We welcome letters to the editor. Letters appear two issues after the article to which they are responding. Letters under three hundred words are preferred, and they may be edited for length and clarity.
Letters responding to articles published in this issue should be received by March 2 for publication in the May issue. Send them to submissions@firstthings.com.
Uninational Paleotism
Glenn C. Loury makes several points with which I can’t possibly disagree (“Tucker and the Right,” January 2026). The conservative movement, which sprang up in the 1950s around William F. Buckley and National Review, revealed tensions from the outset, for example, between traditional conservative isolationists and anti-communist interventionists and between libertarians and those who viewed the state as a vehicle for promoting Christian virtue and/or civic decency. The fusionist position put forth by Frank Meyer was an attempt to create a conservative movement that embraced what were already warring positions, although isolationists could not be satisfied by this theoretical solution and were eventually driven out of the movement.
The second major and most long-lived tension in the conservative ranks came with the prolonged war between the neoconservatives and those who characterized themselves as paleoconservatives. According to Loury—who is not wrong here—the struggle between these two sides continues to the present, and the flare-up between Tucker Carlson and the conservative establishment may be seen as connected to this longtime strife. While the establishment, heavily influenced by neoconservative donors and center-right publicists and media personalities, stresses America’s “universal principles” plus ardent support for Israel, the paleoconservatives highlight American particularism, immigration restriction, and distancing ourselves from Middle Eastern conflicts.
The differences between the two camps have grown more intense as a younger generation of right-wingers, typified by Nick Fuentes, have jumped into the fray and made explicitly anti-Semitic as well as anti-Israeli statements. Loury seems to be cautioning both sides to cool their rhetoric and to find common ground by embracing both the universal and particularistic in their understanding of American conservatism. He also believes that the neoconservative effort to combine Jewish nationalism with universal democratic principles is fully consistent with the “American creed.”
Allow me, as the third architect of the paleoconservative position—the one who, unlike Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis, Loury leaves unmentioned—to comment on the latest phase of our conservative wars. These are not contests among the equally armed but have often been mopping-up operations by a neoconservative-funded media establishment working to keep out of the public conversation critics of Israel or those who still represent an older traditional right.
As an early but long-lived victim of these purges, I can testify that one needn’t do much to find oneself expelled from the movement and suddenly deprived of professional contacts. Failing to take neoconservative party lines faithfully, as I and others learned in the 1980s, can exact a high cost. My own undoing was a tendency to dissent too loudly from positions that others presumably settled for me.
Among my indiscretions was noting the contradiction between claiming a privilege for Israel to remain particularistic and insisting that other countries adopt abstract universals as their guiding principles. This flew in the face of what the conservative establishment wished us to believe. Fastidious gatekeeping has been integral to our conservative movement since the 1950s. But as I’ve documented in my books on the conservative movement, the enforcement of party lines became far more restrictive after the neoconservatives ascended to power in the 1980s.
I’m not sure that Tucker Carlson, as Loury suggests, speaks for all self-identified paleoconservatives. Carlson and I don’t agree very often on foreign policy and indeed expressed antithetical views about President Trump’s bombing of the Iranian nuclear installations. The paleoconservative camp, as anyone who reads Chronicles would know, offers a wide range of opinions on numerous subjects, including foreign policy, although we are all social and cultural traditionalists. Speaking for myself, I don’t identify politically or philosophically with either Nick Fuentes or Ben Shapiro, although I admire Nick as an entrepreneur who lacked the start-up money that was available to Ben.
I would also note that if the paleoconservatives had not been ostracized so methodically for so long, the right-wing opposition to the conservative establishment would feature mature, reasonable people rather than young strident podcasters. As one of the movement’s elderly critics, I believe that the conservative establishment created the opposition on the right it fully deserves. In a better world, there would be a more tolerant but also more authentic right.
