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.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].