Joseph Bottum – Preliminary Discussion of Academics & Mentorship 

Doug Monroe:

When I hear your name, I feel this Impending doom of a superstar intellectual entering my presence. And I think that’s built up from the ’90s and into the 2000s and into the 2010s when you were constantly slaving away.

Joseph Bottum:

And also there’s a reputation that will ultimately arrive from that. At the time, academia doesn’t know what to do with generalists. They want to be able to put a label on you. “Oh, you’re a literary critic. Oh, you’re a theologian or you’re a sociologist,” and if you’re writing across the board like that, academia has no idea what to do with you.

Doug Monroe:

No, they really don’t. But I know this, that when Mary Eberstadt says something, I listen. And when she says that you’re one of a handful or two handfuls of our best intellectuals in this country, that makes it true. Pretty damn true.

Joseph Bottum:

Mary introduced me at the poetry reading last night. She got out of her sickbed. She’d broken in her foot and came to do that. She has been a wonderful friend.

Doug Monroe:

Well, when I look at who you all have worked with, it’s astounding. We’ll get to that. And I think in my finance career, I have worked for some stars more on a regional basis, but of similar, and it’s such a pleasure to do that, and I want to hear more about it.

Joseph Bottum:

I have this metaphor I’ve used for certain writers and all their contemporaries liked. And I say, but you see it most often in rock bands, which is, “You have to be good enough to clear the hurdle. But after that, fun to be with counts as much as anything else.” So every group has the Ringo in it. He has to be good enough to play with them, but then the difference between people who could play with them and Ringo is that he was just good enough to play with them, and he was fun to be with.

Doug Monroe:

And he was fun.

Joseph Bottum:

And every rock band, you have to have that guy who is-

Doug Monroe:

You have that, and I think kids today understand mentorship a little better than my day, but mentors help you get where you want to go, but they also, once you get there, on your way, all you have to do is think, “What would Richard John Neuhaus do?” And then you go, “Ah, there’s my answer.”

Joseph Bottum:

I also think that this whole self-conscious idea of mentorship and the kids, I think they’re brought up in a falsity of human relations. If you’re self-consciously thinking, “Oh, I’m going to have this man as my mentor,” that that whole idea of mentor is actually not the way the world works. But anyway, okay.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, no, well, we were talking about happiness, I think it was coming out of the conference on Monday afternoon and thinking, “Well, if you’re trying to be happy, you’re not going to get there. If you’re focusing on mentorship, you’re not going to get mentorship.” It’s not-

Joseph Bottum:

I feel the same way, because these young friends of my daughters talk about networking, and I feel exactly the same way. Networking is true, if you’re not thinking about networking.

Doug Monroe:

If you’re not thinking about networking, exactly.

Joseph Bottum:

If you’re thinking, “I’m going to go out now and network,” you’re not.

Doug Monroe:

You’ll be networking with people like you. But anyhow, so just to open it up and to move it on to the Praxis Circle stuff, we were talking a little bit about you being from South Dakota, and I’m from a small town on the Chesapeake Bay, and so I know what that is about, being from a beautiful place.

Joseph Bottum – The Importance of Belonging to a Place 

Doug Monroe:

We were talking a little bit about you being from South Dakota, and I’m from a small town on the Chesapeake Bay, and so I know what that is about, being from a beautiful place.So to get to the intellectual side, in America, it started with the City on a Hill, then it went to Manifest Destiny, and then you have the Frontier Thesis. What does that mean to someone who lives near Deadwood? It’s a general question for you.

Joseph Bottum:

I think it is important to be of a place. The old line is, “It’s easier to make it in New York City than it is to make it in an Iowa city,” because everybody in New York is fresh arrived, and you can create yourself in New York in a way that you can’t create yourself in Rapid City. I grew up mostly in Pierre, South Dakota, the state capitol. By the way, this is how we tell Dakotans from Outlanders, is that Outlanders say the state capital is Pierre, and we say it Pierre, like a fishing pier.

Doug Monroe:

Pierre? Oh, I would’ve said it wrong.

Joseph Bottum:

But especially when you’re young, there’s an attraction to the anonymity of the crowd where you can get in trouble and the person who’s shouting at you doesn’t say he’s going to go tell your grandmother. There’s an attraction to that at a certain age. There’s a reality to place, and I think it has a moral purpose. I want people to keep their accents. I want them to sound like they’re from Virginia or they sound like they’re from New Orleans or sound in that drawl like they’re from the West. I want people to have that because keeping your accent is a kind of declaration that you are not easily changed by the winds of fashion. And this is what we’re looking for in the people we want to be with. We want them to have a certain gravitas, a certain weight of personality, a certain ability to stand against the mild winds that would blow the unfocused, the unlocust from position to position. So I love people being of a place.

Doug Monroe:

It’s like you’re bringing something to the party. When you go to the Cosmopolitan area, you’re offering something that other people may not have. So let me put you back. 

Joseph Bottum – Who influenced your early intellectual life?

Doug Monroe:

In your days in, say high school or coming of age. Who made the impression on you? Who formed you then?

Joseph Bottum:

Almost no one. My father had a gig for a while in Salt Lake, and I actually graduated from high school in Salt Lake City. And then I went east to go to college, and then I stayed east to go to graduate school. And then I stayed east when I got a job teaching. And then I stayed east when I found out you make a lot more money as a writer than you do as an assistant professor of medieval philosophy at a small Catholic liberal arts college. And I stayed there and the whole time my grandmother in Pierre is writing me notes saying, “Honey, the house down the street’s for sale.” But I would’ve starved to death doing what I do there. But at the same time, I never left it. I never dismissed it from my personality. I never thought, “Oh, I am now a Bostonian,” or “I am now a Washingtonian,” or “I’m now from New York.”

I think whether I did that knowingly or not, I think it’s good to do that. I think it’s good to think of yourself as from a place. I’ve lived here 10 years, but I’m really from Virginia, I’m really from the prairie. It lends a certain strength to you, I think, and we should encourage that.

Doug Monroe:

Yes. For me, it’s almost like a fallback position where I go home and I go over this beautiful bridge, I can leave it all behind, and I’m still the guy from there. And they know me, they know who I am. It’s like the “Cheers” bar where everybody knows your name, that kind of thing. What about your mentors? You’re the boss at this point, but at first things and the weekly standard, and I could tell you who is famous from those eras that you would’ve been your mentors, but I want to know who really influenced you early in your-

Joseph Bottum:

Intellectually, I had some fine teachers as an undergraduate. Henry Veatch, the philosopher, the Medievalist, Tom McTighe, the great scholar of Teilhard de Chardin, Father King. These were all professors at Georgetown when I was an undergraduate there. My graduate school was the American home of continental philosophers. So I studied with Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Habermas. They were all there at my graduate school and took courses from.

Doug Monroe:

That’s incredible.

Joseph Bottum:

And that was serious. And then you meet people just when you’re writing and I would meet, who really influenced me. They’re not always the people I end up being closest to, but the people who help form my mind. I think Richard John Neuhaus to some degree, although he’s more of a friend, Michael Novak is the same. The thinker I had met, if we can have that as a category, the thinker of my own lifetime, who most influenced me is Rene Girard, the great theorist of sacrifice, the Catholic philosopher, anthropologist. All that talk from the 1960s on about scapegoats, that’s Girard.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, got you.

Joseph Bottum – Influence of Rene Girard & Relationship with William Kristol 

Joseph Bottum:

The opening poem of my last collection, my latest collection, Spending the Winter, is dedicated to Girard. And its deep work is an analysis or an application of his theories of sacrifice. Just as the last poem in my first collection, The Fall and Other Poems is dedicated to Richard John Neuhaus and it’s about his forcefulness in a world of evil. And also sense that even if I had the talent, which I didn’t, to do what he did, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the personality or the drive to be this constant active force in the world. Richard and I ended up very, very close. But Girard, I visit him all the time in California and his thought on what he called Mimetic rivalry…

His thought on what he called mimetic rivalry, which is where he argued that we learn what we desire, not from some interior shape the way Freud had said, like the Oedipus complex or the death instinct, that these are natural shapes for desire. He said, “From many of our desires, we learn what to desire by watching what other people desire.” And he said, “This is how in novels…” He started as a literary critic. In Flaubert, two men are competing for a woman, and their relationship becomes far more real than their relation to the woman. Their rivalry with each other, their mimetic rivalry.

He extends that to anthropology, and his scapegoat mechanism becomes this way of understanding how cultures escape this ratcheting into violence of mimetic rivalry. In a piece I wrote, years later when I started doing tech stuff, computer analysis, what did the computer revolution bring us? I had this line, which I still think is right. I said, “In some ways the internet seems to have been invented to test the social contagion theories of René Girard. It’s doing a bang-up job.”

It really is. If you ever thought Girard might be wrong, look at the internet, and you see mimetic rivalry, escalation of social contagion.

Doug Monroe:

I would say that about the Anxious Age, too, and we will get to that. Just an aside on William Kristol, anything to-

Joseph Bottum:

I love Bill. Bill was a friend. He was a help at moments I needed it. I couldn’t follow him into the rabidly anti-Trump stuff, which for him is so important that he was willing to set aside all the other conservative positions he held. I just couldn’t follow him there, and much of this is happening while my wife was sick and I was caring for her. I never actively opposed Bill in this stuff, in public life. But no, Bill Kristol was important to me, and I think he mattered at a moment at which that was important. The Weekly Standard, when it started up was a very hot shop, as they say.

Joseph Bottum – Friendship vs. Politics

Joseph Bottum:

And I’ve also never been someone who cuts off friendships over political disagreements.

Doug Monroe:

Oh, I put friends-

Joseph Bottum:

I know people who do.

Doug Monroe:

They’re not friends if you don’t put them first as people,

Joseph Bottum:

But you know people. I did. I wrote a piece that became controversial and had people I thought of as friends throw me overboard. Some of them are so political that for the most transient points, they’re like, “I will never speak to you again.” I was friends with Scooter Libby, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff who was accused of lying to Congress and ends up actually being convicted of that. I wrote the angriest piece I’ve ever written about how politics had become a bloodsport for that. Anyway, his lawyers asked me to write one of the sentencing letters, and they picked people from different parts of Scooter’s life. I knew Scooter originally as a novelist. He published a novel with Greywolf, which is a very toney literary press. I wrote that letter, and a person I thought of as a friend… I’d spent time with him in Rome. We’ve saved money by renting a place together. I thought of him as a real friend. He used that letter… The judge said he wouldn’t release them, but of course he did.

