First Ross Douthat told us that God will punish and torture people for not being totally on fire hot for Jesus. Now, Douthat says it’s okay to join a Christian church while still not really believing in a lot of Christian doctrine. Douthat says that even in an absolutely dogmatic sect like Catholicism, there are lots of people who are really just there for the coffee.
So which way is it, Ross Douthat? Will God hate us for being lukewarm believers, or does anything go?
It sounds like Ross Douthat mostly is just willing to say anything to get people to join a Christian church and start paying 10 percent of their income in tithes.
Podcast Transcript:
We are at page 115 of Ross Douthat’s book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, but we are also referencing back to page 112, because it's really confusing to me to try to figure out exactly what the author Ross Douthat is getting at here.
Ross Douthat has said a lot of really judgmental stuff about how very important it is that you be a member of the right religion, we've talked about how Ross Douthat is referencing the Book of Revelation, in particular on page 112, where he says it's “better to face the consequences of even a mistaken commitment or decision than to hear at the last the fateful judgment, ‘Because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.’”
That's a quote from the Book of Revelation, in which Jesus is saying over and over again, I'm going to kill everyone on earth who refuses to submit to my authority and worship me as a god.
It’s not a little mealy mouthed thing; Submit to my authority or die, and I might well torture you for five months straight. Seriously, that's one of the tortures of the Book of Revelation, and that torture not coming from demons. It's coming from an army of angels that is released by an angel who was sent by Jesus.
God sent this army, this army of monsters to earth, or that's the prediction, maybe, of what's going to happen. God is going to send these monsters who are scorpions in the tail, but they have the body of locusts and the heads of human beings with crowns and metal armor and long hair and sharp teeth, and they'll sting you and the sting will give you utter agony for five months straight, and people will beg the angels of God to please just kill them to end the agony.
The Bible, the New Testament says, no, Jesus is not going to allow that. Jesus is going to force people to suffer for five months straight because he doesn't want to give them relief from their pain because they have refused to worship him. That's some pretty serious stuff.
Now, on page 115, there's this on the other hand, from Ross Douthat
He says, “This submission,” this submission to Christianity, “doesn't require total certainty about the tradition you're joining. Some religions explicitly allow for all kinds of uncertainty, just as modernity has multiplied religious options, it has also multiplied religious institutions that try to accommodate the uncertain pilgrims. This accommodation might be more extensive in a tradition like Hinduism, with its extreme multiplicity of schools, than in the more dogmatic traditions of the West, but the liberal religious programs in Christianity and Judaism exist, in part, to offer the benefits of Western monotheism, to people who aren't sure about all its doctrinal claims or communal. Requirements, to offer general maps to questers who aren't sure about the entire guidebook.”
Ross Douthat is saying, well, you can join Christianity, just join one of these churches that doesn't require you to have all of the rules of Christianity. They're more lax about it in these parts, and Hindus, they let you do pretty much anything.
First of all, Hinduism isn't always really that low key about things. There are Hindu nationalists, and Hindu fundamentalists who are pretty hardcore, and engage in acts of mass religious violence against Muslims, for example. Let's not play around with those non-Christian religions, all right?
There are religious traditions that are more low key and easygoing.vThere are Quakers, although Quakers sometimes, they can be nasty sometimes.
There are Unitarian universalists, yes, but here's the thing. Isn't belonging to that kind of congregation just saying, hey, believe whatever you want to believe about, religion and Christianity and Jesus and all that stuff or something else, even if it's not Jesus, it's all okay?
You know, you figure it out. You go at your own pace. Isn't that exactly what Ross Douthat was saying you must not do, when he's talking about how you can, you shouldn't be lukewarm?
You shouldn't be in between, he said. You should be hot, or you should be cold. You should not believe something, or you should believe it very strongly. That's what that's Ross Douthat was saying just two pages ago, so that's kind of confusing.
Now, earlier on page 112. Here's what he says. He's trying to kind of have it both ways. He's saying, well, maybe you start out. You start out just anything goes, whatever, just get into church.
So, what Ross Douthat says is, “As a starting place for someone with no definite ideas about religion, beyond the sudden realization of its importance, there is nothing wrong with this approach,” the approach of just, you know, remixing religion and personalizing it for yourself, taking what you like and not taking the other parts. He continues, “Just as you wouldn't expect someone newly introduced to the concept of politics to immediately become an ideological activist or someone unexpectedly dropped into a novel PhD program to become immediately bound to a single interpretive school, becoming newly interested in religion, should at first be a mind opening experience, a chance to explore without prejudice, to take ideas seriously without the temptations of team spirit, and not only ideas, but experiences, different forms of communion, of worship, of prayer.”
Of course, Ross Douthat is also saying, oh, well, don't accept atheism that way, wth that kind of open mind? Remember what he wrote earlier? He said an open mind is not a good idea. You actually want to close your mind. “Open-minded, open-mindedness is not necessarily a virtue.”
That's where he talks about not being lukewarm. So Ross Douthat is kind of all over the place.
What it really looks like to me is that Ross Douthat is trying to say that there is an absolute right and wrong, and that there is a right religion, and there is one true path, and you can't do multiple paths, and you can't just say, oh, I'll be a Hindu today, and a Christian tomorrow, and you can't just take the parts of Christianity that you want. There is truth and God wants you to be absolute and on fire for religion.
But hey, Ross Douthat also wants people to become Christians. So, at this point, Ross Douthat seems to have a two-step process. Ross Douthat wants to get you in the door. He wants to sell you on Christianity.
Then, once you get comfortable, at first, you’ll get love bombed by everyone and everyone will be saying, oh, hey, don't hurry yourself, don't commit. Why don't you just try things out and see if our church is for you? Come on back, have a cup of coffee. We're so happy to have you.
Then as you go on further, people are going to start to make demands. Isn't that the experience that people have with church? It starts out with, oh, we're open-minded and everybody's on a path, and then you go to the Book of Revelation idea. You’ve got to be on the team. You’ve got to be all for it. You’ve got to be for the church, and you've got to obey our rules, and you've got to change your life, or you're not on the team, and you're either with us, or you're against us.
It's a bait and switch. It's a classic bait and switch. It's the kind of thing that happens to people going into church all the time.
I wanted to read something else to you from Ross Douthat’s book, though, because it also lets you know a little something that lies underneath that absolute obedience.
Ross Douthat starts to talk about his own church, the Roman Catholic church. This is, again, on page 115 in the middle.
“The more conservative confessions, ask more of their practitioners. My own Catholic church expects converts to profess fidelity to all the church believes and teaches, but in practice, they too are filled with people who maintain private heresies, or private doubts, who feel agnostic 2 days out of 7, but who have made the sensible decision, that it's better, better to live inside the tradition they consider most plausible while holding doubts than to reject. In the name of those difficulties.”
Okay, so what Ross Douthat is saying here is that actually, the Roman Catholic Church is full of a bunch of people who don't really believe what the Roman Catholic Church teaches. They have doubts. They have skepticism. They think that a lot of what the Roman Catholic Church teaches is complete BS.
But do you know what they do? They don't talk about it. They don't share it. They don't go public with their doubts, their skepticism. They are decent people who keep their thoughts quiet and to themselves and pretend that they believe fervently just like everyone else.
This is what Ross Douthat claims is a virtuous church, one in which people are dishonest, one in which people lie about what's really on their minds, one in which people imitate faith, pretend to have faith, to go along with the crowd, to go along with community.
I just want to point out that this is in direct contradiction to the promise Ross Douthat made at the beginning of this book, that he was going to give us a rational, reasonable basis for belonging to a religion and for believing in that religion, not for posing with a religion. The thing about rationality, the thing about reason and logic, is that it has to be debated and discussed. If you are rational with your suspicions, with your thoughts, you need to be able to talk about them.
It's not rational to have skepticism to have doubts about the truth of something and then to just shut up about it and not talk about it. That's the opposite of rationality.
That is a herd mentality, which is the metaphor for Christianity, that you're a sheep. You're a member of the flock, and Jesus is the good shepherd, and you should just be a frickin’ sheep. You don't have to know what Jesus is all doing. You don't have to know what the priests are doing. Just obey.Just go along with it and just trust that it's all okay.
