Give Me Crosses
The religion of our time, many have said, is the easygoing “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” which I used to portray for my students by drawing a big smiley-face on the blackboard. “Our God is a consuming fire,” I said. “Smiley has no fire. Our God has arms to save. Smiley’s got no arms. You fall into the depths of sin? Smiley just goes smiling on.”
The “therapeutic” part of this deism isn’t therapeutic at all, but a make-believe analgesic or narcotic. If you have infected your heart with sin, the “therapy” is to be patted on the head and let be, at best pretending that it never happened, at worst pretending that the infection is a good thing after all. Thus, the person who places his trust in the therapeutic Smiley-god does not want to be healed. And why should he? Healing hurts. The purgative fire burns to the roots. The flames at the far end of the final terrace of Dante’s purgatory are so hot, says the poet, that to cool himself he would have thrown himself into boiling glass. Yet not a hair of our heads shall perish in the purging.
Nor does the Moralistic Therapeutic Deist think about the divine Person that sin offends, just as a spoiled child does not think about his father. But Scripture says that “whom the Lord loves, he chastens,” dealing with us as fathers with their sons, but if we are not chastened, then we are “bastards, not sons” (Heb. 12:6–8). The empty faith of our time, then, is in an indulgent, hand-wringing mama who will somehow make everything all right without our having to turn one degree from pursuing what we want on earth, or in an inattentive father who cares no more for our moral uprightness and health than he would care for a stepson he despises, mama’s child, who can do as he pleases so long as he leaves the old man alone.
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Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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