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.

I do think that evangelicals in general need to think seriously about how you pass on your faith across generations and over the long haul.

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

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

The idea of universal human rights may not seem as weird to some people as the idea of a personal God, but it is still a metaphysical idea that liberalism, at least as we know it, couldn't really survive without.

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

I think that secular liberals need to recognize that they are still, often, hanging their worldview on what are metaphysical ideas.