Recommendations for a Nation of Heretics

May 9, 2012 By Mark D. Roberts 2 Comments

In my last post, I began to comment on Ross Douthat’s new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Well, actually, I focused on a recent interview Douthat did with Christianity Today. He does believe that much of American religion, Christianity, in particular, is “bad” because we have lost touch with Christian orthodoxy and with the institutions (churches, denominations) and guard and pass on classic Christian truth.

Ross Douthat at Faith Angle Forum, May 2012

In the last couple of days, I’ve been attending the Faith Angle Forum in Florida. As it turns out, Douthat was one of the featured speakers. He is as good in person as in writing, which made for an engaging conversation about the state of religion in America. Whether you agree with Douthat or not, he is a valuable contributor to this dialogue and I hope he continues to express his views on the matter.

Anyway, back to Christianity Today. In the interview, Douthat was asked: How can we begin to address a nation of heretics? “We,” in this question, means “we who believe ourselves to be orthodox Christians.” Here is Douthat’s telling answer:

There has been much healthy Catholic and Protestant dialogue and cooperation during the past 30 years. But ultimately the success of U.S. Christianity depends on individual churches and confessions, not on ecumenism for ecumenism’s sake. Protestants and Catholics need to recognize everything we have in common and then say we’re also going to focus on building separate effective churches.

Christianity’s failure in the United States is an institutional failure, and the answer to institutional failure is stronger institutions. America has more to gain from a more potent Protestantism and Catholicism than it does from even the most fruitful Protestant-Catholic dialogue.

For evangelicals, it means thinking more seriously about ecclesiology and what it will take to sustain Christianity across generations. Promise Keepers, Campus Crusade for Christ, and other parachurch groups have been important to evangelicalism. But “parachurch” makes sense over the long term in the context of a church. The danger for evangelicalism is becoming too parachurch without enough church. Some megachurches seem to function like parachurches rather than churches, as though everything else that’s going on is more important than the central life of the community of worship. It might be important for evangelicals to think of themselves as Presbyterians, Baptists, and so on, and recover the virtues of confessionalism, because it’s confessions, not just superstar pastors, that sustain Christianity over the long haul.

I think Douthat is substantially right. Though it’s popular these days to love Jesus and hate the church, in fact, the church is the context in which the truth about Jesus is told and passed on. It’s the context where Jesus is honored and worshiped. You cannot ultimately have a vital, sustainable Christian faith apart from the church.

I take seriously Douthat’s recommendation for evangelicals. I agree that we need to do much more thinking about ecclesiology (the understanding of the church). Though parachurch organizations can help to revitalize and strengthen the church, they should not suppose to replace it. As you may know, I work for a parachurch organization (Foundations for Laity Renewal). One of the reasons I joined this organization had to do with its longstanding commitment to support and partner with the church (in the form of particular churches).

By the way, if you’re looking for some serious reflection on the church and its relationship to Christian faith, I would recommend an outstanding book by my friend Tod Bolsinger. It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian: How the Community of God Transforms Lives has been well-received in a wide range of contexts: churches, small groups, seminaries, pastors’ retreats, etc. You can also find lots of insights about the church on Tod’s blog.

In my next post, I want to think with you about why the notion of “heresy” is an important one, even if it isn’t especial PC these days.

 

Filed Under: Books, Church Life, Cultural Commentary Tagged With: , , 2 Comments

Are We a Nation of Heretics?

May 7, 2012 By Mark D. Roberts 4 Comments

Are we a nation of heretics? Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, says “Yes.” It’s a rather elaborate “Yes,” actually, taking up 293 pages of Douthat’s new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

I always enjoy Douthat’s writing, and Bad Religion is no exception to this rule. He is thoughtful, knowledgeable, and can turn a phrase with the best of them. I’m about a quarter into Bad Religion and am finding myself both informed and entertained. So far, Douthat has been focusing on the rise and fall of mainline Christianity in America in the last half century or a little more.

If you’re looking for a way to sample Douthat’s thinking before you purchase Bad Religion, Christianity Today has a fine interview available online.

Here’s how it begins:

The biggest threat facing America is not a faltering economy or a spate of books by famed atheists. Rather, the country meets new challenges due to the decline of traditional Christianity, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggests in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press). Douthat has taken his own personal tour of American Christianity: he was baptized Episcopalian, attended evangelical and Pentecostal churches as a child, and converted to Catholicism at age 17. He argues that prosperity preachers, self-esteem gurus, and politics operating as religion contribute to the contemporary decline of America. CT spoke with Douthat about America’s decline from a vigorous faith, modern heretics, and why we need a revival of traditional Christianity.

