Excerpt: Now It’s The Mormons’ Turn And: Our Fragile Economy; Rethinking Comey; Digital IDs; Good Evangelicals; More, Rod Dreher, Sep 29, 2025 (paywalled)

Along those lines, Peggy Noonan had this to say (paywalled) about the Christian Right, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk service:

There is something you could have said at any time the past decade that is true now in some new way. It is that the GOP is becoming a more explicitly Christian party than it ever has been. A big story the past decade was that so many Trump supporters, especially but not only working-class ones, were misunderstood as “those crazy Christians” but in fact were often unaffiliated with any faith tradition and not driven to politics by such commitments.

But it looks to me as if a lot of those folks have been in some larger transit since 2015, as Kirk himself was. He entered the public stage to speak politics but said by the end that his great work was speaking of Christ. If he had a legacy, he told an interviewer, “I want to be remembered for courage for my faith.”

The secretary of state of the United States gave personal testimony on what Christ is in history and in his life. The vice president did the same. John Foster Dulles and Hubert Humphrey didn’t talk like this!

•  Vice President Vance: “For Charlie, We Will Speak The Truth Every Single Day” September 21, 2025.  Vice President J.D. Vance spoke Sunday at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk. “Charlie suffered a terrible fate, my friends. We all know it. We all saw it, but think it is not the worst fate,” Vance said. “It is better to face a gunman than to live your life afraid to speak the truth.” “It…
•  Rubio: Charlie Kirk Had A Powerful, Special, Positive Impact On Young Men, In Particular September 21, 2025.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke Sunday at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk: SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: About maybe 10 or 12 years ago, a person I knew very well, who had been very helpful to my giving when I was in the Senate, came to me and said he had met this very impressive…
• VIDEO – Charlie Kirk explains why he is a follower of Jesus Christ and believes the Bible represents Word of God — “God, use me for your will”
• VIDEO – In this clip, Kirk explains what’s important to him.
• VIDEO: Kirk: “I want to be remembered for courage for my faith”  and why ….

The whole thing was self-consciously and explicitly Christian. Kirk’s widow, Erika, talked of new converts and asked the crowd to help them. She said of her husband’s assassin, “That young man—I forgive him.” And she received a standing ovation.

As I watched I realized: This is the true sound and tone of the Republican Party right now. This is the takeover of the previously patronized.

She added that when she worked in the Reagan White House as a speechwriter, Christian conservatives had a seat at the table, so to speak, but they were quietly looked down on by the “pragmatists” in the room. No more.

It is no secret that as the GOP has become more religious, the Democrats have become more secular. This is not something you are going to see reflected in media coverage, because US journalists, being overwhelmingly secular liberals, are blind to how their own party has moved to the extreme on religious and cultural matters, just as the Republicans have. I think this is unavoidable, this schism. What you, reader, should watch out for is the attempt to shape the Narrative such that it looks as if religious conservatives are the ones taking America away from Normal. As Bill Maher said in his closing monologue on Friday: