Whittaker Chambers's Anxious Age

In his compelling recent book, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, Catholic author Joseph Bottom argues that the modern left is a religious movement. Liberals, like everyone else, crave the self-esteem that comes with being virtuous. It's just that their virtue comes from dogmatic adherence to and promotion of the canon of the modern left: environmentalism, feminism, and socialism.

Bottom traces the religious urge of the modern left back one hundred years to Walter Rauschenbusch, the Baptist minister who helped promote the Social Gospel movement that held that there were six key sins: bigotry, the arrogance or power, the corruption of justice for personal ends, militarism, the madness of the mob, and class contempt. For today's left, the great Satanic evils are racism, homophobia, classism, white privilege, etc.