From the pages of the New York Times

On the Commentary/Editorial page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of December 31, 2003, a columnist of the New York Times has this publication under the “Title” of Culture, Politics, [America’s Paradox], and Religion. There is also a caption from the column: Political ideologies have grown more rigid, while our religions lean toward flexibility.

Note: The author, David Brooks is a New York Times columnist. From Rush Limbaugh to James Kennedy to Jerry Falwell: all agree that we cannot find a more liberally dedicated news organization than that of the Times or Washington Post or the Post-Dispatch. This column is but one example of the impact and onslaught of this current world-system on both moral values and declared or revealed truth. Remember that revealed truth: “He (Jesus Christ) is the same, yesterday, today and forever”. Also note that the italics and bold face print in the reproduction below are mine. I leave you to make appropriate comments in the columns with exclamation marks.


  President George W. Bush was born into an Episcopal family and raised as Presbyterian, but he is now a Methodist. Howard Dean was baptized Catholic and raised as an Episcopalian. He left the church after it opposed a bike trail he was championing, and now he is a Congregationalist, although his kids consider themselves Jewish.
  Wesley Clark’s father was Jewish. As a boy he was Methodist, then decided to become a Baptist. In adulthood, he converted to Catholicism, but as he recently told Beliefnet. Com, “I’m a Catholic, but I go to a Presbyterian Church.”
What other country on earth would have three national political figures with such peripatetic religious backgrounds? In most of the world faith hopping of this sort is simply unheard of. Yet in the United States, we take it for granted that people will move through different phases in the course of their personal spiritual journeys, and we always have.
  Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville was bewildered by the devout religiosity and the relative absence of denominational strife, at least among Protestants, that he found in the United States. Americans, he observed, don’t seem to care that their neighbors hold to false versions of the faith.
That’s because many Americans have tended to assume that all these differences are temporary. In the final days, the distinctions will fade away, and we will be all united in God’s embrace. This happy assumption has meant that millions feel free to try on different denominations at different points in their lives, and many Americans have had trouble taking religious doctrines altogether seriously. As the historian Henry Steele Commanger once wrote, “During the 19th century and well into the 20th, religion prospered while theology slowly went bankrupt.”

This tendency to emphasize personal growth over a fixed creed has shaped our cultural and political life. First, it has meant that Americans are reasonably tolerant, generally believing that all people of good will are basically on the same side.
Second, American faiths, as many scholars note, have tended to be optimistic and easygoing, experiential rather than intellectual. Churches often compete for congregants by emphasizing the upbeat and playing down the business about God’s wrath. In today’s megachurches, the technology is cutting-edge, the music is modern, the language is therapeutic and the dress is casual. These churches are seeker-sensitive, not authoritarian.
The small-groups movement from which Bush emerges emphasizes intimate companionship and encouragement. Members of these groups study the Bible in search of guidance and help with personal challenges. They do not preach at one another, but partner with each other.
  The third effect of our dominant religious style is that we have trouble sustaining culture wars. For some European intellectuals and even some of our own commentators, the Scopes trial never ended. For them, the forces of enlightened progress are always battling against the rigid, Bible-thumping forces of religion, whether represented by William Jennings Bryan or Jerry Falwell.
But that’s a cartoon version of reality. In fact, real-life belief, especially these days, is mobile, elusive and flexible. Falwell doesn’t represent evangelicals today. The old culture war organizations like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition are either dead or husks of their former selves.
As the sociologist Alan Wolfe demonstrates in his book, The Transformation of American religion,” evangelical churches are part of mainstream American culture, not dissenters from it.
So, we have this paradox: Political parties are growing more orthodox, while religions are becoming more fluid. In the political sphere, there is conflict and rigid conflict and rigid partisanship. In the religious sphere, there is mobility ecumenical under standing and blurry boundaries.
If George W. Bush and Howard Dean met each other on a political platform, they would fight and feud. If they met in a Bible study group and talked about their eternal souls, they’d probably embrace.....Copyright: The New York Times.