The Land of Lost Content

“As we move forward in the present struggle, where the question of race and religion becomes an endemic part of our theaters of division, we must strive to reject the retributive impulse and embrace what Martha Nussbaum keenly called the ‘rational faith.’”

“What are those blue remembered hills, what spires, what farms are those?”

– A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

Introduction

The American Protestant religion is undergoing an identity crisis akin to its post-World War I travails and what it experienced during the commandeering of the political process by the Religious Right in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In one sense, churches have become what Yuval Levin called performative institutions: Instead of forming the character of their members, they create forums exclusive for therapeutic contemplations and broadband enthusiasm. On the other hand, the public image of the church has lost its credulity in the marketplace of ideas, and those who seek the welfare of their neighbors are largely ignored by the mainstream press for lacking scandal and pizzazz. As Reinhold Niebuhr would lament regarding the dual trends of liberals and fundamentalists, one develops a religion so devoid of faith as to render it meaningless, while the other returns to a religion so out of touch with present realities as to be irrelevant.

It is to this end that we need an intellectual awakening to combat this period of “cultural distortion and grave personal stress.” This is a period, to borrow from William McLoughlin, where the public has lost faith “in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state.” What we need is a “restructuring of our institutions and redefinition of our social goals”—a new phase built on the foundations of moderation-as-virtue and dialectics.