In any case, this altercation is not the most significant political and cultural conflict confronting Americans and the West in general. What seems to me far more critical at the present time is our struggle against a cultural and socially radical left and the antidiscrimination regime which advances this left. This vast leftist alliance controls valuable assets, such as the managerial state, educational institutions, the media, and the culture industry. Confronting it effectively may be a task that overshadows even the problem of ending our conservative wars.
Paul Gottfried
elizabethtown, pennsylvania
In an otherwise thoughtful essay, Glenn Loury appears to make a mistake that obscures his main point. After asserting that the paleoconservative, populist agenda promotes national identity, Loury goes on to argue that, in order to maintain logical consistency, American populists should also embrace Zionism, which similarly promotes national identity.
The question, however, is not whether the populist wing of American conservatism should support Israel’s right to pursue its national objectives but whether its aspirations require American involvement—along with its considerable military and financial support. In short, I don’t see how supporting another country’s right to pursue its national interests should necessarily risk American blood and treasure. Nor do I see how this poses any sort of logical inconsistency.
Rev. Thomas Leinbach
chatham, massachusetts
I applaud Glenn Loury’s desire to unite the universalist and nationalist wings of the conservative movement. I also found compelling the lessons he draws from Jewish-American and African-American histories—namely, that “civic nationalism need not require erasing particular identities” and instead “requires a political framework that is capacious enough to accommodate them.” On this point, I fully agree.
Loury is also correct that universalists can at times appear overly moralistic and insufficiently attentive to the cultural and economic anxieties of large segments of the public. Where he errs, though, is in suggesting that universalists fail to honor the nation’s heritage. In fact, universalists explicitly appeal to American tradition and culture to make their case for a creedal national identity, rooted in the founding principles. This is not an abstract or cosmopolitan universalism but a distinctively American one, shaped by history, institutions, and inherited norms. As Loury himself observes, “The American nation is not a tribe but a covenant—a shared project rooted in moral aspiration and historical inheritance.”
The integration of universalism and nationalism that Loury proposes also seems unlikely to occur. I wholeheartedly agree that a mature conservatism should recognize that communities are “enriched rather than threatened by the presence of diverse histories and identities.” Unfortunately, the nationalist movement as it exists today has shown little interest in embracing this view. To my mind, a vision that “honors both the dignity of every person and the particular heritage of its people”—as Loury calls for—is itself a universalist enterprise. Rather than proposing a synthesis with nationalism, Loury could have defended universalism outright and addressed how its advocates might communicate more effectively with those who feel left behind.
Nick Galli
new haven, connecticut
Elite Problems
I enjoyed Aaron Renn’s article “The Problem With the Evangelical Elite” (January 2026). I did my PhD at a top-tier East Coast university during the transition to the “negative world.” The militant LGBTQ ideology among the other students was stifling and isolating, and the members of my suburban Presbyterian church (PCA) could not grasp how bad things were. I survived with my faith and marriage intact, but I was relieved to graduate and leave. What a difference a robust network of allies—however few—would have made.
But evangelicals have a deeper issue than networks. During my doctorate I discovered First Things; its articles were a lifeline. Most of the evangelicals I knew at the time were bemoaning the decline of Christianity, which neither inspired confidence nor gave meaningful direction. Here, however, were thoughtful Christians who did not waver on taboo issues—and most importantly, had real confidence in God’s sovereignty. I assumed First Things was different because Catholics had a global and ancient perspective that American Protestants lacked. Most American denominations had never been in a “negative world” before and struggled to adapt.
Even so, there is another reason why evangelicals self-select out of elite universities, which Renn does not mention: prioritizing family. Evangelical culture encourages starting families young, which I heartily support. But such a lifestyle is at odds with a career at an elite institution where one has to work night and day to get a tenure-track job—and usually not start a family until then (or until tenure itself). Since graduate school, I’ve worked at U.S. National Laboratories, where I’ve invariably found a healthy population of evangelical Christians. Many say they chose that route post-PhD because it’s family friendly (that is, it is okay not to work weekends). As much as professional networks, mentoring, and “tall-steeple” churches would help, many who have the talent will still choose against elite status because they want to be present for their children.
