America's Poetic Past

Mr. Joseph Bottum is the leading scholar of religious and cultural decline in America in our time. His two major essays on the theme are An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America (2014) and The Decline of The Novel (2019). This juxtaposition of subjects by itself suggests an argument from historical evidence, that artistic production arises when faith declines, and art must decline itself as it loses the moral-psychological basis for its investigations, which religion provided. The public thing, religion, seems to be more important than the private thing, art, even for our self-understanding.