Joseph Bottum considers the decline of the mainline Christian denominations, which used to be the backbone of American Protestantism and now are minority institutions, and its consequences:

This is one of the largest sociological changes in American history, and it has happened to institutions that seemed central to the nation itself. For evidence of these churches’ significance, we could look to Will Herberg’s once-famous 1955 book Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, or even President Eisenhower’s traveling up from Washington in 1958 to lay the cornerstone of the National Council of Churches’ official building on Riverside Drive in New York.

Beyond all their differences, the central Protestant churches gave a form and tone to the culture. Their unity-in-difference offered the United States a peculiar gift: America had the advantages of social agreement that come with a state church, without the disadvantages of government control of religion.

To see the unreported and generally ignored statements on every transient political event that issue these days from the central offices of the old Mainline is to understand that these churches mattered more when they wanted to matter less.

The collapse of the central denominations in American religious life is not the cause of our current social and political divisions. But it is a significant cause of the rancor, lack of fellow feeling, and apocalyptic threat in those divisions.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.