The Changing Intellectual Landscape of Texas History, Part II, Are We Moving toward a Post-Christian Age?

Adam Laats (SUNY Binghamton), in a 2016 guest post for the S-USIH blog, noted that the series of culture wars in America’s past were not separate incidents, but rather “part of a history that builds on itself to influence contemporary debates in each new generation.” To stretch this view, my 2018 intellectual history of Texas, Lone Star Mind, anticipated the culture war, framing the long tug-of-war between scholars and traditionalists over the ownership of Texas history as a contest of metanarratives. Subsuming the approach was my conviction that American society was drifting leftward toward a post-Christian age. If the secularization of society identified a process, the emergence of a post-Christian age would become the result, the condition that defines the new era in society’s evolution.[1]

Given the interest in analogous concepts that illuminated the the longue durée, such as paradigm shifts, post-secularization, and the Nova Effect, I believed that the idea of a post-Christian age would soon gain traction. Like the term, postmodernism, it has different meanings for intellectuals in different fields. The drawbacks that limit the concept theologically, for instance, do not diminish the historicity of a society approaching the tipping point where not only religion, but institutions of authority in general are as likely to run headlong into attitudes of moral autonomy as they are to receive compliant conformity. Viewing the culture war through the prism of a post-Christian age that shared common elements with these other theories raised provocative questions about the legitimacy of institutions and the roles they play in managing and controlling society.

Entertaining the idea of an emerging post-Christian age that seeks a balance between institutional authority and individual agency would acknowledge that our culture is moving into a time when everyone counts, and on their own terms—which is actually so profound that it is truly epochal in magnitude. Today, as views continue to polarize, Americans on both sides of the culture war are increasingly seeking their metaphysical values and identities in places beyond conventional customs and mores, such as Christian Nationalism on the right or some form of secular humanism on the left that both embraces and challenges the principles of Christianity as Charles Taylor imagined in The Secular Age. Taking into account the events of the culture war and the introduction of artificial intelligence, which will certainly influence the way Americans think, behave, and believe, the drawbacks of the post-Christian age as a concept do not indicate weaknesses as much as they represent areas that deserve more discussion. Scholars, in fact, should be contemplating the context of epochal change in some form, which should be framing every aspect of the culture war as well as examining the politics of history that ignited it.

In the field of Texas history, where specialized topics and shorter timeframes represent the coin of the realm in research, the concept of a post-Christian age never penetrated the Kuhnian “certainties” that drove most research projects. As outlined in Part I, these convictions, grounded in a three-decade-old intellectual arc, included eschewing traditionalists, a bottom-up approach, and a distrust of metanarratives. There are of course works that rise above that template of certainties, just as we would expect. Perhaps the quality and impact on the field of such books as Unfinished Revolution (2010), Seeds of Empire (2015), The People’s Revolt (2020), and The Conservative Frontier (2025) leaves the impression that Texas historians are covering more ground than they are in fact. Either way, we would expect to see kindred works in progress registered in the list of presentation panels at historical conferences. They exist, but the disproportionate imbalance leaning toward political identity studies without a metanarrative to explain such a conspicuous imbalance is simply not a good recipe for the intellectual growth of the field. Especially in a wartime environment, where words and opinions are ammunition. The field will begin to make progress only when it begins to produce and discuss studies that break that three-certainties template. Particularly, studies that provide explication for the authoritarian turn and the chaos it has tendentiously engendered. Yet because Texas scholars have expressed little interest recently in intellectual history, the field has shown few indications of exploring what lies beyond those certainties.[2]

When, during the COVID pandemic, the power elite quietly entered the contest, it soon turned more than three decades of discordant bickering over Texas history into a hostile takeover. Scholars were already handicapped by being poorly equipped for verbal combat outside of the academy, where bottom lines and manipulating emotions replace patience, respect for analysis, and logical understanding.[3] Bearing the extra burdens of these flawed certainties, scholars were simply unprepared to contend with traditionalists for ownership of the field.[4] As the waves of causes for social justice swept across the land during the pandemic, progressive scholarship in Texas remained locked onto a course that constricted around the political identity studies reinforcing their certainties. The sprawling and complicated history of Texas would have been better served by the academy through expressions of curiosity in the historical forces of political, economic, and social inequalities that were responsible for the upheaval.[5]

Now, consider, as Laats, Andrew Hartman, and others have suggested, that we can trace the way society evolves by tracking our moral controversies.[6] A common factor that unites them is how backward and naive the defense of the status quo looks in posterity. In each case, we could say people “got woke” to new realities. To understand how the progressive gains during the pandemic gave way to a turn toward authoritarianism, my work has argued that what we are experiencing now is the reaction to a grander awakening, a post-Christian phenomenon that leads society to a tipping point. Consider that until recently, liberals could enjoy progressive gains, but they did not threaten to change the engine driving society. While the pandemic accelerated this incremental pace, Texas scholars continued to focus on political identity studies, showing no interest in exploring the tipping point that so alarmed the power elite that it committed incalculable resources into turning back the momentum of social change.[7]

Given the presumption of an imminent post-Christian age, events of the pandemic placed the power elite in a horserace with the accumulating epiphanies of individuals in an evolving society. The leftward drift toward critical mass in this scenario presents the harbinger of an epochal transition, that tipping point in the life of the nation. It represents the source of wokeness for progressives and the fountain of anxiety for traditionalists and the power elite.

In Texas, the phenomenon posed a direct threat to the precarious ascendancy that the power elite enjoyed over state government, its economy, and the culture. Traditionalists and the power elite, concerned by the revolutionary overtones arising from the pandemic, responded with the kind of urgency that regarded enlightenment like another contagion for which Americans needed inoculating. Both regarded “woke history” as a threatening view of the past built on dishonest progressive constructions. Traditionalists believed such a version was based on insincere and self-righteous political correctness; the power elite in Texas viewed the manifestation of wokeness itself as an existential threat to the conservative social order.[8]

Prior to the pandemic, Andrew Hartman declared that the culture wars were over. In an America where the rule of law is respected, and the commonweal has a voice in government that counts, he would have been right without need of an asterisk. The recent dismantling of institutional checks has instead led to a crisis of legitimacy. Still, to say that none of this was predictable fails to account for the likelihood of a paradigm shift in society of epochal proportions. Ironically, the banana republic behavior of those who campaign most passionately for American exceptionalism is adding yet another argument for proving that America is not so exceptional after all.

At the end of the day, American society is unequivocally moving toward a social change of epochal proportions—whether it is authoritarianism, some form of corporatocracy, or a government that serves the commonweal. The only way the culture war will reach its natural conclusion, the one that Hartman had in mind, is by crossing over to the other side of the tipping point that leads into a post-Christian age, in which the war will continue—until it does not. What will finally bring it to an end is the same realization that characterized every previous moral conflict. The moralists end up looking out of step with society. That, of course, is not our present reality, and the outcome of the American culture war is uncertain. When this liminal state we are now in, tilts toward something more conclusive, the conflicts that follow will unfold in the context of the new age that emerges.