The Daily Signal - Is the US a Post-Christian Nation? Here’s What Ross Douthat Thinks

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Amid declining church attendance, and cultural storms, do Americans still take faith seriously? "We're a no longer deeply Christian country that is not yet post-Christian and is still heavily influenced by Christianity," says Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist and author. We also cover the following stories: House Democrats release a new impeachment report. President Trump has a strained exchange with French President Macron. Facing charges over his use of campaign dollars, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., pleads guilty. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesdays, December 4th. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Kate Trinko. Is America a post-Christian? Ross Douthit, New York Times columnist and author, joins the podcast to discuss how institutional Christianity is faltering in the U.S. But while many still practice religion in some way, Douthit thinks that may not endure forever. He says, religious individualism doesn't fulfill impulses towards community.

in solidarity. And it doesn't necessarily work for people when things go really bad. We'll talk about that and more. And don't forget, if you do enjoy this podcast, please be sure to leave us a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. President Donald Trump had a strained exchange with French President Emmanuel Macron in a meeting on Tuesday during the NATO summit. In their exchange, Trump implied that a large majority of captured ISIS fighters are from various countries in Europe, like France and Germany, while Macron pushed back, saying that many instead come from Syria and Iraq.

Here's what they had to say. Well, I haven't asked that to the president today. I have over the period of time. We have a tremendous amount of captured fighters, ISIS fighters, over in Syria. and they're all under Lock and Key, but many are from France, many are from Germany, many are from UK. They're mostly from Europe,

and some of the countries are agreeing. I have not spoken to the president about that. Would you like some nice ISIS fighters? I can give them to them. You can take everyone you want. Let's be serious. The very large number of fighters you have on the ground are fighters coming from Syria,

from Iraq and the region. It is true that you have foreign fighters coming from Europe, but this is a tiny minority of the overall problem we have in the region. And I think number one priority, because it's not yet finished, it's to get rid of ISIS and the terrorist groups. This is our number one priority. Democrats issued a new report about the findings in the impeachment inquiry so far. The report states that the impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump,

personally, enacting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection. And the president placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security. Republicans issued a report prior to the Democrat report, faulting the party. is a nature of the impeachment hearings. The GOP report stated, Chairman Schiff, referring to the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Adam Schiff, interrupted Republican members and directed

witnesses not to answer Republican questions. Chairman Schiff refused to allow Republicans to exercise the limited procedural rights afforded to them. Chairman Schiff rejected witnesses identified by Republicans who would inject some semblance of fairness and objectivity. Today, the House Judiciary Committee will have its first impeachment hearing, focusing on legal scholars' views on impeachment. Congressman Duncan Hunter, a Republican representing California's 50th district, pled guilty Tuesday to fraud in his campaign, namely embezzling funds from his campaign after pleading not guilty in 2018 after being indicted. Hunter and his wife both have been charged with misusing over 250,000 in campaign funds. Here's what Hunter told media on Tuesday.

I failed to monitor an account for my campaign spending. I made mistakes, and that's what today was all about. So that being said, I'll have more statements in the future about the future. Thank you. Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, is exiting the presidential race. In a post on Medium, Harris wrote, My Campaign for President simply doesn't have the financial resources we need to continue. you. I'm not a billionaire. I can't fund my own campaign. Next, we'll feature Daniel Davis's

interview with Ross Douthit. If you're tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger and bigger government, it's time to partner with the most impactful conservative organization in America. We're the Heritage Foundation, and we're committed to solving the issues America faces. Together, we'll fight back against the rising tide of homes. homegrown socialism and we'll fight for conservative solutions that are making families more free and more prosperous. But we can't do it without you. Please join us at heritage.org. I'm joined now by Ross Douthit. He is a New York Times columnist and author of the forthcoming book, The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Ross, it's great to having the studio.

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So, Ross, we've been told that in America in the 21st century, We live in a post-Christian society that things are only going to get more secular. And yet, in so many ways, Christianity almost has a zombie-like existence in our culture, even in the secular parts of the culture, where not just institutional Christianity, but Christian concepts continue to inhabit our minds. How would you describe the state of Christianity in America, the role it's playing, and the relative grip that it still has on us. I think one way to look at it is that on the one hand,

there is sort of a resilient core in American life of actual Christian practice and belief, right? Of people going to church on Sundays and identifying as Roman Catholics or reformed Presbyterians and so on. And that core is somewhat smaller than it used to be, but its collapse might be somewhat overstated. It's still there. it's still real, it still matters. Then you have sort of two other zones of sort of spiritual attitudes, both of which are more post-Christian but are, as you say, still heavily influenced by Christian ideas. And one is this sort of the kind of spiritual zone, which is a zone where people no longer

believe in the absolute authority of scripture or the authority of the Catholic Church's Magisterium, but they're still likely to believe in supernatural and metaphysical concepts that are not always, but often connected to Christianity. And, you know, this is sort of the zone that runs from Joel Osteen on the right to Oprah Winfrey on the left, if you wanted to. And it folds in, you know, a lot of people who identify as Christian, but maybe are in some sort of prosperity gospel zone that is a little bit unorthodox, shall we say, and people who don't per se identify as Christians but would identify with Christian traditions and ideas to some extent.

That's more the Oprah zone. Then you have a zone that sort of thinks of itself as secular, this is the world of the intelligentsia, the academy, perhaps some readers of my own newspaper. And that zone doesn't usually have Christian metaphysical concepts in the sense. or it doesn't have supernatural concepts. It's unlikely to believe in angels, miracles, divine revelation, and so on. But it does still have a sort of Christian moral framework in a lot of cases, a sort of vision of, you know, the inviability of the individual. The, you know, the sort of apart from the abortion debate, thou shalt not kill, right?

and sort of a lot of progressive attitudes around human rights, especially I think still manifest a strong Christian influence. And you can even see it sort of in what we think of as sort of woke culture, the sort of rituals of, you know, confessing your privilege and being, you know, being ashamed of your, you know, your associations with past sins. All of that without being Christian still participates in the Christian tradition in certain interesting ways. So I don't think it's correct to call us. We're a no longer deeply Christian country that is not yet post-Christian and is still heavily influenced by Christianity, is how I'd put it. Yeah, that picture you paint is a very residual and it points to a past where some of these institutions and ideas were much more shored up. Can you give us the broad strokes of, you know, say the last 60 to 70 years, how we got to where we are now from, say, the post-World War II consensus.

Right. So, I mean, the first thing to be said is that, you know, a lot of these sort of quasi-Christian or semi-Christian trends are not, they're not entirely new, right? I mean, America has always been a nation of heretics to use a phrase I used in one of my books. It's always been a place with a lot of spiritual freelancers. You know, the American intelligentsia has been pretty secular for a long time. There have always been figures like Oprah Winfrey.

Let's put it that way, right? That said, there has been a shift where 60 or 70 years ago there was a lot of clear institutional vitality and convergence between different institutional forms of Christian faith. And, you know, I use the example because it's relevant right now because he's about to be beatified of Fulton Sheen, who was Catholic bishop, who had. had a sort of Oprah-esque or Dr. Phil-esque prime time show or maybe Jordan Peterson-esque to pick a different figure where he delivered a kind of moral and philosophical self-help to Americans of all faiths that was clearly rooted in a very strong institutional Catholicism and a strong Catholic framework. And of course, he wore the full, you know, bishops regalia while he did it, right? And a figure like Sheen or a figure like Billy Graham or a figure like Reinhold Niebuhr or even a figure like Martin Luther King all represent sort of strong forms of religious influence that come out of strong institutional traditions.

Mainline Protestantism for Niebuhr, the black church for King and evangelicalism for Graham. And some of that is what we've lost, I think, over the 50 or 60 years since. that there is no, there are very few figures who are sort of directly associated with a mainline church or an important evangelical body or even Roman Catholicism who have sort of non-sectarian and apolitical influence. You have figures who have influence as conservative Christians, right? Like Franklin Graham has influence. But he's seen as a sectarian and partisan figure in a way that his father was not. And similarly, Catholic bishops are sort of always caught up in the Catholic Church's post-60s Civil War, where you'll have Catholic bishops who are seen as liberal Catholics and Catholic bishops who are seen as conservative Catholics, but very few who sort of successfully speak to their own church as a whole, let alone the culture as a whole. So I think it's that decline of strong institutions and strong non-partisan figures associated with them.

that's the big shift since the 50s. And of course, we couldn't have this conversation without noting the sexual revolution that came after the 50s. What effect do you see the sexual revolution as having on the church itself? I mean, I think the best way to understand it is to say that before the sexual revolution, if you weren't a zealous, pious Christian, the basic Christian ideas about sex and marriage and sexual morality still seem to, you know, make a kind of basic sense, right?

