Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age never got the Catholic attention it deserved

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 22, 2024

With the 2025 Jubilee almost upon us, I am remembering the Great Jubilee of 2000. What a time of excitement in our Church. Of hope for its future and for the future of the world. Looking back from the perspective of 25 years later, I can’t help but wonder:

What the heck happened? All that hoopla about a “New Evangelization” of the West and how the Third Millennium would be a “New Springtime” of Faith. Where did it all go?

That is something we ought to think about as we approach the 2025 Jubilee. What we were trying to do a quarter-century ago and what went wrong. I can think of no book explaining overall why “the Catholic Moment,” at the turn of the Millenium, failed. With one exception.

2024 marks the 10th anniversary of “An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America” by Joseph Bottum. It is the only book I know of that ever tried to answer the questions I pose above. And it has been ignored by the Catholic press for a decade.

This may be because Bottum was, according to Wikipedia, “forced out” as editor of First Things many years ago. Or because he argued, even before Obergefell, that the Church should stand down against gay marriage in an article that was, to put it mildly, not well-received.

Whatever the reason for ignoring An Anxious Age, it was not because Bottum was lacking in insight. The first half of the book explains how today’s Woke are actually “Post-Protestant Poster Children,” having shed traditional religion but still being motivated by the anxieties that traditional religion properly addresses. Bottum wrote it before Woke was a thing. When the George Floyd Riots of 2020 broke out, Protestant and secular outlets rightly hailed the book for its prescience.

The second half of the book, “The Swallows of Capistrano and the Catholic Conundrum,” is not as prophetic as the first half. Bottum dismisses 1970s-era Catholic divisions as old news, unaware at that time—only one year into the Francis pontificate—of how the current pontiff would reignite those divisions. Preconciliar traditionalists vs. Call to Action radicals? Break out the theological disco ball. The ‘70s are back, baby!

Where Bottum shines, though, is in his analysis of what Turn-of-the-Millenium Catholicism was trying to do. And why it failed. No one else has ever attempted a book-length explanation of it.

The thesis holding together both halves of Bottum’s book is that the single most important fact of American life is the collapse of the Protestant Mainline. Its collapse creates the “poster children” he describes in the book’s first half, those poor souls desperately attempting to fill their religious longing for absolution through Woke politics.

For Catholics in the book’s second half, the Mainline’s collapse was a challenge to be taken up. Catholics sought to fill the space in American public life previously held by the Mainline. To provide the nation a moral language by which to understand itself and its doings in the world.

The effort was a success until it wasn’t. Catholics and non-Catholics alike made moral claims using natural law language borrowed from the Catholic tradition. But Bottum believes Catholicism’s language was ultimately too foreign to the American experience to replace the Mainline’s role in our moral fabric.

More to Bottum’s point, Catholic language had to be rooted in Catholic institutions and those institutions never recovered from the self-destruction of the 1960s and ‘70s. The over-intellectualized Catholicism of the John Paul II and Benedict XVI era brought in converts but was too thin to recreate the kind of thick Catholic culture that the Church’s own leaders had dismantled in the immediate post-Vatican II era.

Bottum’s analysis is one that really should have been engaged by Catholic media. Even now, the book’s 10th anniversary ought to be measured against our present situation. In the age of Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, for instance, isn’t the nation, again, “speaking Catholic?” How can “speaking Catholic” somehow encompass both Bottum’s old school conservative fusionism and Vance’s newfangled post-liberalism?

Catholicism’s enemies reacted to the old fusionism with hysteria about theocracy. They react to the new post-liberalism with hysteria about the rosary being a symbol of “extremist gun culture” and hysteria about Opus Dei pulling the strings at the Heritage Foundation.

Things have changed and yet they haven’t. The Catholic Moment has failed and yet a new Catholic Moment may be upon us.

Twenty-five years out from the Great Jubilee, we ought to take stock of where we were then, were we are now, and where we may be headed. Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age remains a good, if much-neglected, place to start.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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