Modern Age - Winter 2016 - 130

MODERN AGE

WINTER 2016

see Kenneth Grasso's review on page 46) and One Nation under
God: How Corporate America Invented Christianity by Kevin Kruse
(a skeptic's account).
Bottum's book focuses on two related developments: the collapse of Mainline Protestantism as a moral force in American public life that took place roughly from the 1960s to the 1980s, and
the rapid rise and equally rapid fall of Catholicism as a potential
replacement in that role, which Bottum dates from 1987 to 2002.
Ours is an "anxious age," he writes, because any semblance of an
American consensus-once formed on a stable tripod consisting
of democracy, capitalism, and Protestantism-is now missing one
leg, leaving a highly unstable bipod (democracy and capitalism)
whose contradictions become increasingly evident.
Arguably, as the legs of the stool have been reduced from
three to two legs, our politics have moved from the possibility
of achieving relative consensus afforded by a common religious
and moral language that balanced the demands of democracy
and capitalism to a deep and insurmountable hostility between
the two in the absence of any religious connective tissue.
Yet this anxiety, Bottum implicitly concludes, is only really felt
by the declining remnant of religious believers, increasingly limited to evangelical and orthodox Catholic circles (with far smaller
numbers of non-Christian religious variously situated). The heirs
of mainline Protestantism-what Bottum calls post-Protestant
"Poster Children"-he rightly describes as animated with a profound confidence born of certainty in their moral rectitude and
spiritual-political purity, and an unassailable belief that they are
on the right side of History. Controlling most of the levers of social,
educational, administrative, and cultural power, these "post-Protestant" elect (who are, notwithstanding Bottum's protestations,
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2016

Contents
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