Books - "Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics" by Ross Douthat

The Church of What's Happening Now

By Ryan T. Anderson 

The "fear of theocracy," Ross Douthat argued in a 2006 First Things essay, "has become a defining panic of the Bush era." He suggested that the panicked should take a deep breath: the Bush years were just the latest iteration of the ongoing story of religion in America, always "at once a secular republic and a religious nation, reflexively libertarian and fiercely pious."

Douthat, now a New York Times columnist, revisits and develops these themes in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. No volume covers the politics and sociology of American religion as well--as thoughtfully or as lyrically--as Douthat's. Yet he doesn't pull his punches. Bad Religion endorses biblically orthodox, socially conservative Christianity in a way that will be accessible, even appealing, to liberal skeptics.

Against alarmists decrying the Religious Right and the Religious Right decrying modern godlessness, Douthat contends that America doesn't suffer from excessive or insufficient religion, but from bad religion that exacerbates rather than heals our sociopolitical ills. The "slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place" has been disastrous for the nation. We're still a religious nation, but "a nation of heretics."

On Douthat's telling, American culture was long shaped by the "shared theological commitments that have defined the parameters of Christianity since the early Church." Those commitments included not only belief in the Trinity or Incarnation, but also the Ten Commandments, a "rejection of violence," a "deep suspicion of worldly wealth and power," and a "stress on chastity." Most importantly, Americans believed in the "idea of orthodoxy," that a truth unchosen by us binds our belief and behavior.

Heresy, however, is simpler and easier than orthodoxy, which holds truths together in tension: God is both one and three; we are both fallen and called to perfection. Orthodoxy insists on both/and formulations while heresy embraces an either/or approach. Orthodoxy lives with mystery and paradox, content that some truths lay beyond humanity's finite intellect. Heresy tries to "streamline Christianity, rationalize it, minimize the paradoxes and difficulties, make it more consistent and less mysterious." Easier, too, rarely placing greater moral demands on adherents.

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