No, I don’t think the adjective “post-Christian” is a good adjective for describing American society. It’s too categorical, too… decisive. But people are using it these days, and more in the spirit of description than in one of just-around-the-bend warning. For example, at the Anglican church I attend, where a dwindling of membership has prompted us to have a number of meetings about “re-visioning” our overall approach, a church-growth consultant we’d brought in used the adjective fairly freely and authoritatively.
Hearing him use that term bothered me. That, alongside my own thinking about Lennon’s “Imagine” and CNU’s holding a conference on “The Future of Religion in America” led me this fall to a couple of books which turned out to be useful to read in tandem: Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America. Douthat’s is from 2012, Bottom’s was released this summer. My “notes” upon them have turned into an essay, however, so gird thyself.
Let’s begin with the less comprehensive book, An Anxious Age. It consists of two parts, the first about how the crash of the Protestant Mainline left in its place a distinctive approach to politics and culture that Bottum calls that of “The Poster Children,” and the second about the travails of contemporary Catholicism, which can be summed up as why the “Catholic Moment” didn’t happen, or why Catholicism couldn’t culturally replace the Mainline. I’ll only talk about the first part here.
“The death of the Mainline is the central political fact of the last 150 years of American history,” Bottum says. The Mainline once was the uniting cultural river of the realm, but now that it’s subsided nearly to extinction without anything able to fill its place, we are left fragmented, and more subject to polarization. Bottum describes his theory in a recent Weekly Standard essay:
…the Protestant churches in early America were widely divided on theological and ecclesial issues—and yet they somehow joined to form what Alexis de Tocqueville would call the nation’s “undivided current of manners and morals.” We can debate how long-lasting and all-encompassing that central Protestantism really was, but…the collapse in recent decades of the mainline churches (from around 50 percent of the nation in 1965 to under 10 percent today) remains one of the most astonishing cultural changes in American history.
He works more with the Mainline “river” image in the book, describing Jews and Catholics as having “lived on its banks,” socio-culturally speaking. He does not speak of this river as having been dried up so much by outside factors, but as having had its members ascend/evaporate right out of its banks of their own accord: “American Protestantism thinning itself up so far that it loses all tethering in the specifics of the faith that gave it birth.” The ascension was, initially, into a theology more abstract about the concept of God, focused upon social justice, and less bound by the Bible, creeds, and sexual restrictions.
Bottum uses his interview subjects, and a few well-known figures, as symbolic types (in the way Habits of the Heart did with “Sheila” and such). He begins his account with “Bonnie Paisley,” a twice-divorced Oregon liberal very serious about how she decorates her home, only slightly so about her flirtations with New Age religion, and completely dismissive of her family tree’s Protestant roots.
Bonnie’s life illustrates where American Mainline Protestantism has gone, the place where it’s been aiming for generations: Christian in the righteous timbre of its moral judgments, without any actual Christianity; middle class in social flavor, while ostensibly despising middle-class norms; American in cultural setting, even as she believes American history is a tale of tyranny from which she and those like her have barely managed to escape.
Bottom traces the pattern here back to the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch (whose grandson, both he and Douthat both note, was none other than Richard Rorty). The “post-Protestants,” in things like their heightened moralism regarding food and fitness, their attraction to theories that demand self-examination like today’s “white privilege” one, and their demonization of certain institutions or persons, display an “anxious” need to
…see themselves as good people—a hunger for spiritual confidence in perfect parallel to the hungers that drove previous generations of American Protestants… In their view, the social forces of bigotry, power, corruption, mass opinion, militarism, and oppression are the constant themes of history. These horrors have a palpable, almost metaphysical presence in the world. Post-Protestants believe the best way to know themselves as moral is to define themselves in opposition to such bigotry and oppression—understanding good and evil not primarily in terms of personal behavior but as states of mind about the social condition. Sin, in other words, appears as a social fact, and the redeemed personality becomes confident of its own salvation by being aware of that fact. By knowing about, and rejecting, the evil that darkens society.
Bottom then tells us that he compiled “that list of six evil social forces…from the writing of the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch.” A chapter is devoted to his teaching, and particularly focuses upon his call for “redeemed personalities.” Here are two striking Rauschenbusch quotes, from the early 1900s:
A better and more Christian method of getting a religious realization of sin is to bring before our minds the positive ideals of social righteousness contained in the person of Christ and in the Kingdom of God and see sin as the treasonable force which frustrates and wrecks these ideals…
As long as man sees in our present society only a few inevitable abuses and recognizes no sin and evil deep-seated in the very constitution of the present order, he is still in a state of moral blindness and without conviction of sin…
Or as one young Occupy protester told Bottom, “we want people to know about the wrongness in society the way we do.”
Different conservative scholars will regard this arc of Rauschenbusch to post-Protestantism in different ways: some will see it as a corruption of American Protestantism by historicist philosophy, some will see it as the destiny of Biblical religion generally, and others as reflecting a dynamic peculiar to Protestantism, which is more where Bottum stands. But he is less interested in ultimate explanation than in description of what has been afoot.
One of the more fruitful ways he does this is to suggest that to think about class in America, particularly in the mode of the “liberal elites”-talk that conservatives have indulged in in recent years, actually requires one to think less about economic ownership and quantifiable wealth, and more about how the old insiders of Protestant society set a the classic pattern for elite behavior in America. By this pattern, what matters most is a priestly-class badge of Rauschenbusch-like or Emerson-like focus upon redeeming politics—or at least upon redeeming lifestyle and aesthetics. One has to be cultivated in a certain way (elite “liberal education” or something similar) and one has to display signs of having seen the light. By this understanding, mere “Power Elites” of course exist, and as Rauschenbusch’s list of six evils indicates, they threaten social righteousness, but a rightful elite exists also, that of the elect.
One might consider what I once wrote about the Quaker-rooted Joan Baez in this respect. Folks like her undoubtedly felt excluded by and hostile to the WASP “Society” of the day, but by Bottum’s understanding, their transmutation of the Protestant spirit eventually became the new elite coin of the realm. And in part because for some time it had been no longer united around religion, “Society” collapsed in the face of the 60s revolutions, with its would-have-been heirs becoming the marginalized preppie class portrayed in the Whit Stillman films; whereas the counter-cultural sorts who really embraced the likes of Joan Baez-music, whether post-Protestant, ex-Catholic, or non-Orthodox Jewish, gradually took over most of the cultural heights.
Now today, as the fall of The New Republic might symbolize, and the hollowing out of our college’s humanities departments definitely indicates, these seem to be being replaced themselves by more tech-oriented “liberaltarian” types on one hand, or by PC-activist Upworthy-types on the other. There’s something less spiritual and less intellectual about the Post-Protestants’ apparent millennial heirs, we might say, so that Bottum’s theory is only really useful for explaining the age we’ve just been through. However that may be, Bottom holds and anecdotally shows that many of today’s younger progressives still manifest many of the attitudes he pegs as post-Protestant.
As all single-cause explanations of modern American liberalism are deficient, and trying to connect such to social class analysis is trickier yet, it is of course the case that Bottom’s theory ultimately works too neatly. But I find it much more suggestive and convincing than most such theories. It captures something quite important about contemporary liberalism’s overall tone, and I feel better about the more strident of my liberal brothers and sisters when I think of them less in terms of their affinity for what non-theological conservative thought (including my own) tells me is their Jacobinism, “liberal fascism,” Marxism, vengeance-seeking, and hate-enabling historicist idealism, and more in terms of their feeling a religious-like longing for redeemed life. More importantly, this seems closer to how they (with big exceptions admitted) understand themselves.
Again, Bottum’s thesis is not presented as a theory about American liberalism simply, but one about our whole history with respect to how religion interacts with politics and national identity. It is useful for considering the contemporary nature of this given that “secularization” and “post-Christian” turn out to be inadequate concepts.
That last sentence cracks me up at myself. As if I, raised in a Presbyterian church, and won over to evangelical understandings of faith in my college days by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, could ever be simply objective about whether America (Europe, too) was losing its religion, and thus could talk coldly-scientific about whether the “secularization thesis,” the idea that the more modern a nation becomes the more it will turn away from belief in God, was “an adequate concept” or not!
But as we turn to the more important book here, Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, let’s proceed–since we have no other choice–as if such an objective stance can be arrived at, by any of us whether religious or not. Douthat’s main argument should already be familiar to Postmodern Conservative readers, although it is much more powerful in book form than in summary: America is not moving into a secular age shorn of religion generally, in the manner typical versions of the secularization thesis would predict, but it is moving, indeed already has moved, into an era in which Christian orthodoxy is pushed to the side, with its place filled not by atheism and secularist disregard, but by Christian heresy.
Following Alister McGrath, Douthat defines a “Christian heresy” as “a form of Christian belief that, more by accident than design, ultimately ends up subverting, destabilizing, or even destroying the core of the Christian faith.” This serves well to describe the doctrines traditionally described as heretical, such as those of the Gnostics, Marcion, Pelagius, the Donatists, the Arians, etc., but it’s not immediately evident how it will serve Douthat’s purposes for analyzing many of the religious alternatives to Christianity in our time and place, since many of these derive from Eastern religions or atheistic psychology. In any case, speaking to secularist fearers of “theocracy,” on one had, and to Christian fearers of “Godless America” on the other, Douthat says
…America’s problem isn’t too much religion, or too little of it. It’s bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place. Since the 1960s the institutions that sustained orthodox Christian belief—Catholic and Protestant alike—have entered a state of near-terminal decline. The churches with the strongest connection to the Christian past have lost members, money, and authority; the elite that was once at least sympathetic to Christian ideas has become hostile or indifferent; and the culture as a whole has turned its back on many of the faith’s precepts and demands.
The bad heretical religion occurs in the “vast America in between, where papal enyclicals rarely penetrate and the works of Richard Dawkins pass unread.” This vast segment of our society still leads surveys to conclude that America “remains the most religious in the developed world.” But from a small-o orthodox Christian perspective, this provides little comfort, as much of this religion is pseudo-Christianity. What are the heresies that Douthat has in mind?
First, choose-your-own authentic-Jesus reconstruction, as academically represented by Elaine Pagels, the Jesus Seminar, Marcus Borg, and Bart Ehrman, but popularly more significant through writers like Dan Brown. A lot of variety here, and really at the border of an older style of Higher Criticism and actual belief systems. Actually, this is more a heretical method than it is a heresy itself. It usually issues in a) the type of Christianity held by the mainline remnants today, or b) the essentially New Age updated-Gnosticism of someone like Pagels.
Second, Prosperity Gospel. Joel Osteen is Douthat’s main target here, but he shows how many reputably evangelical preachers, from Oral Roberts to T.D. Jakes, flirt upon its edges. He traces it back through Osteen’s father, the Word-Faith movement, and Kenneth W. Hagin to the interesting New Thought movement of the early 20th-century.
Third, “God Within” theology, aka The New Age. Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra, James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy), Paulo Coelho, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, etc. All this has roots on one hand in Eastern religion, but on the other hand in the East-influenced but very-American transcendentalism of Emerson and such. Those influences had a big role to play in the 60s turn to alternative religion, issuing either in traditionally-disciplined monist/pantheist sects, such as Hare Krishna or Zen Buddhism, or, perhaps by way of less-demanding teachings like Transcendental Meditation or those of the burgeoning “human potential” movement coming out of EST and such, into New Age proper. But in Douthat’s telling, the Eastern roots of the New Age shed less light upon it than its modern proclivity towards the Therapeutic.
We’ll return in a moment to the difficulties in defining this, and whether it should be regarded as closely related to Christianity, as Douthat must argue if his definition of heresy is to hold, or whether Eastern religion, through all the transformations it underwent in the West, remained essentially distinct. Douthat’s argument that it is, illustrated in part by certain contemporary readings of Christian mysticism that connect it to New Age-ish theology such as those made by ex-nun and popular historian Karen Armstrong in her The Case for God, is not obviously implausible.
