Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
by Ross Douthat
Free Press (New York, 2012)
337 pages.
In a 2005 study conducted by sociologists Christian Smith
and Melinda Lundquist Denton, they found that 97% of teenagers professed some
sort of belief in the divine. 71% of those teenagers also agreed that they were
“very” or “somewhat” close to God, and an overwhelming majority identified
themselves as Christians. Contrary to public opinion—and the fear of many
parents and churches around the nation—secularism does not appear on the rise
in the United States. Celebration, however, would be premature. According to
Ross Douthat, it’s not that we no longer have religion in this country.
Instead, we have bad religion—which is the theme (and title) of Douthat’s
latest book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.
For Douthat, the youngest ever New York Times op-ed columnist, “America’s problem isn’t too much religion, or too little of
it.” Bad religion, according to the author, is “the slow-motion collapse of
traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive
pseudo-Christianities in its place.” Chock full of telling anecdotes and
history, Douthat surveys the rise and decline of mainline Protestantism in the
United States, as well as the golden era of American Catholicism that reached
its peak in the 1960’s. For
Catholics and Protestants alike, much of the twentieth century was defined by
an individual or a family’s commitment to their particular faith tradition,
which had a core understanding of orthodox beliefs and practices, dubbed by the
Anglican C.S. Lewis as a mere Christianity.
The problem today, however, is that most Americans are losing that center.
Gone are the days when religious debates throughout the
country were over Catholic belief in the real presence in the Eucharist or
Southern Baptist condemnation of alcohol. Even more divisive topics like
women’s ordination or the use of contraceptives within marriage have taken a
back seat, while beliefs that were once considered to be at the very heart of
Christianity and widely shared in all Christian traditions, such as the
doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, a common understanding of sin,
the need for constant repentance, and the hope of Heaven after death, are now
largely questioned and viewed as irrelevant to our modern age.
Some may respond that Douthat is too pessimistic and argue
that those embracing or promoting unorthodox beliefs are simply heretics. For
Douthat, however, these heretics are becoming the new norm. Once upon a time in
American Christianity, thinkers like Jacques Maritain, Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
John Henry Newman, Elizabeth Anscombe, and G.K. Chesterton were heralded as men
and women who spoke and wrote with authority on matters related to Christian
thought. They have now been replaced with figures like Benny Hinn, Oprah
Winfrey, Dan Brown, Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and Elaine Pagels and orthodox
Christianity is being replaced by a do-it-yourself spirituality or therapeutic
religion.
Consider, for example, the 2006 buzz around the Gnostic Gospel
of Judas in which the National Geographic
Society spent $1 million dollars to purchase the document and hundreds of
thousands more in restoration and analysis or the over four million copies of
Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now
that have been sold. This interest in religion does not at all hint at
secularization, but instead, a redefining of what Americans consider to be true
religion. The success of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for
Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia
by Elizabeth Glibert, which spent 187 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, is the brand of religion that
Americans are now embracing. Gilbert, who divorced her husband, traveled the
world, and supposedly found happiness by marrying a Brazilian man she met in
Bali, has become a mouthpiece for religion in America today. In her book and
other writings, she chronicles her quest to discover the God within, and
encourages readers to “take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and
you keep moving to the light.”
Throughout Bad Religion,
Douthat convincingly argues that Gilbert and others are not only changing the
way Americans view religion, but they are also weakening the moral fiber of our
country. Christianity and its teachings have long shaped the way in which
Americans live their lives—from Christian sexual ethics that demand chastity
and aim to uphold marriage and the family to Christian principles of virtue and
charity that should transform the way Christians engage in business
transactions, there has been a distinctively Christian approach to American
public life that is now in jeopardy of being lost. The bad religion being
taught by Osteen, Gilbert, and others, which emphasizes personal pleasure and
happiness over adherence to moral norms and unchanging values, offers little to
sustain families or communities—or even the individual.
In this new era, in which self-help has replaced
self-sacrifice and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has supplanted T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets, there is much work to be done if we are to reorient
our country and ourselves. For Catholics, this is part of what both Pope John
Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI are calling for in the new evangelization—a
renewed zeal for the faith and its witness to the world around us. The millions
of dollars Americans spend on self-help books and therapy can all be found for
free in the confessional at any Catholic Church.
As Douthat concludes in Bad Religion, anyone wanting to save their country should first
be concerned with saving themselves. Americans looking to achieve personal
success or greatness—or even simple happiness—would be wise to look to the
saints who bear witness to lives of great heroism and virtue. The lives of
these holy men and women remind us that it is a full, robust commitment to the
faith that ultimately satisfies both our wants and our needs. Seeking first the kingdom of God will not only amount to
satisfaction in this life, but also the hope of the world to come.