more on bad religion
I want to go back to say a few more words about Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, a book for which I wrote a commendatory blurb, and some of the critiques of it. Ross begins the book with a kind of rough-and-ready overview of American religious history, but his chief concern is to look at the last sixty years or so, and the decline during that period of the broad cultural influence of orthodox Christianity. To the claim that there has been such a decline, there are, generally speaking, three responses. The first is that there has been no such decline. The second is that there has indeed been such a decline, but it’s largely the result of an increasingly anti-Christian cultural elite, especially as manifested in American universities and major newspapers and magazines. The third is that the decline exists and is largely (though not wholly) attributable to the failures of American Christianity itself. That’s Ross Douthat’s view, and mine.
To the first response — that there has been no such decline — I would suggest reflection on a few facts. First, that in 1947 Time magazine featured an adulatory cover story on C. S. Lewis — “His Heresy: Christianity” — followed a few months later by an equally reverent cover story on Reinhold Niebuhr. T. S. Eliot, a self-avowed conservative Anglo-Catholic, was the best-known poet in the English-speaking world. W. H. Auden’s explcitiy Christian poem The Age of Anxiety won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, and Auden wrote explicitly Christian and deeply theological essays and reviews for The New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, and many other prominent and intellectually serious periodicals. In the mid-1950s Bishop Fulton Sheen’s television program Life is Worth Living ran on ABC opposite Milton Berle’s show, with which it was highly competitive in the ratings.
Can anyone seriously imagine that such generally public prominence for explcitly Christian ideas and beliefs would be possible in mainstream American media today? Of course not.
The only thing preventing people from acknowledging this strikingly obviously fact is a prima facie insistence that decline-and-fall narratives are always nostalgic and always wrong. But neither of these is the case. One can acknowledge that Christanity has a less powerful public presence today than it had in the 1950s without seeing that decline as inevitable, without seeing it as irreversible, and without seeing it as a wholly bad thing. But to deny that historically orthodox Christianity had a stronger presence in the general American culture in the 1950s than it has today — that’s just crazy talk.
The remaining question is: Why the change? To that there are many answers. For secularists, a Relentless-March-of-Truth account is appealing; for many religious believers, a Perfidious-Mainstream-Media narrative is irresistible. There are other explanations that might accompany these without necessarily excluding either of them: for instance, the rise of broader media contexts that allowed Christian television stations, Christian publishing houses, Christian magazines, and even Christian movie studios to emerge. But even if you take the rise of these Christian subaltern counterpublics seriously — as you should — the question remains: Why did Christians prefer them?
If you’re a Christian, it’s tempting to say (drawing on the Perfidious-Mainstream-Media account) that we were forced into these subaltern modes by the relentless hostility of the cultural elites. That’s a very comforting narrative: we get to cast ourselves as the persecuted minority, and who can resist that temptation? Ross is offering a less consoling explanation: that Christians lost their cultural influence in large part because they lost their connection to historic orthodoxy, preferring comfortably flaccid theologies — of the Right and the Left — that were pretty much indistinguishable from what most religiously indifferent Americans believed anyway.
So for those readers especially hostile to Ross’s account, I have a question: Are you sure it’s not because he’s telling you something you don’t want to hear? — That if you have a marginal place in American culture, the situation may be largely your own fault?
This is a picture of Billy Graham with Cardinal Cushing of Boston in 1964. They were old friends by this time. When Graham held his first crusade in Boston in 1950, Cushing himself wrote an editorial for the diocesan newspaper titled “Bravo, Billy!” Graham in turn encouraged Roman Catholic priests to participate as counselors in his crusades, to meet people who responded to his invitations to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior. (Indeed, it was this ecumenical attitude that led many fundamentalists to denounce Graham as a wishy-washy compromiser and, as Bob Jones Sr. put it, a “limb of Satan.”)
But to hear Michael Sean Winters tell it, in his tendentious and willfully ill-informed review of Ross Douthat’s new book Bad Religion, this was impossible: he gives a list of figures on both sides of the denominational divide who professed hostility, and solemnly assures us that “The one sign of convergence came, unintentionally, from the preachings of Father Leonard Feeney, who held that none but Catholics could be saved.” Apparently in Winters’s reckoning Cushing and Graham are marginal figures, unworthy to be considered in this context, unlike, say, Leonard Feeney. In fact, as Douthat acknowledges but Winters, trapped in a simplistic binary narrative, does not, the relationship between Catholicism and the various forms of Protestantism in the mid-century era was complicated, though more often positive than is usually recognized.
Winters’s whole review is constructed from patronizing assertions about Douthat’s “ignorance” — assertions which continue in his retort to Douthat’s response to the original review. I think there’s considerably more ignorance on Winters’ side. For instance, he employs his usual tone of blandly confident assertions when he writes, “If Douthat wishes to consider [Henri de] Lubac a liberal, he is the first to do so.” Now in fact, Douthat does not call Lubac a liberal — he doesn’t mention Lubac at all — but some Catholic traditionalists during the Vatican II era thought him to be so, a claim that Winters could have confirmed by doing a very simple Google search. (News flash for Winters: some Catholic traditionalists are still calling Lubac a liberal.)
So Winters is not only unable to get his basic facts right, he is unable to discern what Douthat is actually saying, as opposed to what Winters wants to make his favorite straw men say. Thus Winters claims that Douthat called Michael Novak’s work a “breakthrough” in Catholic theology, when (as you can see if you turn to page 201 of Douthat’s book) that is Novak’s word, not Douthat’s. Douthat points this out in his reply; Winters ignores the point. He’s not even trying to be accurate, fair, or honest.
This past Tuesday night I took a bunch of Vicodin and went to see Wrath of the Titans, partly because I had fallen down a flight of stairs a few days earlier and needed an escape, partly because I wanted to see if enough painkillers could make me feel like the titans were starring in a Sofia Coppola movie. I kept picturing a thousand-foot-high flame minotaur directing a gaze of numbed-out longing toward the space slightly left of a Cyclops, “Wind Cheetah” by T. Rex kaleidoscoping in the air. Chained to the chalky / chalice of night. I was intrigued by this possibility. My right arm was in a sling and was basically useless.
They called Jimmy Rushing “Mister Five-By-Five.” What a voice.
If you ask on what grounds do I accuse rapists of having done wrong, then the authentic answer is that a world with rape displeases me and this is a tool I can use to get society to impose sanctions against it.
Mild surprise; slight disagreement
Lizzie Thomas’s Hidden Forest
I will state this as clearly as possible:You cannot buy Japanese Kobe beef in this country. Not in stores, not by mail, and certainly not in restaurants. No matter how much you have spent, how fancy a steakhouse you went to, or which of the many celebrity chefs who regularly feature “Kobe beef” on their menus you believed, you were duped. I’m really sorry to have to be the one telling you this, but no matter how much you would like to believe you have tasted it, if it wasn’t in Asia you almost certainly have never had Japan’s famous Kobe beef.
A couple of years ago, I spent three months playing World of Warcraft – partly as research for a short story I was writing, mostly because I became addicted to it. This convinced me of one thing: If the computer games which exist now had existed back in 1979 I would not have read any books, I think; I would not have seen writing as an adequate entertainment; I would not have seen going outdoors as sufficiently interesting to bother with.Similarly, I find it difficult to understand why any eleven-year-old of today would be sufficiently bored to turn inward for entertainment.