SAVING SILK STOCKINGED SOULS:

DAVID BROOKS WAS STRUGGLING WITH SIN. More precisely, he was seeking a way to translate the Christian understanding of sin into secular terms for millions of readers. His emerging specialty, whether in his New York Times column or best-selling books, is distilling dense concepts for the mainstream. An ugly word for that, he notes, is popularizing. On religious topics, some might say proselytizing. He calls it reporting. "He's the master," says Princeton professor Robert George, a onetime adviser to Brooks. "Nobody is better at that than David."

Explaining Christian theology has bedeviled Brooks for several years now, in writing his latest book, The Road to Character, and in recent columns, much to the bewilderment of readers. It's strange partly because Brooks was raised Jewish, but also because the opinion pages are generally reserved for current events and politics. For counsel on political punditry, Brooks used to make a practice of interviewing three elected officials a day. To flesh out his sense of sin, he sought a different sort of expertise.  

He consulted Pastor Timothy Keller, founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and one of the country's most prominent evangelicals. There are many explicitly Christian descriptions of sin: fallenness, brokenness, depravity. Keller suggested Brooks try a more neutral phrasing: "disordered love." When we blab a secret at a party, for example, we misplace love of popularity over love of friendship. [...]

Brooks, 54, also now occupies a lonely journalistic space. When he began using his column several years ago to philosophize about personal morality, he says, "I felt like I was wandering off the map into weird territory." Where to, exactly, remains mystifying. Brooks thinks a tradition of journalists fluent, or at least conversant, in moral concepts dissipated in recent decades. Theologians were walled off within their denominations, and public discourse about values grew dysfunctional. A life of "meaning" by today's standard, he wrote in his Times column to begin 2015, "is flabby and vacuous, the product of a culture that has grown inarticulate about inner life."

In general, Brooks contends, journalists balk at sharing moral viewpoints, and readers bristle upon receiving them. His critics find him an insufferable scold, a pompous sermonizer. "I think there is some allergy our culture has toward moral judgment of any kind," he reflects. "There is a big relativistic strain through our society that if it feels good for you, then who am I to judge? I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I'd rather take the hits for being a moralizer than to have a public square where there's no moral thought going on." There is at least marginal evidence that this is changing. His book, published in April, spent 22 weeks on the Times best-seller list.

For Brooks, studying sin (and other moral categories) has been transformational. His political views have shifted before, quite publicly, but this is closer to an intellectual rebirth. Whether it is also a religious one, he won't say.  

On his book tour over the summer, Brooks committed to a mission for the rest of his career: to restore comfortable, competent dialogue about what makes a virtuous life. If that is truly an area of cultural illiteracy, then journalists have neglected it. Like Brooks, their values have been out of order.

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