As a public philosophy, conservatism largely abandoned its public appeal to religious faith. Christian conservatives still made up the plurality of the conservative electorate, but the public appeal to religious ideals and the effort to ground conservatism in Christian theology all but evaporated. A transition point occurred in the years immediately after the Great Recession. Activist conservatism regrouped into the Tea Party movement, a fiscally conservative movement mainly comparing libertarians and small-town and rural populists who were committed to lowering taxes, reducing the national debt, decreasing the federal budget deficit, and above all, opposing the Obama administration’s efforts to universalize government-sponsored healthcare. The pragmatic and economic turn was also a largely secular turn.
James Davison Hunter, Democratic and Solidarity, 245