Aristotle tells us we are political animals, and Sasse agrees. But today our politics are too national and partisan and insufficiently local and cooperative.

Sasse discussed this problem at length in his 2018 book Them. Now he is dying and is on a media tour that put him recently on 60 Minutes, where he made the same point. When host Scott Pelley asked Sasse why he is a Republican, Sasse responded that the party of Lincoln and Reagan was the best at combatting the idea that “Washington is our fundamental political community.”

Sasse explained: “I think your fundamental political community is your neighborhood, and your city hall and may be even your state legislature. And right now, we are sacrificing a lot of our national politics to weird folks who want their main community to be their political tribe at a federal level, and that should be like the ninth thing, or the 15th thing you care about, not the first or second thing.”

Sasse brushed off the idea that our bad politics are fracturing our culture, arguing that the causal arrow pointed in the other direction: “I don’t really think our current politics are driving what’s happening. I think it’s mostly an echo of what’s happening. I think we have really thin, shallow community right now. And unless people know the thickness of their local community, it’s hard to make sense of what national politics are for. I think our national political dysfunction is an echo of larger problems.”

Later, speaking of the zeal with which some lawmakers cling to their jobs, Sasse said: “We got a lot of people who serve in government who really do think the highest and greatest thing you can ever do is have the title senator or congressman. Bulls**t. The best thing you can do is be called Dad or Mom, lover, neighbor, friend.”

Sasse is correct that national partisan politics take up too much of our attention. But I want to make the point a bit broader than Sasse did in this interview:

Our problem is not simply caring too much about Trump and Kamala and Congress. Our problem is caring too much about activism, government, policy, and elections in general. Activism isn’t bad in itself, but activism is often rivalrous with community: The more time you spend trying to change the world, the less time you spend living and working among your neighbors.

Ryan Streeter reported on this a few years back at AEI:

“Active members of traditional civic organizations such as religious and volunteer groups” and “members of other civic organizations, such as athletic teams, hobby groups, or school-based organizations” are less lonely than the average American. “By contrast, active members of political organizations have an average loneliness score two points higher than the national average. … In addition, the survey finds that socially active yet lonely — yes, it is possible to be both — young adults ages 18–35 are seven times more likely to volunteer in politics. …”

Politics is making us lonely, and loneliness is making us more politically partisan.

This is true for the Left and Right, red and blue. The fiercest supporters of Trump were those most likely to say they felt like strangers in their own land. Trump’s base in the 2016 GOP primaries were the disaffected and alienated.

But in general, the problem is more acute on the Left: Progressive columnists have reported that opposing Trump replaced serving the community:

The more alone and disconnected we get, the more likely we are to engage in radical activism.

In 2023, sociologist Miloš Broćić published a rigorous paper in the American Journal of Sociology, titled “Alienation and Activism.” One key finding: “Alienation in the forms of meaninglessness and social isolation predicts participating in both radical and reactionary movements.”

Broćić studied the attitudes of teenagers and found that those who felt most “alone and misunderstood” and who found life “meaningless” were more likely to spend their time protesting. For instance: “Meaninglessness and social isolation were the strongest predictors for Occupy Wall Street.”

We need less occupying Wall Street, and more caring about Main Street.

Allen’s apparent manifesto was eerily lucid, and to the extent he was divorced from reality, it was exactly as divorced as the standard NPR-listening No Kings protester is divorced from reality: calling Trump a racist, a pedophile, and a traitor, and accusing the administration of starving children.

For decent people who detest political violence, this creates a very uncomfortable situation. A democracy needs and deserves robust political debate, but when the center-leftism of Bluesky and Reddit becomes a gateway to murder plots, it’s hard to hold onto the “let it rip” free-speech absolutism that makes America exceptional.

“Civility” is a standard request in these times, and a reasonable one: We don’t want to curb political opinions, we just want to curb how they are expressed. This is good and true. We should disagree with respect and keep debates substantive rather than personal.

But this argument doesn’t apply you believe the guy on the other side rapes little girls. You shouldn’t be civil to a rapist or a pedophile. Likewise, Allen’s preferred columnists and social media commentators will also tell you Trump is a fascist who will cancel all future elections. Facing fascism and the literal end of democracy, it’s hard to uphold liberal pluralistic pieties such as free and respectful debate.

So “civility” is an unconvincing argument given the nature of the Left’s charges.

The problem isn’t that the liberals are uncivil. It’s that liberals are too convinced that they are correct. This is a problem that predates the Trump era: There is not enough epistemic humility on the left half of American political discourse. I’m not saying the Right has adequate humility either, but hubris (and, subsequently, political violence) seems concentrated on the progressive side.

