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41 " To this end, they stressed ethics rather than eschatology; social reform rather than confessional debate; symbolic and allegorical interpretations of the Bible rather than more literal readings. Their great project was the Social Gospel, which urged believers to embrace an “applied Christianity” that would put Jesus’ commandments into practice here and now, through legislation as well as conversion, law as well as grace. Some aspects of modernism were compatible with traditional Christianity, "
― Ross Douthat , Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
42 " (Indeed, by the mid-2000s, college graduates were actually more likely to be in church on Sunday than Americans who had only a high school diploma.) "
43 " The religious mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul. Along the way, both sides have embraced a wildly simplified vision of our culture, in which the children of light contend with the children of darkness, and every inch of ground is claimed by absolute truth or deplorable error. The "
44 " But again, the requiem for faith was premature. America at the close of the Bush presidency was in many ways still as religious as ever, and the spiritual instincts of most Americans were still heavily influenced, overtly or covertly, by two millennia of Christian faith. Culture abhors a metaphysical vacuum, and there was no materialist ideology capable of supplying the kind of holistic account of human life that the great “isms” of the nineteenth and early twentieth century had attempted to provide. Marxism and fascism had been ground into fertilizer by the wheels of history, and Freudianism was increasingly regarded as a superstition—or, at best, a kind of literary conceit—rather than a science. Darwinism supplied explanations but not meaning: the attempts of evolutionists to answer the ultimate questions were either thin and unpersuasive or else led swiftly into Nietszchean abysses that only a few safely tenured academics still felt comfortable plumbing. "