Marilynne Robinson: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we take your Iowa, which presumably you know quite well, when I was younger, I had the impression of it as a Democratic Party–leaning, highly educated, fairly tolerant, liberal, Protestant state overall with, obviously, a lot of diversity. Today, it seems to be a state that, say, Donald Trump is going to win quite easily electorally, assuming Trump is running. How did that change? And why did the former philosophies held in Iowa not satisfy people? We’re talking about something that has happened over a brief period of time, basically during the governorship of this Kim Reynolds. I think that Trumpism is a fad that suddenly everybody’s doing the same thing, using the same language, and so on. I’m very grieved by the change in the political climate in Iowa because I admired its generosity and civility and so on, and I hope that this is some weird temporary fluctuation because the basic decency and enlightenment of Iowa was so well established over such a long time, it’s hard to believe that this is a permanent conversion. Some thinkers, I think especially on the conservative right, have argued that as America becomes more pluralistic — ethnically and religiously pluralistic — that that, on net, marginalizes the influence of religion. That it’s easier for society to be fairly religious when there’s mostly one or maybe two religions in question, but when you have people from all over the world with a variety of religions or just very different understandings of Christianity, there’s a least-common-denominator effect, where most of us become more secular. Do you think that’s true?…

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