America is in decline — social, political and economic. This is a fact that can no longer be ignored, especially after the financial crisis of 2008. Various secular-political explanations have been advanced to explain the US’s predicament, however the most powerful theories, says Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion (2012), involve religion. The religious argument is the same as it is in the Islamic world. It states that the cause of the decline is wandering away from a traditional, more puritanical faith. A somewhat more convincing version of this argument links the decay to the loosening of morals caused by the collapse of religion. The argument states that even though secularism is at the base of US democracy, American morality always was centred on Christian morality. Hence the degeneration of the Christian faith has led to degeneration of morals in the public and private sphere. According to this view, progressive educators, judges, Hollywood dons and a God-averse media are the culprits. Since 1970, opponents of this view have attempted to put religion back at the centre of American life, its culture, politics, and law. Although the increasing secularism of the elite is the key to understanding the social changes that are transforming the US, this writer believes that the religious argument does not adequately explain the American predicament. The flaw in the pious argument is that while it might explain social degeneration within the private sphere as a function of declining private morals, it does not account for the fact that secular-minded elites in godless communist regimes and western secular democracies have achieved spectacular political and economic successes for their countries. Within the last decade a polar opposite view, which started as a critique of the Bush administration and widened into an explanation of the American decay in general, has been propounded. It states that the rot is not due to lack of religion in American life, rather it is due to excess of religion and its ingress into politics. Hence Christian belief is to be blamed. The proponents of this view cast the struggle as one between ‘science and ignorance, reason and superstition, the light of progress and medieval dark’. Neither view is without merit. Over the last half century the US has become less Christian but certain brands of Christianity remain as influential as ever. According to Douthat it is probably the excesses of the faithful that matter more in explaining the American crisis than the sins of the disobedient. The problem is neither too much nor too little religion; it is what Douthat calls ‘bad religion’: “The slow motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place…that stroke our egos, indulge our follies, and encourage our worst impulses.” Catholic and Protestant churches are in decline; Protestant churches are particularly factionalised and fragmented; Catholic as well as Protestant churches have lost members, money and authority. The elite have become hostile or indifferent to the faith and the American culture as a whole is less receptive to the faith’s precepts and demands. “These faiths speak from many pulpits — conservative and liberal, political and pop-cultural, traditionally religious and fashionably ‘spiritual’ — and many of their preachers call themselves Christian or claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional Christianity, not the real thing.” The apostles of these pseudo-Christianities are the real threat to the American soul. They put the stamp of Divine approval on whatever their parishioners’ fantasy is as morally permissible. They have even transformed the concept of Jesus. Within these pseudo-faiths, Jesus is whatever the adherent’s preconceptions are about what a Saviour should and shouldn’t be, a hip hop Jesus for a pop church, a more solemn figure for the conservative temperament. Likewise with the Bible. Either a blinkered fundamentalist belief that the book is divinely inspired and without errors, contradictions, and assertions contrary to scientific facts, or a progressive approach emphasising aesthetics, allegory and human values over literal truth. Traditional Christian virtues humility — a virtue mentioned in the Quran too. Poverty and self-denial are out of vogue. The new mantra for a hedonistic culture is pray and get rich; if your parishioners reap worldly rewards, it indicates that God is pleased with you and your flock. “The result is a society where pride becomes ‘high self-esteem,’ vanity becomes ‘self-improvement’…greed and gluttony become ‘living the American dream’.” The spread of democracy, the world over, never a Christian tenet, is believed to be part of the Divine plan now. This, says Douthat, is the real story of religion in the US. For all its piety and fervour, today’s US needs to be recognised for what it really is: not a Christian country but a nation of heretics. Throughout US history, heresy has been balanced by orthodoxy, but in the last 50 years the decline of religious institutions has eviscerated orthodoxy. But dissent has not been all bad. Heretics and dissenters have often contributed to the progress of American civilisation. Many of the American Founding Fathers, being of Deist and Unitarian persuasions, helped establish a commitment to religious freedom in America. Compared with the Black Legend — which claims that everything that went wrong with the Spanish culture and government was because of the Spanish Catholic Church — the Catholic Church’s desire to control and manipulate secular affairs, freedom rather than control appears to be more conducive to cultural progress. Despite its many sectarian splits, a central core of Christianity or a Christian consensus exists. It consists of the basic dogmas of the faith such as Resurrection, Trinity and Virgin Birth, Afterlife, sacredness of the Christian scriptures, moral strictures, and also the idea of orthodoxy, i.e. “the core of Christianity is an inheritance from the first apostles, rather than being something that every believer can and should develop for himself.” It is ironic that some of the liberal minded, especially younger, clerics are attempting to subvert the core of Christianity by promoting secular ideas within their churches and many lay Americans seem to agree with them. The writer is a freelance writer and an electrical engineer. He can be reached at shahid.rafi@yahoo.com