Fourth, the nationalist heresy. In America, this either occurs in the messianic Americanism mode, as one sees with much progressivism, such as with Woodrow Wilson, but also with some conservatives in the mode of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, or it occurs in the apocalyptic mode, such as with (Wilson-hating) Glenn Beck, or anyone who idolizes the Founders but then warns of how our turning away from them is leading us to certain doom. Oh, and there are liberal varieties of nationalist apocalyptic-ism also. This is Douthat’s least convincing chapter, even though I think many conservatives today could benefit from heeding what he says about apocalyptic thinking. He admits that a limited sort of American exceptionalism, in the mode of Lincoln taking the care to say that America is an “almost-chosen nation,” can remain faithful to orthodox Christianity, but overall, this chapter seems too complex, and too much of a sop to those who delight in criticizing contemporary conservative patriotism.
Where would Bottum’s “Post-Protestant” moralistic liberals fit in this list of four? Well, their heresy would have to be the messianic and liberal version of the nationalist one. I think that alone shows what’s inadequate about Douthat’s fourth category. It doesn’t capture the more across-the-board and more intense threat of the progressivist heresy to orthodoxy, which should be understood through Rauschenbusch, but also through what Williams James’s “The Will to Believe” and Herbert Croly’s Progressive Democracy illustrate about the deliberate construction of a progressivist “Democratic Faith” for secularists and modernizing Christians alike(see also Patrick Deneen’s Democratic Faith). The way such faith often parallels the way Marxism became for most of its adherents a Secular Religion, and the way in its Rauschenbusch mode it often explicitly edited the New Testament to refigure Jesus as an exemplar of Social Justice, indicates why it was and remains a more fundamental threat to orthodoxy compared to the conservative messianic and apocalyptic ways of idolizing America. The fact that America is only initially the locus of American progressives’ idolization of the socially just super-state—all progressivism winds up being transnational progressivism—is another indication of this. So I say the progressivist heresy is a distinct one that deserves a fifth category.
Now let us return to the issues raised by the “God Within”/New Age category of heresy. Here is how Douthat describes its basic characteristics, in comparison to the prosperity gospel:
Whereas the prosperity gospel suggests that material abundance is the main sign of God’s activity in this world, the apostles of the God Within focus on internal harmony…as the chief evidence of things unseen. Whereas the prosperity gospel talks about prayer primarily in terms of supplication, the theology of the God Within talks about it primarily in terms of meditation and communion. And while the prosperity gospel insists that evil and suffering can be mastered by prayer, the God Within theology suggests that true spiritual enlightenment will expose both as illusions. The prosperity gospel is a theology of striving…; the gospel of the God Within is a theology of letting go. The prosperity gospel makes the divine sound like your broker; the theology of the God Within makes him sound like your shrink.
This distinction is illustrated by Oprah Winfrey herself… “Our mission,” Winfrey said of her ever-expanding cultural empire, “is to use television to transform people’s lives …I am talking about each individual coming to awareness that ‘I am Creation’s son. I am Creation’s daughter…ultimately I am Spirit come from the greatest Sprit. I am Spirit.”
Douthat’s New Age, then, is centered around this God Within message. It’s a good way to present things, but I’d say there are six studies we would have to conduct to sort out the problems mentioned above. We’d have to get a good grasp upon 1) what Tocqueville says about the inclination of democratic peoples for pantheism, and about what it is; 2) what certain key philosophers, especially Parmenides, have to teach us about what it is, and why certain thinkers today like Richard Dawkins think of it as “sexed-up atheism”; 3) what it is in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and how much they were altered when they travelled into the West; 4) what 1800s American pantheism was, given its Eastern influences, its roots in Deism and Unitarianism, and its articulation by Emerson and such; 5) the relation of New Age teaching to developments in psychology, and why these developments might plausibly be seen as culminating in what a pair of sociologists, following the lead of Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapuetic, labelled “Morally Therapuetic Deism”; 6) the actual development of contemporary New Age doctrines and sects from their initial explosion in the 60s to the present—this would obviously go into their relation to the counter-culture’s parallel interests in paganism and LSD, but it would be most interested in providing a taxonomy of the doctrines and sects that have remained constants over the whole 60s-to-the-present period.
Perhaps the biggest question we would want to answer from all of that is whether the New Age is more fundamentally pantheistic, or solipsistic/therapeutic. Is it more about understanding oneself as a mere part of the divine all, or more about divinizing the inner self? Douthat says the latter, and our Peter Lawler, by arguing that pantheism serves more as a temporary therapeutic episode or technique than a seriously-followed doctrine, essentially backs him up. I agree, but admit that there is a lot of learning necessary here to speak truly authoritatively. And, the thing itself is in process.
Part of the process and confusion here is about how to relate the New Age to a set of vague popular American beliefs of the sort described as Morally Therapeutic Deism(MTD), on one hand, and how to relate it to what remains of liberal Christianity. Here is MTD as summarized in 2005 by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Denton as the “de facto creed” of America’s youth, as revealed by their survey work:
First, “A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.” Second, “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.” Third, “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.” Fourth, “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.” Fifth, “Good people go to heaven when they die.”
Well, that’s substantially shorter than the Apostle’s Creed, but it sure isn’t pantheism. So it fits Douthat’s criteria for being a Christian heresy. Compare it with what Douthat gleans about the new-and-improved religion desired by the various scholars of authentic Jesus-reconstruction—these reconstructions of the New Testament differ upon lots of points(“whether we end up with Jesus the Gnostic, the Cynic philosopher, the proto-feminist, or the apocalyptic prophet”), but they always seem to recommend a religion that “rebuke[s] Evangelical Christianity, conservative politics, and the combination thereof.” Himself bringing together the elements of the “kind of church nearly all these authors envision,” Douthat says such a church
…should be nonjudgmental about sex…open-minded about doctrine…and equipped with a cannon that makes room for apocryphal texts while policing the existing New Testament to (as Ehrman puts it) “encourage interpretations…that don’t lead to sexism, racism, bigotry, and all kinds of oppression.” [Such Christianity is] less about replacing orthodoxy “with a different system of doctrines,” Pagels writes, and more about rejecting doctrinal religion entirely, in favor of the quest for “insights or intimations of the divine that validate themselves in experience.”
This, Douthat says, “is a decent summary of the commitments of what remains of Mainline Protestantism…” The real Jesus of these scholars is always said in one way or another to “want his followers to be accommodationist Christians today.”
The term “accommodationist Christian” takes us back to the more valuable part of Douthat’s book, which are the chapters where he sets up a history of post-WWII Christianity in America along the following main landmarks: Flourishing, Decline, Accommodation, Resistance (to Accommodation), and the present era. He doesn’t provide dates for these trends, some which overlap, but I’ll try to provide approximate them based on what he says: 1945-1964, 1965-present(but esp. 1965-1980), 1960-present, 1973-present (but esp. 1990-2005), and 2005-to-present. It is a masterful framing, in itself making the book a must-read, and I felt key aspects of my own religious life within the larger story of American religion were illuminated by the waxings, wanings, reactions, and counter-reactions he described.
We begin in the 40s and 50s with Christianity flourishing in America more fully than it ever had in the 20th century, or at least since before WWI, which Douthat characterizes as “The Lost Age” dominated by figures like W. H. Auden, Billy Graham, Reinhold Niebuhr, Fulton Sheen, John Courtney Murray, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and things like Eisenhower’s public recommendation of religion or Catholic-friendly Hollywood films. (A third recent religion-focused book that deals with that era, but more in terms of a dominant working consensus between mainstream political thinkers and mainline or mainline-like [e.g. Graham, Murray, Herberg] religious thinkers, is the excellent The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief by Reformed writer George Mardsen.) Then in the early or mid-60s, the growth of church membership that had characterized the post-WWII era stopped, and reversed into a fairly rapid decline. Douthat provides a multi-cause explanation for the decline, centering upon the cultural and sexual revolution, but not limited to this.
Accommodation was a key response, undertaken both by majorities in the Mainline Protestant churches, and by a majority of institutional-level leaders below the top hierarchy in the Catholic church. Basically, the idea was to alter church practice and teachings in ways that would be more amenable to the increasingly modern and urban character of contemporary Americans. The popularity of The Secular City by Protestant theologian Harvey Cox, the vogue for the works of the Jesuit evolution-guided philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, the expectations that developed for further and further Vatican II-style reforms, Death-of-God “theology” on the cover of Time, nuns and priests renouncing vows, the ordination of women ministers and priests in various Protestant denominations, rapid and often odd liturgical innovations, various headline-making denials of the creeds by Episcopal bishops James Pike and John Shelby Spong– these are some of the Douthat’s markers for the trend and era. His framing somewhat obscures the fact that much of this had been afoot among Protestant mainliners for some time, even if it had been downplayed and “Niebuhr-chastened” in the 50s.
The eventual response to all this liberalizing theology and accommodation-ist practice, and particularly to the way its leaders made quick peace with the radical Roe v. Wade decision, is perhaps best symbolized by the magazine that was Postmodern Conservative’s first sponsor, First Things. Douthat begins his chapter on “Resistance” by recalling the 1994 “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” statement that appeared in its pages. He reviews editor Richard John Neuhaus’s arc, moving from at least potentially-accommodation-friendly Lutheran theology and close involvement in the Civil Rights movement, to Catholicism and a leading role on the conservative side in the Culture Wars. Even more interesting is his telling of Michael Novak’s journey, from a young Catholic writer who attacked Jacques Maritain’s 1966 critique of accommodationism, to becoming a leading voice of theologically and politically conservative Catholics by the early 80s. Pope John Paul’s overall impact, particularly his “reaffirmation that the Church still believed in itself” and that “the definition of Catholicism wasn’t nearly as up for grabs as it had seemed,” the growth of evangelical numbers, and the emergence of evangelical leaders calling for political involvement and intellectual engagement such as Francis Schaeffer and certain key leaders at Fuller Seminary, are similar signs Douthat uses to explain the overall trend.
So Evangelicals rose, and Catholics reconsidered, and by the late 1990s their unexpected convergence was being spun by optimists in both camps into a kind of broader comeback for Christianity as a whole. Yes…their common faith had suffered losses during the 1960s and 70s. But liberal theology and secularism alike had failed to satisfy the heart of modern man, and the rising generation, coming of age amid the moral and spiritual anarchy that their parents had unleashed, would eventually turn back to the Christianity the baby boomers had abandoned. In this sprit…books were written with titles like…The Twilight of Atheism and The End of Secularism… Just as the accommodationists of the 1970s and early 80s had read the signs of the times and confidently predicted their theology’s inevitable triumph, by the turn of the millennium it was the resisters’ turn…
Such triumphalism had its final moment sometime shortly after Bush’s re-election and the box-office success of The Passion of Christ. The reactions to those events on the part of a number liberal secularists were so wildly impassioned, so off-base in their fears of social conservatives like yours truly wanting an American Theocracy, that they plausibly could seem to be the last gasp of a dying viewpoint. But just at that point, the revelations of the sex-abuse scandal were hitting the American Catholic church, and the energy of the 80s and 90s evangelical revival, after a last spike following 9/11, went down a notch or two—from my own perspective, some of the inherent weaknesses of evangelicalism, and some of the hostility these had long engendered (such as from the late 80s hardcore punk band Bad Religion) finally became more widely felt. Lives had not been utterly transformed as promised, and the segments of American society “taken back” from secularism often simply looked more like, well, the white South, perhaps dressed with the cheesy Christianized pop-culture and pop-psychology characteristic of much Southern California evangelicalism. “New Atheist” books began to sell, gay marriage gained acceptance, the internet intensified the entertainment industry’s distracting and sleaz-ifiying impact on daily life and mores, Mel Gibson was revealed to be…well, Mel Gibson, and Bush’s evangelicalism and openness to Catholic natural-law reasoning began to seem more of a burden to the GOP’s fortunes, and his politics, especially with respect to Iraq and the GWOT, more of a burden to evangelical churches themselves. By 2010, what earlier aughties surveys had suggested and many of us had feared was the case, was confirmed: Putnam and Campbell’s American Grace showed the number of those claiming to be Christian had dramatically decreased, and the number of those claiming “no religion” had dramatically increased.
