Bad Religion - Ch 5&6

Section 2 of the book talks about the main ways the American Church has wandered from Orthodoxy. First, Douthat points out that all heresies attempt to remove paradoxes from the gospel by focusing on a few main tenets while minimizing the other details. This results in a "more consistent, streamlined, and non contradictory Jesus." The crux being the following: “Every argument about Christianity is at bottom an argument about the character of Christ himself, and every interpretation of Christian faith begins with an answer to the question Jesus posed to his disciples: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ From Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy, America’s famous heretics have always offered their own answers to that question, drawing on a mix of scholarship and supposition to craft alternatives to the Christ of orthodoxy.” Additionally, scholors have suggested that the current iterations of Christianity have won out from older editions of Christianity, and that tomorrows Christianity will be yet another iteration. 


Meanwhile, if we review the texts, there has not been this wild variation. In general, orthodoxy has, in the past help establish tradition within a very narrow road with core ethics and beliefs consistent with the oldest accounts of Christ available (the letters of the Apostle Paul). 

Chapter 5 also introduces three mainstream deviations that are popular today: The prosperity gospel, which associates faith with material blessing; the God within movement, which suggests that God is inside all of us and that our own deepest longings are actually those of God; and Nationalism, which claims America is the second Israel, God's favored land.

Chapter 6 covers the Prosperity Gospel. The face of modern prosperity theology being Joel Osteen. "By linking the spread of the gospel to the habits and mores of entrepreneurial capitalism, and by explicitly baptizing the pursuit of worldly gain, prosperity theology has helped millions of believers reconcile their religious faith with their nation's seemingly unbiblical wealth and un-Christian consumer culture" 


The problem of this is this:

"But like many forms of liberal Christianity, the marriage of God and Mammon half-expects somehow to undo the Fall, through the beneficence of Providence and the magic of the free market. In its emphasis on the virtues of prosperity, it risks losing something essential to Christianity - skipping on to Easter, you might say, without lingering at the foot of the cross.

It's there that you find the pieces of Christian tradition that a gospel of prosperity leaves by the wayside. An understanding that there can be strength in weakness and defeat; an appreciation for the idea that there might be greater virtue in poverty and renunciation, suffering and purgation, than there is in abundance and "delight"; a hard-earned wisdom about the seductions and corruptions associated with worldliness, power, and wealth." (p.205)