Some weeks ago, I registered some of my reservations about Ross Douthat's recent foray into a distinctive style of apologetics, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Douthat is neither a theologian nor an academic religion scholar but a journalist, a New York Times opinion columnist; but that is no reason to disparage his writings on religion. Moreover, whatever one concludes about Believe, I think that Douthat's 2012 book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press), which I have reread in preparation for Holy Week, remains a masterful account of the multiple crises facing contemporary American religion today and is, if anything, more relevant and more to the point than it was 13 years ago when it was first published. In that now classic book, Douthat served up a rigorous analysis of the contemporary American Christian landscape and offered advice to both believers and their institutions.
The first half of Douthat's book summarized how we got to where we are today. It's a familiar story - familiar certainly to those of us either old enough to have lived through it or historically aware enough to appreciate how our relatively recent past was so very different from our present. It's the familiar story of a "Lost World" of confident, evangelizing, post-war American Christianity and its largely (and seemingly self-inflicted) decline. Douthat's "Lost World" examined four successful strains of post-war American Christian experience - Mainline Protestantism (personified by Reinhold Niebuhr), Evangelical Christianity (represented by Billy Graham), Roman Catholicism (exemplified by Fulton Sheen), and African-American Christianity (de-marginalized by Martin Luther King, Jr.). From there, the familiar trajectory is traced, as most major American Church groups, for the first time in American history, suddenly stopped growing and entered a period of unprecedented decline (as they frantically aspired to remain relevant by accommodating to the culture which they were originally meant to convert).
A crucial key to understanding our present situation is that popular interest in the things that religion had traditionally been about has continued, even while religious institutions seem to have been in a free fall of decline - with predictable consequences for both religion and society.
Whereas "both the Protestant Mainline and the Catholic Church were strong cultures in 1950s America - capable of making their presence felt in the commanding heights of American life," today's "mainline has drifted to the sidelines of American life, Catholicism's cultural capital has been reduced by decades of civil war, and Evangelicalism still has the air of an embattled subculture rather than the confidence of an ascendent force."
In the second part of Bad Religion, Douthat discussed four "heresies" that have come to dominate contemporary American culture and America's still ostensibly Christian religion: "heresies" he calls "Lost in the Gospels" (a fashion for finding a "real" Jesus prior to and apart from the historical Church), "Pray and Grow Rich" (an uncritical reconciliation of Christianity with prosperity), "the God Within" (a pyschologized, self-absorbed religiosity, what Philip Rieff famously warned against in his 1966 classic, The Triumph of the Therapeutic), and finally "The City on the Hill" (our contemporary - and if anything significantly increased since 2012 - uncritical reduction of religion to politics). What all these "heresies" have in common - the goal of all heresies, according to Douthat - is "to extract from the tensions of the gospel narratives a more consistent, streamlined, and noncontradictory Jesus," in contrast to Christian orthodoxy's "fidelity to the whole of Jesus."
In the second part of Bad Religion, Douthat discussed four "heresies" that have come to dominate contemporary American culture and America's still ostensibly Christian religion: "heresies" he calls "Lost in the Gospels" (a fashion for finding a "real" Jesus prior to and apart from the historical Church), "Pray and Grow Rich" (an uncritical reconciliation of Christianity with prosperity), "the God Within" (a pyschologized, self-absorbed religiosity, what Philip Rieff famously warned against in his 1966 classic, The Triumph of the Therapeutic), and finally "The City on the Hill" (our contemporary - and if anything significantly increased since 2012 - uncritical reduction of religion to politics). What all these "heresies" have in common - the goal of all heresies, according to Douthat - is "to extract from the tensions of the gospel narratives a more consistent, streamlined, and noncontradictory Jesus," in contrast to Christian orthodoxy's "fidelity to the whole of Jesus."
In our contemporary context, it is especially the fourth of these "heresies" that seems so especially salient, although I think all the others remain vigorous alternatives to traditional Christianity.
Douthat identified "four potential touchstones for a recovery of Christianity, each of which has both possibilities and limitations. The first, he called, "the postmodern opportunity" (the possibility of the Church confronting and responding to globalized rootlessness, widespread skepticism, and religious relativism as the Church has successfully confronted and responded to such forces in its past). Personally, I suspect that may account for some of the seeming revival of spirituality and religion that appears to be occurring at present in certain settings. The problem with that for religion, however, is the challenge "to avoid simply becoming a kind of warmed-over accommodationism," which may end up ultimately more interested in adapting to the culture than in changing it."