The Obama years were full of this sort of certainty: Debates are for the past, back before we were all so enlightened and smart. We now can solve the problems.

During the Biden years, health experts were perfectly happy to spread noble lies and lean on Big Tech to shut down debates because they knew what was right. Ironically, “we believe in science” became a shorthand for “we should stop questioning things.”

This certainty was obviously misplaced. Many of Obama’s policies were awful trainwrecks. During COVID-19, the experts were wrong about the nature of the spread, the efficacy of masks, and the ability of the vaccine to prevent infection. Shutting down debate made it harder for us to get closer to the truth.

One argument for free speech and against using violence to achieve our aims is that we may be wrong. If you silence dissent, then it’s harder to learn your errors. If you kill a guy you thought was Hitler, but he was really just Captain Queeg, then you cannot reverse the horrible course of events you have initiated.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS TURNED ON ISRAEL

This applies to other illiberal behavior, such as lying. If you lie because you know you are right, you make it harder for others to know if maybe you are wrong.

We need a lot of things right now. One of them is a lot more intellectual humility.

Colorado has been called to the principal’s office yet again.

The Democrats in charge just can’t stop unconstitutional religious discrimination.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear the case of St. Mary, a suburban Catholic parish, which has been excluded from the state’s pre-K program. St. Mary’s sin: holding fast to Catholic teaching.

Nobody who has followed the news is surprised that Colorado is doing this, and nobody will be surprised if Colorado loses at the high court, as it has done many times before.

Colorado lost at the Supreme Court when it tried, twice, to compel a cakemaker to violate his conscience. Colorado lost at the Supreme Court when it tried to force therapists to practice gender ideology.

What’s going on in Colorado?

The root problem is Colorado Democrats’ near-religious dedication to an extreme separation of church and state. This separation fundamentalism is not confined to Colorado but has achieved official status at the state level there.

They believe that anything touched by the state becomes a no-religion zone. Of course, they also constantly expand the reach of the state, thus constantly narrowing where religion is allowed.

Taken as a whole, Colorado’s project is one of driving religion into the catacombs.

No Catholics need apply

Colorado, in 2020, created a “universal pre-K” program, an item high on the wish list for progressives for the past few decades.

The program provides state funding for all parents to send their 3- and 4-year-olds to preschools, including daycare centers, public schools, private schools, and other privately run preschools. Colorado politicians and state officials assured religious institutions that they would be eligible for the money.

The key condition, state officials would explain after the bill became law, was that every program receiving state subsidy be an “equal opportunity” daycare, which would take in families “regardless of, inter alia, race, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, income level, or disability.”

St. Mary’s is a Catholic parish in Littleton, a suburb of Denver. St. Mary’s offers a preschool that is open to families of all faiths, races, incomes, immigration statuses, and backgrounds. But as a Catholic institution, St. Mary’s does not grant that a boy who identifies as a girl is therefore a girl. Also, the Catholic church teaches that marriage is between a man and a woman.

St. Mary’s never demanded that every family be Catholic or even Christian, but it does require that parents agree with the sort of education the school is providing.

Catholic teaching — this is lost on secular critics — holds that parents, not schools, are the primary educators of their children. Schools are the parents’ chief partners in this undertaking. Thus, when a Catholic school takes in a student, it is not contracting with the parents for the education of the child — it is partnering with the parents in the formation of a child.

This formation includes moral formation and, as one of its ends, helping a young man or woman discern his vocation, which in most cases is the vocation of marriage and parenthood.

A Catholic school cannot be a good partner with a parent who rejects that project of formation.

Thus, Colorado’s nondiscrimination rule effectively bars parents at Catholic pre-K from the taxpayer-funded “universal pre-K” program.

“Colorado created a universal preschool program that funds families to send children to the public or private preschool of their choice — but not the Archdiocese of Denver’s Catholic preschools,” as St. Mary’s put it in its petition to the Supreme Court.

Nondiscrimination is often held up as dogma by liberal Democratic politicians, but there are plenty of exceptions. Colorado, for instance, made it clear it would fund an all-black preschool, or a preschool only for “gender-nonconforming children.”

Explicitly, Colorado says a gay-parents-only preschool can get state funding.

But a preschool that follows Catholic teaching? That is unacceptable.

This is rank discrimination in the name of nondiscrimination. Discrimination against religion, particularly Christianity, is the modus operandi for Colorado’s government.