What do you mean when you say we’re facing the threat of heresy?

I try to use an ecumenical definition, starting with what I see as the theological common ground shared by my own Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations. Then I look at forms of American religion that are influenced by Christianity, but depart in some significant way from this consensus. It’s a C. S. Lewisian, Mere Christianity definition of orthodoxy or heresy. I’m trying to look at the ways the American religion today departs from theological and moral premises that traditional Protestants and Catholics have in common.

How did America become a nation of heretics?

We’ve always been a nation of heretics. Heresy used to be constrained and balanced by institutional Christianity to a far greater extent than it is today. What’s unique about our religious moment is not the movements and currents such as the “lost gospel” industry, the world of prosperity preaching, the kind of therapeutic religion that you get from someone like Oprah Winfrey, or various highly politicized forms of faith. What’s new is the weakness of the orthodox Christian response. There were prosperity preachers and therapeutic religion in the 1940s and ’50s—think of bestsellers like Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking—but there was also a much more robust Christian center.

The Protestant and Catholic churches that made a real effort to root their doctrine and practice in historic Christianity were vastly stronger than they are today. Even someone who was dabbling in what I call heresy was also more likely to have something in his religious life—some institutional or confessional pressure—tugging him back toward a more traditional faith. The influence of heretics has been magnified by the decline of orthodox Christianity.

Of course, Douthat won’t win any popularity contest by using the words “heresy” and “heretics” to describe people in our day who think they are Christian or, at any rate, acceptably spiritual. He’s got enough here to make just about everybody upset. Mainliners will object to his blunt depiction of denominational decline. Freethinking Christians and other religious folk will be put off by being labeled heretics. And atheists will be bugged by the fact that a book on “bad religion” turns out to believe that certain kinds of religion, especially orthodox (right-thinking) religion, is in fact good.

Whether you agree with Douthat’s basic thesis or not, I think he’s on to something. I’ll have more to say about this later.

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Why is The Hunger Games So Popular? Part 2

March 26, 2012 By Mark D. Roberts 21 Comments

In my last post on The Hunger Games, I offered some explanations for the popularity of the book/movie that do not account for its extraordinary popularity. Yes, it’s a page-turning thriller, but that doesn’t explain why millions of people, especially teenage girls, love it so much. There are many other less successful page-turning thrillers. The protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, is unexpectedly hard and peculiar, not the sort of heroine you’d expect to capture the hearts of America. And there just isn’t that much romance in The Hunger Games, at least not when compared to Twilight or even Harry Potter

So, why, then is The Hunger Games movie breaking records and The Hunger Games trilogy of books topping the bestseller charts

I’ve looked around online to see what people are saying about this. I found plenty of the explanations I consider to be inadequate. But some people get a little closer to what I think is really going on with The Hunger Games. Consider, for example, this excerpt from an interview with Elizabeth Banks, who stars as the bizarre character of Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games film:

I know that you were a big fan of these books going in, so just looking at it from the outside, this story really has become a phenomenon and I was hoping you could tell me why you think that is.

Well, first of all, the way she writes the book – they’re just page-turners. You can’t put them down. So there’s that. Rebellious teen at the heart of it, I think a lot of people can relate to that, and there’s a great love story, of course. But most importantly I think it really speaks to our time. There’s just something in the zeitgeist right now about media and using media not just to entertain but to shape our world – oppressive governments, youth revolts. It’s happening around the world right now.

Banks is moving in the right direction, I believe. There is something at the core of The Hunger Games that connects deeply to young people today. It is related to oppressive government and youth revolts. But it’s much bigger and broader than this. It’s about young people feeling profoundly alienated and abandoned from adult society. It’s the kind of “hurt” documented in Chap Clark’s watershed book, Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers. It’s the disconnectedness documented in Christian Smith’s landmark study, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games trilogy, has struck a painful, vital nerve in the lives of today’s young people. In fact, I’d argue that the popularity of The Hunger Games proves in a popular and obvious way the very things that Clark and Smith have argued on the basis of sociological analysis.

Yet, there must be something more going on, because The Hunger Games does not feature a youth rebellion against an oppressive adult society. (This may or may not come later in the series. I will not offer any spoilers here.) All of the readers who love The Hunger Games became engaged in this series through the first book. And the dominant element in this book is not kids fighting oppression, but kids fighting themselves to the death because of the oppressive order that controls their lives. What could explain the resonance young people feel with this kind of story, which, at first, has so little hope?