Douthat describes this failure of the Resistance era to reverse earlier declines somewhat differently than I do above, but the same basic points are made. It is the backdrop to the overall “spirit of pessimism” he says he wrote the book in. His innovation, of course, is to hold that the new era, let’s begin it around 2005, is not a “Post-Christian” or “finally-secularizing-according-to-theory” one, but is better characterized as an “Age of Heresy.” As the hold of Reinhold Niebuhr-style, Pope John Paul-style, and Billy Graham-style Christianity upon the average American is lost, it is not replaced so much by secularist atheism, but by Osteen, Oprah, Brown, and Beck. And as I would add in Bottom’s name, by political religions like early Obama-ism, and today’s Occupy-ism.
There is much we could say in response to these two book’s insights, and I hope to say more in a year’s end final post on Lennon’s “Imagine,” but let me mention just two. Conservative intellectuals, particularly if they are not themselves religious, tend to read too much into accounts of evangelical churches or leaders falling under the sway of various self-help and managerial trends, such as those revealed by the popularity of Prosperity Gospel, of bad praise music, or hipster “emergent church” innovators like Rob Bell, so that they think these churches will largely come under the sway of these ideas, and thus eventually some form of liberalism or libertarianism. They do not understand how much authority the Bible, and the creedal aspects of Christian doctrine embraced by the Reformers, still have within these churches, and will always have. This is why Rob Bell or those in the future like him, in embracing universalism, gay marriage, and “process-theology”-like ways of speaking about God, are likely not going to transform evangelicalism from the inside-out. They are just going to repeat the previously-mainline story of liberalized theology in membership-diminished churches, albeit perhaps in more moderated ways. The threat to evangelicalism is far more from diminished conversions and diminished retention of the young. As to the Prosperity Gospel, I think Douthat overstates its danger to the main currents of evangelicalism, although it certainly is a more potent one than that of Oprah-ization. Similar observations could likely be made about the factional disputes with Catholicism, although more depends on what happens with the Papacy. One thing all this means, is that the while the Culture Wars may continue to lose a good deal of GOP sponsorship, they are not going away, and they are not over or resolved simply because the blue states and a large majority of the judicial class have come around to gay marriage.
Second, whereas conservative religious leaders need to continue to guard the ramparts against liberalizing theology, and the related creep of Beck-ish, Oprah-esque, and Osteen-ian beliefs into the churches, it is necessary for conservative political leaders, and all political friends of religious liberty, to think less dismissively about a) New Age groups, and b) remnant mainline churches. Politically speaking, continued de facto alliance between them and secularists spells disaster for protecting religious liberty, for everyone but beginning with that of the small o-orthodox, at least if the membership patterns of the present era continue. My sense is there really are some theological liberal churches (and this could include any Rob Bell-like boomlet of evangelicalism-rooted liberalism) that are trying as best they can to prevent that total untethering from Christianity that Bottom assumes is their destiny. And I know from personal acquaintance that some these churches contain pockets of more-orthodox-than-not Christians who regard it as their calling to stick it out and help heal them. I feel a diplomatic appeal to the liberal churches to defend basic religious liberty if it does come under threat would be positively answered by many of them. I would think that something similar could be expected of some of the more-organized New Age sects, particularly those more directly grounded in Eastern religion. That’s looking perhaps pretty far ahead, as more of America’s present secularist liberals are more attached to religious liberty than many conservatives think, but it is something to keep in mind.
Douthat appropriately prefers to end his book on a non-political and more hopeful note, offering some suggestions for how orthodox Christianity could make a comeback, and throughout the book he suggests that thoughtful atheists cannot exactly be comfortable with the type of religion that is increasingly taking orthodoxy’s place in America. I’ll make no predictions here, but despite his present pessimism, Douthat gives us some reason to think what we’re going through is more of a season than a long-term trend.