Bake me a cake

Jack Phillips is an observant Christian and a baker in Lakewood. The state government has repeatedly told him he must choose just one — he can’t be both in Colorado.

Colorado’s government has spent the last 14 years persecuting Phillips. The case that made Phillips and the Colorado Human Rights Commission famous stemmed from a 2012 visit.

A gay couple asked Phillips to make a specialty cake for their wedding. To Phillips, that would amount to participating in a ceremony. While he would sell anyone a cake, he refused to participate in a ceremony he found morally objectionable.

The couple sued Phillips, and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled in their favor and ordered Phillips to undergo ideological training. Phillips appealed, and the state courts agreed with the commission. Phillips fought to the Supreme Court, and in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, he won a 7-2 ruling. Justices Stephen Breyer, nominated by former President Bill Clinton, and Elena Kagan, nominated by former President Barack Obama, agreed with the five conservative justices.

The court ruled that Colorado’s actions were clearly motivated by anti-religious animus.

Colorado’s government clearly didn’t think that was a problem, though, as it has continued to act on that animus ever since.

Colorado subsequently lost in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, in which the state tried to compel a graphic designer to express messages that violated her conscience.

Colorado also tried to ban “conversion therapy.” This is an old fight for the cultural Left, where it invokes the image of Bible-thumpers trying to give electric shocks to force their gay children to be straight. But now it basically means any emotional or psychological guidance that could be understood as questioning homosexual activity or identity.

The sudden rise of gender ideology has made the Left’s prohibition on “conversion therapy” even more awkward. If a boy wants to transition into being a girl through irreversible means such as surgery or cross-sex hormone injections, a therapist who questions this objectively harmful course of action would be guilty of “conversion therapy.”

Therapists sued, and last year, Colorado once again lost.

How does Colorado keep failing to understand?

The Constitution and the courts

The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing any religion or outlawing one. It also guarantees the free exercise of religion. Freedom of religion is the first clause in the First Amendment, and so it is literally the very first right in the Bill of Rights.

Religion, that is, deserves special accommodation and special consideration, according to the Constitution.

The American Left sees it differently.

COLORADO’S PATTERN OF RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION

It believes that religion has less right than any other organization. This is why Maine allowed ideologically rigid secular private schools to get voucher money but barred all religious schools. It sees the public square as sacred and religion as profane.

It believes religion must be a fully private thing, hidden away. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) once said, “I do my religion on Sundays.” Obama replaced “free exercise of religion” with “freedom of worship.”

Religion, in this worldview, is demoted from the first of the rights to a second-class thing that is merely tolerated.

This is how to understand Colorado’s penchant for discriminating against religion: The liberals there believe Christians deserve it.

Only a corrupt New York City developer like him, Trump was arguing, could root the corruption out of D.C. This was a theme of his 2016 campaign.

“I was a businessman. I give to everybody,” Trump said during a Republican debate in August 2015. “When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me.”

Trump put it a bit more colorfully in a January 2016 speech: “I have given to everybody, because that was my job. When I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass, okay?”

The Iowa crowd applauded.

Ten years later, Trump is on the other side of the table, but the same theme persists. Consider the president’s recent social media post heaping praise on Tim Cook, the retiring CEO of Apple.

“For me it began with a phone call from Tim at the beginning of my First Term,” Trump said of Cook on Truth Social. “He had a fairly large problem that only I, as President, could fix.”

Trump continued to praise the CEO for lobbying him directly rather than hiring a professional inside-the-Beltway lobbyist.

“Most people would have paid millions of dollars to a consultant, who I probably would not have known, but who would say that he knew me well. The fees would be paid but the job would not have gotten done,” the president wrote. “When I got the call I said, wow, it’s Tim Apple (Cook!) calling, how big is that? I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to ‘kiss my ass.’”

This particular ass-kissing relationship has continued, according to Trump: “He makes these calls to me, I help him out (but not always, because he will, on occasion, be too aggressive in his ask!), and he gets the job done, QUICKLY, without a dime being given to those very expensive (millions of dollars!) consultants around town …”

Thus, in Trump’s narrative of his arc from businessman to president, he has gone from the asker to the asked, but throughout it is his rear end that is being kissed. He formerly wielded his wealth so that politicians would smooch his derriere, and now he wields his governmental power to secure against his backside the lips of various masters of the universe.

This is the key that the observer can use to unlock the sometimes confusing mess of official actions and public comments of our president.

