noun
The belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers, regarded as creating and governing the universe.
A particular variety of such belief, especially when organized into a system of doctrine and practice.
A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
In 1991, Alasdair MacIntyre published Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, which consisted of a series of edited Gifford Lectures he’d given over the years. In his first chapter, he confessed to having, with many others , infiltrated a rival version of philosophy into Gifford’s program — Adam Gifford himself having been what MacIntyre classified as an encyclopaedist (against MacIntyre’s traditionalist and Nietzsche’s genealogist orientations).
Gifford and his nineteenth century peers shared “what I [MacIntyre] am calling their unitary conception of rationality and of the rational mind that they took it for granted not only that all rational persons conceptualize data in one and the same way and that therefore any attentive and honest observer, unblinded and undistracted by the prejudices of prior commitment to belief, would report the same data, the same facts, but also that it is the data thus reported and characterized which provides enquiry with its subject matter.”
Gifford himself wrote of the establishment of his lectures, “I wish the lecturers to treat their subject as a strictly natural science . . . I wish it to be considered just as astronomy or chemistry is.” This applied to all subjects, and the premises of such an idea activated the creation of actual encyclopaediae — alphabetically-organized, comprehensive reference books that treated all subjects as if they were reducible to brief expositions. Dictionaries try to do the same thing with language.
I opened this post with a dictionary definition as an example of how the definition itself is, like Gifford and Gifford’s fallacious presumptions, a creature of its time. Religion didn’t acquire anything similar to its current meaning or its definition’s universalizing presumptions until the sixteenth century and didn’t come into more general use for at least another century. That’s to say, there was no such thing as the religious-secular dichotomy even possible until this process of “defining” took place. Gifford and his contemporaries, drunk on their idea of Big Science, were the heirs of Descartes, Bacon, and Kant, like their American predecessors who authored the US Constitution and enshrined therein “the separation of church and state.”
They didn’t say “church and state,” a popular phrase, but that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The most passionate advocate for this “separation” was James Madison, who would become the fourth President of the United States.
Madison grew up on a plantation with over a hundred slaves, the eldest of twelve children. He studied under the Presbyterian Professor John Witherspoon at Princeton, who instilled in him both a powerful Enlightenment optimism and the conviction that virtue and success were co-indicative of one another. Madison was a slave-plantation owner (tobacco), a lawyer, a property speculator, and an American expansionist, who supported an invasion of Canada (as part of the disastrous War of 1812). Raised as an Episcopalian, he was widely considered to be a deist by the end of his life. He openly regarded religious persons as both ignorant and violent, and he subscribed to a still-popular fallacy that the wars of Europe were motivated primarily by religious differences.
Contemporary theologian William Cavanaugh challenges “the idea that religion is a transhistorical and transcultural feature of human life, essentially distinct from ‘secular’ features such as politics and economics, which has a peculiarly dangerous inclination to promote violence,” in his book The Myth of Religious Violence; and a close study of Europe’s “wars of religion” shows they were far more powerfully motivated by peasant’s revolts, palace intrigues, power vacuums, land hunger, and fights over colonies than church doctrines. Just as today, these crude-power motivations were promoted by propagandists as religious disputes to gain the support of a credulous public, but religion was neither the source of nor the motivation for the wars themselves.
Madison, nonetheless, promoted this fallacy; and it has survived in public school curricula ever since as part of our own nationalist propaganda. The idea of a religious-secular dichotomy was further entrenched when it took hold in the Academy with “religion’s” reduction to an object of study by sociologists like Durkheim and Weber. Once again, the distinction’s fallaciousness was concealed behind the baseline presumptions of the sociologists themselves in the imposition of this category and the attempt to isolate it (in the French Third Republic and German Empire respectively). The context always matters.
They can probably in turn lay part of the blame at the foot of Augustine who made quite a big deal about the celestial-terrestrial distinction (himself a product of Constantinian Rome). Jesus, Paul, and even John of Patmos, while interpreted this way, are not saying quite the same thing, their pre-imperial distinctions related to the inter-penetration of of the cosmos and the kingdom of God, which we won’t explore here.
