Joseph Bottum on religion and the American experiment

“Think of the American experiment as a three-legged stool, its stability found in each leg's relation to the other legs. Democracy grants some participation in national identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in history, but it always leans toward vulgarity and short-sightedness. Capitalism gives us other freedoms and outlets for ambition, but it, too, always threatens to topple over, eroding the virtues it needed for its own flourishing. Meanwhile, religion provides meaning and narrative, a channel for the hunger of human beings to reach beyond the vanities of the world, but it tilts, in turn, toward hegemony and conformity.”

So says Joseph Bottum in “The Death of Protestant America,” a very nice essay that you can find in the current issue of First Things. I'll post one or two other sections that jumped out at me later in the week, but you should read the whole thing now, for the total effect of a Bottum essay is always more than the sum of its parts: he usually writes as if he's composing music rather than mere nonfiction prose.

If I can indulge in a bit of clumsy paraphrasing, Bottum warns that the democracy tends toward demagoguery, capitalism toward amoral individualism, and religion toward ideology, yet when these things can be properly balanced, the hold against each other in a more or less uneasy equilibrium.

Bottum goes on to argue that the special feature of mainline American Protestantism was its combination of countless theological divisions with a nearly univocal set moral teaching. They could never agree on the precise nature of God's relation to man, but they all agreed on how men (and women) should relate to each other. Out of this agreement sprang a rich vocabulary of moral appreciation for and criticism of the American experiment: the Christian civil religion. Yet by 1975 the mainline churches were irrevocably in decline. The strangest part is that they were complicit in their own expulsion from the public square.

Questions: Is Bottum right in his characterization of democracy? Could Evangelicals or Catholics (or Evangelicals and Catholics Together) conceivably step into the role of the old mainline churches? How can a political regime be seen as legitimate without a theological grounding?