Trump was the first Republican nominee since Ford or H.W Bush who was not a hard line Christian theocrat. This certainly helped in the Upper Midwest, West Coast, Northeast and especially New England, which have been disgusted by GOP social Conservatism.
This is not true.
Most socially liberal, well-educated areas trended Democratic. Take a look at Massachusetts, the West Coast, the D.C. Metro, and numerous college towns. Hillary also performed very well in traditionally Republican but socially moderate areas like suburban Chicago.
Trump meanwhile achieved record performance among white Evangelicals (never mind that Trump may not be sincerely religious himself). He also overperformed among culturally conservative Democrats, which is why he turned so many rural counties Republican.
2016 clearly widened the urban-rural, social liberal-social conservative divide.
Hillary Clinton, while not an economic progressive, personifies the concept of an "enemy of the church". Christians recognized that Hillary's Justice Department would do everything it could to force churches to perform same-sex marriages and hire gays in ministry positions, regardless of what Scripture says. Part of the WikiLeaks revelations included Podesta and Palmieri talking about a "Catholic Spring" where liberals would actually infiltrate the Catholic Church and seek to change its doctrines. Her "deplorables" comment didn't help, either. Trump is not my idea of a devout Christian, but he is willing to leave the Church alone and not force every secular doctrine on it.
New England as a whole has become the Solid Northeast because of the resistance to the Religious Right in the GOP. Trump cooled this somewhat, but what made this worse for Democrats was the hostility Christians feel toward Hillary. This is something Hillary brought on all by herself.
The ironic thing is Hillary was criticized from the left during the primaries of being insufficiently pro-gay, and not coming out for gay marriage until 2013.
Hillary's a middle class girl whose entire interest in politics 50 years ago started with her pastor, and has remained in the same denomination ever since that time. The religious right rejected her for a son of wealth and privilege who makes a mockery of Christian values, largely out of an obsession with abortion, a word that is not even mentioned in the Bible and even implicitly condoned, and is only mentioned in the apocrypha.
