They may think they represent the alternative: a higher, productive rationality. But they are underestimating their own secular competition--the many, often confused cultures loose in the U.S. now. Hip-hop culture, acquisitive consumerism, fashion, hipsterism, street gangs, mystical evironmentalism, Web-centered "reality" cultures. Where's the higher-level thinking here? And by way, the hobgoblin fear of bioengineered food doesn't reside in the American South but in agnostic Europe.

Do virtues matter as ballast in a dynamic, complex society? If yes, where will they come from? Do secularists simply expropriate them from religion? Or do they create their own, such as "do not oppress"?

Atheists and the unchurched undervalue the extent to which they are getting a free ride on the social strength that religious-based virtue provides. It's one thing to write in a book that we don't need them. But I'd rather not run the real-world experiment of navigating without them. And this is why this weekend so many will spend an hour with virtue's originalists.