On the Square Today

Elizabeth Scalia on Ross Douthat’s new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics :

Douthat’s book is a neatly laid-out dissertation on the people of faith and their place in American society. It is a deft chronicle of where faith communities went right—spanning a heyday of religious commentary and social activism, from John Courtney Murray to Martin Luther King—where they gravely misstepped (through over-accommodation, self-defeating scriptural scholarship, and the inevitable discovery of “the God Within”) and where, through the embrasure of so-called “prosperity gospels” catering to the worst instincts of a post-binge capitalist society, they have simply gone mad.