The Discipline of Delusion: How Secular Ideas Became the New Idolatry is by Jerry Bangert (ISBN 978-1-947360-04-4).
Who wrote it, stated plainly
Jerry Bangert is a medical doctor. He worked as a dermatologist and dermatopathologist for around forty years. He is not a theologian, a historian of ideas, or a pastor.
We are leading with that because our old review did not mention it at all, and it changes how you should read the book. This is an intelligent layman’s book about intellectual history and idolatry, written by someone whose professional training is in a different field entirely. That is not disqualifying. Plenty of worthwhile Christian books have been written by people outside the academy. But a reader deserves to know whether the author is working inside his expertise or outside it, and here it is outside.
What it argues
Bangert traces what he sees as the development of a humanistic idolatry of ideas: the way secular concepts get absorbed as unquestioned assumptions, how that has affected the church, and what he thinks the church should do about it. The framing device is idolatry, applied to ideas rather than to objects.
It sits in the same broad territory as a good deal of recent Christian writing on cultural drift. Whether you find it convincing will depend largely on how much you already agree with the diagnosis before opening it, which is true of most books in this category.
What we removed
The old review quoted the book saying “To combat the discipline of delusion, it is imperative that we remain anchored in the truths of Scripture” and quoted a reader praising its insight into “how we arrived at where we are today.” We could not verify either. There was also a stray phrase, “spiritual leadership for men,” sitting in quotation marks in the body as leftover template text. All gone.
We could not verify the page count or whether the book includes any study material.
Where we land
Read it if the subject interests you and you are comfortable that the author is a thoughtful physician rather than a specialist. For a Christian reader who wants a rigorous treatment of how secular thought reshaped the modern imagination, there are better-credentialed options on the same shelf.
The Discipline of Delusion by Jerry Bangert on Amazon