Just finished reading the book Bad Religion by Ross Douthat. Douthat was and, as far as I know, still is the youngest ever Op Ed columnist for the New York Times. Below are a few of the passages I highlighted.
"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."
"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."
"Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"For these reasons and more, the crisis of traditional Christianity, not the rise of the conservative churches, remains the major religious story of the 1960s and ’70s. The gains of certain denominations notwithstanding, the era witnessed an extraordinary weakening of organized Christianity in the United States and a fundamental shift in America’s spiritual ecology— away from institutional religion and toward a more do-it-yourself and consumer-oriented spirituality— that endures to the present day. In subsequent decades, traditional believers would hopefully cite various revivals or awakenings as evidence that their faith might be regaining the ground that it lost between 1965 and 1980. But nothing that’s happened since, whether in small prayer groups or booming megachurches, has made up for the losses that institutional Christianity sustained during America’s cultural revolution."
"Whether it was conservative Evangelicals hinting that the Holy Spirit had a strong position on the proper rate of marginal taxation, or liberal clergymen insisting that loving your neighbor as yourself required supporting higher levels of social spending, two generations of Christian spokesmen steadily undercut the credibility of their religious message by wedding it to the doctrines of the Democratic Party, or the platform of the GOP."
"Over the course of a decade or so, a large swath of America decided that two millennia of Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality were simply out of date."
"As went the university, so went catechism class. A typical religious education textbook from the post– Vatican II period wouldn’t deny basic Christian teachings like the Resurrection and the Atonement, or specifically Catholic concepts like purgatory and the intercession of the saints— but it would often ignore or minimize them, substituting the language of self-actualization and personal growth, until it became hard to distinguish a religious education manual from a typical handbook for building self-esteem."
"Ultimately, the Christian sexual ethic asks more of people with same-sex attraction than it does of straights— a far greater self-denial, a more heroic chastity. And as gays left the closet behind and entered the mainstream of American life, they ceased to be convenient scapegoats for the moral revolution that heterosexual desire had wrought. Instead, they became just sons and daughters, friends and siblings whose aspirations seemed no more radical than the sexual freedoms that straight Americans had already embraced."
"Christianity is a paradoxical religion because the Jew of Nazareth is a paradoxical character. No figure in history or fiction contains as many multitudes as the New Testament’s Jesus. He’s a celibate ascetic who enjoys dining with publicans and changing water into wine at weddings. He’s an apocalyptic prophet one moment, a wise ethicist the next. He’s a fierce critic of Jewish religious law who insists that he’s actually fulfilling rather than subverting it. He preaches a reversal of every social hierarchy while deliberately avoiding explicitly political claims. He promises to set parents against children and then disallows divorce; he consorts with prostitutes while denouncing even lustful thoughts. He makes wild claims about his own relationship to God, and perhaps his own divinity, without displaying any of the usual signs of megalomania or madness. He can be egalitarian and hierarchical, gentle and impatient, extraordinarily charitable and extraordinarily judgmental. He sets impossible standards and then forgives the worst of sinners. He blesses the peacemakers and then promises that he’s brought not peace but the sword. He’s superhuman one moment; the next he’s weeping. And of course the accounts of his resurrection only heighten these paradoxes, by introducing a post-crucifixion Jesus who is somehow neither a resuscitated body nor a flitting ghost but something even stranger still— a being at once fleshly and supernatural, recognizable and transfigured, bearing the wounds of the crucifixion even as he passes easily through walls. The boast of Christian orthodoxy, as codified by the councils of the early Church and expounded in the Creeds, has always been its fidelity to the whole of Jesus. Its dogmas and definitions seek to encompass the seeming contradictions in the gospel narratives rather than evading them. Was he God or was he man? Both, says orthodoxy. Is the kingdom he preached something to be lived out in this world or something to be expected in the next? Both. Did he offer a blueprint for moral conduct or a call to spiritual enlightenment? Both. Did he mean to fulfill Judaism among the Jews, or to convert the Gentile world? Both. Was he the bloodied Man of Sorrows of Mel Gibson; the hippie, lilies-of-the-field Jesus of Godspell; or the wise moralist beloved by Victorian liberals? All of them and more…. The goal of the great heresies, on the other hand, has often been to extract from the tensions of the gospel narratives a more consistent, streamlined, and non-contradictory Jesus. For the Marcionites in the second century, this meant a merciful Jesus with no connection to the vengeful Hebrew God; for their rivals the Ebionites, it meant a Jesus whose Judaism required would-be followers to become observant Jews themselves. For the various apocalyptic sects that have dotted Christian history, this has meant a Jesus whose only real concern was the imminent end-times; for modern Christians seeking a more secular, this-worldly religion, it’s meant a Jesus who was mainly a moralist and social critic, with no real interest in eschatology."
"Even if you do not consider yourself a Christian, chances are that your values and beliefs owe more to Christianity than you think. Even if you think that you have left your ancestors’ faith behind entirely, chances are that you are still partially within the circle— more a heretic than a true apostate, more Christian-ish than post-Christian. If so, then there is something to be said for returning to the source, for looking again at your half-forgotten patrimony, for considering anew the possibility that Christianity might be an inheritance rather than a burden. You may be disappointed in what you find. But then again you may be joyfully surprised. And just as importantly, your very presence might make a difference to what others find, when they come to look themselves."
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