An interview with Ross Douthat from The Gospel Coalition.
What is the greatest threat to the church today? Does this threat come from outside or inside the church? Our friends at The Gospel Coalition posed this question to New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat. Here’s part of his response. (Listen to the full conversation.)
If you can imagine a world in which Christianity was fully replaced in some sense, I don’t think it would be replaced with a hard secularism. I think a hard secularism is a very thin, potentially weak thing that becomes very vulnerable very quickly, as I think we’re seeing in parts of Europe right now. And I also don’t think it would necessarily be replaced by a sort of explicitly liberalized theological perspective.
I think it would be replaced by a more sort of generalized syncretistic, gnostic kind of spirituality, the kind that is in certain ways already the dominant form of religious expression and belief in America…. Even with liberal vs. conservative debates resurgent, even with secularism pressing anew at religious institutions, if you’re talking over a long term time horizon or you’re talking about the life of the average American with religious impulses and yearnings, the rival of Christianity is this sort of “trending towards post-Christian but not yet post-Christian” gnostic spirituality.
The Center for Faith and Culture invites you to a luncheon with Ross Douthat on Monday, October 22nd at 11:30 a.m. in the Ledford Event Room.
Learn more and register now.
Ross Douthat
Ross Douthat is a New York Times op-ed columnist who writes about politics, religion, moral values and higher education. His columns appear each Wednesday and Sunday in The New York Times.
He is the author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, published in 2012, and Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (2005), and a co-author, with Reihan Salam, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008). He is the film critic for National Review.
Douthat is a graduate of Harvard University and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, and various other nationally syndicated programs.
The Center for Faith and Culture invites you to a luncheon with Ross Douthat on Monday, October 22nd at 11:30 a.m. in the Ledford Event Room.
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