Thread by @RadioFreeTom

An important line from the @DavidAFrench piece today: "About half of self-identified evangelicals now attend church monthly or less often. They have religious zeal, but they lack religious community. So they find their band of brothers and sisters in the Trump movement." /1

But think about that: It suggests how shallow the roots are of a particular kind of religious belief that is less a belief system than an expression of social identity. (If your replacement for Christian worship is a Trump rally, maybe church-going wasn't about Christ.) /2

I've seen that with ethnic churches, where being from a certain country is more important than the mass or liturgy. It's not a surprise that the collapse of some strands of evangelicalism led to the cultish experience of Trumpism. /3

As French notes, you can't displace Trumpism with "nothing", because it only exists for many people as a form of social tribalism. You can replace it with something *worse*, but hard to undo the jolt that comes from the joy of relieving boredom and anomie with shared hatred. /4

David's probably more optimistic than I am about whether such people can recover some sense of civic identity outside of the cult, but it's not going to come from persuasion and carefully crafted policy positions. /5x