Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
By Ross Douthat
(Free Press, 352 pages, $26)
MEET THE TWO FACES of American religion. One belongs to Dr.
Leroy Thompson, a black preacher who teaches that God not only has
treasure stored for the believer in heaven but will also deliver
riches in this life. A friend covered one of Thompson’s conferences
for a magazine, and his sermons can easily be found on YouTube.
Thompson is a cross between Jimmy Swaggart and Scrooge McDuck.
After a smattering of Scripture, he leads his flock into a chant:
“Money cometh to me now!” But for most of the
congregation, it would be more accurate to say money goes. They lay
their dollars on the altar. Thompson proceeds to dance in their
money, a sight that in a different era would have been more common
in a strip club on Saturday night than in a church on Sunday
morning.
The second face belongs to Elizabeth Gilbert, whose spiritual
journey became the popular book and film Eat, Pray, Love.
After a night of despair, she locked herself in the bathroom of her
Hudson Valley home and offered the Almighty—or Whoever, really—this
unorthodox prayer: “I don’t want to be married anymore…. I don’t
want to be married anymore. I don’t want to live in this big house.
I don’t want to have a baby.”
Eventually, she received a response, but not of the burning bush
variety. “[I]t was not an Old Testament Hollywood Charlton Heston
voice,” she later wrote, “nor was it a voice telling me I must
build a baseball field in my backyard. It was merely my own voice,
speaking from within my own self.” Yet it was her voice as she had
never heard it before, “perfectly wise, calm, and compassionate.”
Gilbert received two miracles: Her husband granted her a divorce,
and a publisher gave her the advance that allowed to her travel to
Italy, India, and Indonesia.
One face is at least nominally orthodox, invoking Scripture and
tradition while seeking a real, supernatural, and personal God. The
other is secular, skeptical of absolute moral claims like the “one
fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path
to God.” Both are ultimately rooted in the self. God, whether He
exists in a conventional sense or not, is reduced to what Harry
Emerson Fosdick described as a “cosmic bellboy for whom we can
press a button to get things.”
ROSS DOUTHAT CONFRONTS both extremes in Bad Religion: How We
Became a Nation of Heretics. Douthat is a columnist for the
New York Times, where he faces the unenviable task of
trying to persuade a mostly liberal, secular audience of the
reasonableness of being conservative, pro-life, and Christian. In
this capacity, he does yeoman’s work and deserves combat pay for
navigating the comments sections on his own blog posts.
Douthat paints a familiar picture of old-time religion in
decline. The mainline Protestant churches stopped growing in the
1960s and have hemorrhaged members ever since. Douthat observes,
“Of the eleven Protestant churches that claimed more than a million
members in the early 1970s, eight had fewer members in 1973 than in
1965.”
The plunge in church attendance coincided with a steep drop in
cultural influence. Church school enrollment fell dramatically.
Donations dried up and churches ran large budget deficits. Foreign
missionary work all but vanished. “By the early 1990s,” Douthat
writes, “60 percent of Methodist parishioners were over fifty, and
there were more Muslims in America than Episcopalians.”
Latino immigration helped the American Catholic Church’s numbers
remain steady as the mainline Protestants atrophied, but the Roman
church wasn’t immune to these trends. Weekly attendance at mass
dropped from 70 percent to 50 percent in just 10 years. The gap
between Catholic and Protestant church attendance disappeared—and,
writes Douthat, “not because Protestants suddenly became more
diligent in their churchgoing.”
In 1950, there was one priest for every 600 American Catholics.
By 1980, there was only one for every thousand. Seminary enrollment
had fallen by Two-thirds. The rate at which women entered into
religious communities dropped by 88 percent just between 1965 and
1971. The ratio of nuns to American Catholics was halved between
1965 and 1985. Douthat concludes: “The thick culture that had defi
ned and sustained the pre-Vatican II Church—the round of
confessions and novenas, pilgrimages and Stations of the
Cross—dissipated like a cloud of incense in a sudden breeze.”
Some of this had to do with the crisis of liberal Christianity.
The established churches had largely tried to accommodate changes
in the broader culture, often diluting the Gospel in the process.
The moral high-water mark came with the civilrights movement of the
1960s. But as social pressure to attend church declined, more
secular people decided to stop snoozing away their Sundays in
Episcopalian pews. More orthodox Christians left the Catholics and
mainliners in search of stronger stuff.
Conservative churches grew and flourished as liberal ones
withered. Douthat is nevertheless skeptical of popular claims that
this means American Christianity is just fine. For one thing, the
new evangelical churches never replicated the cultural and social
influence obtained by the mainline Protestants or the Catholic
Church of the 1950s. They were, for better or worse, a strong
subculture.
Second, Douthat notes, previous religious awakenings in the 18th
and 19th centuries had strengthened institutional Christianity
across the board. The First Great Awakening was a time of explosive
growth for the Methodist Church. Even when the most prominent
spiritual leaders of the era espoused unusual theological
doctrines, the orthodox and the established tended to benefi t from
the revival as well.
MOST IMPORTANTLY for the purposes of Bad Religion,
these new churches were unreliable in their orthodoxy. Yes, their
members were politically conservative, serious about the
supernatural aspects of their faith, and strict in their sexual
morality. But their fundamentalist theology frequently carried many
19th-century innovations. Douthat calls it the “Evangelicalism of
the Left Behind novels and Joel Osteen… rather than of
Billy Graham or C.S. Lewis.” Many denominations Dean Kelley
classified as “conservative churches”—Seventh-Day Adventists,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons—were arguably outside of orthodox
Christianity.
At the same time, the rise in secularism did not entirely dampen
religious enthusiasm even among those who understood themselves to
be irreligious. Many of these new seculars were deeply
superstitious, confi rming G.K. Chesterton’s observation that when
people cease believing in God “they don’t believe in nothing—they
believe in everything.” Douthat argues that the 1960s and ’70s were
a period when “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,” he writes. “It was a golden age if you wanted to talk
about UFOs or crystals, the Kama Sutra or the I Ching.”
This in turn gave way to a golden age of narcissism: the
name-and-claim-it prosperity gospel and the secular self-help gurus
who can find an excuse for fulfilling your every need. James Frey
writes in The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, a 2011
attempt to improve upon the Gospels, “God doesn’t care what we say
or who we f—k or what we do with our bodies or who we love or who
we marry.” Those words are attributed to Jesus, denying any divine
interest in some of the most important things in life.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church has been racked by the priest
sexual abuse scandals. Evangelical Protestantism frequently becomes
a form of redstate identity politics. Outside of the “devoutest of
the devoutest,” there’s a wide gap between Christian belief and
practice when it comes to sexuality and abortion. Our national
civil religion is not Mere Christianity but therapeutic moral
deism.
Yet the longing for God remains as strong as ever, even if we
don’t recognize it as such. So too is the philosophical and
spiritual debt that even the most secular among us owe to
Christianity. The evidence is growing that self-help is doing more
to foster isolation than contentment.
Near the end of Bad Religion, Douthat quotes the same
Scripture that Leroy Thompson cites in promising that the money
will cometh: Seek first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “My
hope throughout,” he writes, “has been 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.”
If such a rediscovery were to occur, Douthat’s important book
would be a valuable starting point.
