An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America - Hardcover

Bottum, Joseph

 
9780385518819: An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385518811 ISBN 13: 9780385518819
Verlag: Image Books, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light.
In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life.
Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic,An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life.
Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected,An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

JOSEPH BOTTUM is one of the nation’s most widely published and influential essayists—and author ofThe Christmas Plains, classic reflections on the meaning of Christmas and the American prairie. Bottum, whose writing has appeared inThe Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, is the former literary editor ofThe Weekly Standard and editor in chief of First Things. He holds a PhD in medieval philosophy and has done television commentary for programs from NBC'sMeet the Press to the PBS Evening News. Bottum Lives with his family in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Joseph Bottum is one of the nation's most widely published and influential essayists and the author of The Christmas Plains, classic reflections on the meaning of Christmas and the American Prairie. Bottum, whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the IV WI Street Journal, and the Washington Post, is the former literary editor of The Weekly Standard and editor in chief of First Things. He holds a PhD in medieval philosophy and has done television commentary for pro-grams from NBC's Meet the Press to the PBS Evening News. Bottum lives with his family in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

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1.

The Poster Children

I

She lives in Oregon, a woman I know. Call her Bonnie, Bonnie Paisley. Married and divorced twice, she has two children. The younger one, the daughter, lives with her, while the older one, the son, stays with her first husband and his current wife--although that couple, too, is getting divorced, and it looks as though, for now, the boy will remain in Connecticut with his stepmother and her children.

Bonnie is a psychologist by profession, with a master’s degree from a California state university. UC Davis, I think, although I keep forgetting to ask. She has a home office in one of those surprisingly sleepy, droopy-pine Oregon towns outside Portland: a nice big old wooden house, all dark brown shingles and red trim. And to visit, even to hear her talk about it, is to realize the extent of her house pride. Not wealthy (not poor either, but she lives off her alimony and her work primarily for the county government), she paid for her perfected house mostly with thoughtfulness and elbow grease: every decoration carefully chosen, every antique sensitively restored, every wall color precisely matched, every environmentalist touch gently installed.

She would mock--in conversation, she does mock--the sterile flawlessness of 1950s suburbia. Ozzie and Harriet houses, she calls them, Leave It to Beaver homes. Of course, born in 1972, she has no memory of television’s original presentation of those fantasy residences. But for people like Bonnie, the 1960s-style sneer at the 1950s remains a common cultural coin, much as Edwardian ridicule of prissy schoolmarms and teetotaling aunts long outlasted any reality of prim Victorian women perched on Victorian chairs in overcrowded Victorian parlors. In truth, Bonnie’s careful house is a re-creation of the old television homes she mocks. Only the styles have changed: the black slate kitchen counter, the rough plank wood floor, the tied-rag rugs, that piece of oiled driftwood on the table behind the sofa, the oval bowl of smooth black stones beside the needles shoved through a ball of red yarn for her somewhat ironically indulged hobby of knitting, and over there--twisting and sparkling in the afternoon sun through the west windows--the rainbowed New Age crystals.

Ah, yes, the New Age stuff. Bonnie says she isn’t really deep into it--the sand candles and cartomancy, incense holders and angelology, the crystal balls: all the quasi-religious accoutrements they sell down at the local New Age bookstore. She hired a feng shui consultant while first setting up the parlor in the old house to be her consulting office, but she’s swapped out so much of the furniture and decoration that, she jokes, the positive chi has all drained down to the basement. And anyway, the point of that nice wooden home on a tree-lined Oregon street is that it expresses her somehow: her personality, her inner self, her way of being. She perceives it, more than anything else in her life, as her projection in the world.

As far as religion goes, she doesn’t have any. At least not any she follows with commitment, although she insists she’s a spiritual person. Her great-grandparents, her father’s grandparents, were Jewish immigrants, but their children stopped going to synagogue back in the 1940s and 1950s and married Gentiles. By the time the family line reached her, no one had practiced Judaism for over a generation. Bonnie sometimes calls herself Jewish, but mostly that’s just a way of saying she’s not one of those old-fashioned Christians. A way of saying she has broken free from the more dominant side of her family--her mother’s clan, who were once Scotch-Irish pillars of the First Presbyterian Church in a town much like, say, Mason City, Iowa.

Some of this seems to involve (as far as she’ll let on) the emotional hangover of her parents’ bitter divorce when she was eight or nine. But that cannot be the complete explanation. Everyone’s story is unique, of course, caught up in the particularities of personal experience, but in the aggregate, our stories tend to bunch up and travel together like caravans down the same highways. That’s what the discipline of sociology is supposed to be about: the combinations and shared paths, the millions of eccentric individual choices coalescing into cultural norms. It’s sociologically meaningless to say that Bonnie could have responded to her spiritual situation by worshiping the Thousand Gods of the ancient Hittites or by joining the local Oregon chapter of the Roman cult of Mithras. Possible beliefs exist, at any given moment, as either live wires or dead wires (to use a helpful metaphor William James gave us back in 1896), and whatever our theoretical possibilities, our practical choices are limited to the ones that still have some electricity running through them.

Seriously religious people have difficulty believing that any power can be pushed down the “I’m spiritual but not religious” wire. For that matter, Bonnie’s occasional claims of Jewishness don’t sound particularly religious when she deploys them; they’re more like grabs at an ethnic identity in the handful of moments when she feels she needs one (“Scotch-Irish Orange” just not having much oomph in America’s complex hierarchy of ethnic groups anymore). But there are cultural reasons that Bonnie, a reasonably smart and independent woman, has made what look at first blush like thin and unoriginal choices--class-based and socially determined preferences--in her spiritual life. And the most telling of those reasons may be that the wire of possible spiritual belief is even thinner, carries even less power, at the local Mainline Protestant church down the street from her in Oregon.

Or back at her family’s First Presbyterian Church in Mason City, Iowa, for that matter. Everyone in America has an idea of Mason City as it existed (or is imagined to have existed) a hundred years ago. It was the boyhood home of the songwriter Meredith Willson, and when he sentimentalized it as “River City” for his 1957 Broadway extravaganza The Music Man, he painted a picture of small-town America probably even more enduring than what Thornton Wilder achieved with Grover’s Corners in Our Town or Edgar Lee Masters managed with Spoon River--if only because Willson took all the stereotypes of small towns’ stolid, prudish closed-mindedness and played them for sweet, indulgent laughs: comic foibles, bathed in a golden light.

As it happens, Mason City also features in One Foot in Heaven and Get Thee Behind Me, a pair of best-selling 1940s memoirs about being the child of a preacher on the Methodist circuit in Iowa, by a writer named Hartzell Spence. Spence would go on from that parsonage upbringing to become editor of the G.I. magazine Yank during the Second World War, where he coined the noun pin-up to describe the weekly pictures he published of Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr, and other Hollywood bathing beauties. One doubts, somehow, that this is quite what his Wesleyan parents had in mind for him.

And yet Spence would also go on to produce a 1960 book called Story of America’s Religions (with its time-capsule subtitle “Published in Cooperation with the Editors of Look Magazine”) and the 1961 Clergy and What They Do. Copies are hard to find, but they may be worth the effort, for they remain wonderfully representative of their time. Oh, they have a touch of that American “multiple melting pots” stuff that they got from Will Herberg’s widely discussed 1955 book Protestant–Catholic–-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Mostly, however, they paint a panglossy, Look magazine view of the American landscape at the beginning of the 1960s. It is a terrain...

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Verlag
Image Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385518811
ISBN 13 
9780385518819
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
296
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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