Norm's non-comedy persona (I suspect even when not "performing" he was still performing, at least to himself) was probably not immune to pretense.

I can see the point he is trying to make, although I think it's nonsense

Hardly nonsense and a view espoused by several other cultural commentators and authors (e.g., Ross Douthat, Dostoyevsky, Simone Weil, to name a few).

All I can say is that hankering for moral bedrock by looking back to a surely contrived ideal of Christianity seems trite and somewhat vindictive to me. To use one of my favourite Norm-isms, I don't own a doghouse: am I lying to myself?

To what truth does he refer to? You don't get to pick and choose which bits you like and which you don't, when making this kind of argument.

Isn't your first line projecting onto him something that he's not evidencing? Then the second line... is he picking and choosing? He names Christianity, it's not an ambiguous term.

The entire Romantic era was a diss of the Enlightenment. Norm wasn’t “a bit crazy”, he was educated.

It reads as an appeal to irrationality or the opposite of reason. Educated or not, not particularly useful.