Which is all to say that the religious-secular distinction as popularly understood is a construction of Western modernity, and — I insist — an imperial distinction designed for imposition on subjugated and colonial targets. One of Madison’s and Jefferson’s proposed projects was the civilization of the Indians; no different in many respects from Christopher Hitchens’ support for the US/UK invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 in the name of stamping out religious “backwardness” in the name of modernity. Secularity — which is often itself a “religious” orientation — is something modern elites and their epistemological captives want to impose on the ignorant masses no less than Madison’s dream of forcing the Indians to become like white farmers. And they’ve achieved a substantial degree of success.
Naomi Goldenberg, writing (ironically) in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, called “religion” an “empty signifier, in the sense that it is historically, socially and culturally constructed and negotiated in various situations.” In other words, those who use the term unironically in support of various historical-political arguments are blissfully unaware of the fact that the term itself can’t be captured by the “dictionary definition” above, but has its meanings determined purely by the intent of the speaker.
Cavanaugh’s thesis is that the very categories we try to separate with the fantasy of separating religion from politics are in fact in many respects interchangeable as determined by the intents of various speakers. He flips the script by describing politics (especially nationalism) in such a way that it fits pretty much every definition of religion, by emphasizing blood sacrifice, or the willingness to kill or die for something other than another person.
“In the West,” says Cavanaugh, “revulsion toward killing and dying in the name of one’s religion is one of principal means by which we become convinced that killing and dying in the name of the nation-state is laudable and proper.” Echoes of Madison.
“A speech given by a Department of State official,” Cavanaugh once said, “four years into the occupation of Iraq condemned those ‘who try to achieve their goals through the use of violence.’ His target was Sunni and Shi’ite partisans. Journalist Rami Khoury remarked on the speech: ‘as if the US had not used weapons when invading Iraq.’ The myth of religious violence works so that secular violence just doesn’t seem to count as violence.”
This myth serves as validation for one side of an ongoing American political polarity with regard to the “separation of church and state,” which we might call the liberal position. It’s not an all-encompassing polarity, but it’s a noisy one in which both “sides” are polemically served by amplifying both themselves and their antagonists to give this controversy a kind of life-and-death feel. The “liberal” pole is created by the “conservative” pole and vice versa. This controversy does not map directly onto the general idea of liberal and conservative, nor does it map directly onto political parties — though in both cases, there are substantial areas of correspondence.
The strict separationists include those annoying people who tell you they’re atheists within fifteen seconds of any conversation, a lot of libertarians, leftists, most “progressives,” many members of the mainline ecumenical churches like Methodists, Catholics, and Presbyterians, and most members of minority traditions (Jews, Unitarians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Pagans, etc.). The church-state contrarians include “evangelicals,” conservative Catholics, and a loose amalgamation of refugees from the aforementioned mainlines and minorities.
As public life has become increasingly precarious and unpredictable, the contrarians are finding allies among the formerly uncommitted. This migration has been helped along by the most combative of the separationists, who take a condescending pleasure in insulting the “uneducated and ignorant,” and by over-privileged, nihilistic provocateurs.
One thing all the antagonists share is the popular definition of religion to which each side relates differently. I’m throwing doubt on the popular understanding of the category itself not because I want to weigh in on this phony-ass controversy, but because I believe the shared understanding — apart from how the antagonists relate to it — is pregnant with the controversy from the outset. The perpetual battle is built into it, because it’s — in the vernacular — a bullshit category (Goldenberg’s “empty signifier”), rendering the controversy unsolvable.
As a “religious” person — theist, Christian — I’m looking at this from a perspective that was illuminated for me by a long engagement with feminist thought on legal and contract theories: the public-private distinction, like religion, also an artifact of liberal modernity. The public-private distinction is also a bullshit distinction (at least a very flexible signifier).