I was supposed to write about one part of Scooter’s life, and this friend picked up that letter and said, “What a snob he is.” I am. “I bet he doesn’t write letters like this for the poor people of his parish.” Just savaging me because he wanted Scooter to be guilty, because he thought Bush had lied about the uranium yellow cake in that run-up there. I thought for the most transient point, which literally no one will remember two weeks later, he’s willing to burn a friendship of several years. Who does that? At the very least, I will not be a person who does that. I will stay friends with-

Doug Monroe:

Well, we were talking about the saloons in the old west. In many ways, the social media and personal attacks have become the guns of today and it’s creating a terrible problem in our culture.

Joseph Bottum – Relationship with Mary Eberstadt 

Doug Monroe:

One last question before I ask you about worldview is, how did you and Mary Eberstadt meet? You all are real friends.

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah, I can’t actually remember when we first met. Mary said it was at a wedding, one of our mutual friend’s wedding, right when my daughter was born. I remember that, but I thought I knew Mary before that. So no, I don’t have this moment where I met Mary Eberstadt. We had read one another. Mary had worked for Irving Kristol and with Todd and Richard Starr and others who Irving passed through his shop at the public interest. That was a real springboard for surprising number of people. They would be interns at the old Public Interest magazine, which was a sociological account of American politics and American policy. That kind of person you meet and it’s like you can’t remember when you met because it is almost as though you had always known them? That’s my relationship with Mary. I feel like I’ve always known her.

Doug Monroe:

It was funny. I had the same feeling, interviewing her 10 years ago. She’s a special person.

Joseph Bottum – What makes a worldview: community, language, truth?

Doug Monroe:

I’m going to move to worldviews. Praxis Circle focuses on worldview as an academic concept, and I’m really convinced that even really brilliant people like yourself may think they know what the academic concept is, but often they don’t. So it’s a special secret out there that a lot don’t get. But I love this phrase in what I’m going to call AAA, An Anxious Age. We lack a coherent worldview in the West, and here you are a dedicated Christian, but you make that statement. I can fill it in, but my question is how do you define worldview, and what is yours in a nutshell?

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah. I’m not sure about the technical use of it, in certain academic circles or certain non-academic circles. I will say this. You can’t have a worldview by yourself. This is a social construction of how we are going to look at the world together. Just like you can’t have a language for yourself. Language is meant to be shared. It only has meaning if the other can hear it. A worldview, I take it to mean how is it that we jointly, socially, emotionally see the world? And by world, I mean the universe, which extends to the more eternal truths and all the way down to how we joke about our in-laws. The universe here is a familial universe, a social universe, a physical universe, and a moral universe bound together in the unity of truth by a certain consistency of intellectual endeavor and intellectual shape. It has to make sense.

What you cannot have as a good worldview is anything that partakes of the doctrine of double truth, as though… Well, there are truths in poetry, then there are truths in physics, then there are truths in theology, and they don’t contradict each other because they live in different worlds. That will never suffice for a worldview. A worldview has to be able to say, “If science tells us actual truths, then religion must account for them.” And if religion tells us actual truths or morality tells us actual truths, then science must bend to them. The idea that there are scientific truths that don’t match or even contradict religious truths is this doctrine of double truth, out of the Middle Ages. The name is out of the Middle Ages.

It’s an old human phenomenon, and it is a recipe for sadness. It’s a recipe for cultural disaster, sadness, personally, emotionally. It’s a recipe for cultural disaster. So if a worldview has to be something that at least tries to account for the totality. That’s how I see worldview, and I see, of course, that one of our problems is we do not have it, even at the most abstract level that tries to say, “It’s pluralistic. We need broad shoulders to allow other people to disagree with us.” Even if you step that far off, we don’t have anything coherent in the culture right now, which means it’s people screaming their individual truths at one another with ears that cannot hear and tongues that can only scream.

Doug Monroe:

Let me stop you there. That’s a beautiful introduction to worldview, because you’re focusing on truth and the various ways people think about truth today and so on. Let’s just say, I’m going to reveal my cards. I think truth is a judgment on reality. It’s a judgment. It doesn’t mean that we’re judging truth. It means we have to collectively, in a community, to operate. But there is an objective truth out there, in my worldview, that is independent of any judgment that people make. But the point is, you’re connecting it to a community. You’re connecting it to language. You’re connecting it to, I think, a reality out there. Now, I want to read you, from 2014, one of the lines. It was filled with typos, but

Joseph Bottum – No Truth outside of Language

Doug Monroe:

You said in An Anxious Age, “Even educated believers seem now to lack the words with which to express a principled defense of American freedom, American religion, and American exceptionalism.” Is that still true?

Joseph Bottum:

Oh, it is more true now, 10 years later, than it was then. What’s decayed is our shared vocabulary. I will say this, and it’s a way to connect what you just said with what I had to say. Technically speaking, truth and falsity are modalities that attach to propositions, meaning there is no truth outside of language in the technical meaning of truth. They adhere to as modalities to propositions. The sky is blue-

Doug Monroe:

I believe personally, again, that faith is involved in any knowledge. There’s an element of faith in it, which would agree with what you’re saying, but I don’t want to get you out of your flow.

Joseph Bottum:

That’s belief, and knowledge says Plato is justified true belief, and how we understand truth there is interesting, but ultimately, truth and falsity have to do with language. There is no truth outside of language. There’s no falsity outside of language. Even when it’s used analogically, as we say that Christ is the way, the truth, and the light, truth there, even… That’s an analogical use because he’s not a proposition. But even there-

Doug Monroe:

All right, you said I could interrupt you, and I’m going to give you a thought experiment. We drop Joseph into a jungle, and there are no other human beings. There’s no one to talk with, but you have to survive. You get hungry, you get thirsty, you aren’t talking to anyone. There is no language. What is truth in that situation?

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah, there’s no truth because truth… I’m not talking to anybody. Truth is only in language. There is reality, and if I make a proposition about it, that proposition will be true, but there’s no truth. As I said, even if we use it analogically, if you say, “The truth is kill or be killed,” that’s the proposition, and you’re saying it’s true, and then… But even if you’re saying something is… “The stone’s the truth,” that analogical use, for instance, in the Gospel of John, occurs in a Gospel whose prologue begins that Christ is the word. Even the analogical use of truth there is tied to language.

I emphasize this point about language, not because I’m making some strict, British, analytic philosopher’s point about technical philosophy, but because we have to share these things, we live in community, and the truths that we speak are spoken, and they exist within a society. They exist with others. This is not relativism. It’s not a denial of objective truth. It is to say, we learn a way to look at the world. We learn worldviews. We learn them out of community, and some are better than others, and some are more complete than others, but they are all shared. It’s meaningless to say, “I have an unshared truth.” And it’s worse, because it tempts one to the kind of relativism that has eaten up a lot of our public discourse where you say, “It’s true for me.”

Joseph Bottum – Sense and Reference: Issues of Analytical Philosophy

Doug Monroe:

As an aside comment on what you said, based on what you said, I would say you’re getting to sense and reference, where language people are saying, “If I drop Doug into the jungle, and he sees a lion coming at him, he knows it’s not good. He has a sense, and he has to think something, and the reference will be the word.” So it is, in that case, subjective thinking. I immediately start thinking and acting based on truth without saying a word, but to verify it and build it into objective truth, you have to have language. You have to have other people there, and that is where language enters.

Joseph Bottum:

This is why I’ve said I don’t want to get into technical analytic philosophy. This is sense and reference and that’s whole lot of J.L. Austin.

Doug Monroe:

I realize I’m speaking to a medieval philosopher, and that’s dangerous territory for anyone to go into. I can tell you that. I appreciate that.

Joseph Bottum:

But let’s not do philosophical technicalities. I think in this case, we can simply say… If we have a worldview that can be articulated, it’s meaningless and potentially damaging to say, “It’s my worldview.” It’s not… Worldviews, to be meaningful, I think, have to be shared. They are corporate and social ways of looking at the world.

Joseph Bottum – Truth Is Shared: The Impossibility of “My” Truth

Joseph Bottum:

My target here is the people who say, “It’s my truth.” And I see even politicians doing this now.

Doug Monroe:

It’s the Oprah-

Joseph Bottum:

“I just had to speak my truth.” And this is where I bridle and say, “Technically speaking, truth is truth. Technically speaking, there are no truths outside of language.” To put it in the most precise language, truth and falsity are modalities of propositions. Let’s be real here, for a moment. It isn’t truth if it’s your truth. It has to be objectively true and also corporately true. We have to have a worldview that allows that possibility. Now, Doug, I’ve always been a big shoulder guy. I’ve always loved America for its pluralism. I’ve always loved disagreement. I don’t like fights the way Richard John Neuhaus loved fights. At his funeral, I quoted the line from a novel, “He was too great a man to have fought for less than the truth, but it was the fight he loved as much as the truth.” And I’ve never been that fighter guy.

But at the same time, I do love what Tom Wolf called this vast, baroque, insane, hog-stomping country of ours. I love the diversity. I love the madness of it. I love that we’ve got snooty academics at Harvard and NASCAR fans in Atlanta, Georgia. I love how weird it is and the cowboys out west, and that’s what I want. I want that diversity. But even there, there’s a worldview. There’s a worldview that Emerson puts in the democratic mind. There’s this worldview that says, “We need to have broad shoulders. We need to mix with one another.”

My parents used to say, “We’re going to get you this summer job hauling hay because you have to learn how to rub shoulders.” That’s the America that I want. And I say, that’s a worldview. It’s a pretty vague, loose one, but it is shared, and it is wry, and it’s fun, and it’s what I think we used to have that increasingly is getting ripped away by what we see on social media and the politics which says, “You are either for us or you’re evil.” One of the most quoted lines in An Anxious Age is where I say, “If you think your ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken but evil, you have ceased to do politics and begun to do religion. You have turned your politics into a religion.”

Joseph Bottum – A Principled Defense of American Freedom, Religion, and Exceptionalism

Doug Monroe:

I completely agree with everything you said, and I’ll just leave it at that. We know we share the same worldview on some basis. But I’m going to come back to my question, and I’m going to read this again to you. You said it’s gotten worse. This is what you said, “Even educated believers seem now to lack the words with which to express a principled defense of American freedom, religion, and exceptionalism.” If that’s true, doesn’t America and the West need a new narrative and new vocabulary to connect us, I would say, to Judeo-Christianity.

