"A Secular Age?": P. Deneen reviews J. Bottum and C. Smith

I think I've mentioned here at MOJ -- if not, I should have! -- my colleague Christian Smith's new book, "The Sacred Project of American Sociology."  (It's excellent.)  Here is an essay in The American Conservative by another colleague, Patrick Deneen, of Smith's book (as well as Jody Bottum's An Anxious Age . . . two for the price of one!).  Here's a taste:

. . . In a word, both books are stories about the “sacred” nature of what we often call “secularism.” Bottum speaks of the decline of Mainline Protestantism and its replacement by the “Post-Protestant” denizens of academe, journalism, entertainment, business, most Protestant religious outside Evangelicalism, many liberal-leaning Catholics and non-Christians, and broad swaths of “non-elites” who have been shaped by these many leaders of culture and opinion. Smith writes of one segment of this population—sociologists—who are the embodiment of what Bottum calls the Post-Protestant “poster-children.” They are what we typically call “secular.” Both these books call into question the purported a-religiosity of this “secularism,” but rather point to the specifically sectarian nature of this particular form of “secularity”—not so much “Post-Protestant,” as Bottum describes, but Protestant after God.

What struck me through my juxtaposed reading of these two books is that they together tell the story of where Protestantism went and what Protestantism became when it ceased to be a “religion.”  . . .