Bad Religion How We Became a Nation of Heretics

The book that has sparked a vigorous national debate about the state of American religion, praised by Timothy Keller as "provocative" and "compelling," while The New York Timessays "Douthat attacks nonsense on both the cultural right and left…responsible and fair," and the Washington Timesraves "a superb documentation of America's crisis of faith," now in paperback. Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. In Bad Religionhe offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the railsand why it threatens to take American society with it. America's problem isn't too much religion, as a growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right believe. Rather, Douthat argues, it's bad religion:the protracted breakdown of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of pseudo-Christianities that stroke our egos, indulge our follies, and encourage our worst impulses. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Barack Obama, Eat Pray Loveto Joel Osteen, and Oprah Winfrey to The Da Vinci Code, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel's mantra of "pray and grow rich," a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach, and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country's ability to confront our most pressing challenges and accelerated American decline.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times op-ed page. He is the author of To Change the Church, Bad Religion, and Privilege, and coauthor of Grand New Party. Before joining the New York Times, he was a senior editor for the Atlantic. He is the film critic for National Review, and he cohosts the New York Times’s weekly op-ed podcast, The Argument. He lives in New Haven with his wife and four children.