Faith traditions, for lack of a better phrase, like my own, have lost their appeal not only or even primarily because of the hypocrisy of churchgoers, or their unfortunate alignments with power, but because they’ve been domesticated into the “private” sphere where they are almost a vestigial appendage to our lives.
The pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas admired the Marine Corps for the way it recruited and enculturated its members, promising them challenges, even hardship and danger, and providing a tough, immersive catechism. The church, by contrast, has progressively moved in the other direction, trying to make itself fit in with the rest of society, becoming less countercultural, promising not to be overly-immersive. There are waiting lists to get into the Marines, whatever one may think of their mission and culture. The privatization of “religion,” and its separation from the “public” sphere has been internalized in such a way that even “believers” put it down to a once-a-week social gathering that has little relevance during the other six days. Latour called it the “strange beginning of a crossed-out God, relegated to the sidelines.”
The recent uptick in people joining faith traditions with more demanding catechisms, I think, is in part a reflection of the desire of many for their very lives to be immersed, baptized, incorporated into something that gives them belonging, meaning, guidance, structure, challenge, and identity. Like joining the Marine Corps, it’s actually counter-cultural.
The Christian right — which corresponds to a substantial section of the Republican Party in the US — is anything but counter-cultural in this sense. Perhaps more than any other “religious” bloc, they have adapted their “religious” beliefs to a pre-existing political orientation growing out of the Cold War and developed on the ground of the post-WWII explosion of defense industries. Perhaps a quick historical review is in order.
For a deeper look into the origins of the Christian right in the US, I recommend Lisa McGirr’s book, Suburban Warriors — The Origins of the New American Right.
I have a kind of Forrest Gump autobiographical stake in this history, because my own family was part of the postwar migration from Arkansas to Southern California to work in the proliferation of factories producing war materiel in the late 1940s and 1950s. I was actually born in San Diego in 1951, when my father was working for the defense contractor Convair.
Just northwest of us was Orange County, which would become by 1960 the embryo of Sunbelt “Christian” right-wing nationalism’s rise as a potent political force. Like Southern California itself, the Christian right we see today, most recently consolidated in the Trump cult and which will go on to exercise hegemony in the Republican Party after Trump is left behind, was a fusion movement. War production and military bases were its material foundation, the war propagandist Disney provided its privatized cultural zeitgeist, the Cold War provided its backdrop and justification, its prosperity gospel religiosity was imported from East Texas and Arkansas (along with its racial anxieties), it “cowboy capitalism” zeal was adopted from Hollywood and ranchers-turned-speculators, its politics was adapted from McCarthy, its funding came from big business with is anti-Keynesian/anti-union agenda (including the infamous Koch family), and its shock troops were tech-savvy suburban housewives. Even the Catholic Diocese there was presided over by them most right-wing member of the Roman hierarchy in the US, Francis Cardinal McIntyre.
The population explosion that was Orange County and surrounds came in from the Midwest and the South. Redlining and restrictive covenants ensured lily-white enclaves of enthusiastic settlers whose shared dissociative pastime was a consumer bacchanalia in a miasma of political paranoia. (Fortunately for us, my Dad was laid off in early 1956, and we decamped to rural Missouri, where my father’s Seventh Day Adventist flirtation was converted into a local rumor that we were Jewish.)
Other Sunbelt loci for the movement were Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, Scottsdale and Maricopa Counties, Arizona, Cobb and DeKalb Counties, Georgia, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, and Colorado Springs.
The paranoid style of their politics was maintained by the conviction that they were already engaged in a holy war with two fronts: communism abroad and the “com-symps” at home, whose vanguard were black activists, women’s liberationists, liberal “collectivists,” “secular humanists,” and predatory homosexuals. In Southern California, by the early 1960s, schools were let out and stadiums filled by participants in anti-communist training designed by members of the John Birch Society.
