Ross Douthat Quotes
America's problem isn't too much religion or too little of it. It's bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place.
Douthat, Ross. Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Free Press, 2012.
With the exception of Israel and Lebanon, the Christians, like the Jews before them, are constantly discriminated against under threat of physical violence and death from Muslim fundamentalist extremists.
At the beginning of the 21st century there were substantial demographic changes in America which eroded the majority historically held in America by White Christians. A smaller proportion of the American population were identifying with any religion. At the same time that Blacks and Hispanics were a larger proportion of new immigrants than were whites. And those minority groups both had a fertility rate that was substantially grater than that of whites. The result was that in the early 21st century the white Christians were losing their majority status in America.
There were several dynamics that contributed to the change. Younger Americans of all persuasions were much more tolerant than previous generations. A much larger proportion of Americans did not identify with any religion. The many Christian sects were very diverse and almost never presented a unified view of exactly what were Christian values for any issue. The tactics of the religious extremists had alienated many people from all religious efforts to shape, much less dominate, the norms and culture. Finally, the Courts and the Politicians began to take the separation of church and state much more seriously than and been the case in many past generations.
Ross Gregory Douthat (/ˈdaʊθət/) (born 1979) is an American conservative political analyst, blogger, author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of conservative topics, including the state of Christianity in America and "sustainable decadence" in contemporary society.
