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.

Institutional Christianity has had clear secular benefits to American life for hundreds of years. It's played both a prophetic role in terms of generating moral critiques of American excesses, and so on, and also a communal role, in terms of building community as the country moved westward to the role my own Catholic Church played in assimilating generations of immigrants.

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

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.

No one doubts that pure libertarianism is simple, but that's just why it remains on the ideological fringe - because it boils down the most difficult questions in human affairs to a simple equation, a What Would the Market Do bumper sticker.

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.

I do think that evangelicals in general need to think seriously about how you pass on your faith across generations and over the long haul.