Sociology once understood spiritual anxiety as an important metric in social analysis, but it gradually disappeared as the idea of humans as naturally spiritual slipped away. Only by restoring the concept, however, can we understand the fervor and the features of our current identity politics. 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 Church of Christ Without Christ. In their anxiety to know that they are good people, in their lack of a sense of belonging, for too many American these days politics has become a religion—a religion in which how you vote is how you are saved. 

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.