God and Mammon …

… The University Bookman: Rise of the Poster Children. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

While the Poster Children don’t consider themselves Christian, and indeed tend to believe that it’s more moral not to be a professing Christian, Bottum finds them to be remarkably like their Protestant forebears. The major evils in the world, in their view, are bigotry, power, corruption, mass opinion, militarism, and oppression—the same evils identified by Walter Rauschenbusch, a leader in the Protestant social gospel movement of the early twentieth century. While their sense of sin, where the body is concerned, has shifted from sex onto food—they support abortion and same-sex marriage but abhor smoking and obesity—they are as puritanical and judgmental as previous generations of Protestants, as infuriatingly self-righteous, and as willing to use the powers of law and government to enforce their beliefs on others. And while they no longer speak in religious terms, they are driven by a need to see themselves as morally right and assured of salvation. Though it makes more sense to speak of the Poster Children as an elect than an elite, through their monopolization of the meritocratic credentialing machinery that determines entrance into the professions they have become “a new class that rent-seeks, hoards privilege, self-righteously congratulates itself, and arrogantly despises other classes as thoroughly as any group in American history ever has.”

I was taught that Mammon was the god of this world, of power as well as riches. What Rauschenbusch did was to reduce the Gospel to its social implications (somewhat odd, given that Protestantism asserts that faith alone justifies).