fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

MTD and the degraded civil order

Sean Scallon sends along this quote from David Frum’s mid-1990s book “Dead Right.” Great observation about the effect of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’s hollowing out of American religion: Are Americans drifting from bourgeois individualism, with its emphasis on self-mastery to expressive individualism and it’s cult of self-gratification? Do they insist upon their rights and heed to […]

Sean Scallon sends along this quote from David Frum’s mid-1990s book “Dead Right.” Great observation about the effect of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’s hollowing out of American religion:

Are Americans drifting from bourgeois individualism, with its emphasis on self-mastery to expressive individualism and it’s cult of self-gratification? Do they insist upon their rights and heed to little of their responsibilities? All of these faults can be lain at the door of religious America every bit as much as secular America. Spend any time listening to the sermons of the Pentecostals and Baptists and it strikes you that they think of God the same way as Great Society liberals thought of government, a distant benevolent agency who showers goodies upon all those who ask without demanding very much in return – except for the occasional contribution. Secular conservatives who value religion for its positive social effects habitually confuse the unyielding Calvinist that shaped the country’s early heroic character with the God will-make-you-rich/God-will-make-you-thin/God-will-improve-your -sex-life that fill America’s TV sets and suburban churches today. America’s spiritual life does not stand apart from, as a refuge from or as a witness against the excesses of American culture. It fully participates in that culture, receives its ideas from that culture and is decisively shaped by that culture. In their faith as in their politics, Americans are keenly aware of what they want their authorities to do for them and strikingly indifferent to their obligations to those authorities.

So many religious people, and so many secular people, like to believe that American religion is a threat to the contemporary secular order and its values. It is neither.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now