"The core reality of contemporary American life is that religion is in decline in the United States, but where religion is resilient and flourishing, those are usually places where the American social fabric is still resilient and flourishing,"
Where religion is resilient and flourishing, those are usually places where the American social fabric is still resilient and flourishing.
My hope for the future of the religious liberty debate is that that reality and the implications of that reality will prevent the sort of low-level warfare that we're seeing now from turning into a kind of epic religious-institution breaking or destroying conflict, that basically the people who lead and run American will look at the good that American religion clearly does and the good that conservative religion especially very clearly does, and essentially stay their hand from some of the conflicts that they've already started and that I fear they're about to push a little further.
"I think it's entirely possible we're living through a strange era in which essentially all religious conservatives are the new Mormons, and the treatment that was meted out to Mormons in the 19th century is a more violent but possibly relevant prologue to what is to come,"
"Elite American should be sending fleets of experts out to Utah to basically try to figure out what Mormons are doing right and how that could be operationalized on a mass scale, because the reality is that if you look at all of the things that contemporary American liberalism is most concerned with — issues of inequality and upward mobility and the successful assimilation of immigrants and so — Utah and what you might call the greater Mormon region in the United States is doing far better than almost any other part of the U.S.