"Sinking into a Morass of Gluttony and Narcissism"

"Faced with two choices, accommodation or resistance, most Christian leaders chose the former. On the liberal side, the 'death of God' movement, the Episcopal bishop James Pike and Harvey Cox in 'The Secular City' argued that orthodox understandings of the faith must yield to contemporary insights. Douthat, himself a conservative Catholic, believes that evangelicals generally hewed to the resistance model. By the 1980s, he insists, 'what vitality remained in American Christendom was being sustained by the unexpected alliance between evangelicals and Catholics,' although he acknowledges that the religious right’s identification with George W. Bush tarnished its reputation."   

In The New York Times, Randall Balmer reviews Ross Douthat's Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.