High brow?

The guy sitting in for Sullivan does make some interesting points about this whole religious debate. A snippet of a post:

So, returning to the original question, what does this mean for Christianity? Simply, this: that America has a lowbrow culture that's still pretty religious, but whose religiosity tends to be, well, lowbrow - a lowest-common-denominator mix of self-help spirituality and New Age mush. And the highbrow culture, meanwhile, isn't religious at all: it's not anti-religion, exactly, but it definitely considers religious belief an oddity and an anachronism, and orthodox Christian belief dangerously close to fanaticism. Which is one of the reasons that most religiosity in America is so lowbrow - because the highly intelligent people who might elevate the level of religious discourse have their faith leeched out of them by their immersion in the highbrow, in its assumptions and its prejudices. And the people who complain about this - about how we don't have any more Reinhold Niebuhrs, and isn't it a tragedy? - tend to be exactly the people who in an earlier era would have been the Niebuhrs, but who now partake of what Richard John Neuhaus once called "the pleasures of regretful unbelief."

Interesting. I belong to a group and didn't even know it.. Highbrow!

His solution to the problem? The religious highbrow's need to take religion back from the lowbrows. No! That's simply not going to work.

The thing that Sullivan always misses, and most of his guest writers as well, is that what they ask for is impossible, so there's no point in asking for it.

This writer obviously thinks the culture of religion in America can be changed, and a more "enlightened" Christianity can dominate the discourse rather than the bat-shit crazy types that control it now (Pat Robertson anyone?). He is either stupid or intellectually dishonest. There is no possible way for the highbrow version of religion to make a comeback merely by definition. Highbrows don't appeal to the ugliest of human traits like the lowbrows do.

It's exactly the same way the Sullivan approaches conservatism. It is by definition corrupt and morally bankrupt. Therefore, it can never be made into the utopian concept that Sullivan would like to have.

He seems to think that the Bush empire is a conservative anomaly, when on the contrary it is the conservative ideal. Ronald Reagan and Bush I were just the warm-up acts.