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.

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.

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

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.

Our culture has few taboos that can't be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place. Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing. This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that "bravely" trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

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

The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics.