The Future Of Christian America

I'm not sure I'd go so far as "perfectly suited".  It seems to me that a broad swathe of the right, and some of us on the left, don't like the egocentric hedonism espoused by principle #3.  It's not good for a polity, and it's not helpful for anyone who's adrift and is actually looking for an answer to what "the meaning of life" is.

I second Simon.  Point #3 may seem blandly inoffensive, but it's basically an affirmation of a life spent in the self-centered pursuit of one's own happiness.  I suppose it may win from a purely political perspective, but it's a deeply lousy philosophy.  First of all, it won't actually make anyone happy.  But it will lead to an etiolated society, one in which service to others is overlooked as a means of personal and societal benefit.

I don't know that I want a country that makes fundamentalist Christians happy, but at least they actually stand for something.

simon and Dr. Dan,

It seems like a hedonistic approach to life, yes. But "happiness" here is not (if I understand Damon correctly) a string of activities in which one is content. Video games may bring people a certain kind of happiness, but not the kind Jefferson mentions in the Declaration of Independence. It's basically going back to the central questions of philosophy: How does one lead an ethical life? How does one fulfill the meaning of what it is to be human? I think viewing principle #3 in that context is more suitable to a body politic.

I echo the sentiments above concerning #3.  However, I wonder if there isn't a bit of an illusion here, one fostered by the very "theocons" whom Mr. Linker so dislikes.

Not only does this catechism (what's so Rousseauist about it, btw?) reflect the views of most people I knew in those very middle decades, it reflects the outlook of the college students from deep here in Red State America whom I have been teaching for the last twenty years--and this is supposed to be the Bible Belt.  If there have been changes in the actual religious attitudes of Americans over the last few decades, they have been at the margins (which is all you really need to show up in the media or have an impact on elections).  The general unseriousness about matters religious of most Americans (unserious as it would be defined by, say, St Augustine or Luther) has continued with little change.  The vague deism described above is not based on any actual religious tradition or experience, but is the normal human default position for the unreflective, and will likely continue to be so.

What worries me is not the rise and fall of religiosity (I prefer subtler but stronger forms of faith anyway), but the growing lack of actual content behind the catechism given above.  I'm not sure what statistics, if any, are out there to demonstrate this or not, but (in my experience, anyway) there has been a steady decline in the most elementary knowledge of basic biblical, or generally religious, knowledge among students.  Forget the Bhagavad Gita or the eight-fold path; more and more students have never heard of Job or can name a single gospel writer.  This makes their appreciation of the past that much more shallow and their education about it that much more difficult.  Those concerned with the future of civilization might want to ponder that.

timteeter, it's not just the Bible. It's the entire canon. Not knowing Job or Jonah, much less the one from the other, is of a piece with not knowing Hamlet or Hamilton. I'm a pretty extreme wall-of-separationist, but I do think basic religious knowledge ought to be just as much a part of the American public curriculum as basic civics and literature. None of which seem to be taught in too many schools, a trend reinforced by NCLB.

As for #3, a couple of point. First off, #3 is what most of us actually want from life most of the time, so we might as well admit it openly, and to the extent that our station in life does not allow us to realize it, we will tend to seek to change our station. Whether that means leaving our church or looking for a new job or overthrowing the government by force. People rarely rebel against the established order because they're poor or because they're oppressed. We can live with poverty or tyranny. But if we cannot satisfy our basic desires for personal happiness, which is most often a function of perceived fairness and ability-to-feel-good-about-ourselves, that's when we break out the guillotines and start shooting redcoats.

But if stating #3 out loud is really such a problem, then a change in wording to make it more precise might be in order. Something along the lines of,

3. The central goal of life is to be satisfied that one is living a good life.

"Happiness" in this sense is not about experiencing pleasure from moment to moment, but more about the ability to hold a general state of mind in which one doesn't feel compelled to kill oneself out of disappointment or despair. Given modern usage of "happiness," I think "satisfaction" is a more precise expression of the older meaning of the word as it is most frequently used in philosophy and theology. And it also subsumes the important aspect of #3 that one must feel good about oneself. Not necessarily in the complacent sense, but in the sense of not having thugs from the Ministry of the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice telling us what disappointing failures we are all the time. If one wants to join a congregation that tells one what a terrible sinner one is and how disappointed God is in one, that's fine. But a society so ordered that such theological browbeating is unavoidable, whether by state agents or simply by dominant cultural institutions, will not long remain a peaceful and free society.

The only problem with this "moralistic therapeutic deism" is that it isn't true. But, hey, all the other religions in the world have the same problem.

I scanned the Newsweek article, and my immediate response was "What bilge!"  Here is what the 15% of us unaffiliated Americans want from monotheistic religion:  Leave us alone.  Don't try to turn government into a conveyance to bully us into buying the guilt and tripe and twaddle you peddle within the confines of the four walls of your megachurches/parish churches.  A part of America's uniqueness rests on each individual American's right to define "happiness" and to find "happiness" and to live "happiness" according to the dictates of her conscience and experience, that is, within the parameters of the law.  We don't need a civil religion nor do we need a sectarian religion to provide the definition of "happiness"  for us.  Invariably, one size definition of happiness does not fit all.  If at death's door I die claiming myself to be "happy," whatever that means, then that state of mind/spirit/conscience will be of my making.  If the opposite is true, then the failure is mine.  And no one need worry that fundamentalist Christianity or orthodox Christianity will soon fade from our national scene; both are adept at retooling and remaking themselves into whatever keeps their institutions' coffers full.  Jesus' knew of what he spoke when he preached of folds and sheep.

moralistic therapeutic deism?  I suppose Joel Osteen and Oprah Winfrey should sue Linker for copyright infringement

This is happiness and the not the drivel of # 3:

THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE

I

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,

Pink and white carnations. The light

In the room more like a snowy air,

Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow

At the end of winter when afternoons return.

Pink and white carnations - one desires

So much more than that. The day itself

Is simplified: a bowl of white,

Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,

With nothing more than the carnations there.

II

Say even that this complete simplicity

Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed

The evilly compounded, vital I

And made it fresh in a world of white,

A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,

Still one would want more, one would need more,

More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III

There would still remain the never-resting mind,

So that one would want to escape, come back

To what had been so long composed.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Allow me, not Stevens, to repeat that, last stanza, just for emphasis;

There would still remain the never-resting mind,

So that one would want to escape, come back

To what had been so long composed.

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

You gotta marvel at how the "Christ" in Christianity got from the Sermon on the Mount to ""The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself."   You'd have thought a religion 2000 years in the making could have grown beyond early adolescence by now.  But somewhere along the way, a lot of Christianity starting looking inward toward the self, rather than outward toward society, and it is indeed a pretty bland, narcissistic faith I encounter here in the heartland, as a result.

When I looked at #3, I didn't see hedonism -- I saw "self help"-speak.  Which, quite frankly, is completely consistent with oversimplified Christianity.

Shocked, shocked to read that Damon Linker thinks that Christianity's decay into a wet-toilet-paper shell of itself called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is good for the country. Excerpt: Theologically speaking, this watered-down, anemic, insipid form of

"Christian in all kinds of important ways"

"Christian is significant senses"

Are these anything like being "a little bit pregnant"?

The US isn't Christian now (maybe "Christian" but not without the scare quotes) and wouldn't be then.  So what's the diff?

It's interesting to think that when our nation was formed, the dominant Christianity was the variety espoused by Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather, a religion based on the omnipotence of God and the reality of the Devil. In many ways a binary religion where nuance came in descriptions of HOW the damned were damned and the saved were saved, not in debates about WHO would be saved or damned  (since it was predestined).

During the Bush #2 years, that binary nature of religion came back but the element of free will was thrown in. During the Bush years, if you chose to be born again then you were saved.  If you chose not to be born again or if or chose to be gay or chose an abortion or chose to be liberal then you were damnable.  It's this binary feeling that is driving the electorate away from evangelical Protestantism.

Americans have never been very tolerant of binary choices even though, in many ways, our national psyche tends toward binary thinking.  This explains our peculiarly American form of entrepreneurship that has allowed (until the recent past) for global economic influence,  but it also explains the "you're either for us or against us" mentality that drives our thinking about the world and each other.

The "decline" of religion I think is more a reaction to this  binary thinking.  Nuance is becoming more fashionable (an Obama White House was a promise of this during the election) and the younger generation is getting tired of the "greatest generation" and baby boomers exercising the power of "no" and refusing to see issues as complex.

Because western religion tends to be about stark choices (for better or worse), it will suffer in an age in which people refuse to give credence to the need for stark choices.  Organized religion based on obedience and binary thinking may have been a good model when it was limited to desert-wandering tribes or catacomb-dwelling rebels, but it tends to break down or splinter the further it tries to reach.

