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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.