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Book Review:
An Anxious Age:
The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America
by Joseph Bottum
(ISBN 978-0-385-51881-9, hardback)
Reviewed by Peter A. Taylor
January 6, 2021
Note Rachel Fulton Brown's review of this book, "Progressive is the New Puritan".
Introduction
We live in a spiritual age when the political has been transformed into the soteriological. When how we vote is how our souls are saved.
— Joseph Bottum (p. xiii)
Several years ago, there was a church men's group lunch conversation where someone asked whether the other people in the group thought the US was headed for another civil war. I tried to steer the conversation in a slightly different direction: we are already in a cold civil war—but what are the sides? Or, to put it a little differently, what are we fighting over?
We can look at social conflict in the US as a layered cocktail, e.g. a "B-52" (Grand Marnier over Bailey's over Kahlua). The controversy over Sarah Jeong's Twitter history is, on its face, about racial animosity (and double standards about racial animosity). This is the Grand Marnier.
Some racial animosity is genuine. But as Reihan Salam argues, Jeong was denigrating one group of white people, Salam's "lower whites", in order to ingratiate herself with another group of whites, Salam's "upper whites". Some of the racial acrimony is camouflage that allows "upper whites" to pretend they are heroically punching up (David) when they're really punching down (Goliath). In Salam's view, the principal conflict is between social classes. (Glenn Reynolds similarly sees class warfare disguised as culture war. This is the Bailey's.
But it's more complicated than that. For one thing, there's some "high and low against the middle" action going on, as depicted in the allegorical novel, The Burning City. But there's also far more social mobility between political factions than there is between socio-economic classes. My wife is a partisan Democrat, but comes from a conservative family, and it's not that she's all that wealthy or went to an ivy league school. She married me, now a neoreactionary, and she isn't richer or "better" educated than I am. I used to be a moderate libertarian, and became radically more politically incorrect after the 2002 election cycle, but I'm no richer or more "educated" than I was. Switching political factions is more like switching religions than switching races or classes. You don't need a lot of money or education, or a change of skin color. You may or may not have to change your theological beliefs. Mostly, you need to change your answer to Sam Keen's question, "Who are my people?" Who are the good guys in my movie?
Enter Joseph Bottom. Bottum is one of many observers who see the political turmoil in the modern US as fundamentally religious. Religion is the Kahlua in the bottom of our B-52 cocktail. What makes Bottum interesting is that (1) he has a better feel for religious psychology than anyone else I've read on this topic, and (2) he has noticed not just people moving from one religious community to another, but how these communities themselves have evolved, Mainline Protestantism in particular.
To me, the spiritual continuity, the things that didn't change, are as interesting as the things that did. Bottum traces some of America's behavioral tics all the way back to John Calvin. I will be looking at America's cold civil war in those terms. I also want to keep the Serenity Prayer in mind. What parts of America's religious heritage can I accept? What parts can I reasonably hope to change? How do I do this? And what would this involve if I decided to be a little bit unreasonable? How do I build a better religion?
The Collapse of Mainline Protestantism
There is more fear of the New York Times editorial page than fear of God.
Joseph Bottum is Catholic, but this book is mostly about Protestantism. He writes (p. 12) that Protestantism was "our cultural Mississippi, rolling through the center of the American landscape—and even the nation's Catholics and Jews understood that they lived along its banks." Bottum traces American Protestantism, as a unifying force, to "the end of the seventeenth century when the Puritans of New England began to reconcile with their fellow Protestants", seeing themselves as fellows joined in the Reformation rather than pilgrims set apart. (Sometimes Bottum writes about Protestants in general, and sometimes specifically about Puritans, leaving me a little confused about how much difference he thinks there is between the Puritans and the other kinds of Protestants.) Religious freedom paradoxically endowed the United States (p. 83) with "something very similar to the establishment of religion in the public life of the nation." He describes America as supported by a three-legged stool: democracy, capitalism, and religion. He writes (p. 291), "Religion actually works to ground the American experiment because we take religion more seriously than the American experiment."
But (p.12) "Somewhere in the 1960s, the waters began to run shallow, and by the 1990s, the central channel of American Mainline Protestantism was almost dry." Bottum goes into the statistics on pp. 88-90. He puts the high-water mark at 1965. The Mainline Protestant numbers start to collapse around 1975. Membership in Mainline churches has gone from over 50% of the US population in 1965 (p. 88) to less than 10% today (p. 90; the book is copyright 2014).
Bottum quotes Putnam and Campbell, from American Grace: "A whopping 89 percent of Americans believe that heaven is not reserved for those who share their religious faith." I want to interpret this as meaning that the Universalists have won, that only 11% of Americans believe in hell. But people can still believe in hell without believing that there is only one religion that provides a path away from it. So maybe this isn't as complete a victory for the Universalists as I imagine. But it is still a far cry from the Christianity that fought the 30 Years War.
The decline in numbers has been accompanied by a decline in ability to resist political fashions. H. L. Mencken described the Episcopal Church in the 1920s as "the Republican Party at prayer." Bottum describes it today (p. 97) as "NOW at prayer." Similarly, he writes (p. 104), "With no deposits into the account of its prestige by accommodating the economic and political props of the nation—and no influence on the culture from the everyday practices of its congregants—the prophetic demands of the United Church of Christ cash out to nothing. No one listens, no one minds, no one cares."
As G.K. Chesterton put it, "A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing goes against it." Mainline Protestantism now goes with the stream.
Bottum uses William James' metaphor of live wires and dead wires: the live wire is the one that transmits power. Many non-churchgoing people today claim to be "spiritual but not religious". Bottum writes (p. 5), "Seriously religious people have difficulty believing that any power can be pushed down the 'I'm spiritual but not religious' wire." So why don't these people go back to the Mainline churches their parents went to? His answer (p. 6) is that "the wire of possible spiritual belief is even thinner, carries even less power, at the local Mainline Protestant church...."
Other refugees from Mainline Protestantism became Evangelicals or Catholics. But (p. 13) by the 2008 election, it was clear that the Evangelicals were also in decline. (More on American Catholicism later.)
Theological vigor is not doing well, either. Bottum remarks (p. 283) that "...the theology department is typically where bad sociology goes to die." As a Catholic, Bottum is not theologically sympathetic to the Mainline Protestant churches, but nevertheless writes, "I mourn their loss." Unity has been lost. One of the legs of the American stool is broken.
Bottum writes, (p. 80) "the death of the Mainline is the central political fact of the last 150 years of American history."
The decline in membership is a lagging indicator of problems that have been building for a very long time. Bottum writes (p. 39) of the progressive children of Mainline Protestants having "a social gospel without the gospel". But he spills a lot of ink on leaders in the social gospel movement, going well back into the 19th century. Roger Finke says the Methodists hit the skids in 1850. How long has the hollowing-out of Mainline Protestantism been going on?
Divisions in American Society
In our time, the most widespread of differences between rulers and ruled is also the deepest: The ruled go to church and synagogue. The rulers are militantly irreligious and contemptuous of those who are not. Progressives since Herbert Croly's and Woodrow Wilson's generation have nursed a superiority complex.
What are some helpful ways of describing the factions in our cold civil war?
Bottum focuses on two groups of people in modern America, two sets of "case studies", whom he calls "Post-Protestant Poster Children" and (Catholic) "Swallows of Capistrano". To a lesser extent, he discusses Evangelicals, as well as the less than 10% of Americans who remain in the Mainline churches.
He also mentions some attempts to describe the political divisions in the modern US. He writes (p. 31), "The sociologist Peter L. Berger once joked that if India is the most religious country in the world and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes." But Bottum is uncomfortable with that statement, because the set of nominally irreligious Americans is much larger than any set who can reasonably be described as "rulers", and the concerns of typical "Poster Children" and rulers are different. The pseudonymous friends he describes as "case studies" (e.g. "Bonnie Paisley" and "Gil Winslow") are not high-rollers. He writes (p. xviii) that these Poster Children, cultural descendents of John Calvin, are not the "elite", but the "elect". They are, or regard themselves as, "morally elite", but not necessarily rich or powerful. Bottum writes (p. 130), "But they do not feel themselves elite in any economic or political sense of real personal power." "What they do feel is that they are redeemed. Of course, that word, too, is not one they would use of themselves, but nothing else seems as precise."
Bottum settles uneasily on the term, "Post-Protestant", to describe Bonnie (p. 10). "What, then, shall we call her? A Protestantizer, a manneristic Protestant, an example of the Protestantesque? Perhaps there's nothing better than 'Post-Protestant', a word that describes the natural result of American Protestantism thinning itself up so far that it loses all tethering in the specifics of the faith that gave it birth." I was thinking, "Trans-Protestant", to emphasize the continuity with Protestantism, but theologically, is it "post". Also, in so far as we are distinguishing between the "Elect" and the non-elect, I'm not sure what to call the latter, so I will probably call them "Deplorables".
Another view (p. 44) is that the US is divided mainly over sex. Americans are divided into "libertines" and "prudes".
Bottum has a lot to say about American Catholicism, especially his Swallows of Capistrano. The second half of the book is devoted to them. Catholic traditionalists have succeeded in bringing the Evangelicals around on the topic of abortion. Catholics have also provided theological language. Bottum's chapters on William F. Buckley and Pope John Paul II are interesting and often moving. But American Catholicism isn't really doing all that much better than Protestantism. Catholicism hasn't been able to fill the hole left by the collapse of Mainline Protestantism. He writes (p. 158), "It should also be no surprise to hear that nearly every political position for which the public vocabulary of Catholic thought was thus used has ended up losing."
Other authors follow Calvin's influence back further than the 19th century, back to the English Civil War. There is a Cheshire Cat phenomenon here, where the cat has disappeared, but the cat's grin is still there. Bottum describes (p. 9) Mainline Protestantism as "...Christian in the righteous timbre of its moral judgments, without any actual Christianity..." He observes (p. 39) "a social gospel without the gospel". Writing about democratic liberalism (p. 122), he alludes to "the puritanical root of its moral mood". He writes (p. 126, quoting Tocqueville), of "the nation's character and destiny 'embodied in the first Puritan who landed on those shores'". Daniel Hannen, author of The New Road to Serfdom, described current American politics as the third act of the English Civil War, a war between Puritan "Roundheads" and Anglican (and Catholic) "Cavaliers", with the American revolution being the second act. Hannen sympathizes with the Roundheads. He regards the American Tea Party movement as the modern version of the Roundheads, and the Washington DC establishment as the modern version of the Cavaliers. Mencius Moldbug also sees modern US politics in terms of the English Civil War, but he sympathizes with the Cavaliers, and regards the Washington establishment as "cryptocalvinist" Roundheads. Hannen's Roundheads are freedom fighters. Moldbug's Roundheads are authoritarian religious kooks who used libertarian rhetoric when they were out of power. Moldbug writes, "For me, Calvinism is a system of government which aims at total righteousness." (I was initially opposed to Moldbug's view.) Hannen's view is plausible because the Tea Party types identify with the descendants of the Roundheads, largely embrace their rhetoric, and want to preserve the Patriot (i.e. Roundhead) victory of 1782. I want to call these people "paleo-Roundheads". Moldbug's view is plausible because of the Progressives' intellectual lineage and political behavior, as well as occasionally their rhetoric, e.g. about "democracy". But they sneer at the historical Roundheads, and at their theology, so I want to call them "neo-Roundheads". The Cavaliers, as far as I can tell, are ideologically extinct, and so we are left with two different forks of the Roundhead tradition.
The difference between the elite and the non-elite parts of the Progressive coalition is not just that one group has more money or power. In "Bootleggers and Baptists", Bruce Yandle describes a coalition opposed to liquor sales on Sunday as consisting of venal "bootleggers" who want liquor banned so that they can make money selling it illegally, and high-minded "Baptists" who want it banned so they can save the world from Demon Rum. Similarly, Hillary Clinton may be motivated by money or power, but my wife's only incentive for supporting her was emotional gratification. I take it for granted that there will be opportunists among the elite. What makes An Anxious Age interesting to me is the question of what motivates people like my wife.
Religious Continuity I: Anxiety
We still have a lot of the structure of the Christian faith and the Judeo-Christian religion, but without the answers that it provides. So that we have all of the thing of guilt, but there is no way to alleviate guilt. There is no redemption. There is only a guilt.
In his preface, Bottum writes (p. xvi), "The people at Occupy Wall Street were the return of the Levelers and Diggers, lifted straight out of the seventeenth century—albeit with the explicit religion of those old Christian movements shed along the way." He says of his Poster Children (p. xix), "In both the noble range and the insufferable self-righteousness of their moral and spiritual concerns, the members of the social class that defines and sets the agenda for American culture prove identical to their middle-class Mainline Protestant Christian grandparents—just without much of the Christian religion."
I was raised Protestant, raised to think of religion in terms of theological belief systems, and so it feels unnatural to me to describe someone as a "Puritan" when he unequivocally rejects Puritan theology. Moldbug (and Bottum) spend a considerable amount of time tracing the leaders of Progressivism to their Puritan intellectual forebears (Bottum's "Erie Canal thesis"), but these leaders also rejected large parts of this legacy. I want to show that the parts that they didn't reject are still important. My justification for tarring Progressives with the Puritan brush is that I have come to see religion as being more fundamentally about the rules by which people interact with one another than about beliefs. Theology provides a rationale for where moral authority comes from, so it's somewhat important, but as Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "Our real religion is the one we behave." So what is it that causes Puritans and Progressives to resemble each other behaviorally?
