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Sean's avatar
May 2Edited

One minor gripe I have with churches and evangelism in America is how binary it is. And in one sense, most Christian’s are completely correct. They think you’ve said something equivalent to the sinners prayer (or taken the prerequisite steps to enter the kingdom of God) or you haven’t.

The NYT essay by the ex-Mormon reminded me that the more I talk to people outside of church, the more I find there is an immense amount of internal spiritual churn in people’s thoughts and hearts, much of which longs for God, church, etc.

I’m not sure how I want churches and Christian’s to go about evangelism, but I do wish that there was some understanding that many are much closer to the kingdom of God than we might suspect, and to remember that even sinners outside of the kingdom can have complex spiritual lives, some of which can find ways to be tuned into the things in the heavenly places.

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JOSEPH SADOVE's avatar

Ross Douthat is a splatter-brain. I have been a lifetime subscriber to the NYT even when I lived in Europe in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I vaguely remember his arrival (I think it was after I returned to the States) and was immediately disgusted that the Times would allow such an intellectual lightweight. He was the Times’ excuse for a “balanced” conservative. So, as with anything conservative, he is almost all pseudo.

What he “documents” in this piece is just what history always has been: change. Writers at the turn-of-the-century (19TH to 20th) had all kinds of cockamamie projections and this just follows in that tradition: mix of the obvious (Douthat’s specialty) and the otherwise splatter-set of what most intelligent people might speculate about.

On religion… well, it’s a belief system that has 2 completely regular and predictable trajectories: Rise and Fall. And these states are almost entirely a function of larger changes in society and the world. And these changes are different everywhere at every time in every other society or subculture. And when I read a line like this, it sounds like writing for writing’s sake: “In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity.”

And, honestly, for me this is the lowest of truisms: “Many of the demographers, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians I spoke to offered the same explanation: Americans simply haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion.” Let’s be clear, a feature of human beings is that they are afraid of uncertainty and most of all death. End of rumination.

And then he goes on and says he can’t go back to the LDS church, well, human all too human, Douthat. It’s a shame that the Times keeps such a lightweight around.

And then we have David Brooks queued up. Brooks is the Ross Douthat of Judaism. His views and understanding of Israel are the classic tourist’s. He is in so many ways a vastly lighter lightweight compared to Douthat who doesn’t have to contend with something like the abject trajectory to fascism of the tribe. Nor has he ever (as I did) lived in Israel as I did twice, including 8 months in a Ba’al Tsuva yeshiva just up the stairs (in those days) from the Kotel called Aish haTorah. Nor, most of all, did he have close friends among West Bank Arabs, as I have.

Both of these characters (for me) deserve the greatest contempt. They are trying to appear to straddle their respective political-religious spectra. Why? My guess is the base impulse of all religious adherents: fear… fear of uncertainty in one’s choices, fear of not belonging and at the same time wanting to appear that they live in empirical real world. To me, they are like the Hitler apologists who refer to Hitler making the trains run on time.

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