Douthat recently addressed (NYT) an oft-invoked paradox of American life – that social scientists associate religious faith with a number of social goods, from personal well-being to participation in civic life, while areas like the Bible Belt suffer from more than their fair share of social ills, like out-of-wedlock births and poverty. How to explain this? He argues that the “social goods associated with faith flow almost exclusively from religious participation, not from affiliation or nominal belief,” and that such mere affiliation or nominal belief – the “Christian penumbra” – could be the problem:
In the Christian penumbra, certain religious expectations could endure (a bias toward early marriage, for instance) without support networks for people struggling to live up to them. Or specific moral ideas could still have purchase without being embedded in a plausible life script. (For instance, residual pro-life sentiment could increase out-of-wedlock births.) Or religious impulses could survive in dark forms rather than positive ones — leaving structures of hypocrisy intact and ratifying social hierarchies, without inculcating virtue, charity or responsibility.
And it isn’t hard to see places in American life where these patterns could be at work. Among those working-class whites whose identification with Christianity is mostly a form of identity politics, for instance. Or among second-generation Hispanic immigrants who have drifted from their ancestral Catholicism. Or in African-American communities where the church is respected as an institution without attracting many young men on Sunday morning.
Seeing some of the problems in our culture through this lens might be useful for the religious and secular alike. For nonbelievers inclined to look down on the alleged backwardness of the Bible Belt, it would be helpful to recognize that at least some the problems they see at work reflect traditional religion’s growing weakness rather than its potency.
Paul Elie isn’t so sure:
What to make of this? Well, my first instinct is to challenge the social science: for one thing, its categories are usually vague to the point of imprecision, and for another, the strong religion Douthat is drawn to has as one of its core beliefs the conviction that social goods can’t be understood (or fostered) in a general sense, social science-style — can’t be understood apart from particular traditions with specific conceptions of the good, conceptions that are meant to challenge our common-sense, social-science-y ideas of what social goods are. …
[W]hat’s easy to miss is the (seemingly) obvious point that the most powerful and effective way to promote a social good is personally, not culturally – for individuals or communities to reach out to those in their midst who are in need and try to hear them, and help them. Call this virtue, or kindness, or charity, or love – but this, and not promoting social goods as a means toward the maintenance of the community and the strengthening of its position in an “ideological battle,” is the heart of the matter, isn’t it?
Also responding to Douthat, Dreher indicts his generation for failing to pass on their faith, creating “the murky space where many, many Americans dwell: between unbelief in Christianity and committed belief in Christianity”:
My fear — and it is that: a fear — is that so many of us older believers are making it difficult to impossible for our children to believe, simply by failing to teach them the basics of the faith, and to demonstrate by our lives that these things we believe are true.
It is the case that not everyone in ages past knew much theology, or even cared to know. But I believe it was the case back then that the faith was nearer to hand than it is today, for those who cared to embrace it. This no doubt led to Christianity as little more than middle-class respectability; this, in fact, is what Kierkegaard railed against in 19th-century Copenhagen: the reduction of the radicalism of the Christian faith to bourgeois ideology. Maybe the times we’re in now require those who profess Christianity, in all its forms, to embrace its core radicalism more consciously. Yes, this must be true: Christians have to push back against the world as hard as the world pushes against them. The lukewarm and their descendants will be seduced by the siren song of individualism, shoved over the cliff and washed down the river by the irresistible current. What a terrible judgment to inflict upon one’s children. I’ll be crude here, but the seriousness of the situation demands straight talk: you are a Christian, but half-assed about it, you had better face the likelihood that your children and your grandchildren will be strangers to the faith.
The Dish 