Bottum's explanation, as his title suggests, is psychological: Puritans, and Calvinists in general, suffer from a characteristic anxiety about their salvation. Whereas Catholics and Lutherans believe that they are saved by faith, or possibly some combination of faith and works, Calvinists believe in predestination, and they can never be entirely sure if they were among the predestined (i.e. the elect). Bottum thus talks about salvation (soteriology). But what exactly do Progressives believe in that they need to be saved from? Instead of asking, "How do you know you're saved?", I think a better question to ask of Progressives would be "How do you know you're a good person?" Alternately, we could ask, "How do you know that your moral views are correct?"
Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt, writes in the context of race relations that the behavior of white Americans is driven by the fact that they suffer from a painful "vacuum of moral authority". Steele explains this in terms of slavery and the civil rights movement, but "vacuum of moral authority" strikes me as a pretty good description of what Bottum says is going on with the Post-Protestants. Bottum clearly understands that his Post-Protestants don't really believe in Hell, but he likes to use "salvation" and "moral authority" synonymously. He writes (p. xvi) of "the burden of the Anxious Age: an anxiety not just to be morally right but to be confirmed as morally right. Not just to be saved but to be certain of salvation."
I find myself wanting to use the term "moral authority" in a different sense than Steele uses it. Steele's "vacuum of moral authority" is about low prestige, a sort of historical, inherited guilt, like original sin. I am concerned about "moral authority" more in terms of uncertainty over the provenance of one's moral views. To some extent, people depend on the prestige of their leaders for assurance of the leaders' good moral judgement, so these two meanings overlap a good bit, but I think most people would be reluctant to admit that their moral correctness rests on such a shaky basis as prestige, so high prestige doesn't make the anxiety go away entirely.
Bottum writes that Progressives, as illustrated by John Humphrey, wanted (p. 107) "something like the Christian morality without the tommyrot". But without the "tommyrot", the theological origin story for Christian morality, what basis does John Humphrey have for thinking that the Christian morality is correct? Serious Catholics have the Pope as a source of moral authority. Serious Protestants have the Bible. What do Progressives have?
One thing they have is bluster. For both Puritans and Progressives, anxiety often manifests itself as arrogance. I got a fortune cookie once that read, "Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause." Or as Eric Hoffer writes in The True Believer, "Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us." Bottum writes (p. 36) of his Post-Protestants having a "strange combination of arrogance and anxiety". For Hoffer, this is not strange at all. Moral anxiety leads to defensiveness, which masquerades as arrogance. But in any case, Bottum's story is that American Post-Protestants resemble Puritans because they share a fundamental spiritual anxiety.
I have been using "guilt" and "anxiety" as synonyms for uncertainty about one's moral stature. This is probably appropriate when comparing Douglas Murray with Joseph Bottum, but there is some question about the sincerity of many Progressive statements about guilt. When a UU minister preaches about white guilt, is he expressing his own feelings of guilt, or is he saying that his political outgroup should feel guilty? Thomas Sowell writes,
Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.
It's not even clear that feeling guilty and laying a guilt trip on someone else are separable. Uri Harris writes,
Consider, as an analogy, a religious person writing an article on the sinfulness of humanity. It's entirely possible for that article to be both a form of self-critique via acknowledgement of one's own sins and an outgroup demonisation of nonbelievers, who are much greater sinners and don't even acknowledge that they're sinners.
Likewise, it's possible for anti-white rhetoric to simultaneously be self-critical/-flagellatory and outgroup-demonising. After all, the whites engaging in this are acknowledging their own perceived flaws, but they're also distinguishing themselves from other whites by doing so.
Religious Continuity II: Church Polity
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human race—because he is so human.
Any virtue carried to excess becomes a vice.
— Aristotle
Another problem with the word, "salvation", is that it implies a pass/fail grade administered based on a fixed standard. Everyone could conceivably pass. One person's good behavior in spreading the Good Word might even help other people pass. On the other hand, competition for social status is a zero-sum game, at least in terms of social rankings. Anything I do that increases my social status relative to you necessarily decreases your social status relative to me. Social status is a "positional good". There is no fixed standard. Whatever you do in order to get ahead of me, I have to do a little more in order to get ahead of you. If this sort of competition is not regulated somehow, it can quickly spiral into insanity.
How then, do different religions regulate such competition? The Catholic Church has a formal hierarchy, i.e. a Pope who can tell people to sit down and shut up if they're getting out of hand. Furthermore, Popes are chosen by Cardinals who are selected by previous Popes; being holier than the Pope doesn't necessarily endear you to the Pope.
When the Anglican Church split off from the Catholics, they wrote a document called "The 39 Articles". Article 14 flatly bans this sort of holiness competition, which it calls "supererogation".
However, within the Puritan tradition, we have "Congregationalism". Here, each congregation is self-governing, and can go off on a different tangent, holier than the neighboring congregation. The Unitarian offshoot from Congregationalism, which comes up repeatedly in Bottum's book, is anarchistic even by Congregationalist standards.
Much of the point of the Protestant Reformation was to break out from under the authority of the Catholic hierarchy. Martin Luther asserted that religious authority came only from the Bible (sola scriptura), and wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible and interpret it himself. So Protestantism in general tends to have problems with supererogation, but most denominations have some sort of governing structure that tries to keep this tendency in check. The Puritan tradition is an outlier in being weak in this regard.
I note that the American Civil War followed closely after the Second Great Awakening, which was going on at about the same time that Massachusetts disestablished its state religion (1833), unleashing a generation of abolitionist firebrands.
I also note Rodney Stark's claims that the Catholic Church's behavior regarding witchcraft accusations changed after the Protestant Reformation. The Church generally regarded witchcraft accusations as theologically incorrect, and generally didn't take them seriously until after the Reformation and the 30 Years War, when the Church lost its ability to impose its governance on much of Europe. Protestantism became a peer competitor in a religious marketplace, and witchcraft persecutions became useful as advertising gimmicks.
The Post-Protestants Bottum writes about are in the Puritan traditon in that they also lack a governing structure that can suppress supererogation. There is no Pope of Social Justice. As the blogger, Handle, put it, under leftism, there is open entry into the career of "public sanctimony entrepreneur". In fact, this lack of a structure to govern the Social Justice "faith" is one of the arguments that Mike Nayna and James Lindsay give for not regarding it as being a true religion: "Though there are many smaller ones, as we'll discuss, among the biggest differences between Social Justice and true religions is that religions—at least the established ones—tend to be organized around their doctrines in ways that Social Justice isn't."
