"I Will Make a Way in the Wilderness and Rivers in the Desert"

In her perceptive response to Eric Cohen and Jonathan Silver’s essay “America’s Hebraic Awakening,” Luma Simms kindly cited my interview with Joseph Bottum about his Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America. As Simms notes, Bottum described the Catholic Church’s inability to replace collapsing Mainline Protestantism as America’s spiritual guidepost and to “constrain social and political demons.”

For all its theological and intellectual riches, the Catholic Church can contribute towards, but cannot guide, an intrinsically Protestant country, Bottum justly surmises.

Simms adds to Bottum’s thesis by asserting that Catholicism, with its favorable view of human nature, cannot replace American Protestantism’s more dour perspective. Protestantism stresses the Hebrew scriptures more strongly than do Catholics, she writes, especially its call to repentance, which of course the New Testament reiterates.