Joseph Bottum - An anxious age : the Post-Protestant ethic and spirit of America

Copyright 2014 by Joseph Bottum
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Image, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bottum, J.
The anxious age : how America ceased to be Protestant and failed to become Catholic / Joseph Bottum. First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-51881-9
1. United StatesChurch history20th century. 2. Christianity and politicsUnited StatesHistory20th century. I. Title.
BR516.B667 2014
277.30825dc23

2013037085

ISBN 978-0-385-51881-9
eBook ISBN 978-0-385-52146-8

Cover design by Jessie Bright

v3.1_r1

In memory of
my sister Maggie
and the world gone by

Part I
T HE P OSTER C HILDREN AND THE P ROTESTANT P ERPLEX

Part II
T HE S WALLOWS OF C APISTRANO AND THE C ATHOLIC C ONUNDRUM

Ours is an anxious agethe Anxious Age, it often seems: a moment more tinged by its spiritual worries than any time in America since perhaps the 1730s.

Not that the nations spirituality is as easy to discern now as it might have been back in those colonial times, with the First Great Awakening beginning its rise. At the latter end of the Year 1733, as Jonathan Edwards, the great theologian pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, records in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, there appeared a very unusual flexibleness, and yielding to Advice, in our young People. Presently upon this, a great and earnest Concern about the great Things of Religion, and the eternal World, became universal in all Parts of the Town, and among Persons of all Ages.

These days, American spirituality often seems more like the dull background buzz of a fluorescent lightbulb than the roar of a marching bandthe throb of a persistent headache rather than a raging fever. Still, once we begin to notice the odd new forms that mystical feeling has taken, we can see their impact almost everywhere. The nations unconscious spirituality is splashed across our supposedly secular public life.

As it happens, we often fail to recognize the effect as spiritual, because American history has led us to expect our national spirituality to be explicitly religious, tied to the nations churches. These new supernatural entitiesor, at least, these new manifestations of the enduring human desire to perceive something supernatural in the worldhave broken away from the theological understandings that would once have helped corral and tame them. We are like a people who dismiss ghosts as archaic, superstitious nonsense, even while we imagine that all around us are ectoplasmic projections of the dead we just happen not to call ghosts. Spirits and demons, angels and demigods, flitter through American public life, ferrying back and forth across our social and political interactions, the burdens of our spiritual anxieties.

Think of it this way: We live in what can only be called a spiritual age, swayed by its metaphysical fears and hungers, when we imagine that our ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken but actually evil. When we assume that past ages, and the people who lived in them, are defined by the systematic crimes of history. When we suppose that some vast ethical miasmaracism, radicalism, cultural self-hatred, selfish blindnessdetermines the beliefs of classes other than our own. When we can make no rhetorical distinction between absolute wickedness and the people with whom we disagree: The Republican Congress is the Taliban! President Obama is a Communist! Wisconsins governor is a Nazi!

We live in a spiritual age, in other words, when we believe ourselves surrounded by social beings of occult and mystic power. When we live with titanic cultural forces contending across the sky, and our moral sense of ourselvesof whether or not we are good people, of whether or not we are savedtakes its cues primarily from our relation to those forces. We live in a spiritual age when the political has been transformed into the soteriological. When how we vote is how our souls are saved.

Through the long centuries after the Middle Ages, the combination of liberal Protestantism and scientific materialism slowly drained Western civilization of its metaphysical density: devils, specters, elves, magic, all fading away. The disenchantment of the world, the sociologist Max Weber called it (borrowing a concept Friedrich von Schiller had developed in 1794), and by the late 1800s, most educated Americans probably had no strong belief in any supernatural entities beyond the bare Christian minimum of the individual soul, below, and God, above.

The otherworldly genius of the nation, however, would not leave it so. Over the last hundred years, Americas metaphysical realm has been gradually repopulated with social and political ideas elevated to the status of strange divinities: a scientifically acceptable re-enchantment and supernatural thickening of realityborn of the ancient religious hunger to perceive more in the world than just the give and take of ordinary human beings, but adapted to an age that piously congratulates itself on its escape from many of the strictures of ancient religion.

It was at a Catholic academic conference to which Id been invited, a few years ago, that I first began to think about some of this. I hadnt spent much time before with that particular subgroup of Catholic professors and graduate studentsmost of them young, all of them seriousand as I listened I became aware of an odd undercurrent flowing through the papers they read aloud for one another. Oh, the papers were primarily academic takes on the encyclicals of John Paul II, the concept of subsidiarity, the philosophical difficulties of natural lawinteresting, all in all, if a little dry. But within them, especially in their metaphors and hypothetical applications, something else lurked: something unrelated to, and occasionally in conflict with, the Catholic teachings they were expounding.

Modern nation-states should have no more substance than a phone book, I remember one of the sincere young academics explaining to me. Americans need to understand them the way we do, as merely incidental lists of people who happen to live near one another. A few of the conferences scholars took guidance from the Baptist writer Wendell Berrys call for an agrarian Christian anarchy, and a few from the Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwass rejection of modernitys rights-based ethics. For the most part, however, they looked to the British-American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyreand during that week I must have been given five copies of MacIntyres small essay on the Catholic duty not to vote in contemporary America, not to sully pious hands by participating in the political regime of pro-abortion Democrats and prodeath penalty Republicans.