For the better part of a decade, the rise of the so-called “nones” — individuals without religious affiliation — has provoked voluminous commentary.

And rightfully so.

America’s unique brand of religiosity, after all, has long been one of the nation’s distinguishing characteristics; losing it now would mean a seismic shift in the country’s core constitution.

The oh-so-quotable French cultural chronicler of early American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed, “There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” He further wrote: “Religion in America … must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it.”

So, in a nation where religion and freedom have been so inextricably intertwined for so long, fear that religious atrophy might lead to a diminishment of genuine freedom is not altogether unwarranted.

Which begs the question: is there anything that can stem the tide of what scholar Charles Taylor aptly dubs the “Secular Age”?

For the late Stephen Webb, a Protestant scholar-turned-Catholic convert, the answer was, at least partially, Mormon theology.

Before his untimely death last year, he experienced a stunningly prodigious period of scholarship in which he produced articles, speeches and books with titles such as “Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter” (Oxford, 2012); “Mormon Christianity: What Non-Mormon Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints,” (Oxford, 2013); and “Catholic and Mormon: A Theological Conversation,” (Oxford, 2015).

Underlying his work is the idea that, to stay relevant, Christianity has to overcome a form of soft-agnosticism bred from today’s pervasive scientific worldview in which most people believe that the known physical universe is all that exists. Any other kind of “existence” is incoherent.

The classic Judeo-Christian conceptions of deity as noetic and sentient (but also immaterial and beyond time and space) are increasingly incoherent to modern sensibilities that assume consciousness and existence require matter and physicality.

Can a being think, for example, without some sort of brain or other material mechanism?

But in the revelations of Joseph Smith, Webb saw a solution. “There is no such thing as immaterial matter,” one of Smith’s revelations reads. “All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes.” Smith said, in other words, that there are different gradations of matter.

At a lecture at Brigham Young University, Webb said: “Atheism is widespread because so many people think that every aspect of existence can be reduced to a set of physical causes. Even while scientists keep pushing the limits of our ability to imagine what matter is, what the world needs now is what it has always needed: a renewed and renewing sense of the reality of God.”

For Webb, Smith began that project by “bridging the gulf between spirit and matter with his first vision, in which he saw God the Father and God the Son as two individual and fully embodied persons. … In other words, he inferred from his vision that the world consists of multiple levels of physical reality rather than simply two kinds of substances, one material and one immaterial.”

If there is a way out of an agnostic, secular-based worldview, Webb believed theology had to create a space for the modern mind to conceive of a worship-worthy God who is not wholly other and beyond the realm of reason. For Webb, that God was in Mormonism.

“We cannot see it,” he said, quoting Smith’s revelation, “but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.”