The Lines of the Times

By Ross Douthat

April 1, 2014

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat marks the boundaries of a faith that engages the world without sinking into softness or isolation

RD: Well, I think part of the argument in the book is that it's very easy for observers, both religious and secular, to sort of fall into a kind of binary on exactly that question and to say, "Okay, the story of modernity, the story of the last 40 or 50 years in American or Western life, has been a choice between a pure, purely secularist materialism on the one hand and some form of traditional Christianity or traditional religion on the other I try to complicate that a little bit by arguing that what's interesting and distinctive about a lot of American life in particular — and I think this is true across the developed world but it's particularly true in the United States — is the extent to which our sort of secular materialism is still deeply entangled with ideas that are very explicitly about God, that are not just implicitly about religion in the sense that any value system has a religious component, but that are actually, actively religious One of the things that I like best about Francis is that he balances the general images of healing and mercy with a stress on the idea, as he puts it, that the Church can't just be an NGO, right? Because I think the problem a lot of more self-consciously progressive or liberal forms of both Catholicism and Christianity, and religion in general, have fallen into over the last 30 or 40 years is they've focused on the works of mercy and lost sight of any kind of foundation in ritual and dogma How do you survive; how do you thrive? What about the dynamic for our common life? Do we risk having a common life in which people of faith have opted out or have nothing distinctive to offer aside from aping a sort of quasi-ideological platform that is really not distinctively religious? And in either of those two cases, our common life is impoverished But, yeah, I see the concept of decadence probably as being useful in the same way I see the concept of heresy being useful, in the sense that it's kind of a difference-splitter between narratives of progress and ascent, which are deeply woven into Western civilization going back hundreds of years, arguably going back to Jewish and Christian ideas, depending on your point of view And the end of the poem is that evening has fallen and the barbarians haven't come, and everyone's returning to their homes sort of perplexed, and the last line is something like, "They were, those people, a kind of solution So that's what I'll be committing myself to after this evening is over If the horizon is limited, then, to this world, if you've lost the horizon of eternity, does that kind of society necessarily become decadent over time? Because there's only to be enjoyed what is here, and what's the point of being very vigorous when you can enjoy it in a leisurely way? It's about the history of religion as a shaper of the public life of the United States and how many of the trends of the United States that have political manifestations, but that are also properly theological, are — as you argue — various forms of Christian heresy I think, in that sense, it's a mistake to look particularly at America right now and say, "Well, you know, the institutional churches are in retreat, traditional Christianity is in decline, and therefore society is just becoming more secular in some straightforward fashion

Read more...