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.

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.

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

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.

Independent of the critique I'm making, I'm just trying to paint a more comprehensive portrait of American religion than you get from a right versus left, religious conservatives versus secular liberal, believer versus atheist, binary. Too often, we just look at religion in America through that kind of either/or lens. I think it's much more complicated than that.

Just as the superstar pastor model can have its problems once the superstar pastor gets old or has a scandal or something, the house church model... there's a reason that the house churches of the New Testament era grew up into a more institutional faith down the road.

I read a lot of G.K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.