Daily Blague

In one of the most interesting cross-cultural projects of recent times, The Atlantic has commissioned French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, to take a trip through the United States, following Alexis de Tocqueville's 1831 footsteps. The first instalment of M Lévy's findings appear in the current (May) issue, which I encourage you to pick up even though the text is, astonishingly, available online. Where Tocqueville drew a series of broad generalizations about America and about democracy in action from his encounters, M Lévy piles up the anecdotes and lets inferences and conclusions precipitate. The installment ends with the declaration that we have become a nation of ideologues, a proposition that I'm very unhappy about having to agree with. And we have refashioned religion into something that no pious person of a century ago (much less a millennium or two) would recognize as religion. Our deity appears, in practice, to be part animist presence, part Clark Kent - a regular guy with super powers. He demands no sacrifices and will forgive all members of the club.

I don't know quite how I got this, but it's the English translation of M Lévy's interview with France-Amérique, and quite interesting in its own right. Edward Rothstein, in the Times yesterday, gave the project high marks. Be sure not to miss the anticipation, in each of these linked articles, of the installment in which, flying the author over the Grand Canyon, a helicopter pilot notes that it may have been carved by Noah's Flood.

And in Cooperstown, M Lévy finds a curious mixture of willful self-deception - nobody really believes the Genesis of baseball promulgated by the Hall of Fame - and secular religion - an awed man refers in hushed tones to imagined on-site sepulchres of great ball players.

As readers of this site will understand from my constant hectoring, religious and moral values in Cooperstown America have little to do with the either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament beyond the wallpaper effects of Tim LaHay's exciting Tribulation novels. Christianity has been boiled down to an accessible Costco of the soul. You need only sign up and affirm your membership. You can go on with your regularly scheduled activities with a clear conscience, and, as for the unscheduled activities that you wouldn't want anybody to know about, they'll be forgiven upon request.

There has always been much about institutional Christianity that was wrongheaded and oppressive. But even in the throes of its lowest-common-denominator excesses, it was usually right for most people, and liberals today are paying through the wazoo for having overlooked that FACT. Nevertheless, Christianity was, until recently, a serious, demanding faith. It was inconvenient (a point that Orthodox Jews have turned into a plus). It was hard. The religions that Bernard-Henri Lévy encounters in his travels across America - even among the Amish of Iowa - are not only easy; they're mindless.