None of this could have happened without massive funding; and big business was the real puppeteer, funding not only political activity, but evangelism. Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, Carl McIntire, Jesse Cochran, Bob Wells, Fred Schwarz, Robert Schuller, and a host of other well-financed evangelists peddled a potpourri of prosperity theology, anti-communism, crackpot race theory, anti-unionism, anti-Semitism, and anti-feminism, alongside a Disneyfied ideal of highly-technological white suburban life. I think back now just a couple of years to the Trump party barge rallies.
Between them and their financiers, they remolded Weber’s Calvinistic capitalism into a “religion” specifically designed to advance a corporate political agenda (which, of course, included loads of “defense spending”). Which is not to say this was a homogeneous movement. Western libertarians didn’t take warm showers with Darbyist fanatics; but the financiers ensured a kind of speak-no-ill, common-front discipline on the right that translated in just over two decades into the Reagan presidency. This discipline was cannily maintained by keeping common enemies clearly in view. War requires alliances.
The Democratic shift to the right, as the captive of Reagan neoliberalism, was an adaptation to the emergent reality of Sunbelt suburban (and now exurban) political hegemony. Bill Clinton, the pioneer of Democratic third-way politics, has never been an ideologue. As in his sex life so in his politics, he is the consummate opportunist, raised as he was in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a huckster town and gambling mecca developed by the Irish mob (and home to most of my own living family).
So much for the myth of a secular-religious distinction.
Secularity, in its popularized, metropolitan liberal sense, also stands apart from its history — which we might summarize as the progressive desacralization of life — natural, cultural, and political. This desacralization, however, was set in motion by professed Christians (and Christian lawyers, we might add), i.e., Descartes, Bacon, et al, who proposed building the New Jerusalem themselves as a kind of fulfillment of prophesy. I’m not sure they envisioned Garden Grove, California or Hot Springs, Arkansas; but suburban lunatics Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert — resembling the mobilized and paranoid housewife army of 1960s Orange County — both ascended to the halls of Congress two years ago and constructed their identities as defenders of the suburbs of Denver and Atlanta as God’s country. They are also extremely materialistic, posed, and artificial, which explains in some sense their affinity for the a-religious Trump.
For an interesting account of the relation between “secularity” and the hyper-individualism displayed by the so-called religious right, I’d suggest Charles Taylor’s book, The Secular Age, in which he calls this isolated (rugged) individual a “buffered self.” Joseph Ratzinger called this individual “a bunker without windows.” The “Christian right” epitomizes a kind of bunker mentality, ergo its unhealthy attachment to guns, even though most of them live in places that look like this:
Along with guns, they are avid collectors of techno-toys, their houses and garages filled with massive SUVs, ATVs, gaming gear, computers, security systems, hoverboards, dirt bikes, clap-lights, pools, gym-rooms, intercoms, one-acre televisions, and for those with youngsters — the full array of overpriced Disney-character paraphernalia.
“[W]hy was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society,” asks Taylor, “while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” This is the key to one aspect of the Christian right’s aggressive “defense” of their nationalist god. They themselves are drenched in the culture of technology and consumption and its utter disenchantment. They’ve externalized the war within themselves between their own intense secularity and professions of belief . . . beliefs that bear little resemblance to a fifteenth century English or French or German peasant.
They’ve justified their own overconsumption, and at the same time transformed the lamb that was slain into a pagan war deity.
When theologians like Hauerwas or Cavanaugh argue on behalf of church-state separation and against Christian nationalism, they are doing so in full view of their own skepticism about the secular-religious distinction — one a medieval peasant had never heard of or imagined. This false distinction was a failed attempt to come to terms with the social ramifications of modern disenchantment . . . and, in the case of modernists, to validate that disenchantment — Hitchens-style — as the ground of some universal and all-encompassing truth claim. Anti-nationalist theologians don’t fear what church can do to state. State always prevails. They see precisely what happens to church when it aligns with power and the quest for power. The Jesus of the Gospels is supplanted by the golden calves of finance and war, and the imposter appears as the spiritual General of a holy war.