Protestant Christian holier-than-thou thus becomes intersectional Progressive more-oppressed-than-thou, more-compassionate-than-thou, or more-reality-based-than-thou. Bottum writes (p. 35) that among his Poster Children, "it is somehow more Christian not to be a professing Christian".
It's not clear to me how important soteriology is relative to church polity.
Religious Continuity III: Fossils of Past Power Grabs
It is not the love of our neighbour, it is not the love of mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues. It is a stronger love, a more powerful affection, which generally takes place upon such occasions; the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters.
— Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
The result is that by now, the average voter's head is stuffed to bursting with the fossils of past power grabs. Almost everything they say or do that has any political relevance whatsoever is the echo of some dead politician's clarion call to serve his interests over their own.
—
Alrenous
I quote Smith here in order to contrast his emphasis on moral grandeur with Bottum's emphasis on anxiety. In Bottum's view, anxiety is a specifically Calvinist thing. If the Poster Children are motivated by the love of moral grandeur, which in Smith's view is a human universal rather than being specifically Calvinist, we need another explanation of why their pursuit of it resembles Calvinism.
Alrenous' explanation is that the modern United States is the result of a series of successful power grabs by a series of politicians, and the received political wisdom of the American people is the accumulated set of lies and sophistry that enabled those power grabs. He writes, "The truth is what it is, but a lie can be designed for marketability; to go down easy and smooth, to fit existing misconceptions." Each lie builds on the previous lies, taking advantage of the previously established misconceptions.
For example, my impression is that John Locke and Thomas Jefferson were both propagandists rather than serious philosophers. My sense of Locke is that his contribution to political thought consists mainly of confusing two very different questions:
The result of this confusion reminds me of the South Park "Underpants Gnomes" episode.
My impression is that the whole classical liberal movement was a swindle, confusing these questions in order to rationalize a power grab. George III took the view that the American revolutionaries, in the name of natural rights, were attacking the person whose job it was to defend those rights (i.e. him).
Other examples of established misconceptions include
Progressives thus resemble Roundheads because their political culture is built on the same foundation of sophistry (i.e. the English Civil War and its sequel, the American Revolution). Progressives and Roundheads both think that politicians should be chosen based on their claims of superior holiness, and holiness is calculated according the evolving but still recognizable Puritan tradition.
Religious Discontinuity
That power can be considerable, and for all the good it can do, among the biggest lessons learned over the last two thousand years is the lesson that a free society depends upon preventing the institutional power of a moral tribe (to generalize a bit) from gaining state power—this is of the utmost importance to any free society.
— Mike Nayna and James Lindsay,
Postmodern Religion and the Faith of Social Justice
Mike Nayna and James Lindsay present a mixed argument. On the one hand, they say that "Social Justice" is a "moral tribe", a "close cousin" of religion rather than a "true religion". So not only is Social Justice not a form of Calvinism, it isn't even a "religion". And the problem of keeping "moral tribes" away from state power is not a uniquely Calvinist problem. On the other hand, "hate" is functionally equivalent to the "total depravity" that forms the "T" in the Calvinist TULIP. "Privilege" is functionally equivalent to Original Sin. (Paul VanderKlay points out that "white guilt" is a form of substitutive atonement, in which one group of white people, those alive today, are supposed to atone for other white people's behavior, e.g. antebellum slavery.) The humanities professors in academia are functionally priests, who engage in "idea laundering" (Bret Weinstein's term) by misrepresenting "beliefs" that have not been subjected to scientific scrutiny as "knowledge", which has been so scrutinized. They write, "The priest's job is to muddy this water while appearing to clarify." They even explain Social Justice soteriology: the two paths to salvation are either to be a member of an oppressed minority, or an "ally". Becoming a trans-sexual is a way of becoming a member of an oppressed minority.
So Social Justice isn't technically a "religion", but it's functionally equivalent.
Obviously, belief systems do not reproduce sexually, so describing the relationship between Christianity and Progressivism in terms of biological evolution is only an analogy. The argument is over whether it is a useful analogy. I suggest that a better analogy might be that of a hermit crab taking over the shell of a dead nautilus. Christianity is dying out in America, and Progressivism resembles it because it occupies what is largely the same niche, and in many cases the same institutional structures (e.g. Unitarian Universalist "churches"). But in some respects, the "hermit crab" and the "nautilus" are very different animals.
One difference, which Nayna and Lindsay allude to, is that Christianity and Progressivism have different biases regarding the State. Christianity has "render unto Caesar", a default assumption that the State is not a friend, and needs to be kept at arm's length. This principle has often been trampled by opportunism on the part of the Church and by the need for moral legitimacy on the part of the State, but it is still felt. Progressivism, on the other hand, appears to have evolved from Marxism in this regard, and is unequivocally political. "The personal is political." Progressivism has been shaped from its inception as a tool by political leaders wanting to grab power.
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
— George Orwell,
Politics and the English Language, 1946
Another difference is in the basic worldview. Anthropologist Robert Priest says that there are two kinds of culture. In one kind of culture, if something bad happens to me, my reaction is,
Oh. God must be angry with me. I'd better figure out what I did wrong and stop doing it.
In the other kind of culture, if something bad happens to me, my reaction is,
Oh. One of my neighbors must be practicing witchcraft. I'd better figure out who it is and kill him.
Identity politics and the academic "grievance studies" industry are essentially industrial-scale promoters of witchcraft accusations. "Stereotype threat" is witchcraft, causing people to stumble by thinking bad thoughts about them, even unintentionally. The "disparate impact" doctrine is similar: the negative consequences of one group's statistically bad behavior are blamed on a different group. It's true that Christianity did at times become tainted with witchcraft accusations, but as Rodney Stark indicates, it was something of an aberration, whereas it seems to be the central feature of modern Progressivism. It seems to me like a bum rap to blame these witchcraft accusations on Progressivism having a Christian heritage.
There is also Bret Weinstein's observation that fundamentalist Christians proselytize. They want to persuade you, to save your soul. Social Justice Warriors don't want to persuade you. They just want to metaphorically burn you at the stake.
I notice that I have been throwing around the terms, "Progressivism" and "Social Justice Faith" as if they were more or less interchangeable, which is a mistake. "Social Justice Faith" is a narrower term than "Progressivism". Bret Weinstein is a Progressive, but not a Social Justice Warrior. Weinstein says there is a liberal left and an illiberal left. The Social Justice Faith is part of the illiberal left. Lindsay did an interview with Paul VanderKlay, "Grievance studies as religion eating atheism from the inside", in which VanderKlay proposes the name, "Progressive Liberationism", as an alternative both to Lindsay's name, "Social Justice Faith", and to "Critical Theory".