Here’s the rule: Trump will adopt the policy that maximizes the incentive of powerful people to kiss his ass. This, by the way, is the charitable interpretation of Trump’s behavior. The less charitable version is that he wants to maximize his ability to extract bribes from governments, companies, and other politicians, an interpretation corroborated by the business success of his family members and his crypto undertaking.

But also considering Trump’s narcissism, it is useful to assume Trump is at all times butt-kiss-maxxing.

Trump sometimes likes tax cuts and sometimes likes tax hikes. He will massively increase federal spending, and he’ll campaign on massive cuts to federal spending. What drives him isn’t any ideology or policy framework, but maximizing his own leverage.

Trump even suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which interferes with “the art of the deal,” after all.

His foreign policy, too, is best understood as an effort to elicit butt-kissing.

One reason Trump wants friendships with dictators and strongmen in Russia, North Korea, Turkey, and the Philippines is that he wants to make deals with everyone, and these autocrats have unilateral authority unbound by law or politics.

One reason Trump keeps our allies at an arm’s length is that he favors arm’s-length negotiations over intimate alliances. Negotiations are transactions where you can always demand more and more, and alliances are relationships where norms of reciprocity are expected.

It’s how he conducts trade policy, too. Last April, Trump announced he would bar the export of NVIDIA microchips to China, but then reversed course in August and allowed the export in exchange for a 15% cut to Uncle Sam from the sales.

And it’s one reason he loves tariffs. Trump unilaterally controls many tariffs (and controlled more before a recent Supreme Court ruling), and tariffs inherently come with all sorts of exemptions, differing rates, and other tweaks. Severe government control over many companies’ profits, with tons of presidential discretion involved? There’s nothing better for bringing the boys to the yard.

Which brings us to one of Cook’s successful kisses of Trump.

Last year, Trump placed a 100% tariff on all semiconductor imports, but together with Cook, Trump soon announced that Apple would be allowed to import semiconductors tariff-free. Apple stock instantly rallied, gaining back trillions in market value.

THE TRUE SHAPE OF THE BABY BUST

Had there been no tariffs, there would have been no call from Cook and no fawning Oval Office photo op.

Conservative governance, with minimal government intervention and uniform neutral rules, would do nothing for Trump. Inconsistent, fickle, and transactional — that’s the style of governance that maximizes butt-kissing.

So it is with Democrats and day care facilities.

If the word “family” is mentioned, or “affordability,” every Democratic politician in earshot will start gathering up taxpayer money like so many tree trunks to try to build a day care.

New York City gives us a particularly absurd example.

“Empty NYC Pre-Schools Cost Taxpayers Nearly $100M in Rent Alone,” the New York Post reported in an April headline.

City officials explained that one unused pre-K center in Queens for 3-year-olds, “estimated to cost $10.8 million, [was] placed in a section of the city that already had trouble filling existing early childhood education seats. … Another vacant site is located within blocks of four existing 3-K centers in Rego Park, Queens.”

But like beavers, they keep building.

The New York State Comptroller reported in January, “Enrollment in the City’s 3-K and Pre-K programs declined in FY 2025, suggesting the programs may be reaching a saturation point. … Population declines have also meant flat or declining enrollment in the City’s public school programs, including Pre-K and 3-K.”

In 2020, the city was home to more than 106,000 children under age 5. By 2024, the number had dropped to 85,000. The lockdown was a huge culprit: Parents fled the city’s high rents for greener pastures when their kids’ teachers refused to show up and teach for a year.

There is no reason to expect a child rebound in the five boroughs: Births in each of the first 9 months of 2025 were lower than the same period in 2024.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Only a small minority of parents of babies and toddlers want to work full-time and rely on a child care center. All the surveys show that. Most parents want mom and dad to take some time off work to care for the little one and to rely on family, friends, or informal day care to plug the holes.

Why are political and media elites so intent on building day care facilities where there is little to no day care demand?

THE TRUE SHAPE OF THE BABY BUST

Well, because the elites are the ones who want the day cares. Yes, there are parts of New York City where day care demand outstrips the supply, but they’re not in Queens or the Bronx. They are in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, where the columnists of the New York Times and the aides to the mayor all live.

The “day care shortage,” it turns out, is a rich-person problem, which makes it an awkward fit for a taxpayer-funded public program. But the busy beavers of City Hall will keep building, facts be dammed.

Americans had fewer babies last year than in any year since the 1970s, even though we have more women of childbearing age than at any time in our history. The result is the lowest birth rate in American history, a collapse of more than 25% since 2007.

