Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics di Ross Douthat - PROLOGUE A NATION OF HERETICS - #ortodossiaemoderazione #eresiasenzacentro #religionecolla #dissensonecessario #paradosso&mistero (et-et)
PROLOGUE A NATION OF HERETICSRead more at location 96
After the great crash of 2008, Americans awoke and saw their country the way anti-Americans have always seen it:Read more at location 97
Note: IL DECLINO AMERICANO Edit
During the 2008 election season, the extraordinary unpopularity of George W. Bush made him an obvious scapegoatRead more at location 102
there were trends at work that couldn’t be reversed by simply dispatching a more talented set of leaders to Washington, D.C.Read more at location 106
Conservatives denounce liberals as free-spending socialists, while liberals denounce conservatives for championing a cult of deregulated dog-eat-dog.Read more at location 108
some theories are frankly conspiratorial, involving perfidious foreigners and conniving corporations,Read more at location 110
The most potent theories, though, involve religion. This is as it should be because, at the deepest level, every human culture is religious—definedRead more at location 112
The reality doesn’t have to be a personal God: It can be the iron laws of Marxism, the religion of blood and soil, the Gaia hypothesis, the church of the free market, the cult of the imperial self.Read more at location 114
The first holds that Americans have lost their way because they’ve fallen away from the faithRead more at location 117
The more sophisticated version follows Alexis de Tocqueville in suggesting that American democracy, while formally secular, has always depended on religionRead more at location 120
Their scapegoats include progressive educators, activist judges, Hollywood elites, and the deophobic media.Read more at location 124
a growing chorus began insisting that the United States is in decline because it’s excessively religious.Read more at location 128
the political controversies of the 2000s as an apocalyptic struggle between science and ignorance, reason and superstition,Read more at location 130
the spate of Bush-era books attacking “Christian fascists,” “Christian nationalists,” and “Christianists,” culminating in Kevin Phillips’s bestselling jeremiad American Theocracy.)Read more at location 132
atheists who shared Christopher Hitchens’s sweeping assessment that religion “poisons everything.”Read more at location 134
These two visions seem mutually contradictory—but both contain an element of truth. America has indeed become less traditionally ChristianRead more at location 136
But certain kinds of religious faith are as influential as ever, just as secular critics and the new atheists contend—andRead more at location 138
America’s problem isn’t too much religion, or too little of it. It’s bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place.Read more at location 140
Since the 1960s, the institutions that sustained orthodox Christian belief—Catholic and Protestant alike—have entered a state of near-terminal decline.Read more at location 142
a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egosRead more at location 146
The secular mistake has been to assume that every theology tends inevitably toward the same follies and fanaticisms,Read more at location 151
The religious mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul.Read more at location 152
the children of light contend with the children of darkness, and every inch of ground is claimed by absolute truth or deplorable error.Read more at location 154
where papal encyclicals rarely penetrate and the works of Richard Dawkins pass unread. That’s where you’ll find the reality of contemporary religion,Read more at location 156
You’re either a rigid fundamentalist who believes that dinosaurs just missed hitching a ride on Noah’s Ark, or a self-consciously progressive believer for whom the Bible is a kind of refrigerator magnet poetry,Read more at location 161
religion actively encourages the sort of recklessness that produced our current economic meltdown, rather than serving as a brake on materialism and a rebuke to avarice.Read more at location 169
The result is a society where pride becomes “healthy self-esteem,” vanity becomes “self-improvement,” adultery becomes “following your heart,” greed and gluttony become “living the American dream.”Read more at location 173
the spread of democracy is part of the divine plan, the doctrine of American exceptionalism is a kind of Eleventh Commandment,Read more at location 176
You can’t have fringes without a center, iconoclasts without icons, revolutionaries without institutions to rebel against. We have always been a nation of heretics, but heresy has never had the field to itself.Read more at location 189
now consider orthodox Christianity’s contribution to America as well. From the beginning, the existence of a Christian center—first exclusively Protestant, and then eventually accommodating Catholicism as well—has helped bind together a teeming, diverse, and fissiparous nation.Read more at location 207
It has also often provided a means of necessary dissent—dissent from the intellectual overconfidence of the Age of Reason and the anti-intellectualism of nineteenth-century revivalism, dissent from the cold scientism of the Gospel According to Darwin and the crass materialism of the Gospel According to the Robber Barons, dissent from the desiccated rationalism of modernist theology and the dreary literalism of fundamentalism.Read more at location 218
Americans, steeped in the ideal of religious freedom, take it for granted that orthodoxy without room for heresy is dangerous. Think of the Inquisition, they say, or the trial of Galileo, or (a little closer to home) the Puritan witch hunts. Yet heresy without room for orthodoxy turns out to be dangerous as well.Read more at location 222
