All grace, no nature

There’s a quiet irony unfolding in the evangelical church today. After decades of lamenting cultural decay, many Christians like me are watching with fascination, and some degree of caution, as the broader culture shows signs of a rightward shift after the 2024 election.

This week, Axios put out what I can only call a stunning article on the abysmal state of the Democratic Party. That article follows from an interview the New York Times’s Ezra Klein did with Democratic pollster David Shor, revealing the same trend: a general cultural rejection of progressivism that appears to be happening at virtually all levels of American life, especially among Gen Z, which is forecasted to become one of the most conservative generations on record. This is particularly true of younger men, who are decidedly more conservative.

There are many possible explanations for what is happening in the culture. One reason is that progressivism went too far. It assumed that everyone would accept social progressivism’s fascination with identity, inclusion, and political correctness or simply overwhelm the opposition owing to the cultural majority that elites enjoy. Another possible explanation is that liberalism misread the field. After all, most Americans do not have college degrees. It’s insane to assume that highly educated New Yorkers’ social dogmas are amenable to the values upheld by farmers in Nebraska. Or maybe the explanation for Gen Z’s rightward trajectory, in particular, is that it is the generation that grew up under the most stifling regime of woke progressivism, a constellation of ideas that viewed society through the lens of oppressor and the oppressed, with white men as the arch-scapegoat to assuage progressivism’s wrath.

Disillusionment with progressivism, a questioning of progressive social dogmas, a reconsideration of traditional values, the growing acceptance of masculine and feminine ideals, and an increasing desire for order and permanence are taking root, particularly among younger generations. As I have written previously, that also coincides with some very dark trends, such as racism, eugenics, transhumanism, and anti-Semitism.

You might think this is the moment evangelicalism was waiting for. The wicked witch of progressivism is dead, right? So that means an opportunity for Christians to finally “engage the culture” and win, right?

But evangelicalism isn’t ready to lead in this moment because generations of evangelical leaders have not spoken affirmatively of the creaturely instincts that progressives have been attacking for decades. Sure, figures within the Religious Right correctly protested the demise of the family and traditional morality. But other strands of evangelicalism have spoken of the Christian life as a pious evacuation from political responsibility. Evangelical egalitarianism ran through creational differences. Liberalizing evangelicalism preached social justice, evidencing an ambient materialism to their so-called “gospel.”

Third-wayism among many evangelical elites told us that Christianity “stands above” American polarization only to provide theological justification for ceding the cultural ground to progressives. Or much of mainstream evangelicalism shows discomfort with creation order realities, fearing that loving the nation violates the transnational Kingdom of God or that celebrating masculinity offends the quiet expectation that we all become functional eunuchs within the church. In too many cases, evangelical political theology lacks a doctrine of creation. Evangelicalism often appears as all grace, no nature.

For all its strengths—its evangelistic zeal, its emphasis on grace, its defense of biblical authority—evangelicalism has long suffered from a theology that skips straight from the Fall to the Cross to the Resurrection with little consideration of what original created nature was for. It has little capacity to speak about the created world as good in itself (Genesis 1:31; 1 Timothy 4:4). Nature, order, design, morality, hierarchy, limits—these are not simply remnants of a fallen system to be transcended. They are goods to be received, stewarded, and fought for. But when a theological tradition has no place for creation in its moral and political imagination, the re-emergence of natural goods—like male and female distinction, the good of loving and prioritizing one’s family, or the basic moral instincts of conscience—feels foreign, even threatening. The over-valuation of grace into platonic detachment has left us unable to participate in politics without guilt about immediate compromise. While politics after the Fall is about restraining the evildoer, we overlook why we have the retributive justice of the state—to protect pre-Fall goods.

So when the culture, weary of chaos, begins to grope back toward its outer-boundary natural law violations, evangelicalism will fumble unless we relearn the value of nature. We must be able to affirm the goodness of maleness and femaleness, the goodness of hierarchy and authority, the goodness of limits, the good of the family, the good of conscience and moral law.

This is why many evangelicals find themselves uncomfortable with the language of authority, duty, or rootedness. These are not primarily red-state values—they are creational ones. But if your theology has no robust doctrine of creation, you will inevitably treat them as cultural preferences or, worse, as impediments to “authentic gospel witness” rather than moral goods.

The irony, of course, is that evangelicals often claim to be “biblical” in all things. Yet Scripture is saturated with creation’s logic: God made the world with order and form before filling it with life. He called it good—not just spiritually, but materially, structurally, socially. The created order is not an accidental backdrop for redemption; it’s the very thing grace redeems. Grace restores nature.

Without recovering this, evangelicalism will either miss the moment or mislead it. The culture’s rightward shift is not necessarily a revival—but it is an opportunity. A people grounded in creation and alive to grace could help give it form and direction. But a church that only speaks of grace as escape, not restoration, will fail to channel this moment toward the good. It will either surrender to secular nostalgia or react against it with progressive instincts in theological disguise.

Evangelicals must relearn how to love the world—not in the worldly sense, but in the creational sense. Until then, we will not meet the culture’s shift with the wisdom and depth it demands. We will only speak half the gospel to people asking, at last, the right kinds of questions.