In The Wake Of Mainline Protestantism

For an overview of Jody Bottum’s new book, An Anxious Age, check out Bottum’s lecture at AEI. In it, he argues that “our purely political concerns have been reduced to nothing more than footballs with which we happen to play that public game of spiritual redemption”:

The major event that allowed this spiritualizing of our politics is the utter collapse of the Protestant mainline churches, those once central and stabilizing institutions in the American experiment. With their collapse, since the 1970s, strange entities have broken loose to find a new home in politics. There’s a reason far too many Americans think their opponents are evil. Politics has become a supernatural battleground, where we want to work out not our political problems, but our spiritual anxieties.

The disappearance of the Protestant ascendancy that defined the American new world for 300 years is a cause of enormous amounts of our current political situation, of our incivility toward one another, and of our politics of salvation.

Last weekend we featured laudatory reviews of Buttum’s book. Greg Forster wasn’t as impressed, describing it as “a bad book with a good book trapped inside it, struggling to get out.” He particularly laments its “cartoon caricature” of Protestantism:

Bottum’s sneers at evangelicalism arise from a deeper contempt for Protestant religion as such.

Having uncritically assimilated Max Weber’s long-discredited account of Protestant theology and sociology, Bottum sees the religious anxiety of the social gospel movement as a natural product of Protestant religion. Thus, the current downfall of American culture is merely the necessary historical consequence of Protestantism.

As Bottum’s own evidence shows, the social gospel did not develop religious anxiety and hand it down to today’s secularism because it was following the natural direction of Protestant religion. Bottum describes, complete with damning original source quotations, how social gospel theology denied the power of the cross to save anyone. Yet he never explains why he doesn’t accept what would seem to be the theory best supported by these facts—namely, that the social gospel created religious anxiety precisely because it abandoned Protestant religion.

If Bottum made a serious case against Protestantism, providing argument and evidence, his book would be worth taking seriously. But Bottum is no Brad Gregory. He is simply tossing around unexamined prejudices.

Geoffrey Kabaservice picks up on the pessimism of Bottum’s book:

The American experiment, in Bottum’s telling, has always rested on the three-legged stool of democracy, capitalism, and religion. Throughout most of the country’s history, these three legs both “accommodated one another and, at the same time, pushed hard against one another.” At times, the force of democracy pushed back against overweening religion, as with the immigrant-led populism that halted anti-Catholic oppression in the nineteenth century. At other times, religion used its prophetic force to call democracy to account, as with the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Bottum worries that with the collapse of Mainline Protestantism, much of what we value about America may not survive in the future, leaving us with either a rapacious consumer society or a nanny state. He also warns that liberalism itself may be undermined by the disappearance of religion from the public square; liberalism is based on religiously derived ideas of human dignity, and “every attempt to anchor human dignity in something other than biblical religion has failed.” …

Time will tell if Bottum’s more pessimistic conclusions will bear out. In the meantime, this book drives home what we have lost, as a culture, with the death of Mainline Protestantism, and the ways in which religion continues, in one form or another, to shape our American present.