Literally to the choir

Ross Douthatt, a conservative Catholic who has been writing for NYTimes for many years, has a new book titled “Everyone should go to church.”

I got tired of Catholic intellectuals a long time ago. Ockham got tired of them 700 years ago. They have an endless appetite for detailed argument about insignificant matters.

In this case Douthatt is literally preaching to the choir. His readers are the elite high status people who are ALREADY in church. They don’t need the advice. Unlike the Catholic intellectuals, this tendency is relatively recent. Burge has been documenting it with surveys and census data. Church is a ‘luxury good’ like yachts and diamonds and tax shelters.

Going to church won’t help low status people because we just feel like outsiders. We’ve already tried it and found we weren’t wanted.

Churches, like journalism and all other institutions, have become closed clubs for the rich and powerful. They pretend to want new members or customers or readers, but everything they do is specifically designed to insult and degrade the riffraff.

More broadly, Douthatt is assuming that everyone CAN be religious. Genes don’t work that way. Religion is a talent like music and math. If you don’t have musical ability, you won’t enjoy playing the violin. If you don’t have math ability, you won’t enjoy reading census data. If you don’t have a spiritual talent, you won’t enjoy church.