"The Rise of Secular Religion"

This essay, in The American Interest, by David Goldman, is a review of Jody Bottum's new book, An Anxious Age:  The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America.  I have not yet read the book, but I thought the review-essay was very interesting:

. . . Bottum wants us to understand that the inner life of secular Americans remains dense with spiritual experience, and that the post-Protestant experience resembles the supernatural world of the Middle Ages, but with new spiritual entities in place of the old devils and elves: “social and political ideas elevated to the status of strange divinities . . . born of the ancient religious hunger to perceive more in the world than just the give and take of ordinary human beings, but adapted to an age that piously congratulates itself on its escape from many of the strictures of ancient religion.” What Bottum calls the “re-enchantment and spiritual thickening of reality” is the subject of the book. It is an elusive quarry, for it is not a simple task to show that self-styled rationalists entertain a firm belief in the modern equivalent of ghosts and witches. For the post-Protestants, “the social forces of bigotry, power, corruption, mass opinion, militarism, and oppression are the constant themes of history” against which they must array themselves[.]

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