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Notes -
Here's my take on that: I believe the detente worked in the US when a very shared concept of Christianity was ubiquitous in the first order cultural and institutional hegemony yet a very broad liberalist defection was not just tolerated, but treated as respectable through it's explicit allowance in the Bill of Rights. Eg 60s-2012ish.
During this time, take the 90s, it's was often the case likely that one was surrounded by irreligious liberal indulgence that was tacitly approved in social circles, yet that was socially boxed within a very visible sense of propriety that was more-or-less Christian. I think for example, Seinfeld demonstrates this well equilibrium. A bunch of non-Christian New Yorkers were able to live openly and happily, but a lot of the social-boundaries and humor found by nudging them was in the traditionalist propriety frame (see e.g. The Contest).
The problem is that this was always unsustainable because the liberalism continued to gnaw through the hegemony as if it was it's cage, not it's scaffolding.
There's two possibilities, that I'm unsure about: 1 (my suspicion) is that this was fundamentally untenable because the liberalism was deinstitutionalizing force coupled with modernizing technology and we always would have atrophied here as more people became irreligious and traditional institutions weakened, and communities evaporated into an atomic monoculture.
The other possibility is that this detente could have been held if the liberalizing had been defanged a bit somehow. The (classical) liberal, as I said, loved gnawing the nearest scaffold/boundary as a matter of right, whether that be teaching creationism in schools, public prayer, Blue laws, co-ed dorms, pushing boundaries in media, or whatever. Again, this wasn't one mono-effort, but a million different cuts that each time saw either a local limit on liberalism and uderstandably fought it, or (less understandably) openly rebelled against the yardstick of the hegemony even when they were free to ignore it.
I'll give an example of the latter: living in sin. Even as late as the 90s two unmarried people living together was seen as improprietous in large portions of society, but was widely practiced and pretty much blanketly tolerated. If people wanted the detente to remain, those even taking advantage of the freedom should have supported social disapproval, and not agitated for it's normalization.
Anyway, long story short, the whole culture house fell apart right around Obergerfell, and the traditional hegemony of cultural propriety (Im using this word as a placeholder for a much broader concept) was pretty much over. Was it gay marriage? Was it cellphones and social media? Reverberations of Catholic priest scandal? The end place of a long and steady momentum? Whatever.
The detente cannot exist any more or be returned to because the necessary tension between liberalism and shared cultural restraint snapped and the institutions of the latter fell over.
The most likely way back is for progressives to finish institutionalizing their own illiberal hegemony, and then get enough liberal tension coming from it's dissenters. But the if you want the old detente back, you're not getting it. And if you want to try, I (tongue-in-cheek) suggest all the agnostic liberals here go crypto with that and publically invest in either supporting progressivist takover or rebuilding American Christianity as the hegemonic force so you can start to rebel against it again. In other words, become an accelerationist is one direction away from your libertarian sensibilities or the other.
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