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

the anxious need for moral validation, ethical certainty, and psychological self-esteem. The nation’s citizens were haunted by an increasing lack of confidence in their own salvation.

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,

selfish interiority and willful blindness would want to deny. They

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

“Because the Kingdom of God has been dropped as the primary and comprehensive aim of Christianity, and personal salvation has been substituted for it, therefore men seek to save their own souls and are selfishly indifferent to the evangelization of the world.”

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.

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.”

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