The American right’s future involves waging a ‘religious battle’ against the left, leaders say at a conservative conference

MIAMI — In a luxury Miami resort earlier this month, leading conservative politicians, influencers and academics gathered to formulate a grand path forward for the American right.

Repeatedly, speakers here framed the ongoing fight against the American left in biblical terms — a “religious battle” in which Republicans must be unafraid to use state power to thwart progressive goals not just in government, but the private sphere, too. Those at the gathering often argued both the culture wars and a changing economy are a battle of Christian ideals vs. a new age secularism.

Again and again throughout the three-day National Conservatism Conference, or NatCon, these right-wing thinkers argued for putting an end to the era of small-government conservatism while promoting religion at the center of public life.

Closing the conference, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued the divide in the country was one between Christian theology and a “woke religion that is raising itself up as the official state ideology,” adding that “insofar as conservatism as a movement has a future, it is a future that is going to be increasingly tied to explicit theological claims.”

Hosted by The Edmund Burke Foundation, a 3-year-old conservative organization aimed at promoting right-wing nationalism across the globe, and sponsored by some of the largest right-aligned advocacy groups and donors in the country, the conference was held at the J.W. Marriott Miami Turnberry resort in a space nestled between a swimming pool and two 18-hole golf courses, and with a restaurant serving up lobster rolls, short rib and filet mignon.

The conference serves as a gathering of so-called national conservatives, a movement that seeks to organize a cohesive, nationalist agenda in light of former President Donald Trump’s ascension in the GOP.

But Trump, while the subject of some praise, was hardly at the center of the gathering. This year’s conference featured warm welcomes for Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.; Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; Rick Scott, R-Fla.; tech mogul and megadonor Peter Thiel; and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was introduced at the conference as the “future president of the United States.”

The conference distilled the animating forces of the American right at a time when Democrats control the presidency and Congress: a no-holds-barred approach to the culture wars; a turn away from laissez-faire economic policy toward one in which the cultural…