Bad Religion

How We Became a Nation of Heretics

By: Ross Douthat

Narrated by: Lloyd James

As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times and the author of the critically acclaimed books Privilege and Grand New Party, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. Now he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails - and why it threatens to take American society with it.

In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, Douthat brilliantly charts traditional Christianity's decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith - which acted as a "vital center" and the moral force behind the Civil Rights movement - through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s and down to the polarizing debates of the present day. He argues that Christianity's place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, but by heresy: debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption.

Ranging from Glenn Beck to Eat Pray Love, Joel Osteen to The Da Vinci Code, Oprah Winfrey to Sarah Palin, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel's mantra of "pray and grow rich", a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach, and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country's ability to confront our most pressing challenges and accelerated American decline. His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital listening for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.

©2012 Ross Douthat (P)2012 Tantor

Most Christian book of our time

Ross does two things that most 21st Century Christians fail to do in our present era.

1. He goes beyond the common denominator of mere Christianity to objectively call out what is and is not Christianity.

2. He conveys his argument in a gentle and fatherly way that is respectful of the reader and their particular creed, yet assertive in delivering the radical challenge of Christ, which the orthodox Christian Faith's have preserved over the millennia.

This is an academic and scholarly read, so if you are like me, it may get dull at times. Nonetheless, I applaud Ross for the way he so delicately, yet strongly, challenges American culture to see the great value of authentic Christian culture, and the universal danger of watering it down to an unorthodox relative dogma to be used for one's own personal justification.

Eye-opening

An even-handed treatment of how the Christian church in America has fallen to the sorry state it is in.
What impressed me is the author states there may be some bias in his work. And while there may be, I thought he dealt fairly with the issues he brought up.

Thought Reverberating on 2 Levels

Profound on both the broadest levels: history, culture, politics, sociology, &, of course, religion & on the more personal ones: psychology, morality, the family, & human yearning.

A Clear Indictment...

of the postmodern "church," more self-help group or vague, self-satisfied social mission than body of Christ embracing the doctrine of the Bible. PCism, selfishness and spiritual laziness are what have given us the easy, breezy Joel Olsteen and Oprah takes on Christianity (washed clean of anything unpleasant and nearly of scripture itself), and Douthat makes a great argument against such a mistaken approach in this book, encouraging us to get back to the faith that has truly been the backbone of Christianity from the beginning.

Still a great read 12 years later

I've become a big fan of Douthat in recent months while I've always read him respectfully and I'm so glad he has a podcast now at the NYTimes. As a person with a renewed interest in Christianity due in large part to C.S. Lewis's and Chesterton's writings, I have been struggling to articulate just exactly what has happened to Christianity amongst the religious people I know, and even amongst the people who think they aren't! Many people are still very religious, but definitely not in the challenging, intellectually compelling but hopeful way that I have to come to understand to be truly Christian and which I struggle to live up to every day. Like Douthat, I'm very drawn to Harold Bloom's thesis that most American religion is really gnosticism (but of course Bloom meant it mostly as a complement!?!). Also like Douthat, I think various "heresies" are a better way of framing it and I'm grateful to him for this idea. As he writes towards the end, "the under catechized Catholic and Oprahfied Protestant are still only a good confession or an altar call away from a more authentic Christian life". This book is still a brilliant and essential read 12 years later.