Allen Scheie
los alamos, new mexico
My friend Aaron Renn makes a very strong case that an evangelical elite can hardly be said to exist. In the century or so since the “fundamentalist” versus “liberal” split in the Protestant churches, the liberal elites rose to the heights of American life, whereupon they promptly self-destructed, both religiously and sociologically, while the fundamentalists accepted a kind of retreat into the hinterland but eventually became politically important as part of the Reagan coalition.
Aaron’s recommendations, however, seem to me to lead to weakening the only strengths evangelicals have, at least according to him: politics and business. Accordingly, the most important man in the American evangelical elite goes entirely unmentioned in a long essay: Charlie Kirk! Instead, Aaron offers us a provocative statement, to embrace defeat with Mitt Romney.
The future evangelical elite should worry seriously about politics and look to its strengths in organization, as Charlie did with Turning Point USA. It’s useless for evangelicals to try to cultivate a counter-elite at Yale. Yes, Catholics excel at that for precisely the historical and theological reasons Aaron presents, which do not favor evangelicals. Men like Charlie and the men he inspired are going to be the cadre of the evangelical elite. Charlie’s mix of unusual intelligence, voracious reading, and dropping out of college is almost a recipe. As for business, evangelicals should embrace social media and technology to give the new generation a chance to make a future for themselves.
I largely agree with Aaron’s presentation of our situation, yet I entirely disagree about what to do. My guess is that Aaron thinks the American elite of the mid-twenty-first century will very much resemble the elite of the early twenty-first century. I believe that’s not so. If evangelicals want a future, they should bet on change, and they should bet on their own strengths—so they shouldn’t follow Aaron’s suggestions but something closer to mine. I’m not evangelical; it’s not my fight. But Charlie was, and I think his activity should matter.
Titus Techera
hillsdale, michigan
America’s Role
As a fellow skeptic of post-1989 American foreign policy, I read Nathan Pinkoski’s wide-ranging review of America’s Fatal Leap: 1991–2016 (“Hegemon or Empire?,” January 2026) with delight. I would add one more shortcoming to Schroeder’s criticism of the Iraq War: The decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was popular. As I show in my recent book, Securing the Prize: Presidential Metaphor and U.S. Intervention in the Persian Gulf, 73 percent of Americans favored war with Iraq on September 21, 2001, well before George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” address. This impulse is discernible as an outgrowth of the manner in which the Cold War ended, leaving unresolved the mythic tensions promulgated by Schroeder and many others regarding America’s role in the world.
Randall Fowler
abilene christian university
abilene, texas
Needlessly Dogmatic
Richard Rex (“Make Me A Lutheran,” January 2026) writes:
[Martin Luther’s] theological vocabulary is the legacy of late scholasticism, and Erasmus took the measure of him pretty fairly in his Diatribe, identifying him as just one more needlessly dogmatic scholastic. Although the Christian humanist program of Erasmus did nothing so crude as to reduce the Bible to the level of a human text, it did seek deeper understanding of the Scriptures by treating them, in many respects, like any other human text. . . . [Whereas Luther’s] emphatically anti-humanist approach explains why the phrase “Word of God” took off so strongly among Luther’s followers and, ultimately, among all Protestants as a name for the Bible. It was about emphasizing the difference.
Yet all this is simply an echo of Erasmus’s own caricature that Luther “attributes very little importance to scholarship, and most of all to the Spirit.” But it is Erasmus who argues in his Diatribe on free will that the Bible is not like any other human text: It is a “Corycian cavern” of mystical darkness whose interpretation depends not on philology but on the preponderance of those possessing the Spirit and finally on the authority of the Church—“to which,” Erasmus stipulates, “I everywhere willingly submit my personal feelings, whether I grasp what it prescribes or not.”
