In this contemporary age of over-analyzing and overly sensitive people, our world has become a place where every little thing is placed under the microscope in attempts to pry controversy and media content out of every crevice and crack, even if it’s not really there. One of these major topics that is being analyzed more than ever is the topic of Religion and its role in our society today. Ross Douthat, a contemporary author and New York Times columnist, in his book Bad Religion does just this, deeply analyzing the problems with religion in our society, mainly Christianity, and how it’s been caused by false interpretation of scripture and misconceptions about the meaning and purpose of Christianity. As a result of this we have foolishly developed…show more content… He claims that the cause of America’s economic, political, social, and moral corruption is due to, “for the last five decades, with the decline of institutional Christianity, the river of orthodoxy has gradually been drying up"; the departure from our original Christian roots and our inclination towards atheist fundamentals and religion. In order to restore a perfect American he says, we must as a society move away from this heresy and drift back to our fundamental Christian roots. However, it is not entirely the fault of the decline of Christianity in America, but rather the lack of solid response from the remaining Christian orthodoxy that is to blame. In the second half of his book, The Age of Heresy, Douthat paints a portrait of heresy’s newfound dominance and explores the current debate of Christian origins. He argues in this second half that there is “no materialist ideology capable of supplying the kind of holistic account of human life that the great 'isms' of the nineteenth and early twentieth century had attempted to provide." Instead, we have created versions of "Christian heresy” and "bad religion" to wrongly provide this account of human
