While the specifics of what our society looks like are contingent, now that we’ve arrived at a definitely post-Christian culture, we should expect that the bourgeois values associated with zombie Protestantism would largely disappear. And they have.

It’s no secret that America’s working classes – more broadly, those without college degrees and professional jobs – have been living increasingly socially dysfunctional lives. This was documented well by Robert Putnam in Our Kids and Charles Murray in Coming Apart.

Just as one example, America has the highest share of its children living in single parent households of any country in the world. This has profound negative consequences for our country.

One popular culprit for this is a decline in adherence to “bourgeois values” or bourgeois culture. We see these values described well in Amy Wax’s controversial Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed on the subject:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries. The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Failure to valorize and adhere to bourgeois values is part of the conservative theories about the “culture of poverty.”

Bourgeois values are a modernized and secularized version of those of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic. For a deeper exploration of America’s traditional Protestant ethic, see my essay from last year:

Read the full story: Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant?

Bourgeois values is actually a good term for them because they are associated with the bourgeois economy, that is to say, capitalism, particularly capitalism as it existed prior to roughly the Great Depression.

The problem is that America is now a post-bourgeois country, both economically and culturally. This poses significant challenges to those, such as myself, who want to both reduce social dysfunctions like drug abuse and generally elevate the health, flourishing, and productivity of our people.

I will trace this American post-bourgeois shift across three dimensions:

• From a Protestant to a post-Christian culture
• From a bourgeois to a managerial economy
• From a production to a consumption based society

From Protestant to Post-Christian

America was 98% Protestant at the time of the founding and deeply embodied an Anglo-Protestant, Calvinistic culture. While Weber’s Puritans were the English Puritans, not the American ones, his analysis does broadly describe the austere, self-controlled, industrious, energetic, and expansionistic American culture that tamed the continent and perhaps more than any other built the modern world we live in today.

These values and behaviors were ultimately rooted in religion. As that religion dissipated, so did those values. French writer Emmanuel Todd views this collapse of Protestantism as a crisis for the West. I previously wrote an essay that went into some detail on his views.

Read the full story: Will the End of Protestantism Be the End of America?

Todd divides the story arc of religious decline through three states: active, zombie, and zero.

• In the active state, people still attend church and practice Christianity, living out the habits and values of their religion.
• In the zombie state, regular church attendance and genuine belief are lost, but the habits and values of religion remain.
• In the zero state, not only do people no longer believe of practice religion, but the habits and values of religion have disappeared.

Todd does not give specific dates for America, but implies that the active state ended by around 1900. The zombie state lasted from around 1900 to 1965. Then there was a transition phase from zombie to zero state that ended in 2015. Todd identifies the legalization of gay marriage as the definitive sign of our arrival at a religious zero state.

Seen in Todd’s framework, bourgeois values are the values of zombie Protestantism. They are post-religious but continue forward the habits and values of American Protestantism. 

Read More