Ross Douthat – Bad Religion. How We Became A Nation Of Heretics
Ross Douthat on Eat, Pray, Love
God wants me to be happy and feel good about what I already want to be doing.
That’s pop spirituality in the West. What my libido wants is what God wants.
American Christianity has grown weaker, but Americans as a people are still deeply interested in religious concepts. We may be more spiritually inclined than fifty years ago when churches were stronger.
The rise of the “nones”
We’re more secular, it would seem, but…
People still say:
- I pray
- I believe in God
- I believe in an afterlife
- I consider myself a spiritual seeker
Big emphases of the New Testament – ethical demands – are
- Don’t give in to the temptations of material prosperity
- Don’t give in to sexual temptation (“you have heard…” but I say … )
Jesus made it harder. He affirmed the OT and reinforced it.
Since 1946, when Christianity was widely accepted, America has experienced unprecedented prosperity (problem for ethical demand #1) and the pill – sex with much less risk of the consequence of a birth (demand #2).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zsljbjM_4Q
Imagine MLK trying to appeal to our common faith as he did in his Letter from a Birm. Jail
Relative convergence between different churches in the US and robust demographic strength to our polarized era today.
- Polarization itself.
In politics – the parties have sorted themselves according to ideology. Liberal Christianity became easily confused with the Democrat Party and Conservative Christianity with the Republican Party. - Sexual Revolution.
the idea of No Sex outside of traditional marriage was widely accepted as common sense. People became married are were married to the first person they had sex with. The Pill. The revolution.
Today there’s a sense that chastity is unhealthy. Sex outside marriage is common and cohabitation. Now gay marriage. - Money.
The country has become much richer since the 1950s – more than any country ever. vs. the NT suspicion of wealth. This has pushed people away from ministry and the priesthood, towards theologies that would justify wealth.
- Globalization, Mass Communication and Decolonization.
My church doesn’t have a monopoly on truth especially since so many bad things were done throughout history by my religion. BTW, this is great in areas experiencing decolonization. (Latin America, Africa)
The world is too big for one creed to claim a monopoly on truth. Or as I would paraphrase – all religions are pretty much the same.
Decline in American affiliation with churches since the 1960s.
Steepest in mainline churches.
Roman Catholicism has suffered steep declines masked by Hispanic immigration growth.
Evangelical Christianity in America has hit a ceiling, benefitting from the decline of Protestant denominations. There is vitality in many ways, but there is much more institutional weakness, dissolution and a much reduced footprint in elite culture, mass-media and elsewhere than there was a few generations ago.
So…what forces have risen? The heretical tendency.
We’re a nation with one foot in Christianity and a foot somewhere else.
Three Pop Cultural Examples
Where are people getting their religious ideas? Religious pop culture. Things like
- The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown and other novels. The secret is that Jesus would more likely approve of your lifestyle.
- Joel Osteen. (re: Money) The Billy Graham of our day. What is he offering? Open-handedness. God’s love. But you have half of Billy Graham’s message. No emphasis on Love, Friday (not Good Friday), not sin, judgment, What God wants for you is what God has given Joel – big house, new car…
- Eat, Pray, Love – book and movie. (re: Sex) Elizabeth Gilbert. Shows that America is not purely secular. She has raw mystical encounters with God. Contrast her experience with Aquinas. She doesn’t convert. She goes to an Ashram but does not become a Hindu or a Christian. It’s about how God helped her leave her husband, leave her boyfriend and find love in the handsome Brazilian divorcee in Bali. Relativism. Globalization. Refrigerator magnet poetry. A little Hinduism. A little Christianity. No sense that part of a religious tradition is to call you out of yourself or your libido.
When we have religious impulses but do not pour them into – we pour them into politics – Glenn Beck. Win in absolute terms. We’re going to take back America.
RD to Bill Maher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgrP-T5Qpss
There’s a word for where we are – when Christianity is … a nation of heretics.
What you hate most about religion is
Embodied by the faiths that have risen as institutional Christianity has declined. Prosperity Gospel, Joel Osteen, self-help gurus, Deepak Chopra style spirituality.
“The difference between the winners and losers is how long they take to pity themselves.”