One of the more thoughtful conservative Christians out there today is Ross Douthat. He writes a column for the New York Times that is must reading for up to date cultural analysis in light of the Christian faith. This week he's out with a column about Dan Brown and his new movie, "Angels and Demons." He argues that understanding the popularity of Brown will give us a good insight into modern American religious life.
Here's an excerpt:
"In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.
The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married."
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