There are also differences in postures towards envy. Christianity teaches that envy is a sin. But envy is the easiest sin to weaponize for political purposes. Progressivism makes it a sacrament.
But even if we reject the claim that Progressivism is essentially Christian, it is still more religious than racial. The Chinese term for Progressivism is "baizuo", or "white left". There is conflict over beliefs about race, but it is still mostly conflict over beliefs. Note St. Paul's position in Galatians 3:28:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Paul had an ingroup and an outgroup, but they were based on beliefs, not ethnicity. Progressivism is more complicated. It tries to rally supporters based on race, sex, and various other "identity" factors, but it is not the case that Progressives view blood as thicker than water. Let a Thomas Sowell criticize a Progressive doctrine, e.g. affirmative action, and he will be declared an "Uncle Tom", i.e. liturgically "white".
Mike Nayna has a 9:06 introductory video about his paper with James Lindsay. His written notes on the Youtube page say,
It's worth mentioning we're not claiming that either social justice or religion are inherently bad. We're neutral in this regard. The claim is Social Justice takes on many of the qualities of a religion and should be recognized and treated as such.
I'm hoping that insight into the relationship between Progressivism and Christianity can be used to stop Progressives from abusing state and quasi-state power (e.g. social media and other monopolies that are too firmly in bed with the state). But this is complicated. In my view, there is enough "horizontal gene transfer" going on that the creature we are looking at is neither an evolved "nautilus" nor a "hermit crab", but a chimera.
Why Did the Collapse Happen and Why Circa 1970?
Bottum only spends a page or two discussing why Mainline Protestantism collapsed. To me, the question seems much more interesting and important, and none of the explanations Bottum provides seem satisfying. The first three explanations he provides (p. 104) are the standard ones, and the next two are his own. The remainder are my additions.
Standard explanations:
Bottum writes of a debate between John Calvin and Cardinal Sadolet, that "when believers break the chain of apostolic succession", it results in dangerous "innovation" (Sadolet's term).
Sadolet's concerns about "innovation" sound much like Handle's "entrepreneurship". Yes, it's a thing, and yes, it makes Protestantism fissiparous, but Laurence Iannaccone argued in Deregulating Religion with a wealth of supporting data that having large numbers of independent religious "firms" results in healthy competition that makes religion better and more popular. "Fissiparous" does not mean the same thing as "unpopular". And if it did, why would there be a 400 year delay between cause and effect? And why is Sunni Islam, which is similarly fissiparous, still going strong? And why is Christianity still going strong in the developing world?
Bottum also writes (p. 105) of Søren Kierkegaard's concerns, expressed in 1854, that Protestants would destroy their religion by watering it down. Indeed, Laurence Iannaccone writes of churches lying on a spectrum from "lenient" (watered down, low tension) to "strict" (cask strength, high tension), and has a paper titled, Why Strict Churches are Strong.
Randall Collins (p. 165 of Rational Choice Theory and Religion: Summary and Assessment, Lawrence A. Young, ed., paper, ISBN 0-415-91192-3) writes that there is typically conflict within churches between lower class members wanting to be on the high tension end of the spectrum (Matthew 20:16, "So the last shall be first, and the first last") and "worldly" upper class members wanting to be on the low tension end (maintain the status quo). Over time, the upper class members tend to win these fights, and so churches tend to move from high to low tension. But low tension churches tend to have trouble attracting new members. And so there tends to be a natural life cycle: new religious institutions start "strict", grow, turn "lenient", and fade away, to be replaced by younger institutions. This is what Roger Finke says happened to the Methodists.
So yes, this watering-down of religion is also a thing. Individual denominations do this. But then the question becomes, why would all of the Mainline Protestant denominations do this simultaneously (and relatively suddenly)? Why aren't new Christian denominations in the US growing at their expense and replacing them? And why did this happen in 1965?
A third explanation is that Churches couldn't compete for people's attention with newspapers, entertainment, sports, and material goods. (Bottum says the related "Secularization Thesis" is "mostly debunked".) Part of the reason why people go to church is for supernatural benefits like faith healing. If modern medicine is getting pretty good, there will be less demand for faith healing. Part of the reason to go to church is for Rodney Stark's "compensators", promises of a better afterlife for people who are suffering in this life. If people aren't suffering so much, because their lives are better in material ways, again there is less demand for these promises. Part of the reason to go to church may be for entertainment. Maybe now we have better, more addictive forms of entertainment. Maybe the Beatles really are more interesting than Jesus and the Superbowl more interesting than eternal salvation. Maybe people would rather meet their future spouses at school or work than in church. I will add that part of the reason for being a member of a faith community is to be able to get help in an emergency. To some extent, the welfare state may have displaced traditional religion.
But the reasons for going to church mostly haven't really gone away. People still get old and sick, and die, even if they die older and die of different things, and the causes of death are better understood. The Beatles and the Superbowl aren't going to help you stay married or help you raise your children. People still struggle with the search for meaning and purpose. Most important in my view, it doesn't fill the vacuum of moral authority.
Also, in some respects, medicine and church are complementary. Paul VanderKlay ("You must care for yourself because you are not your own, JBP 12 Rules for Life Chapter 2") talks about a diabetic who shows up at church with doughnuts. He goes to a doctor to get treated for diabetes, but he still needs moral support to stay on his diet, which he gets some of at church (but apparently not enough).
We could also add the sexual revolution to the list of things that Churches may have had trouble competing with for people's attention. Reliable contraceptives offer a partial explanation for the timing. But was the sexual revolution more a cause of the weakening of Mainline Protestantism, or more an effect? Alternative forms of birth control (e.g. oral sex) have been around for a long time; my impression is that the sexual revolution was a sign of a loss of influence of Christianity over Americans' behavior that had been going on for a long time.
Bottum's bonus explanations:
Another explanation that Bottum offers is eccumenicalism, or cross-denominational sympathy. Paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, he calls this "Mere Religion" (p. 106). "[T]he horizontal unity of Mere Religion cuts across denominations. Serious, believing Presbyterians, for example, now typically feel that they have more in common with serious, believing Catholics and Evangelicals—with serious, believing Jews, for that matter—than they do, vertically, with the unserious, unorthodox members of their own denomination." In Larry Iannaccone's terms, Mainline Protestant leadership has abandoned "distinctiveness".
American Protestants used to take a dim view of Catholicism, but nowadays they have pretty much buried the hatchet. Catholics used to be reliable allies of the Democratic Party, but (p. 185) between 1970 and 2005, they have been thrown under the bus because of opposition to abortion, a cause which evangelical Protestants have generally taken up.
