What replaces Christianity isn't going to be Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and so on. It's going to be something else and something secular people may not like very much.

You start reading C.S. Lewis, then you’re reading G.K. Chesterton, then you’re a Catholic.

Our culture has few taboos that can't be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place. Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing. This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that "bravely" trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics.

Independent of the critique I'm making, I'm just trying to paint a more comprehensive portrait of American religion than you get from a right versus left, religious conservatives versus secular liberal, believer versus atheist, binary. Too often, we just look at religion in America through that kind of either/or lens. I think it's much more complicated than that.

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

The idea of a post-religious society is a fantasy, ultimately. Human beings are, by nature, religious in various ways.