A reader writes:
I'm a cradle Catholic, daughter of a biologist, a Fulbright scholar, and married to a Presbyterian minister, so you could say I can see the American religious debate from all sides. I have a long-founded respect your informed and unique perspective on this topic, but was disappointed in your first post on The Nones this week. I felt your reflexive biases won out.
First, the statement of theocons and Christianists being intellectually bankrupt is actually the opposite of what you yourself argue about both these movements, more thoughtfully, in The Conservative Soul. Theocons/Christianists may be power-hungry, narcissistic, and narrow-minded, but stupid? No way. That's part of the problem.
Secondly, you also seem to contradict yourself when you imply that there is a large, vague "continued and accelerated flight from organized religion." Yet as your yourself show in the same post, if there's any large religious movement in this country, it's actually movement towards (politically powerful, literalist, creationist Christian) organized religion.
Additionally you also imply that anyone with a brain rejects, or will eventually reject, organized religion– as if all organized religious belief, from Zen to Zoroastrianism, has been corrupted by our favorite political assholes. (You may argue that you're only talking about Christianity here; I would counter that the statistics from which you argue cover all religious belief, and if you mean to limit your analysis to Christianity, you're not being very clear about it.)
You also try to support the "smart = areligious" view by claiming the best of opposing analyses. In one breath, it seems to be an educated few (and therefore unimpeachable) who have the intellectual means to rise above religious mass hypnosis. In the next, it's also some implied ad populum (and therefore unimpeachable) movement of the many. None of this rhetoric is really accurate.
The reality of religion in America– as my history, and certainly yours, demonstrates– is much too nuanced. Unfortunately, the one thing we've got to be when we're talking about religion in America is accurate. And of all the people in the world who need to be accurate, it's you– you who is such a meaningful, necessary voice in intellectual, political, and religious conversations in this country.
I accept that a brief and politically pointed post is not the last or only word on the subject. But I didn't mean that theoconservatism was stupid, merely that its attempted resuscitation of natural law is a form of intellectual bankruptcy and unconvincing for all the reasons I laid out in The Conservative Soul. And I don't believe that an intelligent person would reject all organized religion (I sure don't), merely that many intelligent Americans rightly find the current orthodoxy and its emphases unattractive and unpersuasive. I believe that this view can be held simultaneously by those paid to think about it and ordinary people of faith who can recognize a failing argument when they see it.
But more nuance is always important, and I'm sorry if that post seemed too truncated and political to do this complex subject justice. On a blog, one post is never the summation. It is one part of a conversation, now amplified by my reader's skepticism.
The Dish 