Institutional Christianity has had clear secular benefits to American life for hundreds of years. It's played both a prophetic role in terms of generating moral critiques of American excesses, and so on, and also a communal role, in terms of building community as the country moved westward to the role my own Catholic Church played in assimilating generations of immigrants.

No one doubts that pure libertarianism is simple, but that's just why it remains on the ideological fringe - because it boils down the most difficult questions in human affairs to a simple equation, a What Would the Market Do bumper sticker.

Even secular people can't really escape from the need to rest their ideas on some belief, some sort of commitment that is not scientific commitment.

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.

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.

Just as the superstar pastor model can have its problems once the superstar pastor gets old or has a scandal or something, the house church model... there's a reason that the house churches of the New Testament era grew up into a more institutional faith down the road.

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