Bottum is not clear on how this leads to the collapse of Mainline Protestantism, but I gather that the argument is that competition between denominations strengthens them (see p. 105, or Laurence Iannaccone's paper, Deregulating Religion). Without meaningful competition, ministers get lazy, church gets boring, and people's spiritual needs don't get met. Also, distinctiveness makes people feel special. What is the point of joining a church if being a member is no different from being a non-member?
But again, if ecumenicalism is bad for church growth, why would all of the Mainline Protestant denominations embrace it more or less simultaneously? Why aren't new and highly distinctive Christian denominations in the US eating all of their lunch rather than just part of it? And why 1965? I don't really see how the distinctiveness argument gets me out of church entirely, rather than just moving me to a different church.
Bottum also suggests that the collapse of US Protestantism is a side effect of the collapse of European Protestantism. Europe provided theological leadership and kept the denominations distinctive. I presume that high-grade theology helped keep them intellectually respectable, as well.
But that raises more questions. Why did European Protestantism collapse? If Biblical criticism undermined Protestantism, why didn't the Protestants become more like Catholics, who didn't make so much of a "fetish" of the Bible?
Why can't Americans provide their own theological leadership? We have Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists, Heaven's Gate, and just generally
kooks in all colors and sizes. Okay, "intellectually respectable" may be kind of a stretch, but we also have top-notch universities. Why can't we combine them?
More bonus explanations:
A second interpretation of the Secularization Thesis is that, in addition to less demand for the services that churches provide, it's also possible that communications and transportation technology (e.g. television and cars) undermined people's belief in Christian theology. Jordan Peterson (circa 7:20) talks about "group-fostered beliefs". Larry Iannaccone talks about "credence goods". These kinds of propositions (i.e. theology) are essentially unprovable, and churches promote belief in them largely by creating an illusion of consensus. Television shows people strange foreign lands, with strange people who have strange beliefs that tend to undermine the illusion of consensus. In addition, cars tend to break up the communities that support these group-fostered beliefs.
The problem I have with this explanation is that a new illusion of consensus has emerged. If the old pillars supporting a Christian consensus have eroded, where is the support for the new consensus coming from? Did Christianity die first, and Progressivism get sucked into the vacuum, or did Progressivism kill Christianity while it was still reasonably healthy? Did Humpty-Dumpty fall, or was he pushed? Did television kill Mainline Christianity, or did Progressivism take over television to create a new illusion of consensus? And if so, how?
Regarding the Secularization Thesis, Phil Gorski writes, "the weakening of traditional Christianity appears not as a decline of religion per se ... but as a return to polysemism, since the new worldviews are not uniformly theistic." What's going on is not so much a decline in "religion" but a transfer of people from Christianity to other religions, belief systems, or James Lindsay's "moral tribes". If one doesn't recognize Lindsay's Social Justice Faith as a de facto religion, then the decline of Mainline Protestantism looks like a decline in religion in general, and a scattering of religious impulses over many new-age fads. But once we recognize Progressivism as a de facto religion, it seems pretty clear to me that "religion" is alive and well, and that Progressivism is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room.
A third interpretation of the Secularization Thesis is what is called "the God of the gaps", or (VanderKlay) the "subtraction story". This is the version of the Secularization Thesis that I am familiar with from Larry Iannaccone's work. The focus here is on science rather than technology. Religion is seen in large part as a bunch of pre-scientific explanations for natural phenomena. As science has filled in more of our understanding of how the universe works, "God" has retreated into the shrinking gaps in our knowledge.
Charles Darwin figures prominently this story. In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins makes a big point of the fact that, prior to Darwin, atheism wasn't intellectually respectable. You could be a Deist, but atheists couldn't explain where plants and animals came from.
As Paul VanderKlay put it in his Rough Draft for Melbourne Talk 3, "Darwin destroyed Heaven." (VanderKlay also refers in this talk to "this age of anxiety".) I also note Talk 1 and Talk 2. In Talk 2, he talks about different visions of God, i.e. "God 1" and "God 2", and about how people thought about God differently post-Darwin and post-Reformation. God 1 is important for explaining origins and finding meaning. God 2 is important for morality. (He also complains that Critical Theory has seeped into Mainline Christianity.) God went from Old Testament judge, with heaven and hell, to the Deist "vast indifference of heaven" that Warren Zevon sang about. Mainline Protestantism devolved into Charles Taylor's "Moralistic therapeudic Deism".
In this story, Darwin knocked the legs out from under Christian theology (God 1, mostly), but it took a long time to fall. This process took longer in the US because, as Iannaccone explains in Deregulating Religion, the free market in religion in the US offered Americans a superior product to what Europeans had under their state churches. But still, the collapse seems like it took an awfully long time before it started in earnest, and then it happened awfully fast.
This "subtraction story" also doesn't make sense when one looks at the distribution of religious beliefs among university faculty, as Stark, Iannaccone, and Finke do in Rationality and the Religious Mind. Anthropologists and non-clinical psychologists tend strongly to be atheists, but people in the hard sciences tend to be about as religious as regular people (after controlling for sex). They write, following Robert Wuthnow,
...[T]he social sciences lean toward irreligion because they are "the least scientific disciplines." Their semi-religious reliance on nontestable claims about the nature of humans and human society puts them in direct competition with traditional religions (something Comte explicitly acknowledged when he coined the word "sociology" more than 150 years ago). Not coincidentally, it is these same disciplines that have produced nearly all the literature on the presumed incompatibility between religion and science and the inevitability of religious decline.
A fourth interpretation of the Secularization Thesis, as suggested above by Stark, et al, is that, rather than science inevitably replacing religion in general, what is really happening is that a new religion is replacing Christianity in the West. Furthermore, rather than being inevitable, this replacement is contingent on a number of highly dubious propositions, through which the new religion has clothed itself in scienciness.
At about the 11 minute mark in his interview with Paul VanderKlay, James Lindsay says that there are two atheist movements running in parallel, the "rationalists" (e.g. Sam Harris) vs. the "social justice activists". As the title of the video says, the latter is "religion eating atheism from the inside". But where Lindsay is concerned about "Social Justice Faith" recently eating atheism, I am concerned about it having first eaten much of Christianity.
About 42 minutes into the video, Lindsay begins talking about "something that is distinctly not science, that is getting to pass as science". Then, "There is such a thing as sociological rigor, but when you start allowing people in the humanities to draw sociological conclusions without demanding that they use sociological rigor, now you've got a problem." The hoax papers he authored with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose were all broken in some way, e.g. asserting the conclusion. He says "The sociologists went berserk" when this stuff was associated with sociology. This "grievance studies" literature is neither humanities nor social science, and is statistically illiterate. "Through some process that Bret Weinstein called 'idea laundering', this goes through their peer review system.... carries the imprimatur of sociology." VanderKlay describes this literature as "the sociological equivalent of creation science". Lindsay agrees, and describes the blank slate theory as "the psychological equivalent of creation science".
This scienciness matters because real sciences like geology and biology have justified high prestige, providing the oil and medicine that modern life depends on. The stolen prestige gives the "Social Justice Faith" the moral authority which Bottum's Post-Protestants crave. Scienciness thus replaces God.
Scienciness also allows the Social Justice Faith to get around the US 1st Amendment prohibition against establishing a state religion. SJWs can use the 1st Amendment as a pretext for driving Christianity, as a competing religion, out of the public sphere, while demanding that its own dogmas be taught in the public schools as "science". (See How Dawkins got pwned, parts 1 and 2.)
In Western European countries such as Great Britain, the existance of a nominal state religion complicates this argument. The "indolent clergy" of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, who "repose themselves on their benefices", tend to weaken Christianity, which is consistent with it collapsing there before it did in the US. On the other hand, the Church of England should have been able to maintain its influence on public education through the state. At least, there is no 1st Amendment there that could be used as a pretext for driving it out. But Great Britain seems to have the worst of both worlds, suffering from the "indolent clergy" of a formal state religion while having political norms that support freedom of (nominal) religion, making the state religion toothless as well as lazy. This toothlessness may require its own explanation.
Several of the above explanations are plausible, but incomplete: they don't explain the rapidity of the collapse of Mainline Protestantism. One possibility is that we have had a lot of apathetic agnostics for a long time, but until recently, there was a great deal of social pressure on them to represent themselves as Christians. What happened during the 1970s was a preference cascade. A critical mass of atheists and agnostics had gone public, which encouraged others to go public, which encouraged still more to go public, in a rapid chain reaction. Suddenly large numbers of atheists and agnostics feel comfortable admitting openly to not being Christian.
This still suffers from the problem Phil Gorski described, that I am not trying to explain genuine secularization, but rather the replacement of Mainline Christianity by a different religion, or mix of religions. James Lindsay mentioned two "atheist" movements running in parallel, one (the Social Justice Faith) having large numbers. Has this really been the case for centuries?
Edward Dutton (25 minute mark) says it was genetic, and we hit the "spiteful mutant" tipping point in 1993. This led to a preference cascade. At the risk of putting words in Dutton's mouth, apparently 20% of the population being uncooperative is enough to disrupt the "altruistic punishment" (I don't recall Dutton using that term) by which weakly altruistic people enforce good behavior upon one another. This explanation doesn't really satisfy me because, again, I see the collapse of Mainline Protestantism as a transition from one religion to another rather than a genuine reduction in "religious" behavior. Besides, the timing is wrong.
Paul VanderKlay (also in Melbourne 2) offers another explanation for the suddenness of the Mainline collapse in the US, especially in contrast to Europe: the cold war kept Christianity alive in the US. With the USSR championing atheism, and the USA opposing the USSR in general, it was unpatriotic for Americans to abandon Christianity.
I don't think this is crazy, but I also don't think the timing quite works out. The Mainline collapse started in the late 1960s or early 1970s, but the USSR seemed to be going strong until the late 1980s. I also tend to think that Communism itself was a consequence of the weakness of Christianity, and that many Mainline churches were rather sympathetic to Communism.
On the other hand, it's possible that Apollo 8 had something to do with it. Maybe a lot of people decided that the USSR had reached its sell-by date during the Apollo 8 mission. (The G.I. Bill may also have had something to do with the collapse. Maybe academia was already becoming hostile towards Christianity, and an increasing number of people attending college lowered the prestige of Christianity, but it took a generation before the effects became evident in church attendance.)
Another explanation is that, despite the 1st Amendment, the US actually does have a de facto state religion, which is enforced by various institutions in plausibly deniable ways, and that the collapse of Mainline Protestantism is a reflection of its loss of control over these institutions. Eric S. Raymond (ESR) writes of Gramscian damage, a reference to Antonio Gramsci's "long march through the institutions". ESR attributes this takeover to Soviet activity during the cold war, sort of like Hamlet dying from the poison on Laertes' sword, even though Laertes died first. (Mencius Moldbug differs here and here on where the poison originated.)
In some ways, this is the antithesis of the previous explanation. Where VanderKlay suggests that Mainline Protestantism collapsed because people no longer felt the need for it after the US won the Cold War in material terms, Raymond suggests (in my terms, not his) that Mainline Protestantism was suppressed after the US lost the Cold War in religious and institutional terms. It's as if the USA and USSR were horses that were being ridden respectively by Martin Luther and Karl Marx; Marx had his horse shot out from under him, but he still won the battle against Luther. Here I am using Marx as a metaphor for a religious tendency rather than an economic or political theory. The war between "Marx" (and his ideological kin) and "Luther" had been going on for well over a century; what happened in the 1960s was that a critical line was breached in "Luther's" institutional defenses.
The institutions involved in promoting the new de facto religion include the public schools, the universities, the churches, Hollywood, and the news media. I like to say that an operational definition of a theocracy is "any government that controls the education system", and I tend to focus primarily on the public schools, but it's not actually clear to me which of these institutions is the most important. I have a friend who was home-schooled, and she's pretty much a stereotypical Progressive. Hollywood probably has more power to determine what is "cool" than teachers do.
Note that my version of this story is different from ESR's version. ESR is focused on the USSR and its activities as revealed in the Venona transcripts. My thinking runs more along the lines of Eric Hoffer: "Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves." Also, ESR isn't trying to explain the collapse of Mainline Protestantism, so much as the collapse of classical liberalism.
One objection to the previous explanation is that, while American Progressivism was, to a considerable extent, a stalking horse for Soviet Communism, they were never really the same thing, and they had a falling out in the aftermath of WWII. Marxism was an attempt to create a quasi-religious alternative to Christianity, and was always explicitly hostile to Christianity, but Progressivism started out as Social Gospel Protestantism, an offshoot of Christianity. Progressivism was an "inclusive" quasi-religion in the sense that you could be both a Progressive and a Christian, whereas Christianity was an "exclusive" religion that frowned very strongly on people claiming to be simultaneously both Christian and some other religion (but Progressivism doesn't officially count as a "religion"). Larry Iannaccone talks of "portfolio religion", where one can mix different religious traditions in a "Chinese menu" fashion. Christianity has traditionally frowned on this (although it does tend to swallow up its competitors, for example turning Saturnalia into Christmas).
So one explanation for the collapse of mainline Protestantism is that, sometime around 1970, Progressivism switched from being an inclusive religion to being an exclusive one, or at least, it started to exclude traditional Christianity. As the saying goes, "We will be your friend until we are strong enough to be your enemy."
Politically, this is a little awkward for the Democratic Party. As Scott Alexander pointed out in The Godlessness that Failed, the Democratic Party has black and hispanic votebanks that are respectively heavily Protestant and Catholic. As Alexander explains it, the radical atheist movement that was a conspicuous presence in the early days of the internet became unfashionable when The Powers That Be realized that it was costing them votes. But this hasn't caused Mainline Protestantism to make a comeback. Possibly there are "high church" and "low church" versions of Progressivism; perhaps high church Progessivism is exclusive, and has replaced Mainline Protestantism, but low church Progressivism is still inclusive, and is compatible with the Christianity practiced in black and hispanic churches.
Update: Peter Hitchens seems to think the collapse was a delayed reaction to World War I, in which the various churches squandered their moral authority by enthusiastically supporting the war. But was WWI really all that much worse than the Crusades and the 30 Years War?
The explanations I find most plausible are
After listening to John Vervaeke's lectures on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, the distinction between 7 and 8 seems blurry to me. Vervaeke talks about the relation between science and religion. Aristotelian science and metaphysics played well with Christianity (at least, as Aristotle was understood by Augustine), but by the time of Hegel (1770 - 1831), Christianity had become estranged from science and philosophy; at best, they were becoming irrelevant to one another, with science being more prestigious. The supernatural stopped seeming real to many people. Hegel's successors developed pseudo-religions such as Marxism that wrapped themselves in the prestige of science.
My impression of what happened to Mainline Protestantism is that it was a combination of explanations 7, 8, 9, 11, and 12. These Marxism-related pseudo-religions gradually took over the largely state-controlled education industries and the nominally private intellectual fashion industries throughout the Western world. The Cold War was mostly a religious war, and the Marxists (or their intellectual descendents) won. In Europe, Marxism was openly hostile to Christianity from the start, but in the US, Social Gospel Protestantism (AKA Progressivism) was formally a branch of Christianity. The intellectual orders (see Vervaeke) that supported Christianity continued to erode until, in the sixties, Progressives decided it was time to kick Jesus to the curb and be openly more like Marxists. This triggered a preference cascade. Christianity became unfashionable among "educated" people (i.e. people who had been indoctrinated in State-controlled institutions), and the Mainline collapsed over the next generation. The new Post-Protestant religion of "Progressive Liberationism", or "antiracism", as Bottum calls it at one point, has become the de facto US state religion.
Update, 4-13-2023: John Vervaeke says in this video at the 38:36 mark that Mary Eberstadt says in How the West Really Lost God that the rise in people living alone is the variable that correlates most strongly with loss of belief in God.
5-2-2023: Louise Perry suggests at the 53:18 mark in this interview that de-Christianization was partly caused by the drop in infant mortality. "People must have been desperate to believe in Heaven when they could expecct half of their children to die before they reached adulthood." (It isn't clear if she is thinking of the timing in terms of the Industrial Revolution or the discovery of penicillin.)
The Other Loose End
I was disappointed by Bottum's explanations for the collapse of Mainline Protestantism, but I was also disappointed with his discussion of the political implications. Bottum, like Tom Holland, spends a lot of time describing how religion affects people's political behavior, but the influence goes in both directions. Theoretically, the US is not supposed to have a state religion, and people tend to overestimate the importance of that theory. But as long as religion and pseudo-religion confer moral legitimacy on politicians' actions, political actors will find the temptation irresistable to try to influence these belief systems. As Orwell said, "there's no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'", so everyone with any influence is a political actor, from journalists, to media moguls, to academians. Bottum is interested in how religion drives politics, how people use politics to fill the vacuum of moral authority left by their abandonment of traditional theological beliefs. I'm more interested in how politics drives religion, how a breakdown of religious authority makes people vulnerable to political charlatans. Protestantism influenced Western politics (e.g. the English Civil War and it's continuation in the American Revolution), but political movers and shakers also influence the development of religion. Martin Luther was successful in part because certain German princes found it politically expedient to support him. Henry VIII wanted a divorce. Charles I wanted the power to appoint bishops (although that seems to have backfired).
How are these tendencies playing out in the modern US? Is multiculturalism being forced on the political establishment by the legacy of Galatians 3:28? I find it hard to see how Muslim and Hindu immigration is justified by the principle that "all are one in Christ Jesus." It seems to me that multiculturalism is a circumstantial ad hominem, in which people for whom Christian theological arguments are not cogent are using those arguments in order to manipulate Christians. But why do these arguments work on Post-Protestants like "Bonnie Paisley" and "Gil Winslow"?
I like the "bootleggers and Baptists" model of political coalitions in general, but one shortcoming of that model as it applies to Progressive Liberationism is that bootleggers don't have much influence over Baptist theology. Modern American political movers and shakers, on the other hand, have quite a lot of influence over what Progressives think. Moral authority, or as Bottum calls it, "salvation", is now derived from worldly prestige, and the gatekeepers of worldly prestige all seem to be in bed with the political establishment, whom I regard as charlatans.
Where Is This Going?
The Post-Protestants are still acting insecure. As Bottum puts it (p. 178), "But the god of the philosophers isn't much of a god to go home with." The Post-Protestants seem to know that they're on thin ice. The situation seems unstable. No one seems happy.
If the "Elect" are unhappy, there's also some interesting fermentation going on among their critics, for whom I have still found no better term than the "Deplorables". I feel awkward describing Peter Boghossian as a "Deplorable", but consider his essay, "Welcome to Culture War 2.0: The Great Realignment", in which he writes,
This is where it gets bizarre....
As a point of contact, I am a non-intersectional, liberal atheist. If a conservative Christian believes Jesus walked on water—and believes this either is or is not true for everyone regardless of race or gender—and if she values discourse and adheres to basic rules of engagement, then she is closer to my worldview than an atheist who believes race and gender play a role in determining objective truth and that her opponents should not be allowed to air what she considers harmful views.
I see Christians like Paul VanderKlay on Youtube talking to atheists like James Lindsay and John Vervaeke, with the ambiguous Jordan Peterson in the background. Christianity started out as a bastard child of Judaism, with Hellenistic influences. I can easily imagine another mutation of Christianity that outcompetes the Post-Protestant Social Gospel non-gospel. I am reminded of atheist Mencius Moldbug's tribute to the conservative Christian, Lawrence Auster:
Actually, there are few things that would please me more than seeing my daughter become a Christian. If only because it would mean she was not a worshiper of Beyonce, or something worse....
For instance, characteristic of the enormous, and certainly regal, dignity of the man, is the strength and honor with which Auster approaches death. Socrates was not a Christian, nor was Cato, nor were the 47 Ronin. So atheists need not despair of these qualities. On the other hand, neither Socrates nor Cato had to live in the same world as Beyonce. It strikes me as quite implausible that when our dark age ends and the kings return, if ever, it will be under any banner but the Cross.
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