“The religious [orthodox Christians] mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul.”"The United States remains a deeply religious country, and most Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well. But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses."
-Ross Douthat
Sky View preface: Ross Douthat, author of the recently released book, Bad Religion, has made an appearance on The World Over with Raymond Arroyo and The Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio. He is a conservative columnist at the New York Times. His contribution is that he provides a big picture analysis of orthodox Christianity, liberal Christianity and secularism. He naintains that although America is still a religious nation, institutional Christianity is drying up.
Christopher Dawson, early in the 20th century, once cautioned that Christianity's biggest problem willl not be the anti-religious so much as the sub-religious; that is, those who profess a Christian faith but only accept a portion it. In hindsight we see that the Church's tolerance of this imitation or pseudo-Christianty has ushered in considerable confusion as to what a true follower of Christ really looks like.
Prologue: A Nation of Heretics
Courtesy of Catholic Education Resource Center
ROSS DOUTHAT
"Bad Religion is nothing short of prophetic. In a time of religious, political, and cultural upheaval, Ross Douthat tells the American faithful — liberals, conservatives, and everybody in between — not what we want to hear, but what we desperately need to hear. With this provocative and challenging work that no thoughtful Christian can afford to ignore, Douthat assures his place in the first rank of his generation's public intellectuals." - Rod Dreher
After the great crash of 2008, Americans awoke and saw their country the way anti-Americans have always seen it: spendthrift, decadent, and corrupt. The city on a hill had become a mismanaged empire; the land of self-reliance was buried in debt. Our political class had run up enormous deficits at home and entangled us in never-ending military operations overseas. Our financial elites had been exposed as reckless, self-deluded speculators who had gambled away the country's economic future and then gone begging for a bailout. And the whole mess had been made possible by middle America's relentless appetite — for bigger houses, bigger portfolios, bigger government programs, bigger everything, and damn the long-term cost.
During the 2008 election season, the extraordinary unpopularity of George W. Bush made him an obvious scapegoat for these debacles, and the charisma of Barack Obama made him a convenient savior figure. By the fall of 2010, it was Obama's turn to take the blame, while the Tea Party offered a right-wing version of hope and change. But even as Americans turned the parties into and out of office, most of them understood that the rot ran deeper than the White House and Capitol Hill, and that there were trends at work that couldn't be reversed by simply dispatching a more talented set of leaders to Washington, D.C.
Thus the ongoing search for more comprehensive theories of American decline. Some of these theories are ideological: Conservatives denounce liberals as free-spending socialists, while liberals denounce conservatives for championing a cult of deregulated dog-eat-dog. Some theories are structural: On the left, in particular, there is a widespread sense that America's creaky eighteenth-century institutions are no longer capable of responding to the challenges of a polarized country and a globalized world. And some theories are frankly conspiratorial, involving perfidious foreigners and conniving corporations, villainous ex-Weathermen and dissembling Straussians, controlled demolitions on 9/11 and forged birth certificates in 1960s Hawaii.
The most potent theories, though, involve religion. This is as it should be because, at the deepest level, every human culture is religious — defined by what its inhabitants believe about some ultimate reality, and what they think that reality demands of them. The reality doesn't have to be a personal God: It can be the iron laws of Marxism, the religion of blood and soil, the Gaia hypothesis, the church of the free market, the cult of the imperial self. But Bob Dylan had it right: You gotta serve somebody, and every culture does.
This insight forms the basis for two of the most popular explanations for America's current predicament — one offered by the Christian right, the other by the secular left. The first holds that Americans have lost their way because they've fallen away from the faith of their fathers, or else been bullied into apostasy by secular elites. The more simplistic version of this argument insists that the United States was founded as an explicitly "Christian nation" and, like Israel of old, has lost God's favor by straying from this covenant. The more sophisticated version follows Alexis de Tocqueville in suggesting that American democracy, while formally secular, has always depended on religion to provide a moral framework for its citizens — and so the eclipse of Christian belief has led, inevitably, to the eclipse of public morality and private virtue alike.
