Ross Douthat

That clerical celibacy doesn't guarantee asceticism is obvious, any more than attending Mass guarantees prayerfulness (trust me on that one). But it preserves the call even when the system is corrupted.

I think religious individualism doesn't fulfill impulses toward community and solidarity and it doesn't necessarily work for people when things go really bad.

In fact, the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy.

I grew up in a household that spent most of my childhood on a religious pilgrimage through American Christianity.

I think you can see a clear link between certain kinds of Christian nationalism and support for Trump. Then, I also think that Trump is benefiting from the weakening of religious participation. He's winning evangelicals who aren't in church.

America's gravest moral evil, chattel slavery, was defeated by an authoritarian president in a religious civil war, not by proceduralism or constitutional debate.

It is not white nationalism to believe that countries like the United States would be better off with more babies. That belief can be held for racist reasons by racists, but it can also be held, reasonably and righteously, by people who worry about the economic consequences of demographic decline.

We have plenty of examples from twentieth-century history where, out of fear of liberalism or Communism, religious conservatives made alliances with secular populists and nationalists, and it ended up going pretty badly for everybody.

In the end the recrudescence of racism on the right is conservatism's problem to solve, and it has to be solved independently of whatever liberals and leftists happen to be saying. But the task of solving it still gets a little harder with every nonsense charge or bad-faith accusation.

I am not a post-liberal and I do not think that such a return to full 19th-century anticlericalism inevitable or even likely - which is one reason among many that I doubt the bargain many religious conservatives have made with Donald Trump.

To visit the West Coast, now and always, is to be overwhelmed by its beauty - the blue water and blue skies, the temperate air and the beaches and the looming mountains not so far away.

Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left.