The contemporary, American conservative movement and the GOP are fundamentally post-modern and post-Christian. The contemporary left remains (and this might be a flaw) an essentially modern project – or perhaps it is better say that the contemporary left is an effort to complete (an) unfinished project of modernism.

The key for American conservatives is Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of ‘legitimation.’

Science, rational thought, and, yes, facts, are no longer sufficient. Legitimacy is no longer something determined by knowledge, but something malleable, changing, and able to brokered and manipulated for subjective purposes.

When George W. Bush the candidate was asked in a debate about global climate change, his response was: don’t scientists disagree about that?

Of course, the ‘legitimate’ answer in the modern(ist) sense is no, no the overwhelming majority of scientists working in the relevant fields do not.

Since the field in which the modern Republican politician operates is not the field of knowledge or facts, but legitimation. A few oil company paid scientists manage to produce something which sort of kind of suggests maybe not, then climate change can be de-legitimized. Which is the point: not to ascertain truth (which is a modernist goal) but rather to legitimize or de-legimitize aspects of the world in support of one’s goals.

Ultimately, Christianity and religious authority, becomes something for this post-modern gaming of legitimacy – with the tendency of many American conservatives to speak (preach) in religious terms is just another part of the legitimation game.

When Paul Ryan creates a budget (which also plays legitimation games with math, but not using it, but questioning the legitimacy of criticism of the lack math by asserting his own legitimacy as ‘taking entitlements seriously,’ even though pre-post-modern thought would have pretty quickly dismissed any budget that gets such things as addition and subtraction wrong as being fundamentally not serious) that the Catholic Church (of which he is a member) criticizes as being immoral, he attacks the legitimacy of their argument. He takes a minor theological idea known as subsidiarity and uses that to de-legimitize the criticisms of bishops, priests and nuns (which are based on a far more central and basic social argument within the Catholic Church – the preferntial option for the poor).

The Church, to put it mildly, is not a democracy. Untrained lay figures like Ryan should not have any ground to stand on here, at least not theologically. But by appealing to the post-modern idea of legitimation, Ryan makes an appeal for the religious and Catholic rightness of his budget through (pseudo) intellectual games that are post-Catholic and post-Christian. Because legitimacy ceases to be something relatively absolute, something determined by scientifically accepted facts or even by religion’s eternal truths. For the Catholic Ryan, even the truths of the church can be gamed through efforts to de-legitimize the unwelcome positions held by the Church or written out in the Bible.