After years of denying or ignoring this Baby Bust (and after decades of trying to scare us about overpopulation), the major media is trying to come to terms with this problem: Americans aren’t getting married as much as they want or as early as they want, and they haven’t been having as many children as they want.

The consequence will be an aging population, a painful transition, and a sadder future.

WE NEED MORE BABY FEVER

This is tricky for the media. Feminism has cast the decline in marriage and births as a victory for equality. The American press has an almost religious devotion to career and work, and family is obviously the chief rival with career in people’s lives. Also, America’s elites are beholden to an ideology of individual autonomy, into which marriage and parenthood don’t fit neatly.

But the facts are undeniable: Our Total Fertility Rate (projected lifetime births per woman) has fallen from 2.1 in 2006 down below 1.6 in 2025. We now have fewer children in America than we did a decade ago, and the decline will continue.

Unable to ignore the story, the press adopts storylines to soothe the elite sensibilities. At the same time, many conservatives jump to conclusions about the causes.

If we are to reverse this birth dearth, we need to set aside our assumptions and wishes, and study the actual shape of the Baby Bust.

MYTH 1: This is just about births moving later

“The record-low U.S. birthrate could be only temporary as today’s young women postpone pregnancy,” surmised the New York Times Claire Cain Miller. This is one of the most common efforts to cope with or diminish collapsing birthrates: Maybe women aren’t really having fewer babies; maybe they’re just waiting longer to get married and start a family.

The argument allows commentators to say the birthrate isn’t really falling, and that apparent drop — a statistical artifact — really reflects a good thing.

It’s statistically plausible, because a culture-wide delay in births would temporarily cause birth rates to fall, only to rebound later — and the population will end up with the same number of babies in the end.

In an extreme example: Imagine a small country where everyone had two babies in their mid-20s. Then all of a sudden, the culture changes, and everyone decides to have those same two babies in their mid-30s. For ten years, the number and rate of births will collapse, but in the long run, just as many babies will be born.

Some demographers and journalists claim that something like that is happening in the U.S. In fact, the Social Security Administration assumes the birthrate will rise 20% in coming decades because the agency “continue[s] to assume that recent low rates of period fertility are, in part, indicative of a gradual shift to older ages of childbearing for younger birth cohorts.”

You can see why this story would be soothing. And it’s possible that it’s true — that 15 years from now, as the youngest millennial women turn 45, they will be no more likely than their predecessors to be childless, and they will have just as many children as Gen X women did. 

But given current data, it seems unlikely.

First, birthrates are falling not only among 20-somethings but also among 30-somethings.

The birthrate for women in their early 30s peaked in 2016, with 102.6 births per 1,000 women aged 30-34, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. So while the birthrate for these women ticked up last year to 96.2, that’s still nearly 10% below peak.

Women in their late 30s are having more babies than in recent decades, but that number does not appear to be rising. The late-30s birthrate increased only about 1.5% last year to 55.3 births per 1,000 women ages 35-39, but that’s actually lower than the rate was in 2022.

In other words, women in their early 30s are having many fewer babies than a decade ago, and baby-making among women in their late 30s appears to have peaked.

The birthrate for women in their early 40s still may be creeping slowly up, from 11.4 per 1,000 in 2016 to 12.6 in 2022, to 12.8 last year. (The birthrate of women 45 and over is up slightly but remains a negligible 1.1% for the past four years.)

Add it all up, and women aged 30-44 had about 55 births per 1,000 women last year, compared to about 57 ten years ago — and the data suggests this slight downward trend will continue.

The big picture: Women under 30 are having far fewer babies than any time in history, and women over 30 are not even coming close to making up for it — and the odds are they never will.

Demographer Lyman Stone puts it this way: “Fertility is falling very fast, and we are not seeing large recuperation at older ages as cohorts with delays hit those ages. Every single mathematical tool we have for projecting cohort fertility is flashing ‘DOWN’ signs for eventual cohort fertility.”

In other words, “completed fertility” — the number of babies the average woman has had when she enters menopause — is on track to be lower for older millennials than it was for Gen Xers, and then to be even lower for younger millennials, and so on.

MYTH 2: This is about fewer white babies

The liberal media spent years dismissing concerns about the Baby Bust with the same tactic liberals use to dismiss anything they don’t want to deal with: Crying racism.

The Washington Post in 2019 ran a smear by left-wing journalist Marissa Brostoff who stated that J.D. Vance, then a Senator from Ohio, lamented the drop in white births. He had really lamented the drop in all births. But Brostoff simply knew what Vance meant, and she chastised the Post for running a correction.

Liberal reporter Lydia DePillis, who now covers birthrate and pro-natalism for the New York Times, wrote in 2021 that concern over falling birthrates was just “master-race puffery.”

This line was more common before the past couple years, when the lies behind it became obvious.

The Baby Bust is not mostly a white-people problem. It’s affecting everyone. White women actually have above-average birth rate in the U.S., higher than the rates among black women, Asian women, and mixed-race women.

While Hispanic women have a higher birthrate than white women, the Hispanic rate is the fastest-dropping, having fallen by about 33% since 2007 when the Baby Bust began.

MYTH 3: This is about girlbosses

Conservatives also sometimes jump to convenient explanations for the Baby Bust. Most notably, many commentators on the Right have blamed “girlbosses” for the collapse in marriage and family formation.

This is an understandable assumption. After all, Millennials were all fed a steady diet of careerism. In particular, the Boomers in the 2000s peddled a sort of feminist careerism that denigrated marriage and motherhood in favor of professional achievement.

And workism on the cultural and individual level does seem to drive down birthrates.

But here’s the problem with blaming girlbosses for the Baby Bust: College-educated women are now getting married more and having more babies than non-college women. Yes, the Baby Bust is mostly a working-class thing.

Conservative pro-family writer Patrick Brown wrote a piece exculpating America’s young elite women: “The girlboss is getting married later than ever, but she’s getting married. Low-income women used to be more likely to be married than higher-income ones, but that relationship flipped around 2010. Women in their early 40s with a bachelor’s degree are now 10 percentage points more likely to have ever married than those without—and that gap is growing.”

The biggest driving factor of the Baby Bust is the decline in marriage, and so the working-class retreat from marriage deserves much of the blame. Sure enough, the birthrate decline is faster among the working class.

MYTH 4: The pendulum will swing back

The most fatal mistake about the birthrate is the assumption that this is part of a pendulum swing. Again, the Social Security Administration has baked this assumption into its forecasts of the program’s long-term solvency.

Some, like the New York Times, assume that the birthrate will roar back because the Millennials and Gen Z’ers will have a ton of babies when they finally have their lives in order, after age 35.

Others assume it will bounce back because lower birth rates will make us richer, and once richer, we will have more kids.

BABIES AND FAMILY SHOULD NOT BE EXOTIC

The last few decades have suggested the opposite: Low birthrates beget even lower birthrates. That’s because a culture with fewer kids is a culture less friendly to kids.

The Baby Bust is real. It’s not just a white thing or an elite thing. It’s not merely a delay in family formation. And it won’t go away on its own.

My friend was one of 31 who became Catholic at that Mass, including plenty of newly baptized Christians, Protestants becoming Catholic, and cradle Catholics whose Catholic formation stopped after baptism.

My own parish, in Falls Church, Virginia, welcomed 25 adults into the church at Easter.

These massive numbers were rivaled in Catholic churches across the country.

The diocese of Duluth in Minnesota saw a 145% increase in new Catholics this Easter. More than 100 students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison became Catholics. At Harvard University, 50 new Catholics joined.

The New York Times, after sampling a few American dioceses, estimated a 51% increase in new Catholics this year.

This doesn’t mean the number of Catholics is growing. No, America is still rapidly secularizing — more so, America is unaffiliating or deinstitutionalizing. Religion scholar Ryan Burge has repeatedly pointed out that the number of Catholics keeps falling, down at least 5% over the past 15 years.

Old Catholics are dying, many nominal Catholics are giving up the charade, and many Catholics are crossing the other way across the Tiber into Protestant denominations. But offsetting these losses, in the last couple of years at least, is a real wave of adult converts.

Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate has more granular but slightly older data, which suggest that the number of new adult Catholics every year steadily dropped from 2000 to 2020, but has since reversed. After bottoming out in the lockdown years of 2020 through 2022, the number of new Catholics climbed in 2023 and 2024.

The Pillar, a Catholic publication, crunched more recent numbers in select dioceses and found, for instance, a 50% increase in new Catholics in Washington from 2024 to 2026, a 37% increase in Brooklyn, New York, and massive increases in Newark, New Jersey, from 330 to 1,700, and Philadelphia, from 280 to 1,160.

In the 19th-century Great Awakening, upstate New York was called “the Burned-Over District” because the fire of the Holy Spirit seemed to burn extra hot there. For the 21st-century Catholic Great Awakening, the burned-over district is the Acela Corridor.

While the masses leave the Catholic Church, the elites, it seems, are flocking to it. The Catholic parish with the most buzz these days is St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village, where I was baptized last century. St. Joseph’s has been featured by the New York Times and a handful of other outlets.

