An Anxious Age

An Anxious Age: The post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America by Joseph Bottum

Or how America kept “Protestantism” but lost God.

In An Anxious Age, author Joseph Bottum takes on the questions: What has happened to religion in America? And does it matter? Bottum is one of a number of observers (going back to Alexis de Toqueville) who say it does because they consider democracy, capitalism and Protestant Christianity to be the three legs that gave the American experiment stability, albeit sometimes shaky, with that third leg often acting as the conscience that held the former two in check. What he’s asking is: with it gone, or at least very much diminished, what can we expect to restrain the caprice of the mob and the greed of the robber baron?

The numerical collapse of the Mainline Protestant churches (he includes the United Methodists, United Church of Christ, the American Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Evangelical Lutherans in the category) that once defined America came in the 1970s, and was coincident with their full embrace of a variant of Walter Rauschenbusch’s turn of the 20th C Social Gospel which emphasized social reform over personal spiritual salvation through Jesus Christ. Rauschenbusch believed that the civilization of his time was fundamentally evil and that only “redeemed personalities” were capable of recognizing this and sympathizing with the victims of it, though he stopped well short of preaching revolution. Adoption of the Social Gospel drove a wedge deep into the already present split between Evangelical and modernist Protestants, and led to an uncomfortable, if temporary, alliance between the former and the Catholic Church, to which we turn next, on social issues.

In the US, the Catholic Church evolved from being a suspect (by the Mainline and by Evangelicals) tribal religion of unassimilated ethnic immigrants in the late 19th to mid-20th C (when it was pretty “blue collar”, supported labor unions and Democratic party candidates); to a position of increasing acceptance at the center of society in the 50s-60s, with the ascendancy of such popular public Catholic figures as Bishops Fulton Sheen and Avery Dulles, and the Kennedys. Then it went through a post-Vatican II crisis, culminating with a weakened and fractured 1970s Church torn between the poles of progressive social action, driven partly by its own home-grown (in Latin America) Marxist Liberation Theology, and the Traditionalists. Pope John Paul II was quite successful at healing and reconciling these tendencies during his long reign (1978-2005), leading to a renaissance in the status and reputation of the church in the late 90s-2001.

The touchstone issue that made bedfellows of the historically antagonistic Protestant Evangelicals and Catholicism was opposition to abortion and Bottum argues that Catholicism gave some the intellectual underpinnings (e.g. the concepts of just war, natural law, dignity of human life) for the Evangelical revival that occurred from the Carter years (mid-70s) through its collapse as a political force in the 2012 election. In this epoch the Catholic Church swung toward the Republican Party on social issues, while the Democratic Party seems to have consciously distanced itself from the ethnic (Irish, Italian, Hispanic) Catholic voters who were once its mainstay. However, in general, Bottum points out that in numerical terms Catholics have voted pretty much like the rest of the nation since the 1970s and constitute nothing close to a “bloc”. While the influence of Catholic thought in America may have reached its apogee under John Paul II, any chance that the actual Catholic Church had of filling the gap in the American religious scene created by the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches was laid low by the revelations of the priestly sex abuse beginning in the early 2000s. The resulting near financial bankruptcy of the Church was nothing compared to the image of moral bankruptcy it was now blackened with.

So where does this leave us? One possibility (supported by some recent polling) is that a majority of Americans still consider themselves spiritual, if not religious, but that their individualism and the atomizing tendency inherent in Protestantism since the Reformation (“Every man a priest”) has rendered organized churches an anachronism. In America, Protestantism may have finally split down to the smallest unit possible, the individual believer. Bottum asks whether this process and the general secularizing tendency on-going since the Enlightenment will ultimately lead us to toward a European style system with parties of the religious (Christian Democrats/Republicans) versus the non-religious (Social Democrats/Democrats). This may be evident in the increased polarization and stridency of political discourse in this country’s last two elections.

In my opinion one great lacuna in Bottom’s otherwise fascinating account, is his ignoring the rise of Mormonism, which can’t be easily pigeonholed into any of his religious categories. It started in the same “Burned Over District” of upstate New York, along the trace of the Erie Canal, which spawned many uniquely American religions that he spends considerable ink on. It spread westward and then nationally and internationally. It exhibits many of the same elements that de Toqueville noted in American Protestantism of the 1830s, to wit: spiritual and patriotic fervor, a strong social and communitarian spirit. It has an increasing strong political projection as well, with its first consequential (if, ultimately, losing) presidential candidate in 2012. Will Mormonsim rise to fill the void left by the collapse of mainline Protestantism? Or are its doctrines simply too strange?

Bottum’s ultimate question is: In the long run, do the values, morals and ethics upon which society depends not only in order to function properly, but to evolve positively; survive and thrive in, of and for themselves? Bottom thinks not, and argues that they derive from and are sustained by belief in something higher and better than the present world. This question has troubled thoughtful commentators on politics and society since at least Roman times; we’ll see how the answer plays out in our time.

Bottum’s quote from Stephen L. Carter’s 2000 book God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics, is well taken and it fits with the theme of another very thoughtful book I previously reviewed: Pascal Bruckner’s Perpetual Euphoria, to wit:

In a nation grown increasingly materialistic and increasingly involved in urging satisfaction of desire as the proper subject of both the market and politics, the religious voice, at its best, is perhaps the only remaining force that can call us to something higher and better than thinking constantly about our own selves, our own wants, our own rights. Politics without religion must necessarily be, in today’s America, the politics of me.

Overall, this is a fascinating and thought-provoking book, and very timely as we approach mid-term elections in 2014.