But both the populists and the intellectuals in this camp share the same basic understanding of our national predicament. Their America is a nation in which religious faith has been steadily marginalized, with increasingly disastrous results. Their scapegoats include progressive educators, activist judges, Hollywood elites, and the deophobic media. Their prescription, from the 1970s to the present day, has been a religious counterrevolution, aimed at restoring faith to its rightful place at the center of American culture, politics, and law.
For a time this narrative dominated the conversation about religion and American decline. In the last decade, however, an alternative story came into its own — first as a stinging critique of George W. Bush's administration, and then as a broader account of the American situation. Against the idea that the United States has lost touch with its religious roots, a growing chorus began insisting that the United States is in decline because it's excessively religious. On issue after issue, these critics made Christian belief the problem in and of itself, casting the political controversies of the 2000s as an apocalyptic struggle between science and ignorance, reason and superstition, the light of progress and the medieval dark.
Sometimes this argument has been couched as an attack on the socalled theocracy that Christian conservatives are supposedly bent on setting up. (Thus the spate of Bush-era books attacking "Christian fascists," "Christian nationalists," and "Christianists," culminating in Kevin Phillips's bestselling jeremiad American Theocracy.) At other times it has taken the form of a straightforward assault on belief in a God, advanced by atheists who shared Christopher Hitchens's sweeping assessment that religion "poisons everything." Either way, the portrait of contemporary America is roughly the same: a once-great nation brought low by piety and zeal.
These two visions seem mutually contradictory — but both contain an element of truth. America has indeed become less traditionally Christian across the last half century, just as religious conservatives insist, with unhappy consequences for our national life. But certain kinds of religious faith are as influential as ever, just as secular critics and the new atheists contend — and they're right, as well, that to the extent that there's an ongoing crisis in American culture, the excesses of the faithful probably matter more than the sins of unbelievers.
That's because 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 United States remains a deeply religious country, and most Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well. But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses. These faiths speak from many pulpits — conservative and liberal, political and popcultural, traditionally religious and fashionably "spiritual" — and many of their preachers call themselves Christian or claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional Christianity, not the real thing.
Locked in conflict, neither religious conservatives nor their secular antagonists have come to grips with this transformation. The secular mistake has been to assume that every theology tends inevitably toward the same follies and fanaticisms, and to imagine that a truly postreligious culture is even possible, let alone desirable. The religious mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul. Along the way, both sides have embraced a wildly simplified vision of our culture, in which the children of light contend with the children of darkness, and every inch of ground is claimed by absolute truth or deplorable error.
The real story is what's happening in the vast America in between, where papal encyclicals rarely penetrate and the works of Richard Dawkins pass unread. That's where you'll find the reality of contemporary religion, and the roots of our present crisis. It's an America that remains the most religious country in the developed world, as God-besotted today as ever; a place where Jesus Christ is an obsession, God's favor a birthright, and spiritual knowledge an all-consuming goal. But it's also a place where traditional Christian teachings have been warped into justifications for solipsism and anti-intellectualism, jingoism and utopianism, selfishness and greed.
In this America, the ancient Christian teaching that the Scriptures are simultaneously divinely inspired and open to multiple interpretations has become an either/or choice instead. You're either a rigid fundamentalist who believes that dinosaurs just missed hitching a ride on Noah's Ark, or a self-consciously progressive believer for whom the Bible is a kind of refrigerator magnet poetry, awaiting rearrangement by more enlightened minds. As a result, the Jesus of the New Testament, whose paradoxical mix of qualities and commandments presents a challenge to every ideology and faction, has been replaced in the hearts and minds of many Americans with a more congenial figure — a "choose your own Jesus" who better fits their own preconceptions about what a savior should and shouldn't be.
Likewise, in this America the traditional Christian attempt to balance the belief that God desires human happiness with the reality of human suffering has been transformed into the simpler teaching that God wants everyone to get rich — that your house or car or high-paying job was intended for you from before the foundation of the world, and that the test of true faith is the rewards that it reaps for believers here on earth. The result is a country where religion actively encourages the sort of recklessness that produced our current economic meltdown, rather than serving as a brake on materialism and a rebuke to avarice.