Joseph Bottum:

Or we need a resurrection of the old vocabulary.

Doug Monroe:

Of the old vocabulary, okay.

Joseph Bottum:

This is the John Courtney Murray project, as it was often put, John Courtney Murray was a Catholic writer back in the late fifties. He was an advisor to Kennedy, the Catholic advisor to Kennedy. He was on the cover of Time Magazine, and he’s got a way in which you can be Catholic and American. He was looking for that at the time, and had a lot of influence on people that you have met and talked to. Michael Novak, George Weigel, Richard John Neuhaus. He had a lot of impact on those people who came of age as Catholics at a certain time in America. That’s great, but what I want to think about here, when you ask that, is, what’s the consequence of our not having that?

If you are an ordinary person, and you walk down the street, and you believe in American exceptionalism because it’s in the air, and it’s been in the air since Winthrop called it a city on a hill. If you’ve got that, can you actually defend it? Do you have any sense of what it actually means? This is what I meant by educated believers no longer having the vocabulary to support these what Alasdair MacIntyre would’ve called taboos, which are moral propositions that we’ve forgotten the reason we used to hold them for. Then if anybody blows on them, they fall down. The great example would be… He’s using this out of the Polynesian history of the taboo, but we used to be able to explain why we thought public nudity was wrong. Then after that reasoning went away, the proposition, “Public nudity is wrong,” survived for a long time, until Hugh Hefner comes along in 1955 and says, “Prove it.” He challenges to prove it, and we find that we cannot.

These lines that we have, we don’t have the vocabulary anymore for it. Let me tie this to something else. This is essentially a point I made, and something I got very beaten up for, which was when I did a big cover story for Commonweal Magazine in which I said, “The church should probably get out of the same-sex marriage fight because they’re going to lose it.” And they’re going to lose it because Americans no longer have a vocabulary in which they could explain what was wrong with same-sex marriage. They don’t have a metaphysical vocabulary, and that only leaves the one vocabulary they have left, which is the language of legal equity.

If legal equity is all you have, you can’t explain what the difference between men and women is, you can’t explain what the purpose of marriage is. You’ve lost all of that reasoning. Then legal equity becomes your only reasoning, and what does that say? Why should those two people be deprived of this? I didn’t say it was right. What I said is the country lacks the shared vocabulary to explain to itself why that’s wrong. Consequently, this fight is lost completely, and to invest in fighting it is going to just waste money and time and prestige and reputation. I said, “The church and Catholic scholars should just say, ‘That’s a lost fight. We’re not going to win-‘”

Doug Monroe:

I completely agree with you on that one, too, and I think one of the things that’s so exciting about the times we’re in is it is time for a whole new vocabulary. A comprehensive vocabulary.

Joseph Bottum:

Oh, exactly. Think how much it’s escalated since same-sex marriage, where we now have people who say they can’t tell the difference between men and women. Andrew Sullivan and my old friends who liked the same-sex marriage and invented it out of the whole claw. It was just purely an invention that they never thought was going to go anywhere, then they ended up winning it. They, at least, understood that same-sex attraction required that there be a difference between the sexes. Now, that vocabulary is so far gone that our inability to have a metaphysics that would let you say why same-sex marriage is not marriage, now has reached the point where we can’t even, say, defend the proposition that men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports.

Doug Monroe:

Since the early 1800s, and maybe you can go back to about 1750, what would be called the far left today and through now, to the extent there’s continuity, they got very good at language. They got very good at inventing new ways of thinking and new language. And we-

Joseph Bottum:

It’s also dissolution of language.

Doug Monroe:

Yes, but that’s part of the game, as well. I love and appreciate and know very well the wonderful meaning of the word being conservative, but I really don’t like the label, and actually, I think what I believe in explodes the power of the ages. To say it’s… Some say it’s holding people down. I know that’s not what it means, but it’s confusing. They’ve warped it, and we need new ways of talking about this.

Joseph Bottum – Medieval Times vs. Modernity: Disenchantment

Doug Monroe:

I cannot resist the fact that you’re a medieval guy and I’m thinking of Rodney Stark and that beautiful man. How do you look at medieval times versus modernity in your mind? People want to always think that today’s so much better, and there was dark ages and whatnot. How do you think about it, having studied it thoroughly?

How do you think about it having studied it thoroughly?

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah, better in some ways, worse in others. I wrote recently a piece in which I said, look, every age has its good features and it’s bad. In my own age, we saw the dissolution of shared culture, the loss of a sense of truth, the rise of antagonism and the breakdown of culture. On the other hand, books were cheap so that every age does have its benefits and look, there’s awful stuff about the Middle Ages, really awful, and we can exaggerate the extent to which people die.

Doug Monroe:

Absolutely. Oh my goodness.

Joseph Bottum:

One of the things that we don’t actually-

Doug Monroe:

Up until late-1800s.

Joseph Bottum:

… we don’t actually live that much longer in the mean than people did then, what skews those statistics to let people say, “Oh, you died at age 30,” is that infant mortality and death in childbirth reduce the apparent age, but if you made it to 50, you were going to make it to 70.

Doug Monroe:

You were bulletproof.

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah, so we can exaggerate those still. It was medicine. I am glad for modern medicine. I’m glad for modern air conditioning. I’m glad for my computer. I actually like a lot of modernity, but I was persuaded very young and have had to sophisticated over the years by Max Weber’s account of the elective affinities that brought about the modern age. That didn’t logically have to go together, but somehow they all worked in the same direction and out of the early, the late medieval, you see these lines pushing forward. This is the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the rise of thinking about democracy, the age of exploration, capitalism. You add up all these lines. Do they have to go together? Do they have a logical necessity for each other?

Not at all, but historically, somehow they were elective affinities and they all pushed in the same direction to bring us out of the Middle Ages into modernity and Max Weber makes a couple attempts to connect these. He says, for instance, bureaucracy is one of them. He thinks you get bureaucracy. Well, he says, how do you get bureaucracy, to have bureaucracy you need, and the nation, the modern nation state, needs bureaucracy. You get bureaucracy only when you have a sufficient class of people who can read and write. You have a sufficient class of people who read and write only when the Protestants have given you the cult of Bible reading to increase literacy. So he does make some attempts to connect them. The Industrial Revolution, he says, is really born when capitalism meets the Scientific Revolution and you get the Industrial Revolution.

But generally he says they don’t have a lot of connection except this, Doug. They all involve disenchantment. They all involve stripping out the magic of the world and say, “No.” This is modern physics. This is how chemistry emerges from alchemy. This is how astronomy emerges from astrology. You take the old field and you strip the magic out of it, and then you have the modern thing. And he calls it disenchantment, hearing, this is a word out of Goethe, hearing the… Goethe by way of Schiller but yeah, hearing in it the kind of duality of that word disenchantment, meaning literally you’ve taken the song out of it, the chant and also you’ve broken the dream. And he says, in the medieval period we can discern, even in the ancients, we can discern the enchanted garden of meaning where you look at the stars and their meaningful and you look at the forest and it’s full of portents and the world seems rich.

And the effect of modern disenchantment is the thinning of things, and consequently we get say Matthew Arnold’s, Dover Beach, that wonderful poem in which he says, “You, the sea of faith once wrapped us around like a girdle as it pulls away from the shore, we see the reality which is the naked shingles of the world, like a darkling plane where ignorant armies clash by night.” And that’s the modern age. We get all these wonderful things out of it. Thank God, in the serious phrase, thank God for modern medicine, but the price we paid for it was living in a rich world.

Joseph Bottum – Conversation on Secularism and Max Weber

Doug Monroe:

There are other narratives out there too other than that one. That one’s a big part of it, and I think if we’re at Dover Beach, we’re dead in the water as human beings. That’s personally, but Rodney Stark, his book “Victory of Reason” was helpful. Deirdre McCloskey has written quite a lot and you know about her I’m sure, but she’s written three books and she actually thinks that being a Christian in an Imago Dei and ultimately businessmen who were robber barons and so on, but they realized that serving others was important and serving customer needs was important. You’re talking to a businessman, so I would point to say Andres Widmer, who’s a big man at Catholic University now in the MBA school and John Paul II, and as they write about, I have to test the word “capitalism”. I would jettison it immediately. I think it’s actually false, although I like what it is in terms of human flourishing, that’s a whole different thing, but there are other, I’m not personally totally convinced that it’s because we became purely secular that we have all this richness, so I’m much more about that.

Joseph Bottum:

No, and with that, in fact, Max Weber, when he first uses the-

Doug Monroe:

Protestant work ethic.

Joseph Bottum:

Right, does the first uses, excuse me, elective affinities is in the Protestant ethic in the spirit of capitalism.

Doug Monroe:

Yes.

Joseph Bottum:

In which he very impishly turns Marx on his head. Marx said the Protestant Reformation happened because of economics. We had this new middle class, they had to get rid of the throne and altar stuff, and Max Weber says, “It’s so impish.” He’s really wonderful in this, Weber who is a genius and Weber says-

Doug Monroe:

Peter Berger, they’re both like just super genius.

Joseph Bottum:

Weber says, in essence, you know how Marx said the Protestant Reformation came out of capitalism. In fact, the reverse is true. The Protestant Reformation was necessary in order to have capitalism.

Doug Monroe:

Correct. Correct. That is correct.

Joseph Bottum:

That’s Weber’s brilliant standing Marx on his head, and it’s a wonderful observation that has the benefit of not just being impish but also being true.

Joseph Bottum – How is God real to you?

Doug Monroe:

Is God real and is God a good idea? Let’s say the Christian God of the Bible or of Anselm or Augustine. Is God real? Is God a good idea? I think social sciences are really starting to almost all agree that God’s a very good idea, but is God real? How is God real to you? How do you satisfy yourself as a Christian, but you could be a Muslim, you could be any supernatural oriented person. How do you satisfy that to yourself?

Joseph Bottum:

If you are an American, I believe that I will encounter God and I will encounter judgment in the specificity of my actual life. That I will encounter God as an American when I die, that I am locust in the places in which God had the grace to put me and that I will be judged as that. I will be judged as a person who was an American, a person who was a man, a person who did various things that were culturally and historically possible and that I have to be judged in that context and that I will be because God put me in them. Some of those are contradictory and broad. It’s that broad-shouldered American thing. As a Westerner, I have this deep libertarian streak in me, which is not economic libertarianism because it was never connected directly to economics. It is just this conviction somewhere down in my boyhood psyche that the goal in life is to be no man’s slave and no man’s master, that that’s what it is to be the wayfaring stranger in a landscape in which really all that’s real is the soul and God and I have that.

