Someone who wants to understand why conservative Protestants don’t vacate the public square now that their kind of religion seems to have been so completely routed — can anyone think of a single TV show that portrays them as respectfully as television does, say, homosexual people? — would benefit from reading the last two-thirds of Miracles, which presents the stories of dozens of Christians who’ve experienced miracles. The God who finds your car keys for you is a God who commands your vote.
Which I don’t mean snarkily. Catholics like me have our own stories of the same sort and a belief in the permanent presence of the supernatural that is even more out of step with the intellectual and cultural mainstream. We believe that over there in the Tabernacle above the altar in our churches is the Lord of the cosmos himself, in the form of bread, as the theologians put it, available for conversation or worship; that personal guardian angels watch over us; that hosts of the departed remain intimately interested in our lives and able to help us if we ask them; and that the elderly Argentinian CEO in Rome can tell us what God says without possibility of error (not that he’s done so in a long time).
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