So the idea that, you know, maybe you didn't think sex before marriage was a mortal sin, but you accepted the social conventions that if you did have sex before marriage, it should be premarital sex in the literal sense where you're having sex with someone you're likely to get married to. Or, you know, that divorce might be necessary, but it should be an extreme last-dish situation. Or, you know, living together outside of marriage is socially unacceptable even if it's not going to send you to hell. And that's what shifts in the course of the sexual revolution, that people, you know, sort of

conventional middle class morality stops thinking of Christianity, a Christian morality, New Testament, sexual ethics as sort of generally good wisdom and starts thinking of it either as an ideal that people can't live up to or as a sort of patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic burden that we're better off without. And I think it's affected the Christian churches by basically dividing them internally between factions that think the churches need to adapt to this new reality by dramatically shifting or evolving Christian sexual ethics and factions that think, no, you need to sort of maintain tradition, maintain the traditional teaching, stay true to the words of Jesus and St. Paul,

and eventually the culture can be reconverted or come back. And that's sort of not the only point of division within Christian churches, but it's clearly one of the biggest ones. And it just, you know, it didn't exist to anything like the same extent in the late 19th century or early 20th century. Not that these debates weren't there, they were, but they just became much, much sharper. And neither the conservative approach nor the liberal approach has necessarily worked in the sense of sort of building a recovered Christianity for a post-sexual revolution age. Would you say that one of those approaches has worked in the sense of maintaining just internal integrity? I mean, you do. I mean, look, I'm a conservative, right.

I identify, I guess, as a conservative Catholic. So I think the conservative approach has more generally more moral and theological integrity, not I think, on every issue and every argument, but generally so. And I think that sociologically it's been somewhat more successful at sort of giving people a reason to remain in the pews and present sort of a persuasive coherent Christianity. I think that the amount of sort of creative editing of both church tradition and scripture that you have to do to get to a fully liberalized Christianity, a sort of, you know, Nadia Boltzweber, right, to pick, you know, to pick a sort of current, you know, liberal Protestant writer who basically says the church needs to adapt completely to the sexual revolution.

to get there, the editing required makes the larger Christian gospel and witness seem much more implausible. But it does have to be said that the conservative approach, you know, has not reclaimed the culture. It can sort of build a bunker mentality where people are sort of hunkered down and saying, you know, we're going to defend our, defend my family against the culture, but you aren't, that doesn't mean you have any idea of how to do missionary work and a bunker mentality can breed a sort of toxic and hermetic environment.

And I don't think, I guess I want to be cautious of sort of the demographic triumphalism that conservative Christians sometimes get into where they say, well, our churches are still here and the liberal churches have vanished because that's not always the case, right? I mean, Roman Catholicism has declined pretty steeply even though, you know, Pope's John Paul the 2nd and Benedict the 16th were sort of trying to hold the line on these issues. So it's not, there isn't sort of a perfect correlation between conservatism and robustness on every front. Right. I mean, even in my own evangelical tradition, the term evangelical because it's been so politicized, it's become a more of a political identifier, people will respond to surveys and say, oh, yeah, I'm an evangelical just because they live in a white or rural or, you know, conservative region of the country. But that doesn't necessarily map on to their worldview.

You. Right. I mean, there's a zone of sort of residual cultural Christianity on the American right that is not practically practicing the faith. Right. And, you know, this is sort of the conservative equivalent of Christmas and Easter liberal Christians, right? It's people who, you know, when Donald Trump or before him, people on Fox News talked about like how there's a war on Christmas, right? There's a certain kind of. American who doesn't go to church but wants to say Merry Christmas, right? I mean, that's not, you know, I don't want to be reductive, but that's a real phenomenon. And, you know, I mean, it's not, as a Christian, you want to say in certain ways that any residual form of Christianity is worth nurturing. And, you know, the impulse to say Merry Christmas is a Christian impulse and it's worth nurturing. But if you're sort of reducing your Christian identity to identity, and not practicing the faith, then you're not going to pass it down and the church itself

is not going to survive over the long haul. You mentioned some key names from the 50s, Reinhold Niebuhr, Fulton Sheen, and then you mentioned Martin Luther King. You could speak of a religious center in America in that era. Who is the religious center of America today? I mean, I think it is figures who are sort of supernaturally. in the sense that they believe that prayer, divine intervention, miracles, all of these things are possible, but fundamentally individualist in their religious outlook.

