Arthur Brooks, president of The American Enterprise Institute has written Gross National Happiness to analyze the American experience and the King of Bhutan has launched a similarly named project in his own country to better its citizens.

In addition, there is an ongoing debate in the evangelical community about the relationship between discipleship and happiness. C.S. Lewis called joy, which some distinguish from happiness, "the serious business of heaven." The conversation continues today at a quickening pace. Debate picked up for conservative Christians with John Piper's book called Desiring God published in the 1980's, which attempted to readdress the "theology of pleasure" for our time. Indeed the number of books with "happiness" in the title appears to be exploding, due to the confusion over the choices offered by today's culture, threatened economic collapse, and a renewed interest in Thomas Jefferson's famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence.

Happiness is an enormous subject that I will not fully address here. My thesis is more narrow and it is this. Don't expect the revisionist religious left to participate in "pursuit of happiness" talk for this reason: they are committed to misery as a way of life by mobilizing the miserable*. In making this claim, I do not use the word "miserable" in the Les Miserable sense that Victor Hugo used it. I am not referring to the sufferers of this world, who deserve our attention and help, but rather to the grievance community that is angry with America, the church, the Bible and sometimes God himself and is determined to press their agenda at any cost.

But it is not even to many of these grievance followers that I refer, but rather to their leaders who are making ecclesiastical careers out of spiritually-based resentment, which ultimately defiles many. (Hebrews 12:15) These leftist revisionists, far from the "pursuit of happiness" and as a matter of faith, are committed to things far more serious, sober and grim, namely making common cause with the aggrieved, the angry and the resentful, attempting to join forces with them to "right the wrongs of this world." Let me be clear. The grievance movement, always masquerading as liberation, is not to be confused with helping the needy, lonely and outcast, which is accomplished mostly by average, traditionally minded people. The aforementioned Arthur Brooks documents this in his masterful book Who Really Cares, which significantly undermines the media-driven myth that lefties do more and give more for the poor. They do not.

How did the misery movement engulf liberal Christianity? The record since the late 1960's demonstrates that the religious left has evinced little interest in traditional Christianity, orthodoxy or seeing that the average person enters and inhabits a kingdom "not of this world." No, the religious left trumpets what in their view is a higher ground and calling that embraces victimology rather than theology and the endless causes that accompany its march through American culture. Whether the cause is: third world radicals, "climate change", gay ordination and marriage, LBGT issues, endless female empowerment, inclusive language liturgies, racialism or whatever, they jump in with both feet. The causes are forever changing. The impetus for grievance-based power remains the same.

But why? When did the religious left become so wedded to misery and grievance? And why is their lot likely to never change? To answer these questions, we must return to the 1950's and early 60's. This was a time when the Episcopal Church was pushing 4 milllion in baptized members, nearly twice the size it is today. Indeed, mainline churches were thriving, as post-war America returned from World War II, moved to suburbia and returned to church. But something else happened within these mainline churches, namely silence. Deadly silence. The greatest generation won the war, returned home and yet had little to say about their faith. Was it present but submerged? Or was it unexamined and therefore inarticulate? Perhaps some of both. Nonetheless, the insistence calls of their soon to be radicalized children cried out for answers.

These courageous men and women had just defeated facism and were confronting "godless communism," but they could not explain to their baby-boomer children as a whole what they believed and why. The generation that gave us books like Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd were more interested in fitting in and moving up than defending the ideas they fought for at Normandy, The Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima and Saipan. The aforementioned Dennis Prager analyzed this well in a recent speech. To paraphrase him, the baby-boomer's parent's biggest mistake was that they could not or did not explain American exceptionalism to their children. Having risked life and limb for their country, they could not or would not explain why America and the free world was worth fighting and dying for. If this was true, how much more difficult must it have been to explain their faith and its truth-claim, how it compared with atheism or agnosticism, why wrong ideas were a threat to their country and the world and what difference it made both culturally and personally. They had paid the price in fighting and winning the war. Wasn't that a sufficient answer for what they truly believed? Apparently not. It was this very silence that helped give rise to the 60's and created much of the vacuum into which leftist Christianity leaped.