Doug Monroe:

That’s certainly what I would say Christ a lot.

Joseph Bottum:

Right. That’s the western, this view. At the same time, Catholic social ethics pushes us in other directions. I would say the easy answer, which I’m not going to take, is I encounter God in the Eucharist when Christ offers his body to us. That is a theologically correct answer, an ecclesiologically correct answer, but I feel like you’re looking for something more than just that kind of, “Oh, where do I encounter God? I encounter God in the sacraments.” I do, and that’s what’s real. At the same time, I’m always mistrustful of instrumentalist accounts of God. I think God is a good idea socially and so on, but I would love Jesus Christ even if my loving Him meant that all those instrumental reasons were wrong. I would love Jesus Christ even if loving Him condemned me to hell.

Joseph Bottum – The Erie Canal Thesis and State of Protestant Religion

Doug Monroe:

Well, let’s move to one of my really most favorite books. I would put it up there with The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. It’s just something that to Doug just went, boing, that explains it. And so to start off, I want to ask you about an underlying thesis I will call it, that you don’t see all over the place, like the Frontier thesis, and that is the Erie Canal thesis. Mary loves the Erie Canal too, so.

Joseph Bottum:

Well, Mary, our friend, our mutual friend, Mary Eberstadt’s from that upstate New York area, but the name comes from the fact that I noticed how much of American religious history passed through upstate New York. The American studies idea began late 40s, 50s, spread to American colleges, always went back to the Puritans and they’re undoubtedly important. But Digby Baltzell, who did the Quakers, Digby Baltzell is the sociologist who coined the word WASP or the acronym WASP, and he was from Philadelphia, and he said, and we always talk about the Puritans, but there were other Protestant sources here, including the Quakers, who had a real influence. For a businessman, one of the things that the Quakers did is they essentially invented or made widespread the price tag, and they did so for deliberately Christian reasons. They thought that bargaining and barter had an element of dishonesty in it because you were always offering a price you knew wasn’t what you were going to pay, and the way to Christianize the marketplace was price tags, fair price for a fair product.

And the shaker or the Quakers who were the first to really in Philadelphia and London to build a department store empires popularized the price tag, and they did it in the deliberate sense that they were Christianizing to some small degree the Paganism of the marketplace. And Digby Baltzell looks at that and he looks at the Puritans, and I think he’s quite right, that among the Southerners and among the Quakers and among the Puritans, there were alternate sources of this Protestant stuff, but almost all of it I noticed in the 18th and 19th century moves through upstate New York. This is where we get the Mormons. This is where we get the Seventh-day Adventists. This is where we get the revival movement, which created the burnt-over district. It all, like if there were many threads, they all got gathered into upstate New York in the 19th century, we get the spiritualism that’s able to happen.

Doug Monroe:

That’s part of the western movement, and the Erie Canal was-

Joseph Bottum:

And then it explodes out there, but we get the table tapping and the Ouija board stuff, that’s all upstate New York. And so I called it the Erie Canal thesis because of that.

Doug Monroe:

Did you make that up?

Joseph Bottum:

Yes.

Doug Monroe:

You did?

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah. That’s my phrase.

Doug Monroe:

Oh, I didn’t know that originated with you. Oh, okay.

Joseph Bottum:

But the meaning of the thesis is this-

Doug Monroe:

It’s beautiful.

Joseph Bottum:

… at any point in American history, if you want to understand what’s going on, you have to ask this question, what is the state of Protestant religion at that moment in this country? And everything opens up for you. The Civil War opens up, the Revolutionary War opens up out of the Great Awakening, the Prohibition, the abolitionism before the war. Everything opens up if you ask yourself, what is the state of Protestant religion? Sometimes the answer is going to be very high, sometimes it’s going to be very bad, but that’s the question you need to ask to really understand any particular moment in American history including our moment. If we ask in 2014, as I saw what would become called The Woke Movement emerging, I saw this in the preface. I talk about wandering down. I’d been given a magazine assignment to write about Occupy Wall Street, remember Occupy Wall Street?

Doug Monroe:

Yeah.

Joseph Bottum:

And I’m talking to these kids down there. I ended up not writing the piece because I didn’t have the answer yet, but I realized something that there was a profound spiritual anxiety about them, this desperate knowledge to be thought to be good and to be recognized as good. And I thought gradually what came to mind is Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Peter Berger, that line of sociological analysis, which takes spiritual anxiety really seriously is a sociological phenomenon. And I said, if we ask the Erie Canal question, what’s the state of Protestant religion? It is these post-Protestants who have lost all of the old religion, but they still have this fundamental Protestant question, which is, “How do I know that I am saved?”

Joseph Bottum – Protestant Descendancy and American Exceptionalism

Doug Monroe:

I’ve got you 100%. And you stated so clearly in the Anxious Age, that’s an obvious theme that you state clearly then. But it really illuminates really all of modern western history to me, because I think, was it Martin Luther that made Protestantism happen, or was it the vernacular? Turning the Bible over into the vernacular within 50 years, it spread everywhere, literally in Europe. And I mean, I personally, as you may know, I’m the biggest fan of the Catholic Church who’s not a Catholic, like my friend Pat Calhoun, the greatest Clemson fan that ever lived, and he went to Carolina. But I think that’s so illuminating. So let’s go right into the poster children, and you take a snapshot then and you say, what is the state of Protestantism then and their poster children, what is that?

Joseph Bottum:

Well, and it’s a play of course on the missing kids, of poster kids who used to appear on milk cartons, but also they’re examples. They’re the poster figures for certain lines of Protestantism and how they look once you strip away the actual religion. Once you have what Flannery O’Connor called the Church of Christ without Christ, you strip that away. They still feel churchly, they still feel like they are the center of America. Doug, this is where I’m in the opposite position where you are a Protestant who admires Catholicism. I’m a Catholic, a lifelong Catholic, but I look at America under the Protestant descendancy, these 250 years or more of Protestant definition of America and what Tocqueville said, every little sect fought with every other little sect and the two seed in the spirit Baptist were vehemently opposed to the Green River Baptist. And there were probably 16 different varieties, identified varieties of Baptists at that moment, and they hated each other. They prayed for one another’s souls because they assumed that the other Baptists were condemned and they were violently, not violently, but they were strongly opposed to each other.

Doug Monroe:

No, it was the same thing in Luther’s time. Protestants were doing this.

Joseph Bottum:

And yet somehow in America, Tocqueville sees this in the 1830s, he says, even though they opposed one another bitterly, they agreed on nothing doctrinally, somehow out of them all there was a unity and there emerged what he called the central current of American morals and manners out of that, and you know exactly what he meant. This is how we got births and baptisms, deaths and funerals. This is how we got the definition of the family. This was the locus of charity. If you were going to give money, you gave it to the churches to distribute. But even more, it gave us this sense that, a very American Protestant sense that the drama of the individual soul’s redemption, that’s cosmic drama is far more important than politics. And our art reflects that, our novels are not about politics. Every European novel, the minor characters are more politically aware and politically smart than the major characters in American fiction because it’s not what we are about.

And if you are the Protestant who admires Catholicism, I’m the Catholic who admires that old Protestant descendancy, I felt like it gave us American exceptionalism, it gave us the frontier, it gave us all these things that helped define America and keep us together. And look, Jews, FDR once famously said to Henry Ford, “This is a Protestant country. Jews and Catholics live here on sufferance.”

Doug Monroe:

That is definitely not true anymore, but we’ll get back to that.

Joseph Bottum:

Right, it had bad aspects, but the Protestant descendancy gave us a kind of shape. It was our Mississippi running down the center of the country and as a Catholic, as my Catholic ancestors hated it, they felt oppressed by it. But there was a difference-

Doug Monroe:

Was a lot going on. There was a lot going on.

Joseph Bottum:

Right. There was a difference between feeling oppressed by it and thinking what it would look like once it’s gone. And once it’s gone, things are bad.

Joseph Bottum – What is needed now?

Joseph Bottum:

I think my ancestors, my predecessors were right. I also think I’m right. I think that we have a duty, you and I, on some very high level, that in an age of chaos we should be agents of order, in an age of order we should be agents of chaos. And we are in an age of chaos, and thus we are called morally because there is no perfect solution.

Doug Monroe:

No.

Joseph Bottum:

There is no perfection until the eschaton, right?

Doug Monroe:

No.

Joseph Bottum:

There is no perfect solution. We work with what we’ve got against a pendulum that swings back and forth. My ancestors lived in an age of order and they said we need to be Catholic chaotic agents. I live in an age of disorder, and I think my job is to be a Catholic agent of order.

Joseph Bottum – How did Protestant poster children lose their morality?

Doug Monroe:

We need foundationalism today in an age of chaos. But I want one more question on the poster children. Back up a little bit. Historically, your flash freeze, it was in 2014, talking about what had happened, let’s say maybe since the year 2000 in them, or probably started maybe in the mid-80s, late 80s. But anyway, we’re poster children. But back up to the early 1900s, what really got them there? What historically created a wave that hit? Do you know where I’m going with this?

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah. In the book, I’m consistently refusing a single explanation. I think there was so many factors that it was kind of over-determined. One of the underappreciated elements was the mission boards. These Protestant churches were sending off missionaries, especially the Far East, Africa, and they were for the Presbyterians, the most prestigious part of the church was the mission board, and the missionaries were going off where you were Mennonite, but suddenly you were surrounded by your other missionaries and a what they called an ecumenism of the trenches emerged. It infected the mission boards and then infected the churches. Suddenly doctrinal differences between the Presbyterians and the Methodists seemed a lot less important when the prestigious part is the mission boards, and this is where the really best and brightest were going. Your sharp kids who were morally serious, what did they want to be? They wanted to be missionaries at that moment, right? So you’re sending your best kids out and they absorb it and they come back.

Then they’re on the mission boards, and nobody in the Presbyterian church feels that they have the authority to stand up against them. And the ecumenism that happens starts to erode the doctrinal distinctions that Tocqueville had said these different denominations and sects had. You also saw pressure toward unifying. So the Baptists are going to come together into the northern Baptists and the southern Baptists. The different Lutheran churches are going to try and blend, still haven’t perfectly, but this was a movement. The Congregationalists are going to merge with two German Reformation churches to become this United Church of Christ. The Congregationalists disappeared into that. So you saw this pressure of consolidation.

Doug Monroe:

Consolidation…

Joseph Bottum:

That’s another cause. But I actually think those made possible the triumph of the Social Gospel Movement, and that I think is a major factor. Walter Rauschenbusch was a rhetorical genius, really wonderful guy who really, really knew the Bible and really was a believer. Some of my friends, like Stan Hauerwas want to say, “Well, he was never a Christian.” I think that’s wrong. He was a very serious Christian. What he said though is that individual sins are not what Christ died for. He died because of these social sins and the ganglion chain of redeemed personalities. Rauschenbusch was just a wonderful rhetorician, is what will all the people who realize the social problems that Christ bore upon his-

… Initial problems that Christ bore upon his body.

The consequence of all that, of course, is that Christ ceases to matter. He becomes this moral teacher who moves us up to the next level of morality and then we don’t need him anymore.

So for Rauschenbusch and his very well-trained Bible-reading congregations he was preaching to, it was one thing: their children are not going to understand why they need to read the Bible, their children are not going to understand why they have to go to church, and their children are going to think, “Why do we have to believe? We are already redeemed personalities living at the higher level of morality.”

And these are the poster children. They don’t go to church. They don’t even have memories of their families going to church. They don’t understand that their family were Congregationalists, which made them different from the families that were Methodists. They don’t have any sense of that. All they have is the inherited Protestant sense of being the moral center of judgment for the world.

Doug Monroe:

It’s a little bit of a sin of pride, a puritanical sin of pride. Whereas I heard you describe a couple of days ago, they climb up the ladder, they kick the ladder away, they’re the only ones up there.

Joseph Bottum:

Mm-hmm.

Doug Monroe:

And what used to be more of a private matter is now all politics. God is gone. Christ is gone. It’s all political: “I know exactly what’s right.”

Joseph Bottum:

Well, now, the Protestant forbears were like this. I mean, New England after the Civil War, with the prestige of having been on the right side of abolition, these women were-

Doug Monroe:

Believe me, I’m on the wrong side, living in Virginia, right?

Joseph Bottum:

Right. But they felt like they were the center of moral judgment. They were puritanical still a certain way, but, “We are the redeemed. We are the elect.”

And the Boston School of Cooking comes out of this nutritional stuff as a way of saying, “Well, we’ve got to get into the kitchens of these poor benighted immigrants and clean them up and teach them to eat bland food.” And this was all that kind of moral certitude.

The greatest account of it is Henry James’ novel, The Bostonians, which is about a very masculine southerner, southern lawyer, who’s set loose among these women in Boston. And it’s hilarious to see this masculine principle introduced into this feminine world of utter conviction of their moral rightness. Henry James is a genius on this stuff.

Joseph Bottum – “An Anxious Age”: The Swallows of Capistrano and the Catholic Movement

Doug Monroe:

All right, well, let’s go to the swallows of Capistrano.

Joseph Bottum:

Okay.

Doug Monroe:

I want to shift on you. Thank goodness for them. They keep coming back every year and they keep us together. Give us a feel for that. It’s 25% of the student body.

Joseph Bottum:

Well, you got to say the metaphor there is not a happy one, because the swallows stopped going back to Capistrano.

Doug Monroe:

Oh, they did.

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah.

Doug Monroe:

I’d forgotten that.

Joseph Bottum:

So the metaphor there is not-

Doug Monroe:

Ah, okay. Gotcha.

Joseph Bottum:

You can actually … They knocked down all the nests to do painting. The swallows came, the nests were all gone, and the swallows stopped coming.

Doug Monroe:

Hmm.

Joseph Bottum:

And my argument is there’s a way in which that’s what happened.

Doug Monroe:

Wow.

Joseph Bottum:

These kids, these JP II kids, some of whom are now 40 years old, not kids anymore, were an interesting phenomenon. They were highly intellectualized. Often what drew them to the faith or back to the faith very often was a kind of intellectual conviction.

Which we’d seen before. You know, Avery Dulles was an intellectual convert. John Henry Newman was an intellectual … Thomas Merton. The mind is convinced of the structure of truth before the instrument of faith is engaged. And we’ve seen converts like that before.

Doug Monroe:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joseph Bottum:

And that had a lot to do with this.

Also, what that second half of the book is about is what Richard John Neuhaus would’ve called ‘the Catholic moment’, which was this brief period where it looked like we could see the mainline Protestant churches collapsing. They went from 50% of America down to 10%. Huge sociological change. And they ripped that pillar out of the support for America.

I say, using a metaphor out of Michael Novak, that America basically before for several hundred years was this three-legged stool in which you had capitalism, you had democratic politics, and you had Protestant religion, and they each pushed against the other and corrected the faults of the other.

So the Protestant religion has this tendency to become totalizing and capitalism or populism in democracy pushes back on that. Populism in democracy has this tendency to be vulgar and wants to grit, and religion pushes back on that. And the same with capitalism. The three of them pushed against each other and kept the stool standing.

Doug Monroe:

True. This is absolutely true.

Joseph Bottum:

You rip out one, which is the collapse of the mainline churches, and suddenly all we have is politics and capitalism. That is to some degree the definition of today. All we got is money and outrage. Those are the only two things we have left, and it’s inherently unstable.

There was a moment in the eighties, late eighties, the decade of the nineties into the 2000s, where a deliberate effort was made, because it looked possible, to slot in Catholicism to replace the missing pillar; to give us a moral vocabulary, to give us the third leg that would push against the other legs and get pushed back against. That’s the beauty of that metaphor of the three-legged stool.

There was a brief period where it looked possible, and this is where I would go to all those meetings of-

Doug Monroe:

What decade would that be?

Joseph Bottum:

Nineties.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah.

Joseph Bottum:

I’d go to all those meetings of the evangelicals and Catholics together, and serious Protestants would come to that, serious Catholics. There was this vocabulary that actually triumphed.

Its peak may have been George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, which is not theological, it’s highly philosophical. It is the language of Catholic natural law, which is a philosophical concept, not a religious one. That may have been the peak of its influence where the evangelical Mike Gerson, who wrote that speech, used this language.

But I can give lots of other examples.

Just War Theory. As late as the Korean War, Just War Theory was thought to be something eccentric that Catholics had to do to justify their participation in modern wars. Now, after that, in the run-up to the Iraq war, the New York Times is using Just War Theory to critique the run-up for the Iraq War.

That Catholic vocabulary triumphed in a whole lot of ways, but the attempt of all of my friends and the people I was around to substitute Catholicism for the missing leg that the collapsed mainline Protestant churches were failed. It failed. That project did not succeed.

Doug Monroe:

I can see that … This is just Doug’s opinion a little bit on this.

I saw John Paul II and Benedict, based on what I know and have read … What I would say … And I’m trying to be objective. There’s no such thing, right? No one’s objective in their own worldview. But I personally believe there is a Christian orthodoxy out there somewhere, and I feel like they somehow, since Leo and so on, the Catholic Church was … You can call it an Americanized version of orthodoxy. I don’t know. But it was moving in that direction.

I believe that’s still there for us to do together. I really do. And maintaining all of the foundations of the institutions. I hope it is, and that’s what I pray for.

Joseph Bottum – “An Anxious Age” Predicting Today’s Chaos

Doug Monroe:

Here’s my question for you.

In 2011, when you, I believe, went back to South Dakota, and then you wrote the book there, I presume, in 2014, did you think it could get this bad? Could you have projected the future up to where it is now or down to where it is now?

Joseph Bottum:

Some of it certainly, but there’s craziness that … I think I am not alone in being unable to predict that the treatment of children for transgender stuff, I don’t think any of us could have predicted that 10 years ago. It’s so horrifying that you just couldn’t imagine that this would actually happen.

I think I was clearly on top of my predictions of what social media was going to do, but looking at Jonathan Haidt’s new book about the damage to children, no, I didn’t see that it was going to be that, as bad as it actually is.

In other ways, I think I was predictive of how bad it was going to get.

Doug Monroe:

That’s why I think you were a prophet. What would you say if I said you were a prophet? Is that too strong?

Joseph Bottum:

I wish it was reflected in book sales.

Doug Monroe:

Well, yeah, but … Yeah.

Joseph Bottum:

This is-

Doug Monroe:

You were ahead of the curve by several years.

Joseph Bottum:

The summer of George Floyd … Which was, what, 2020?

Doug Monroe:

Mm-hmm.

Joseph Bottum:

The book did okay. My publisher was a little disappointed. They’d given me an advance that would match the idea that it was going to make the bottom of the bestseller list, that it was going to do really well. And it did okay, but it didn’t do as well, and they were disappointed in me.

And that summer of the George Floyd stuff, so five, six years after the book appears, David Brooks, in the New York Times, mentions the book. He says, “Oh, I’m going back to Jeremy Bottums’ book.”

Doug Monroe:

I remember. Yeah.

Joseph Bottum:

And then Ross Douthat did a whole column in which he said, “When the book came out, I thought it was interesting but somewhat abstract. I now realize it’s the most prophetic book of the last decade. I thought he was reporting. I didn’t realize he was predicting.” And that actually made the book take off again. The sales went back up, and I had lots of interviews, especially in Europe.

The French, for some reason, are just obsessed with this … I think the Ross Douthat column interested Laurie Mandeville at La Presse in Paris, and she did an interview with me, which has become a [inaudible 01:38:11] in France.

I think because secretly, these French people want to say, “Well, you see, he says it’s a Protestant thing, and we were never Protestants, so we are going to escape wokeness.” Which they’re in for a very bad surprise.

Doug Monroe:

Mm-hmm.

Joseph Bottum:

But I think that was the reason I took off in France.

But I think I did successfully predict what was going to happen when these kids stopped being willing to accept the kind of hypocrisy of their parents that, “Oh, we all believe this stuff, but we don’t want to do anything about it.” Because you’re saved by knowing that you’re a good person, you’re not saved by actually doing anything.

Well, once that breaks and then you get the excitement of protests and the excitement of rebellion-

Doug Monroe:

That’s the sin of pride. Yeah.

Joseph Bottum:

… Then it all adds up into really bad stuff.

Doug Monroe:

Well, as I said earlier, I read it in 2021, and so then I was probably talking to Marion trying to figure out the summer of 2020 and I felt like it explained it.

The thing when I look back on it a little bit is I realize all that you say in there about the poster children is completely true. What I don’t know is in terms of the property destruction and the protest movement across the country, which is as bad as the sixties. You didn’t have Watts fires and so on.

Joseph Bottum – Are “poster children” organized Marxists?

Doug Monroe:

Was that the product of the poster children who were probably still in their rooms, or was it organized Marxist Antifa, that kind of thing? Do you have an opinion on that?

Joseph Bottum:

I do.

Doug Monroe:

Okay.

Joseph Bottum:

But I would say some of it is ideological, some of it is adventitious. In any movement that claims a moral authority, there are going to be people who take advantage of it.

This is the great economic theory of bootleggers and Baptists.

Doug Monroe:

Mm-hmm.

Joseph Bottum:

You know, who are the two forces that are actually pushing to keep liquor prohibited? It’s the believers, the Baptists, and the bootleggers who make money off of the … So that coalition-

Doug Monroe:

The mafia.

Joseph Bottum:

Right. ‘The coalition of bootleggers and Baptists’ is the phrase economists use.

Some of it’s that. And then there are the charlatans. So there are people who took advantage of this. They’ve always wanted the destruction of America. They took advantage of this. They said, “Ah, you are all Marxists.” They weren’t, but the people didn’t have strong convictions, and here the Marxists are saying, “Oh, you’re all us.”

And then there are the people who take advantage of it. The Elmer Gantry’s. What Elmer Gantry was in Upton Sinclair’s account, novelistic account of this really empty Christian preacher, you’re going to see that in any moral movement. You get these people who say, “Ah, I am your spokesman. I am your deep thinker.” And I saw a lot of that with the project to redefine America fundamentally as a slave-owning country with all the rest of it.

You see the charlatans emerge when this situation occurs, and the opportunists emerge, and the kids looking for some excitement, and you add up all of those and they coalesce in this way.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. It’s not one thing. It’s five, six things.

Joseph Bottum:

Right.

And the coalition can have horrifying results. I mean, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia started as a student movement, and it ends up with the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Percentage-wise, perhaps the greatest slaughter of any communist regime is the Killing Fields in Cambodia. That was a student movement, and they got allies because there are people who wanted excitement and then there were people who were interested in overthrowing the monarchy, and you got the allies. And of course then, once they get control, the allies are the first with their backs to the wall.

Joseph Bottum – Is the West catching the cold of fascism?

Doug Monroe:

Well, it does remind me of the analogy of the 1930s in Germany and some of the events over the last, well, since you wrote the book in 2014.

Joseph Bottum:

Here’s where I-

Doug Monroe:

Are you worried about that or not?

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah, I mean, I think we cannot help but be worried.

But I will say this. I think there’s still a sensibleness somewhere down that … You know, we’re always catching the cold of fascism and then shaking it off, where it’s the Europeans who actually get the disease.

Doug Monroe:

Mm-hmm.

Joseph Bottum:

You know, the virus here spreads and we sort of shake it off.

Doug Monroe:

Mm-hmm.

Joseph Bottum:

And my hope is, and my belief is, especially living out in South Dakota, that there’s a sort of immunity to this. We can get sick from it, but we’re not going to die from it.

Doug Monroe:

Mm-hmm.

Joseph Bottum:

I know writers, some friends of yours and mine, who push this really hard. They think we are on the edge of Kristallnacht.

Doug Monroe:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joseph Bottum:

I don’t believe it.

I think in part, this is the silly season and it’s overwrought in the reporting, which allows it then to kind of go. And it’s dangerous.

Things could go very wrong, and they are going wrong, but whether it ultimately ends up in complete disaster, I don’t know, and I don’t think so. I don’t want to think so. But I hope that it is not my will driving my analysis here, that I think actually Americans are a little more sensible. They’ll shake this off.

Doug Monroe:

It’s also a very big country to target.

Joseph Bottum:

Right. And we’re not going to end up in civil war.

Doug Monroe:

I wouldn’t want to fight my redneck friends who will stop me if they have to. I mean, if you come looking for them.

Joseph Bottum:

There are always people … This was a revelation to me during the COVID stuff. And I have no opinion about what was the proper response. I just don’t know. So I’m not going to go there. But I am going to say it was a reminder to me that there’s always an impulse out there that some people have that they want to order other people around. And whether it’s fascist or the prissy thing …

Forest Service just fired a group of volunteers out in California in embarrassment. These volunteers, they had a little forest service patch because the volunteer group got that. They were arresting people, hassling people, demanding that people recite environmental slogans. And when it finally comes out, the Forest Service is like, “No, it was a group of volunteers that we would have show people trails.” But it reminded me there’s always an impulse out there among some people, among maybe many people to be anti-bureaucrats in charge of other people. And those are the ones we have to watch out.

This is what one scholar called ‘Hitler’s willing executioners.’ You know?

Doug Monroe:

Mm-hmm.

Joseph Bottum:

That there are going to be people out there … This is why you don’t want it to go bad, because there are people who will do that.

But I think we want to say, in the end, I hope that America will shake off this stuff, that we’re not actually headed towards civil war.

The danger is this, that as René Girard saw, the apocalypse happens because we believe in the apocalypse. We bring it about. If you keep screaming something is apocalyptic, it turns out it’s your screams which make it apocalyptic.

Joseph Bottum – Has the wind shifted toward normalcy and societal guardrails?

Doug Monroe:

Well, as you could tell from my question that I threw out there … By the way, your summation was beautiful, I thought, at the conference to empower America, [inaudible 01:46:16] conference. And the way you talked about the seventies was beautiful. You just had to live through it to appreciate it, okay? I’m just loving the fact that that’s when I came of age. It was a great time. Although probably not a great time from an American standpoint, but … I don’t know.

I’m more optimistic just over the last year. I’m seeing creativity, I’m seeing people energized, I’m seeing people going back to church. I’m seeing people that have been in the private sector saying, “Wait a minute, I’ve got 20 years left. I’ve got to do something about this”, and they’re putting money and time behind it. And we do have the money and time. So it’s happening.

And young people are searching. I was just with Mr. Widmer and he was talking about the Catholic students that are wonderful, much more happy and friendly, like I think we used to be, than in Carolina, where you tend to look at your phone on the way to class and you’ve got all these beautiful people you’re not looking at.

You know, I’m optimistic.

Joseph Bottum:

I still think there’s some—in business there’s some reaction against this. You saw Google fired those people who occupied their employees, who occupied the office.

Doug Monroe:

Yes. You’re seeing it. You’re seeing it.

Joseph Bottum:

And that strikes me. Now, you can over-read these tea leaves, right?

Doug Monroe:

Correct. It’s an anecdote.

Joseph Bottum:

But we may be past the peak of it when the staff of the New York Times demanded and got the Op-Ed editor fired, the opinion page editor fired for running an op-ed by a sitting US senator expressing the majority opinion of the United States.

Doug Monroe:

Wow. Yeah.

Joseph Bottum:

They said, “He made us feel unsafe”, and they got him fired. When I was young, I was talking to Deborah Saunders, old newspaper people, and we were saying when we were young just starting out, if you had gone to one of the gray hairs at the editorial desk and said, “Oh, our position on this makes me feel unsafe”, they would’ve said, “I’m sorry that you’re leaving.” They would’ve said, “You have no business in our profession. If you are so frightened, then you can’t be a journalist.”

Doug Monroe:

Yeah.

Joseph Bottum:

And the idea that you could have gotten the editor of that piece fired-

Doug Monroe:

Exactly.

Joseph Bottum:

… Would’ve seemed to them bizarre. They would’ve said, “Okay, well, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Doug Monroe:

That’s what I would’ve called the monkeys running the zoo, and in my time that didn’t happen.

Joseph Bottum:

Right. But I think the Google thing is a sign that we’ve-

Doug Monroe:

It is. It is a good sign. Yes.

Joseph Bottum:

… Moved past this mode where they’re just going to say-

Doug Monroe:

And you’re seeing that across the board.

Joseph Bottum:

Forbes ran a piece that quoted the CFO, I think, whoever issued the statement about firing these people, and he said the four most important words in this blather, because every corporate statement has a bulk, a blather in it, but he said the four most important words in it were, “This is a business.”

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joseph Bottum:

Right?

Doug Monroe:

Exactly. Exactly. I love hearing that, and I know it’s true. And that in and of itself tells me there are some guardrails out there.

Joseph Bottum – Is there a Christian orthodoxy?

Doug Monroe:

Is there an orthodoxy? I don’t like the word orthodoxy because it sounds like dogma. But when you read the Gospel and you read the Bible, are there certain things that Catholics and Protestants and orthodox Christians can agree on that can shape the world on earth as it is in heaven?

Joseph Bottum:

Sure. I mean, [inaudible 01:50:21] can shape the world. But this is the theme of, say, C.S Lewis’s “Mere Christianity.” It’s mere because it is what we can share among all believers. Absolutely. Yeah. There’s that.

Whether it will be sufficient unto the social problems of today, I don’t know.

And there’s a tendency toward a kind of old-fashioned 1950s and sixties ecumenism which wanted to abrade the distinctions. Whereas I’ve got that Baroque hog-stomping … What Tom Wolfe called the Baroque hog-stomping America that wants to look to Tocqueville and say, “It’s through our disagreements that we actually create the central channel. And you don’t want to abrade them. You don’t want to do that cheap and easy ecumenism which gave us lots of bad results. You want to say we disagree fundamentally, but when truth is on the line, we stand on the same side.”

That’s the strong ecumenism. That’s the vital ecumenism. And that comes from knowing what we believe as different from what other people believe, and yet I will stand up for your right to say … If I believe in free speech, I think we have to go with Voltaire’s line, “I disagree with you fundamentally, and I would die for your right to say it.” I think that’s the kind of strong American sense that Emerson calls us to in the democratic mind, that an appreciation of difference in America and pluralism calls us to, and that true ecumenism calls us to.

I don’t demand that the differences between you as a Protestant and me as a Catholic are unimportant. I think they’re vital. But when someone faces us with a gun, we’re on the same side.

Doug Monroe:

I do think America can get to that, but perhaps we need an enemy to do that.

Joseph Bottum – Christian Nationalism: A Washed Up Argument

Doug Monroe:

First Things now is focused on Christian nationalism, and I think they’re handling the issue fairly well. It’s not something you can just write one article and deal with. When you hear all the negatives out there, I think it’s more common to hear about it as a negative thing. Christian nationalism, what do you have to say about that?