In this America, too, the Christian teaching that every human soul is unique and precious has been stressed, by the prophets of self-fulfillment and gurus of self-love, at the expense of the equally important teaching that every human soul is fatally corrupted by original sin. Absent the latter emphasis, religion becomes a license for egotism and selfishness, easily employed to justify what used to be considered deadly sins. The result is a society where pride becomes "healthy self-esteem," vanity becomes "selfimprovement," adultery becomes "following your heart," greed and gluttony become "living the American dream."
Finally, in this America the Christian view that God desires justice but that it's wrong to expect utopia in this lifetime has given way to a more optimistic vision, in which the spread of democracy is part of the divine plan, the doctrine of American exceptionalism is a kind of Eleventh Commandment, and political leaders are expected to achieve an approximation of heaven here on earth. The results: an overreaching foreign policy under both Republicans and Democrats, a domestic government that tries to be all things to all people no matter which party is in power, and a polarized mood in which the two political coalitions oscillate between messianic delusions and apocalyptic fears depending on whether or not they control the levers of government.
This is the real story of religion in America. For all its piety and fervor, today's United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.
But haven't we always been a nation of heretics? Wasn't our country founded as a religious sanctuary and a haven for experimenters of all stripes — Pilgrims and Quakers, Methodists and Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists, and a parade of more exotic sects? In the stories we tell about ourselves, aren't the heroes usually iconoclasts and freethinkers, not sticklers for dogma and theological correctness?
Indeed they are. Since the first settlers arrived in Jamestown and Plymouth, our common life has been shaped by a succession of fascinating, only-in-America faiths: the chilly Deism of the eighteenth century and the warm metaphysical bath of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalism; the Mormon theocracy of the nineteenth century and the New Age movements of the 1960s; Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science and L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology; and many, many more.
But there's another story to tell about religion in the United States, one that gives the dogmatists their due. You can't have fringes without a center, iconoclasts without icons, revolutionaries without institutions to rebel against. We have always been a nation of heretics, but heresy has never had the field to itself. Instead, the potency, creativity, and resilience of American faith have been a testament to both the boldness of our spiritual freelancers and the staying power of our religious establishments — the various denominations of mainstream Protestantism and then, as its presence in the United States grew apace, the Roman Catholic Church. A chart of the American religious past would look like a vast delta, with tributaries, streams, and channels winding in and out, diverging and reconverging — but all of them fed, ultimately, by a central stream, an original current, a place where all the waters start.
This river is Christian orthodoxy. Not the orthodoxy of any specific Christian church, whether Lutheran or Presbyterian or Roman Catholic, but the shared theological commitments that have defined the parameters of Christianity since the early Church. The constant struggles between this consensus and its critics — between existing churches and start-up faiths, between ancient doctrine and modern experimentation, between the belief that religious truth is handed down from the apostles and the belief that it's something that each believer needs to discover on his own — have played an immensely fruitful role in our religious history, and helped to make the American experiment such a remarkable success.
Time and again, America's heretics have tugged their Christian countrymen forward toward new ideas, new horizons, new visions of justice, and new experiences of the numinous. Think of the Founders themselves; many of them were Deists and Unitarians rather than orthodox Christians, and their distance from institutional Christianity helped guarantee the new nation's absolute commitment to freedom of religion. Think of self-appointed prophets like John Brown, violent and half-mad but also visionary in his absolutist condemnation of chattel slavery. Think of the late-nineteenthcentury Social Gospel, which aimed — in tension with traditional Christian emphases and understandings — to build the kingdom of God on earth, and succeeded in curbing some of the worst excesses of industrialization. Think of twentieth-century Pentecostalism, doctrinally suspect from the perspective of many Christian churches, but also responsible for reviving the strangest and most ancient form of Christian worship — the wild ecstasy of glossolalia.
But now consider orthodox Christianity's contribution to America as well. From the beginning, the existence of a Christian center — first exclusively Protestant, and then eventually accommodating Catholicism as well — has helped bind together a teeming, diverse, and fissiparous nation. This binding has often been tangible and concrete: The hierarchy, discipline, and institutional continuity of Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism helped build hospitals and schools, orphanages and universities, and assimilated generation upon generation of immigrants. But our religious center has bound us together in a more mysterious fashion as well. In a country without a national church, the kind of "mere Christianity" has frequently provided an invisible mortar for our culture and a common vocabulary for our great debates. As Jody Bottum put it in a 2008 essay, the major Christian churches have operated "as simultaneously the happy enabler and the unhappy conscience of the American republic — a single source for both national comfort and national unease."
That "unease" has been particularly important. In a country where religious enthusiasms tend to run ahead of common sense, the insistence on continuity with the Christian past has saved many churches from captivity to whatever fad or fashion happened to be passing through at the moment — and often helped save America as well. In this sense, orthodoxy hasn't just provided a moral and theological center for Americans. It has also often provided a means of necessary dissent — dissent from the intellectual overconfidence of the Age of Reason and the antiintellectualism of nineteenth-century revivalism, dissent from the cold scientism of the Gospel According to Darwin and the crass materialism of the Gospel According to the Robber Barons, dissent from the desiccated rationalism of modernist theology and the dreary literalism of fundamentalism.
But, for the last five decades, with the decline of institutional Christianity, the river of orthodoxy has gradually been drying up. Americans, steeped in the ideal of religious freedom, take it for granted that orthodoxy without room for heresy is dangerous. Think of the Inquisition, they say, or the trial of Galileo, or (a little closer to home) the Puritan witch hunts. Yet heresy without room for orthodoxy turns out to be dangerous as well. Many of the overlapping crises in American life, from our foreign policy disasters to the housing bubble to the rate of out-of-wedlock births, can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity — one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition — at the expense of all the others. The goal is always progress: a belief system that's simpler or more reasonable, more authentic or more up-to-date. Yet the results often vindicate the older Christian synthesis. Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme.
Such extremism isn't a new thing in American life. Today's heretics are all eminently American, the heirs of Jefferson and Joseph Smith, Emerson and Eddy, the Victorian prosperity preachers and the religious intellectuals of the Progressive Era. Pushing Christianity to one extreme or another is what Americans have always done. We've been making idols of our country, our pocketbooks, and our sacred selves for hundreds of years.
What's changed today, though, is the weakness of the orthodox response.
A sign of this weakness is the extent to which the very terms orthodoxy and heresy have become controversial in today's religious conversation — either dismissed as anachronisms, or shunned for their historical associations with bigotry and persecution. In the modern age, there's an assumption that theological debates are really just struggles for power, that the lines between heresy and orthodoxy are inherently arbitrary, and that religious belief is too fluid and complicated to fit any sort of binary interpretation.
These assumptions aren't entirely wrong. Any theory of Christianity, my own included, has to allow that the line between orthodox and heretical beliefs often will be apparent more in theory than in practice, and clearer in hindsight than in the heat of controversy and debate. The definition of heresy proposed by Alister McGrath is a useful one: A Christian heresy is "best seen as a form of Christian belief that, more by accident than design, ultimately ends up subverting, destabilizing or even destroying the core of Christian faith." But McGrath's cautionary follow-up is also useful: "Both this process of destabilization and the identification of its threat may be spread out over an extended period of time." This means that the last word on a particular controversy can take generations to be written. Reformers may be damned in one generation and rehabilitated in the next. Apparent heresiarchs are sometimes remembered as faithful Christians who attacked abuses, rather than as wreckers who threatened the essence of the faith. Mystics who were burned for heresy, as was Joan of Arc, may reemerge as saints.
