By David G Bonagura, Jr.

"Christian Nationalism" has fast become a favorite boogeyman term of the cultural Left. Its precise meaning, as many have noted, is intentionally ambiguous so it can tar as many believing Christians as possible with toxic intentions. The most overreaching definition, which rocked the Internet before a minor retraction, claimed that Christian Nationalists are those who "believe our rights as Americans and as all human beings do not come from any earthy authority.

They don't come from Congress, from the Supreme Court, they come from God."

That is, Christian Nationalists are guilty of believing the truth of our nation's Declaration of Independence ("men have been endowed by their Creator"), which is neither a Christian nor a nationalist document.

Such a fatuous description betrays a seemingly paranoid fear that Christianity might again become a public force that shapes laws and customs. A restoration of how America used to function would inaugurate, in the words of a longtime opinion writer at a supposedly responsible newspaper, "the peril of the theocratic future toward which the country has been hurtling."

In calmer words, "Christian Nationalism" concerns the role that Christianity plays in American public life, culture, and law. Those lamenting it care nothing about Christian claims for the Triune God, the Virgin Birth, or the Resurrection. They fix their disdain on Christian moral teachings that oppose their creed of expressive individualism, which enshrines the Sexual Revolution as the first article.

Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, are the final obstacles preventing total victory. Yet, from the rewriting of marriage and family law to the sudden rush to enshrine IVF as a human right, it's clear that expressive individualism has long had "Christian Nationalism" on the run.

Beleaguered Christians of all denominations, appalled by America's moral collapse, have been seeking various ways to stem the tide. Public life, culture, and law are all expressions of a deeper vision, whether religious or secular, that a people hold in common.

For Christian morality to again direct American life, Americans would need not only to call themselves Christian, but they also would have to believe what they claim. For that, we need the slow, grinding work of guerilla evangelization. Top-down impositions by a "Christian government" or otherworldly power will not work.

Plus, given the GOP's meager post-Dobbs opposition to abortion and its instant capitulation to IVF, progressives need not fret: "Christian Nationalists," Twitter blusters aside, have little appetite for a government takeover.

As America severs more of its Christian roots, Catholics need not lose hope. We have been doing our "Catholic thing" - living out our universal faith in the particular historical context of America - for centuries, and almost always under duress.

We forget that even when American law and culture embodied Christian morality - abortion was illegal, divorce was fault-based, pornography curtailed, adultery criminalized - Catholics were not entirely welcome in these United States because the reigning culture rejected their religious sensibilities.

Working within the law, Catholics responded by building their own neighborhoods, churches, schools, and universities where they could live their faith unencumbered. At the same time, Catholics found ways to participate in the general culture as Americans - through military service, civil and public offices, and working in industry.

Discrimination was rampant and nasty, yet Catholics fought the hostility as a creative minority. They prayed, they imagined, they built, they stuck together, they engaged rivals, and they offered charity to all.

"Creative minority" is a term coined by British historian Arnold Toynbee, who recognized how a small group's spiritual vision can breathe new life into a dying civilization. Twenty years ago, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger baptized the term to articulate...