{"id":370,"date":"2011-04-22T11:51:53","date_gmt":"2011-04-22T15:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=370"},"modified":"2011-04-22T11:51:53","modified_gmt":"2011-04-22T15:51:53","slug":"david-brooks-v-golden-rule-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/david-brooks-v-golden-rule-religion.html","title":{"rendered":"David Brooks v. Golden Rule religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Brooks, the Last Puritan Columnist, loved<\/a> “The Book of Mormon<\/a>,” but then had guilty second thoughts about its message that religions have weird doctrines but can do “enormous good as long as people take religious teaching metaphorically and not literally; as long as people understand that all religions ultimately preach love and service underneath their superficial particulars; as long as people practice their faiths open-mindedly and are tolerant of different beliefs.” Harking back to Dean Kelley’s old diagnosis of the ills of liberal Protestantism, Why the Conservative Churches Are Growing<\/em><\/a>, Brooks takes after this kind of Golden Rule religion.<\/p>\n

Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn\u2019t actually last. The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because people are not gods. No matter how special some individuals may think they are, they don\u2019t have the ability to understand the world on their own, establish rules of good conduct on their own, impose the highest standards of conduct on their own, or avoid the temptations of laziness on their own.<\/p>\n

The religions that thrive have exactly what \u201cThe Book of Mormon\u201d ridicules: communal theologies, doctrines and codes of conduct rooted in claims of absolute truth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is this right? Is the key to the survival of religion what Brooks calls “rigorous theology”?<\/p>\n

Last evening my wife and I went to see Of Gods and Men<\/em><\/a>, the remarkable film that tells the true story of eight Trappist monks who decide to stay in their monastery in an Algerian village in the Atlas Mountains even though they are likely to be killed–and are killed–by Islamist guerrillas. Certainly the monks work hard and pray regularly. They also read the Koran, provide their Muslim neighbors with medical care, and participate in the life of the larger community. In turn, the villagers, devout Muslims that they are, consider the monks as holy sustainers of their world–as one woman says, the “branch” on which “we birds” sit.<\/p>\n

Historically, communities have dealt with religious differences much more the way the monks and the villagers do than in the manner of the guerrillas. The latter are the theological rigorists who come and go, depending on social, political, and economic circumstances. No doubt, they will always be with us. But it is not their rigid theologies that have sustained religious traditions throughout the ages. That has had much more to do with, yes, the love and service that, underneath the doctrinal particulars that may or may not be superficial, they all do tend to preach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Brooks, the Last Puritan Columnist, loved “The Book of Mormon,” but then had guilty second thoughts about its message that religions have weird doctrines but can do “enormous good as long as people take religious teaching metaphorically and not literally; as long as people understand that all religions ultimately preach love and service underneath…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[17,1,19,18],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-david-brooks","tag-news","tag-of-gods-and-men","tag-the-book-of-mormon-musical"],"yoast_head":"\nDavid Brooks v. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":372,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}