In 2012, Joseph Bottum, former editor of First Things, visited Zuccotti Park to report on Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Where others focused on the protestors' economic demands, Bottum heard “…a great, incoherent, cry of apocalyptic spiritual pain: we know what is right — true, good, real — and still the world lies in sin and error” (xvi). This is a hard sell, not least because OWS participants — as he admits — disavowed any connection to religion, and even named it as part of the problem. The details of the protests, though, are quickly left behind as he makes a larger argument about the fading Mainline Protestant denominations, and their surprising inheritance. An Anxious Age begins nearly a century earlier, with Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. Ministering to impoverished immigrants in Hells Kitchen, he became an important voice in the Social Gospel movement. Previously, American Protestants understood faith in terms of personal salvation. The Social Gospel, however, called on them to see their faith as a commitment to changing social structures. Jesus, in this account, came not to redeem sinners, but to call on believers to make the Kingdom of God ever closer in this present reality.

Bottum narrows in on Rauschenbusch, who decisively reconfigured the movement's understanding of the spiritual in his book A Theology for the Social Gospel. His innovation was to attribute metaphysical weight to social institutions. For Rauschenbusch, Capitalism is not just a bad idea, it is Evil per se; the sin we bear is not the result of our choices, it is the product of social systems in which we live and which we — consciously or not — perpetuate. Rauschenbusch's logic should be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with modern social theory. Good people do bad things because pernicious structures force them to.

Rauschenbusch asks his listeners to see redemption and salvation in terms of social attitudes, not God. Eventually, as Bottum recounts, God is rendered entirely superfluous; we arrive at a point where a Mainline Protestant pastor can insist that Jesus did not die to redeem our sins, he died “…because the political hierarchy of the time demanded it.” It's hard to find anything in that pastor's account that a progressive atheist would argue with. To make an analogy, preaching the Social Gospel was like jerking a tablecloth off without disturbing the place settings on top; it pulled out the belief in God, while leaving Christian ideas about equality and serving the poor in place.

To make a long story short, the Social Gospel won. Mutually reinforcing the early Progressive Movement, the New Deal, and parts of the Sixties, Social Gospel theology triumphed in one mainline denomination after another. When salvation doesn't require God, what's the point of going to church? Church attendance dropped, and the Mainline faded into irrelevance. Nevertheless, Bottum emphasizes, even with the tablecloth long gone, the place settings still remain in place. Just as a progressive atheist wouldn't object to a Social Gospel account of Jesus, there's nothing in either structural theory or income inequality rhetoric that Rauschenbusch wouldn't give an “amen.” Without realizing it, contemporary progressives — OWS protestors and structural theorists alike — are living out the theology, mores, and habits of mind laid down by their mainline ancestors. Or as Bottum puts it, this new “Post-Protestant” class is “…Christian in the righteous timbre of its moral judgments, without any actual Christianity; middle class in social flavor, while ostensibly despising” middle-class norms” (9).

If he's right, Bottum raises quite a few interesting questions, but the book feels incomplete; it reads more like an extended article than a book. He documents the similarity between Rauschenbusch and contemporary thought and, based on that, builds a persuasive theory that explains quite a bit about modern political attitudes. Nevertheless, Bottum does not provide the necessary historical evidence. For example, when did social issues replace God in Mainline rhetoric? How and when did Social Gospel rhetoric — the phrasing of social issues as spiritual responsibilities — jump to secular speech? Did those trends quantitatively correlate with church attendance figures? More challengingly, Bottum argues that contemporary secular discussions of social issues use “God talk” lifted from Mainline Protestantism, with invocations of Good and Evil and supernatural forces. But do they really, or is he just hearing what he wants to hear?

There is also surprisingly little discussion of evangelicals in the book; how do they relate to this process? The last part of the book offers a great deal of inside baseball about the Catholic Church's evolution, mostly of interest to sociologists of religion, but he does offer an interesting argument about how evangelicals adopted Natural Law rhetoric from Catholic intellectuals that is worth exploring. There is a host of potential research topics here.

One place to begin might be recent work by Jürgen Habermas and Michael Walzer who view religion not as a vestigial legacy to be rooted out, but rather as an instrumentally useful part of the human psyche, a vein of shared ideas that can be mined for the parts useful to their social projects. These ideas can be axioms like the dignity of all humans, or a vocabulary of right and wrong, but they see them the way a corporate raider sees a bankrupt corporation, as a bundle of useful assets. Once stripped of objectionable content, they insist, religion's assets can become productive units in the creation of a better society. Is this philosophical possibility the story of Mainline Protestantism? Bottum suggests that it is.

For the academic study of politics and religion, though, An Anxious Age raises a larger point. As a perusal of Politics & Religion back issues reveals, our working definition of religion is exclusive. It demands an explicit belief in a divine being who is active in the world: principally the Abrahamic God. By that definition, Post-Protestants are not religious. Anthropologists, however, tend to define religion more inclusively as a comprehensive worldview that gives meaning and moral heft to the world, regardless of whether that meaning emerges from a divine being. Bottum challenges us to follow them and listen for the metaphysical understandings behind political discourse, even when participants explicitly reject “religion.” Doing so, and in a way that expresses deep sympathy for those on all sides of contemporary debates, makes An Anxious Age worth reading.