The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues. In line with this mission statement, several times I have addressed the issue of what does it mean to be a “conservative” in the 21st century? A label that captures my personal convictions is the phrase “principled conservativism.”  The views and convictions I expressed in the 17 January 2026 edition of Issues are a helpful summary of what I believe. In this edition of Issues, I want to think about the future of the conservative moment in America.

Few would disagree with the observation that Donald Turmp and his presidency have upended the historic meaning of “conservative” and created a significant amount of confusion as to what it actually means to be a conservative today. Furthermore, it is next to impossible to determine with confidence the future of conservatism in America. Nonetheless, I want to speculate on the future of this moment and add a few additional comments about evangelical Christianity, which at least since 1976 has identified itself as conservative in the broader political culture of America.

Let me begin with an insightful observation from Glenn Loury, Professor of Social Sciences at Brown University: “Something like a civil war is unfolding within the American conservative movement. It is not merely a dispute about policy agendas, foreign alliances, or the boundaries of political discourse. It is a deeper conflict struggle over the meaning of conservatism itself. The recent controversy surrounding Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes revealed a fissure that has been widening for years: a clash between two visions of the right, one grounded in universal moral principle, the other in cultural and civilizational loyalty. What might otherwise have been a marginal media dustup became a moment of revelation about the future of American conservatism.”  Loury argues that the conservative movement currently consists of two diverse groups:

• “For figures such as Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and perhaps the single most influential moral philosopher within conservative intellectual circles, conservatism begins with the claims of natural law. Its founding premise is the inherent dignity of every human being—an anthropology that descends from classical philosophy, Christian theology, and the Enlightenment. For George, conservatism is first a moral project: It safeguards life, liberty, marriage, family, and religious freedom because these institutions reflect universal truths about the human person. George has spent his career articulating these principles in philosophy, public policy, and constitutional thought. His is an approach to conservatism that emphasizes the primacy of the permanent things, the universals that transcend time and place.”
• “Opposing this universalist strand is the ascendant nationalist wing of the right—a coalition influenced by the populist energies that surged after 2016 and represented by Tucker Carlson, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and polemicists such as John Zmirak. This faction sees conservatism less as an expression of moral philosophy than as a defense of Western civilization: a concrete culture, a historical inheritance, with its own people, faith, memories, and vulnerabilities. This conservatism is particularist rather than universalist. It begins not with abstract principles but with cultural loyalties. Whereas George begins with human dignity, Carlson begins with civilizational survival. Whereas George sees imperatives and violations of the moral law, Carlson sees a beleaguered West beset by global elites, porous borders, and cultural disintegration.”

The recent dispute over Carlson’s treatment of Nick Fuentes brought these differences into sharp focus. Carlson’s critics—including George, Ben Shapiro, and others in the moral-universalist camp—argued that he had given a platform to a figure who traffics in anti-Semitic rhetoric and white-nationalist themes. For them, this was not merely a lapse in judgment but a failure of moral responsibility. Carlson’s defenders countered that conversation does not equal endorsement, and that conservatives must not mimic the left’s “cancel culture” by excommunicating those who question dogmas about foreign policy or Israel. They argued that a movement committed to free inquiry must not shrink from difficult conversations. Loury calls this position paleoconservativism.

Loury concludes that “Beneath this quarrel lies a more fundamental question: Is American conservatism about preserving a moral order or protecting a civilizational identity? Is it grounded in rights and duties that apply to all human beings or in the defense of a particular way of life that belongs to a specific people? One could say that the universalist right worries about moral illegitimacy, whereas the nationalist right worries about cultural extinction.”

The civil war within conservatism will not be resolved by the choice of universalism over nationalism or nationalism over universalism. “It will be resolved by an integration of the two: by a vision of America that honors both the dignity of every person and the particular heritage of its people . . . A conservatism that achieves this synthesis will be intellectually coherent, morally serious, and culturally grounded. It will conserve not only the inheritance of the past but the promise of the future.”

As an illustration of the paleoconservative position, consider the case of Carrie Prejean Boller and Candace Owens. To this point, evangelical attorney and columnist, David French, reports on a meeting of the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission in mid-February. The commission itself, which is housed in the Department of Justice, is supposed to “advise the White House Faith Office and the Domestic Policy Council on religious liberty policies in the United States.” President Trump had named Carrie Prejean Boller, a former Miss California USA who had a brief moment of stardom, backlash and controversy in 2009 when she said during a question-and-answer session at a pageant that she believed that marriage was between a man and a woman. After her comments, seminude photographs of her emerged, which — as The Times reported at the time — she blamed on “disreputable photographers.” Then, a month after standing by her, Trump (along with other pageant organizers) fired her, alleging that she’d violated her contract by failing to perform her duties.

But in 2025, Trump appointed Boller to the Religious Liberty Commission. At the Commission meeting in February, “she arrived at the hearing loaded for bear. In a series of contentious exchanges, she asked if ‘certain parts of the Bible’ could now be considered antisemitic for ‘referring to the killing and crucifixion of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ,’ defended Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson—two of the most prominent sources of antisemitic propaganda in the United States—and attacked Zionism as incompatible with her Catholic faith . . . As her social media following soared, she reposted a supportive tweet from Owens, in which Owens declared that Boller was being attacked for refusing to “’support the mass slaughter and rape of innocent children for occult Baal worshipers.’ [Later] Boller posted, ‘Be a good little Goyim and give me a follow.’  Additional summary statements from French:

• In a defiant interview with The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg, Boller refused to disavow even the most grotesque and blatant antisemitic statements from Owens, including Owens’s claims that “Jewish supremacists had everything to do with the Civil War in America” and that “Jewish people were in control of the slave trade. They’ve buried a lot of it, but it’s there, and you can find it.”
• Boller responded to a tweet from Ted Cruz by saying, “Ted, in Catholic theology the true Israel is the church, not a political movement. You Zionists have always hated Catholics who reject Zionism and don’t support 1948 Israel.”
• The chairman of the commission, Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, said he was removing her from the commission, but Boller was defiant. “I remain on this commission until I hear from the president,” she told Rosenberg, and she had her own request of the president: “I want the president to admit: Is he ‘America first’ or ‘Israel first’?”

Boller’s comments reflect the pernicious theological position called Replacement Theology, which I addressed in the 27 December 2025 edition of Issues. It is abhorrent and thoroughly unbiblical. Indeed, Robert P. George, cited earlier in this article, wrote a powerful essay in Sapir, a Jewish journal of ideas, in which he described the relationship between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church as an “unbreakable covenant.” As George writes, Pope Benedict XVI explicitly rejected the idea that the Jewish people “ceased to be the bearer of the promises of God.” Pope John Paul II said that the Catholic Church has “a relationship” with Judaism that “we do not have with any other religion.” He also said that Judaism is “intrinsic” and not “extrinsic” to Christianity and that Jews were Christians’ “elder brothers” in the faith.

Tragically, Paleoconservatism, at least in some of its iterations, reflects the ugly position of replacement theology. If the future of the conservative movement embraces this paleoconservative conviction, it will no longer be a movement committed to universal moral values rooted in Scripture, but a movement that egregiously violates everything Scripture declares. I never thought I would live to see some “conservatives” embrace such apostasy. May God have mercy on us!

See Glenn C. Loury “Tucker and the Right” in First Things (January 2026), pp. 7-10; and David French in the New York Times (17 February 2026).