Matt Yglesias: evaluation

Transcript context

…Not make them, but just root for it. Talk up religion. Look, if you told me, for mysterious reasons, church attendance is going to start going back up again over the next 30, 40 years, I would consider that to be a very optimistic forecast for America. I think good secondary things would follow from that. I think community institutions are important, and in a practical sense, religious ones are what seems to really work for people. When I hear people say, “Oh this new woke anti-racism on the left — that’s like a new religion.” I don’t know that that’s 100 percent accurate. I think there’s something to that, and there’s also ways in which it’s not true. But if it was really literally true — this is a new religion where people are going to get together once a week, and they’re going to know each other, and they’re going to have a higher value system that motivates them, and they’re going to make connections — that would be really good. Bad things have happened by religious people or under religious causes, but generally speaking, it’s good when people go to church. If you’re rooting for a more religious America, does that mean, in a sense, you’re rooting for a more right-wing America? These are correlated, right? Causality may be tricky, but I suspect there is some.…

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