In the most recent issue of Harpers, author Curtis White describes what he sees as the core theology of the so-called American Religion. Nothing that hasn’t been said before, but interesting nonetheless:
“It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that our truest belief [as Americans] is the credo of heresy itself. It is heresy without orthodoxy. It is heresy as an orthodoxy. The entitlement to belief is the right of each to his own heresy. Religious freedom has come to this: where everyone is free to believe whatever she likes, there is no real shared conviction at all, and hence no church and certainly no community.”
“Strangely, our freedom to believe has achieved the condition that Nietzsche called nihilism, but by a route he never imagined. For Nietzsche, European nihilism was the failure of any form of belief. But American nihilism is something different. Our nihilism is our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once. It’s all good!”
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