Between Christendom and the Catacombs
At Fare Forward‘s Summer Symposium, Ross Douthat spoke on the state of America’s religious-secular divide.
Editor’s Note: From July 12 to July 14 2013, Fare Forward hosted its first annual summer symposium for its writers and supporters. Forty-eight emerging Christian leaders (in media, arts, academia, business, and law) gathered to explore the challenges and opportunities facing Christian witness in today’s culture and how Fare Forward’s voice can contribute to a revitalization of Christian presence in America. Keynote presentations were delivered by two influential Christian voices in mainstream media: New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and USA Today Cover Story Editor John Siniff. Additional presentations were made by Fare Forward writers to explore important aspects of Christian witness and faithful presence. The following is an abridgement of Mr. Douthat’s first keynote address.
I find it useful in doing talks about Christianity to talk a little bit about my own religious background, so I’ll start there. I grew up in southern Connecticut in the 1980s and 1990s, which for you guys was a very, very long time ago, though to me it feels just like yesterday. My mother went to Yale, and my father went to Stanford, and I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, where my dad was a lawyer. And in many ways, I had a childhood that was very conventionally upper-middle class, with liberal, Ivy League parents: I went to private schools; my earliest political memory was walking down the street with my mom to cast a vote in the 1984 election for—she was very insistent— Geraldine Ferraro. (Walter Mondale was incidental to the vote.) And most of my school friends and peer groups were, again, typical of the New England, liberal, upper-middle class—good centrist Democrats in their politics, and fairly secular in their theological worldview.
But there was also a sort of parallel track to my childhood, because my mother had fairly severe—and hard to diagnose and treat—allergies and chemical sensitivities. Basically all of the stuff that now, in our more enlightened era, has created the aisles upon aisles of detergents without scents or dyes. If you shop at Whole Foods, there are endless shelves of this kind of stuff, all pitched to people with my mother’s kind of sensitivities. But thirty years ago, there was none of that, and there was no real awareness of these weird illnesses of modernity, if you want to call them that, and many of the people who suffered from these kind of severe allergies would end up living in stripped down huts out in the middle of nowhere with no access to the normal stuff of modern life.
And so my mother, in the course of looking for unorthodox treatments and cures for her unorthodox illness, ended up taking us to a faith healing service—to faith healing services, I guess I should say, that were part of a ministry run by a woman with the actual first name of Grace, from Connecticut, who I believe had had a near death experience and returned from it with a kind of charismatic gift.
These were services that were basically Pentecostal in form, if not in theological substance. There was guitar playing and preaching, and then there was a blessing line, and she would pray over people and they would be slain in the spirit. She would go around these high school auditoriums in Milford and Danbury and Waterbury, these Connecticut towns—where this wasn’t a normal thing—and pick out people in the crowd and say, “I think your lower back is bothering you, I think you’ve had arthritis for a very long period of time,” and so on. And my mother was literally picked out of the crowd one night and prayed for, and then she went “out in the spirit” and spent 30 minutes on the floor of a southern Connecticut high school auditorium. And that was, not surprisingly, a life-changing event.
So while I was living my fairly conventional, upper-middle class, liberal childhood during the weeks, on the weekends we would drive around Connecticut and New England and go to these services, and I would watch my parents get slain in the spirit speak in tongues. And those were the two tracks of my childhood.
We didn’t spend my entire childhood attached to this ministry; ultimately, it opened into a sort of wider tour of American Christianity. So I was baptized and initially raised Episcopalian, and then we spent a fair amount of time, through our involvement with this healing ministry, in Pentecostal and evangelical circles. My parents were briefly involved with a much more disastrous attempt to bring Christianity to an Ivy League campus, Yale. And then we did things like drive all the way to Toronto for this famous outpouring of the spirit at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church—where I didn’t just get to see my parents speak in tongues, I got to see them roar like lions.
I was 13 at the time, so that was fairly intense.
So I’m in the unusual position of being neither an adult convert nor a cradle Catholic, but in the adolescent place in between.
This journey ended, for my family, in the way such journeys sometimes do, with my parents—and again my mother was driving force behind this—converting to the Roman Catholic Church. She converted when I was 16, and I became a Catholic the following year, at the age of 17. So I’m in the unusual position of being neither an adult convert nor a cradle Catholic, but in the adolescent place in between.
For my mother, the conversion was very much a carryover of her intense mystical side, with Eucharistic adoration and various saints as the bridge from the charismatic side of American Protestantism to the charismatic side of American Catholicism. For me, it was again much more intellectually conventional. I read G.K. Chesterton, and I thought, “This sounds pretty good.” Also, since I was 17 and awkward, I was very relieved to join a church where no one would put their hand on my shoulder and ask me in the middle of the service to testify to how Jesus had changed my life. Many of the things that Protestants complain about with Catholicism—the rote prayers, everybody sitting in the back at Mass—were perfect for an awkward teenager. I was like, “Sitting in the back, yes!”
So that was my religious background. And it also coexisted, because my mother had these illnesses, with a third cultural experience that also didn’t normally fit with the other two—which was that we spent a lot of time going to health food stores, and eating at vegetarian restaurants. And again, all this was long before the days of Whole Foods, and for any of you who live in D.C., Teaism—the kind of restaurants that now have the fancy plates of brown rice with a little seaweed sprinkled on them. To get that in 1987, you had to go to some weird basement covered with sawdust in a far corner of Connecticut, and a guy in a tie-dyed shirt would slop tofu onto the plate.
But that world, the vegetarian/health food/hippie world, was different from the secular upper-middle class world of my weekdays and also different from the evangelical, Pentecostal, ultimately Catholic world of our weekends—because it was itself religious, in a sense. It was deeply infused with post-‘60s New Age spirituality, and all these health food stores and restaurants had their little bookstores attached, and I would go over after dinner and browse books with titles like Women Who Run with the Wolves. I didn’t necessarily think about the religious aspect of it that much at the time, although when we went to a three-day macrobiotic camp in Vermont, the religious aspect became hard to miss. The lectures were all about how this Japanese diet was ultimately going to bring about world peace—and then eschatological things beyond that. And there were some people who blended it with aliens, but I can’t remember how that worked. […]
But anyway, all of this was the baggage that I carried into an Ivy League education and then a career in American journalism. I did college journalism at Harvard, where I was the editor of the conservative paper and the token conservative columnist at the Harvard Crimson, which was good preparation for my life’s vocation. And then I became a political journalist in George W. Bush’s presidency, so I entered into this already existing and very potent debate about religion and public life in the United States.
But while participating in these debates, in large part because of my somewhat peculiar—though also certainly very American—childhood and religious background, I had a very strong sense that the binaries that these arguments set up missed huge swaths of the story of what was actually going on with religion in the United States.
This debate went back—well, all the way to the founding, obviously, but in its current form it went back really to the 1970s and to the sense among Christian conservatives in that era that there was a liberal, secular elite that was in a sense taking the country away from them, and that there was a need, and an opportunity, for a kind of political populist Christianity to revolt against this elite misgovernment. And by the Bush Era, that had inspired a counter-reaction on the left from liberals who were very, very worried that we were about to turn into a theocracy. After Bush won the reelection in 2004, you may recall, this was the Number One explanation among a lot of people for how this could have possibly happened: It was all those people out in Jesus Land, out in flyover country, who had voted based on moral values, and who were plotting to tear down the wall between church and state, and so on. There was a lot of paranoid stuff along these lines circulating around, which then fed into the heyday—I think it’s a little bit in a rearview mirror now—of the so-called New Atheists, who argued that the problem wasn’t just American Christianity or American fundamentalism, it was religion itself. For a while, you couldn’t turn on C-SPAN without seeing Richard Dawkins having his way with some well-meaning but hapless Anglican bishop.
So those were the religion and public life debates that were going on when I started participating in them. They were fun debates, and I participated in them fairly vigorously. (I had one really unfortunate occasion—unfortunate for me—where I actually debated Christopher Hitchens, and fortunately I think the videotape of that has been lost forever. It was a dark day for God.) But while participating in these debates, in large part because of my somewhat peculiar—though also certainly very American—childhood and religious background, I had a very strong sense that the binaries that these arguments set up missed huge swaths of the story of what was actually going on with religion in the United States.
On the one hand, they missed the deep and dizzying internal diversity of American Christianity, which I had passed through in various stages as a kid, and which wasn’t easily pigeonholed into these evangelical versus liberal, secular versus religious divisions. And they also missed the diversity of religious sensibility beyond the Christian churches, which I had picked up at macrobiotic camp and Women Who Run with the Wolves, and which people were obviously picking up in all kinds of places and in all kinds of ways. […]
So this became the jumping off point for the argument I make in my recent book [Ed. Note: Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics], which in a nutshell is that what has happened in American life over the past—I guess now it’s three generations—is a decline of traditional institutional Christianity, but a decline that has not necessarily coincided with a decline in spiritual interest and religious belief. My view is that there are deep structural forces that have made people less likely to find traditional Christian ideas—small “o” orthodox Christian ideas, if you will—compelling, without making them likely to become actual fire-breathing, militant atheists, or even really to become “secular” in the way we use that term in conventional discussion. America is not seemingly on the way to turning into Sweden—and really Sweden isn’t quite as Swedish, if you dig below the surface of the polling on religion, as people think. Particularly, there is a deep resilience of the religious impulse in American life and Western life writ large, even in an era when people are less likely to find that impulse satisfied by traditional Catholicism, Protestant denominations, and so on. […]
And this is where my book’s subtitle comes in, because for all its, shall we say, controversial historical associations, I think the term “heresy” is actually very useful for understanding what’s going on in religious culture in the United States today. You get into these debates often where people will say, “We were a Christian nation; now we’re a secular nation. We were a Christian nation; now we’re a post-Christian nation.” You run through these different narratives. But I think if you look at some of the most popular manifestations of non-orthodox, non-traditional religion and spirituality in American culture, they’re still deeply influenced by Christian ideas, in way that make them heretical, not post-Christian.
