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Wednesday, April 15, 2009  

Our Perpetually Inevitable Post-Christian Future

I'll go back to regular religion blogging shortly, but for now some meta-religion blogging is in order. Jon Meacham says that "Christian America" is on the ropes demographically and politically (though we're still a center-right nation on the TGV to beret-wearing socialism). To which Damon Linker says "good," proposing Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as a suitable alternative to center America's civic religion as the threat of theocracy fades away. Rod Dreher in turn insists that Martin Luther King, Jr. could never have figured out that segregation was wrong if he hadn't been a Christian, or something, and rather curiously analogies MTD to the religion of the white Birmingham clergy King critiqued from jail. Douthat responds to Linker a little differently:

But let's say you think that the biggest problems facing America in the Bush years were, I dunno, the botched handling of the Iraq occupation and a massive and an unsustainable housing and financial bubble. In that case, you don't have to look terribly hard to see a connection between the kind of self-centered, sentimental, and panglossian religion described above and the spirit of unwarranted optimism and metaphysical self-regard that animated some of Bush's worst hours as President (his second inaugural address could have been subtitled: "Moral Therapeutic Deism Goes to War") and some of his fellow Americans' worst hours as homeowners and investors. In the wake of two consecutive bubble economies, it takes an inordinate fear of culture war, I think, to immerse yourself in the literature of Oprahfied religion - from nominal Christians like Joel Osteen to New Age gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Rhonda Byrne - and come away convinced that this theological turn has been "salutary" for the country overall.

Now we're cooking with gas. But hindsight is doing a lot of the work here. I don't remember a lot of religious and cultural conservatives picking Bush out for and apostle of MTD, though the evidence was there. The then-Texas governor was viewed warily by some, but if there was an obvious standard-bearer for New Agey moralistic Christian revisionism in most Christian conservative eyes back then, it was Al Gore. Whether this reflects how deeply MTD is embedded in more "traditional" or "orthodox" versions of Christianity, or perhaps a narrow focus on policy issues on the part of the Christian Right's barons, I can't say. That Obama, whatever the failings of his personal theology, seems less given to MTD (despite his personal relationship with Oprah, no less) than his predecessor only underscores how hopelessly entangled and contradictory theology and politics have become.

Larison pushes the analysis further:

To the extent that Linker’s favorite targets, the so-called “theocons,” were more or less entirely on board with what Mr. Bush was doing, even if they felt compelled to use their own teachings in distorted form to do it, they were not championing orthodoxy at all. One might go so far to say that as they became stronger supporters of Mr. Bush, the less orthodox they tended to become, because the arguments they had to employ to defend Mr. Bush’s outrageous actions and gnostic impulses necessarily ate away at orthodox teachings.

This has created a predicament for the majority of conservative Christians who tended to go along with, if not actively defend, Mr. Bush’s acts and rhetoric. Having identified strongly with him, these Christians–Linker’s “champions of orthodoxy”–ensured that his errors would be imputed to their beliefs, even though Bush had a very different set of assumptions. It seems more reasonable to conclude that the “champions of orthodoxy” were undermining orthodoxy to the extent that they aligned themselves with the gnostic Bush rather than judging the failure of the Bush political project to be a demonstration of the flaws in an alliance between orthodoxy and politics. It might be that somewhere in all of this there is a “cautionary tale about what happens to politics and faith” when they combine in certain ways, but what does religious orthodoxy have to do with any of this? There is a far better argument to be made that the lesson to be learned is that greater fidelity to orthodoxy would have avoided many of the errors of the Bush Era by grounding those Christians who identified with Bush politically in the stable and sobering truths of theologically conservative Christianity.

Now the definitions are doing all the work. If First Things is a gnostic, liberal, ecumenical journal, as Larison says, then indeed orthodox Christian voices have held no power in the Bush years. Orthodoxy is a slippery concept, which is why I try to use it as narrowly as I can, to refer primarily to an acceptance of Trinitarian theology, two-natures Christology, the canon of the Scriptures, baptism, the Lord's Supper, and a range of expressions of sin and grace. Others use the term more expansively. However Larison is using it, though, it's hard to see how the failure of orthodox Christians in the Bush years can be explained by insufficient orthodoxy. Or rather, it can be explained that way, but what of it? It's like saying that the Soviet Union's failure doesn't disprove Leninism because it wasn't Leninist enough (I know this argument because I made it for a year or two way back). Maybe; but there's no way to judge the valence of an ideology apart from the ways in which it's been put into practice. If the implementation has been marred by human error, perhaps that's a problem with the ideology. No version of Christianity yet devised has been able to resist the distorting effects of being close to power--at least, not since Bruno retreated to Chartreux. I don't think Richard John Neuhaus was consciously wicked or cynical in his embrace of endless aggressive war, just as I'm confident Michael Novak is sincere in his conviction that capitalism is ordained by God. The law of averages suggests that some people will come to hold such ideas. And when they do, there will be generous donors making sure their voices are heard.

Think: neither orthodoxy nor heresy saves us, to paraphrase Eliot. You can define orthodox American Christianity such that Neuhaus and Weigel are excluded, but then you'll end up with a small remnant. And you can even imagine such a remnant having a voice distinct from economic agendas, imperial ideologies, and movement neuroses, but only in an America we do not presently inhabit.

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