If you think your ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken but actually evil, you have ceased to do politics and begun to do religion — and a fundamental question for our time is why so many Americans are now practicing this kind of religionized politics.
The answer comes when we look back to recover what sociology once understood: the influence of spiritual anxiety. Only by understanding our national anxiety can we understand the fervor of our current political turmoil. With the collapse of the Mainline Protestant churches that once defined the American scene, a vacuum formed that could only be filled by a new church—a very Protestant-styled sense of belonging to what’s best described as The Church of Christ Without Christ. We have moved from the Great Awakening to the Great Awokening.
This event is open and free to the community. Parking is free and light refreshments will be provided.
About the Speaker
Joseph Bottum
Joseph Bottum is one of America’s most widely published thinkers. Author of over a thousand essays and reviews in journals from the Atlantic to the Washington Post, he has written books of literary criticism, the American social condition, prize-winning children’s verse, and collections of New Formalist poetry. The former literary editor of the Weekly Standard and editor of First Things, with a Ph.D. in medieval philosophy, Bottum has been profiled and interviewed in journals from Le Figaro (Paris) and Il Foglio (Rome) to the New York Times, Spiked Online, and National Review. He lives in the Black Hills, where he writes on literature and philosophy.