Douthat identified "four potential touchstones for a recovery of Christianity, each of which has both possibilities and limitations. The first, he called, "the postmodern opportunity" (the possibility of the Church confronting and responding to globalized rootlessness, widespread skepticism, and religious relativism as the Church has successfully confronted and responded to such forces in its past). Personally, I suspect that may account for some of the seeming revival of spirituality and religion that appears to be occurring at present in certain settings. The problem with that for religion, however, is the challenge "to avoid simply becoming a kind of warmed-over accommodationism," which may end up ultimately more interested in adapting to the culture than in changing it."
A second strategy would be something akin to Rod Dreher's "Benedict option" (a limited withdrawal from engagement with the world on the model of St. Benedict's monastic response to the Roman Empire's collapse). One problem with that, however, is that it "often seems to have little to say about the millions o baptized Christians whom separatism would effectively leave behind." Ancient Christians, after all, "did not just withdraw from a collapsing civilization" but "took responsibility for it as well."
The third possible avenue for Christian recovery Douthat called "the New Chrsitendom" (the growth of Third World Christianity and its impact on the American Church through immigration and missionary activity). On the other hand, as in fact we are already seeing some signs of in the years since Douthat wrote this, "the American way of religion" may changes immigrants, more than immigrants change American religion.
Finally, he proposed "an age of diminished expectations" (a crisis-induced reassessment "that's willing to reckon with the ways that bad theology and bad religion have helped bring us to our present pass"). That Douthat saw as contributing to the mid-century, postwar religious revival in the U.S. On the other hand, he feared, "institutional failure may just end up inspiring Americans to be even more suspicious of any sort of religious authority, and more inclined to put their faiht only in the God they find within." That caution certainly seems warranted by recent experiences of Churches' institutional failures.
Douthat concluded with an exhortation to the kind of individual and communal faith that can animate what he calls "a Christian renaissance." He called for a faith that is "political without being partisan," which frees Christians to embrace different political positions, while being open to the Gospel's challenge to every ideology. He recalled how not that long ago "America's leading Evangelical politician was the antiwar environmentalist Republican Mark Hatfield, and one of its leading Catholic officeholders was the pro-life Democrat Sargent Shriver. But what, one wonders in the light of all that has happened since, would be required to enable anything like that now? Secondly, he suggested "a renewed Christianity should be ecumenical but also confessional" and offered Timothy Keller (The Reason for God, 2008) as a model. Thirdly, he proposed "a renewed Christianity should be moralistic but also holisitic." By this, he meant not downplaying Christianity's moral demands in the area of sexuality but also not acting as if there were only one, rather than seven, deadly sins - and not exclusively emphasizing culturally contentious issues such as homosexuality, while neglecting, for example, "the heterosexual divorce rate, the heterosexual retreat from marriage, and the heterosexual out-of-wedlock birthrate that should command the most attention from Christian moralists.""
Finally, Douthat insisted, "a renewed Christianity should be oriented toward sanctity and beauty." He concludes: "Only sanctity can justify Christianity's existence; only sanctity can make the case for faith; only sanctity, or the hope thereof, can ultimately redeem the world. ... To make any difference in our common life, Christianity must be lived - not as a means to social cohesion or national renewal, but as an end unto itself."
Douthat concluded with an exhortation to the kind of individual and communal faith that can animate what he calls "a Christian renaissance." He called for a faith that is "political without being partisan," which frees Christians to embrace different political positions, while being open to the Gospel's challenge to every ideology. He recalled how not that long ago "America's leading Evangelical politician was the antiwar environmentalist Republican Mark Hatfield, and one of its leading Catholic officeholders was the pro-life Democrat Sargent Shriver. But what, one wonders in the light of all that has happened since, would be required to enable anything like that now? Secondly, he suggested "a renewed Christianity should be ecumenical but also confessional" and offered Timothy Keller (The Reason for God, 2008) as a model. Thirdly, he proposed "a renewed Christianity should be moralistic but also holisitic." By this, he meant not downplaying Christianity's moral demands in the area of sexuality but also not acting as if there were only one, rather than seven, deadly sins - and not exclusively emphasizing culturally contentious issues such as homosexuality, while neglecting, for example, "the heterosexual divorce rate, the heterosexual retreat from marriage, and the heterosexual out-of-wedlock birthrate that should command the most attention from Christian moralists.""
Finally, Douthat insisted, "a renewed Christianity should be oriented toward sanctity and beauty." He concludes: "Only sanctity can justify Christianity's existence; only sanctity can make the case for faith; only sanctity, or the hope thereof, can ultimately redeem the world. ... To make any difference in our common life, Christianity must be lived - not as a means to social cohesion or national renewal, but as an end unto itself."
Therein, ultimately lies the challenge. It seems increasingly plausible to suggest that it is less secularization as once understood than it is the varieties of "bad religion" that Douthat described - consumeristic, psychologized, and politicized - that pose the greatest ongoing and continuing threats to authentic Christian revival in the U.S.
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