We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. 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 desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.

The meaning of "the modern world" -- The meaning of "Protestantism" -- Protestantism and the modern world : points of contrast -- Protestantism and politico-social institutions -- Protestantism and economic organisation, social developments, science and art -- Protestantism and modern religious feeling.

Ernst Troeltsch focuses his Protestantism and Progress on two main areas. First, he centers on the intellectual and religious situation, from which the significance and the possibilities of development possessed by Christianity might be deduced. This leads to an engaging historical investigation regarding the spirit of the modern world. Troeltsch argues that the modern world can only be understood in the light of its relation to earlier epochs of Christian civilization in Europe. He notes that for anyone who holds the opinion that in spite of all the significance that Catholicism retains, the living possibilities of development and progress are to be found on Protestant soil, the question regarding the relation of Protestantism to modern civilization becomes of central importance.Troeltsch also distinguishes elements in modern civilization that have proven their value from those which are merely temporary and lead nowhere. He gives the religious ideas of Christianity a shape and form capable of doing justice to the absoluteness of religious conviction, and at the same time considering them in harmony with what has actually been accomplished towards solution of the practical problems of the Christian life.A new introduction by Howard Schneiderman brings this monumental work into the twenty-first century, and explains why its ideas are more important than ever, one hundred years after its original publication.

What if Protestantism were true? What if the Reformers really were heroes, the Bible the sole rule of faith, and Christ's Church just an invisible collection of loosely united believers? As an Evangelical, Devin Rose used to believe all of it. Then one day the nagging questions began. He noticed things about Protestant belief and practice that didn't add up. He began following the logic of Protestant claims to places he never expected it to go -leading to conclusions no Christians would ever admit to holding. In The Protestant's Dilemma, Rose examines over thirty of those conclusions, showing with solid evidence, compelling reason, and gentle humor how the major tenets of Protestantism - if honestly pursued to their furthest extent - wind up in dead ends. The only escape? Catholic truth. Rose patiently unpacks each instance, and shows how Catholicism solves the Protestant's dilemma through the witness of Scripture, Christian history, and the authority with which Christ himself undeniably vested his Church.

That Men Would Praise the Lord breaks apart the process of mass conversion in the sixteenth century to explain why the Reformation occurred, using Nîmes, the most Protestant town in France, as a case study. Protestantism was overwhelmingly successful in Nîmes (since most people converted), but the process culminated in two bloody massacres of Nîmes's remaining Catholics. Beginning in 1559, Nîmes went through a revolutionary period comparable to 1789 in its intensity. Townspeople flocked to hear Protestant preachers and then took over Catholic churches, destroyed statues and stained glass, and zealously took part in the Wars of Religion, which convulsed France beginning in 1562. As the Protestant movement grew, it had to adapt to changing circumstances. Nîmes's first Protestants were attracted to Calvin's theology. Later converts believed that the Church needed to be cleansed of its excesses to encourage moral reform and to assist the royal treasury. Iin the end, many converted because of peer pressure or under duress. Thus rather than argue that one factor - whether religious, economic, or political - explains the Reformation, Tulchin emphasizes that the Protestant movement was the result of compromises forged among its members. The conclusion extends his arguments to the rest of France. That Men Would Praise the Lord marries techniques from the social sciences, anthropology, and cultural history in an analytic narrative, resulting in a new, interdisciplinary theory of the Reformation.

With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R. White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the 1920s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching. A new therapeutic orthodoxy, influenced by modern medicine, celebrated heterosexuality as God-given and advocated a compassionate "cure" for homosexuality. White traces the unanticipated consequences as the therapeutic model, gaining popularity after World War II, spurred mainline church leaders to take a critical stance toward rampant antihomosexual discrimination. By the 1960s, a vanguard of clergy began to advocate for homosexual rights. White highlights the continued importance of this religious support to the consolidating gay and lesbian movement. However, the ultimate irony of the therapeutic orthodoxy's legacy was its adoption, beginning in the 1970s, by the Christian Right, which embraced it as an age-old tradition to which Americans should return. On a broader level, White challenges the assumed secularization narrative in LGBT progress by recovering the forgotten history of liberal Protestants' role on both sides of the debates over orthodoxy and sexual identity.