The answer, I believe, lies in the congruence between the world of The Hunger Games and the world we adults in America have created for our teenagers. Not only have they been substantially abandoned by us, so that they feel alienated, but also they are literally caught in a cruel game that pits them against each other. No, I’m not thinking of the usual adolescent conflicts that have been around for ages. Rather, I’m thinking of the battle among teenagers to be successful, to win, to be not just their best, but better than their peers, including their friends.

This battle often begins on athletic fields or in dance studios as parents drive their young children to win, even at great cost to their emotional health. The battle is brutally evident among teenagers in the most contested game of all . . . getting into a great college.

If this seems silly, allow me to defend what I’m saying here. I know of which I speak because I have a freshman in college and a daughter who is a junior in high school. I’ve watched the pressure my own children have had to live with since they were in elementary school. I’ve seen how they must compete with their peers, and often against their best friends, for success that will someday lead to the most prized success of all . . . getting into a great college and, if possible, with a fine scholarship.

I certainly worked hard in high school and tried to excel. I managed to do well enough to get into a fine college. But teenagers today face five times the pressure I felt about getting into college. They are overloaded with AP courses, extra-curriculars, internships, test prep courses, and the like. Why? Because that’s the only way they’ll be able to beat their friends who are competing with them for those hard-to-get spots in top colleges. This system may help students to excel, but it also depletes them and discourages them. Sometimes it can depress or devastate them. Yet, they are caught in the game, a game made by the adults who control their lives.

And where did this game come from? Did teenagers invent it to torture each other? Hardly. It’s a creation of the adult world, the world of hyperactive tiger moms, the world of dads who demand athletic prowess from their children to stoke their own egos, the world of colleges competing with each other for top ranking (and therefore money, reputation, and influence). The college game has almost nothing to do with helping young people become moral, well-balanced, healthy, spiritual, and well-educated. Rather, it has to do with parental egos and the cutthroat business of education, not the business of educating students, but the business of building financially successful academic institutions. (If you’re looking for documentation of the claims I am making here, I would highly recommend Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College by Andrew Ferguson. This very funny and, at times, very chilling book reveals in detail the craziness of the game into which we draft our teenagers.)

The competition among teenagers to get into college epitomizes what they have experienced in so many other settings throughout their lives. The adults who have the power over them demand that they compete, often against their friends, for the sake of the adults’ own benefit (pride, success, bragging rights, etc.). We force our children into the game whether they want to go or not. We provide all sorts of preparation and prettying up so our kids will be successful. And we laud the few who win the game. In the process, our children can feel used, pressured, desperate, lost, alone, starved, hurt, and as if they are fighting for their very lives. Hmmmm. Sounds a lot like The Hunger Games

Of course I realize that not all teenagers are shooting for the top colleges. But even those who are not competing at this level still feel the demands of the game, not to mention the sense of failure when they don’t live up to the expectations of the adults who control their lives. So, even though Katniss Everdeen is hard and remote, teenagers relate to her. They feel her pain, if you will. They relate to her experience of being trapped in a world that makes unfair demands upon her. They connect to her desire to break away and be free. They suffer with her as she is forced to conform to adult expectations. They feel her desperation as she is forced into a competition she didn’t and wouldn’t choose for herself (except to save her sister’s life). Thus, young adults connect with Katniss in spite of, or perhaps because of, her depressed stoicism. Take this sense of connection with Katniss and her cohort, throw in action, mystery, danger, surprise, interesting characters, and a bit of love, and you have a formula that will sell millions of books and millions of movie tickets.

From what I have read, Suzanne Collins did not write The Hunger Games as an implicit critique of succeed-or-die game that we adults have foisted on our children. But, in my opinion, her story expresses the frustrations and yearnings of teenagers who are caught in this very real game. Thus, it helps them to wrestle with their own feelings of desperation, powerlessness, fear, and hope. Wouldn’t it be great if The Hunger Games also challenged us grown ups to ask whether or not we really want to draft our young people into our version of the hunger games? Wouldn’t it be something if we could learn from The Hunger Games phenomenon and begin to rethink the world we have made for our children?

Filed Under: Books, Hunger Games, Movies Tagged With: , , , 21 Comments

Why is The Hunger Games So Popular?

