Transcript: The Religious Left Is a Leader in the ICE Resistance

This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 2 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by David Buckley. He’s a professor at the University of Louisville and a political scientist who studies comparative politics, with a particular expertise in religion and politics. Today, we’re going to talk about the role religion and religious groups are playing in the Trump presidency—Trump 2.0. David, thanks for joining me.

David Buckley: Great to be here, Perry. Thanks.

Bacon: So I’m going to go through different religious groups. I think that might be helpful as a way to think about this—to think [about] different groups in the U.S. and how they’re playing a role. So I want to start with Protestants who are for Trump.

The old story was basically white evangelicals were a big part of the Republican Party and they were pushing kind of pro-life and maybe anti-LGBT policies along with the Republican politicians. But I think things have changed now. So, like, Protestants who are on Trump’s side—what are they doing right now?

Buckley: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that if you just look at the kind of demographic data at a top-line level, right? White Christians in general are a huge part of Trump’s core constituency, right? That is predominantly white evangelicals, right? But it’s also actually white mainline Protestants and disproportionately white Catholics, right?

Bacon: We’re coming to Catholics in a minute, but yeah, go ahead.

Buckley: Buckley: Yeah. So at a basic level, saying that white Christians make up a core of Trump’s political constituency is true.

That has maybe started to change—is that the first-term, kind of rationale was that this was essentially a bargain being made by sort of social conservatives in exchange for justices who would make progress on Roe, for a president who they weren’t personally enthusiastic about, but who they went along with because they were making a kind of calculated judgment rooted in their social conservatism.

In the second term, it’s harder to see any of that hesitancy playing out, right? These are not reluctant social conservatives. These are, in fact, some of the kind of fullest-throated supporters of the president. And if anything, I think that there’s important evidence emerging from political science and sociology that it’s as much the personal loyalty to the president that’s driving the support as any kind of theological motivation—or that the line between the two is almost impossible to distinguish. That, on a certain level, the president has become a kind of theological figure, almost, for a lot of these reasons.

Bacon: What are the Protestant right’s policy priorities? Because, as you said, Roe has been overturned. So that was the old priority—Roe—and to some extent, gay marriage is legal and probably going to stay that way. So what are the policy priorities of today’s Protestant Christian?

Buckley: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think, again, you have the old social conservatives who are still out there, right? Who are pushing “frontier issues,” maybe related to abortion in the states, right? Related to same-sex marriage and conscience exemptions. Older issues related to religion and education, for instance—which are not new at all in American democracy but have really flared up again in the second term—including legal questions related to the funding of religious charter schools.

And questions of kind of “curricular reform,” quote-unquote, and how religion fits into the curriculum of American public schools or materials that are made available in American public schools. So you might think of those as just traditional sort of sexuality- and gender-based culture wars—version 2.0.

Bacon: This is kind of issue… like the school vouchers has been going on a long time.

Buckley: Yeah, exactly right. So there’s nothing particularly new there, although it’s a new environment that it’s playing out in. But I think that what has bubbled up in this term is also the kind of fusion of kind of Trumpist Christianity into areas of the second Trump term that we might not have traditionally associated with conservative Christians.

What do I mean by that? For instance: enthusiastic conservative Christian endorsement for dismantling of elements of foreign assistance and attacks on U.S. foreign aid as being “woke” or enmeshed in DEI politics, right?

That wasn’t necessarily on the bingo card for most folks who studied conservative Christian politics. Trump’s most enthusiastic Christian supporters have really become also enthusiastic endorsers of the kind of “war on woke,” the turn against DEI policy, [and] the turn against elite universities, right?

Those sorts of issues that we associate with this side of the Trump term—I think are newer. You could find analogs for these things going back, but I think that those are “new frontiers” that we didn’t see as much of in the first term.

Bacon: Are those issues they’re motivated by, or they’re just joining? Because those issues that the coalition is motivated [by]—are they driving them, or are they just going along?

Buckley: Yeah, I think this is the million-dollar question. There’s a lot of evidence from scholars like Michele Margolis and David Campbell and others that, frequently these days, we might think of religion as changing politics, right? When we study these things, religion changes politics. But that, actually, politics has changed religion and people’s religious, sort of, commitments in the U.S. as much as the other way around.

