Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.

I read a lot of G.K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.

The thinking person's case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn't believe a word he says.

It's clearly the case that there's not some moment in American history when every evangelical is holding hands with every Catholic who is holding hands with every mainline Methodist, or what have you. Obviously, American Christianity was deeply divided in all kinds of ways at mid-century too. But there was a kind of convergence going on. Even though Reinhold Niebuhr, the great mainline Protestant theologian, didn't think highly of Billy Graham, he and Graham still, clearly, had more in common, both theologically and in their attitudes toward religion in public life.

Americans are an "almost chosen people," which is meant to suggest that there are clear parallels, literal, theological and everything else, between the American story and the Old Testament story of Israel and then the broader story of the Christian church. It's OK to recognize the parallels. It's OK to invoke them. But, you have to keep that "almost" in front of the "chosen." You can't go all the way and say, "America is Israel, America is the Church." That's where I think patriotism shades into, what I call, the heresy of nationalism.

If you're willing to recognize the religious element in one secular ideology, you need to be able to recognize it in your own.

One of the things I try to do is take seriously some of the forms of American religion that people consider to be shallow and try and figure out why they have such a strong appeal and tease out the theology they actually represent.