Christianity has steadily become a morally evil force in the United States. This was not an inevitable result, although, perhaps it was a likely one.
Mainline Protestants and Catholics could have tried to nip in the bud the current trend in the bud, denouncing the prosperity gospel, the resort to Old Testament thinking, and the general atmosphere of hate in Christianity. There were seeds of that. In Catholicism there was liberation theology and the social gospel, and as a global faith with a leader in Italy, it has always been a bit more cosmopolitan than American Protestantism, even if it has had no qualms about blending church and state. These trends also made real progress in elite seminary training for mainline Protestants, but the living faith of the people in the pews didn't transform in the same way.
These movements within American Christianity didn't bear fruit. Promising steps in the 1960s and 1970s in that direction fizzled out without fanfare. The path suggested by the Chicago Folk Service faded away, while the path imitating secular arena rock thrived.
One of the big barriers to this path is that Christianity is fundamentally at odds with the metaphysical naturalism that is the correct description of our world. In a scientific worldview, there is no room for miracles, for divine intervention, for prayers that make a difference, for faith healing, for demonic temptation and corruption.
The people who have left Christianity are not a random sampling of Christians. They are disproportionately people who share that scientific worldview, and it so happens that a scientific worldview and more humane moral instincts tend to coincide. This is why a more moral Christianity was always going to be a less likely outcome.
Of course, in the United States, where there is great freedom of religion, it is also the case that heresy can't have legal force. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution means that there is no such thing as a heretical sect in the United States. It is an open marketplace of ideas, and the sects that appeal to the darker sides of human nature thrived in that competition.
2 comments:
Hum, why believing in science and have a good moral compass go together is rather uncorrelated I think. The high moral compass leftys still believe in the tenets of Christianity (*) deep in their heart (He's got the whole world in his hands...). It's the next generation of post-modernist lefties that will implement the reeducation camps and gulags. Which they will tout as the height of moral progress.
(*) New England Presbyterian style.
"why believing in science and have a good moral compass go together is rather uncorrelated I think"
The evidence says otherwise. I don't have an answer for why this is the case, although I have some hypotheses. But the conclusion seems to hold quite reliably.
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