Review: Ross Douthat’s “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics”

I’ve followed Ross Douthat for a while now, well before he became an online and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, one of its few conservative voices and the youngest op-ed writers in the paper’s history. He’s one of the country’s great thinkers, in my estimate. So I was excited with the release of Bad Religion, as Douthat turned his attention away from the subject of politics to religion. What I wasn’t expecting was the rather dour feeling this book left me with. Sort of like watching an autopsy: The clinician (in this case, Douthat) quite ably determines the cause of death. While the cadaver (in this case, American religion), remains very dead.

The focus of the book is the decline of orthodox Christianity and how that decline threatens every level of American society – politics, education, the arts, etc. Douthat’s thesis is simple: America’s problem isn’t too much religion, as secularists have argued; nor is it intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian Right believe. Rather, it’s bad religion: The slow collapse of traditional faith has given rise to a variety of alternative, watered-down, pseudo-Christianities.

Bad Religion is divided into two parts. The first half traces institutional Christianity’s decline and the factors that have contributed to it. Beginning in the 1950s, where religion was still bipartisan and acted as the moral force behind the civil rights movement, through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s, the co-opting of religion by the Right and the Left, to the polarizing debates of the present day.

A Christian “crisis of confidence” began as globalization spread. With the increase of technology, so came an awareness of other traditions and faiths. Suddenly, truth claims that supported a Christian worldview seemed to wither.

The more the newfound global perspective exposed Americans to non-Western realms and cultures, the more skeptical they became about the idea that their particular faith (whether Protestant or Catholic) could claim to speak definitively for God and truth.

With Christian truth claims sufficiently weakened, the tumultuous 60s opened the door for an embrace of relativism and, what Douthat labels, an “age of accommodation,” wherein the secular and the sacred were conveniently intertwined.

…it was time for Christianity to turn from the supernatural to the natural, from theology to anthropology, and from the Kingdom of God to the City of Man.

This sets up the second half of the book in which Douthat articulates four prominent “heresies” that have pervaded American culture:

1.) The Gnostic Gospels — embodied by Dan Brown, Bart Ehrman, and The Jesus Seminar. The belief that secret texts like the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, alternative Gospels, have been suppressed by organized religion.

2.) The Self-Help / Prosperity Gospel – which Joel Osteen epitomizes. A therapeutic gospel which believes in a “formula” for success; that prayer, meditation, positive thinking and positive confession are the key to God-given material prosperity and health.

3.) The God Within Heresy – a synthesis of Eastern religion, Gnosticism, and positive thinking. Books like Elizabeth Gilbert’s, Eat, Pray, Love and Oprah Winfrey are perhaps the best representations of this heresy. A “designer religion” that Douthat suggest is behind the “spiritual but not religious” movement.

4.) The Gospel of American Nationalism – A messianic / apocalyptic faith that deifies the Founders and sees America as a Christian nation with a distinct destiny. Glen Beck is an example of the apocalyptic, the doomsayer who proclaims calamity unless we repent and turn to God. Interestingly enough, both the Right and the Left have their messiahs. On the Right was George Bush who mobilized evangelicals. On the Left is Barack Obama who was hailed as a new leader who would unite the world and bring justice to the oppressed.

I found Bad Religion slow reading, not because it was boring, but because it’s packed with info, quotes, and historical references. Douthat maintains a fairly balanced critique, looking hard at both the Religious Right and the Secular Left. All that to say, this isn’t a conservative tirade.

But I must admit – this book left me rather down. In his conclusion, The Recovery of Christianity, the author assures us

Christianity… must contract before it grows.

Meaning,

…not a renewed engagement with the postmodern world and a more successful quest for relevance, but an extended period of withdrawal, consolidation, and purification.

So while the accommodationists are ultimately “more interested in adapting to the culture than in changing it,”  the thinking Christian is willing to bide their time to “withdraw, consolidate, and purify.” Which led me to ask: It was bad theology and bad religion that got us here. But is there enough good theology and good religion to get us out?

Therein lies my like and dislike for Bad Religion.