When is the right time to compare US politics to the Nazi era? This expert on Christian nationalism says: now

Robert P Jones argues that declining white Christian influence has fuelled an alliance with Trump, and warns it is reshaping US democracy

The lawyer Mike Godwin famously came up with the “law” that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one (or 100%).

Robert P Jones thought long and hard about whether to go there in his latest book. But the more he studied US demographic numbers, considered the rise of Christian nationalism and heard Donald Trump use the language of racial purity, he found the conclusion inescapable. “This is our 1933,” he writes.