But we should be able to recognize these complexities, and the crucial role that heresy has played in the history of the faith, without going to the extreme of denying that Christianity has a theological core at all. However blurry matters get on the periphery, a Christian center still exists — one that dates to the earliest centuries of the faith and that's still shared by most of the divided churches of Christendom today. Even as decisive a break as the Reformation, with all its hurled anathemas and "whore of Babylon" polemics, didn't shatter this common Protestant-Catholic connection to what Thomas Oden calls "the consensus of the early church." The major Reformation-era debates were over how to interpret an existing consensus, both ancient and medieval, not about whether the consensus should be binding in the first place.
This consensus includes the basic dogmas of the faith: Christ's incarnation and atonement, the Trinity and the Virgin Birth, the forgiveness of sins and the possibility of everlasting life. It includes a belief in the divine inspiration and authority of a particular set of sacred scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, with no additional revelations added on and nothing papered over or rejected. It includes an adherence to the moral vision encoded in the Ten Commandments and expanded and deepened in the New Testament: a rejection of violence and cruelty, a deep suspicion of worldly wealth and power, and a heavy stress on chastity. It includes a commitment to the creeds of the ancient world — Nicene, Apostolic, Athanasian — and to the idea that a church, however organized and governed, should guarantee and promulgate them. And it includes the idea of orthodoxy — the belief that there exists "a faith once delivered to the saints," and that the core of Christianity is an inheritance from the first apostles, rather than being something that every believer can and should develop for himself.
What defines this consensus, above all — what distinguishes orthodoxy from heresy, the central river from the delta — is a commitment to mystery and paradox. Mysteries abide at the heart of every religious faith, but the Christian tradition is uniquely comfortable preaching dogmas that can seem like riddles, offering answers that swiftly lead to further questions, and confronting believers with the possibility that the truth about God passes all our understanding.
Thus orthodox Christians insist that Jesus Christ was divine and human all at once, that the Absolute is somehow Three as well as One, that God is omnipotent and omniscient and yet nonetheless leaves us free to choose between good and evil. They propose that the world is corrupted by original sin and yet somehow also essentially good, with the stamp of its Creator visible on every star and sinew. They assert that the God of the Old Testament, jealous and punitive, is somehow identical to the New Testament's God of love and mercy. They claim that this same God sets impossible moral standards and yet forgives every sin. They insist that faith alone will save us, yet faith without works is dead. And they propose a vision of holiness that finds room in God's Kingdom for all the extremes of human life — fecund families and single-minded celibates, politicians and monastics, queens as well as beggars, soldiers and pacifists alike.
Time and again, in the early centuries Anno Domini, the councils of the Church had the opportunity to resolve the dilemmas and shore up the fragile syntheses — to streamline Christianity, rationalize it, minimize the paradoxes and the difficulties, make it more consistent and less mysterious. They could have joined the movement that we call Gnosticism in attempting to minimize the problem of theodicy — of how a good God can allow evil to endure — by simply declaring this pain-filled world the work of a foolish or wicked demigod, and portraying Jesus as an emissary from a more perfect deity than the one who made our wounded earth. They could have fallen in line behind the second-century theologian Marcion's perfectly reasonable attempt to resolve the tensions between the Gospels and the Hebrew scriptures by abandoning Christianity's Jewish roots entirely. They could have listened to the earnest British moralist Pelagius instead of to Saint Augustine, and replaced the mysteries of grace and original sin with the more commonsensical vision of a God whose commandments can be obeyed through straightforward exertion.
In each instance, and in many more as well, they chose the way of mystery instead — or else they were bullied and arm-twisted into it, by mobs and emperors and polemicizing intellectuals. The process seemed haphazard at the time, but in hindsight it looks providential. In the choices they made and the arguments they rejected, the Fathers of the Church forged a faith whose doctrines speak to the intuition, nearly universal among human beings, that the true nature of the world will always remain just beyond our grasp. But they accomplished this without surrendering to an unintelligible mysticism or a crude anti-intellectualism. Indeed, this is perhaps the greatest Christian paradox of all — that the world's most paradoxical religion has cultivated rationalism and scientific rigor more diligently than any of its rivals, making the Christian world safe for philosophy as well as fervor, for the study of nature as well as the contemplation of divinity.
