Ross Douthat, a Catholic columnist for the New York Times, has written about the difference between some of the various strains of orthodox Christianity and the various heresies that are still in the Christian orbit (including what he calls “Americanized Christianity”). Then there is Christian influence, which can even be seen in people who reject Christianity. But at some point, as we are starting to see, there is a mindset and a culture that are utterly devoid of anything Christian. Please read his whole essay, but I quote how he finishes after the jump.
From Ross Douthat, Where Christianity Ends – The New York Times:
You can take a big-tent view of what counts as Christianity, as I try to do, while still recognizing that some worldviews, some people, can be Christian-influenced while ultimately deserving a very different label. For instance, is a figure like Richard Dawkins still influenced by Christianity? Certainly, in the sense that his is a very Anglican sort of atheism, in the sense that his moralism and Whiggish view of history alike have Christian roots, in various other intellectual and cultural senses … But is he a Christian? Well no, he is not; he is something else, something genuinely post-Christian; whatever Christian-ish ideas he still holds together with his atheism, the label itself no longer fits. Likewise other figures and ideas, present-day and historical. Yes, it’s intellectually helpful to read Karl Marx’s ideas as a kind of materialist/political heresy of Christianity, it’s theologically useful to trace the development of “Aryan Christ” ideas as a bridge from Christianity to Germanic racial supremacy. But Marxism and National Socialism remain essentially post-Christian ideas, and Lenin and Hitler remain essentially anti-Christian leaders; any description of them as Christians flirts with the absurd.
These are intentionally extreme examples; they don’t tell you where to find the breaking point. And I don’t know exactly where to find it myself. But as long as we’re talking about transgender issues and sex-reassignment surgery, consider the following two passages. The first discusses Jenner’s own religious faith, and it’s written by a youth leader at the church he/she attended:
She [then Bruce] was there at church almost every Sunday, sitting in the front row and singing along to every song if she could. She would chat with me before services and make fun of how I wore sandals every day … I eventually left that church under great terms … Caitlyn was there my final Sunday and gave me a big hug wishing me well.
News came out a few months later that Caitlyn would no longer identify herself as Bruce Jenner.
My newsfeed is flooded by both enormous support and enormous disappointment. Most of my friends who don’t know Jesus were in support of Caitlyn, proclaiming their acceptance and love for her. Those who did know Jesus were mostly either silent or derogatory.
Today, I can’t help but think how backward that is.
Caitlyn knows who Jesus is, and Jesus knows her by name. Whether that sits comfortably on a Facebook timeline or blog comment, I know firsthand that Caitlyn has heard the good news.
And, Caitlyn has taught me more about Jesus.
Caitlyn taught me to be bold. Jesus was bold enough to overturn tables at his father’s temple, he was bold enough to stand up to the religious leaders of his day and let them know they had it backwards. In the Bible, we see the oppressed overcome the oppressor and the meek become strong. That is the core of the Jesus I know. Jesus came to eat with the people no one would be seen with, to turn the tax collector into an honest man. He came to transform the world.
… Jesus wasn’t one to turn away from those the world had labeled broken. He was the one who would walk toward them with open arms.
Now, I could write you an essay on how this view of Jesus is true but partial, sincere but incomplete, more faithful to American ideas about the self than to the words in the New Testament … but my point here is that it is recognizably Christian in some of the senses I described above, and that even if I think it represents a version of the American heresy in action I also feel the author and I still share some important assumptions about God, morality and human flourishing that could enable us to argue in good faith.
Contrast it, then, with this (briefer) passage, from a frankly-terrifying New Yorker reported piece on the spread of euthanasia in Belgium:
In Belgium and in the Netherlands, where patients can be euthanized even if they do not have a terminal illness, the laws seem to have permeated the medical establishment more deeply than elsewhere, perhaps because of the central role granted to doctors: in the majority of cases, it is the doctor, not the patient, who commits the final act. In the past five years, the number of euthanasia and assisted-suicide deaths in the Netherlands has doubled, and in Belgium it has increased by more than a hundred and fifty per cent. Although most of the Belgian patients had cancer, people have also been euthanized because they had autism, anorexia, borderline personality disorder, chronic-fatigue syndrome, partial paralysis, blindness coupled with deafness, and manic depression. In 2013, Wim Distelmans euthanized a forty-four-year-old transgender man, Nathan Verhelst, because Verhelst was devastated by the failure of his sex-change surgeries; he said that he felt like a monster when he looked in the mirror. “Farewell, everybody,” Verhelst said from his hospital bed, seconds before receiving a lethal injection.
Now: Could you argue that what’s happening in Belgium is on a continuum with what’s happening in America, that the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner and the death of Nathan Verhelst are both manifestations of expressive individualism in action? Yes. Could you trace, with Linker and Tocqueville and others, the roots of both forms of individualism in certain Christian ideas, certain (selectively-chosen) gospel admonitions? Yes again. Could you argue that there’s a clear cultural slope that could take Americans, too, from celebrating the man who transitions to womanhood to permitting his medically-administered quietus in the event that the transition doesn’t work out? One certainly could.
But the two stories still represent very different points on the continuum, two very different places on the path away from Christendom. I look at the celebrations of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and see, with Bloom and Wilkinson, a gnostic-influenced Christian heresy; I look at the death of Nathan Verhelst and see Belgian Christianity’s eclipse, disappearance, defeat. I look at the United States, sexually permissive but still deeply conflicted on abortion and moving only slowly toward limited forms of physician-assisted suicide, and see a nation that’s Americanized its Christian inheritance but hasn’t yet jettisoned it. I look at the Belgium, or at least the Belgian medical and media culture, portrayed in the New Yorker and see a social reality to which the term “Christian” no longer meaningfully applies.
Again, where precisely the break happens I can’t claim to know. But in Belgium it seems to have happened; here, not yet. Not yet.
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