And so, in this case, the implication of that might be that the reason that these issues have come to rally the faithful isn’t because there’s a kind of preexisting theological commitment here; it’s because the president has told them to. It’s the political cues, essentially, setting the religious agenda.

Now, there’s certain theological foundations that have maybe made some of those individuals in those communities more susceptible to Trumpist signaling. There’s traditions of, kind of, apocalypticism, for instance. My colleague Paul Djupe talks a lot about this—and his colleagues and co-authors—and how that’s fusing with a kind of Trumpist anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism. There’s raw material there theologically, but I think that the president is the driver of that, and his religious supporters are responding to his cues.

Bacon: In an old world, there was Jerry Falwell; there was Pat Robertson. There were people whose names I remember who were prominent Protestants involved in politics. I guess Paula White is someone I can name, but do we have the same kind of cohort of pastors around—like the way we did with George W. Bush? Is there a cohort of pastors Trump is around, and who is that? And if so, what does the group look like, demographically and socially?

Buckley: Sure. You certainly could point to folks who are on kind of advisory councils, right? So there’s a Religious Liberty Commission in this term that you could point to. In the first term, there was especially a network tied to his campaign’s evangelical advisory board from the first campaign that then transitioned into an informal advisory role. And so those types of folks are around.

I think that folks who study their backgrounds—there would be diverse individuals, including Catholic bishops, for instance, involved in the Religious Liberty Commission—but there’s probably a disproportionate representation from leaders from the more kind of Pentecostal wing of American Protestantism among those folks, including somebody like Paula White, who’s probably the most prominent national-level representative of that.

But I do think it’s fair to say that this generation of kind of a conservative Christian organizing is a little bit less institutionalized than the kind of old-line religious right organizations, right? So there are newer organizations; there are organizations out there that are communicating regularly.

But to me, it seems like a little bit of a less coherent organizational landscape than the kind of generation maybe 20 or 25 years ago, when you had the Family Research Council—or a little bit before that, when you had the Moral Majority and Concerned Women for America. And these are pretty clear-cut national, nationally organized focal points. To me, it’s a little bit of a more diffuse landscape right now in terms of the religious leadership.

Bacon: You’re not quite saying this, but I want to drill down. Are you saying that in the old world, maybe that the religious leaders had a policy agenda that they pushed on the politicians—and maybe today the politicians have an agenda and the religious leaders are adopting it because... and it’s not clear that there’s a Christian conservative policy that’s separate from the Trump agenda?

Buckley: Yeah, I think that’s a fair enough way to capture the change in the model, right? The old sort of model would’ve been that the Christian right was essentially an interest group from within the Republican coalition, right? That tried to do what it could to push its priorities onto the party that best matched those priorities, right?

And actually, often felt like it was losing those debates even inside the party, right? Often felt like it was taken advantage of or not really appreciated, blah, blah, blah. Exogenous preferences—preferences that stood on their own. I’m not as clear that is systematically the case right now.

Bacon: Are you following that Don Lemon, the journalist, got arrested today? He was recording at a church in Minneapolis. That church was conservative—the pastor was conservative. What’s the story there?

Buckley: I’ll be perfectly honest that I don’t know the details of the church and the religious leadership involved. I believe the idea was that someone in religious leadership at the church—maybe not the main pastor—was somehow involved in immigration enforcement in a day job. But I don’t know the details on that.

Bacon: Talk about Protestant opposition to Trump. I think that is part of the story in Minneapolis—where the Black Church is involved—but talk about where we’re seeing opposition to Trump among Protestants?

Buckley: Yeah, I would say so. Most visibly in Minneapolis—it’s not been hard to find clergy, actually, in the—in the protest coverage and in the leadership of protest networks. It’s not an accident, actually. Minneapolis has a very active, faith-based community organizing sector that kind of predates all of this.

And the infrastructure of that sector does have a heavily Protestant foundation—not only, but heavily—and it’s in denominations that we would typically associate with Mainline Protestantism as scholars, which we would usually contrast with evangelicalism as a tradition.

Bacon: Presbyterian, Episcopalian, what are we talking about?

Buckley: Episcopalians, United Methodist Church. Maybe Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—yeah, those—PC USA, Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., United Church of Christ. Sorry if I’m forgetting anyone off the top of my head. But those are the kinds of denominations that—that we’re talking about.