But if this spirit of paradox and mystery, of both/and rather than either/ or, has made Christianity extraordinarily adaptable, it has exposed the faith to a constant stream of criticism as well. One man's mystery is another man's incoherence, and the paradoxes of Christian doctrine have always been a source of scandal as well as strength — not only among atheists, but also among the many honest believers to whom orthodox Christian doctrine looks like a hopeless muddle or else transparent sophistry.
Jews and Muslims have argued as much for going on two thousand years. More significantly for our purposes, so have most heretics. The great Christian heresies vary wildly in their theological substance, but almost all have in common a desire to resolve Christianity's contradictions, untie its knotty paradoxes, and produce a cleaner and more coherent faith. Heretics are often stereotyped as wild mystics, but they're just as likely to be problem solvers and logic choppers, well-intentioned seekers after a more reasonable version of Christian faith than orthodoxy supplies. They tend to see themselves, not irrationally, as rescuers rather than enemies of Christianity — saving the faith from self-contradiction and cultural irrelevance.
The nature of these rescue attempts varies according to which aspect of the Christian synthesis seems most incredible to a given culture at a given time and place. Amid the oracles and mystery cults of the early Roman Empire, for instance, the Gnostics sought to make Christianity more appealing by making it more overtly supernatural. Their Christ was a pure spirit disguised in mortal flesh, their vision of salvation an escape from physical suffering into an entirely disembodied plane. Eighteen centuries later, at the height of the Age of Reason, Deists and Unitarians went in the opposite direction, trying to rescue Christianity from the scorn of the scientific age by stripping away its supernatural aspects while leaving its ethical core intact. Their Christ was just a particularly insightful version of the species Homo sapiens, their God a distant watchmaker who had established physical and moral laws and then let His world unfold without any further intervention.
For many orthodox believers, these and all the other heresies are traps from which the faith has narrowly escaped. In G. K. Chesterton's vivid vision of Christian history, the fullness of truth is sustained in a perpetual balancing act, conducted at a wild gallop:
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. . . . It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. . . . To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom — that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.
Yet perhaps this vision does not give heresy enough credit. "With no small amount of irony," Jonathan Wright points out "[heretics] did many favors to the cause of orthodoxy. Heresy was always orthodoxy's grumpy but indispensable twin." Christianity's two thousand years of dynamism, its persistent and often unexpected vitality, owes something to the tight grip that the faith's leaders have kept on the reins of doctrine. But it owes a great deal to bold experimentation as well — to scholars who flirt with heterodoxy in the pursuit of a deeper understanding of the faith, to saints who rebel against the limits imposed by ecclesiastical authorities, to artists and poets who boldly go where popes and theologians fear to tread.
All of which is to say that Christian faith needs heresy, or at least the possibility of heresy, lest it become something rote and brittle, a compendium of doctrinal technicalities with no purchase on the human soul. Indeed, like flying buttresses around a great cathedral, the pull-and-push of competing heresies may be precisely the thing that keeps the edifice of Christian faith upright.
For most of our country's history, the American experience has vindicated this point. In many ways, the landscape of Christianity in America — where the faith is uncorrupted by state power and a thousand heresies are allowed to bloom — resembles the climate of the early Church, with all the furious theological ferment but (mercifully) none of the Roman persecution. What Christianity has offered to the United States has been matched by what the United States has offered to Christianity: a chance, in a nation with no establishment of religion, to recover the subversive power of its early centuries — a power that a religion founded on the crucifixion of a God-man alongside common criminals ought by rights to always possess.
In the nations of Europe, where orthodox belief was backed up by the force of law as well as by custom, the idea of what Robert Inchausti calls "subversive orthodoxy" often seemed like a contradiction in terms. But in America, where heresies had free rein and established churches competed on a level playing field with start-up sects, the paradoxes of Christianity could regain their countercultural power. In America, religious gestures that would have been viewed as establishmentarian in the state-supported Christianity of Europe — becoming a priest or pastor or a monk, defending creeds and rituals and doctrinal exactness, seeking God through Holy Communion as well as in nature or philosophy — became radical once more. In America, because orthodoxy couldn't be taken for granted, orthodoxy came alive. In America, Chesterton's whirling adventure could become a real adventure once again.
