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

In many ways, American evangelicalism is somewhat stronger today than it was in, say 1955 - certainly more mainstream and influential in the culture as a whole. But, the increased strength of evangelicalism hasn't increased fast enough to compensate for the total collapse of mainline Protestantism and the pretty steady weakening of my own Roman Catholic Church.

It's not always clear where a healthy patriotism shades into a dangerous nationalism.

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

Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.

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

I think it is very clear that, though great difference remained, evangelicals moved closer to Catholics, mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants moved closer together, and this convergence coincided with greater institutional strength for all the Christian churches than, for the most part, you see today.