Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics QUOTES

21 " Whether it was conservative Evangelicals hinting that the Holy Spirit had a strong position on the proper rate of marginal taxation, or liberal clergymen insisting that loving your neighbor as yourself required supporting higher levels of social spending, two generations of Christian spokesmen steadily undercut the credibility of their religious message by wedding it to the doctrines of the Democratic Party, or the platform of the GOP. "

― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

23 " These changing attitudes led to the redefinition of the private sphere, in the courts and the culture alike, and a widespread sense that issues like contraception, premarital cohabitation, and divorce—and then, much more controversially, abortion—were private matters where the government had no business interfering. The very idea of “morals legislation” became suspect, and Christian arguments about family law and public policy that might have been accepted even by secular audiences in the 1940s came to be regarded with suspicion as potential violations of the separation of church and state. "

― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

25 " As messianism tempts liberal Christians, apocalyptism tempts their conservative cobelievers: The vision of American history as a long apostasy, a steadily downhill slide, blurs easily into the fundamentalist vision of the modern age as the gradual fulfillment of the book of Revelation. As "

― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

27 " One need not subscribe to a vulgar Marxism to recognize the impact of economic changes on patterns of belief. It was John Wesley, no prophet of secularization, who remarked that “wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. "

― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

29 " He who marries the spirit of the age is soon left a widower,” the Anglican Ralph Inge remarked, "

― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

31 " Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton conducted a long investigation into the religious lives of American teenagers, and discovered exactly the kind of therapeutic theology that Rieff had seen coming. Smith and Denton found no evidence of real secularization among their subjects: 97 percent of teenagers professed some sort of belief in the divine, 71 percent reported feeling either “very” or “somewhat” close to God, and the vast majority self-identified as Christian.59 There was no sign of deep alienation from their parents’ churches, no evidence that the teenagers in the survey were poised to convert outright to Buddhism or Islam, and no sign that real atheism was making deep inroads among the young. But neither was there any evidence of a recognizably orthodox Christian faith. “American Christianity,” Smith and Denton suggested, is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself,” or else is “actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.”60 They continued: “Most religious teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe, or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it. "

― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

33 " Since the first settlers arrived in Jamestown and Plymouth, our common life has been shaped by a succession of fascinating, only-in-America faiths: the chilly Deism of the eighteenth century and the warm metaphysical bath of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism; the Mormon theocracy of the nineteenth century and the New Age movements of the 1960s; Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science and L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology; and many, many more. But "

― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

35 " Religious man was born to be saved,” he wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased. "

― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

37 " 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, awaiting rearrangement by more enlightened minds. "

― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

39 " The faces and partisan affiliations change, in other words, but the song remains the same. The party in power hero-worships its leaders (recall the evangelical kitsch-art showing Bush praying in the snow with the ghosts of Washington and Lincoln, or Will.I.Am’s worshipful YouTube hymns to the glories of “the One”), and the other party turns them into hate figures. The party in power claims to be restoring American greatness; the party out of power insists that the current administration is actually deeply un-American—heretics in the holy temple of the U.S.A., you might say—and promises to take our country back. The party in power piles on new military commitments and new domestic programs, which the party out of power bitterly opposes right up until the moment that it takes power itself. Meanwhile America’s commitments keep on multiplying, the tide of red ink keeps rising, and the country keeps cycling through savior figures, hoping each time that this one will be the One that we’ve been waiting for. "

― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics