Serious religious practice is not a strange minority thing within the United States. And yet, such practice is treated as such an oddity by non-religiously trained journalists.

Catholicism, in particular, has become especially susceptible to this position. Catholics did everything they could to seem like a normal "American" in the 1960s. And so, no one seems to get the weirdness of Catholicism. That often includes Catholic academics.

By weird, incidentally, I don& #39;t mean irrational. But I do mean that Catholicism makes a totalizing claim on one& #39;s existence. If it& #39;s true, then it& #39;s everything. It changes everything about how one thinks and lives, because Baptism changes one& #39;s identity.