Anxious Age

Jody Bottum’s new An Anxious Age is as idiosyncratic, quirky, eloquent, and insightful as its author.

Bottum offers a spiritual reading of contemporary America, starting from the insight that American culture has been re-enchanted, our “metaphysical realm . . . repopulated with social and political ideas elevated to the status of strange divinities: a scientifically acceptable re-enchantment and supernatural thickening of reality” (xiii). “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” (xii). It’s a manichean re-enchantment, where we have become incapable of making any “distinction between absolute wickedness and the people with whom we disagree” (xii).

The collapse of mainline Protestantism is the central event of recent American political history. Protestantism plays a fundamental role in American social, moral, intellectual, and political history; in what he calls an “Erie Canal” analysis of American religious history, Bottum traces the way a peculiar American form of Protestantism grew out of the revivals of the early republic and found a base of operation upstate, along the banks of the Erie Canal. 

We now live in an age of anxiety because we can’t answers the question, What replaces the mainline’s soft establishment? Evangelicalism is too ecclesially weightless; Catholicism too complex and now too ridden by scandal. What has emerged is a post-Protestant elite, which Bottum brands the “elect.”

The elite is not made up of the 1% or inhabitants of DC. Many of the elite don’t think of themselves as elite at all, though their educational, economic, and social standing places them on the top of the American heap. What makes them elect is their identification of the six persistent systematic evils of society (bigotry, power, corruption, mass opinion, militarism, and oppression, first highlighted by Walter Rauschenbush, 15), and, more especially their rejection of these systemic evils: “Sin . . . appears as a social fact, the redeemed personality becomes confident of its own salvation by being aware of that fact. By knowing about, and rejecting, the evil that darkens society” (15). 

It doesn’t seem right to say that the enlightened elect “rule.” Bottum suggests that they practice “a particular solution, inherited from their Protestant parents, to a very American spiritual worry,” rewarded not by wealth and power but by “the certainty of their own redemption.” The superiority they feel “is the superiority of the spiritually enlightened to those still lost in darkness” (31). These “Poster Children” have been transformed by recognition of and repentance from collective sins “and this transformation into the elect is the class marker by which the Poster Children recognize one another” (130).

American Catholics Bottum labels (too cutely) the Swallows of Capistrano. Catholicism, or some alliance of Catholics and Evangelicals had some potential to succeed the Protestant mainline. 2012 spelled the end of that hope: “Catholic voters in 2012 broke the way the rest of the nation broke: Hispanic Catholics in one direction, white ethnic Catholics in another; churchgoing Catholics trending one way, non-churchgoing Catholics a different way. Just drop the word Catholic, and you have a reasonable idea where their votes went” (193). Catholicism is still a force in American politics, but, Bottum argues, a declining one. 2012 also marked the end of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together project of replacing the mainline. Catholicism is too foreign, and “the new Catholic culture is in no position to combat the new elect class of American post-Protestants” (279-80).

Bottum’s conclusion is somber. Absent a religious vocabulary and religious institutions that cultivate and sustain civic virtues, including the virtues of the family, what’s left is “the consumer society, which is about choice, and the nanny state, which forbids and penalizes bad choices” (288). He puts in a good word for the civility, the niceness, that even anemic American civil religion promotes, but argues that “American civil religion . . . appears derived from, even parasitical on, American Protestantism” (293). 

The residual niceness that still characterizes one-on-one relationships among Americans “seems a think reed on which to rest the future of national character” (294), not strong enough to stand against the manichean re-enchantment of public discourse. What, he wonders, might keep the Poster Children from legislating the Swallows out of the public square altogether.