Don’t be fooled by Joseph Bottum’s cheery and delightful prose: His An Anxious Age:  The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America is a dark and disturbing book, one that has more in common with the final chapter of David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions—a recognition that the relativistic and post-Christian forces are in control and will be for conceivably quite some time—than with any detached, stale, and statistics-driven work of sociology.

But Bottum's work, unlike Hart’s, is focused on the United States, not on Western Civilization itself. And Bottum also offers an interesting take: Our elites, or ‘elect,’ as he puts it (for many of these people do not qualify as elite), did not materialize out of nowhere. They are, in fact, our Mainline Protestant ruling class, except they have stopped believing in God.

They’ve maintained their moralism, though, and it is bulwarked by the specter of Walter Rauschenbusch and his social gospel. Rauschenbusch, a prominent and thunderous Baptist writer and preacher who straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, most famously coined the social gospel, one that, Bottum contends, left no room for Christ, because it focused so much attention on combating ‘social sins,’ which are these: “bigotry, the arrogance of power, the corruption of justice for personal ends, the madness of the mob, militarism, and class contempt” (37). And Bottum is right:  their faith, of course, eventually faded, leaving nothing but these shadowy things to float around like ghosts. Thus the post-Protestants, as he put it, would focus their energy on rejecting these metaphysical evils, because they felt—a key word here, for they, as mentioned, have kept the emotionalism of progressive Protestantism—that doing so would bring about a personal redemption.

In the second half of the book, Bottum discusses how Catholicism attempted to fill the void left by the Mainline Protestants and failed. This failure was due to many different things: the sex abuse scandals, the confusion after the Second Vatican Council, the collapse of a genuinely Catholic artistic culture, the innate anti-Catholicism of the United States. It did, however, inject an intellectual language foreign to American political discourse, into that discourse; and some of the people most receptive to it were Evangelicals. Bottum, amusingly, observes that in 2010, “the typical new member of Congress … was—to indulge in a little reduction—a mildly successful businessman who attended an Evangelical church, belonged to the Republican Party, and had been trained to speak quite confidently in a very alien, very Catholic vocabulary about such things as the sanctity of life, just war theory, natural law, and the dignity of the person” (157).

The post-Protestants, unfortunately, have zeroed-in on the Evangelicals and the Catholics—and others who do not share their social vision—as agents of evil, and Bottum quite rightly worries that they’ll attempt to “legislate [them] … out of the public square” (294). They’re already doing it: consider the Little Sisters of the Poor and their lawsuit. Note too that the secular-left press often publishes screeds against sincere religious belief. It will get worse.

Also, more generally, Bottum recognizes that religion functions as a limiting principle, and since the Mainline Protestants no longer serve as America’s guiding force, the nation, consequentially, has become unmoored. He closes the book in alarming fashion:

Our current spiritual anxieties and spiritual rewards are the only ones on offer, at the level of the social order. In every age, even our own, they shape us and move us and give us the modes of our being, whether we know it or not. God help us (294).

God help us indeed.  But what to do?

As David P. Goldman noted in The American Interest, An Anxious Age is a deeply pessimistic book. Bottum, the learned and thoughtful observer that he is, has every right to be sad, for ours is a time of transition. But even though “our current spiritual anxieties and spiritual rewards are the only ones on offer, at the level of the social order,” he—and we—shouldn’t give up. We should keep working. For, as Chesterton wrote in his play The Judgment of Dr. Johnson, “these are men; these are fallen men; these are they for whom their Omnipotent Creator did not disdain to die.”

So it always has been, and so it always shall be—even in such a nation as the United States.