And as you point out, neither is the monotheistic version of God central: "God is not primordial in the evolution of religion" is the wording you use.

The notion of God as a kind of absolute person in control of everything all comes from one place and it isn't found anywhere outside it. Of course, since Christianity and Islam picked this idea up it's become very widespread. But it certainly isn't inherent in religion, per se. And it's not very obvious in Confucianism or Buddhism or any of the non-Abrahamic religions.

So given your view of ritual and religion as this intensely socially embedded sort of practice, but also that you don't necessarily see the idea of God as being crucial to the idea of religion, are atheists antisocial? Or can atheists be religious without being theistic?

Well, in the first place, we've seen since 1990 a rise in people when asked what their religion is saying none. It went from 2 or 3 percent to something like 17 percent, which is a rather stunning development in 20 years. But when you ask further, only a tiny percent of the nones claim to be atheists or even agnostics. What they're not is they're not "organized religion."

And for those who are atheists, I think there are two kinds of atheism. There's one kind that says, "Give me a break, I don't care about that whole thing. It doesn't mean anything to me." But there are also people who don't believe in God but have deep moral commitments and have very strong views on what is good and what is evil and who even may devote themselves to good causes. Atheism per se certainly doesn't mean that people are antisocial. It just means they have found other symbols. The traditional religious symbols have lost their meaning to them but they still believe in social good, etc.

There's obviously a range of degrees of sensitivity to large-scale moral-spiritual questions in any society at any time. If we imagine that people in the Middle Ages were all deeply religious—forget about it. Most of them, if they went to church, they went to church because they thought it was going to be good for the crops or the baby would be well or something. There are always great saints and mystics and so on, but there's never been a period in which everybody was engrossed in religion.

Charles Taylor's point in A Secular Age is that the modern age is secular in that there's no presumption that you will be religious or be religious in a particular way, but that doesn't mean you won't be religious. It means there's an element of choice. In earlier, more conformist times, it was taken for granted that you would be of whatever religion you grew up in in your family and that was that. But now it's a question. It's a question whether you're religious or not religious: You have to think about it if you're serious at all. And all kinds of new possibilities arise in religion once we're free from the conformity of taken-for-granted religious practice. Habermas has said we live in a post-secular age. What he meant is we have to understand religion as not dead—though it may be pretty dead in Europe—and we'd better realize it's something we have to wake up and take seriously, because it's certainly alive and well in much of the world.