Ross Douthat on the Crisis of “Small ‘o’ Orthodoxy”

Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics recently discussed the themes of the book at an event sponsored by Georgetown University’s Tocqueville Forum. Georgetown professor Fr. Matthew Carnes joined Douthat on the September 27^th event to offer a response and engage in a dialogue on the book and the state of Christianity in America.

Douthat said his inspiration for the book came partly from his family’s “sweeping tour of … almost the entirety of American Christianity,” which ultimately led him to the Roman Catholic Church as a teen. He took this experience into his professional life as a journalist, and through this lens observed that despite the fears of some (and the hopes of others), America is not secular, but rather heretical. In fact, Douthat claimed: “in some ways you could argue we are more religious” today than we were sixty years ago.

“Institutional decline hasn’t really coincided with the sweeping secularization that people often associate with the religious culture of … Western Europe,” Douthat said. Further, “It doesn’t actually make sense to think of America as a ‘post-Christian’ nation,” because Americans tend to “keep the figure of Jesus, but repurpose him, and reshape the gospel narratives so they fit better with the way we live now.” Today, Americans are less likely to report an affiliation with a particular denomination than they were sixty years ago, but more likely to claim having a personal experience with God, or that they believe in an afterlife.

Douthat argued that the weakening and eventual absence of a strong orthodox Christian presence in American public life “has negative consequences for American life overall.” He explained: “Paradox, synthesis, mystery, [and] holding competing ideas in tension, ultimately gets you closer to the truth about human existence than … trying to emphasize just one piece of what’s supposed to be a larger message.” According to Douthat, “This plays out in our financial lives, in our personal lives, and in our political lives as well.”

There was never a time when America was an “orthodox nation,” Douthat explained. What is new “isn’t the presence of heresy, but the weakness of the orthodox response … [and] institutional churches.” He continued: “What defines contemporary heresy is the desire … to take one piece of the traditional Christian synthesis, one part of what in traditional Christianity is sort of held in tension, in paradox and contradiction, and emphasize it to the exclusion of the other.” As an example, Douthat contrasted evangelist Billy Graham’s “Christ and the cross” message with televangelist Joel Osteen’s “prosperity gospel.” Both share a message of hope, but Osteen neglects to mention the gravity of sin and need for redemption.

In response, Jesuit priest and Georgetown government professor, Fr. Matthew Carnes, expressed appreciation for Douthat’s book on the whole, but stated doubts about “returning to that time.” He lamented the lack of educational opportunities, racism, sexism, and limited information available to the general public during the 1950s and 60s. “A thinking faith in this period … was largely elusive,” so “the depth of thought … [was] almost completely lost on folks that didn’t have the chance to sit on the nuance of [Reinhold Niebuhr’s] thought.”

Carnes said “we live in a radically different world today” where higher education is a possibility for most people, so more can participate in a “thinking faith.” These unprecedented “educational levels [and] new material prosperity” provide an “opportunity for an intellectually rigorous encounter with faith,” the professor said.

In response, Douthat stated he does not believe “we should try to return to [that era],” but learn from its “individual models worth emulating.” Further, the quality of education has not necessarily improved with its broadening availability. Douthat stated: “I don’t think it’s obviously clear that our more educated society is imbibing a sort of higher level of discourse.”

Carnes praised Douthat’s emphasis on mystery and paradox as a distinguishing feature of orthodoxy. But he expressed concern that, “Sometimes [orthodoxy] is defined as something like a lock step adherence to a univocally understood, sometimes derived … simplistically from the magisterium.” He took Douthat’s definition further and argued: “All we do, all we say is said provisionally, humanly and it’s got to be open to revision, it’s got to be ready to embrace new insights.”

Douthat responded: “It’s important to balance [mystery and paradox] against the sense that … there is a specific revelation of God’s purposes on earth that you’re bound to as well. It isn’t enough to simply sort of declare the mystery a mystery … you have to hold that in balance with the witness of scripture, with the witness of tradition.”

Despite the “pockets of vitality” throughout American Christianity, Douthat warned the audience that the millennial generation is the “least churched” in modern American history, and is “more hostile overall to certain elements … crucial to Christian orthodoxy than previous generations.” This generation, Douthat said, exemplifies many of the negative aspects of our culture, such as narcissism and a decline in empathy, contributing to “continued social disillusion.” In the face of these trends, he said, the vibrant orthodox Christian communities interspersed through America must “influence the culture as a whole for the better.”