Anxious Age

An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America by Joseph Bottum, 296 pages 

In Anxious Age, Bottum claims that the central socio-political event of the past century has been the self-destruction of the Mainline Protestant churches.  It is his assertion that as the process of disenchantment - the decline of belief in good and evil spirits populating or infesting the world - reached its peak in the early twentieth century, the American Protestant mainstream substituted for the old angels and demons new powers and principalities such as the "spirit of greed" or the "spirit of tolerance".  The exorcism of the evil spirits justifies the individual, turning him into one of the redeemed.  This new outlook has little role for Christ, however, encouraging the rise of the "spiritual, but not religious", emptying the oldline churches and creating a vacuum in our national culture where they used to stand.  Evangelicals being hopelessly divided, Catholicism has been made to try and fill that gap, but it is a poor fit.

Bottum's account of the current state of American religion is eminently readable and remarkably compelling.  In his description of how we arrived at this point as well as his description of the point at which we have arrived, he concentrates more on representative personalities than sociological statistics or extensive intellectual genealogies.  There is no doubt that he simplifies matters, but he does not oversimplify.