And those clergy have a long tradition of activism in especially American urban environments, going at least back to the American civil rights—to the sort of sixties civil rights movement—and the kind of “social gospel,” even, of the first half of the 20th century. So the fact that those denominations and their leadership would be highly critical of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement is not surprising. And it builds on a kind of long tradition of grassroots advocacy coming out of those denominations.

There’s also certainly been some “Never Trump” evangelicals—to use the term that sometimes gets tossed around—that goes back all the way to the first term. Usually, these were disproportionately relatively elite and university-tied in their affiliations, who, for various reasons, came to see the Trumpist turn within the Republican Party as actually a kind of deeply anti-conservative turn. And so they came to oppose it. I think people like David French would be in that kind of category, and Russell Moore at Christianity Today would probably fit within that kind of category of people who had rich “skin in the game” as conservative Christian leaders in an earlier stage of American politics, but who broke with the Trump administration.

I honestly don’t know the extent to which leaders from that wing of American evangelicalism have been involved in the—in the grassroots protests. I know they’ve said things quite at—on—in public that have been quite critical of what’s happened recently. I’m not on the ground, though, and I’m not positioned to know whether evangelical communities who would be in that kind of “Never Trump” category have actually been in the streets and been taking collective action in this immediate period.

Bacon: What is the rhetoric of the sort of Protestant, religious anti-Trump? How does sound different than like Democratic politicians?

Buckley: You mean the mainline Protestant?

Bacon: Yes. The mainline Protestant.

Buckley: Yeah, sure. I think the kind of theological tradition most of these folks are operating out of is a sort of descendant of that “social gospel” tradition coming out of the first half of the 20th century—one that is very comfortable speaking the language of sin, which might be different from your typical Democratic politician, for example.

But it locates sin not in individual decisions, but in social structures, right? And so in this case, the location of sin is not the undocumented migrant who has crossed borders. The location of sin, for instance, is the economic structures of global capital that have pushed these individuals into making almost choiceless choices, right? Like [to] protect their families.

So I think that language of sin—but locating the language of sin within economic structures and social structures that marginalize communities and enrich minorities and [the] capitalist system—I think that kind of language of sin and critique would be different from what you would get from most Democrats anyway.

Bacon: I haven’t looked at the Pew data lately, but I think, in general, we’re getting to the point where the Democratic Party is about half-split between, let’s call it, Christians and the number of people who are, like, atheists or agnostic or “nones.” Those numbers are getting into where they—those numbers are [converging], where they might be close to 50-50.

I’m not including other faiths, obviously, but those numbers are converging. But I don’t have a sense yet that there’s a real—even though believing in Christianity and not are very different beliefs—I don’t get a sense that the party is divided on religion right now. And it seems like the non-religious can work with religious leaders pretty well. That’s my impression, but I’m just curious if you’re seeing signs of that divide yet?

Buckley: Yeah, I think that it’s true that, in this immediate moment, migration is one of those issues that helps the Democratic Party talk about religion, because I think it’s an issue that presents [an] obvious, common moral vocabulary for both the, kind of, secular wing of the party and the religious wing of the party—which is not just Christian, by the way.

And so a lot of those commitments would be deeply resonant with Jewish communities, with Muslim communities, with various communities of non-Abrahamic religions, right? And so I think that this policy issue helps that kind of—those kind of—coalitions to activate. The question is when we elevate beyond this particular policy issue to a broader, kind of, hypothetical primary campaign between hypothetical candidates for the presidency in a couple of years.

In that environment, when we’re talking about the whole package of the policy vision, does a kind of explicitly religious vision help more than it hurts in a primary environment? I think that’s still an open question. I think that’s where—yeah, that’s where...

Bacon: Buttigieg is very openly religious. Some of the other candidates probably are not. I think Wes Moore is—although a lot of the candidates that are maybe running...

Buckley: A lot of them. Yeah. A lot of them have actually started to position themselves in a pretty clever way. Yeah, Shapiro’s new book—and Beshear here in Kentucky. All the folks that you just mentioned actually have their own kind of foundation laid on those issues.

