An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America

his 2009 article “People Power,” Matthew Continetti explains that “popular outbursts serve as a check on, and corrective to, our elites’ behavior. The people know things the elites forget or don’t want to remember.”

There is such a thing as elite opinion that is not the same as popular opinion.”

Sin, in other words, appears as a social fact, and the redeemed personality becomes confident of its own salvation by being aware of that fact.

John Henry Newman,

The new elite class of America is the old one: America’s Mainline Protestant Christians, in both the glory and the annoyingness of their moral confidence and spiritual certainty. They just stripped out the Christianity along the way.

They are, for the most part, politically liberal, preferring that government rather than private associations (such as intact families or the churches they left behind) address social concerns. They remain puritanical and highly judgmental, at least about health, and like all Puritans they are willing to use law to compel behavior they think right.

The sociologist Peter L. Berger once joked that if India is the most religious country in the world and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes.

This is the final remnant of the Christianity of their ancestors, the last enduring bit of their inheritance: a social gospel, without the gospel. For all of them, the sole proof of redemption is the holding of a proper sense of social ills. The only available confidence about their salvation, as something superadded to experience, is the self-este

largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques … in education as well as the arts.”