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

Every Christian in every time and place is going to be tempted by certain forms of heresy. I'm sure I'm tempted by my own.

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.

It's just silly to look at the incredibly steep decline in the mainline and the clear institutional weakening of Catholicism in the 1960s and 70s and pretend that something really big didn't change then. It did change. There really was a significant institutional decline.

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

The fact that institutional churches have gone into decline doesn't mean that we're going to enter some purely secular age. Secular people need to be aware of 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.