So it’ll be interesting to see how that develops. I don’t think that, for instance, you won’t have an openly, kind of, anti-clerical presidential candidate who, like, makes that the foundation of their campaign; that doesn’t—that doesn’t work in the American environment. But the question is: would there be more subtle ways in which a strong religious framing of the campaign would not help in the primary environment?

Bacon: Let’s talk about Catholics. We have a new Pope; let’s talk about the Catholic opposition to Trump. What does that look like? It looks like that’s playing out in Minneapolis, too. Talk about what the character of that is.

Buckley: Sure. Listeners may be aware that the Pope has himself commented on being troubled by what he’s seeing related to immigration enforcement in the country right now, especially the “dehumanization” of immigrant communities.

And the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops—which represents as a whole group, right, all of the Catholic bishops in the United States—at its most recent, kind of, national meeting back in November, issued a statement that was substantially concerned about the directions of migration policy. So, as a body, this group has chosen to speak in a unique way on this issue. And they would tell you that the last time they issued that type of statement, I believe, was during the Affordable Care Act controversies over the contraception mandate—which obviously would come down on the kind of conservative end of the spectrum, right?

So it’s different for them to be speaking on this kind of an issue. It’s clear that the migration issue touches a powerful moral nerve tied to not just the current Pope, but Pope Francis, who spoke out consistently about the need to minister to migrants and refugees. And there is also, if we’re being honest, a practical necessity for the Catholic Church to minister to migrants because, for a long time in the United States, the Catholic Church has been an “immigrant church.” And this goes back to the Irish, and it goes back to the Germans and then the Italians and the Poles, and now the Vietnamese and Latinos and et cetera, et cetera.

So there is just a very practical need for Catholic leaders to minister to their flocks that makes this issue different, I think. And they also see it on the front lines—not just at a high-level, kind of, abstract theology, but also the practical ministry that Catholic Charities all around this country, especially along the border and in other cities with large immigrant populations [perform]. The practical work of ministering to these communities is carried out in our cities and in our border areas, in not only, but in large part, by religious charity. Then a lot of those are Catholic Charities affiliates in our communities.

Bacon: Most Latinos in the U.S. are Catholic still—is that correct? The Protestant number is growing...

Buckley: I think that “most” is still accurate. That number is decreasing, right? So you’re seeing a growth in both, actually, evangelical Protestantism, but also the religiously unaffiliated, which is a real thing that’s growing in America’s kind of non-white communities in general. But yeah, fairly certain that “most” is still an accurate number.

Bacon: And then talk to me about Catholic support for what Trump’s doing. Are there Catholic leaders who are conservative on immigration too? Is this an issue?

Buckley: So there are certainly lay Catholic leaders who are conservative on immigration. Okay? There’s one who’s living in the—observe—in the Vice President’s residence right now, for instance. And you could point to other leaders within the administration who are quite comfortable, actually, making explicitly moral arguments in favor of the need to enforce laws and have order and that sort of thing.

So on the lay side, there’s no doubt about it that—that exists. And a number of those leaders—most prominently the Vice President—have at times been quite comfortable, actually, about even pushing back on religious leadership, right? Including criticizing statements that are coming from Catholic bishops either as being ill-informed or out of their area of expertise, or something like that.

In terms of full-throated endorsement, particularly on the immigration issue, from within the hierarchy, there haven’t been as full-throated endorsements, I would say. What you’ve seen from some of the bishops who we might think of as more conservative in recent weeks has been—have been—statements that have pointed out the importance of collaboration and cooperation in our relationships with security officials, and the need to maintain order and protest with respect and how we need to not provoke further dissent and division. That kind of framing.

But that’s not exactly coming out and openly saying protesters are terrorists who are targeting our police, right? You haven’t seen that from official, kind of, bishops at the highest levels.

Bacon: Is Trump pushing other policies? Like, he’s not talked about abortion a lot during the administration. They’ve not done a ton of abortion policy. Are there issues where conservative Catholics are excited by his policy vision, and what might those be?

Buckley: That’s a good question. There certainly was some disappointment, for instance, when at the president’s urging, the language about abortion was changed in the Republican party platform, right? The pro-life movement noticed that. And I do think that there is a certain sense of maybe uncertainty about what the next frontier on the national level is for that movement, right?