Luther responds that the Bible is a clear text whose interpretation depends—like any other human text—on its “vocabulary and grammar.” Elsewhere, Luther argues that any interpreter, even “a Jew or a Turk,” can understand what Jesus means when he says, “This is my body”—but only a Christian, given faith by the Holy Spirit, can believe that Jesus’s words are true.
In the Lord’s Supper and in the Bible—as in the Incarnation—Luther believed that God alone acts to accomplish human salvation. But Luther insisted that the Spirit works exclusively through such physical means. Erasmus was just as convinced, as a Christian Platonist, that what was truly spiritual could not be part of the physical world.
Luther commanded the jargon of late scholasticism as well as a respectable Renaissance Latin style. But it was Erasmus who admitted to offering only Duns Scotus warmed over in response to Luther’s theology of the Word—God’s Word in human language, which is like a fire, burning hearts to ash through the law and setting them aflame through the gospel, sweeping human wills along in the rhetoric of the divine orator. Who is the “needlessly dogmatic scholastic” and who the “Christian humanist” here?
Christopher Boyd Brown
boston university
boston, massachusetts
Deconstructing Deconstruction
In response to R. R. Reno’s article, “What Does ‘Postliberalism’ Mean?” (January 2026), I would argue that modernist hermeneutics is a more accurate descriptor of what the article describes as “liberalism.” Indeed, the premise in the university is that modern hermeneutics give scholars—in biblical studies, in theology, in history, in literature, and so on—the right to deconstruct and reinterpret reality, history, truth, and first principles.
I am writing a short book on the question of whether the premise of universal salvation is even present in the Gospels. If you take Christ’s harder sayings, drop them into any AI program, and pose the question, “Is there any advocacy or implication of universal salvation?,” the answer returns (across the board), “No, that would suggest that Christ’s hard sayings (‘It is better to cut of your hand and enter kingdom of god maimed . . .’) were idle threats and meaningless. Which would imply that Christ’s preaching is, sometimes, idle and meaningless.”
If you look at the hard sayings in the Gospels, universal salvation is foreclosed. It’s simply not one of many possible outcomes. In order to defend the premise of universal salvation, a theologian has to either ignore the hard sayings or argue that the synoptic authors fabricated them and assert on non-biblical grounds that human nature is ordered to grace (de Lubac, Rahner), while ignoring the systematic and repeated warnings in the Gospels. Yes, modernists do a lot of foolish things, including arguing (non-biblically) that universal salvation is a possibility.
Parenthetically, what we need is not postliberalism, but a deconstruction and demolition, on first principles, of modern hermeneutics and of the general idea that scholars (in very Kantian fashion) have the right to fabricate a hermeneutic of their own making for interpreting reality from whole cloth.
Fr. Justin Bianchi
santa cruz, california
Advent Pudding
R. R. Reno wrote about the Anglicans’ “Stir Up Sunday” a week before the First Sunday of Advent (“While We’re At It,” January 2026).
My father, who was a major seminarian at Mundelein Seminary in Chicago, taught his children that Stir Up Sunday was the day to make plum pudding for the feast of Christmas. Our plum pudding was, I presume, a tradition that came from England—even though our background is Irish—representing the multiple blessings of Christmas. It was made from orange peel, raisins, citron, flour, and other things besides. On the first Sunday of Advent, each child and my mom and pop would take turns “stirring up” the mixture to be cooked and subsequently stored for the whole period of Advent, after which it was opened and eaten on Christmas Day.
I am now seventy-three years old, forty-six years a priest of the Congregation of the Resurrection, and my family of thirteen siblings—four of whom are priests and two religious sisters—continues to share our plum pudding each year. My sister Jane has taken over the task of stirring and cooking the annual plum pudding, a portion of which is sent to each of us: in South Korea, Mexico, Spain, Tanzania, and various places in these United States.
So, you see, “Stir Up Sunday” has continued to be extended throughout the Christian world.
Fr. Jim Gibson, C.R.
apple valley, california