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you garbed as sheep, but who are ravenous wolves within.” — Matthew 7:15
Nonetheless, everyone who votes with them does not fall into this category; and here’s where I hope to show how the ideologues of the other pole have helped Christian nationalists and their ilk grow their support. I’ve already said that both poles combined are a minority, but they’re a fractious, noisy, attention-seeking minority whose bullshit is echoed by politicians from the two Wall-Street-owned parties in the US. Via those two parties, their bullshit is likewise echoed through major media outlets.
The “secular” liberals, leftists, and civil libertarians who constitute the separationist bloc have lost ground not only through the liberal embrace of horrifically bad economic policies carried out on behalf of speculative capital, but by their own incomplete and sometimes contradictory grasp of their own (let’s call it) church-state position. Anyone who argues that we oughtn’t have prayers led by compulsory public school teachers should also be arguing against kids being led in the Pledge of Allegiance. But I doubt the “religious right” will argue that, and nether will most of the separationists who will throw the Constitution at you the same way a fundamentalist slings decontextualized quotes from the King James Bible. If you want to know what the problem is with state compulsory education, then you’ll have to look more deeply than a prayer controversy. First the state tells you you have to send your kids there if you can’t afford the alternatives, then you have to accept what the school teaches, even if it runs counter to your own beliefs and values. If you think this is an issue for only the right, you haven’t studied the curriculum as a parent who is a socialist or an observant Jew, etc. etc. State schools are indoctrination factories! How would they not become battlegrounds in any pluralistic society? I disagree with pretty much everything the Christian right believes — they follow the American flag, not Christ — but I agree with them that a compulsory public school should not presume to indoctrinate them with liberal opinions about, e.g., sexuality. This is Napoleon forcing the peasants to use French. Controversy is baked into the cake here. If liberals begin to lose this battle, based on what I’ve seen in other arenas, they will be as quick to jettison democratic processes as any dispensationalist reactionary.
“How is it that you will say to your brother, ‘Let me take that straw out of your eye,’ and look: The beam is in your eye? Charlatan, first pluck the beam out of your eye, and then you will see clearly how to pluck the straw out of your brother’s eye.” — Matthew 7:5
If anyone wants an explanation of why the fluctuant American political “middle” has fluxed right in recent years, one reason is that struggling, everyday people are sick to death of professional class technocratic liberals presuming to tell them how to act, what to believe, how to talk, and what to do with their own kids. In that spirit, even if I don’t cut off my nose to spite my face by voting for Republicans, I share the impulse to tell them, “Take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, you clueless, arrogant, presumptuous, self-righteous scolds!”
Since I’m more evolved than that, however, I’ll make a more historical point about the liberal and left devotion to an almost Dawkinesque “secularism.” Your whole point of view is Christian. Perversely so, but Christian nonetheless. (Eeeek, you shall say . . . but I shall explain.)
Let’s begin with the pagan world out of which Christianity and Christendom emerged. There is a popular idea, floating around with the rest of the cultural flotsam of capitalist liberalism in decay, that the pagan world (whatever that reification might mean) was one where happy slappy people surrounded by butterflies and hummingbirds venerated nature and led uncomplicated lives of material abundance, peaceful harmony, and free love. The reality, looking at Western civilization now, of the first centuries BC and AD, was that of the Roman Empire which stretched from Britain to what is now Ukraine, to North Africa, and from the Atlantic Ocean to Damascus.
Historian Tom Holland has studied that period in Rome in great detail, and he notes that the prevailing pagan ethos was quite the opposite of any pop-culture account. It was an economy utterly dependent upon slave labor.
The “sexual ecology,” far from some joyous state of polyamory, gave male householders and the ruling class unlimited reign to rape men, women, and children under their control, and non-ruling-class women were barely considered human. When the Apostle Paul wrote about sex in Rome, he couldn’t be understood properly through the modern lens that paints him as some prudish homophobe . . . this was what he was describing in shorthand, which his readers understood very well. (In this sense, and in his employment of women deacons and apostles, Paul was profoundly gender subversive!)
