The thinking person's case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn't believe a word he says.

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.

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

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

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

It's clearly the case that there's not some moment in American history when every evangelical is holding hands with every Catholic who is holding hands with every mainline Methodist, or what have you. Obviously, American Christianity was deeply divided in all kinds of ways at mid-century too. But there was a kind of convergence going on. Even though Reinhold Niebuhr, the great mainline Protestant theologian, didn't think highly of Billy Graham, he and Graham still, clearly, had more in common, both theologically and in their attitudes toward religion in public life.

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.