Ross Douthat has the dubious distinction of being
“the conservative on the New York Times
op-ed page.” His previous books are an inside look at Harvard culture and a
policy-wonk plan to revive the Republican Party. This is not the guy you expect
to write a passionate and sensitive book on American Christianity, which opens
with W.H. Auden’s journey back to the Anglican Church and ends with something
close to an altar call.
Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of
Heretics tells a story of decline, in which a host of self-comforting and
banal Christianities triumph over the strange, challenging, and paradoxical Jesus
of the Gospels. At the start of Douthat’s book the mainline Protestant churches
are strong, the Catholic Church has emerged as a surprising cultural
heavyweight, and both white evangelicals and the black church are striding
forward–sometimes together, as in Billy Graham’s integrated revivals–after
periods of marginalized retreat. For a brief moment the churches seemed to know
how to be political without being politicized, and every Hollywood priest was a
friend to orphans. A “small-o orthodoxy” seemed like the natural home for poets
like Auden, authors like Flannery O’Connor, prophetic moral and political
leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and even television personalities like
Fulton Sheen: “mass-market faith and highbrow religiosity seemed to complement
each other.”
Many snowflakes made the avalanche which brought
down this great edifice. Douthat points out that the crisis of Christianity
took place during a time of increasing interest in religious questions; he
argues throughout the book that we have neither too much religion nor too
little, but the wrong kind. He lays especial weight on the impact of five
factors: political polarization over questions like the Vietnam War, which
divided the churches much more than the civil-rights movement had; the sexual
revolution, in which effective contraception severed the old link between
Christian moral law and common sense; increasing knowledge of other cultures;
the rise of the affluent and mobile society; and the growing sense, among the
cultural elite, that traditional Christianity was déclassé.
One of the great strengths of Bad Religion
is its hints of Douthat’s fiscal policy-wonk credentials. He is painfully aware
of the way our economic conditions shape our beliefs. In an affluent society,
and especially one with the American ideology that everyone is in the middle
class (if not now, then soon!), it’s harder to hear Jesus’ emphasis on the
temptations of wealth. Both the sexual revolution and the growth of American
prosperity challenged Christian orthodoxy because they seemed to promise a good
life for those who would simply ignore the inconvenient parts of the Gospels.
Douthat is good at fighting his enemies: the
prosperity preachers, the peddlers of Gnostic conspiracy, the nationalists who
call down God’s blessing for America’s utopian wars, and the self-help
solipsism of Oprah-style therapeutic theology.
But he also has the rarer talent of making
attractive the cause he’s fighting for. This cause is, basically, Jesus
uncensored. “Every argument about Christianity is at bottom an argument about
the character of Christ himself,” Douthat writes, and he contends that our
contemporary heresies are attempts to solve the problem of Jesus by erasing
some part of his message. The do-it-yourself Jesus created by these efforts,
unfortunately, is only as big as our own imaginations–and often even smaller
than that. The paradoxes of Christianity—-a practical, mystical, ascetic,
incarnational faith, whose God holds us to extraordinarily high standards and
then offers infinite forgiveness–are paradoxes of Jesus himself. Unlike the
heresies Douthat delineates, Jesus left no part of his disciples unscathed.
Bad Religion’s weak spots are its
necessary oversimplifications of history (Douthat admits as much, noting that
there are counter-narratives that he thinks are ultimately less relevant than
the story he’s telling) and of what Douthat calls orthodoxy. “Orthodoxy”
basically means here acceptance of the New Testament with no additions or
corrections; acknowledgment that none of the seven deadly sins is really a
virtue in disguise; and, overall, a certain humility in the face of the unknown
and the tradition handed down, rather than a belief that the ordinary believer
should be able to pick and choose which parts of Scripture and tradition really
matter. Mainline Protestants fit, as do Catholics, various forms of
evangelical, and (though they play virtually no role in this book) the Eastern
churches. The commonalities between these separated brethren are important and
often beautiful. I am just not convinced that it’s possible to finesse the
Reformation as much as Douthat tries to—-especially when the charge of
resolving the Christian paradoxes by denying some part of orthodox Christianity
is precisely the claim many Catholics and Orthodox would lay against the
Protestant churches.
Still, it would be churlish to complain about a
book as heartfelt and thoughtful as this one. Douthat’s final call for
Christian renewal starts out with suggestions of the promises and perils of
postmodernism, the re-evangelization of America by the global church, and other
big-picture trends. This final chapter is a cri de coeur from someone
longing for the public face of Christianity to be more orthodox and therefore
more beautiful. (Full disclosure: My writing on the renewal of spiritual
friendship is favorably cited in this section.) And Douthat closes with a
poignant personal appeal: “Anyone who seeks a more perfect union should begin
by seeking the perfection of their own soul. Anyone who would save their
country should first look to save themselves. Seek first the kingdom of God and
his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” As an antidote
to the American instrumentalized and weaponized Jesus, that’s hard to beat.
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