Every few years, someone in the far-right fundamentalist Christian community puts forth the argument that modern American culture has become so nasty and hostile to "traditional" Christians that it's time to withdraw.

They don't plan to go to a forgotten island somewhere. Rather, they would create a kind of community in internal exile. As much as possible, they'd form parallel structures, such as fundamentalist-oriented educational institutions and media channels, and tend to their own gardens.

Last week, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito gave a speech to a group of Catholic lawyers that didn't get as much attention as it should have.

Alito addressed Advocati Christi, a group of Catholic lawyers and judges affiliated with the Catholic Diocese of Paterson, N.J.  The Associated Press reported that the organization works to "provide an opportunity for lawyers learn about the Catholic faith and Catholic social teaching and to help them integrate these into their life and practice."

Since President Donald Trump's immigration policy gave law enforcement officials unprecedented power to aggressively target immigrants in the country illegally, the nation's immigrant communities have been living in fear, from the threat of arrest, detention and deportation.

Department of Homeland Security documents "revealed the broad scope of the president's ambitions: to publicize crimes by undocumented immigrants; strip such immigrants of privacy protections; enlist local police officers as enforcers; erect new detention facilities; discourage asylum seekers; and, ultimately, speed up deportations," The New York Times' Michael D. Shear and Ron Nixon reported late last month.

"The message is: The immigration law is back in business," said a gleeful Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports restricted immigration. "That violating immigration law is no longer a secondary offense."

I was interviewed by the Free Speech Radio Network on Tuesday, election day.

Here is the transcript:

    After more than a year and a half of presidential campaigning, Election Day has finally arrived in the U.S.  With the popular vote looking much closer than projections for the electoral college spread, the divisiveness and acrimony has highlighted deep social and political rifts in the country. Some say the outcome will benefit the Christian Right -- irrespective of who wins the White House.  FSRN's Shannon Young spoke with Frederick Clarkson, Senior Fellow at Political Research Associates a progressive, social justice think tank in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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    Shannon Young: Frederick Clarkson, you've said that the 2016 election will be a win/win for the Christian Right. Explain what you mean by that.

    Frederick Clarkson: If the Trump-Pence ticket wins, they will be viewed as kingmakers because polling has shown that conservative evangelicals have been his most loyal base of support, much to many people's surprise. And, of course, Mike Pence is by far the most conservative Christian leader we've had as part of a national ticket, ever.

    But if they lose, they go into resistance mode, which is where they are very strong. They can really rally against Hillary Clinton and build their movement - engaging in fundraising - in much they way that they did during the previous Clinton's administration. And I think that we'll probably see a strong rise in armed militia movements and other extreme expressions, as well. So, for a social movement on the scale and virulence of the Christian Right, it's a win-win day.

On July 25, despite their being no signs of The Rapture, the Rev. Tim LaHaye slipped off this mortal coil, just days after suffering a stroke. Long before LaHaye, and his writing partner, Jerry Jenkins, teamed up to write the Left Behind series of mega-best-selling apocalyptic novels - which took The Rapture and apocalypticism to the mainstream -- LaHaye was a major figure in the founding and nurturing of the Religious Right.

In 1989, the Unification Church-owned Washington Times newspaper described him as "one of the lightning-rod clergy of the Religious Right." In 2005, Time magazine declared LaHaye as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. At the same time, Time named LaHaye and his wife Beverly -- who founded the conservative Christian Concerned Women for America in 1979 - "The Christian Power Couple."

Despite months of hand wringing, public and private condemnations, expressing support for, and endorsing, other candidates, and a close inspection of his miniscule theological underpinnings, many conservative Christian evangelicals are finding their way back to Donald Trump, as nearly four-fifths of evangelicals are now saying they will vote for Trump. According to the Pew Research Center's recent survey, "Evangelical voters are rallying strongly in favor of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump."

Examining the results of the Pew survey, The Christian Examiner's Gregory Tomlin wrote: "Evangelicals aren't just warming to Trump; they're on fire for the candidate." Not everyone has the same view of the survey. In her report, Christianity Today's Sarah Eekhoff Zyistra maintained that evangelicals will vote for Trump, "But they aren't happy about it."

Donald Trump has announced that he plans to put Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on his ticket. This selection signals that Trump, a controversial real estate mogul and reality TV star, is continuing his aggressive courting of the Religious Right, in the hopes of achieving victory this fall.

Whether it will work remains to be seen. In the meantime, here are some things to keep in mind about Pence:

With the nation embroiled in another hot-button culture war issue -- this time over transgender rights -- a Catholic high school in Burlingame, a small city located south of San Francisco, California, is dead set on doing the right thing. Mercy High, a four-year college preparatory school for girls, which is owned and operated by an order of Sisters of Mercy, has fully accepted a transgender English teacher.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle's Jill Tucker, "The announcement of support ... offers a rare policy position on transgender rights from within an internationally respected Catholic order."

Is it the end of the Christian Right as we know it, or is it the beginning of a beautiful relationship? Michael Farris, chancellor of Patrick Henry College, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, and a longtime conservative evangelical leader, claimed in an op-ed piece for The Christian Post that the meeting of 1,000 conservative Christian leaders with Donald Trump "marks the end of the Christian Right." Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, believes that "it was admirable and honorable for Trump to meet with Christian leaders. [because] [h]e is not our enemy."

Never ones to allow grass grow under their feet when confronted by social and cultural changes, the Christian Right has responded with a thunderous "No Way Obama," to the joint directive from Department of Justice and the Department of Education to public schools across the country advising them that they need to permit transgender students access to bathrooms consistent with the gender with which they identify, and deals with such issues as housing, locker rooms, pronouns and gender references on identity documents.

The Family Research Council's Tony Perkins called the directive a "missive ... courtesy of the lawless bullies at the Departments of Justice and Education." Other Christian Right leaders are calling it "radical social engineering," and a "leftist coup of local schools." One longtime conservative activist is calling on Christians to remove their children from public schools.

The American Family Association's boycott of Target stores, over its transgender-friendly bathroom policy, has reached its second or maybe third stage. On Wednesday, May 11, Tim Wildmon, the president of the AFA, made a pilgrimage to Target headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and delivered what he claimed were more than one million signatures pledged to boycott Target. Company officials politely, but firmly, rebuffed Wildmon.

According to the Huffington Post, Target CEO Brian Cornell told CNBC's Squawk Box that, "We took a stance, and were going to continue to embrace our belief of diversity and inclusion and just how important that is to our company."

Cornell also stated that "the vast majority of our stores have a family restroom" (1,400 of 1,800 nationwide) and that the company plans on implementing family restrooms in the rest of its stores over the next few months."

Blogs like this are often the bearer of bad news - we may report about a public school district trying to teach creationism, an attack on LGBT rights by a Religious Right group, an effort by a large and powerful church to secure tax funding for its private school system, etc.

But today's story is good news. It may, in fact, even warm your heart a little.