbreviated to BAP) published Bronze Age Mindset. The title refers to “the secret desire … to be worshiped as a god!”

Written in a faux-caveman style with grammatical errors and neologisms, the book attracted a cult following even as it repelled everyone else. In 2018, news website Politico reported young male staffers in the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill were reading BAP’s book—or at least following his Twitter account.

Media outlets have identified BAP as Costin Alamariu, a Romanian American who earned a Ph.D. from Yale. But when I addressed him as “Mr. Alamariu” in an X message, he responded, “I don’t know why you refer to me by that name.”

Hillsdale’s Kevin Slack calls Bronze Age Mindset a “brash critique of Western society.”

“It seeks to reinvigorate noble young men to prepare for spiritual struggle against the bureaucratic blob and its bugmen,” Slack says. Bugmen is BAP’s term for subhumans who hate goodness and strength.

BAP believes in vitalism, a strain of thinking that traces back to Nietzsche and Romanticism. “Vitalism refers to an old philosophical idea that living organisms can’t be understood merely through what today we’d call chemistry or physics but that there is a vital or life force that animates them,” BAP told me via private message on X.

American Reformer’s Aaron Renn notes BAP is explicitly hostile toward Christianity, a position he takes from Nietzsche. “He thinks it promotes ‘slave morality’ that undermines the kind of ethos he advocates for,” Renn says.

BAP did have some harsh words for modern Christians in his X message. He says public religious identification today is “like the gay identity or trans identity.” He claims he’s not aware of any current strains of Christianity that aren’t “fundamentally broken” and don’t exist “only as a kind of minstrel show.”

“If an admirable strain of public Christianity will exist in the future it will likely be something entirely new and unexpected in relation to what exists now,” he adds.

He does admire “Christian heroes in history,” particularly Roman Catholic conquistadors who used violence to spread the faith to the New World, and Conradin, a young medieval king who fought bravely in battle before being beheaded at age 16 in 1268.

Slack says he doesn’t hear his students at Hillsdale talking about Bronze Age Mindset anymore, but he thinks BAP’s influence lives on because he “created a successful rhetoric for ideas that were circulating among young men.”

BAP exhorts them to be as fit as they can, particularly by lifting weights. He helped make health a priority on the right, which in turn helped shape the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Young MAHA conservatives believe big business and government have conspired to degrade American health.

Sailer popularized the term “human biodiversity,” the idea that the human race is best understood through the lens of evolution. Steve Sailer / Portrait by Jonathan Bruns

Steve Sailer

Tucker Carlson is no stranger to controversial interviews. But in June 2024, he invited a guest on his show that even he acknowledged came with baggage: Steve Sailer.

“So I gotta say, it’s a little weird to be sitting across from you in my barn,” Carlson says. The room doesn’t match most people’s idea of a barn. The two men sit underneath a chandelier made of antlers, surrounded by dark-wood bookcases, a grandfather clock, and an American flag. The occasion for the interview is Sailer’s new anthology, Noticing. But it is so much more.

The “weird” element Carlson refers to is not his barn but the fact that Sailer, who writes for far-right websites and has an eponymous Substack, has appeared in public. In an email, Sailer tells me he used to be seen as “this Lord Voldemort of the intellectual world, frequently referenced but never named.”

“I went over 10 years without being allowed to give a talk in public,” he says. “I’d get signed up to give a presentation in a hotel meeting room, but then the Southern Poverty Law Center or some other hammer of Cancel Culture would intimidate the hotel into cancelling the contract.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has called him a “proponent of scientific racism” and a “white supremacist.”

Sailer popularized the term “human biodiversity,” the idea that the human race is best understood through the lens of evolution. He claims he’s basically a sports fan, noting that some races tend to do better in certain sports and playing positions. “I just employ the kind of thinking that’s not terribly controversial in the sports world to more politicized questions about society, such as education or crime.” He has written about racial differences and test scores. He’s also reported that FBI data shows that 60% of known homicide offenders are African ­American.

Renn explains, “The animating feature of human biodiversity is: evolution works on humans, and therefore human groups, essentially races, genetically vary and all of these differences of outcomes in our world are as a result of genetic variations between groups.”

Despite its connection to evolution, Sailer says he doesn’t see human biodiversity as incompatible with religious faith. “You can also discuss the microevolution of biodiversity among humans intelligently without believing that our species came about solely through macroevolution without any guidance by a higher power.”

Matthew Walther disagrees. “The idea that a human being made lovingly in God’s own image, endowed with a rational soul, can be reduced to or can be considered synonymous with one measure of his or her intellectual capacity, is so profoundly and obviously anti-Christian.”

While Yarvin, BAP, and Sailer emphasize different things, Walther thinks they are closely intertwined. “You could say that the human biodiversity thing is the hardware, and the BAP thing and the Yarvin thing are the software.” Walther believes the notion that some races are more intelligent or more capable is implicit in Yarvin and BAP’s work. Human biodiversity states this notion explicitly, albeit in a style that purports to be neutral and scientific.

BAP denies being influenced by the modern group of writers who use the label human biodiversity. “My own views on the importance of nature and biology in human social and political life are influenced by Plato and Aristotle.”

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Sailer got 4.3 million views on X. But beyond metrics like these, it’s difficult—if not impossible—to measure how many people these non-Christian philosophies reach, much less how many people believe them. Still, the ideas filter into the public consciousness through podcasts, memes, X posts, and Substacks—and often they’re only referenced in indirect ways.

So where does that leave Christians engaged in politics? They have found some issues that have broad-based appeal, such as opposition to transgenderism for children and keeping men out of women’s sports. But when it comes to banning abortion or returning to traditional marriage, “fundamentally, most Americans don’t support what they want,” Renn says.

IRD’s Mark Tooley thinks Christians in politics face a choice: “Whether we’re going to be self-protective, seeking legislation and policies that protect the free exercise of conservative Christianity. Or whether we have a larger vision of trying to influence and redeem the whole of society. Obviously, the religious right for most of its history was about the latter.”

Tooley thinks much depends on whether the number of people attending Christian churches continues to shrink. “If that decline stops, or maybe even reverses,” he says. “Maybe there’ll be a more optimistic perspective.”