I think very few people realize how much the separation of church and state has to do with the fact that Americans are not only more religious than a lot of other people in the world but that conversions are much more common here.

The Roman Empire was fairly tolerant of religious choice as long as you made a point not of thumbing your nose in public at the Roman gods.

Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.

One of the reasons there are largely Catholic and largely Protestant regions of Germany today is that people did sort themselves out geographically.

Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck.

That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.

More than half of Americans have changed religions at least once in their adult lifetime. This is - the rate of religious conversion here is much, much higher than it is anywhere in Europe, for example.