IT CANNOT have escaped your attention that the gold-medalist decathlete American hero of the 1976 Summer Olympics, Bruce Jenner, now prefers to be known as Caitlyn. Ms Jenner's Vanity Fair cover is already, as they say, "iconic". Ravishing at the age of 65, her expression is shy, pleading and coyly hopeful, her athlete's arms held behind her back like a St Sebastian. As Bruce, Ms Jenner in recent years had been little more than an awkward auxiliary member of the famous-for-being-famous Kardashian clan. Last week, however, Caitlyn Jenner was the most famous person in the world, according to Google at least. Searches for Ms Jenner outpaced those of her step-daughter, Kim Kardashian, by a factor of seven, despite the news that Ms Kardashian is now expecting her second child with Kanye West, a famous recording artist. Which is just to say that the advent of Caitlyn Jenner is, like it or not, a very big deal. Ms Jenner's pioneering public journey across the newly porous boundaries of gender identity lends an urgency to the question of what we owe, morally and legally, to the transgendered. There's no avoiding this conversation now.

Republican presidential contenders would prefer to avoid it, however. "Stay the hell away from it,” advises Ed Rollins a Republican strategist. “[I]f you’re not careful, you can end up insulting a large portion of the population". So far, the big names in the race for the GOP nomination have heeded this advice. Those candidates who have piped up have expressed a carefully modulated tolerance.

"I can only imagine the torment that Bruce Jenner went through," offered Lindsey Graham, a senator from South Carolina. "I hope he's—I hope she has found peace." Though Mr Graham affirmed that he is a "pro-life, traditional marriage kind of guy", he added that "If Caitlyn Jenner wants to be a Republican, she is welcome in my party."

"If he says he’s a woman, then he’s a woman," said Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator not known for his open-mindedness. "My responsibility as a human being is to love and accept everybody. Not to criticise people for who they are." As an outspoken critic of gay relationships, Mr Santorum has long reserved the right to criticise people for what they do, but he refrained from knocking all that Ms Jenner has done to make herself womanly.

This combination of silence and accommodation has unsettled some conservative commentators. "A surgically damaged man appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, and the applause is mandatory," writes David French of the National Review. He then argues that the "sexual selfishness and radical personal autonomy” of the transgender movement “shares the same logic as such cultural catastrophes as no-fault divorce and abortion on demand", which are naturally to blame for "poverty, depression, and increasing inequality between two-parent families and the transient remainder". Mr French contends that conservatives are being bullied into a dangerous silence by left-leaning cultural arbiters. "By refusing to speak," he writes, "we contribute to the notion that even conservatives understand that something is wrong—something is shameful—about our own deepest beliefs."

Steve Deace, a syndicated radio host based in Iowa, offered a similar but more practical warning: "If we're not going to defend as a party basic principles of male and female, that life is sacred because it comes from God, then you're going to lose the vast majority of people who've joined that party."

It is surprising that a warning like this needs to be issued at all. Until recently, Republican politicians have been brash culture warriors. Mr Santorum once compared same-sex marriage to the union of a man and a dog, and still won the 2012 Iowa caucus. So why not speak out now? Surely the normalisation of Ms Jenner's gender fluidity is a terrifying prospect for anyone trying, and failing, to hold the line against changing sexual norms. And religious conservatives have long been essential to any conservative victory at the polls.

Still, it would seem that Mr Rollins is right. Ambitious Republicans really ought to keep their traps shut—or, like Messrs Graham and Santorum, offer Ms Jenner an awkward embrace. But if this is true, and it would be electoral poison for any Republican presidential candidate to campaign against Caitlyn Jenner's “sexual selfishness”, then haven't religious conservatives already lost the game?

Well, the game isn't over, but the outcome is not in doubt. The social forces that brought us to the Caitlyn Jenner moment are irreversibly ascendant. The gulf between the anguished vehemence of religious conservatives and the timidity of their brightest political lights is a sign of the times.

This is not to say that conservatives are being bullied by cultural liberals or are ashamed of their deepest beliefs, as Mr French seems to think. Rather, the silence may reflect a dawning realisation that "our deepest beliefs" are not quite what we thought they were.

One of the enduring puzzles of America is why it has remained so robustly religious while its European cousins have secularised with startling rapidity. One stock answer is that America, colonised by religious dissenters and lacking an officially sanctioned creed, has always been a cauldron of religious competition and, therefore, innovation. The path to success in a competitive religious marketplace is the same as the path to success in business: give the people what they want.

Americans tend to want a version of Americanism, and they get it. Americanism is a frontier creed of freedom, of the inviolability of individual conscience and salvation as self-realisation. The American religion does Protestantism one better. Not only are we, each of us, qualified to interpret scripture, but also we each have a direct line to God. You can just feel Jesus. In my own American faith tradition, a minority version of Mormonism, the Holy Spirit—one of the guises of God—is a ubiquitous, pervasive presence. Like radio waves, you've just got to tune it in.

What did the makers of America believe about God and religion? In a magisterial study, "The American Religion", Harold Bloom maintains that the core of the inchoate American faith is the idea of a "Real Me" that is neither soul nor body, but an aspect of the divinity itself, a "spark of God". To find God, then, is to burrow inward and excavate the true self from beneath the layers of convention and indoctrination. Crucially, this personal essence cannot fall under the jurisdiction of the "natural law" of God's creation. Just as God stands outside His creation, so does the authentic self, which just is a piece of God. "[T]he American self is not the Adam of Genesis," Mr Bloom writes, "but is a more primordial Adam, a Man before there were men or women." Roman Catholic teachings about the obligatory roles of man and woman in the created natural order live on in the American religion as a faint and fading ancestral memory, but they are flatly at odds with the central American dogma of the "Real Me" as a bit of original divinity that stands apart. Indeed, from the perspective of the American religion, as Mr Bloom explains it, a moral code based on something as debased as "nature" offensively denies our inherent divinity. "No American concedes that she is part of nature," Mr Bloom says. Ms Jenner certainly has not conceded it. In this light, Mr French's contention that Ms Jenner is "surgically damaged" smacks of a crudely materialistic philosophy that roots moral identity in the dispensation of genitalia. Far from "damaged", Ms Jenner's medical transfiguration is a glorious example of the American faith in action. She has refashioned mere nature to better reflect the hard-won truth of the divinity within. Ms Jenner, it bears mentioning, is also a committed Christian. In the Washington Post Josh Cobia relates what Ms Jenner, then known as Bruce, taught him about Jesus, and life, at a non-denominational evangelical church they both attended. "Jesus wasn’t one to turn away from those the world had labelled broken," Mr Cobia concluded. "He was the one who would walk toward them with open arms." The tolerant Jesus of Mr Cobia and Ms Jenner may not be the Jesus of Thomas Aquinas or Martin Luther or John Knox or John Wesley. He is a Jesus perhaps more thoroughly invested in the "autonomous eroticised individualism" of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman than any first-century reinterpretation of the Judaic law. But that is the American and still-Americanising Jesus of many millions of believers who, like Caitlyn Jenner, attend non-denominational evangelical churches, and who, like Caitlyn Jenner, vote Republican.

This is why going after Ms Jenner is ultimately a loser for Republican presidential wannabes. Caitlyn Jenner of Malibu is a leading indicator not of the secularisation of America, but of the ongoing Americanisation of Christianity. There's no point dying in the last ditch to defend Old World dogma against the transformative advance of America's native faith. Especially not if it will leave you out of step with the growing number of voters who find divinity by spelunking the self.

(Photo credit: AFP)