It sounds like Richard Cohen is tired of whatever hoopla accompanied New York's getting a new cardinal.
And I really doubt he "applauded" Tim Tebow, though I can believe he called him "the so-called praying quarterback."
If religion hasn't been banished from public discussion, it may not be because Richard Cohen wanted to allow it, but because he couldn't help it.
I think that's pretty close to it. Cohen, methinks, is one of those secularized socialist Jews who are perfectly comfortable "doing lunch" with various lowercase exponents of national socialism and socialist nationalism, socialist socialism, or any other form of statist governance you can dream up, if only it pretends to be more-or-less amiable in its materialism and atheism; but become irritable and inconsolable when real Christian theists begin to act from their convictions and talk about public morality and the idea of "virtue in a republic" -- which our Framers reminded us several times, would be indispensable to keeping the forms of the Republic in operation.
Cohen would rather lounge and laze with capos and zampolit types and scoff at the Mel Gibsons of the world, and just hope his friends don't eat him up. Again.