The sharpest and best insight at the core of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is that religious disaffiliation is effectively the new norm, in practice if not in profession. In other words, even though most Americans still profess attachment to some religion, those attachments are in many cases so anemic and so historical—and American society as a result is now so presumptively secular—that a case for religious belief and practice must start from a very different place than might have made sense a quarter century ago.
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