Intellectual Defenestration

Dogmatism vs. Narcissism

David Brooks argues that the real danger is not in Mel Gibson's "religious dogmatism", but in the sentimentalism of books such as Mitch Albom's, "The Five People You Meet in Heaven."

I worry about Albom more, because while religious dogmatism is always a danger, it is less of a problem for us today than the soft-core spirituality that is its opposite. As any tour around the TV dial will make abundantly clear, we do not live in Mel Gibson's fire-and-brimstone universe. Instead, we live in a psychobabble nation. We've got more to fear from the easygoing narcissism that is so much part of the atmosphere nobody even thinks to protest or get angry about it...

Here, sins are not washed away. Instead, hurt is washed away. The language of good and evil is replaced by the language of trauma and recovery. There is no vice and virtue, no moral framework to locate the individual within the cosmic infinity of the universe. Instead there are just the right emotions ? Do you feel good about yourself? ? buttressed by an endless string of vague bromides about how special each person is, and how much we are all mystically connected in the flowing river of life...

The flap over Gibson's movie reminds us that religion can be a dangerous thing. It can be coarsened into gore and bloodshed and used to foment hatred. But we're not living in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Our general problem is not that we're too dogmatic. Our more common problems come from the other end of the continuum. Americans in the 21st century are more likely to be divorced from any sense of a creedal order, ignorant of the moral traditions that have come down to us through the ages and detached from the sense that we all owe obligations to a higher authority.

I haven't read "The Five People You Meet in Heaven," but watching Bruce Almighty left me with a similar thought. A vague spirituality that solely conceives of God as the ultimate Enabler is ultimately too weak to provide any answers to the difficult issues of evil, pain, suffering, damaged and destroyed relationships, and death that everyone faces.

One of the benefits of The Passion is that it stands as a corrective to modern American Christianity's conception of Jesus, which has been rather bland lately.

March 9, 2004 02:59 PM