"Letter & Liturgy"'s Samuel James critiques Andrew Sullivan's "America's New Religions," which I deemed "among his strongest" of columns, partly for the reason that James deems it weak.
Sullivan’s prophetic mantle is a bit too see-through…. For years Sullivan was one of the most influential and impassioned advocates of legal same-sex marriage, and his "conservative case" for radically redefining matrimony drew extensively on his progressive Catholic sensibilities…. Sullivan’s lifelong advocacy for same-sex marriage represents a lifelong resistance to the unanimous teaching of the Christian church and the overwhelming judgment of the Scriptures [my emphasis].
Does Sullivan truly want a Christianity that talks down to politics? It’s difficult to know, only because there seems to be a lot of confusion in his own mind over which
political issues deserve equivalency with the Atonement, and which don’t.
Sullivan's Christianity is, charitably speaking, nuanced, which is to say, he ironically advocates a universal Christianity grounded in his own religious biases and political opinions. I suspect most every Christian's Christianity follows this corrupted nuance — corrupted, if one also believes that the doctrines of theological authority are final, which, alas, most nuanced Christians puzzlingly profess.
Yet, on second thought, my assessment of Sullivan's Christianity is perhaps less charitable than notably pragmatic. I see Christianity for what it is — in practice — not what is written in the New Testament, which, to comply with, requires an unrealistic, Christlike superhumanity. Hence I can forgive Sullivan and his fellow Christians their apostasies. They're only human.
James, on the other hand, is aggressively critical of Sullivan; he implicitly charges the Catholic writer with odious hypocrisy, while implicitly preening his own theological virtue. Writes James: "For Sullivan’s sake and ours, I wish he would reconsider his own role in the gutting of American Christianity, and turn to a solution more ancient, and more spiritual, than ever before." Shades of George Wallace —fundamentalism now, fundamentalism tomorrow, fundamentalism forever.
I don't mean to dwell on this one piece of Sullivan's, and its counter-critiques. The clashes do seem to me, however, an almost divine invitation to ponder the absurd humbuggeries of mass religious devotion, contra the serenity of individual spiritual contemplation — if individuals so choose.