Decline of the Catholic/Religious Consensus Versus Fervor of Cultural Liberalism

"... American faith, even after so many waves of secularization, still retains large numbers and a zealous core. But as a project of expansion and reconquest, it conspicuously failed. After an arguable high tide in the years of John Paul II Catho­licism and George W. Bush’s Evangelical presidency, the project’s more ambitious goals collapsed, its beachheads in elite culture weakened, its own institutions fell into scandal or theological civil war, and the country moved in a more overtly post-Christian direction overall.
Meanwhile, out of the complex currents of cultural liberalism, a more intense form of anti-traditionalism has recently emerged — itself a sort of successor to the lost Protestant establishment, with the Christian doctrine shorn away but with a renewed moral zeal, an extremely detailed blueprint for social and political relations, and a revival of the old establishment’s hostility to more-disreputable (meaning Catholic and Evangelical and even Jewish) forms of faith." Read the report here.