For a time, at least. But if the American religious landscape has long resembled the world of early Christianity, then twenty-first-century America looks increasingly as if it's replaying that story with a very different ending — one in which orthodoxy slowly withers and only heresies endure.
How this came to pass is the subject of this book. The first chapter offers a portrait of American Christianity in the years following World War II — an era of intellectual confidence, artistic vitality, pews full to bursting, and a widespread sense that traditional Christian faith and contemporary liberal democracy were natural partners. Tracing the convergences between Mainline Protestantism, Evangelical Christianity, Roman Catholicism, and the African-American church, I discuss the emergence of what seemed at the time to be a rebuilt Christian center, at once steeped in the faith's oldest traditions and confidently engaged with modern thought and politics. In that lost world, only half a century gone, the Christian religion seemed to have passed through the fires of modernity and emerged scorched but stronger on the other side.
The next three chapters describe how this world came apart, and how an era of theological convergence gave way to a Christian civil war. They cover the divisions produced by controversies ranging from the Vietnam War to the debate over abortion; the efforts to accommodate Christian theology to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s; the attempts at resistance by Protestants and Catholics alike; and the steady institutional decline — apparent in dwindling memberships, declining religious vocations, and diminished cultural clout — of the country's established churches in the wake of those revolutions. And they place special weight on the deeper reasons behind America's loss of confidence in orthodoxy, tracing developments in the late-modern West that have made basic Christian tenets seem less plausible than they did even in the very recent past.
In the second half of the book I consider American Christianity as it is today, in the wake of this slow-motion collapse, focusing on heresy's increasing dominance over our hyperreligious nation's way of faith. Some of these heresies can be associated with the careers of specific individuals — Joel Osteen and Dan Brown, Oprah Winfrey and Elizabeth Gilbert, Eckhart Tolle and Glenn Beck. Other heresies permeate our culture so completely that we take their premises for granted and don't think of them as distinctive theologies at all. Some offer direct critiques of orthodoxy, and define themselves explicitly as alternatives to historic Christianity; others undercut traditional Christian beliefs only implicitly, while noisily insisting on their own fidelity to Jesus Christ. But all of them exert a profound, and often profoundly negative, influence on our American society — on our intellectuals and our popular culture, our bedrooms and our boardrooms, the Democratic left and the Republican right alike. And, judging by spiritual trends within the rising generation, the future of American religion seems likely to be defined by Christian heresy even more completely than the present already is.
Given my own Catholic commitments, it will not be surprising that I would prefer to see a different American future — one where heresy's hold weakened and a more traditional Christianity was gradually renewed. But this book is not intended primarily as an apologia for my own religious beliefs. Obviously, I hope that my readers will be inspired to take a closer look at orthodox Christianity, and to reflect anew on its potential relevance for contemporary life. But I think that my analysis of how and why American Christianity has changed over the last fifty years, and what these changes mean for our national life today, will be compelling even to readers who are unconvinced that Jesus of Nazareth was resurrected from the dead.
As long as the United States remains a God-haunted country, secular as well as pious Americans will have a strong stake in the forms that American religion takes. Both doubters and believers have benefited from the role that institutional Christianity has traditionally played in our national life — its communal role, as a driver of assimilation and a guarantor of social peace, and its prophetic role, as a curb against our national excesses and a constant reminder of our national ideals. Both doubters and believers stand to lose if religion in the age of heresy turns out to be complicit in our fragmented communities, our collapsing families, our political polarization, and our weakened social ties. Both doubters and believers will inevitably suffer from a religious culture that supplies more moral license than moral correction, more self-satisfaction than self-examination, more comfort than chastisement.
This is the argument that I will advance in these pages. I am confident that it can be received profitably by anyone — Christian or not, religious or not — who cares about the state of this country, the challenges of the present moment, and the shape of things to come.
