DOES the New York Times have to take out extra insurance on Ross Douthat's neck and spine against trauma caused by frequent, extended pining stares into America's rear-view mirror? Take last Sunday's column, for instance, in which he lamented the waning influence of "America's old Christian establishment." That establishment, he admitted, could be "exclusivist, snobbish and intolerant," but it "frequently provided a kind of invisible mortar for our culture and a framework for our great debates...It was the hierarchy, discipline and institutional continuity of mainline Protestantism and later Catholicism that built hospitals and schools, orphanages and universities and assimilated generations of immigrants." Well, sort of. Continuity and hierarchy built nothing; individual believers, motivated by their faith as they understood it, paid for the hospitals, schools, etc and others (perhaps some from those "generations of immigrants" benevolently assimilated by their betters) actually hefted the hammers.

The idea that America was a more united country because of Christianity is one of those notions that sounds great, until you start to think about what it actually means. Were politics actually less fractious those halcyon days of which Mr Douthat writes—from the six presidents preceding John F. Kennedy, America's first Catholic president, to Barack Obama's 2008 victory? Perhaps. But it does not follow that Christianity was the cause. America was also far more ethnically homogeneous. Until the Immigration Act of 1965, our benevolent white Christian overlords, in their wisdom, kept tight controls on how many non-white, non-European immigrants could come to America. It was not necessarily that Christianity exercised greater moral authority, but that there were fewer to challenge its claim: fewer Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Jains, Jews and so forth, and before the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, fewer (open, avowed) atheists. Mr Douthat seems to think that America's growing religious diversity is something to lament. I do not.

Mr Douthat also credits mainline Christianity with the victories of the civil-rights movement, which is a bit rich. Yes, as he and David Chappell argue, Martin Luther King junior and senior, Fred Shuttlesworth, Fannie Lou Hamer and dozens of other mid-century civil-rights leaders were deeply, profoundly rooted in African-American evangelicalism. And indeed, those leaders not only placed themselves in but were in fact squarely in a prophetic Christian legacy that traces back to the Old Testament. But to say that the "moral and theological arguments" advanced by Christian civil-rights leaders "effectively shame[d] the South into accepting desegregation" not just glosses over but ignores the crucial work of tens of thousands of protestors who put themselves in harm's way. It ignores the work of the NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund, Thurgood Marshall and similar attorneys. And most importantly, it ignores the violent resistance with which white Southerners greeted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and other legal—not theological—blows meted out against segregation.

Now, one could, and perhaps Mr Douthat would, argue that many protestors and many black activists and attorneys drew their strength from the Christian church—especially if the point of your argument was not to determine an honest accounting of civil-rights victories but to show mainline Christianity in the best, softest, most flattering possible light. But their work was not principally theological in nature. And in any event, if theological argument advanced the cause of desegregation, Southern Baptists used theological underpinnings to justify segregation—something for which they did not apologise until 1995. Mr Douthat claims that "the myth that Mr Obama is a Muslim" has taken root because of Mr Obama's affiliation with Jeremiah Wright's church, a denomination that "seems far more alien to many white Christians than did the African-American Christianity of Martin Luther King, Jr. or even Jesse Jackson." (Even Jesse Jackson!) Note the utter lack of evidence to support that claim. Dr King preached against desegregation: a view that Southern Baptists literally believed transgressed Biblical teachings. Mr Wright was just a loudmouth: small potatoes by comparison. I have a very difficult time believing white Southern segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s viewed Dr King's Christianity more charitably than white Southern Republicans today view Jeremiah Wright, whom Mr Douthat seems only grudgingly to accept as Christian. But of course that's the thing about theology: it is capacious and fungible enough to justify almost any political position.

This column put me in mind of one Mr Douthat wrote about 18 months back, during the controversy over the "ground-zero mosque". It did for anti-immigrant nativism more or less what the current column does for "exclusivist, snobbish and intolerant" mainline American Christianity. In neither case is Mr Douthat fundamentally wrong: nativist pressure may have driven immigrants to assimilate more quickly and eagerly than they do today, and mainstream Christianity may have bound the country together. But in neither case is he fundamentally right, either: immigrants tend to assimilate pretty quickly of their own accord precisely because America is not fundamentally nativist, and in any event, as Jamelle Bouie pointed out when the first column came out, nativists didn't want immigrants to assimilate; they wanted them to stay out. And what does it mean, precisely, to lament the lack of authoritative American Christianity in an ever more religiously diverse America. Should non-Christians like me keep quiet? If so, why? We're not here at Christian America's sufferance; we're not guests; we have as much claim to this country as anyone else. And if not, well, surely Mr Douthat would be better off urging religion to play less of a role in public life, rather than more.