Two comments about my essay in the Guardian today, both of them regarding points that had to be cut in editing:
1) There’s no sense in which a Hillary Clinton administration could have mean “death” to Christians and conservatives, but, as I’ve argued often, the next time Democrats control the federal government they’ll make life much harder for all Christian institutions. In relation to all this, the question that has arisen in my mind in the past year or is this: If a Trump administration makes life easier for me and my fellow Christians but harder for many of the most vulnerable people in American society, do I not have an obligation to support my neighbor in preference to myself? (I still don’t expect to vote for either of our two major parties, though.)
2) I have of course known for many years about the great “temporal bandwidth” passage in Gravity’s Rainbow, a book I have taught several times, but the relevance of that passage to our present moment was brought to my attention by my friend Edward Mendelson in this essay. That debt was registered in my own essay but didn’t make it through the editing process. (My excellent editor, Amana Fontanella-Khan, had to curb some of my loquaciousness.)
Also, I have to admit to taking some pleasure in the fact that in the past 24 hours my writing has been published in the Guardian and the Weekly Standard.