Into the theological truth vacuum came the turbulent 60's and a church full of conformists that would be easily led astray. Mainline, church-going America had lost its passion and its voice. Meanwhile, the religious left was bored stiff by theology and had begun to drift toward Freud and eventually Karl Jung. At Virginia Seminary in the 70's, it was said that on campus, Freud was more talked about than Jesus in the 50's and that by the 1970's, you were either a charismatic or a Jungian. Liberals were in the ascendence in the mid to late 60's as LBJ's War on Poverty gathered momentum. Harvey Cox wrote his famous book The Secular City and it seemed like the secular world was where the action and excitement were poised to explode. Pastoral care and faithful preaching seemed dull by comparison. Average Christians had become spectators to rather than participants in the world's unfolding drama.

Then came two events that would define leftist Christianity as a force in American culture for a generation, the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. For clerics and church leaders looking for "relevance," (a defining 60's term... 60's joke: what is a theologian? A person who answers questions no one is asking.) these two movements were just what the doctor ordered. They also offered power, raw intoxicating power. Media coverage, campus seminars, speeches, demonstrations, confrontations and the possibility of jail, injury or death. It was all there in spades for activists. When The Rev. James Reeb and ETS (now EDS) seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels were killed by white southerners in Selma, the cause became cemented in the hearts of many. All this was for a righteous cause. Many ordinary Americans marched and then returned to normalcy. The religious left did not.

And here is the ugly truth. In the midst of finding their raison detre, the religious left became intoxicated with its own self-righteousness. They became permanently addicted to moral superiority through adopting the latest cause. Men like Bishops Paul Moore, John Shelby Spong and many others never recovered from this intoxication, which in essence traded in the gospel, the truth and the kingdom of God to champion the latest social movement. Having been promised both a birthright and a blessing, the Esau-driven left settled for a hot meal, the next speech and the next book. And like any drunk who will not give up his addictive agent, the causes became more marginal. Jack Daniels became Ripple. Vietnam was less clear than civil rights. Third world guerilla movements even less so. And then on to feminism, climate change and gay issues, each one having less biblical mandate than the moral call to treat people "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

For Christians, power is always seductive and not easily resisted. May I be so bold as to suggest that even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself lost his way by confusing the ultimate with the political? When King ceased marching for civil rights and began marching for garbage workers and against the Vietnam War, he may have been doing what he thought right, but he likely did it because he was losing his power to Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Eldredge Cleaver, Malcolm X and other younger "black power" leaders who were nipping at his heals. Had King lived he might have ultimately been viewed as a man who lost his way because he forgot the distinction between the moral and the merely political.

For the religious left, nothing would ever replace the intoxicating relevance and power from these two movements, civil rights and Vietnam. They could not lay down their Revolutionary guns like so many minutemen and return to their farms. So what did they do? They adopted "liberation" as their life's work. Look for a cause. Find a downtrodden group and mobilize. Get a willing media behind you. Create a phony demonstration. Marshall the campus elites in your cause and away we go. Tom Wolf coined the phrase "radical chic' in the 1960's, symbolized perfectly by Leonard Bernstein hosting the Black Panthers in his Manhattan townhouse. Wolf also wrote a Vanity Fair piece in the 1970's about The Episcopal Church called "Trendier Than Thou" exposing the "latest cause" addiction in TEC.

So what happens to a movement that instinctively blames its church and its country for prejudice, injustice, militarism, environmental degradation, sexism, racism and homophobia? And what does a church become when this is the face and message it shows to the world. The answer is an unhappy and miserable one. In Yeats famous poem "The Second Coming" he writes,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world... The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity

Yeat's words might be the epitaph for mainline Christianity. Before our very eyes, leftist, grievance-centered religiosity is cratering because it has no center. The unhinged, cause-driven church that has lost touch with its historic faith and lashed itself to the mast of the latest power-seeking group cannot endure except as a feckless remnant, which is where TEC and their brethren are headed. The tragedy that is religious leftism has not only sold its soul for a "mess of potage." It has become supremely unhappy. And that is perhaps the biggest loss of all.

----Jay Haug is a member of Redeemer Anglican Church in Jacksonville, Florida. You may e-mail him at cjcwguy@gmail.com