Joseph Bottum:

I haven’t looked at what they’re doing. I don’t know anything actually about what they’re doing. But I will say-

Doug Monroe:

They’re really just trying to explain aspects of it.

Joseph Bottum:

Okay. So I will say this.

Back in the sixties when the new left emerged, an old Marxist socialist, he’d been around since the 1930s, an editor at The Nation, was in a debate with Tom Hayden, who’d written the Port Huron Statement for the Students for a Democratic Society and was this new left guy, and he was making some economics point out of Stalinism. I think it was William Barrett, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, this elderly editor for The Nation said in a line that I love, “You are bringing up arguments so old that I have forgotten the answers to them. All I remember is that we did answer them and moved on.”

When I encounter some of the post-liberalism stuff, some of the Christian nationalism stuff, some of these arguments about how the very existence of democracy is a denial of the truths of the faith, I think, “Those are arguments so old, I cannot remember the answer to them.”

All I remember is we were there with the Philadelphia Society in the 1980s. We were there with the Red Berets in the 1960s. We have faced this argument before. In order to engage you, I would have to think what the actual answers are, but what I do remember is we did answer them and we moved on, and to bring them up one more time is so exhausting and so silly that I can’t be bothered to engage it, nor do I think it has any legs and will go anywhere.

I think its actual importance is that a generally left-leaning American press wants to report it to pretend that they have thereby indicted the whole of conservative thought.

Joseph Bottum – Role of the Family vs. Growing Central Government

Doug Monroe:

What if somebody said the bottom line issue today in the Erie Canal thesis right now with Protestantism is the role of the family in the private sector versus a growing central government? What would you say to that?

An impressive constantly-

… constantly. Let me think about that.

Joseph Bottum:

One of the things that Tocqueville worries about, and many sociologically interested people ever since, is the totalizing impulse of government, that it has to be resisted at every point. Not because there are evil people in government, but that it’s the natural desire of government for there not to exist any rival sources of authority, and that even though government doesn’t intend to strip the churches of authority, it has that effect at every point because the sheer existence of government doesn’t like alternate sources of power.

They will resist businesses for that. They’ll resist the churches for that. They’ll resist the family for that. At every point you have to push back. In the case of the family, I think we actually are pushing back with the help of the Supreme Court whose pretty consistently said, “No, children are not wards of the state. They’re wards of the parents.” Now you see, remember I said there are always people who want to control these child welfare advocates and board members in these state bureaucracies. It’s much worse on the state level and the county level.

These people, their automatic response to any kind of complaint is to take the children away from the parents. They’re really bad. What’s happening in family courts at the state and local level, what’s happening in child welfare hearings, this is horrifying. It’s not the federal government that’s doing it. For one thing, they have to do it out in the sunlight. People can see them passing laws. It’s these county family courts that are doing it, and the child welfare officers for, I don’t know, Shenandoah County or whatever. They’re-

Doug Monroe:

It’s there. It’s everywhere.

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah, it’s everywhere.

Doug Monroe:

It’s everywhere. It’s everywhere.

Joseph Bottum:

These are the people who want to control.

Doug Monroe:

It’s getting my daughter mad at her government when she has every reason to like them.

Joseph Bottum:

Right. It’s happening at this local level and it’s those people who their first impulse is to tell other people what to do. Do I think the family’s threatened? Yeah, but I actually think the real threat is happening in the darkness of local level government.

Doug Monroe:

Local people. Yeah. So it doesn’t matter that the president and the vice president says that your children really are children. That’s what they say.

Joseph Bottum:

That actually has less consequence.

Doug Monroe:

It has less consequence than the infrastructure that’s in there.

Joseph Bottum – The Fourth Great Awakening

Doug Monroe:

You say, I believe, I can’t remember whether it’s actually in the Anxious Age or whether the extensive article you wrote soon thereafter, but you were seeing problems develop and trends that hadn’t happened since the first Great Awakening the 1730s, something like this. Can we have another awakening in the poster child world? The post poster child world, maybe. I don’t know.

Joseph Bottum:

One way to read the last 50 years of history is the Great Awakening, the fourth Great Awakening that never quite happened, that it kept threatening to break out and didn’t over and over and over again. I was guilty, as guilty as others and saying, “Oh no, this is it. With these murders out in Colorado, this is going to break open into the Great Awakening.” I was as guilty as everyone at over-reading this, but it always never quite happened. Another way, an alternate way to read this, is yes, we just had the fourth Great Awakening. It’s the Woke.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. Wow.

Joseph Bottum:

Why are the young drawn to this? Remember, Jonathan Edwards after the surprising conversions in his account of the first Great Awakening, he says there started to appear certain spiritual things. A man who had not been much of a churchgoer is found praying in an orchard. He names these serious things and he says the sudden flowering that came from this was a flowering of seriousness among our young people. That that’s when we get the Great Awakening, out of the young people. That’s what we’ve got here.

What it is, of course, is the young people’s hunger for this and the madness of us telling them that this is what will save their souls. This is what will make them feel like they’re good people. The churches used to corral these impulses. When the mainline churches broke, they were set loose, these tendencies and these madnesses, and some of them good. This desire to be moral, it set loose-

Doug Monroe:

It’s very good.

Joseph Bottum:

… and it finds a home in politics. That was the danger.

Doug Monroe:

The problem is that their data is all wrong.

Joseph Bottum:

Oh, yeah.

Doug Monroe:

They’re going to be rediscovering the same things that have been known now for at least 200 years.

Joseph Bottum:

Oh, right.

Doug Monroe:

To go down these roads and to say that, “Oh, what about these solutions that my parents didn’t accept? They must…” No, the parents knew the 500 year history of why that solution is stupid, so you need to start arguing truth not-

Joseph Bottum:

Right, but then we’ve systematically uneducated or miseducated or failed to educate people by teaching them as this woke thing reinforces itself. It teaches them that they don’t have to know the past because the past is simply a catalog of evil.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, it’s a narrative of the power-

Joseph Bottum:

So now you don’t have to know it-

Doug Monroe:

… of the time.

Joseph Bottum:

… and then… Right, and then it feeds on itself. This is the danger. If you read the Great Awakening and that Jonathan Edwards line of really, you have religious stuff going on, but it’s when the young people get on board that you have the Great Awakening. This is what we just saw. It’s the young here who are enforcing this on one another and teaching it to one another. It’s just the Church of Christ without Christ. They’ve stripped out any possibility of it having any kind of intelligible meaning. It just becomes about feeling right.

Every Great Awakening gave us some sociopolitical consequence. I’m actually persuaded more or less that the revolution doesn’t happen without the Great Awakening first. I think the second Great Awakening gives us abolitionism, which is going to see the Civil War. I think the third Great Awakening gave us prohibition, which isn’t great, but there’s always some consequence. What this fourth Great Awakening is going to give us, I don’t know, but it will have some sociopolitical consequence.

Joseph Bottum – Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America?

Joseph Bottum:

Yeah. Well, to be a Christian is to be an optimist, except to be a Christian is to be a pessimist, because the you catastrophe is what… We only have the happy ending if we have the catastrophe. To be a Christian is to recognize it all ends sad until the second coming. To be a Christian is also to have hope. You have to be both or neither about America. Though in the coming period, let’s say 50 years, yeah, I believe in America. I’ve always liked it. I’m optimistic because I think-

Doug Monroe:

Here’s a question.

Joseph Bottum:

… we’ll shake a lot of it off.

Joseph Bottum – Would the world be worse off without America?

Doug Monroe:

Would the world be worse off without America?

Joseph Bottum:

Oh, absolutely. Years ago, Ralph McInerny, the Catholic philosopher and novelist, mystery writer, Ralph McInerny, had me in for some conference at Notre Dame. I was listening to these Catholics, prototypes of some of the things we’re seeing now, saying, “Oh, America’s a force for evil in the world and we need to correct for this and we need to withdraw from America, withdraw our support.” I had had enough, Doug. Also, the food was bad, the coffee was bad, so I had a sour stomach. I was not in a good place out there at Notre Dame.

I got up to respond to all of this and I said, “You are abandoning the watchtowers and the high places in which God has set you, and you will answer for this because America has its faults, but it is much more a restrainer of evil than it is a creator of it. And you will miss it when it’s gone because we will have raped women and blood flowing in the streets and all of that blood will be on your heads for abandoning the watchtowers and high places in which God sent you.” I sat down to silence as a result of that.

A lot of these people who think America is this force for evil… Is America evil? Absolutely, because every government is evil. Every state is a failure. There is no perfection in this world. None of us now nor ever will be the new Jerusalem, the city founded without violence in which our swords have been beaten to plowshares. That is never going to happen. It is never going to be an actual government in place. As far as the lower level of saying, “Well, relatively speaking, how is it?” The United States has been a force for good that has restrained evil that we would otherwise have had to suffer, and we will miss it when it’s gone.

Doug Monroe:

Well, Joseph, I just want to thank you for one of the most fun interviews I’ve ever done. I would like to do it once a week and be in your book club, but this has been a lot of fun and thank you so much for this opportunity.

Joseph Bottum:

Thank you for having me.

Doug Monroe:

I really look forward to your next book, over 200 pages, about where the hell we are, and also reading your poetry and your Christmas book.

Joseph Bottum – Reading of Poem “Reading by Osmosis”

Joseph Bottum:

I’ll start with the comic one. Okay, so this is in my recent book, Spending the Winter. This is a lighter poem called Reading by Osmosis. It goes, well Mark Twain, Hart Crane and Ursula K. Le Guin, we’ve mastered their books with a difficult trick. We’ve read them outside in. Percy B. Shelley and Machiavelli and Norman Vincent Peale, we’ve never tried opening one of their books. We know them by their field. Does reading seem boring? Does reading seem hard? Does reading seem too precocious? Just pick up a book and give it a twirl. You’ll learn it by osmosis. Because osmosis is the mostest. Osmosis is the best. Osmosis is the closest thing to reading without rest. Osmosis means absorbing. Osmosis means so much. Osmosis means we’re soaking up the books we barely touch. We bobble, bounce and throw them. We never even look. Osmosis means we know them without opening a book.

