As we show in Chapter 2, there has been a long tradition of the archaeological research in both the Pampas and Patagonia since the end of the nineteenth century. From the very beginning of the investigations, the Late Pleistocene human occupation was at the top of the research agenda in both regions. Giant ground sloth skins from Cueva del Milodón and human skulls supposedly found in very ancient (Tertiary) layers in the Pampas seashore ignited the imagination of scientists of those times, and fieldwork looking for spectacular findings as well as reckless interpretations abounded. Since then, the first human occupation has been the main focus of the archaeological investigation in both regions. This chapter summarizes and discusses the results of this almost continuous, intense, and fertile archaeological research.

The conclusion proposes alternative ways to think about Christian normativity, drawing on the concepts of polydoxy and religious autonomy from Alvin Reines, with additional support from Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, and the concept of theological disobedience, derived from Louis Michael Seidman’s notion of constitutional disobedience.

The conservative side of the quest for true Christianity – what traditionalists call the “rule of faith” – can also be organized in terms of doctrine, culture, and politics. The second chapter begins by looking at the doctrinal quest, which focuses on the retrieval of “historic Christianity.” John Henry Newman, Karl Barth, and C. S. Lewis represent key moments in the rise of retrievalism among Protestants.

This chapter examines the liberal approaches to Christian prescriptivism, which have typically fallen under the label of the “essence of Christianity.” The quest for the essence has its origins in the Reformation but becomes a widespread theological concern in the Enlightenment. This first chapter examines liberal, historicist, dialectical, and liberationist versions of this quest. Using Schleiermacher’s rubric, I organize different versions of the essence along the lines of reason (doctrine), experience (culture), and morality (politics).

Doctrine became increasingly less important, giving way to the second form of the conservative quest: the turn to culture as the defining feature of Christianity. The third chapter traces the development of postliberalism through the lens of mainline Protestantism’s interest in the authority and interpretation of scripture, beginning with biblical theology and concluding with the postliberal project of theological interpretation of scripture. This development explains how the norms of Christianity became understood as cultural norms, thus paving the way for orthodoxy becoming a form of culture war.

The last chapter recapitulates the arguments in a normative, rather than historical, mode, examining the underlying logic of orthodoxy implicit in each version of conservative Christianity’s pursuit of authentic, historic faith. The chapter argues that orthodoxy is an inherently ambiguous concept that requires an authoritarian leader to determine arbitrary boundaries by policing and punishing the heterodox. So long as orthodoxy remains the normative goal, the culture-war politics of the Christian Right will remain.

While the political aspect of the traditionalist quest for prescriptive Christianity has been central to the story from the start, this chapter examines, first, the complicated way that religious and political norms are intertwined in American history and dependent on whether the Christian community is in a position of power or not. Second, the chapter examines two aspects of Christian identity that are especially important in understanding contemporary American politics: (1) a global Christian identity that understands Christians as those persecuted by godless secular society, and (2) an antignostic identity that understands Christians as those who wage war against “gnosticism,” a term applicable to whatever conservative Christians are currently combatting in the political sphere.