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

When how we vote is how our souls are saved.

selfish interiority and willful blindness would want to deny. They

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

John Henry Newman,

Rauschenbusch’s genius was to repopulate the metaphysical realm.

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.

capitalism and the furious reactions against capitalism somehow combined to force concrete personal relationships into the abstract social and political interactions of modernity.