Hearing His Voice

The June 25 National Review contains a review of Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America by Christian Smith. In an early work, Smith characterized much of contemporary Christianity as “moralistic, therapeutic deism,” from which, in the words of reviewer Paul Bauman, all the demanding doctrines of religious faith — sin and evil, judgment, redemption, and an afterlife — have been removed, “in favor of a distant and undemanding G-d whose moral edicts are tailored to the essentially benign aspirations of his creatures.”

“Most Americans see making people good as religion’s primary purpose,” according to Smith, but “religion holds no ‘patent’ on its most important “product.’ ” As a consequence, most Americans view religion as nonessential. Terms like eternal, heaven, soul, and judgment seldom appear, even in the religious press. In the mainstream churches, the emphasis is on social justice, while little attention is paid to codes of individual behavior.

Smith is describing American Christianity, but his description would apply equally to the heterodox Jewish movements, perhaps even more so.

That description strikes me as largely accurate — again, including Jewish heterodoxy — though I would quibble a bit with the assertion that traditional religion is not more likely to produce “good” people. True, most of us know many nonreligious people who are honest, faithful, and giving, but one would think that belief in an all-seeing G-d, Who judges every action of His creatures, with eternal consequences, makes it easier to overcome one’s yetzer hara and to become such a person.