Ross Douthat has the dubious distinction of being “the conservative on the New York Times op-ed page.” His previous books are an inside look at Harvard culture and a policy-wonk plan to revive the Republican Party. This is not the guy you expect to write a passionate and sensitive book on American Christianity, which opens with W.H. Auden’s journey back to the Anglican Church and ends with something close to an altar call.
Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics tells a story of decline, in which a host of self-comforting and banal Christianities triumph over the strange, challenging, and paradoxical Jesus of the Gospels. At the start of Douthat’s book the mainline Protestant churches are strong, the Catholic Church has emerged as a surprising cultural heavyweight, and both white evangelicals and the black church are striding forward–sometimes together, as in Billy Graham’s integrated revivals–after periods of marginalized retreat. For a brief moment the churches seemed to know how to be political without being politicized, and every Hollywood priest was a friend to orphans. A “small-o orthodoxy” seemed like the natural home for poets like Auden, authors like Flannery O’Connor, prophetic moral and political leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and even television personalities like Fulton Sheen: “mass-market faith and highbrow religiosity seemed to complement each other.”
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