What is it about Catholicism that would appeal to young, professional, college-educated adults in the mid-2020s?

Maybe it’s just a passing fashion among conservatives. Maybe becoming Catholic is just cool today, and becoming Orthodox will be cool in 2027. Then maybe in 2028, the Assemblies of God will be the new thing.

Alternatively, maybe the Catholic Church offers something that, while no different from what it has offered for millennia, is particularly needed today.

Consider 2020 and 2021 as the turning point in the trend of adult conversions. Many of the young adults becoming Catholic in the past two years were college or high school students during the pandemic. Some significant part of their formative years was conducted at a distance — isolated, alone, in a room in front of a screen.

This cohort is hungry for the tangible.

In our age of abstract rationalism, Christianity offers a tangible faith. Christianity, after all, tells us that God isn’t just a supreme system operator in the clouds, but He became flesh and came down to live among us.

Catholicism, in particular, is a meaty faith. In the Eucharist, the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ are present in a wafer of bread. God is not merely something a Catholic can contemplate, obey, or study. God is Someone we can touch.

Catholics have also never fallen in for the iconoclasm that led some Christian sects to disregard the importance of beauty and art in worship. The Mass, at its best, includes Mozart, incense, and chant, and is held in beautifully built churches whose architecture points the eye and the mind toward Heaven.

Catholic worship is ultimately personal communion with God, but Catholics emphasize that human friendship, and visible, tangible, smellable created beauty can orient our hearts toward the divine.

In addition to being too abstract, our age is also too atomized. Today’s 20-somethings, like the millennials and Gen Xers, were indoctrinated by the Me Generation into a bad hyperindividualistic anthropology that worships autonomy, and tells us all we are the sole authors of ourselves.

The bitter fruits of this worldview have been around for decades, but for today’s young adults, especially the secular or weakly religious elites whose lives have been shaped around workism, mobility, and individual achievement, the error of this way is glaringly obvious.

The Catholic Church offers a different way.

The church tells us that while we are fallen, we are good — and we can be forgiven. It offers up a framework of marriage and parenthood that exalts sacrifice and celebrates mutual self-giving.

For young people who have come up in the world of individualistic and rationalistic transactions, the church offers deep and abiding relations.

Twenty years ago, the secular elites celebrated the decline of Christianity, especially the decline of the prominent and venerable Christian institutions. They saw this as enlightenment and emancipation from systems of oppression and superstition.

TRUMP AS JESUS

Last decade, shrewd observers began to realize that our deinstitutionalization and secularization weren’t making our culture healthier.

These days, as the bursting Easter vigils suggest, folks are seeking a sturdier rock to serve as their life’s foundation.

That is, babies are contagious.

We’ve long known that. As a culture of rational sophisticates, we try to laugh off “baby fever” as an old wives’ tale. As egalitarians and professionals, we aren’t supposed to admit how babies and hormones interact. But it’s all real.

“Where adults see more children, adults want more children,” the economists concluded. “Where the young population shrinks, so does the desire for parenthood.”

In other words, pregnancy is contagious, and Baby Busts are self-reinforcing. Low birth rates beget lower birth rates.

The infamous 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus believed the opposite. He thought birthrates would be self-correcting: “High birthrates make a people poorer, people respond to poverty by having fewer children, with fewer children among whom to divvy up the pie people become richer, and people respond to wealth by having more children.”

Underlying this system is the grim belief that children are a net cost, almost a luxury good.

Malthusianism was wrong. When birth rates get low, that tends to drive birth rates even lower. One reason: Cultures with fewer kids will be less kid-friendly, which increases the difficulty and social costs of having kids.

Another reason, just as important: Being near babies makes people want babies. That’s what Galiani and Sosa call “the empathy channel” for increasing the “demand” for babies.

“Infant exposure activates the brain’s reward circuitry, triggers oxytocin release promoting caregiving desire and extends to fathers,” the economists argue. “The mechanism operates through sensory contact rather than deliberation. Psychologists find that the affective component of fertility motivation is more than twice as strong as the cognitive one in predicting ‘baby fever’ intensity.”

And now that the number of young children is declining every single day, it becomes more and more difficult every day to reverse the Baby Bust.

Galiani and Sosa estimate that 13% of the collapse in birth rates over the past 18 years is due to the decline in Baby Fever, but it might be as high as 33%, they say.

Self-perpetuating cycles are tough to reverse, but this one might have an easy solution: Everyone with a baby should bring the baby everywhere and hand their bundle of joy off to a childless young adult — the human race depends on it.