So, in other words, what do we really want the administration to do on the national front? There are steps that you can take—globally, the Mexico City Policy, for instance, and relatively small-ball asks—but not on the level of “overturn Roe,” right? I don’t personally think that the Obergefell decision poses the same salient target to Catholic leaders—at least not official, kind of, Catholic leaders in this country. I think that, for the most part, they’ve reconciled themselves to that outcome.

I think that, to be perfectly honest, the questions of trans issues and gender and sexuality and kind of “gender ideology”—that yes, that kind of framing is probably the most substantive kind of policy area that does have some ties to theological foundation within the Catholic tradition that those folks can point to and can say that, yeah, this is actually something that—that we’re on pretty firm foundation within and where this administration is delivering for us.

Bacon: What’s the Pope’s position on transgender rights, or “transgenderism,” or lack of a better term here—transgender people?

Buckley: I’ll be perfectly honest that I don’t know if Leo has commented publicly on that. Yeah, so I don’t want to speak out of turn. Pope Francis was certainly someone who was always pushing the church to encounter people on the “margins”—of what he called the margins of society. And that included, in his ministry, encountering people who were in trans communities, which he personally did many times throughout his pontificate.

But that didn’t accompany [a] sort of fundamental change in Catholic, sort of, doctrine on issues of gender and sexuality. And I think that it’s not something that I would expect to see out of Pope Leo, based on the initial signals that we’ve seen from him.

Bacon: I hate to have a sort of “other faith group,” because that encompasses a lot, but that’s what I want to do here in terms of: is there something—anything worth noting—about other non-Christian faiths’ role in supporting Trump?

Buckley: It’s a fair question. I think that you can certainly find evidence, for instance, of some expanded support from elements of the American Jewish community for the Trump administration—especially tied to Orthodoxy within the American Jewish community. Not all Orthodox Jews, for sure, but if you look at survey data, there’s a pretty clear partisan divide between American Jews who identify as Orthodox and other American Jews. And that goes back to the first term. It’s not a surprise, and we still continue to see that in this term.

In terms of the American Muslim community—you, in the last election, there’s pretty, I think, strong evidence that... who knows why, but I suspect that it’s because of the Biden administration’s approach to the—to the war in Gaza and Israel’s role in that, and our role in that as a country. That you saw, for instance, voter turnout decrease in some of the more Muslim-heavy parts of the country, probably most famously in and around Dearborn. So that’s—but that’s different than full-throated support for Trumpism. And I would actually suspect that—I haven’t seen, it’s tricky to survey small religious minorities—but I would expect that we would see a kind of cooling of support in the American Muslim community even since the election.

Sort of other parts of the American religious landscape that are interesting to maybe think about... the other one that is interesting is the American Mormon community, actually, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Bacon: All I really follow is, like, Mike Lee used to be against Trump and now has become very pro-Trump. And I think Utah’s election results—Trump did much better in 2024 than 2016.

Buckley: Yeah, although that’s because of the nature of the ballot and who wasn’t on the ballot.

Bacon: Who was on the ballot in 2016?

Buckley: Evan McMullin in 2016, right? Yeah. He wins a—I forget, I don’t remember off the top of my head—but he wins a large, real number. Large percentage. A real number. Yeah. He gets a real number. And that’s in large part because of Mormon support, and that’s gone. So Trump’s number does go up, but it doesn’t go up to where you would expect a kind of normal Republican to be.

And then there is evidence that the Mormon—or that the Latter-day Saints community—is still less, I don’t know what to say, less “Trumpified” than the rest of white Christianity. Now, I don’t know what that looks like long-term, but it seems to be one sector that has not become as fully Trumpified as other portions of American Christianity have.

Bacon: Let me drill down and finish here on Minneapolis, as we’re seeing this. It looks to me like there’s a lot of activism that happened in Minneapolis. I’m thinking about the fact that we have this growing religiously unaffiliated population in the country. And what is—and I’m trying to figure out—what does that mean for religion and politics, ultimately? How is the religiously unaffiliated community changing politics?

Buckley: Sure. Yeah, again, it’s a good question. This is probably the most important, like, big-picture structural change in religion and U.S. politics of the last 25 years at least.

So for listeners who might not be familiar, the “nones”—those who will say that they don’t have a religious affiliation—are now on their way to being upwards of a third of Americans, almost. And it’s true that there’s some evidence that’s leveled off, maybe just short of a third, but still, that’s an increase of manyfold from just a few decades ago.

