"So perhaps instead of secularization it makes sense to talk about the fragmentation and personalization of Christianity — to describe America as a nation of Christian heretics..."

"...  if you will, in which traditional churches have been supplanted by self-help gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs.... There has to come a point at which a heresy becomes simply post-Christian, a moment when you should just believe people who claim they have left the biblical world-picture behind, a context where the new spiritualities add up to a new religion.... [T]he term 'paganism' might be reasonably revived to describe the new American religion, currently struggling to be born.... [The idea is] that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent. This paganism is not materialist or atheistic; it allows for belief in spiritual and supernatural realities. It even accepts the possibility of an afterlife.... What ancient paganism did successfully was to unite this kind of popular supernaturalism with its own forms of highbrow pantheism and civil-religiosity.... To get a fully revived paganism in contemporary America... the philosophers of pantheism and civil religion would need to build a religious bridge to the New Agers and neo-pagans, and together they would need to create a more fully realized cult of the immanent divine, an actual way to worship, not just to appreciate, the pantheistic order they discern."

Writes Ross Douthat in "The Return of Paganism/Maybe there actually is a genuinely post-Christian future for America" (NYT).

Douthat wants organized religion. We all have our preference on the spectrum from order to chaos. He's too much of an order guy for my taste.