Having left the Protestant religious world 29 years ago next month, I nevertheless remain interested in its goings-on — sometimes horrified, sometimes filled with schadenfreude, occasionally pleasantly surprised — because America is deeply Protestant and I cannot entirely escape that fact short of, perhaps, getting me to an Orthodox monastery and forever eschewing news and political involvement.

But I’ve become increasingly aware that, in David Foster Wallace terms, because Protestantism is not the water I deliberately swim in, there’s not only things I’m better equipped to see but important currents I’m oblivious to.

My version of Protestantism has scarcely been updated since 1997 and a lot of it is shaped by my idiosyncratic experiences in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was caught in a backwater of Wheaton-style evangelicalism — a strongly dispensationalist milieu adjacent to a broader mainstream. So I’m still tending to beat a dispensational premillennialist horse, though I see glimpses that it’s virtually dead.

But I’m updating my version through reading The Protestant Mind, a blog-like project of First Things with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

In this epoch when “Evangelical” is almost synonymous with “MAGA” in the popular press, *The Protestant Mind*’s principal author, Dale Coulter, helpfully provides a taxonomy of the Christian Right in America 2026 (“The Two Evangelical Rights”). The major rubrics are New Protestant Right” and “new evangelical populism”, but there are substreams of each.

It helped me clarify a lot. I was tempted to speculate about which one I’d likely be in were I still Protestant, but that’s just a counterfactual too far.