Born in Vermillion, South Dakota, Bottum was brought up in the state capital of Pierre and later Salt Lake City, Utah, where he attended Judge Memorial Catholic High School.

[15] Forced out in 2010 after controversy about the future and the funding of the magazine[16] following the death of Neuhaus, Bottum moved to his family's summer house in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

[19][20] After returning to South Dakota, he produced his Kindle Single Dakota Christmas, which reached #1 on the Amazon e-book bestseller list,[21] and he published such print books as the examination of song lyrics as poetry in The Second Spring (2011), the childhood memoir The Christmas Plains (2012), and the sociological study of American religion in An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America (2014), together with the e-book collection of selected essays, Pulp & Prejudice.

Bottum's 2013 essay “The Things We Share”[28] in the Catholic journal Commonweal, urging acceptance of state-sanctioned same-sex marriage, was covered by a pair of articles in The New York Times[29] and by many other publications.

[34] Reviewing the book for The American Interest, the columnist David Goldman wrote, “Joseph Bottum may be America's best writer on religion.”[35] In The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty compared the book to work by James Burnham, Daniel Bell, and Christopher Lasch, suggesting “with the publication of An Anxious Age, I wonder if these earlier thinkers haven't all been surpassed.”[36] Bottum was a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard[37] and served as distinguished visiting professor at Houston Baptist University in 2014.

shaped the minds of a generation.”[39] He has read his New Formalist poetry on C-SPAN,[40] done commentary for NBC's Meet the Press[41] and the PBS Newshour,[42] and appeared on many other television and radio programs.