Bad Religion

I’ve added Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion – How We Became a Nation of Heretics to the Books We Like page. A very important book, in my view, and essential reading for all American Christians, if you’ll accept that from a Brit. It’s salutory reading for us, too, since many of the detrimental trends seen in America have either sprung up independently here or crossed the Atlantic in the holds of ships.

Its relevance to the science-faith thing is tangential – though it does a lot to account for the culture wars mentality over that. But I can’t resist quoting just one sentence that speaks to the heart of my beef with the Theistic Evolution enterprise and all the reformulation of core theology associated with it, against which I have railed these several years. The actual context is the Jesus Seminar, but its application is wider:

However superficially appealing, the idea that a religious tradition could be saved from crisis because a group of intellectuals radically reinterpret its sacred texts is the kind of conceit that only, well, an intellectual could possibly believe.

Lo, he speaks wisdom.