Ross Douthat: recommendation

Transcript context

…But at the margin, right? — before I wrote the book, but yes! You asked about nondecadent spaces in the Western world. Israel is one, and you could argue reasonably, I think, that Utah is another. There is a difficulty for Mormons in that the founding of their faith and some of the pretty obvious controversies associated with it have pushed them a little bit away from certain forms of intellectual and theological work that you would want a really successful religious community bent on evangelizing the United States to be able to do. So that is sort of my non-Mormon Christian caveat about Mormonism. But in general, I went out to Salt Lake City when Mitt Romney was running for president. They were trying to introduce journalists to Mormondom. We didn’t get to see their Holy of Holies, but we got tours of the missionary centers and the supermarket/food banks that they run for low-income people. Speaking as a member of a Christian church — Catholicism — that has entered into its own obvious form of decadence in the US over the last 50 years, it’s a shaming experience in certain ways to see what the Mormons can do in the most basic forms of Christianity: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, help drug addicts, help people get their lives together while also serving God. It’s a remarkable and admirable thing that, basically, every other Christian church in the US should be envious of. And they combine this — in a way that does fit with some of my speculations in the book — with this strong interest in economic development and technological progress. There isn’t high Mormon theology and high Mormon aesthetics, but certainly, the technical side of Americanness is very much on display in Mormon culture. If you see Israel as relatively nondecadent, do you then infer that being under military threat all of the time is what keeps decadence away?…

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