Power was exercised through deceptions, riots, murder, and genocidal wars, and Rome was not distinct in this regard. Ever since the Bronze Age, the power of mass killers has been nearly absolute, and whole societies were conformed to this reality. Moreover, the entitlement to power by mass murder and draconian control was unquestioned, accepted as natural. The very idea that the weak, or the victims, were entitled to any special recognition, was unheard of. The only time the rabble was catered to — for example, by Julius Caesar — was as a way of mobilizing mobs as irregular military forces in power struggles. Man-of-the-people Julius Caesar had no problem slaughtering a million Gauls, for example, and his own Roman mobs celebrated him for doing so.
Much of the construction and statuary in Washington, DC today cribbed its design from Rome, by the way. The grandiose so-called founding fathers were bent not only on a Republic but on an empire, but I digress.
As Holland (who is not a Christian [yet]) never tires of pointing out, the “governing moral assumptions” of Rome in this period and the warlike ages before it would — if witnessed in their reality by any modern person — be strangely alien almost to the point of being extraterrestrial. Holland contrasts this with the #metoo movement of recent history, where the prevailing ethos — apart from whatever criticisms one might level at its execution — is that the unrestricted exercise of power (sexual, in this case) is altogether a bad thing, and that the vulnerable — the victims — have a morally privileged status. I’ll talk further down about how this has been perverted, but the question remains: How did we get from Julius Caesar to Harvey Weinstein? How did the weak, the powerless, and the marginalized acquire an elevated moral status (even when this does not translate into remedies)?
The answer is Christianity. Not religion — by most definitions, pagan rulers were religious — but Christianity! Again, short explicatory detour. Religion is an empty signifier precisely because is submerges the specificity of whole traditions into a special and superimposed category of “belief.”
It is very difficult to see now — because of familiarity — what a bizarre and unprecedented idea it was in the first century for a strange new Judean cult, now enlisting non-Judeans, to worship an executed criminal as a “king.” Doubly bizarre was this cult’s preoccupation with the victimized and marginalized — the destitute, orphans, women, prostitutes, prisoners, etc. Just as alarming to some, people of some means — especially women — were enthusiastic recruits who offered substantial material support.
The idea that the a powerless king could ascend to his throne through a torturous Roman execution was unprecedented in all of human history. The power of the powerless over the powerful through powerlessness (and love) was — and Paul testified to this more than once during his perilous travels — considered a form of insanity. To compound the insanity, this strange new cult believed that the person who died on the cross and was raised from the dead . . . was God, the one and only Judean God, who submitted to public humiliation, torture, and an agonizing death. A vulnerable God? In that period, this was a great WTF. God . . . as victim.
This insane idea pivoted the world on its moral axis; and it was accomplished by a troupe who provoked the arrest and execution through a sustained parody of imperial power, epitomized by the “king” arriving in Jerusalem not on a war horse but a donkey colt.
Holland called Jesus, his cult, and his Apostle Paul “a depth charge” under the imperial worship of power, because it created “ripples” throughout subsequent history that broke the surface again and again as little revolutions, even while the church itself was aligning with power and behaving abominably. This idea that every human being had some fundamental dignity as one made in God’s image, and that victimhood (including the martyrdom of the nonviolent) conferred a special moral status and demanded a preferential moral response broke out again and again (or broke in) even on the church itself.
The whole liberal notion of “equality,” untenable as it is as a legal category, was introduced to Western culture by the Christian assertion of the spiritual equality of all God’s children. Without Christianity, there would have been no liberalism (a perversion of the Gospels, but offspring nonetheless), no socialism, no anti-racism, no feminism, et al. The idea of equality before the law began as equality before God. Even as committed an atheist as Žižek acknowledges this.
What calls itself secular humanism grew directly out of this idea of spiritual equality, bent and distorted at times, but always identifying the common moral ground as concern for the marginal, the dispossessed, the victims . . . as suffering inequality as injustice. The struggle between Rome and the the crucified, powerless God has re-emerged again and again, but now with the idea that “justice” can be delivered to the marginalized through laws and institutions. And just as the church has failed and even betrayed this moral imperative often, so have the “secular humanists.” Rome is always close at hand.
