Ross Douthat on Angels & Demons author Dan Brown:

[Brown] isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

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In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.

This strikes me as accurate. With the rise of the vocal “New Atheism” of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al., it’s easy to think of atheism as a growing and increasingly powerful force in the religious landscape. But while it is true that the number of Americans who practice “no religion” has increased – from around 8% in 1990 to around 15% today, according to this survey – this does not necessarily translate into support for the sort of hard-headed secular rationalism espoused by Dawkins. (A 2007 Pew Forum survey finds similar results, but notes that only 1.6% of the American population self-identifies as atheist.)

On the other hand, there is strong evidence that Christianity is indeed being hollowed out and replaced with a more generic brand of spirituality. Sociologist Christian Smith interviewed American teenagers about their religious beliefs, and found that they depart so heavily from traditional Christianity that he needed a new term to describe them: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. In this regard, I think Douthat is correct to draw a connection between the success of Dan Brown and popularity of Deepak Chopra; both are manifestations of the same trend. One could cite several other data points, including the growth of Buddhism in the West and the staggering success of The Secret. The latter has sold well to a nominally Christian buying public, despite offering up a pseudo-scientific New Age theology that would have been considered heretical by Augustine of Hippo.

What all this means, I think, is that human beings are psychologically predisposed to find naturalistic explanations of the universe unsatisfying. When traditional religions are weakened, or when they struggle to adapt to changing social and ethical norms, people are less likely to embrace steely-eyed rationalism than to adopt “alternative” forms of religious belief. These may consist of watered-down Christianity, non-Western orthodoxy, New Age spirituality, or even adherence to self-help cults, political movements and forms of psychotherapy that take on religious characteristics. I expect that people who are satisfied with purely naturalistic and scientific explanations of the universe are always going to be a small minority, and one that is considered somewhat weird by the rest of humanity.