But I think you’re right that it’s not going to take religion off the American political agenda, in part because there’s still a strong kind of floor of religiosity in American society. So maybe the ceiling of that religious influence has come down a bit, but the floor is still well above, like, secularized societies in Western Europe, for example. I just don’t think we’re going down that road.

And because that floor is still pretty robust, there’s a—there’s a foundation in place for public engagement, and it’s not all about conservative Christianity, right? It’s also going to be, especially in America’s cities, tied to the longstanding urban infrastructure of American religion. I said that the activism in Minneapolis doesn’t come out of nowhere. In part, it’s building on a tradition of what’s called “faith-based community organizing”—not just in Minneapolis, but in a lot of American cities.

Faith-based community organizing networks tend to focus heavily on issues of local concern, right? So issues related to community relationships with the department of public safety in a city, right? Or concerns about getting across crosswalks in a safe way or having mental health access for impoverished community members, right? Bread-and-butter stuff of local urban politics. And getting churches and mosques and synagogues and temples to serve as the infrastructure for bringing those public priorities to local elected officials—mayors, city councils, that sort of thing.

Faith-based community organizing networks exist in most American major cities and even some smaller ones. And the one in Minneapolis—ISAIAH—was actually known, I think, for being quite active well in advance of this. That unique role in a more kind of localized religious politics, I think, is what we’re seeing still have an important place in American democracy—in part also because this is a time where, especially in America’s urban areas, local civic institutions are continuing to be hollowed out and weakened overall.

We don’t have the same kinds of urban community associations, especially in marginalized communities, including communities of color, that maybe we did 30 or 50 years ago. And the churches and the mosques and the synagogues are one thing that still has some space. I know right here in Louisville, for instance—during the Breonna Taylor protests several years ago—churches downtown in Louisville were involved in supporting protesters, providing [a] place for rest, for safe recovery, and that sort of thing.

And I think that same sort of thing is going on in Minneapolis. And that role—sometimes under the radar of national politics—it’s always been there. But now it’s very visible all of a sudden, again, because of the way that immigration enforcement actions are targeting American cities at the grassroots, at the margins, which is where these networks have always been strongest.

Bacon: Last question. Do we think that—when I think about protest movements, I’m thinking about Dr. King—do we think that pastors, religious leaders, have moral authority still? In a country that’s becoming less religious, in a country [in] which people don’t believe anyone—numbers about trust in authority, period. Do we have a civil society? What—how do we rise above partisanship? Are there—is there anybody who people listen to for a moral voice?

I saw Senator Warnock went to Minneapolis and he talked about, “This is a moral moment.” I respect him and I think he has authority. But my father was a pastor. I respect religious authorities in a certain way, but he’s a Democratic politician. So I’m guessing a lot of people heard him in that role, because he’s obviously a Democratic politician. So do we think that religious leaders have—the Pope probably does—but do we think that people care what religious leaders think beyond the party hats, whatever party hat you wear?

Buckley: Yeah. So I would leave you with two points on this. The first is that there is evidence that religious leader—moral authority—has become caught up in partisanship in the United States. Support, for instance, for religious leaders speaking out in politics is generally stronger among Republicans than among Democrats.

And while there are some racial differences there, the partisan bit is very powerful. And there’s actually evidence that Americans have become less religiously affiliated over time because they’re reacting negatively to conservative Christian cues in politics. So that’s real.

The other point, though, that I would remind everybody is that if moral authority can be weakened, right, that means that it’s dynamic and it can also be rebuilt. And I actually think that this is a really important frontier of research right now. It’s some work that I’m doing—and colleagues are too—this question of: is it possible to rebuild the moral authority for religious leaders in American communities if Americans see those leaders as engaging in “costly action” on behalf of the common good and their own moral priorities?

And I think that’s a very interesting and, right now, open research question—and one that—that I don’t know the answer to. But I do think that there’s reason to think [that] if the decisions of certain religious leaders can damage moral authority, there’s reason to think that the decisions of other religious leaders could rebuild that authority, although I think it’s unlikely to happen overnight.

Bacon: Good place to end on. David, great to see you. Great conversation. Thank you, and thanks for joining us.

Buckley: Thanks so much, Perry. And thanks, everybody, for being here.