More and more people will ask "Why can't I believe in Jesus Christ but also believe that gays can be loved and allowed to marry?"  And similar questions.

I don't think belief in God will really diminish.  But I agree with Newsweek's (typically shallow) premise.  

Yet there will be a great revival in the future in which the Christian right will seize on an event (natural or man-made) and try to regain its hold.  But that too will fail much as its attempt to use 9/11 as a stab at hegemony.  

It disturbs me that the moralistic therapeutic deism as described by Mr. Smith is proposed as the "most ... salutary option" to evangelical-Catholic alliance orthodoxy. The list reads like a moral equivalent of junk food. Mr. Linker disclaims it as "insipid" and yet proposes it as the best alternative. Observe particularly point three: "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself." Whatever ever happened to the goal of being a good person? - which I take to mean living compassionately, honorably, and humbly? Surely evangelical-Catholics have not co-opted this goal in their orthodoxy. Mr. Linker damages his thesis by proposing such a shabby alternative.

I line up with those who think that #3 and in fact the whole lsit reads like Oprah-lite (sic).

As tired to suggest in pasting Poems Of Our Climate, negative capability, that's the ticket. Or put another and variant way, as Rubin wrote: "...The tragic sense of life therefore has little to do with pathos and nothing to do with despair, but rather implies the loftiest possible conception of the heights to which man is capable of rising. He who has the courage and stature necessary to "maintain his ways" and carry the quest through to its conclusion..."

Now that's what I call the pursuit of happiness.

Most of the time, on TRL, I'm embarassed to be a Christian.  This post makes me embarassed to be a liberal.

It's hard to make much of Linker's article, after just a bit of scrutiny. It is reputedly about the "future of Christian America," but the "all-important question" Linker poses is: "What will provide the theological content of the nation's civil religion ... for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people?" The question is meaningless, almost answers itself, and has nothing to do with the future of Christian America. For what it's worth, his insipid five-point list would mean something if people could build their lives around it, but they can't and they won't.

I suppose what Linker is trying to do is find some common elements in all the world's religions, but that exercise is not very interesting.

Although there are endless varieties of "Christianity" believed and practiced in America, I suspect that one way of forecasting Christianity's future would be to say that those who study Biblical prophecies will be more and more sobered as they see them fulfilled and leading towards apocalypse in some of the very specific ways predicted in Revelation, Daniel, Matthew, and elsewhere in the Bible. Even as God's apparent absence from human history becomes more and more compelling and hard to deny, the prophesies come closer and closer to fulfillment and mystify the mind that wants to put all these questions to rest.

I suspect that to speak of the future of Christianity in America is, at least in one part of the spectrum, to speak of the gradually widening divide between those who cling to the Bible and those who don't care much about the details but still call themselves Christians. Unfortunately, those who have a lot of fundamentalist zeal tend to vote for the most dangerous criminals in our political system. So I suppose in the end, my own prediction is that as America approaches apocalypse, fanatical Christian believers will work harder and harder to get morally bankrupt demagogues into positions of power in Washington.

The future of Christianity in America, then, if there is a resurgence of the "religious right," is probably to put Antichrist into the White House.

Well, Mr. Linker if you want to kill Christian America that a la carte hedonistic religion (not to confuse with Jefferson's beliefs, by far) you are Straussianly proposing is the way to go...

But if, against the absurdity you wrote, you are a Christian and not a political theologian I would only advise a visit to the inscriptions on the Jefferson Memorial in order to regain the spirit of the thing. Pass through the Lincoln and the FDR ones. At least try to understand what's at stake...

I could not resist this contrast with Linker's insipidity:

rossdouthat.theatlantic.com

Ross Douthat

Good Friday (III)

Posted: 10 Apr 2009 12:19 PM PDT

...The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr offered the classic criticism of a feel-good brand of American religion that presented no challenges and posed no problems. He said it peddled the idea that "a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

Niebuhr was critiquing certain varieties of liberal Christianity, but his scolding applies to all Christians too eager to conform their faith to the political and cultural whims of the moment. Grace is never cheap, and a Christianity that is struggling with itself is on the path of rediscovering its true calling....

...E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University....

www.tnr.com/.../story.html

Conider yourself spanked, Linker.

The ordinary resources of empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge give us no warrant for supposing

Sociologist Daniel Bell once famously defined an intellectual as someone who knows how to make relevant