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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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