I am now writing a book — Endarkenment— which traces how American politics, once built on the principles of the Enlightenment, was refashioned by Evangelical Christianity—and how that faith has transformed the political Left. Beginning with the Cold War bargain that brought Evangelicals into Republican politics, the book follows the long arc to today’s progressive movements, which speak in a strikingly Evangelical idiom: from rituals of public confession to declarations of original sin, purity tests, excommunications, apocalyptic millenarianism, and the missionary zeal to bring schools, workplaces, and institutions into their moral fold. What began as a religious turn on the Right has ended up as a cultural transformation of the Left, leaving America with politics that looks less like a republic of citizens than a congregation of believers. This politics has estranged much of its own electorate, fueling the rise of the aggressive Right and the election of Trump, with aftershocks now shaking the world. The book is a call to America’s fellow citizens to wake up to this fact and to listen to the silent majority opposed to this turn, before it is too late.
The United States is a project of the Enlightenment: a republic built to manage shared life by common rules, to defend rights and distribute resources, and to keep faith, conscience and family out of the state’s hands. That political order began to crumble with the end of the Cold War. As history seemed to end, American politics took a quiet turn—away from its Enlightenment foundations and toward a theatre of private passions: bodies, identities, and family life. Concerns that once anchored political life—welfare, taxation, fiscal and political rights, and the common good—faded from view, leaving the country divided and most Americans—who still see these as the point of politics—alienated and politically homeless.
This book tells the story of how that came to pass. It shows how a once-marginal religious community—long suspicious of secular authority and hostile to politics itself—rose to reshape it. With no revolutions or bloodshed, evangelical Christians quietly flooded the post–Cold War political lull, transforming the tone and terms of American politics. Led by figures like Jerry Falwell, they redrew the Right in their image: moralising, millenarian, preoccupied with sin, salvation, and the fate of souls. The transformation of the Right is by now well known.
What came next is far more surprising. By a process of mirroring, the Left also changed—shifting its focus from taxes, labour and civil rights to bodies, identities, and sexuality. Movements that had once fought for political rights and the fair distribution of resources turned instead to a struggle over bodies and souls: sex, reproduction, identity. Gender and sex—especially women’s bodies, reproduction, and desire, once the core preoccupations of evangelical morality—moved to the centre of political life. Longstanding struggles for Black, women’s, and gay rights gave way to a spectacle of newly racialised and gendered identities. The pursuit of equal rights was displaced by claims to the special standing of aggrieved selves. Accusations of original sin—whether whiteness, maleness, or Westernness—took the place of civic and economic demands. Public rituals of confession, penance, and excommunication—alongside personal testimonies once confined to evangelical revivals—began to structure political speech. Even economic protest movements, like Occupy Wall Street, dissolved into moral theatre. And environmentalism, once grounded in science and law, took on a millenarian tone: apocalyptic warnings, carbon guilt, ritual abstinence.
In a political tradition once built to keep sectarian passion outside politics, a new sentimentalised public sphere emerged. In it, the feelings and grievances of “authentic selves,” treated as sacrosanct and unassailable by reasoned argument, have foreclosed dialogue.
This strange politics has now come full circle. The populist Right—once the guardian of tradition, moral restraint and family values—has taken up the very performative grammar it once decried. Trump-era rallies became revival tents; political loyalty was marked through testimonies of grievance, identity signalling, and ritualised excommunication—including, most recently, the cancelling of dissenting voices in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. As a result, the far Right and far Left now sound increasingly alike in their language of derision—towards science, the media, public health, political institutions, expertise, and the idea of truth itself.
Several authors have noted the sectarian cast of this new political life. They have pointed to its proselytising zeal, its obsession with purity, and its rituals of moral discipline. John McWhorter has called it a religion of redemption and guilt. Andrew Doyle describes a New Puritanism, complete with heresies, sinners and saints. Wesley Yang has tracked its rise as a successor ideology, rooted in identity and conviction rather than deliberation. These accounts capture the mood, but they stop at metaphor. This book goes further. It shows that the “woke” so-called does not merely look like a religion, but is the unwitting heir to a specific tradition: American evangelical Protestantism that has shaped the language, rituals, and inner life of the new secular Left.
I write as an anthropologist—trained to see the patterns behind what people say and do, to look past their claims for the grammar of ideas that shape them. I pay attention to rituals: not as decoration, but as expressions of the deep moral logics that underlie public life. I also write as a Ukrainian-American who has long found her political home on the Left—and now finds herself politically homeless. Nowhere has the global unraveling of Enlightenment politics struck closer to home than in Ukraine, where I live and write, to the wail of air-raid sirens, as both of my homes are being torn apart. In the wake of Russia’s invasion, I watched many on the far Right and far Left excuse or endorse Putin’s war. But I also saw something else: a quiet rallying around the old ideals. In a rare moment of political clarity, people across parties and borders instinctively sided with Ukraine. It was the clearest stand in decades for a politics built on rights, freedoms, and law. This book is not a salvo in the culture wars; it is a reckoning with how they took hold—and a call to resist the endarkenment they have brought about, in America and beyond.