We are on the team that’s winning

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 25, 2025

I’m sitting here in the Indianapolis airport, trying to get home from the third of four out-of-state trips for this month. Most of these trips consist of conferences on the current state—and future hopes—of social conservatism in the United States. Thanks to a delayed flight, I have a moment to share with Catholic Culture readers what I’m hearing. The news is good.

“We are no longer in a defensive crouch in the culture war” was how the American Principles Project’s Terry Schilling put it. “We are winning,” said more than one speaker at the Family Policy Alliance (FPA) conference this past week.

While here in Indiana I could see that, even back home in deep-blue Connecticut, it was true. Medical facilities in my state announced they would stop doing gender transitions on minors. Connecticut media and far left politicians seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In Indiana, speakers reminded us that the NCAA, across the street from our hotel, was now banning men from women’s sports. The U.S. Olympic Committee made a similar announcement during our conference.

Whence came all this winning? President Trump, obviously, is the biggest factor. He deserves tremendous credit. But Trump is transactional. The cultural space had to be created first in order for Trump to be Trump. That is, to be the Trump we know and like, the one who is giving us all these policy victories. Absent that space, we would be dealing with a very different President Trump. So how did that happen? Who created that space?

Here, we must back up. There are a lot of answers to that question, names both Catholic and Protestant. The U.S. bishops stood foursquare against Roe v. Wade from the moment it was handed down. The Southern Baptists eventually joined the Catholics. The brilliant fundamentalist writer Francis Schaeffer was key in laying the intellectual groundwork for Evangelicals to unite with Catholics, to contend together against abortion and for our culture in the 1970s. Catholics like Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak and George Weigel gave our alliance with Evangelicals further intellectual heft.

But if there is one man above all whom I would credit with being the builder—not just the thinker—who gave us the institutions that created the space for President Trump to help us turn the tide in the culture war, it would be Dr. James Dobson. A child psychologist and Church of the Nazarene minister, it was Dobson who founded Focus on the Family. And the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). And the Washington advocacy group Family Research Council. And, along the way, he encouraged the founding of state-based Family Policy Councils (FPCs) of which the entity I run, Family Institute of Connecticut, is one. FPCs exist in about 40 of the 50 states. They are ecumenical entities, mostly headed by Evangelicals. Five of us FPC leaders are Catholic.

FPA was spun out of Focus on the Family. It is the organization that links the FPCs with one another and with the mothership, Focus. Their conference this week was actually three conferences: the Statesmen’s Academy, training for pro-family legislators, the FPC conference, at which we are given professional development to do our jobs better, and the “SoConCon,” the Social Conservative Conference, a sort of trade association convention at which we get to hear from the best people in the field as to how to further the cause.

It was at these FPA conferences that we heard the good news with which I opened this column. And stirring advice from multiple speakers. We were reminded that it is never the wrong time to do the right thing. That we are not an appendage of a party, we are an advocate for truth. That we must be in the political world but not of it. That we must not be prideful for thinking we have political weight; that it is the Lord’s doing.

And the news, of course, was not all positive. One of the most important talks I heard was by John G. West, a leader at the Discovery Institute and the author, most recently, of Stockholm Syndrome Christianity. He warned against those “winsome” Christian leaders whose winsomeness is highly selective, who seem to think that God himself is an obstacle to the gospel and that they need to be his press agents. He compared the books Evangelical publishers are putting out today to the books they were publishing in the eighties, noting that today’s books are much less culturally confrontational.

Similar sentiments were expressed the week before, at the ADF Summit. Speakers at that event cautioned against putting too much stock in the “vibe shift.” Ayaan Hirsi said that the West treated the outcome of the Cold War as a victory for political freedom and for economic freedom but forgot to say, “and a victory for Christianity.” The Colson Center’s John Stonestreet said the vibe shift was the revenge of nature, the revenge of common sense, but that mission must serve truth, not the other way around. Similar to John West, Stonestreet said pastors had lost the plot as to what counts as political and what counts as moral. The church cares too much about “the progressive gaze,” thinking the Left’s opinion of us matters.

Hirsi’s description of the West’s blinkered understanding of its own victory in the Cold War struck a nerve with me. That was exactly how I experienced the 1990s. In the ‘80s, we knew there was a spiritual dimension in the fight against totalitarianism. Pope St. John Paul II behind the Iron Curtain and all that. Once victory was achieved, our culture described the Cold War in exactly the way Hirsi said. Something precious had been lost. That omission put us on the road to the crises the West faces today. And it put me on the path to what I do now. I still remember a 1994 cover article in Catholic World Report about James Dobson, laying out the Catholic case for working with what Dobson had built.

The things said at these conferences will, of course, vary with the times. I remember Glenn Beck at the 2011 Value Voters conference going absolutely apocalyptic on the consequences of a possible Obama reelection. When I heard him at the same conference two years later, after Obama won again, Beck was calmly hawking products for a world that he apparently expected to continue.

Nor is it always a perfect fit. The Catholic ear may detect a tinny note on occasion. One noble effort we heard about this year, America Reads the Bible, reminded me of the Catholic Eucharistic Revival, but with the Bible in the place of the Eucharist. Can the mere recitation of Scripture bring about the national transformation its organizers expect?

No idea. But I love that they’re trying. That’s the team I want to be on.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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