These two visions seem mutually contradictory—but both contain an element of truth. America has indeed become less traditionally Christian across the last half century, just as religious conservatives insist, with unhappy consequences for our national life. But certain kinds of religious faith are as influential as ever, just as secular critics and

The great Christian heresies vary wildly in their theological substance, but almost all have in common a desire to resolve Christianity’s contradictions, untie its knotty paradoxes, and produce a cleaner and more coherent faith. Heretics are often stereotyped as wild mystics, but they’re just as likely to be problem solvers and logic choppers, well

Jonathan Wright points out “[heretics] did many favors to the cause of orthodoxy. Heresy was always orthodoxy’s grumpy but indispensable twin.”5

Against the idea that the United States has lost touch with its religious roots, a growing chorus began insisting that the United States is in decline because it’s excessively religious. On issue after issue, these critics made Christian belief the problem in and of itself, casting the political controversies of the 2000s as an apocalyptic struggle

Both doubters and believers will inevitably suffer from a religious culture that supplies more moral license than moral correction, more self-satisfaction than self-examination, more comfort than chastisement.

The most potent theories, though, involve religion. This is as it should be because, at the deepest level, every human culture is religious—defined by what its inhabitants believe about some ultimate reality, and what they think that reality demands of them. The reality doesn’t have to be a personal God: It can be the iron laws of Marxism, the reli

Pushing Christianity to one extreme or another is what Americans have always done. We’ve been making idols of our country, our pocketbooks, and our sacred selves for hundreds of years. What’s changed today, though, is the weakness of the orthodox response.

this is perhaps the greatest Christian paradox of all—that the world’s most paradoxical religion has cultivated rationalism and scientific rigor more diligently than any of its rivals, making the Christian world safe for philosophy as well as fervor, for the study of nature as well as the contemplation of divinity.

there was a shift in the intellectual climate as well, which suggests that something deeper was happening—that the experience of the 1930s and 1940s had really prompted a broader reassessment of the modern story, and that the same feelings that had impelled Auden back to Christianity were at work in society as a whole. After the death camps and the