March 24, 2012 By Mark D. Roberts 25 Comments

On Friday morning at 12:01, I found myself sitting with my teenaged daughter in a theater vibrating with expectation. Along with four hundred eager fans, we were about to watch the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games. I looked around the theatre to see if anyone looked my age or older. I spied a few who seemed to be parents. But there was no doubt that I was in the 1% of this crowd, the over-50 1%, that is.

As it turns out, I was helping The Hunger Games set a box office record. It ranks first in “all-time highest grossing non-sequel midnight screenings ever.” There’s no doubt that this movie will be a blockbuster. Not only has it started strong, but also it will continue to draw multiple millions of moviegoers.

This has perplexed many people, especially parents who wonder why their children want to rush off to see a movie about children killing other children. One obvious reason for this is that their children, usually teenagers, have read and loved The Hunger Games series of three novels. I’d guess that the vast majority of those who joined me at midnight a couple of days ago were already big fans of the story they were about to see on the big screen.

Alternatively, it may be that almost all of the females in the audience loved the books, and brought their male friends along for the premiere. In my completely non-scientific survey, most of the readers of The Hunger Games are female, especially among teenagers. Of course this ups the ante on the popularity question. Why in the world would girls flock to a movie in which the main course is an extended and violent portrayal of kids killing other kids? Why is The Hunger Games so popular, especially among young people who, if they lived in its fictional nation of Panem, might find themselves in a place to kill or be killed by their peers, even their close friends? Why have so many young readers fallen in love with The Hunger Games, and are now translating that love into blockbusting ticket buying?

To be sure, there are some easy answers to these questions. The Hunger Games is an engaging story, a page-turner. Suzanne Collins is an entertaining writer who combines predictability with surprise in the way of all accomplished thriller writers. Plus, the story has plenty of action, dangers, and intrigue. I envy Collins’ imagination, even though I wouldn’t want to have her nightmares.

But, I don’t think the extraordinary popularity of The Hunger Games can be explained by the answers I’ve just given. They contribute, but they’re not nearly enough. They simply don’t account for the heart connection many young readers feel with this literature, and now with this movie.

I have a couple of theses on the popularity of The Hunger Games. These are based, I should explain, not simply or even mainly on the movie I saw a couple of nights ago. Last year, I read the all three books in The Hunger Games series. I did so because my daughter loved them and I have intentionally tried to read books she enjoys. (Yes, this means that I also read all four of the Twilight novels, something not many men in their fifties can say without embarrassment.)

Before I began The Hunger Games, I would have bet that the popularity of these books was rooted in two predictable factors: the appeal of the protagonist and the presence of adolescent romance. I was shocked to discover that neither of these factors are adequate to explain why teenagers love The Hunger Games.

The main protagonist of the books and movie, the teenage girl known as Katniss Everdeen, is an impressive warrior, especially with the bow and arrow. But she has been hardened by a life of suffering and loss, as well as hatred for the government of Panem and the oppressive society it imposes on its citizens. Only occasionally does Katniss show human warmth, and even then she is unusually restrained. She almost never laughs, cries, or gives evidence of vulnerability. She is not what I expected in a protagonist, a female version of Harry Potter, someone who is hard not to love. Katniss is, in fact, a hard person to like, especially as one moves into the second and third books. The movie version of The Hunger Games softens up Katniss quite a bit, but she is still a flinty character. No, she isn’t nearly as hard and disturbed as Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo who played with fire and kicked the hornet’s nest. But Katniss is well on her way to joining Lisbeth’s league.

There are romantic elements in The Hunger Games, but they are nothing compared to the raw passion of Twilight or the heartfelt love in Harry Potter. Without spoiling the story, let me say simply that there is precious little romance in The Hunger Games, and what is there is restrained and almost always mixed with sadness. There is actually more genuine love in this story than romance, such as the love between sisters or sacrificial love between friends. But there isn’t a whole lot of love, either.

So, if the popularity of The Hunger Games cannot be adequately explained by its engaging action, its peculiar protagonist, or its sparsity of romance, what will do it? There has to be something more, something that accounts for why millions of teenagers love this story. As I wrote above, I have a couple of theses. I’ll present and defend them in my next post in this series. In the meanwhile, I’d be most interested in your ideas. If you’re following The Hunger Games phenomenon, and especially if you’ve seen the movie and/or read the books, why do you think The Hunger Games is so popular?

Filed Under: Books, Hunger Games, Movies Tagged With: , 25 Comments
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