So while some people yawned when Trump posted on social media an image of himself as Jesus, apparently raising a man from the dead, many people were shocked, and some were appalled. Because enough of Trump’s allies told him that this wasn’t cute, and was in fact, blasphemous, he took down the post. He later claimed, implausibly, that he didn’t think it was portraying himself as Jesus, but was instead portraying himself as a Red Cross doctor.

In this regard, it really was a new thing. When was the last time he backtracked on something?

But the yawners have a point: Our politics have been headed in this direction for a while.

The tacky paintings, and more recently AI-created drawings, of Trump as some sort of religious leader have been ubiquitous since Trump took over the political scene in 2015.

One way to understand Jan. 6, 2021, is as a religious riot. I say that because I was there, covering it, in person.

Multiple Trump supporters I met near the White House noted that it was the Christian feast of the Epiphany and that they were seeking an epiphany of sorts from Trump. They thought he would reveal his proof that the election was stolen and that Trump had actually won.

Right outside the White House, I saw a Trump supporter carrying a cross, which like the True Cross, had a sign hung from it. But instead of “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” this sign read “Trump Won.”

As I walked with the crowd from the White House to the Capitol, I spoke to a handful of Trump supporters. Every one of them said they did not attend church, and more than one spoke of Trump in spiritual terms.

I wrote at the time, “David, an auto mechanic from Colorado, told me how pleased he was with Trump’s first term. It wasn’t about tax cuts or border walls, either. ‘He brought some pride back into the country. … No more. I feel pride. I feel like there’s something that was missing that’s now been found.’

“His talk was spiritual, so I asked David about faith and church. ‘I don’t go to church. But I am religious. I do read the Bible. I do my own studies, online and stuff. But really, since Trump came in, I really have felt a shift in the power I feel. It’s definitely more positive than it was before.’”

This didn’t start with the 2020 election, either. If you covered a Trump rally, you may have noticed it had a lot in common with a religious revival. Trump rallies in 2016 weren’t dark and brooding as some of the liberal media portrayed them. They were upbeat. There was instant camaraderie. For many people, it was a rare communal event infused with meaning.

If you’ve been following Trump for the past decade, you know that he sees himself, and many of his followers see him, as a messianic figure.

More common than Trump-as-Messiah, but maybe more harmful, is the twisting of Christianity to fit into Trump’s personal tastes.

DOES IT MATTER THAT ERIC SWALWELL IS MARRIED?

Erick Erickson wrote about this:

So Trump kind of wants to be worshipped, and he at least wants religion to be twisted to his likings, which helps explain his anger at Pope Leo XIV. Trump’s unhinged online rant at the Holy Father is hard to understand unless you consider that Trump has been led, by sycophants, to believe that Christianity ought to serve him, rather than the other way around.

You could watch a lot of cable coverage, read a lot of articles, and listen to radio segments covering various women’s accusations against Swalwell and his defenses, without ever knowing that the man is married.

Swalwell’s defense is that he serially cheats on his wife, including with women who worked for him. This ought to disqualify him from being governor of California, before we even determine the truth of the accusations.

But Swalwell’s marriage and his infidelity are often totally ignored by the media.

CNN, to its credit, included his marriage in the original report, but has omitted that detail from nearly all subsequent stories: April 11, April 12, April 12 again, and April 13. Watch this five-minute MSNOW report that discusses his defense, but never mentions that he is basically admitting to serial philandering. Reuters omits the wife, marriage, and infidelity from its stories (here and here).

Because Swalwell apologized to his wife in his denials of the assault charge, you actually see some of these outlets mention his wife and his marital status. But look at another current alleged infidelity scandal, and you’ll see the typical media omission of marriage:

NFL coach Mike Vrabel was photographed being very cozy with NFL reporter Diana Russini of The Athletic, which is owned by the New York Times, and hanging out alone together in a hot tub. Vrabel and Russini say there was nothing inappropriate, and they were hanging out as part of a group.

When the Times covers this Vrabel story, and the questions of journalistic ethics involved, it totally omits that Vrabel and Russini are both married, a fact that casts the hot-tubbing and hand-holding while on the road in a different light.

The news media often omit the marital status of men and women accused of sexual impropriety. It’s an odd tic grounded in the morality of the news media: “Everything is okay as long as it is consensual.”

That simplistic and inadequate belief system forces newspapers to use very odd phrasing.

Does the news media think that being obscene is a problem? Do the editors of major outlets value marital fidelity?