There’s some truth to this, but I think something larger is going on here, which has to do with the Christian relationship to rights-based liberalism, and particularly the Lockean tradition that America is (roughly speaking) founded on. To oversimplify egregiously but not, I think, inaccurately, the modern Anglo-American political tradition came into being because Christians were willing to accept the Christianity-lite political settlement offered by social-contract liberalism – and they were willing to accept it because its major premise, that man was endowed with natural and inalienable rights by Nature’s God, was broadly congruent with Christian tradition. In a Lockean-liberal society, the law might not do everything that some Christians would like it to do – compel belief, for instance – but neither would it directly violate basic Christian principles. ~Ross Douthat

Very few Christians I have ever met or read about have ever wanted to “compel belief,” since most Christians who give it much thought understand that belief cannot be compelled. What they may want is to penalise heresy and unbelief, which is different from compelling belief. The Byzantines barred heretics from the civil service and the army and put them under legal disadvantages with respect to inheritance and other property matters, but with very few exceptions they never “compelled belief.” Medieval Catholics were a bit more robust in enforcing anti-heresy provisions, but these laws aimed at prohibiting false beliefs and not compelling adherence as such. Of course, these prohibitions were aimed at encouraging people to move towards the Faith, but as we all know regulations of this kind will often fail to change people in their most basic convictions. This may seem like a secondary point, but it is important to puncture this myth straightaway, since it is one of Mr. Douthat’s favourite refrains in talking about his more theocratically inclined brethren.

But someone must really explain why social contract liberalism is Christianity Lite. I can see that many of its adherents were Christians, most often of a Dissenting confession, and that almost the entire population of the colonies when these ideas were at their most fashionable and politically significant was made up of practicing Christians. I can also see that it was only in the peculiar circumstances of Reformed England and Scotland that Presbyterian and Independent applications of covenant theology to political theory lent a certain cultural and social heft to Roundhead interpretations of sovereignty, and I can also see that most English Enlightenment theorists would make the necessary references to a vague theism as the ultimate source of the rights that Englishmen had by virtue of constitutional law. But how does any of this add up to “social contract liberalism” being Christianity Lite? Far from being Christianity Lite, it was one of the first moves that pushed Christianity from public and political thought and life. It provided an alternative narrative of the formation and purpose of social and political life in which religious truth and religious authority alike ceased to possess their former centrality. If the notion that “Nature’s God” endowed man with inalienable rights was man was “broadly congruent with Christian tradition,” why did Catholics and Orthodox find this notion so fundamentally at odds with Christian tradition for a very long time?