UNITED STATES
National Catholic Register
by FATHER C. JOHN MCCLOSKEY
07/19/2014
An Anxious Age
The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America
By Joseph Bottom
320 pages, $25 (hardcover)
Image Books, 2014
To order: imagecatholicbooks.com
Joseph Bottum, the former editor of First Things magazine and a top-flight observer of the American religious scene, has written an intriguing book entitled An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America.
This book is not an easy read, but worth the trouble in order to understand the collapse of America as a largely Protestant country with a Catholic minority. In its place, we see a nation that seems to be following the once largely Christian Europe into what one can call practical atheism, i.e., people may believe in God, but he plays no important role in day-to-day living in worship or morality.
The first part of the book details how all of this happened, mostly by tracing the thought and effects of various intellectuals such as Walter Rauschenbusch and William James, who began the process that turned traditional Protestant religion into a quest for social justice rather primarily worship of the Creator, moral living and personal witness and evangelization.
Bottum intersperses his history (to my mind, unnecessarily) with descriptions of people he knows to show how they are affected in the present day by the teachings of these Protestant revolutionizers of the 1800s and early 1900s in the United States.
For Catholic readers, however, Bottum hits his stride when giving a masterly brief history of American Catholicism from the 1940s up to the present. In Chapter 10, he focuses on arguably our nation’s greatest Catholic theologian, the late Cardinal Avery Dulles, a Jesuit.
Cardinal Dulles, who converted to Catholicism (as a student at Harvard), was born into one of those old blue-blood Protestant families who reared their children in lessons of leadership and noblesse obliged (reinforced by prep schools and Ivy League colleges) to steer organizations, hold political office and in general rule the country.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.