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Douthat is Great, but Mistaken

By Bruce Ledewitz

Ross Douthat is the very best political commentator and public Catholic analyst. But he makes a fundamental mistake in his column on the Americanization of religion. Douthat tries to rate the various political heresies on how close they are to their nascent Christian source. But once Barack Obama corrected Dr. King—saying “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. But it doesn’t bend on its own. It bends because you put your hand on that arc and you bend it in the direction of justice”—everything became humanism. No longer was God the Lord of history. No longer did truth have power. That zeal that Douthat identifies is not a great awakening because we are not thinking of ourselves as God’s partners and we don’t expect to be vindicated by history. That is why Americans despise what is perhaps Jesus’ most revolutionary teaching, one that Dr. King wholly embraced: love you enemies. Instead, every movement Douthat discussed thinks history is struggle and it is all up to us. 

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