David Brooks, The Faith and Humility Reporter For The Acela Corridor Pantograph, Is Back on the Beat! Again!

Whenever he publicly belly-flops into the empty swimming pool of his own boundless ignorance of how America lives and works and thinks and feels in the Land Beyond The Hudson, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times frequently retreats to the one safe place where he can pontificate in galactically-sweeping language and no one will dare gainsay him.

The pulpit.

In the pulpit, Mr. Brooks is free to sermonize on the State Of The Human Soul to his heart's content on the Sulzberger Family's dime.

Nice work if you can get it.

Wait, wait, wait.  Hold on a sec while I go check something out with the local fasti.

Damn.  Just as I feared.  I did not conjure these words for your edification today.  I did it month's ...  wait ... no ... it was years ago.  Years.  Damn.  Time really is a flat circle and sometimes I lose track of exactly where on the Wheel of Fuckery we are on any given day, which is why consulting the local newsreader for dates and times is so important:

Apologies.

On the other hand, it all still applies, so here we go.

This time around, having temporarily run out of shallow, insipid things to say about the state of the secular world, Brooks takes a shallow, insipid dive into the sacred.  Yes kids, today it's Pagans versus Judeo-Christians, with Pagans getting the worst of it.  

And, having read through the entire thing so you don't have to, it's almost as if  most of Brooks' knowledge of paganism has been drawn from the 1987 movie Dragnet --

-- while his knowledge of the state of modern American Christianity comes from propaganda that his New York Times colleague, David French, slipped under his door.

And now, to quote gloriously ridiculous The Ten Commandments from 1956, praise God, and down into it!

Today's column follows a typical Brooksian structure: the cartoonishly reductive repetition of what Brooks alleges the vices of the Bad Guys to be, and an equally cartoonish reductive repetition of what Brooks alleges the virtues of the Good Guys to be.

First, the thesis statement:

I had forgotten how exhausting it is to live in Donald Trump’s world. He’s not only a political figure. He creates a psychological and social atmosphere that suffuses the whole culture — the airwaves, our conversations, our moods.

Really?  Then you may quite literally be the only human on Earth for whom this is true.  Remind me again, what exactly is your job?

If there is one word to define Trump’s atmosphere, it is “pagan.” 

The Alert Reader's bullshit antenna should now be fully extended and humming.  Wait a minute!  Is Brooks actually going to write yet another fucking column about the horrors being inflicted upon the American republic by the Republican electorate and the Republican congress and the Republican supreme court and the twice-elected Republican president without mentioning the word "Republican" even once?

Yes, kiddies.  That is exactly what Brooks is about to do.  For the umpteenth time, the Sulzberger family has paid David Brooks, who knows how much? -- a thousand dozen eggs? -- to write a column in which the incredibly inconvenient history and trajectory of the entire Republican party -- David Brooks' Republican party -- simply does not exist.  Instead, there is only "Trump's atmosphere".

And now we are off to the races. 

The pagan ethos has always appealed to grandiose male narcissists...

The pagan culture is seductive because it lures you...

The pagan ethos — ancient or modern — always threatens to unleash brutality once again...

The pagan ethos does not believe...

[The pagan ethos] is not concerned...

[The pagan ethos] does not care much about...

We seem to be entering a pagan century...

To make sure the contrast is as stark and unmistakable as possible -- as Good vs. Evil as possible -- Brooks shrink-wraps a wide spectrum of non-Christian beliefs from a number of different cultures into a single entity and defines that entity by its worst caricatures.  Cruel, immoral and monstrous.  Kickers of puppies and spoilers of movies.  

Brooks then goes on to characterize Judeo-Christianity in the grandest terms possible. By how it wishes to appear.  How it describes itself in those nice brochures available in the foyer of upper middle class suburban churches.  

The professional Brooksologists will immediately recognize Brooks' blend of generalization, cherry-picking and straw-manning here as nearly identical in structure and intent as the hit pieces he used to write for The Weekly Standards more than two decades ago.  Just swap "Judeo-Christians" for "Bush"  and "pagans" for "dirty fucking hippies" and we're right back in the good old days when George Dubya bestrode the world like a Christian colossus and hippy-punching was the easiest, laziest path to pundit career wealth and success.

The truth, of course, is entirely different.  Take it away professor Bart D. Ehrman, who is:

...an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also authored six New York Times bestsellers. He is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

You see, actual scholarship on this subject is widely available, but actual scholarship would interfere with Brooks' hot takes on let's-not-talk-about-Republicans, so let's move on to the Inevitable Pivot. 

If paganism is a grand but dehumanizing value system, I’ve found it necessary, in this increasingly pagan age, to root myself in anything that feels rehumanizing, whether it’s art or literature or learning...

Many great moral traditions have always stood against paganism and rebutted it... Judaism, for example...

Christianity is built on a series of inversions that make paganism look pompous and soulless...

The Judeo-Christian ethos showed the world something loftier...

Judaism and Christianity confront paganism with...

Is Brooks applying for the job of Witchfinder General?

Brooks then tells his audience that help may be on the way!   Because the man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, Brooks very lightly skims some survey data and concludes that the Christian Cavalry may be just over the hill (pun intended), because young men are going back to the pews!  Yay!

Apparently, I’m not alone. Something’s going on in our culture. The decline of religious participation, which was so rapid between 2010 and 2020, seems to have stopped. There has been a relative surge in religious interest among young men. According to research by the evangelical Christian polling group Barna, 66 percent of Americans say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus — a 12-percentage-point jump since 2021.

But if you bother to take even a minute to look just below the surface of that data, the trajectory is not so much reassuring as it is deeply troubling.  From Medium:

Why Gen Z Men Are Flocking to Church

How Grievance Culture, Gender Anxiety, and TheoBros Are Shaping Young Male Faith

Gen Z is the first modern generation of Americans in which men appear to be more religious than women.

But don’t celebrate yet.

The reasons for the religious gender gap’s reversal point toward a worrying future for American Christianity and society in general — unless middle-aged men head it off now...

Evidently, today’s male-centric influencers don’t just keep the question of manhood alive to make money; they also offer more concrete answers. According to an analysis from sociologists Paul Djupe and Brooklyn Walker, Gen Z men are more likely than Gen Z women to:

• support Christian Nationalism;
• espouse Apocalypticism;
• be familiar with ideas such as repealing women’s right to vote; and
• view themselves as victims of modern culture.

And if young men view themselves as victims, Djupe and Walker found, then they are also more likely to identify as Evangelical. The Evangelical tradition, of course, centers a male-dominated gender hierarchy in its theology, churches, and families...

Golly, sounds almost like Brooks' own definition of "pagan" doesn't it?  Back to Brooks:

Are we on the cusp of a new religious revival? The evidence is still much too flimsy and fresh to justify that kind of sweeping assertion, so color me skeptical. 

Oh come on, David!  Why stop now?  After all, your entire career has been a series of sweeping assertions based on flimsy or non-existent evidence, all of which have collapsed very publicly and spectacularly, and yet the House of Sulzberger still keeps you on the payroll, so go nuts.  At least do "On the one hand, but on the other hand" thing.

On the one hand, the eternal forces of dehumanization are blowing strong right now...

On the other hand, there are millions of humanists — secular and religious — repulsed by what they see...

There we go!

And what are we to conclude from all of this?

New winds are going to blow.

America: A Land of Contrasts.

Behold, a Tip Jar!