Spengler reviews Jody Bottum’s new book. Excerpt:

Joseph Bottum, by contrast, examines post-Protestant secular religion with empathy, and contends that it gained force and staying power by recasting the old Mainline Protestantism in the form of catechistic worldly categories: anti-racism, anti-gender discrimination, anti-inequality, and so forth. What sustains the heirs of the now-defunct Protestant consensus, he concludes, is a sense of the sacred, but one that seeks the security of personal salvation through assuming the right stance on social and political issues. Precisely because the new secular religion permeates into the pores of everyday life, it sustains the certitude of salvation and a self-perpetuating spiritual aura. Secularism has succeeded on religious terms. That is an uncommon way of understanding the issue, and a powerful one.

Bottum interprets America’s rising, rigid secularism through a religious lens — that is, he sees it as a kind of godless religion, but a religion all the same. More:

Much of the book is occupied with sketches of Bottum’s “poster children” of post-Protestantism—a psychologist in Oregon, a guitar maker in upstate New York, a gay rights activist from Austin—in whose quirks and eccentricities he detects the “spiritual density” that has made post-Protestantism a religion nearly as stable as its predecessor. The choice of subjects seems a bit arbitrary at first glance, but the common characteristic of the subjects for Bottum’s character sketches is their perpetuation of Protestant attitudes in secular form. “When we recognize their origins in Mainline Protestantism,” Bottum observes, “we can discern some of the ways in which they see the world and themselves. They are, for the most part, politically liberal, preferring that government rather than private associations (such as intact families or the churches they left behind) address social concerns. They remain puritanical and highly judgmental, at least about health, and like all Puritans they are willing to use law to compel behavior they think right.” He contrasts these “poster children” with the young generation of serious Catholics, the “swallows of capistrano” who are returning to the nest. From Bottum’s elegy for the lost Catholic culture of the 1940s and 1950s we grasp most clearly what he means by “metaphysical density,” that is, the fullness of everyday religious life, just what the dry Pietism of Mainline Protestantism replaced with the new Angelology and Demonology of the Social Gospel. In a bravura passage he offers a vivid, visceral description of the Catholic Church before Vatican II: The embroidered arcanery of copes and stoles and albs and chasubles, the rituals of Holy Water blessings, the grottos with their precarious rows of fire-hazard candles flickering away in little red cups, the colored seams and peculiar buttons that identified monsignors, the wimpled school sisters, the tiny Spanish grandmothers muttering prayers in their black mantillas, the First Communion girls wrapped up in white like prepubescent brides, the mumbled Irish prejudices, the loud Italian festivals, the Holy Door indulgences, the pocket guides to scholastic philosophy, the Knights of Columbus with their cocked hats and comic-opera swords, the tinny mission bells, the melismatic chapel choirs— none of this was the Church, some of it actually obscured the Church, and the decision to clear out the mess was not unintelligent or uninformed or unintended. It was merely insane. An entire culture nested in the crossbeams and crannies, the nooks and corners, of the Catholic Church. And it wasn’t until the swallows had been chased away that anyone seemed to realize how much the Church itself needed them, darting around the chapels and flitting through the cathedrals.

The Church lost this rich texture in daily life, and the returning “swallows” are hard put to feather their nests. This is a powerful insight, and not only for Catholics. Orthodox Jewish life is spiritually dense with performance of mitzvoth and flourishes in the United States, while the Jewish cognates of liberal Protestantism, the Reform and Conservative movements, lose members at an alarming rate.

Read the whole review. Every sentence commands attention. And if you’re like me, you’ll want to order Bottum’s book, titled An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of America.

So many books to read, so few hours in the day. Thanks to reader PG for tipping me off to this.

UPDATE: From the book’s Amazon page, this short interview with Joseph Bottum: