Quotes from Ross Douthat

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.

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.

To analyze Trump is to discover only bottomless appetite and need, and to carve at him is like carving at an online troll: The only thing to discover is the void.

There are voters out there that a moralistic and populist conservative right might win but a flagrantly hypocritical and ethnonationalist conservatism cannot.

If we had a populist president who didn't alienate so many persuadable voters, who took full advantage of a strong economy, and who had the political cunning displayed by Modi or Benjamin Netanyahu or Viktor Orban, the liberal belief in a hidden left-of-center mandate might be exposed as a fond delusion.

I didn't really start writing about the church in earnest until the mid-2000s, so I wasn't present for or a participant in a lot of the John Paul II-era debates about papal authority.

In general, I think that not voting is a perfectly honorable and civic-minded course in an election with two options that you consider unacceptable. I think casting a protest vote is a totally acceptable course. I have done both in my life.

I think that liberalism and the centrist governing elite of this country need to learn lessons from the Trump phenomenon. It is part of the way that the country is governed and the country is shaped that induces spasms of populism, including spasms of bigoted populism.

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

Even Warren Buffet is allowed to have an awful year from time to time.

I think true atheism is a rare thing in human affairs: Even in the most secularized precincts of Europe, a lot of nominal nonbelievers turn out to have all sorts of supernatural and metaphysical beliefs.

I think with artists and celebrities, you want to be simultaneously supportive of their conversions without putting too much hope and weight into it.

It's not always clear where a healthy patriotism shades into a dangerous nationalism.

The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics.

On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy's vices (privilege, insularity, arrogance) without the sense of duty, self-restraint and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed.

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.

Human beings seek community, and permanent openness is hard to sustain.

Jewish Americans weren't just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.

I think Trump had this general populist agenda but has not been particularly adept at using the levers of power in Washington.

Liberalism has never done as well as it thinks at resolving its own crises.

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.

In our age of digital connection and constantly online life, you might say that two political regimes are evolving, one Chinese and one Western, which offer two kinds of relationships between the privacy of ordinary citizens and the newfound power of central authorities to track, to supervise, to expose and to surveil.

My view of Trump is that, while he has done some extremely noxious things, in general his worst feature, his most authoritarian feature, really is his public presentation.

For presidential power to meaningfully expand, it is not enough for a president to simply make a power grab.