And so you're sort of you're accepting that God is real and that life has purpose and the universe has meaning and prayer works, but you're not submitting yourself to the authority of scripture or, you know, the Magisterium of the Catholic Church or any kind of traditional religious authority. And so I tend to, you know, I mentioned both Joel Osteen and Oprah Winfrey earlier in this conversation. I tend to think of the American religious center in the 50s as being somewhere between Fulton Sheen and Billy Graham and the American religious center today being somewhere between Joel Osteen and Oprah Winfrey, which means, again, it's not, you know, Osteen describes himself as a Christian, you know, it's not a post-Christian religious

center, but it's much more individualist and much less institutionalist. And they're for much less orthodox by any definition than it was a few generations back. So looking from our present toward the future, what are some possible trajectories you see happening? I mean, I think a lot of us were very surprised to see Kanye West come forward as a born-again Christian and then go up and speak with Joel Osteen and that whole thing and are watching closely to see what happens next. Right. Do you think – I mean, some people are – and I with enthusiasm and. and hope look at this and think, oh, this, you know, he is very influential, could, you know, bring new people to hear the message of the gospel and of the faith.

And, you know, that could be a means. So, I mean, history is so unpredictable like that. I mean, what are some of the future trajectories you see? Right. So one possibility is that this is actually kind of self-stabilizing, right? And you mentioned that my next book is about decadence. And this is sort of the decadence argument, right? That sort of you have a situation where institutional religion has declined, but it never gets weak enough to fall apart entirely.

And it remains, well, what you said, a zombie, a sort of zombie Christianity, right? That you can sort of stay in this kind of zombie state for a long time with a core of religious believers keeping the churches going, enough Christian influence in the culture that you don't get sort of massive, new religious transformation, no, like mass conversion to Buddhism or Islam or something, but things sort of stay much as they are, that we're a rich society, that religious individualism sort of works for a rich society, a society where people are pretty comfortable and, you know, don't want priests or, you know, or Bible, you know, biblical literalists telling them what to do. So I think that's possible, right? that actually that we could have gone through this transformation that started in the 60s

and have reached a kind of stable, decadent zombie point. But as you say, history is unpredictable, right? And the reality is that, one, there's a lot of, I think, religious impulses that are unfulfilled in the current landscape. I think religious individualism doesn't fulfill impulses towards community and solidarity. And it doesn't necessarily work for people when things go really. bad and secularism, the sort of secular world picture with its residual Christian moralism can't really explain where that moralism comes from because it doesn't believe that God created

the universe or that, you know, human beings are, you know, beings independent of their bodies. So there are those sort of points of tension that could be points of fracture and points of change. And then, you know, if you look at just Western religious history alone, right, you can't predict individual figures. You can't predict a Martin Luther or John Calvin. You can't predict a Francis of Assisi or a Thomas Aquinas. You can't predict Jesus of Nazareth. You can't predict the Prophet Muhammad, right? Nobody in the year 550 AD would have said, well, obviously the next religious thing is a monotheistic religion that claims to be the heir to Christianity and Judaism that comes surging out of the Arabian desert, right? No one would have predicted that. So, I mean, Kanye, you know, Bob Dylan had a Christian phase. I think with artists and celebrities, you want to be simultaneously supportive of their conversions without putting too much hope and weight into it. But it's certainly an example of how the unexpected rules religious life. And the reason that religion is resilient in a secular age isn't just that there's sort of a general predisposition towards religious belief, but also because people just keep on having religious. religious experiences, and that has an effect on the culture, whether we like it or not.

