Stranger in a Strange Land

• INTELLECTUM VERO VALDE AMA • Greatly love the intellect

—Augustine

When a book elicits angry, uncomprehending, dismissive reviews from the self-appointed guardians of tolerance and enlightenment, pay attention. What you’re hearing may well be the pain and rage of a wounded behemoth. A case in point is the reception of Stephen Carter’s new book, God’s Name in Vain: The Rights and Wrongs of Religion in Politics (Basic). See, for example, Brent Staples’s review in the New York Times Book Review (Nov. 26, 2000). Staples writes editorials for the Times on politics and culture, so his review is doubly stamped with the imprimatur of the newspaper of record.

“Visit a church at random next Sunday,” Staples begins,

and you will probably encounter a few dozen people sprinkled thinly over a sanctuary that was built to accommodate hundreds or even thousands. The empty pews and white-haired congregants lend credence to those who argue that traditional religious worship is dying out.

Really? For the exceedingly credulous, maybe, or for those whose mind is already made up (after all, no one they know would be caught dead in a place of “traditional religious worship”). By the same logic, after my recent visits to churches such as Southeast Christian in Louisville, which has grown from a congregation of 125 in 1966 to more than 14,000 today, I could conclude that “traditional religious worship” is growing by leaps and bounds.

But neither impression would be worth much, based on such skimpy evidence. In fact, the consensus among the scholars who study church attendance is that it hasn’t changed significantly since the 1960s; down slightly, perhaps, but that is all.

Don’t bother Staples with facts, though; he’s in full swing, explaining that “the quest for spiritual fulfillment has moved away from church and into the secular world.” Shades of the sixties and The Secular City. Does Staples really think the future lies that way? But the next moment he has shifted gears to extol the “new ecumenicalism,” which accommodates “a broad range of religious inflections, including those that have migrated into this country from Asia, South America, and the Caribbean.”

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with Carter’s book. I wondered the same thing. First, Staples wants to lecture Carter about what “religion” really means in America today. (Carter is charged with having missed “the new ecumenicalism,” though in his book he acknowledges religious pluralism at many points.) Second, Carter says that in America today many religious believers rightly feel they are under assault. Staples is convinced that Carter is blind to the “ecclesiastical failures and self-inflicted wounds” of “the traditional church.” The logic, if there were any, would go something like this: If believers feel beleaguered, it’s their own fault! And what are those “ecclesiastical failures and self-inflicted wounds”? Well, “the traditional church … has failed to present religion in a style that the modern world could accept and understand—and has lost touch with the evangelistic impulse that built the great congregations in the first place.”

This is very confusing. Some parts of the church have indeed lost touch with the evangelistic impulse, but aren’t those the very parts that are most desperate to “present religion in a style that the modern world could accept and understand”? As to what that “style” might be:

The traditional church’s sufferings stem mainly from its failure to adapt quickly enough to new religious appetites and new social realities—most notably, divorce, unwed motherhood, birth control, open homosexuality, and the wish of women to serve as pastors.

Stranger and stranger. Isn’t it in the mainline—where many of those dying congregations Staples cited are to be found—that the effort to “adapt quickly” to these “new social realities” has been most pronounced? And what exactly does it mean, come to think of it, for “the modern world” to accept and understand something? Is the “modern world” more or less synonymous with the staff of the Times and the Harvard faculty, or does it also include those benighted souls—many of them immigrants, by the way; far more immigrants are Christian than Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu put together—who flock to the very sort of churches of which Staples clearly disapproves?

The incoherence of Staples’s treatment of “traditional religion” confirms the rightness of Carter’s intuitions, first expressed in his book The Culture of Disbelief and developed further in God’s Name in Vain. Even as Staples ridicules Carter’s portrait of “elite campuses” where “it is perfectly acceptable for professors to use their classrooms to attack religion, to mock it,” his own review is seething with condescension and contempt for traditional religious belief.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following products, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase: • God’s Name in Vain : The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics, by Stephen L. Carter • The Culture of Disbelief : How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, by Stephen L. Carter