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in his new book “The Fractured Republic,” the scholar and journalist Yuval Levin, a Jewish social conservative, has counseled both religious conservatives and secularist liberals that they can repair our dysfunctional politics by comprehending the implications of this one essential truth: that American society is no longer the consolidated unit it once was but a diffuse assortment of subcultures.

Many have finally given up on the whole idea of a culture war or are willing to admit they lost it. They are determined only to remain who they are and to live as amiably and productively as they can in a culture that doesn’t look like them and doesn’t belong to them.

  On the one side were those, mainly Cruz supporters, still voting on abortion, gay marriage and other moral issues. On the other were those among the faithful so angry about the direction of the country and what they saw as the marginalization of conservative Christianity in public life that they opted for the strongman who could push back hard against their enemies.

. By some measures, he's running the most secular Republican campaign since the 1970s.

But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe.

They have their own distinctive worldview (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic)

and of course their own outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise.

it’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe: because that means our leaders can’t see themselves the way the Brexiteers and Trumpistas and Marine Le Pen voters see them.

They can’t see that what feels diverse on the inside can still seem like an aristocracy to the excluded, who look at cities like London and see, as Peter Mandler wrote for Dissent after the Brexit vote, “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”

They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools.

They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world.

What the argument for accommodation is missing is the core reality about Trump. His answer to nearly every problem is himself — his negotiating skill, his strength of purpose, his unique grasp of the national will.

He is offering himself as master of every situation. We are supposed to turn in desperation to the talent and will of one man, who happens to be bristling with prejudice and blazing with ignorance. We are seeing the offer of personal rule by someone with no discernible public or personal virtues.

He has offered disaffected people an invitation to political violence. “Knock the crap out of them, would you?” he said at one rally. “Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”

And this permission for violence is paired with an embrace of ethnic and religious bigotry, casting blame and suspicion on Muslims and undocumented immigrants. It would be difficult — or should be difficult — for any Republican to endorse a presidential candidate whose election would cause many of our neighbors to fear for their safety. Or to embrace a candidate who promised to purposely target children in the conduct of the war on terrorism.

For Republicans, accommodation with Trump is not just a choice; it is a verdict. None will come away unstained. For evangelical Christians, it is the stain of hypocrisy — making their movement synonymous with exclusion and gullibility. For GOP job seekers, it is the stain of opportunism. (Consider the sad decline into sycophancy of Chris Christie.) For conservatives, it is the stain of betrayal — the equivalent of supporting George Wallace in 1968 as an authentic populist voice.

All this leaves completely horrible options: sitting the election out, supporting a third-party candidate, contemplating a difficult vote for Clinton. But these are the only honorable options.

The joy he takes in humiliating women is not something he even bothers to disguise. He told the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, “My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.” Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early ’90s, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”

Women labor under a cloud of Trump’s distrust. “I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback. Working moms are particularly lacking in loyalty, he believes, and thus do not make for good employees. “She’s not giving me 100 percent. She’s giving me 84 percent, and 16 percent is going towards taking care of children,

This is one reason that evangelicals, both men and women, gravitate to Trump, despite his obvious lack of interest in religion and blatantly loose morals. He represents the possibility of a return to patriarchy, to a time when men were men, and didn’t have to apologize for it

In 1989, Trump had returned home from a painful scalp-reduction surgery, intended to remove a bald spot. His ex-wife Ivana had suggested the doctor—and he blamed her for his suffering. He held her arms and began pulling hair from her scalp, then tore off her clothes. Hurt writes: “Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified … It is a violent assault. According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’ ” When the story resurfaced last summer, Trump’s campaign disavowed it. When Hurt was writing his book, Trump’s lawyers forced the author to include a statement from Ivana in the book, “A Note to Readers,” which softens the account but doesn’t disavow it: “As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

The scene offers a graphic summation of Trump’s retrograde beliefs and real brutality. What’s worse, the same spirit informs his politics—the rampant cruelty, the violent impulses, the thirst for revenge, the absence of compassion. Misogyny isn’t an incidental part of Donald Trump. It’s who he is.

how this relates to the on-going issue of violence at Trump rallies. These aren't just stern reactions to hippie-loser protesters. These have evolved into campaign rituals where Trump and his followers play out the centerpieces of his campaign: authority, domination and violence - and Trump's ability to reassert the proper hierarchies his followers crave.

, this tells us why many evangelicals and other traditionalist, right-wing Christians are so supportive of Trump, notwithstanding his fairly open life as a sexual braggart and libertine: because he stands - quite convincingly - for authority, hierarchy and patriarchy.

For many of his supporters, whether they use the phrase or not, he stands for white supremacy.

First, the anti-immigration obsession that had transfixed the right-wing inured many supposed gate-keepers (e.g., magazines, pundits) as well as the base to a candidate peddling a dangerous brew of nativism, protectionism and isolationism. If the “respectable” publications rant and rave about “amnesty,” one can imagine why Trump’s idea for a wall might have gotten traction rather than guffaws

Second, over the past seven years, the anti-government tirades from talk radio, from Beltway groups such as Heritage Action and even from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) saturated the base, convincing them that everyone with experience “betrayed them” and only outsiders devoid of exposure to governance had the secret sauce for peace and prosperity.

Third, the “establishment” — the officialdom of the Republican National Committee — facilitated Trump’s rise, convinced he’d run as an independent

One, therefore, is left with an unpleasant reality: A plurality of GOP voters wanted Trump

A significant segment of the GOP primary electorate itself lacked common sense, standards of decency, and intolerance of bigotry and cruelty. No group was worse than the evangelical “leaders” who cheered him along the way.

A Republican wag joked that the GOP needs not only a new candidate but also a new base. There is something to that. In the 2016 postmortem, it will be worth examining the extent to which the GOP has promoted crackpots, become ghettoized in distorted right-wing media and lost track of what 21st-century America believes and looks like

the party as a whole has to expand its vision and its base. It’s time to stop reveling in ignorance and celebrating lost causes.

It’s a problem when the rest of the country has to rescue the GOP and the country from Republican voters’ terrible judgment.

Milo’s appeal on the right is, one might say, intersectional.

Moreover, his provocations tend to actually work, in the sense that they summon up the illiberal, “shut up or we’ll shut you down” side of left-wing politics.

for a cultural conservatism united only by a shared outsider sensibility, neither consistency nor propriety are consensus virtues any longer — and indecency in the service of attacking liberalism is no vice.

this tax code provision bars tax-exempt entities such as churches and charitable organizations from participating in campaigns for or against political candidates. It dates to 1954, when it was signed by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was not terribly controversial at the time.

The provision basically says that if you want to be exempted from paying taxes — meaning you are effectively subsidized by other taxpayers, who pay for your access to emergency services, roads and other government functions — you can’t be involved in partisan politics. You can’t, among other things, take tax-deductible donations from your worshippers and turn around and spend them on political campaigns.

during the campaign, Trump indicated he’d do his darnedest to get them what they really want: not the ability to endorse candidates from the pulpit — a practice that the IRS has already been ignoring — but the ability to funnel taxpayer-subsidized funds into the political process.

the most recent Republican platform included a commitment to repeal the Johnson Amendment.

The effect of the order might be to create wholesale exemptions to anti-discrimination law for people, nonprofits and closely held for-profit corporations that claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion and transgender identity. It would also curb women’s access to contraception through the Affordable Care Act.

This is, of course, all in the name of preserving religious freedom. Except that it allows some people to practice religious freedom by denying jobs, services and potentially public accommodation to those with differing beliefs.

I wish I could say that only a tiny fringe believes Christian practices deserve pride of place in public life and policymaking. But that’s not the case.

In a poll released this week by the Pew Research Center, Americans were asked what made someone “truly American.” A third of respondents overall, and 43 percent of Republicans, said you need to be Christian. That would exclude me, as well as about 30 percent of the population.

ore prudent ways

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Second, we learned that partisan Christianity cannot effectively change our culture

Little progress has been made despite their best efforts, and an increasing number of individuals now recognize the religious right strategy has largely been a failure. The irony of this turn of events is that Christians above all others know that true change must occur in hearts -- not just the halls of power.

Natural law, Mr. Bottum writes, depends for its force on a sense of the mystery of creation, the enchantment of everyday objects, the sacredness of sex. In the West, that climate of belief has been upended: by science, modernism, a Protestant turn away from mysticism, and, most recently, the sexual revolution. The strictures of natural law were meant to structure an enchanted world — but if the enchantment is gone, the law becomes a pointless artifact of a defunct Christian culture.

