by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Supernaturally Occupied?

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After devoting several years to the strenuous maintenance of the First Things editorial line following the death of Richard John Neuhaus, Jody Bottum turned to what he does more congenially: taking the religious temperature of America.  He exchanged his old haunts (New York, First Things) for new ones (South Dakota, Commonweal, Amazon).  And with the success of his Kindle Singles – three bestsellers in a row – he has applied the moral thermometer in a printed-and-bound book, just out, called An Anxious Age, written out of the 10,000-book personal library in his rambling house in Rapid City.

In an interview – on Amazon, it happens – Jody explains that the book came out of a busted assignment to report on Occupy Wall Street:

I … couldn’t finish the assignment. I could feel a spiritual anxiety about modern civilization radiating from nearly all of them, but I could find no easy way to explain it.

Now, two years later, this book is my answer: Not just those protestors, but nearly everyone today is driven by supernatural concerns, however much or little they realize it. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives—together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation of individuals desperate to stand on the side of morality—anxious to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light.

The trouble, of course, is that we’ve lost any shared cultural notion of what exactly that goodness might entail.

Jody – a Georgetown graduate who has offered plenty of tart commentary about the place over the years – was on campus the other night for a conversation with Ross Douthat, who last summer offered some tart commentary of his own about Jody’s Commonweal essay supporting same-sex marriage.  I wish I’d gotten the chance to ask Jody to spell out his “anxious age” theory.  About everyone’s wish to be good – and to be seen as such – I think he is exactly right.   But about the notion that this wish is supernaturally aspirant I think he is exactly wrong.  It seems to me that what characterizes our American age most strikingly is the willingness of many thinkers and writers and ordinary people – for the first time in our history – to forgo the spiritual or supernatural argument altogether and make their case frankly in terms of science or the self or cultural inheritance.

In what sense were the Occupy Wall Street protesters spiritually motivated?  I’d like to know – and that, needless to say, is what the book An Anxious Age? is for.

Meanwhile, here’s a shout-out to Nathan Schneider, founder of Occupy Catholic.   I hope he’ll speak to the question from his point of view.

The photograph shows Dirty Projectors performing during a benefit concert for Occupy Sandy at the Church of St. Ann and the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn.