Book Review: "Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics" - Part One

In the last fifty odd years there has been a marked decline in traditional religious practice in the United States.  While waning church attendance among Roman Catholics usually makes the news, what was once known as the Protestant Mainline (Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians) has seen even sharper drops in the active participation, and even self identification, of a large segment of the public.  This trend, along with the rise of the "New Atheism" over the last decade, have convinced many that the United States is succumbing to the same secularization as Europe.  Not only is religion and it's influence dead among the people, God is as well, or so the conventional wisdom goes.

Taking a contrarian view on this is Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist and Catholic convert.  In his new book "Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics," Douthat contests that while orthodox faith has indeed lost its influence over the general public, it has not been replaced by secularism, but instead by a Christianity that would have been identified in the past as heresy.  While a conservative, he avoids polemics and identifies culprits on both sides of the ideological and theological aisle for the present state of religion in America. 

The first part of the book traces the religious social history of the U.S. since World War II.  In brief, Douthat contends that there has always been a tension between orthodox belief (using the term to encompass not just traditional Catholic doctrine, but that to which the Mainline had held to since the Reformation) and the more radical tendencies of the various "Great Awakenings" and revival movements that took hold from time to time.  The difference between then and now is that back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a strong orthodox establishment was able to reign in the wilder flights of theological and spiritual fancy while simultaneously being reinvigorated themselves by the new movements.  Now that orthodoxy is on the retreat there is nothing to put a limit on the contemporary trend to create Jesus in our own image and mold a theology to fit out personal tastes.    

The immediate Post War period is presented as the Golden Age of American Orthodoxy.  Fundamentalism had been in retreat since the Scopes Trial and figures like Bishop Fulton Sheen and Billy Graham were at once true to the tenants of their respective Christian creeds while forging a new vision of what it meant to be a disciple of Christ and a citizen of the United States.  Catholic schools, seminaries and convents were popping up everywhere and the National Council of Churches built a nineteen story headquarters in Manhattan (billed as the Protestant Vatican), dedicated by President Eisenhower, no less. These were heady times, and the high point, on the Catholic side anyway, was the Second Vatican Council.  It was here that American theologians like John Courtney Murray influenced the Universal Church on the issues of religious liberty and the compatibility between democracy and faith.

But almost as quickly as the established religions seemed secure the bottom fell out.  From 1965, when the Council ended, seminaries and convents emptied, with priests and religious sisters leaving their vocations in droves.  Church attendance began to fall all around and the once authoritative voices of mainstream Christianity lost their credibility with many.  Douthat identifies five basic reasons for this.  First off was political polarization caused by the Vietnam War.  Christians were at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement, but no such consensus coalesced around the U.S. involvement in South East Asia, with people of faith lining up on both sides of the issue.  This began a dividing of religion along liberal and conservative lines that endures to today, with both groups somehow contorting the Democratic or Republican platforms into pure reflections of Gospel values.  The Sexual Revolution, which we've talked about extensively here, led to a questioning of the "old morality" and still continues with our contemporary debates over gay marriage.  A new global perspective brought into focus the religions of the world, not resulting so much in conversions to Buddhism, for instance, as much as a mixing of the various faiths into a relativistic spiritual stew.  Along with the new experimentation came uncertainty over Christianity's claim of being the singular road to salvation and guilt over the sins of the past.  There was a jettisoning of concern over doctrine in favor of ethical living and with it an abandonment of Christianity as a cultural force, with an intellectual tradition worth preserving.  America's ever-growing wealth turned people off to a religion that not only wanted to help the poor, but also advocated voluntary poverty for it's adherence.  Douthat claims that the call to a vow of poverty may have been just as unattractive to potential priests as the call to celibacy.  And finally, and related directly to the last two points, religion had become declasse: something an affluent, educated, sophisticated, man about town would have nothing to do with.  Spirituality fine, but religion; how bousuasie.   

Next time: How Catholics and the Mainline tried to fight back, and failed.