A profound sense of despair hangs over our political life. There is a growing, quiet conviction that the great moral victories of the past are no longer possible, that our civilization has lost the capacity for the kind of greatness that defined the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This feeling of "doomerism" is often attributed to our toxic media, our political polarization, or the loss of a shared national purpose. The analysis of the symptoms is often correct -- but the diagnosis of the disease is almost always wrong. The tragic reality is that a movement like Dr. King's would fail today not because our politics has changed, but because our souls have. We are mourning the death of a political possibility, without realizing we are actually writing a eulogy for the Christian moral order that made it possible in the first place.

The Civil Rights Movement, as it is now remembered, has been stripped of its soul. It has been reimagined as a modern, secular, progressive activist campaign. But it was nothing of the sort. It was, perhaps, the last great act of American Christendom, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a community organizer. He was a Baptist preacher making a profoundly Christian argument to a profoundly Christian nation.

The power of his movement was not political. It was prophetic. His authority did not come from a handbook on activism. It came from the pulpit. His central, world-changing argument, most famously articulated in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," was a direct appeal to the Natural Law as understood by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. He argued that the laws of segregation were not just bad policy. They were "unjust laws" because they violated the "eternal law and the natural law" of a transcendent God who created all men in His own image. This was not a "lucky" political strategy. This was an act of theological warfare. Dr. King's genius was to hold up a mirror to a nation that, for all its sins, still saw itself as "one nation, under God." He was not proposing a new set of values. He was calling a sinful and hypocritical nation to repent and to be true to the sublime values it had inherited but had failed to live out.

Now, let us look at the modern progressive movements that claim to be the heirs to this legacy. They are, in fact, its philosophical inversion. Where Dr. King's movement was built on a unifying, transcendent truth, the new movements are built on a philosophy of divisive materialism. This is not to say that their members are personally hateful. It is to say that their underlying philosophy -- Critical Theory, with its Marxist roots -- is a form of philosophical tribalism. It rejects the Christian idea of a shared human nature and a universal Natural Law. It replaces it with a world that is nothing but a perpetual power struggle between competing identity groups defined by race, sex, and class.

This reveals a profound difference in the very nature of freedom. Dr. King's movement was a call to a difficult and virtuous freedom -- the freedom to love one's enemies, the freedom to suffer for a truth that is higher than oneself. The new movements are a demand for a different kind of freedom -- the freedom of the group to assert its own will and to seize power from its perceived oppressors.

This is why the modern sense of despair is so tragically correct. A movement based on a unifying, transcendent appeal to the conscience can win the soul of a nation. A movement based on a divisive, materialist power struggle can only win a temporary victory for its own tribe. This will inevitably breed the resentment that leads to the next turn of the wheel of conflict.

The Civil Rights Movement had hope because it was grounded in a transcendent faith. It believed in a God of justice who stood above the fray. The modern progressive movement, having abandoned that God, has no source of hope. It has only the grim, materialist calculus of political power. And a politics without hope is the very definition of despair. The spirit of 1963 is dead -- but it was not killed by its political opponents. It was killed by the triumph of the very secular and materialist worldview that now claims to be its heir.