The good news in all this pop spirituality, for serious Christians, is that it’s yet another sign that religion isn’t going away, even in an era where more and more people are no longer identifying with traditional Christian denominations.
Start with an example like The Da Vinci Code. The popularity of The Da Vinci Code is inseparable from American culture’s continued fascination with the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. A book like The Da Vinci Code would have no interest to anyone if its whole point wasn’t to say, “You can keep Jesus, he just will happen to look more favorably on the way you’re living now than the Jesus of the New Testament seems like he might.” If you read Dan Brown’s complete oeuvre—okay, I haven’t read his complete oeuvre, yet—Brown’s books are almost always pro religion in some sense. Or at the very least he’s pro spirituality—sort of New Age-y, sort of Deist in certain ways, sort of mystical—but he basically wants to repurpose Jesus for somewhat different theological ends. And that’s what you see all over the place in American religion today. There’s a reason that a figure like Deepak Chopra can’t stop writing books about Jesus. And then of course there are also many figures in the pop spirituality marketplace who are nominally Christian: figures like Joel Osteen, basically everyone involved in the ideas of prosperity theology, and so on, that also clearly depart in significant ways from historic Christian orthodoxy.
Another example would be Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, which is a book I recommend everyone in this room read. It is a fascinating example of how spiritual pilgrimage is conceived of and pursued in our era. To read it in parallel with conventional Christian conversion narratives, like a Dorothy Day or a Thomas Merton, tells you a lot about both the opportunities and the challenges for Christians today. It contains this deep and totally authentic spiritual yearning; it is focused on raw—and, I think, authentic—religious encounters with the numinous, the divine. At the same time, it is all focused toward an endpoint that doesn’t involve anything like Thomas Merton ending up in a Trappist monastery; instead, the endpoint of the book is Elizabeth Gilbert finding happiness with a handsome Brazilian divorcée in Bali. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, right? But that distinction is crucial to understanding what we as Christians are facing in this era. It’s not the death of spiritual hunger or the death of the supernatural and the mystical, it’s just a sense that the path to happiness doesn’t lead through committing yourself to a particular religious tradition—and it certainly doesn’t lead through submitting yourself to something larger than yourself. But rather, the path to happiness involves encountering God and then mixing and matching pieces from different religious traditions to suit the way you already want to live.
You’ll notice that all of these are pop cultural rather than political figures. And to the extent that my book’s argument contributes anything really original to discussions of religion in the United States, I hope it’s that: the idea that we should take seriously the theology that’s embedded in popular culture, because there is a lot of theology embedded in popular culture.
And from a Christian perspective, if you spend a fair amount of time looking at the places most people encounter the spiritual and the numinous and the quest for God in their own lives, this stuff is actually much more important than the struggle against secularism per se. Which means that the arguments about whether God exists or not, as important as they are, have to coexist with an engagement with the way that most Americans engage with the deeper questions about meaning and purpose and so forth.
The good news in all this pop spirituality, for serious Christians, is that it’s yet another sign that religion isn’t going away, that even in an era where more and more people are no longer identifying with traditional Christian denominations, and the number of people who identify as “nones” has gone up—even in that kind of world, you don’t actually have to convince people to be interested in the ultimate questions about meaning, the universe, and human life. And that’s particularly true, I think, once you get beyond the slice of the United States that’s represented by Ivy League universities and elite newspapers. Being engaged in the elite level of public life tends to make Christians think the cultural challenge is harder than it is, because the elite level in American life is quite secular, more secular than the popular level, and so believers have a sense of pushing against people who really just don’t understand why they should give religion the time of day. That’s a real and powerful phenomenon, but for the culture as a whole, it’s not the most important phenomenon, and the work of conversion for the culture as a whole doesn’t have to proceed by overthrowing secularism. That isn’t the crucial challenge.
It is both the case that yes, there is still real vitality in American Christianity, but even so the culture as a whole is drifting further and further away from what we think of as orthodox Christian faith.
The bad news, though, is that the old secular versus religious framework led a lot of American Christians to think, “Well, there’s the secular elite, and they’re bad, but the country is with us. The country is still a Christian country, we just have to mobilize the Moral Majority”—to use the language of the 1980s—“against the secular elite.” And that isn’t right. Maybe it was more true in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, which is when these arguments were first being made, but today, the masses aren’t with us. There is no vast Christian army in the heartland, waiting for the right leader to march on Washington and tar and feather Anthony Kennedy. The country is in a different place, and that place—you can use the language of Christian heresy, you can use the language of spiritual-not-religious, it doesn’t really matter what language you choose, the basic fact remains: The culture itself has to be converted, renewed, and reintroduced to what are for Christians very basic concepts and ideas.