Traditional-marriage activists would counter that we can at least begin a Christian renaissance by upholding marriage’s last connections to its Christian past. But Mr. Bottum says that’s the wrong starting point. “There are much better ways than opposing same-sex marriage for teaching the essential God-hauntedness, the enchantment, of the world,” he writes.

Better tactics might include “massive investments in charity, the further evangelizing of Asia, a willingness to face martyrdom by preaching in countries where Christians are killed,” and a churchwide effort to beautify the liturgy.

“I’ve given up on politics,” Mr. Bottum said, as we sat on his wide porch after lunch. “I’ll vote Republican, because I’m a Republican. But I don’t believe a change in culture can come from politics. It can only come from re-enchantment with the world.”

There has always been a tension between self and society. Americans have always wanted to remain true to individual consciousness, but they also knew they were citizens, members of a joint national project

there was some responsibility to maintain coalitions with people unlike themselves. That meant maintaining conversations and relationships, tolerating difference, living with dialectics and working with opposites.

he Democratic Party was once an illogical coalition between Northeastern progressives and Southern evangelicals. The G.O.P. was an alliance between business and the farm belt.

But in the ethos of expressive individualism, individual authenticity is the supreme value. Compromise and coalition-building is regarded as a dirty and tainted activity. People congregate in segregated cultural and ideological bubbles and convince themselves that the purest example of their type could actually win

cults never last because there is no institutional infrastructure.

But along the way the civic institutions that actually could mobilize broad coalitions — the parties — get dismissed and gutted. Without these broad coalition parties, the country is ungovernable and cynicism ratchets up even further.

institutional decay is real, and it’s what happens in a country in which people would rather live in solipsistic bubbles than build relationships across differences.

On questions about the Bible and Christianity, the groups that answered the most right were Mormons and white evangelical Protestants. On questions about world religions, like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, the groups that did the best were atheists, agnostics and Jews.

¶ Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation. ¶ Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ. ¶ Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.

the Christian churches are mainly influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life

Thanks in part to this bunker mentality, American Christianity has become what Hunter calls a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future.

believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation.

The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities,

Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.

“This is a crisis, and not simply a political crisis, but a moral one,”

“The first thing is to make sure we understand these are not issues, these are persons. These children are made in the image of God, and we ought to respond to them with compassion, not with fear.”

“As a Christian organization, we feel like we have no choice — we are clearly called by Scripture to respond to all children in need,”

why are young Icelanders so different from much of the rest of the world

"Secularization [in Iceland] has occurred very quickly, especially among younger people," said Bjarni Jonsson, the managing director of the Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association, an atheist nongovernmental organization. "With increased education and broad-mindedness, change can occur quickly."

 about 40 percent of the country's younger generation still consider themselves Christian -- but none of them believe that God created the Earth. "Theories of science are broadly accepted among both young and old. That does not necessarily affect people’s faith in God," she said.

the study has been widely discussed by Icelandic priests on Facebook. "As far as I have seen they are [neither] surprised nor [shocked by] the results. They see no necessary opposition between believing in God and accepting scientific theories on creation of the world."

40 percent of Icelanders thought that science and religion should both be used to analyze existential questions.

Most experts, however, would agree that the survey also indicates that the Evangelical Lutheran Church's influence is a rapidly diminishing in Iceland.

Mr. Trump’s populism, a combination of economic nationalism that favors protectionism and a strongman approach to foreign countries that is also noninterventionist, defies almost everything Republicans in Washington have stood for

While Republican business leaders and their lobbying groups push for free trade, Mr. Trump has rallied thousands by promising to slap 35 percent tariffs on imported goods made by American companies that move factories abroad.

Exit polls from the New Hampshire primary, which Mr. Trump won decisively, showed 65 percent of Republicans supported his call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Mr. Trump’s call to deport more than 11 million undocumented people in the country, denounced as impossible and inhumane, has substantial support. One in four voters in a New York Times poll last year said illegal immigrants should be required to leave the country.

Keith Hutto, a plumbing contractor who attended the rally with Mr. Moody, blamed George W. Bush for the housing bust and financial crisis that occurred during his second term. “My business in 2006, halfway through, it got bad, Mr. Hutto said. “We kept the doors open and all, but right into 2008 and even into 2010, it was tough.”

Mr. Trump led Mr. Cruz by 20 percentage points among evangelical voters, whose support Mr. Cruz rallied to win the Iowa caucuses this month.

