Lilla obviously is not objecting only to a small band of Catholic thinkers. Rather, he wants all Christians to give up and let self-admitted liberal failures like himself have their way in politics. But to take his advice would be a betrayal of both our citizenship and the love we ought to show to our neighbors. After all, in America the people are nominally the rulers, so citizenship comes with obligations of civic and political participation. Furthermore, Christian truths about the nature of man and how we are to live well with each other are not just for Christians.

Liberals don’t know how to fix our broken politics and degraded culture, they just know they don’t want Christians to try.
This was made clear by liberal academic Mark Lilla’s recent New York Review of Books fulmination against postliberal Catholic thinkers. Lilla focuses on the usual suspects — Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule — but his specific analysis of their work against political and philosophical liberalism is overshadowed by his apparent conclusion that all Christians should get out of politics.
Lilla grudgingly acknowledges that his targets “get a number of things right. There is a malaise … in modern Western societies, reflected above all in the worrisome state of our children, who are ever more depressed and suicidal. And we do lack adequate political concepts and vocabulary for articulating and defending the common good and placing necessary limits on individual autonomy.” Lilla includes himself in this liberal failure to even provide a conceptual framework for how to address the crisis around us.
Nonetheless, he insists that liberalism’s incapacity does not mean Deneen and company are right, either in their full diagnosis or their proposed solutions. Rather, Lilla declares that they are “just one more example of the psychology of self-induced ideological hysteria, which begins with the identification of a genuine problem and quickly mutates into a sense of world-historical crisis and the appointment of oneself and one’s comrades as the select called to strike down the Adversary.” Whatever liberalism’s struggles may be, its postliberal critics are losing themselves in apocalyptic delusions of grandeur.
This may be a reasonable charge to level at a small, radical movement prone to rhetorical bombast and with a penchant for alienating potential allies. There is plentiful space for reasonable praise and criticism regarding the ideas, methods, and personalities of the Catholic postliberals. But Lilla instead concludes by haranguing them for their supposedly unchristian pursuit of political power, and he does this in a way that may be applied against any Christian involvement in politics.
What is striking in their works is that they almost never speak about the power of the Gospel to transform a society and culture from below by first transforming the inner lives of its members. Saving souls is, after all, a retail business, not a wholesale one, and has nothing to do with jockeying for political power in a fallen world. Such ministering requires patience and charity and humility. It means meeting individual people where they are and persuading them that another, better way of living is possible. This is the kind of ministering the postliberals should be engaged in if they are serious about wanting to see Americans abandon their hollow, hedonistic individualism — not hatching plans to infiltrate the Department of Education.
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The lie of “born this way” has been used to justify exposing children to sexual material and teaching them about gender ideology at ever-younger ages. Coaston handwaves away these influences, even as she writes about the increase in LGBTQ identification that shows that they are succeeding in recruiting children into rainbow identities.

The LGBTQ movement was built on a lie, and New York Times writer Jane Coaston is irate that people are noticing. She professes to be concerned by a “very strange complaint from some critics. L.G.B.T.Q. people are OK in theory, they seem to argue, but there are simply too many of them.”
Of course, the point is that the sudden exponential increase in self-proclaimed rainbow identities shows that the mantra of “born this way” is a lie. It is now obvious that LGBTQ identities are being spread by social contagion, which means they are not all innate, immutable, and essential aspects of a person’s authentic self.
Though it was not widely publicized, the search for a “gay gene” ended in failure a few years ago. Rather than crude genetic determinism, the development of our sexual desires is complex and often fluid, with environmental and social factors playing crucial roles. The reality of human sexuality is far more complicated than “born this way.”
There is no objective test to determine whether someone is transgender.
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Leftism seeks to liberate us from all unchosen constraints and obligations, which includes our embodiment as men and women. It has effaced the differences between men and women and embraced the sexual revolution, which presumes that happiness, authenticity, and fulfillment are found through indulging our desires, especially our sexual impulses. But as intense as these desires may be, they are not the key to happiness, and their relentless pursuit damages the relationships in which we can best cultivate our happiness in this life. 

The arsonists have arrived at the inferno, radiating innocence and full of helpful suggestions for putting it out. That is to say, leftists have noticed that Americans feel increasingly alienated and lonely, and they are going to do something about it.  
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has proudly announced the “National Strategy for Social Connection Act,” which “creates a federal office to combat the growing epidemic of American loneliness, develops anti-loneliness strategies, and fosters best practices to promote social connection.” No doubt this bureaucratic buddy program will reweave America’s frayed social fabric, which just needs more friendship-facilitating feds.
Murphy seems sincere, and some of his concerns, such as those regarding what the algorithm-driven world of social media does to children, are valid. But if he wants to confront the real sources of American loneliness, he should look in the mirror. Nothing has done more to destroy American families and communities than the sexual revolution, which Murphy and his party enthusiastically champion. Sexual liberation promised a good time, but it has turned out to be very lonely indeed. 
A lonely society is the predictable (and predicted) consequence of eroding the commitments and duties of the natural family. Broken relationships between men and women lead to broken communities and traumatized children. A culture that worships sexual freedom, even at the cost of killing babies in utero, makes isolation and despair inevitable among the living.  
Of course, community and family life break down in a culture that effaces the differences between men and women to the point of pretending that men can be women and women can be men. Under pressure from adult activists and panicked by the superstition that children are being born into the wrong bodies, Murphy and his party have even embraced the surgical and chemical sterilization and mutilation of children.  
Yes, there are other contributions to increasing loneliness and alienation: economic policies that place too much value on GDP growth over economic stability, bad housing policies, and immigration policies that allow drug cartels to control the southern border. But someone who is unwilling to face the broken promises and evil consequences of the sexual revolution does not really want to address “the spiritual crisis facing America today.” And so, Murphy quickly backtracked when his tweets about expanding the Democratic Party’s coalition were criticized for opening the possibility of compromise on social issues. 
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