Daniel Larison Summarizes What I’ve been Trying to Say for Several Years

He writes:

As for the question of extensive heterodoxy, Ross had a good post on this last year. In it, he wrote this:

And of course a distinctively American strand of heresy is integral to a large swathe of what we think of as “conservative” Christianity [bold mine-DL]: You could call it Americanism or Moralistic Therapeutic Deism or something else entirely, but whatever label you choose it owes as much to Emerson, Hegel and Norman Vincent Peale as to Nicaea and Chalcedon, and its emanations and penumbras influence everything from the prosperity gospel to the foreign policy of George W. Bush.

Ross wrote earlier of “the American heresy” and said this:

The people who read Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer and The Prayer of Jabez may be more politically conservative then the people who read A Wing and a Prayer, and read certain passages of Genesis and Leviticus more literally, but the theology they’re imbibing is roughly the same sort of therapeutic mush. Indeed, the big difference between the prosperity gospel that Osteen and his ilk are peddling and Schori’s liberal Episcopalianism has less to do with any theological principle and more to do with what aspect of American life they want God to validate.[emphasis mine – MS]

It’s this promise of validation that is particularly important. This is the hope not so much that Christ arose from the dead and broke the gates of Hades to free us and our ancestors from our fetters, but that there is basically a way to reconcile taking up the Cross and following Him while not doing much to change how one lives or distinguish oneself from the conventions of contemporary society. It is an inoffensive, undemanding Gospel, which always seems to find loopholes for our self-fulfillment rather than calling for self-denial or sacrifice of any kind, and which exists not so much to call men to repentance as to endorse choices they have already made. Not everyone is equally under the influence of this heresy, and some resist it far better than others, but it is constantly pulling people off the royal road into one or more of a series of ditches where they find rationalizations for abuses of power, abuses of human dignity, abuses of creation and so on. No one, no confession, is immune to its effects, but what makes no sense is to say that the way to avoid falling into these ditches is to abandon the royal road and throw away the map that brought you to it.

Maybe I’ll stick this over on my left rail and just refer people to it the next time somebody is baffled by my political opinions.