The poll showed Mr. Trump losing supporters after the debate on Saturday, with 40 percent supporting him before and 31 percent afterward.

Another pollster, David Woodard of Clemson University, said his survey of Republicans showed Mr. Trump’s support holding steady after the debate.

the Republican base was angry about sending politicians with impeccable conservative credentials to Washington, but seeing nothing change there.

The 2005 Pew typology also suggested a useful way of looking at that coalition as a whole — not as a simple establishment-plus-base pyramid, but as a complicated partnership among business-friendly conservatives, social conservatives and a more inchoate populist cohort, for whom liberalism seems like an enemy but “big government” is not necessarily a dirty word.

In this alliance, most observers of the Republican Party would agree, the business-friendly conservatives (Pew’s Enterprisers) are clearly the senior partners, religious conservatives are the junior partners and the pro-government populists get deficit-funded spending in boom times and table scraps when things get tight.

In 2016, though, something new is happening. A united front isn’t being forged; instead, we have both a religious conservative and a populist insurgency, the former led by Ted Cruz and the latter by that most unlikely populist, Mr. Trump.

In theory this should keep the coalition’s weaker partners divided. But Trump is such a phenomenon that he’s winning enough Enterprisers and enough evangelicals to break out of the Buchananite box, while Cruz has a level of funding and organization that no religious conservative candidate has enjoyed before.

now that we see the real fault lines clearly, it’s also clear how the whole thing could be shattered.

Francis' comments came hours after he concluded a visit to Mexico, where he prayed at the border for people who died trying to reach the U.S. While speaking to reporters on the papal plane, he was asked what he thought of Trump's campaign pledge to build a wall along the entire length of the border and expel millions of people in the U.S. illegally.

"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian," he said. While Francis said he would "give the benefit of the doubt" because he had not heard Trump's border plans independently, he added, "I say only that this man is not a Christian if he has said things like that."

Immigration is among the most contentious issues in American politics. Republicans have moved toward hardline positions that emphasize law enforcement and border security, blocking comprehensive legislation in 2013 that would have included a path to citizenship for many of the 11 million people in the U.S. illegally.

Trump also raised the prospect of the Islamic State extremist group attacking the Vatican, saying that if that happened, "the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened."

Francis, the first pope from Latin America, urged Congress during his visit to Washington last year to respond to immigrants "in a way which is always humane, just and fraternal." He irked Republicans on the same trip with his forceful call for international action to address climate change.

Trump, a Presbyterian and the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, responded within minutes. "For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful," he said at a campaign stop in South Carolina, which holds a key primary on Saturday. "I am proud to be a Christian, and as president I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened."

Hispanics, an increasingly large voting bloc in U.S. presidential elections, have flocked to Democrats in recent years. President Barack Obama won more than 70 percent in the 2012 election, leading some Republican leaders to conclude the party must increase its appeal to them.

However, the current GOP presidential primary has been dominated by increasingly tough rhetoric. Trump has insisted that Mexico will pay for his proposed border wall and has said some Mexicans entering the U.S. illegally are murderers and rapists.

While Trump's words have been among the most inflammatory, some of his rivals have staked out similar enforcement positions. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson are among those who have explicitly called for construction of a wall.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the few GOP candidates proposing a path to legal status for people already in the U.S. illegally, said Thursday he supports "walls and fencing where it's appropriate." Bush said that while he gets his guidance "as a Catholic" from the pope, he doesn't take his cues from Francis on "economic or environmental policy."

Marco Rubio, another Catholic seeking the GOP nomination, said that Vatican City has a right to control its borders and so does the United States. Rubio said he has "tremendous respect and admiration" for the pope, but he added, "There's no nation on Earth that's more compassionate on immigration than we are."

Cruz said he was steering clear of the dispute. "That's between Donald and the pope," he said. "I'm not going to get in the middle of them." Ohio Gov. John Kasich, on the other hand, said he was staunchly "pro-Pope."

The long-distance exchange between the pope and Trump came two days before the voting in South Carolina, a state where 78 percent of adults identify as Christian, according to the Pew Research Center's 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study. Of that group, 35 percent identify as evangelical and 10 percent as Catholic, the survey found.

It's unclear what impact, if any, the pope's rhetoric will have, here or in other states. An October poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that most Americans had no strong opinion on the pope's approach to immigration issues, though he was overall viewed favorably.