Interesting editorial from Ross Douthat of the NY Times, “Tough Season for Believers”, using the season as an opportunity to look at two books, American Grace and To Change the World, which take the pulse of Christianity in America. In the conclusion, he gets at some of our (probably naive but hey, it’s Christmas) hopes for Mockingbird.
Christmas is hard for everyone. But it’s particularly hard for people who actually believe in it. In a sense, of course, there’s no better time to be a Christian than the first 25 days of December. But this is also the season when American Christians can feel most embattled. Their piety is overshadowed by materialist ticky-tack. Their great feast is compromised by Christmukkwanzaa multiculturalism. And the once-a-year churchgoers crowding the pews beside them are a reminder of how many Americans regard religion as just another form of midwinter entertainment, wedged in between “The Nutcracker” and “Miracle on 34th Street.”
These anxieties can be overdrawn, and they’re frequently turned to cynical purposes. But they also reflect the peculiar and complicated status of Christian faith in American life. Depending on the angle you take, Christianity is either dominant or under siege, ubiquitous or marginal, the strongest religion in the country or a waning and increasingly archaic faith.
Thanks in part to this bunker mentality, American Christianity has become what [UVA sociologist and To Change the World author James Davison] Hunter calls a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future. In spite of their numerical strength and reserves of social capital, he argues, the Christian churches are mainly influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life. In the commanding heights of culture, Christianity punches way below its weight.
Both books come around to a similar argument: this month’s ubiquitous carols and crèches notwithstanding, believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation. The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities, and where the idea of a single religious truth seems increasingly passé.
Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.
COMMENTS
4 responses to “Writhing and Sur-Thriving: A Tough Season for Believers”
Leave a Reply
When an old "order" is under stress to the point of collapse, this is when its real vital core often gives birth with remarkable force to unexpected new but altered creative life. I personally don't think American Christianity has had the hell beat out of it enough quite yet to create an evangelical Christian version of William Faulkner. But maybe in 20 years or so…here's to hoping things don't get better.
What a lovely thoughtful and cruciform comment, MC.
He wasn't evangelical, but Walker Percy was pretty close to that Christian Faulkner
As much as I agree that Percy certainly has his place, I would not put him on Faulkner's level. The creativity of Faulkner is not polemical. It is not trying to critique the new order or defend the old one. It is work that is only possible as a fruit of complete defeat.