Christianity Today
Q & A: Ross Douthat on Rooting Out Bad Religion
Why the New York Times columnist wants to see America return to its
confessional roots.
Interview by Sarah Pulliam Bailey | posted 4/16/2012
_Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics_
(http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=WW178300&p=1006327)
by Ross Douthat
Free Press, April 2012
352 pp., $26.00
The biggest threat facing America is not a faltering economy or a spate of
books by famed atheists. Rather, the country meets new challenges due to
the decline of traditional Christianity, New York Times columnist Ross
Douthat suggests in _Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics_
(http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=WW178300&p=1006327)
(Free Press). Douthat has taken his own personal tour of American
Christianity: he was baptized Episcopalian, attended evangelical and
Pentecostal
churches as a child, and converted to Catholicism at age 17. He argues that
prosperity preachers, self-esteem gurus, and politics operating as religion
contribute to the contemporary decline of America. CT spoke with Douthat about
America's decline from a vigorous faith, modern heretics, and why we need a
revival of traditional Christianity.
What do you mean when you say we're facing the threat of heresy?
I try to use an ecumenical definition, starting with what I see as the
theological common ground shared by my own Catholic Church and many Protestant
denominations. Then I look at forms of American religion that are
influenced by Christianity, but depart in some significant way from this
consensus.
It's a C. S. Lewisian, Mere Christianity definition of orthodoxy or
heresy. I'm trying to look at the ways the American religion today departs
from
theological and moral premises that traditional Protestants and Catholics
have in common.
How did America become a nation of heretics?
We've always been a nation of heretics. Heresy used to be constrained and
balanced by institutional Christianity to a far greater extent than it is
today. What's unique about our religious moment is not the movements and
currents such as the "lost gospel" industry, the world of prosperity
preaching, the kind of therapeutic religion that you get from someone like
Oprah
Winfrey, or various highly politicized forms of faith. What's new is the
weakness of the orthodox Christian response. There were prosperity preachers
and
therapeutic religion in the 1940s and '50s—think of bestsellers like Norman
Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking—but there was also a much
more robust Christian center.
The Protestant and Catholic churches that made a real effort to root their
doctrine and practice in historic Christianity were vastly stronger than
they are today. Even someone who was dabbling in what I call heresy was also
more likely to have something in his religious life—some institutional or
confessional pressure—tugging him back toward a more traditional faith. The
influence of heretics has been magnified by the decline of orthodox
Christianity.
Have evangelicals created a fertile ground for heresy?
People have asked, "Don't all the trends that you describe go back to the
Protestant Reformation?" Since I am a Roman Catholic, I do have sympathy
for that argument [laughs]. But it's important not to leap to a historical
determinism about theological and cultural trends. Some of the trends might
represent the working out of ideas inherent in Protestantism or grow out of
religious individualism that is more Protestant than Catholic. But I don't
think it was necessarily inevitable that we reached this point. It's a long
way from Martin Luther's On the Freedom of a Christian to Eat, Pray, Love,
and a vigorous Protestantism should be able to prevent the former from
degenerating into the latter.
You suggest that Christian leaders from earlier decades contributed to the
decline of traditional Christianity by trying to accommodate cultural
norms. Would you consider Oprah, Glenn Beck, and others to be today's
accommodationists?
We're in a slightly different era today. There were tremendous cultural
challenges to Christianity in the 1960s and '70s that both liberals and
conservatives struggled to respond to, starting with the sexual revolution.
"Accommodationists"—what we think of as liberal Christians, Protestant and
Catholic—weren't out to destroy Christianity. They saw their mission as a noble
one, preserving institutional Christianity in a new era. Their choices
ultimately emptied Christianity theologically, but they intended to save the
faith, or at the very least their own denomination.
The danger for evangelicalism is becoming too parachurch without enough
church.
The heretics I write about aren't detached completely from Christianity.
Some of them identify as Christians and like the idea of identifying with
Jesus. But they aren't interested in sustaining any historic Christian
tradition or church apart from their own ministry.
Instead of trying to reform and strengthen institutional Christianity,
they're picking through the Christian past, looking for things they like and
can use, and discarding the rest.
Why do you claim that one of evangelicalism's contemporary struggles is an
alignment with former President George W. Bush?
The Bush administration represented both the best and worst of a broader
evangelical reengagement in politics and culture. It was the fulfillment of
this post-1970s era when evangelicals reengaged with the broader culture,
returned to the halls of power, and left the fundamentalist past behind. That
you had an evangelical President and his speechwriter drawing on Catholic
social teaching to shape domestic policy was a remarkable achievement, a
sign of what you might call "the opening of the evangelical mind." And some
of the Bush administration's initiatives, such as its aids in Africa
efforts, made a real attempt to achieve a more holistic Christian engagement
in
politics.
But the administration exposed the limits of using politics to effect
broader cultural change. The Bush era was the moment when religious
conservatives finally had one of their own in the White House, but it wasn't a
great
era for evangelicalism or for institutional Christianity. But it's pretty
clear that institutional religion in the United States has lost more ground
than it's gained in the past 10 to 15 years. While evangelicalism is
obviously quite robust, evangelical churches aren't growing as fast as they
were
during the 1970s and '80s. Instead of being a period of revival and renewal
for evangelical Christianity, the Bush era looks like a period when
evangelical Christianity hit a ceiling.
After 9/11, evangelicals were also particularly tempted toward what I call
the heresy of nationalism: that promoting democracy overseas by force of
arms would be God's will, which is at best a theologically perilous idea,
and at worst, explicitly heretical.
How has Christianity historically tempered nationalism?
The idea that America has some distinctive role to play in the unfolding
of God's plan is compatible with orthodox Christianity. But it should be
tempered by recognizing that America is not the church. It's fine to see
ourselves as an "almost-chosen people," as Abraham Lincoln put it, but if we
decide we're literally chosen, then we've taken a detour away from a healthy
patriotism towards an unhealthy nationalism.
Lincoln was not an orthodox Christian, but we can look at his second
inaugural address as a model for how Christians should think about these
issues.
He was open to the idea that history unfolds in a providential way, that
the American Civil War could have theological as well as political
significance.
But he tempered that by emphasizing that providence and God's purposes are
mysterious. He emphasized that God simultaneously passed judgment on North
and South alike, that the war is a chastisement rather than a pure
apotheosis of the American idea. If you're too confident in assuming that
America's and God's purposes are one, you tiptoe toward idolatry.
Why do you say that Mormons and evangelicals can bridge their divides
through their love for the Constitution?
Mormons and evangelicals share the temptations that come with an admirable
patriotism. There's a tendency for them to take patriotism one step too
far and say not only that the Constitution is a wonderful document, but that
it is divinely inspired. There's a reason so much of Mitt Romney's campaign
rhetoric has focused on "believe in America," singing "America the
Beautiful," and so on. These kinds of gestures and emphases offer a way to
ease
evangelical doubts about his theology. In effect, he is saying, "Whatever our
different beliefs about the nature of the Trinity, we agree that America is
uniquely favored by God."
Are there parallels between the desire to build an "evangelical empire"
and the desire to build up America as a Christian nation?
You could connect the prosperity gospel—especially its idea that good
Christians need never be poor—with Glenn Beck's view, that if America had
stayed true to its founding, then God would not have given us the Great
Recession
But the nature of heresy is not that it takes a Christian teaching and
gets it completely wrong. Instead, it takes a Christian teaching and
emphasizes it to the exclusion of anything that might counterbalance it. It
isn't
wrong to suggest that there are biblical passages that state that God blesses
his servants in this life as well as the next. There are biblical passages
that suggest a link between a nation's morality, a nation's religious
beliefs, and its historical fate.
But Christian orthodoxy always counterbalances those emphases with other
truths. Sometimes God uses a pagan nation to bring forth his justice. So you
might succeed and prosper not because you are particularly virtuous, but
because you're that pagan nation, Babylon or Assyria, not King David's
Israel. You have to be aware of these possibilities. The same is true for
wealthy
people, and obviously all blessings come from God. But sometimes what you
think of as "blessings" may be ill-gotten gains. Or the guy who is
suffering financially isn't suffering because he didn't pray hard enough;
he's
Lazarus on your doorstep and you're the rich man who's ignoring him.
People write about Marilynne Robinson as a great novelist, but they also
say, 'And she's a Calvinist.' You want to live in a world where that feels
natural.
Why do you think evangelicals have been reticent to look to the government
while maintaining a robust political impulse?
Evangelicals are less likely to look to a government program for help, but
they are more likely to see the election of particular individuals as the
key to fulfilling Christian purposes. Evangelicals have a healthy skepticism
of the efficacy of government, but they are tempted by the delusion that
if you just elect the right godly leader, deeper cultural trends will change
overnight. Or they see adverse trends as a result of individual bad
actors. Evangelicals were galvanized into politics in part by a series of
Supreme
Court decisions, which were the work of five or six people who you could
point to and say, "He's the guy who took away prayer in schools." This has
given rise to the popular idea that cultural changes stem from all these
liberal, secular elites imposing themselves on a conservative Christian
population. But I don't think this view considers the role that broader
cultural
and economic shifts have played in trends that conservative Christians
don't like.
How can we begin to address a nation of heretics?
There has been much healthy Catholic and Protestant dialogue and
cooperation during the past 30 years. But ultimately the success of U.S.
Christianity depends on individual churches and confessions, not on ecumenism
for
ecumenism's sake. Protestants and Catholics need to recognize everything we
have in common and then say we're also going to focus on building separate
effective churches.
Christianity's failure in the United States is an institutional failure,
and the answer to institutional failure is stronger institutions. America
has more to gain from a more potent Protestantism and Catholicism than it
does from even the most fruitful Protestant-Catholic dialogue.
For evangelicals, it means thinking more seriously about ecclesiology and
what it will take to sustain Christianity across generations. Promise
Keepers, Campus Crusade for Christ, and other parachurch groups have been
important to evangelicalism. But "parachurch" makes sense over the long term
in
the context of a church. The danger for evangelicalism is becoming too
parachurch without enough church. Some megachurches seem to function like
parachurches rather than churches, as though everything else that's going on is
more important than the central life of the community of worship. It might be
important for evangelicals to think of themselves as Presbyterians,
Baptists, and so on, and recover the virtues of confessionalism, because it's
confessions, not just superstar pastors, that sustain Christianity over the
long haul.
How did you arrive at your final point: that Christians can work to become
more political without being partisan, ecumenical while being
confessional, moralistic while being holistic, and oriented toward beauty?
I tried to think about the attractive aspects of post-war American
Christianity that we have lost. Being political without being partisan was
crucial
to the successes of the civil rights movement. Figures like Billy Graham
and Fulton Sheen were ecumenical but remained confessional. And it was easier
to be moralistic, but also holistic, in that context because the country
was not polarized on what we now think of as a culture war.
There are reasons why Christianity has lost some influence in creative
culture. You want to live in a world where the opening of a new cathedral in a
major American city is not only a religious event but also a major
architectural event. You want to live in a world where Christian artists
aren't
going to be merely interesting eccentrics. People write about Marilynne
Robinson as a great novelist, but they also say, "And she's a Calvinist." You
want to live in a world where that feels natural.
How do you adapt to cultural forces while maintaining tradition?
You have to address the issues and places where orthodoxy has lost people
over the past few decades without just saying, "We're losing people here,
so we just need to change this teaching or jettison this," which was the
accommodationist answer. There's evidence to suggest that churches that
self-consciously surrender big chunks of Christian teaching don't seem to
thrive
in the long run. Also, it has to be possible to be Christian on contentious
cultural issues without making it seem like Christianity is just an
appendage of the Republican Party.
Finally, it's very important for contemporary Christians to be ecumenical
and to see the best in one another's congregations, but not at the expense
of having a robust, resilient internal culture within their own churches.
Lewis compares his "Mere Christianity" to a hallway with doors opening into
various rooms, which are the actual Christian churches. You can't spend all
your time in the hallway. You can go out into the hallway to talk, but you
have to go back in the rooms to worship
--
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