Op-Ed: Why America needs its ex-Protestants to go back to church

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ross Douthat

The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Our intervention in Syria required me to be fully serious last Sunday, but now it’s time to return to this column’s ongoing series of implausible proposals, Easter Sunday edition. Which means I’ll be proposing — yes, I’m that predictable — that many of this newspaper’s secular liberal readers should head en masse to church. The wider experience of American politics suggests that as liberalism de-churches it struggles to find a nontransactional organizing principle, a persuasive language of the common good. And the experience of American society suggests that religious impulses without institutions aren’t enough to bind communities and families, to hold atomization and despair at bay. [link]