David Brooks Can’t Hide His Contempt for Ordinary Americans | The American Spectator

David Brooks has always fancied himself a kind of moral chiropractor for middle-class souls: Half preacher, half therapist, all smug.. His latest column, “How to Replace Christian Nationalism,” is another exercise in half-hidden disdain — a sermon for readers who think the average American is a barbarian with a Bible.

Brooks begins with a borrowed profundity: “a person’s way of being human reveals their belief.” The quote, from Czech priest Tomas Halík, sounds like revelation until you realize it’s relativism in robes. It shifts faith from what is true to how one feels — perfect for those who prefer their Christianity soft, shapeless, and devoid of substance. The Christianity Brooks praises is so sanitized that even the Devil could subscribe to it without breaking a sweat. He paints “Christian nationalists” as feral fanatics praying for Armageddon, then bows before a globalist gospel so thin it couldn’t save a soul from sunburn.

Defending your country and your culture is obedience in action, not idolatry. The same Bible Brooks claims to revere commands nations to uphold order, protect the innocent, and honor their inheritance. When Christ said, “Render unto Caesar,” He didn’t say, “Render Caesar meaningless.” Yet Brooks’s Christianity knows no borders — geographical, ethical, or doctrinal.

He derides “Christian nationalism” as “particular rather than universal,” as though affection for one’s homeland were the mark of the unwashed. But Christ Himself wept for Jerusalem, not for some abstract human family. Brooks confuses universal love with global indifference. His “pilgrim” metaphor — everyone stumbling together toward some vague horizon — is poetic nonsense. Without truth, pilgrimage is just wandering.

The columnist claims that MAGA Christians have made the nation “stagnant, callous, and backward.” They are, he suggests, a people trapped in “trenches.” Yet it was these same Americans — plumbers, truckers, mothers of five — who filled churches during COVID while coastal elites locked theirs. It is these “deplorables” who still say grace before dinner, still fly the flag, still believe humans are born male or female. Of course, Brooks doesn’t care. Why would he? These are the very people he and his cocktail-circuit friends ridicule between brunch and dinner parties, where “understanding America” is a parlor game.

He writes as if Christianity must choose between mercy and might, as though a believer cannot both love his neighbor and defend his nation. That is a false dichotomy — a spiritual safe space for those who can’t face reality. The early church was both humble and defiant; the apostles prayed, but they also preached in public squares knowing it could cost them their lives. Brooks’s Christianity would have told them to sit down and “dialogue.”

What he calls a “culture war,” others call resistance. For decades, the Left has worked to remove faith from every corner of public life — rebranding prayer as propaganda and conviction as hate. It captured the schools, rewrote the movies, politicized medicine, and called the result “progress.” And now Brooks, ever the apologist for not-so-polite society, blames those who refuse to bow. His solution? Less Scripture, more sentiment. In short, a Christianity that offends no one and saves no one.

There’s a dark humor in Brooks quoting St. Augustine to defend pluralism. The City of God wasn’t a love letter to diversity, but a warning that when faith loses its backbone, civilization follows. Augustine wrote in an age when Rome, drowning in vice, mistook decay for enlightenment. The “delight of pluralism,” as Brooks calls it, is the same indulgence that consumed empires before ours. A nation cannot be both everything and something. When a country tries to please all gods, it forgets the one that really matters.

His parting jab — that MAGA has made America “frightened” — is pure projection. The only people terrified of faith in public life are the atheists who’d rather live in a nation where everything is tolerated and nothing is sacred. Christian conservatives are awake. They’ve seen what happens when both faith and nation forget who they are. Chaos follows, confusion reigns, and churches become “cozy” cafes.

Brooks’s “better Christianity” asks believers to trade their armor for a yoga mat and a few scented candles. He preaches humility as passivity, and self-forgetting as civic amnesia. But this is nonsense dressed as nuance. The prophets Brooks name-drops — Halík, Williams, Havel — spoke truth to tyrants, not in the safety of faculty lounges but under regimes that jailed and silenced dissenters. They embodied defiance. The courage that once carried them through communism wouldn’t last a week in the coliseum of modern progressivism. Today, they’d be canceled before finishing their first sentence — accused of intolerance, privilege, or worse. The saints Brooks invokes would have been silenced by the very society he flatters.

Real Christianity doesn’t need to be “replaced.” It needs to be revived. Not by chasing pluralistic delight but by returning to biblical discipline. Not by melting into moral relativism but by standing firm, unashamed and unapologetic. The problem isn’t too much faith in politics, but too little faith in public.

So let Brooks have his spineless syncretism, his pilgrim’s path paved with platitudes. The rest of us will keep our armor on. While he’s busy redefining belief, real Christians are still feeding the poor, raising families, and fighting for a country built on Christian values. America doesn’t need a new Christianity; it needs to rekindle the one that made it the greatest nation ever built. Brooks calls that “nationalism.” But most Americans call it belief in something greater than themselves. And they don’t mind being unfashionable for it.

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