Many of the overlapping crises in American life, from our foreign policy disasters to the housing bubble to the rate of out-of-wedlock births, can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity—one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition—at the expense of all the others.Read more at location 224
Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme.Read more at location 228
The definition of heresy proposed by Alister McGrath is a useful one: A Christian heresy is “best seen as a form of Christian belief that, more by accident than design, ultimately ends up subverting, destabilizing or even destroying the core of Christian faith.”Read more at location 239
without going to the extreme of denying that Christianity has a theological coreRead more at location 246
This consensus includes the basic dogmas of the faith: Christ’s incarnation and atonement, the Trinity and the Virgin Birth, the forgiveness of sins and the possibility of everlasting life. It includes a belief in the divine inspiration and authority of a particular set of sacred scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, with no additional revelations added on and nothing papered over or rejected. It includes an adherence to the moral vision encoded in the Ten Commandments and expanded and deepened in the New Testament: a rejection of violence and cruelty, a deep suspicion of worldly wealth and power, and a heavy stress on chastity. It includes a commitment to the creeds of the ancient world—Nicene, Apostolic, Athanasian—and to the idea that a church, however organized and governed, should guarantee and promulgate them. And it includes the idea of orthodoxy—the belief that there exists “a faith once delivered to the saints,” and that the core of Christianity is an inheritance from the first apostles, rather than being something that every believer can and should develop for himself.Read more at location 252
the world is corrupted by original sin and yet somehow also essentially good,Read more at location 265
the God of the Old Testament, jealous and punitive, is somehow identical to the New Testament’s God of love and mercy.Read more at location 266
They could have joined the movement that we call Gnosticism in attempting to minimizeRead more at location 271
They could have fallen in line behind the second-century theologian Marcion’s perfectly reasonable attempt to resolve the tensions between the Gospels and the Hebrew scriptures by abandoning Christianity’s Jewish roots entirely.Read more at location 274
They could have listened to the earnest British moralist Pelagius instead of to Saint Augustine, and replaced the mysteries of grace and original sin with the more commonsensical vision of a GodRead more at location 275
In each instance, and in many more as well, they chose the way of mystery instead—orRead more at location 277
Church forged a faith whose doctrines speak to the intuition, nearly universal among human beings, that the true nature of the world will always remain just beyond our grasp.Read more at location 280
Indeed, this is perhaps the greatest Christian paradox of all—that the world’s most paradoxical religion has cultivated rationalism and scientific rigor more diligently than any of its rivals, making the Christian world safe for philosophy as well as fervor, for the study of nature as well as the contemplation of divinity.Read more at location 281
the paradoxes of Christian doctrine have always been a source of scandal as well as strength—notRead more at location 286
Christian heresies vary wildly in their theological substance, but almost all have in common a desire to resolve Christianity’s contradictions,Read more at location 289
Gnostics sought to make Christianity more appealing by making it more overtly supernatural.Read more at location 295
Deists and Unitarians went in the opposite direction, trying to rescue Christianity from the scorn of the scientific age by stripping away its supernatural aspectsRead more at location 297
In G. K. Chesterton’s vivid vision of Christian history, the fullness of truth is sustained in a perpetual balancing act,Read more at location 301
the pull-and-push of competing heresies may be precisely the thing that keeps the edifice of Christian faith upright.Read more at location 319
United States has offered to Christianity: a chance, in a nation with no establishment of religion,Read more at location 323
In America, because orthodoxy couldn’t be taken for granted, orthodoxy came alive.Read more at location 331
a widespread sense that traditional Christian faith and contemporary liberal democracy were natural partners.Read more at location 336
an era of theological convergence gave way to a Christian civil war. They cover the divisions produced by controversies ranging from the Vietnam War to the debate over abortion;Read more at location 341
In the second half of the book I consider American Christianity as it is today, in the wake of this slow-motion collapse, focusing on heresy’s increasing dominanceRead more at location 347
specific individuals—Joel Osteen and Dan Brown, Oprah Winfrey and Elizabeth Gilbert, Eckhart Tolle and Glenn Beck.Read more at location 349
Both doubters and believers have benefited from the role that institutional Christianity has traditionally played in our national life—its communal role, as a driver of assimilation and a guarantor of social peace,Read more at location 361
Both doubters and believers stand to lose if religion in the age of heresy turns out to be complicit in our fragmented communities, our collapsing families,Read more at location 364
Both doubters and believers will inevitably suffer from a religious culture that supplies more moral license than moral correction, more self-satisfaction than self-examination, more comfort than chastisement
