Losing our religion: Ross Douthat rightly asserts that religious faith is essential to America's understanding of itself. But his own understanding of religion is suspiciously selective.

• Author: Baumann, Paul
• Position: On political books - Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics - Book review

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat Free Press, 336 pp.

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Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat closes the lament over the decline of "orthodox" Christianity in America in his new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, with a plaintive warning about the soul of our nation in the dark decades to come. He is convinced that reversing America's political and economic decline will require a moral renewal, a return to the practice of traditional virtues long taught by the Christian churches. He is not optimistic about that happening.

Douthat's religious prophecy recalls the more flamboyant vision of a very different sort of American intellectual--Norman Mailer. "Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other!" proclaimed Mailer in The Armies of the Night, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon.

Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America--the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people--if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn--was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now would know where was what? Liars controlled the locks. Mailer knew that the fate of American democracy cannot be disentangled from that of Christianity in all its peculiar as well as its traditional manifestations. (A Mormon president? A thrice-married Catholic convert?) Democracy is "essentially a spiritual idea," observed G. K. Chesterton, one of Douthat's heroes. Mailer would have agreed. Where, he asked, would the dangerous idea of democracy take a people who understood themselves to be both uniquely blessed in having given birth to a new kind of human freedom and uniquely burdened by that very blessing? Mailer's fervid formulations about why America was careening out of control in the 1960s were idiosyncratic, but then it was a disorienting, even apocalyptic time. Assassinations, race riots, the tumultuous end to legal segregation, and the long struggle against communism all found a terrible culmination in sending a half-million Americans to fight an unwinnable war halfway around the world.

Douthat is also attempting to address the big questions at a time of national crisis. A self-described orthodox Catholic, he looks back longingly to the 1950s, when mainline Protestantism and a traditionalist Catholic Church both forged and reflected a broad cultural consensus regarding marriage, sexual morality, citizenship, fair dealing, patriotism, and a host of other Christian values. This consensus emerged in the aftermath of the Depression and World War II, events that shook our confidence in Enlightenment rationalism and the inevitability of progress. Institutional Christianity, in Douthat's analysis, anchored American culture and politics to a firm sense of the fallibility of man and the dangers of utopian enthusiasms. By the 1960s and '70s, however, the nation found itself bitterly split by Vietnam, and radicalized by the civil rights and women's movements and especially by the sexual revolution. He argues that most mainline churches and a significant segment of the Catholic Church were co-opted by these trends, eventually adopting the liberal politics of the Democratic Party. Christian teachings about sexual morality were either ignored or discarded.

For Douthat, this collapse of institutional religious authority was nothing short of calamitous, leaving the country precariously adrift. "We're freer than we used to be," he writes, "but also more isolated, lonelier, and more depressed." America has become a nation of narcissists, and "the rot is deep." A strong dose...