My favorite inquisitor

"After the great crash of 2008, Americans awoke and saw their country the way anti-Americans have always seen it: spendthrift, decadent, and corrupt. The city on a hill had become a mismanaged empire; the land of self-reliance was buried in debt. ... The most potent theories ... of American decline involve religion ..., one offered by the Christian right, the other by the secular left."

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Book review, Title Bad Religion, Author Ross Douthat, Rating 3.0, My favorite inquisitor

Bad Religion Ross Douthat Book review

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Since all other than orthodox is heretical by definition, it is thereby 'Bad Religion.' Ross, a practicing Catholic, argues that Christianity is a highly paradoxical religion whose orthodox views provide a necessary and hard won synthetic narrative providing the one true way. The argument is not very compelling, particularly as it contains the usual demagogic description of American society as corrupted, long in decline, whose only salvation is embracing his orthodoxy. (Yawn ... the ancient clarion call of the entrenched and the reactionary.)

But the book is nonetheless valuable for its summary of those Christian paradoxes, as well as a survey of various Christian trends like Evangelical fundamentalism, prosperity gospel, liberation theology, revival of Gnosticism, etc., all of which Ross labels as heresies, and finally an 80 year history of the intersection of politics and Christianity in America.

No liberation theologian he, his book defends the orthodox positions of the Vatican, whose suppression of heresy was institutionalized in medieval Christendom via the establishment of the Inquisition, which has manifested itself in various ways up to today’s time, as the Papal Inquisition remains constituted in a less tortuous form as the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Ross Douthat, my favorite Inquisitor. Attrib: adapted from Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition, by Cristiano Banti, PD-US.

 

Ross is my favorite inquisitor, a really smart, Harvard summa-cum-laude kind of guy. If you would want anyone to root out heresy, Ross is your man. His defense of Catholicism is hard bound to today’s highly conservative Republican party, which from a theological point of view seems absurd, but is no surprise in today’s United States. His columns written for the New York Times are sometimes of interest because he makes occasional effort to look at a political issue more honestly than his fellow travelers, but more often his columns serve as sturdy examples of sophistical and intellectually dishonest attempts to justify what are often un-Christian political policies. Ross provides a reader the means to gain some familiarity with the bewildering harshness of conservative Christian thinking in contemporary U.S. society.

Ross, who converted to Catholicism in his adolescence, is not unlike many religious converts, particularly those who like Ross changed religious sects to do so. He can come across as fervent, unforgiving, rigid and one-sided, despite the patina of scholarship with which he decorates his opinions. True believers like Ross seldom seem bothered by their deliberate obfuscation of relevant counter-arguments, or the routinely harsh underlying justifications that help to maintain their sect and political party in power, at the expense of those at the margins of society, those whom Jesus embraced.

Yet orthodoxy and true compassion are not mutually exclusive:  Pope Francis, no favorite of Ross’s, also defends orthodoxy, one of his jobs as the head of the Catholic Church, yet manages at the same time to place greater emphasis on compassion towards the poor, the disadvantaged, and even those who seem to be in violation of said orthodoxy. It is sad that an intellect as Ross’s seems unable to absorb the profound idea that love trumps often self-serving “morality.” One can hope that Pope Francis may yet influence him in that direction.

A gift from my Jon and Melinda Miles.