American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

As Jackson Lears has observed, many turn-of-the-century Protestants, feeling plagued by the “weightlessness” of modern experience, became attracted to the medieval asceticism in Catholicism. For Protestants of late Victorian and Progressive America who felt “overfed” and “overcivilized” by modern culture, the self-denying strain of the Catholic martyr appealed to their longing for intense bodily experience, a mystical “release” from secular anomie, and a righteous stoicism in the face of a degenerate and decadent world.65 The comforts of modern life and the secular millennialism of modern culture, Catholics and Protestants could agree, had an influence on modern faith’s making religion too easy, too soft, too feminine.

Why postliberals convert today