I have to say, Thiel is closer to the truth than Rufo.

You don’t have to buy Nietzsche’s entire “slave morality” melodrama to see that Christianity overturned the classical moral order. In Rome, you could of course find private pity, personal kindness, and the odd Stoic sermon about universal reason, but public virtues were still honor, courage, strength, victory, dignity. The weak could be pitied, but they were not morally privileged as such. Christianity changes that. It puts a tortured, humiliated victim at the center of the cosmos and announces that “the last shall be first.” It insists that God identifies with “the least of these”: the poor, the slave, the outcast. As Tom Holland explained in his book Dominion, this is a radical moral revolution.

Viewed in that light, Thiel’s basic point is straightforward: modern egalitarian instincts, including the sort that animate “woke” politics, grow in soil prepared by that Christian revolution. Two thousand years of preaching that the weak, the oppressed, and the marginalized are God’s special concern have left their mark. Even people who despise “organized religion” generally take it for granted that siding with the “victim,” however defined, is the default moral stance. A Roman aristocrat would have found that obsession baffling, if not perverse.

Of course Christianity isn’t the only ingredient. The stew we now call “woke” has other ingredients: Enlightenment rights-talk, Romantic authenticity, Marxist and post-Marxist theories of power, therapeutic culture, and, more recently, the incentive structures of universities, HR departments, and social media. But the underlying stock – the moral grammar in which “the victim” has a special claim on our conscience – is recognizably Christian. Take that away and the whole thing becomes much harder to imagine.

Rufo’s response doesn’t touch this genealogical point. First, he notes that Christian civilizations were “heroic and martial” and that colonization marched under Christian banners. All true, and all beside the point. No one seriously thinks Christian history is a tidy story of meekness and mercy. The tension between ideals and behavior is precisely what made Christian doctrine so explosive: a society that proclaims the blessedness of the poor while building empires on slave labor is piling up moral contradictions that later generations can and do exploit. The existence of crusaders and conquistadors doesn’t disprove the Christian revaluation of values; it shows how often humans fail to live up to it.

Second, Rufo points out that “woke isn’t really a thing in Italy, which is the seat of Christianity.” This confuses genealogy with cartography. The claim is not that wherever Christianity is, woke must follow; it’s that the specifically Western and especially Anglo-American moral sensibility – with its intense concern for distant victims, its habit of dividing the world into oppressed and oppressors, its missionary zeal – is unintelligible without Christian inheritance. That history runs through Northern European and American Protestantism, through abolitionism, social-gospel movements, civil-rights rhetoric, and so on. It is more plausible to describe woke as a secularized, deracinated descendant of Anglo-Protestant Christianity than as an inevitable outgrowth of whatever the Vatican is doing in Rome.

The Italy example actually undermines Rufo’s point. If a heavily Catholic country can remain relatively immune to the full American strain of wokeness, that suggests that something more specific than “Christianity” in general is at work – some particular blend of Christian moral grammar, Anglo-liberal individualism, American race history, and 21st-century university culture. The right conclusion is not “Christianity has nothing to do with this,” but “Christianity is one necessary ingredient, not the whole recipe.”

What’s especially disappointing in Rufo’s reply is how far below his usual standard of argument it falls. He’s normally incisive and to-the-point; here he fires off two rather obvious rejoinders – “Christians were warriors!” and “Italy isn’t woke!” – that don’t actually engage what Thiel is saying. It looks less like analysis and more like a reflexive move to shield Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, from any hint of responsibility. Thiel’s framing may be rough, but Rufo’s counterpunch doesn’t land.

Personally, this is why I will keep a skeptical eye on the development of the right, especially post-Trump. Rufo is one of the most effective political activists on the right, and he’s likely to have real influence over whatever replaces fusionist conservatism. He currently talks the language of classical liberalism and pluralism, and on many concrete issues he’s a welcome counterweight to the left’s cultural dominance. But when someone that intelligent starts defending his preferred religion with arguments this sloppy, it’s a reminder that political movements have a way of subordinating principle to passion once they gather enough momentum or power. The temptation to decide that unbelievers and skeptics are “corrosive to the body politic” is never far away in a self-consciously religious populism or national conservatism.