To St. Augustine: “Prudence is love choosing wisely between the things that help and those that hinder” (De Morib. Eccl. xv). Contrary to the Beatles’ message, love is not all you need, for many well-motivated acts do much harm. So cautionary tales, such as Ross Douthat’s Bad Religoin: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (New York: Free Press, c. 2012), should provoke serious reflection on what we are actually doing in our religious life.
Douthat is the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for The New York Times as well as a practicing, traditional Catholic who writes with a deep concern for the current and future well being of Christianity in America. He argues: “America’s problem isn’t too much religion, as a growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right believe. Rather, it’s badreligion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of pseudo-Christianities” (p. 3). Clearly “most Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well. But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses” (p. 4). Consequently, we are les
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Douthat is the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for The New York Times as well as a practicing, traditional Catholic who writes with a deep concern for the current and future well being of Christianity in America. |
Knowing the word “heretic” is a loaded term, Douthat takes Alister McGrath’s definition for his own: “‘a form of Christian belief that, more by accident than design, ultimately ends up subverting, destabilizing or even destroying the core of Christian faith’” (p. 9). Its converse is the historic orthodoxy defined in ecumenical creeds that have distinguished conservative Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) for centuries. During the past half-century, however, such orthodoxy has virtually disappeared.
Douthat documents the vigorous health of America’s churches following WWII—churches and seminaries overflowed; preachers such as Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen effectively reached millions with a soul-saving gospel; serious thinkers and writers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Maritain, Walker Percy and C.S. Lewis provided compelling intellectual guidance. It was, quite simply, an American age of faith.
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Douthat documents the vigorous health of America’s churches following WWII—churches and seminaries overflowed; preachers such as Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen effectively reached millions with a soul-saving gospel... It was, quite simply, an American age of faith. |
“The crucial element” in this era, Douthat says, “was a deep and abiding confidence: not just faith alone, but a kind of faith in Christian faith, and a sense that after decades of marginalization and division, orthodox Christians might actually be on the winning side of history.” The churches “at midcentury offered believers a relatively secure position from which to engage with society as a whole—a foundation that had been rebuilt, as we have seen, rather than simply inherited, and that seemed the stronger for it” (p. 53). “For a fleeting historical moment, it seemed as though the Christian churches might” in fact “become something more like what the Gospels suggested they should be: the salt of the earth, a light to the nations, and a place where even modern man could find a home” (p. 54).
With the rapidity of a punctured balloon, however, this burgeoning religious world deflated in “the locust years” of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Despite desperate attempts to soften standards and accommodate cultural trends—especially regarding sex and marriage, abortion, euthanasia, and women’s ordination—the “Protestant Mainline’s membership stopped growing abruptly in the mid-1960s and then just as swiftly plunged” (p. 58).
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With the rapidity of a punctured balloon, however, this burgeoning religious world deflated in “the locust years” of the ‘60s and ‘70s. |
As if sharing the same harness, the post-Vatican II Catholic Church dramatically lost priests, monks, nuns, schools, and mass-attendees. “Only what Dean Kelley described as the ‘conservative churches’ bucked these trends” (p. 60), though in general “the heretics carried the day completely. America in those years became more religious but less traditionally Christian; more supernaturally minded but less churched; more spiritual in its sentiments but less pious in its practices” (p. 64). Reflecting this societal shift, a surging “dismissive attitude” triumphed in the nation’s elite institutions—universities, media, bureaucracies—so that by the century’s end “the tastemakers and power brokers and intellectual agenda setters” snidely dismissed orthodox Christianity as “completely declasse” (p. 82).
Churches zealously accommodating to the culture—substituting a message of “social justice” for personal redemption, replacing theology with sociology, embracing Harvey Cox’s prescriptions in The Secular City—were the biggest losers as their seminaries and congregations quickly shrank. They perfectly illustrated Dean Ralph Inge’s dictum: “He who marries the spirit of the age is soon left a widower.” Claiming to function “in the spirit of Vatican II,” accommodating Catholics (especially in universities, religious orders and liturgical committees) quickly distanced themselves from embarrassing vestiges of antiquity. By the mid-‘80s, one scholar noted that “‘the dismantling of traditional Roman Catholic theology, by Catholics themselves, is by now a fait accompli” and seminarians were taught “‘that Jesus of Nazareth did not assert any of the divine or messianic claims the Gospels attribute to him and that he died without believing he was Christ or the Son of God, not to mention the founder of a new religion’” (p 100).