Yeah, well, that sort of gets to the secularization thesis that I want to ask you about. You mentioned Islam, and that's a factor that is sort of disrupting the secularization thesis in Europe, where secularism really did triumph for a long time, and now you've got Islam sort of coming in through immigration and filling a kind of spiritual vacuum. In America, we don't have that so much, but America has always been. the exception to the rule of secularization. Given those contexts, do you think secularism really has a viable long-term future? I mean, I think secularism, I think hard secularism is a little bit overstated even

in the European context, right? That like the sort of secularism that is represented by a Richard Dawkins, right? sort of real atheism is actually pretty rare even in Sweden or England or in sort of northern European countries where church going has fallen off a cliff. I think what triumphed in Europe was much more sort of really the kind of religious individualism that I was talking about earlier that was a little bit more secularized in the European context because Europe didn't have this tradition of religious entrepreneurship and, you know, sort of start up churches and so on. But as for, I think religious individualism, though, I sort of think that, you know, it has the capacity to last as long as wealth and stability last in a sense, right? And I think, you know, if you look at sort of whether it's Muslims in Europe or, you know, Mormons and Orthodox Jews and the Amish and the U.S. and so on, I think you often see religious communities that,

you know, sort of thrive within secularism and people have a lot of kids and they grow rapidly at the beginning. But then there's also a lot of attrition because, you know, it's hard to practice a faith intensely in a context of general disbelief. And it's harder in a context, again, of sort of, you know, wealth and stability and pleasure seeking, right? That sort of hedonism really is attractive to people, right? And I mean, and even like, sort of getting up on Sunday and going to church, having kids and raising them, nothing made me more sympathetic to the life of the secular European than having kids because I realized, wow, this is really hard, right?

And you can see why, given the choice, people might not. And the same is true of sort of intense religious practice, which, frankly, I'm not very good at myself. So I think I don't, I don't think that religious people should look at the real weaknesses of secularism and assume, oh, it's going to collapse and we'll have, you know, a Muslim. Europe and a Church of Kanye America tomorrow. I think there is up until the point when the whole system seems to be in crisis, there's likely to be a certain resilience to a certain kind of secularism. Again, not militant atheism, but a softer kind.

When you look at political divisions within the church, particularly along racial and ethnic lines. You see two parties in America that have lots of Christians in them. We often think of the Democratic Party is very secular, but has a large base of Christians. Do you think that political split within the church has weakened the church's ability to have an impact on society at large? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the big shifts from the 50s to the present is just political polarization is more powerful and people put more of their identity into their political party and less into their religion, right? People used to, you know, the Catholics wouldn't want their daughters to marry Lutherans and vice versa.

And now that's a lot weaker, but it's Republicans don't want their daughters to marry liberals and Democrats don't want their sons to marry conservatives. And that, yeah, any time when political identity becomes more important than religious identity, the church is going to be in a lot of trouble. contributes to this sense that like if you wanted to be a Billy Graham or a Reinhold Niebuhr or Fulton Sheen you wouldn't have a place to stand that was seen as not liberal first and conservative second. Conservative first and liberal second. The racial polarization is, I mean on the one hand it's certain ways it's the deeper

scandal in a sense that it's connected to, you know, the sort of America's original sin and slavery and everything else, right, which has created, I think, very historically understandable reasons that African-American churchgoers don't feel comfortable in a party dominated by, you know, Southern white evangelicals, even though they have a lot in common, theologically. The only thing that might be said about that that's more positive is that on the one hand, a political reconciliation between black and black. white Christians is obviously desirable. On the other hand, it might be good for America that there are reasons why there's a, you know, still a strong religious presence in one of our political parties that's otherwise secularizing. And actually, American politics might become much more toxic if it was sort of purely, you

know, all the religious people are in one party and all the secular people or all the, you know, non, you know, all the sort of spiritual, mushy middle people are in the other. So, I mean, there are ways in which the secularization of the Democratic Party is constrained by racial division and the racial division is bad, but I don't necessarily want a world where there aren't any churchgoers in the Democratic Party anymore. Well, I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there, but you mentioned a book that you had written. It's bad religion. Yeah. If listeners are interested in more of these thoughts, they can read my 2012 book, Bad Religion, How We Became a Nation of Heretics, which. Some of it needs to be updated probably, but a lot of it is still relevant.

I am waiting for the second edition right now. Excellent. Ross, thanks for your time. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to SCOTUS 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court.

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