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 (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
