The Battle to Fill the WASP Void

It’s Sunday let’s talk church-

Specifically- The decline of the WASP in real time.

The old WASP establishment is basically gone, and you can feel it everywhere from DC to Wall Street to the Ivies. Trump’s impersonation of Jesus isn’t out of touch- he is picking up on real religious undercurrents in the deteriorating WASP world. Trump isn’t a WASP. He’s what the working class Protestant tradition looks like when it finally gets a champion and the champion has no theology. The messianic imagery isn’t WASP confidence, it’s WASP collapse dressed as revival and mislabeled as populism. His entire campaign was built on bringing down the WASPS and has largely been successful. His fatal flaw will forever be taking on the Catholic Church in all his pride and arrogance because, as I’ll point out, the quality of Catholic converts and the number of Catholics already in the establishment is not an ally you can lose while burning the old system down.

For most of the 20th century, a narrow slice of white Anglo‑Saxon Protestants ran the show: old families, old money, old schools, and very particular mainline churches. They didn’t represent most Americans, but they quietly controlled the commanding heights of politics, finance, law, media, and the military. Their power ran through prep schools, certain colleges, old‑line firms, and a shared cultural code more than through explicit ideology. That world has unraveled due to Civil‑rights reforms, immigration changes, meritocratic admissions, and the rise of new money and new elites shattered the old club.

Today the top tier is far more plural: Catholics, Jews, secular technocrats, immigrants, and various “hyphenated” identities all competing and collaborating at the top. White Protestants are still there in large numbers, but they no longer own the system.

What makes the Catholic piece interesting is that Catholics didn’t start out as part of that club. For most of American history they were the despised outsiders: hit with nativist riots, anti‑Catholic laws, and constant suspicion that they were “un‑American” or secretly loyal to Rome. Irish, Italian, German, Polish, and other Catholic immigrants were told they didn’t belong here, so they built their own infrastructure (parishes, schools, hospitals, mutual‑aid societies) and spent generations trying to prove they could be fully Catholic *and* fully American. Not an easy thing when the country hates the church.

You can see that fight for identity in everything from the old parochial school system and ethnic parishes to the way Catholic soldiers and politicians had to publicly swear they weren’t taking orders from the Pope. Being Catholic in America meant living under a question mark: Are you really one of us, or are you a foreign presence that needs to be watched? But here’s the thing -that discrimination helped us. Our institutions are on average better then the ones we were discriminated from. That’s a problem for the Protestants who are still attending underfunded public schools in rural areas where teachers have to buy their own supplies on inadequate salaries as it is. A big problem that’s never been so apparent.

Catholic law schools are producing the legal architecture of the current constitutional moment. The Federalist Society pipeline is disproportionately Catholic. The Supreme Court majority is Catholic. Catholic hospitals are among the largest healthcare systems in the country. Catholic schools in urban markets are outperforming public schools with a fraction of the budget.

None of that is accidental. That’s the compounded return on two centuries of building under pressure.

By the mid‑20th century, that stigma had faded enough that a Catholic like JFK (although we know how that ended) could reach the White House, and over time Catholics slid into the mainstream. The irony is that the people who once had to fight simply to be accepted are now one of the groups helping to fill the vacuum left by the fading WASP establishment.

Here’s where the present moment gets really interesting: as that old WASP moral and cultural center dissolves, people are not drifting into some neutral, value‑free order. Instead we get a competitive field of meaning systems, institutions, and tribes. On the ground, you see a lot of people becoming “nones,” cobbling together a personal spirituality, or just living with a thin, consumerist identity. But you also see something else: a visible minority moving toward thick, historic, demanding traditions.

That’s where the current bump in Catholic conversions comes in. Despite all of its scandals and internal crises, Catholicism offers things the old establishment once claimed to provide but no longer can: continuity with a long tradition, a coherent moral framework, a serious sacramental life, and an institutional home that’s bigger than any one country or political party. In a world of permanent churn, some people want something old, hard, and rooted rather than endlessly customizable.

The irony is that Catholicism is not “winning” the numbers game overall; it’s bleeding people out the back door even as new converts come in the front. But the type of person converting matters: educated professionals, young adults in cities, people plugged into media and politics, former seculars and ex‑Protestants who are intentionally seeking a meaningful identity. That can translate into outsized influence long before it shows up as a raw headcount.

So you could say we’re watching the same process from two angles:

- From the top down: the decline of a single, coherent WASP ruling class and the rise of multiple, competing establishments.

- From the bottom up: a country where Catholics once had to fight to be seen as truly American, now becoming one of the main destinations for people who sense that the old cultural center is gone and don’t want to live without one.

The question that hangs over all of this is simple: if the old WASP world is gone and nothing quite replaces it, what kind of moral and cultural center—if any—will America have in 20 or 30 years? And that my friends is the exact chaos we are watching play out in real time.