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

During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

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

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.

Americans are an "almost chosen people," which is meant to suggest that there are clear parallels, literal, theological and everything else, between the American story and the Old Testament story of Israel and then the broader story of the Christian church. It's OK to recognize the parallels. It's OK to invoke them. But, you have to keep that "almost" in front of the "chosen." You can't go all the way and say, "America is Israel, America is the Church." That's where I think patriotism shades into, what I call, the heresy of nationalism.

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.