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“it became increasingly clear that what vitality remained in American Christendom was being sustained by the unexpected alliance between Evangelicals and Catholics”. Their stance was visibly present in the mesmeric Pope John Paul II, who, George Weigel says, “‘did not propose to surrender to modernity. He proposed to convert it’” |
Resisting the spirit of the age, of course, were believers who dared to be somewhat old-fashioned, and “it became increasingly clear that what vitality remained in American Christendom was being sustained by the unexpected alliance between Evangelicals and Catholics” (p. 115). Their stance was visibly present in the mesmeric Pope John Paul II, who, George Weigel says, “‘did not propose to surrender to modernity. He proposed to convert it’” (p. 119). “In effect, John Paul made his pontificate a rallying point for the resistance to the redefinition of Christianity. And rally many Catholics did” (p. 120). They were joined in that endeavor by Evangelicals such as Francis Schaeffer, who early urged his readers to oppose the culture of death and deftly critiqued many of the threats posed by modernity.
Turning from his historical assessment, Douthat points out various heresies now captivating Christianity in America. There is, first, the effort to add various “gospels” to the New Testament canon. Accomodationist scholars such as John Dominic Crossan, Bart Ehrman, and Elaine Pagels, employing historical criticism and generally discarding any notion of biblical inspiration, propose adding various “gospels” to the New Testament canon, reverting to variants on the Gnosticism early condemned by the Church. Their views are invariably non-judgmental and tolerant of all sexual orientations, promoting self-esteem and the political agenda of the Democrat Party. But ultimately, “whether we end up with Jesus the Gnostic mystic, the Cynic philosopher, the proto-feminist, or the apocalyptic prophet—the present-day theological implications of his ‘real’ identity usually turn out to look a lot like the accomodationist Christianity of the Protestant Mainline” (p. 161).
Traditional orthodoxy, rooted in the thought of St. Paul, is discarded by emulating rather than worshipping Christ, treating the crucifixion as an example of brotherly love, and reducing the resurrection to a psychological insight. Equally attuned to the spirit of the age—and equally heretical—popular, entrepreneurial preachers such as Joel Osteen promote a God who “gives without demanding, forgives without threatening to judge, and hands out His rewards in this life rather than in the next” (p. 183). The Houston megachurch pastor has effectively refashioned “Christianity to suit an age of abundance, in which the old war between monotheism and money seems to have ended, for many believers, in a marriage of God and Mammon” (p. 183). Douthat cites a study “suggesting that 50 of the 260- largest churches in America now preach prosperity theology” (p. 192).
Even less attached to historical Christianity are various New Age spokesmen, such as Elizabeth Gilbert, who promote a mystical, pantheistic “God within” who “‘dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are’” (p. 230). The author of the phenomenally successful Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert felt inspired to leave her husband and travel the world in search of personal enlightenment, carving out for herself a satisfying religion. “‘You have every right,’” she writes, “‘to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God’” (p. 214). Whatever works for you must be true! The God within speaks to Gilbert in her own voice—the same message “preached by a cavalcade of contemporary gurus, teachers, and would-be holy men and women” as well as the same “theology that Elaine Pagels claims to have rediscovered in the lost gospels of the early Christian Church” (p. 215).
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To “recover” Christianity in America, Douthat urges and prays for revival—a return to the kind of good religion so brilliantly set forth in G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. |
Fortuitously, “the greatest popularizer of God Within theology” is Oprah Winfrey, effectively (and profitably) using her TV empire to spread the message. “It’s the church of the Oprah Winfrey Network, you might say: religion as a path to constant self-affirmation, heresy as self-help, the quest for God as the ultimate form of therapy” (p. 230). Needless to say, the God of the New Age resembles neither the Yahweh of the Jews nor the Holy Trinity of the Christians.
To “recover” Christianity in America, Douthat urges and prays for revival—a return to the kind of good religion so brilliantly set forth in G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. He hopes “to persuade even the most skeptical reader that traditional Christian faith might have more to offer this country than either its flawed defenders or its fashionable enemies would lead one to believe” (p. 293). It should be: 1) “political without being partisan;” 2) “ecumenical but also confessional;” 3) “moralistic but also holistic;” and, 4) “oriented toward sanctity and beauty.” “We are waiting, not for another political savior or television personality, but for a Dominic or a Francis, an Ignatius or a Wesley, a Wilberforce or a Newman, a Bonhoeffer or a Solzhenitsyn. 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” (p. 292).
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Gerard Reed is a retired professor of history and philosophy, most recently Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He is the author of three books — The Liberating Law; C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness; C.S. Lewis Explores Vice & Virtue — as well as a variety of articles and book reviews.