As Ivan Illich once pointed out, once you have Christ, you have the conditions in place for his opposite — for anti-Christ (which Illich called “a monstrously churchy term”), by which he meant the perversion of the word. For Illich, this was what institutionalization did when it crossed certain thresholds into “iatrogenesis,” a medical term meaning ailments created by the treatment of ailments. There are also linguistic, ideological, and epistemological perversions, especially where institutional power is at stake (politics!).
My Dad’s simplified version of the Christian ethos was, “Always root for the underdog.”
In today’s ever more performative culture where image trumps all, we have virtue signaling (always been around, but not as a digitally-enhanced public display).
“And make certain not to practice your righteousness before men, in order to be watched by them; otherwise you have no recompense with your Father in the heavens. When you give alms, therefore, do not trumpet it aloud before you, as those who are playacting do in the synagogues and streets so they may be lauded by men; amen, I tell you, they have their recompense in full. But when you are giving alms, do not allow your left had to know what your right had does, So that your almsgiving is in secret.” — Matthew 6:1–4
When the real victim has special moral status, it is only a matter of time before there is a kind of competition to claim that status for oneself or the objects of one’s performative virtue. This can be confusing — and controversial — because it can be difficult to disentangle these matters, and because they can easily be pulled into overgeneralized abstractions.
Citing Holland, I brought up the #metoo movement, around which there has emerged two polar extremes: one that disparages the whole movement based on missteps, contradictions, and excesses; and one that ignores missteps, contradictions, and excesses by saying “believe all women.” Neither of these poles are representative of the phenomenon or most people. I myself was and am more sympathetic than critical, because I’m 70 years old, I’ve known a lot of women, I’ve lived for long periods among men in very macho cultures, and because I’ve been powerfully influenced in my thinking by a lot of very convincing feminists. Men’s power as men over women as women, physical and social, has been especially pernicious in the arena of sex; and that power should be restrained so women can live their lives without being harassed, intimidated, and attacked. Men need to learn sexual restraint as part of their formation as decent human beings. Men who fail to exercise that restraint and sexually harass, intimidate, and attack women should be held accountable. It’s not complicated.
On the other hand, Jesus also befriended tax collectors — not victims, but repentant victimizers — so forgiveness factors into this equation as well . . . the easiest thing to forget. Love your enemies and pray for them . . . that’s everyone’s stumbling block. And that’s what’s missing in this Christianity without Christ era. The reset that gives an alternative to war, where everyone eventually becomes the victim and victimizer.
I’ve found lately that I’ll raise the hackles of others far more quickly by refusing to hate a designated enemy than I will by holding a contrary opinion.
My criticisms of woketivism — as a repentant sinner on that account — is its abstraction (white men all have privilege), its un-nuanced moral absolutism, its superior self-righteous posturing, its aversion to proportionality and forgiveness, and its contribution to the tendency to make “traumatic” mountains out of molehills. But its underlying “governing moral assumptions” were inherited from a Judean construction worker turned Rabbi who was executed as a criminal. Those assumptions, however, have been twisted to the point of strangulation by that age-old desire for control and power.
This was the discomfiting discovery that led me, as a committed communist in 2006, to back out of my activism and spend four years doing hard manual labor while I figured things out. The question that led me there was, “Why, if we’re all going to die anyway, should I want to spend so much time and energy advocating for my Dad’s underdog?” Why not just take what you want and let the devil have the hindmost? Without some final referent, that question staggers into an abyss leaving behind a bunch of watered down rationalizations that Nietzsche’s ghost could disassemble in his sleep. Communism — for which I still feel a residual affection based on the many wonderful people who shared my convictions — was my religion; just as Americanism is the state religion in the US. Founding myths, a list of saints, doctrine and dogma, teleology, higher power. Check, check, check, check, check!
Religion. Empty. Signifier.
