A story commonly told these days on both the left and the right says that American Christians, and especially evangelicals, are solidly behind President Donald Trump. The real story is far more complex, and has led many Christians to some fairly serious soul-searching, and others to ask hard questions about whether we even know what an “evangelical” is. Among Christians, as among so many other Americans, one of the chief effects of the rise of Trump has been to widen some fault lines and expose others that we didn’t even know existed. It is at least possible that some good will come from this exposure. You can see some of these fault lines opening up in a recent controversy that has greatly occupied many journalists, scholars, and ordinary people who care about the relations between Christianity and conservatism. The controversy began when Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor of the New York Post, tweeted, “There’s no polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war”—referring to the lawyer, former soldier, and senior writer of National Review who has often made the case that Christians in the public arena need to practice civility. Ahmari then expanded that tweet into a full-scale attack on French, and since then, the conservative world has been fairly obsessed with adjudicating the dispute. It’s important to note that Ahmari sees the differences between him and French as rooted, ultimately, in their different Christian traditions: Catholicism for Ahmari—who recently published a memoir of his conversion—and evangelical Protestantism. But whether this is indeed the heart of the matter, the dispute so far hasn’t fallen out that way. Some Catholics are with French, some Protestants with Ahmari. And in any case, I’m more interested in the ways this dispute illuminates questions that all Christians involved in public life need to reckon with than in choosing sides. How Christians choose to reckon with these questions will have consequences for all Americans, whether religious or not. In brief, Ahmari’s critique of French is that he is too nice a guy for the harsh times we live in, and he is too nice because he has too much belief in what political philosophers call “liberal proceduralism.” That’s the idea that all Americans can flourish, more or less, in a political environment in which we don’t agree on the prime ends of culture or of human life more generally, but do agree to follow the same set of political and rhetorical rules—the same “procedures.” To this idea, Ahmari responds:

But conservative Christians can’t afford these luxuries. Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

In Ahmari’s view—and it’s a view I largely share—liberal proceduralism has become a fiction. Today’s secular left has no intention of playing fair, and if Christians and conservatives—if people who follow “David French–ism”—insist on playing by the discarded rules, they’re just setting themselves to be played for suckers. Ahmari thus echoes a great American who wasn’t willing to be suckered. I refer to Bugs Bunny, who on more than one occasion intoned, “Of course, you realize this means war.” For me, a Christian who is also sort of conservative, this is not a merely academic dispute. But I think that the argument to this point has not been fruitful, and that, I believe, has happened because of a lack of clarity on one key point. That point can be clarified if you look at an earlier moment in the history of First Things, the magazine in which Ahmari’s critique of French appeared. In 1995, when I wrote regularly for First Things, the editor in chief, Father Richard John Neuhaus, gave me an interesting bit of news: The prominent literary critic and theorist Stanley Fish, who was then thought of as a disturber of the intellectual peace and certainly not as a religious person, had submitted an essay to First Things, a self-described “journal of religion and public life.” Neuhaus wanted to know whether I thought he should publish it. Indeed, I did. (He probably asked many people, but I don’t know anyone else’s answer.) He decided to run it, but to include a lengthy response. I pleaded with him to allow me to write that response, but he did it himself.