In his review of my book, Bad Religion, Michael Sean Winters suggests that I have “drunk the Kool-Aid being distributed by the papal biographer George Weigel, the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Novak, and other neoconservative interpreters of Catholicism.” He is right to discern some areas of agreement between myself and those writers, but his review grossly misrepresents my interpretation of their work, at times literally reversing the points I actually make in order to fit his own preconceptions about what my book is arguing.
In particular, he accuses me of being a largely uncritical admirer of “the accomodation to laissez-faire capitalism that American Catholic conservatives have been championing,” characterizes me as “heaping praise” on Michael Novak’s work on the subject, and suggests that I hail Novak’s arguments as a “breakthrough” in Catholic theology. In fact, the word “breakthrough” appears in a quote from Novak himself, and I repeat it as part of a summary of Novak’s self-understanding, rather than as an uncritical endorsement. And it would be odd indeed if I did endorse it uncritically, given that the chapter in question goes on to issue a sharp warning of the ways in which Novak’s accommodation with the spirit of capitalism can lead Christians astray—a critique that culminates in an extended quotation from an embarrassing encomium that Novak penned to Kenneth Lay. Indeed, I would have thought it obvious to even the least diligent reviewer that one of the major reasons I included Novak’s views in that chapter was to cite his frequent overenthusiasm for capitalism as an example of the way that prosperity theology has influenced more mainstream Christian thought for the worse—by encouraging “a naïveté about how riches are often accumulated and about the dark pull that money can exert over the human heart,” as I put it in one of the many, many critical passages that follow my quotations from Novak’s work.
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