You know, my sister osmoted the Mill on the Floss, a marvelous book and gave me a gloss. My brother osmoted, the Lord of the Rings, a story of insects with thousands of wings. Or was that a book called Lord of the Flies? Oh, well, we’re getting wise by learning the things that osmosis now brings. We’ll juggle the books, Little Women and men, they’re all about dwarves in a mountainy den and throw in a copy of Watership Down concerning a boat and some sailors who drown. And then, we’ll run to the bookstore again. We boast. We boast osmosis is the most indelible way to read today while eating jam and toast.

We shout, we plead, osmosis we will need for munching snacks and playing jacks and dancing while we read. So Rebecca West and Edgar Guest, we’ll never be certain which one is the best. Christopher Smart and Jean-Paul Sartre, just think of the wonders they have to impart. John Donne and Thom Gunn, osmoting them both is a gallon of fun. Somerset Maughan and L. Frank Baum, Josiah Royce and James Joyce, John Bunyan and Damon Runyon, Graham Greene and Molly Keane, Tom Payne and Ed McBain, Ring Lardner and John Gardner, Alice Monroe and Arthur Rimbaud… And oh, hundreds of others we know because…

Osmosis is the mostest. Osmosis is the best. Osmosis is the closest thing to reading without rest. Osmosis means absorbing. Osmosis means so much. Osmosis means we’re soaking up the books we barely touch. We hold them to our noses, we brush them with our clothes. We’re learning by osmosis when we tap them with our toes. We pile them on the table, we slide them on the floor, we stack them into stairways and we climb up for some more. We bobble, bounce and throw them. We never even look. Osmosis means we know them without opening book.

Joseph Bottum – Reading of “Easter Morning”

Joseph Bottum:

This is the opening poem called Easter Morning. I wrote it for, and to some extent about, René Girard’s theories because he’s such an influence on me, his theories of sacrifice. It was also really a poem set here in Washington when my daughter was young, a toddler. We lived here in Washington DC, and I took her for a walk in Rock Creek Park and she was running to see all the spring flowers. I became terrified, as fathers can, about what will come of their children, what will become of them. This is called Easter Morning.

Doug Monroe:

Well, I did not ask you about your wife and I know you’ve been doing that. You’ve done-

Joseph Bottum:

This is called Easter Morning. Quick as dawn, the dogwoods have raised improbable awnings, christened with rain. Thrusts of witch Hazel stands of rue, and there, there across the stream in the shade of those dark-likened rocks, white flocks and geraniums strain to reach the angled light. One bright morning, a clean April day amazes familiar paths with a green tangle and bazes the winter stain. Faster, each Easter, my daughter flies past tumbled mounds where brambles grow, the blood-root flowers near her feet as delicate as Bible leaves and slow persistent ivy kindles on old trees. The year will know a fresh redemption burning green.

The Greenwood glows till ash and thorn fall back to sleep, counter-pained again with snow. Beneath these trees with ragged knives, cold priests once tried to wake the leaf, the root, the branch, the frozen world that needs new life for spring. A lamb, a child, the shrouds of snow would melt in their warm blood as grief by grief, pain by vengeful pain we paid the sacrificial debt that swells with each repaying death. And where in time is time’s relief. My daughter runs by the brief flowers, Touch-Me-Nots among the stones, bluebells and sorrels. Solomon’s Seal.

Every spring pretends a pity for all the pretty short-lived things. Last night I watched the fire zones, the bomber’s plumes, and tracer rounds, blooms of war on the TV news. And now in these green trees, I see the graves of gods and a grove of bones. History labors a worn machine sick with torsion, ill-meshed and every repair of an old fault ruptures something new. The sacred knife no longer hallows woods, but winter’s blood still springs refreshed and an altered world still summons death. As long as we endure ourselves, innocence will come to grief, and mercy must remain un-fleshed.

The parish bells begin their carols. Down through the trees like flourished prayer, the Easter call resounding. Time reaches forward hungry for winter. And what will save my daughter when even hope is caught in the ancient snare? A cold fear waits till all that had fallen, all that was lost, rudely broken, crossed in. Love comes rising, rising on the breath of the new spring air.

Joseph Bottum – Final Cowboy Talk on “Shane”

Doug Monroe:

I want to tell you a little bit about Shane though, the movie. I’m just telling you, my Christian men’s group, they joke about it when we talk about issues, and I think I have the answer. They say, “Is it Shane? Is it Shane again?” I say, “Yeah, unfortunately it is,” but I’m a real George Stevens fan, the director who did Shane, and he was fan for 10 years and Shane’s along with High Noon, they came out about the same time. …cowboy Hollywood person that you would know that that set the tone of every single Western since then, those two movies together. There are other great ones, but Shane really is, I believe, a Christian allegory, and I’ve looked at this very carefully, and it’s comprehensive.

Joseph Bottum:

I think that’s probably right. The self-consciousness of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance meant that it didn’t have a lot of successors. It’s very self-consciously, we’re telling the myth of the West as myth and the sadness of the truth underneath the myth. High Noon has some of that too. There’s a self-consciousness about High Noon. So I’d be willing to hear this argument about Shane. I will say in terms of Western Books, that Shane is a genre book. And it’s very influential in the genre. This is who’s writing in those days? Max Brand, Luke Short, these western genre writers who are going to kind of culminate in Louis L’Amour.

But when True Grit comes out in ’64, I think, this is a period of high literary writers doing Western. So we get Little Big Man, we get True Grit. There’s a genre thing going on. Ron Hansen, the Catholic, started as one of those high lit western writers. He did Desperadoes and the Robert Ford, The Coward Who Assassinated Jesse James, and which was made into a nice movie with Brad Pitt. But I will say True Grit-

Doug Monroe:

Is up there.

Joseph Bottum:

…actually changes everything up.

Doug Monroe:

It does.

Joseph Bottum:

I mean, I do. I think it’s a great book and an okay movie, but just in terms of a book, it changes everything because it creates a literary language for the characters to speak. And that strangely formal self-conscious, biblical phrasing that every Western movie now has, that all comes from True Grit. He creates that-

Doug Monroe:

Would you fit Clint Eastwood into that?

Joseph Bottum:

Oh, he got that-

Doug Monroe:

Did he master that eventually? He was doing it before, wasn’t he?

Joseph Bottum:

Not that language thing.

Doug Monroe:

No?

Joseph Bottum:

If you even think about the John Wayne version of True Grit-

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, true grit, got you.

Joseph Bottum:

…it’s still driven by these characters, self-consciousness about the way they talk, the bad guy scene, Mattie says, “If I could not find him with the Mark of Cain upon his face in three years, then I am not qualified to speak to you about how it is that he may be found.” That formalism of language and…

Doug Monroe:

Right, exactly.

Joseph Bottum:

That all comes from True Grit, from the book. It’s hugely influential.

Doug Monroe:

It’s definitely in historical accounts of the West. And where I’m going with this is, there were two books that got me ensconced in this, and the Monroe’s that I’m from is we basically founded Austin for the settlers in the 1830s, and they’re still around down there. So I have a lot of this wanting to know more about the West, even though I’m a Virginian. But what got me into the genre just in the last two or three years is Empire of the Summer Moon about the Comanches and Blood and Thunder, which is about Kit Carson and the Navajo, and that’s gotten me into just a whole realm of Tom Glavin, and he’s a popular-

Joseph Bottum:

You read Death Comes for the Archbishop, right?

Doug Monroe:

No.

Joseph Bottum:

Oh.

Doug Monroe:

No. I’m not real well… I’ve just gotten into-

Joseph Bottum:

That’s Willa Cather’s novel about the Archbishop of Santa Fe, but Kit Carson appears in that book as the complete man.

Doug Monroe:

Yes. Oh, he is the super stud.

Joseph Bottum:

He’s a well-formed man. He’s moral, he’s confident. She uses him as, the way Hamlet calls Horatio, his complete man. The Archbishop of Santa Fe, who’s this Frenchman who just shows up and has to carve a diocese out of the wilderness, but she uses Kit Carson in that way.

Doug Monroe:

He’s an absolute superstar. And the one thing I want to throw out at you while I have it is, being a Western guy like you are, you know how people that aren’t from the West, they see all these cowboy movies, especially boomers, where it was so big and they think, “Oh, that’s so exaggerated.” My point is no, it’s not exaggerated at all. It was actually far more dangerous, far worse, far more everything.

Joseph Bottum:

What we don’t know is the actual language that these people use, which is why-

Doug Monroe:

That’s true.

Joseph Bottum:

…True Grit in ’64 is so influential because it creates a plausible diction for these people.

Doug Monroe:

Think about it, if it’s true that in Deadwood, South Dakota or-

Joseph Bottum:

I’s just up the road from me.

Doug Monroe:

Or Dodge City, you really did, and it often happened every other week, somebody gets shot in a saloon, you’re going to be very careful about how you pick your language with people while you’re sober,

Joseph Bottum:

My daughter, who was more of a libertarian than I was, she always loved that line of the libertarian science fiction, Robert Heinlein, where he said, “An armed society is a polite society.”

Doug Monroe:

Yes, it is. It is so true.

Joseph Bottum:

But I mean, what takes those Western stories out of the Penny Dreadfuls and moves them into genre fiction is Zane Gray’s Riders of the Purple Sage in 1906 and Owen Wisler’s The Virginian in 1912. And The Virginian is exactly that story of the Southerner who had been an officer in the defeated Confederate army goes west.

Doug Monroe:

Exactly.

Joseph Bottum:

And he is polite, and he is well-mannered, and he thinks of himself as-

Doug Monroe:

Josey Wales, the movie, that’s what it is.

Joseph Bottum:

Although he’s lower class, he’s a farmer, whereas The Virginian is a-

Doug Monroe:

The Virginian is an aristocrat in some fashion.

Joseph Bottum:

…the confederate captain who’s now lost, and his life has lost meaning, but he wanders through as the hybrid existential hero through the West.

Doug Monroe:

Yes. And it is true that the Civil War came along, sucked all those men into the army, and then the Indians had a fun time, and then they all came back and they were changed people due to that.

Joseph Bottum:

One of the things just as I hold forth on Western literature, at this point in life, I realized I’ve read near everything. You want to talk about Western? Sure.

Doug Monroe:

Well, see this, I mean, you’re obviously an extremely literary person, I’m not that. If it’s American history generally, civil war, I am an expert. I was a founder of the Civil War Center in Richmond, only because as a businessman, I was known to know so much. It’s been a passion of mine since I went to Carolina and had a great professor there and so on, but so I’m new to the West other than Shane, and I see a biblical allegory there, and it is… I can send you an essay on that.

An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and Spirit of America