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How We Became a Nation of Heretics
Free Press
April 2012
On Sale: April 17, 2012
352 pages
ISBN: 1439178305
EAN: 9781439178300
Kindle: B005FLOGC2
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Religion
As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times,
Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and
influential voices of his generation. In Bad Religion 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. Writing for an era dominated by recession, gridlock, and
fears of American decline, Douthat exposes the spiritual
roots of the nation’s political and economic crises. He
argues that America’s problem isn’t too much religion, as a
growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an
intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right
believe. Rather, it’s bad religion: the slow-motion collapse
of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of
pseudo-Christianities that stroke our egos, indulge our
follies, and encourage our worst impulses. These faiths speak from many pulpits—conservative and
liberal, political and pop cultural, traditionally religious
and fashionably “spiritual”—and many of their preachers
claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly
offering distortions of traditional Christianity—not the
real thing. Christianity’s place in American life has
increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, Douthat
argues, but by heresy: debased versions of Christian faith
that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption. In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, he
brilliantly charts institutional 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 to
the polarizing debates of the present day. Ranging from
Glenn Beck to Barack Obama, Eat Pray Love to Joel Osteen,
and Oprah Winfrey to The Da Vinci Code, 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 reading
for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.
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