Do you know what a rational animal is not? A rational animal is not a sheep. Sheep are not the animals that are known for their debating and their logical skills, but what Ross Douthat is arguing for is that you just become a sheep, and you can have your doubts, and that's great, so long as you just shut up and you keep them quiet so that you don't disturb the congregation. Ross Douthat is promoting the opposite of rationality.
What’s more, Ross Douthat is not even being biblically consistent about it. Let me go back to page 112 here in chapter 4. Ross Douthat is saying, “You wouldn't expect someone newly introduced to the concept of politics to immediately become an ideological activist.”
Is that what Christianity teaches? There's this little bit from the New Testament.
It's a story of the road to Damascus. Saul is a Jew. He’s a skeptic of all the claims of the Christians that Jesus has risen from the dead.
They ask where's the body?
“Oh, well, he floated up into the sky,” Christians respond. “That's why we can't find the body. That's why he's not walking around.”
Everyone else is saying, “This sounds pretty damn suspicious.” Saul kind of makes fun of Christians for this.
Anyway, Saul is traveling, walking along the road to Damascus and guess what? Wow, Jesus appears to him. Jesus is not like a voice in the wind whispering. He's not there in the form of like a bird that reminds you of something mystical. He’s not indirect. This is certainly not like the story in which Ross Douthat shares that there was a radio playing a love song in the bedroom, and that makes him think that maybe there are ghosts. The story of Saul not that kind of nonsense.
Jesus appears, floating down from the sky, and there are lights. So, in the Bible, Jesus actually appears to people. There's none of this “Does God exist?” Doubt. God just shows up and says hello.
You will notice that in our present day reality, Jesus never appears. Jesus is never ready to have people take a selfie of him. Why is that? Maybe it's because Jesus isn't real, or if Jesus ever was actually a person, he died 2000 years ago.
Anyway, that's just one possibility. I know it's kind of crazy for me to say it, but well, I’m just spitballing here.
Anyway, in the story of the New Testament of Saul on the road to Damascus. Do you know what happens when Saul sees Jesus? He's all in. He falls down to his knees, and he's like, “Wow, I guess you really are real. I can't believe I didn't believe in you. That was really stupid of me. What can I do?”
From that moment, Saul becomes hot for Jesus. He's not lukewarm. He's not cold. He's not tepid. He's not room temperature. He's hot for Jesus. He goes around, and he becomes Paul. He changes his name and everything, and now he's like the Christian’s Christian.
Paul is like, “Yeah, man, I'm so Christian, the whole world has to be Christian.” He spends the rest of his life going around to all of these cities and telling everyone else how they should be the right kind of Christian, and be Christian, and here's how you do it, and here's the right way, and here's the wrong way, and let me write nasty letters to you if you're not getting it right. This idea that, wow, gosh, you can't just expect someone who just learns about religion to be serious about it at first, that's not what the Bible says.
So which is it, Ross Douthat? Do you believe or do you not? What is it that you really want? I think Ross Douthat doesn't actually trust his own religion when it comes down to it. He doesn't trust his own religion.
He's saying you've got to be mealy mouthed about it. He’s saying you can't force people. You can't ask them to commit to believing in things, at least not at first, even though later on the church going to tell them, “You’ve got to do it our way or the highway, or you're going to go to Hell and burn forever and be tortured by the angels of God as the rest of the world is slaughtered all around you.” You will get to that, but he wants to soft pedal it.
He's trying to do market research with religion. Sometimes Ross Douthat thinks that it's truth, and sometimes he thinks it's really just a sales tactic.
When you act inconsistent like that, people notice. People notice that you're not even staying true to your own thing. So why should anyone else want to be true to that, just so that we can join a church and give away 10% of our income in tithing to the church, and watch as our lives get consumed by this organization that begins to demand control over what we do, over who we love, how we live, and how we vote?
Boy, churches are big time political machines now, under Donald Trump. All of that separation of church and state stuff is out the window.
Christianity is running hot and cold at the same time. Choose a temperature! What is it going to be, Ross Douthat? Ross Douthat doesn't seem to understand his own religion.
That's why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat. We don't even know what the hell you're saying.