heresy without room for orthodoxy turns out to be dangerous as well. Many of the overlapping crises in American life, from our foreign policy disasters to the housing bubble to the rate of out-of-wedlock births, can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity—one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or

Jonathan Wright points out “[heretics] did many favors to the cause of orthodoxy. Heresy was always orthodoxy’s grumpy but indispensable twin.”5

The great Christian heresies vary wildly in their theological substance, but almost all have in common a desire to resolve Christianity’s contradictions, untie its knotty paradoxes, and produce a cleaner and more coherent faith. Heretics are often stereotyped as wild mystics, but they’re just as likely to be problem solvers and logic choppers,

But both the populists and the intellectuals in this camp share the same basic understanding of our national predicament. Their America is a nation in which religious faith has been steadily marginalized, with increasingly disastrous results.

Against the idea that the United States has lost touch with its religious roots, a growing chorus began insisting that the United States is in decline because it’s excessively religious. On issue after issue, these critics made Christian belief the problem in and of itself, casting the political controversies of the 2000s as an apocalyptic struggle

A chart of the American religious past would look like a vast delta, with tributaries, streams, and channels winding in and out, diverging and reconverging—but all of them fed, ultimately, by a central stream, an original current, a place where all the waters start. This river is Christian orthodoxy. Not the orthodoxy of any specific Christian

all—what distinguishes orthodoxy from heresy, the central river from the delta—is a commitment to mystery and paradox. Mysteries abide at the heart of every religious faith, but the Christian tradition is uniquely comfortable preaching dogmas that can seem like riddles, offering answers that swiftly lead to further questions, and confronting

You can’t have fringes without a center, iconoclasts without icons, revolutionaries without institutions to rebel against.

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy…. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of