It seems to me that people aren't paying enough attention to William Barr's attack on "secularism", which is clearly part of a Trump administration strategy that should outrage and scare us 1/
Bear in mind that around 1 in 5 Americans now profess no religious affiliation roughly the same as the number of Catholics. What would we say if the Attorney General gave a speech demonizing America's Catholics? 2/ news.gallup.com/poll/1690/Reli…
And he's not just saying secularists are bad, he's accusing them of a sinister conspiracy against American values. That's real witch hint/pogrom type speech 3/
Barr also blames secularists for crime and drug deaths, which is nuts. Secularism has definitely risen since the 1990s; meanwhile, violent crime has fallen dramatically. Internationally, the US is much more religious than other advanced countries 4/ pewforum.org/2018/06/13/how…
And has vastly higher homicide rates 5/ ourworldindata.org/homicides 
I think we can take it as a given that nothing Barr says is sincere; after all, he works for the least godly man ever to occupy the White House. But there is a strategy here. Partly it's about deflecting gun control: guns don't kill people, Darwin kills people 6/
Also, Trump and company are going all in on playing to the base — which consists not so much of working-class whites as of *evangelical* working-class whites 7/ cnn.com/2018/12/11/pol…
Anyway, we may need to update Samuel Johnson. Historically, patriotism may have been the last refuge of scoundrels; but for Trump, with his fondness for foreign dictators, that route is problematic. So now religion is the last refuge. 8/
The thing is, all the polling data I see shows that we're becoming a more tolerant country. Can religious bigotry still be a winning strategy? If so, God help us all 9/