The secular and religious were only recently opposed. In the late pre-modern era, the terms referred to believers — everyone basically was a believer — who were either clerical on non-clerical. Religious referred to monks, nuns, and priests, and secular meant lay persons. Until this fake distinction came to pass, cultures simply shared a constellation of ideas about “the way things are,” in which there weren’t conceptual threads labeled “economics,” “politics,” “nature,” “religion,” “gender,” “family,” etc. It was all one cloth. What secular liberalism wants to accomplish, but can’t, is to make one cloth out of the compartments themselves by defining them into Nature — that realm where no critical intervention is possible; “a unitary conception of rationality and of the rational mind that they took it for granted not only that all rational persons conceptualize data in one and the same way and that therefore any attentive and honest observer, unblinded and undistracted by the prejudices of prior commitment to belief, would report the same data, the same facts, but also that it is the data thus reported and characterized which provides enquiry with its subject matter.”
What is equally impossible is the establishment and maintenance of some Disneyfied “Christian-American” fantasy state. I don’t fear this, like those people who’ve gone all Chicken Little about The Handmaid’s Tale coming true because Roe v. Wade was struck. There was no Handmaid’s Tale before Roe, and there won’t be one after. It’s a preposterous idea, just as the “Christian” Disney state of the right is a preposterous idea. These imaginings are based on the common indoctrination of left and right by the manufactured stories of Hollywood. The US state doesn’t have that kind of control, no matter who’s at the helm. Like the Titanic, the rudder’s too small.
With all the criticisms I can level at “Christian” Americanism, militant secularism (modern and postmodern) is still an imperial conceptual trope, something elites want to impose on those ignorant yokels who refuse to accept their “unitary conception of rationality.” Christian Americanism does not include all Christians, and Christianity is not the only faith tradition that rejects this militant secularism.
I would point out to all those “progressives” who wring their hands in DSA meetings about “How do we reach out to African Americans?” that you might begin by ceasing to look down on people with “religious” convictions. These would-be Lenins won’t say it aloud, but they still harbor the belief that African Americans — who are five times less likely to be atheists than white people (and ten times less likely than Asian Americans) — are backward and in need of elite “educated” tutelage to bring them up to speed (a bit like Madison and Jefferson wanting to civilize the Indians).
This applies to liberal political elites as well and their contempt for working class, small-town, and rural people of all “ethnicities,” with a special woketivist-contempt for “uneducated whites.” These imperial jackasses still haven’t grasped that Trumpism’s base was in the “educated” suburbs and exurbs. The rural fraction of support for Trump was more of a “fuck you” vote in the face of this technocratic imperial contempt and a rebellion against an ever more hegemonic and pretentious liberal cultural nihilism.
These fracture lines aren’t going away. They’ll widen, because they ride the surface of some very active tectonic shifts; and the combination of arrogance, fear, and denial will have us all fighting one another even as we fall into these chasms.
One thing Augustine referred to when he laid out his thesis on the City of God and the Earthly Empire — remember, he wrote this in response to Roman anxieties in the wake of the sack of Rome — was the ephemeral nature of empires. Like the life of a single person, empires themselves are born, grow up, grow old, become senescent, and die. The City of God, embodied on earth, said Augustine, by the Church, portrayed the Church as the undying refuge of those left in disarray by the fall of earthly states.
Little could the Berber savant know how the Church itself was headed for its own turbulent fractures and realignments, as it was dragged into the shifting and eruptive power politics of Eurasia and North Africa. He certainly wouldn’t recognize America and its secular-religious tempests; but he might recognize the anxieties of those left in disarray as an empire (and a world) teeters on its crumbing foundations.
While we were wrapping ourselves around the axle about “church-state separation” yesterday (the Forth of July), and while we were celebrating a high holiday on the American liturgical calendar, a 22-year-old kid opened fire on a parade in Highland Park, Illinois.
Thank You, M. Goff. I assume this is a masterpiece. Certainly interesting ideas about religion. And its relationship to state. Hafta read again. Looking forward to that. TY.