From the Article:
The new elite class of America is the old one: America’s mainline Protestant Christians in both the glory and the annoyingness of their moral confidence and spiritual certainty. They just stripped out the Christianity along the way.
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The failure to achieve a new synthesis, however, derives most of all from the simple fact that an enormous number, an entire social class of American Protestants became neither Evangelicals, nor Catholics. They simply stopped being Christian believers, even while they kept the assurance of their Protestant parents that they represented the center of American culture.
This is where the mainline went. And many members of this new class are entirely representative, educated with a postgraduate degree, churchless, successful, somewhat fragile in their finances, and utterly confident about the essential moral rightness of their social and political opinions.
. . . Over the past 50 years or so, these post-Protestants have gradually formed the core of a new and fascinating social class in America. Although not as dominant as their genuinely Protestant forebears once were, they nonetheless set the tone for much of our current political discourse. And we can recognize their origins in mainline Protestantism when we discern some of the ways in which they see the world and themselves. They are, for the most part, politically liberal, preferring that government rather than private associations address social concerns. They remained puritanical and highly judgmental, at least about health. And like all puritans, they are willing to use law to compel behavior they think right.
Source: The Post-Protestant Ethic and Spirit of America, The American, February 22, 2014
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