Good piece. One of the reasons Islam has made so many advances is that many non-Muslims are like Carroll: they really don't think their religion is very important, has anything special to say, or, in fact, is worth believing or practicing. They just shrug and say, oh, ok, it's a cultural thing and it's all the same to me.
But they're seriously in denial, because they think that Muslims have the same attitude to their own religion (that is, they don't believe it), and therefore the fact that it is undeniably a violent, aggressive, oppressive cult that has assaulted the world time and again can be ignored. Carroll and his ilk think everybody can just sort of hang out together and agree not to believe their respective culturally-determined religions. It's going to be a big surprise to Carroll when he's in the mosque making his Islamic profession at gun-point.
Catholicism is a power base in Boston, and the Globe seems committed to levelling that. They are the ones who conflated 25 years of pedophilia into a scandal that rocked the church. so, I am not surprised by this. It is just what every city needs, a hometown paper antagonistic to the folks.