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

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

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

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

I do think you can see, throughout American history, this temptation, and it's both a liberal and a conservative temptation, to take a healthy patriotism a little too far. For liberals the temptation is to say the purpose of politics is to straightforwardly bring the kingdom of God to Earth. For conservatives, I talk about Glenn Beck, the temptation is more apocalyptic and messianic, it's the temptation to say we did have a covenant with God, a literal covenant beginning with the Founding, and we are, like Israel in the Old Testament, falling away from it.

My mother converted when I was 16. She was the driving force behind religion in our family. So, I'm sure I was heavily influenced by that. But, I also was, and still am, convinced by the Catholic churches historical claims to represent the continuity with the early Church that other forms of Western Christianity lack.

I think it is fair, in a way, to describe certain forms of Marxism, for instance, as the secular equivalent of a religion. But, I think the same is true, to a certain extent, of secular liberalism as well.