So that’s one framing of the challenge. Then here’s another way to look at it, which I’ve thought about it a lot while I’ve been traveling around the country promoting my book—everywhere from Vancouver, which I know technically isn’t in the United States, to North Dakota, to Tennessee, to Houston, to California, speaking to audiences at Catholic and evangelical colleges, mostly. On the one hand those experiences have given me a tremendous sense of optimism: Once you get outside of Washington, D.C., the Acela corridor, the northeast, it really is remarkable how much vibrancy and vitality there is in American Christianity all over the country, among people in their teens and their twenties as well as older folks. So that experience definitely gives you a sense that Christianity in America isn’t going away. There’s going to be a Christian culture embedded in broader American culture for the foreseeable future for as far as the eye can see. And there’s a tremendous opportunity for those pockets of vitality to become something more than pockets.
But at the same time, that kind of traveling also highlights—and this idea comes up in James Davidson Hunter’s book, about how Christians have tried and failed to change the world—how the vitality in American Christianity tends to be mostly on the periphery of American culture, not the center. It is in the really impressive Catholic college that I visited in Bismarck, North Dakota. It’s in Union University in the middle of Tennessee, a place that almost no one in New York or Washington has ever heard of. The things that happen in these places are important and powerful and change people’s lives, but they are still often marginal to the culture as a whole. And it’s important that Christian writers and thinkers who move from pocket to pocket not be lulled into a false sense of security about the culture as a whole. Because you have to be willing to look at the general statistical drift of the United States and recognize that it is both the case that yes, there is still real vitality in American Christianity, but even so the culture as a whole is drifting further and further away from what we think of as orthodox Christian faith.
We’re living through a period of decline, but we can’t just skip ahead to some hypothetical future where the church has been reduced to a purer core.
There’s also an unusual difficulty to this kind of landscape, because when Christians think about their history, people tend to fall back on two models—Christendom on the one hand and the catacombs on the other. Once you convince people that America is no longer a Christian nation—it was never truly a Christian nation, obviously, but it was more Christian in certain ways in the past than it is today—once people become convinced of that, it’s an easy leap for a lot of believers from that to saying, “Okay, we’ve lost the culture, now we’re either going to be persecuted face the lions and the arena, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that, but there’s at least some romance to it.” Or, “I’m going to take the Benedict option. I’m going to go cultivate my own vineyard and raise my two kids or my seven kids and run an organic farm and homeschool my kids and teach at a Christian college—and eventually watch American fall apart around me, and then we’ll emerge from the rubble and rebuild.”
The problem with that option is that the culture isn’t actually far gone enough for Christians to have the right to withdraw from it—but it is far gone enough that it is difficult to see how it is regained and rebuilt. And this is a problem you particularly see in the case of my own Catholic Church, because the Catholic Church is built for a population of 70 or 80 million Catholics. It’s built around huge archdioceses and huge cathedrals and huge bureaucracies, and there’s a sense in which if you look at the actual state of the Catholic Church, you would say, “You know, it would be a lot better if we shrank precipitously, and maybe if a lot of lukewarm self-identified Catholics didn’t identify as Catholic, that would be clarifying, and we would have smaller, more beautiful churches and smaller, more orthodox religious orders, and so on.”
That’s in certain ways happening; it has to happen in big northeastern dioceses. Parishes are closing, there’s consolidation happening. But that process coexists with the reality that all of those 70 million Catholics in the United States are baptized and confirmed Catholics. They are actual Catholics. They may be theologically mis-educated, they may be in a state of mortal sin, but they’re one good confession away from not being in a state of mortal sin anymore. (God knows I’m always one good confession away from being there.) And so the challenge very difficult, particularly if you’re in a leadership position in the Church. You can’t just say, well, to hell with the lukewarm and the liberal and the disaffected and we’re just going to have our smaller, purer church, because as Christians—Christian shepherds or Christian intellectuals, whatever the case may be—you have an obligation to your fellow believers, to your fellow baptized Christians, whatever kind of situation you’re in.
So when I think about where Christianity goes from here, it’s that challenge that has to be addressed: We’re living through a period of decline, but we can’t just skip ahead to some hypothetical future where the church has been reduced to a purer core. And so the trick is the figure out whether you’re just managing the decline or figuring out a means to revival.
But either way, you can’t just withdraw from the struggle.
Ross Douthat is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and was previously a senior editor for the Atlantic. He is the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (with Reihan Salam), and Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. He lives in Washington, D.C.
