James

Ten thoughts on Percival Everett’s James; spoilers abound:

1. It’s a compulsive read. I finished it in a day. Everett’s prose is supple without being simple. And he lives up to his reputation: bitterly funny and brutally direct, often one when you expect the other. His racial politics are likewise unpredictable, incisive, and reliably scrambled—that is to say, they scramble the reader’s priors.

2. The worst version of this book would have been a Mark Twain “own”: a simplistic takedown of a “problematic” American classic. Everett doesn’t take the bait. His affection for Twain is palpable. There’s nothing “corrective” on offer here. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing elaborated, investigated, or interrogated. (Joel Rhone’s is my favorite essay on the novel so far.) In fact, for good or ill, Everett extends or completes the Twainian ethos that, perhaps, Twain elected, or felt compelled, to mute. For example, Twain’s book remains thematically Christian in ways Twain abjured in his own life; Everett eliminates all traces of this, about which I’ll say more below.

3. The second worst version of this book would have been a Huck Finn “own”: not a rebuke of Twain but of the indelible little boy he created. In this case, the trick would be, not to reveal Huck as problematic, but to make him so. Once again, no dice. Everett clearly loves Huck and draws his friendship with Jim with affection and care, deepening a relationship we thought we knew: no longer merely friends—who are, of necessity, equals (I take this to be Twain’s first aim and lasting achievement)—but father and son. This change functions to undermine Huck’s priority in Twain’s tale, a fundamental problem given that Jim is a grown man and Huck is a boy.

4. The paternity twist is clever without being cute for many reasons. At the level of the text, it enables a subtext that Twain never countenanced in the original. It offers an emotionally authentic explanation of why Huck’s dad hates him so much. And it explains Jim’s special bond with Huck, both in Everett and in Twain. Beyond these, it entwines the bloodlines of two of the most famous characters in American literature. In Albert Murray’s words, it makes “omni-Americans” of Huck and Jim both. Huck in particular has a white mother and a black father; in other words, the prototypical good-hearted Southern white boy is now, by the retroactive power of the written word, biracial.

In any other hands, this idea would have been cloying or overwrought. In Everett’s hands, it’s deftly hinted at and masterfully revealed at just the right moment. It forces Huck to face questions of identity and maturity from which Twain protects him, as Wendell Berry once observed; Huck’s transformation in Twain is morally profound, but he never grows up. By the end of Everett’s novel, by contrast, he’s ready to.

5. Now to Jim himself. Even calling him by that name feels like a choice, but I think it’s the right one, since “James” is a name he achieves in and through the narrative, and he does not definitively name himself by it until the final sentence. The power of language and especially of naming is the thematic thread of Everett’s whole novel. With great cost, Jim pockets a small pencil and carries it with him throughout his odyssey, up to and beyond his reunion with his wife and daughter. Having earlier noted a narrative “as related” by a slave, Jim ruminates on telling his own story himself. The implication is that what we’re reading is what he’s written.

6. I was surprised that Everett chose to depart from so much of the narrative spine of Twain’s original. The opening third (maybe half) is Rashomon-like, but from then on there’s not even an attempt to make it “line up” with the Urtext; it’s simply Jim’s story, as written by him, an author rendering himself (his name) on the page.

I wondered more than once whether we are meant to suppose that Huck’s tale is the fiction, filled with some “stretchers”; or whether Jim’s is a kind of private fantasy, an escape from his life on the lam, or perhaps behind bars—a life-saving fiction enabled by the word. I even wondered whether the middle third of the book, or alternatively the final 10-20 pages, were a dream: after all, Jim’s dreams are regular features of the novel; the fiery coda to the story is abrupt and ecstatically triumphant; and the tree under which Jim first dreams on the island, after having been bitten by a snake, is the tree under which he awakes on the same island just before the climactic action occurs. There’s a there there, I’m convinced, but I’m not yet certain what I think it is.

7. I’ve not yet mentioned the brilliant conceit at the heart of the novel, namely the code-switching from slave dialect (in front of white people) to standard English (when whites are absent). Nothing to say here except that, in the hands of a lesser novelist, it would be painful to read, at best imperfectly executed; here, it is brilliant and effective. The trap doors are everywhere, and Everett doesn’t fall into any of them.

8. Except one. The only thing I disliked, even hated, was Everett’s decision—loudly made and consistently upheld—to rob his black characters of all faith, religiosity, and superstition. Every black character knows Christianity is false; superstition is a show for the white man; and atheism is the universal default setting, with one or two characters vaguely allowing that maybe something numinous is real.

To state my criticism as bluntly as I can, this is a failure of imagination on Everett’s part. The problem is not that the decision is ahistorical and anachronistic, though it is. It serves no purpose, unlike the linguistic code-switching. It flattens each and every black character into a single non-religious shape. Why? To what end? Sure, make some characters skeptical of the white man’s religion, of the white gospel or the white church or the white god; but what narrative or philosophical purpose is served by evacuating any and all religiosity as such from the inner lives of black slaves in the antebellum South?

As I read the novel, this felt like Everett projecting himself onto his characters—not just Jim but all of them. Making them all the same instead of vibrantly different is a very strange move, in my view. Moreover, the implication is both absurd and insulting. Am I really meant to nod along, as if it were simply and self-evidently true that black American religiosity in toto, Christian faith most of all, has been one great deception from the beginning—a trick pulled by white Americans on Africans too gullible to know better? Give me a break. Granted: I can imagine a book that does the heavy lifting to try to justify such a claim. James, unfortunately, is not that book.

9. A second shortcoming was the ending. I was caught off guard, underwhelmed, and, finally, unpersuaded. In just eight pages Jim finds an unknown plantation, discovers male slaves without being detected, sets them free, rallies them to his cause, finds the female slaves, including his wife and daughter, then sets fire to the fields, liberates all those held in bondage, shoots the master through the heart, and escapes north with his (apparently unharmed) family. Come again?

Sure, send Jim—James!—off into a sort of sunset, however qualified by the horrors of his time and place. But as a literary matter, the finale is rushed and unbelievable, with James himself as the deus ex machina. Oh well.

10. Best not to leave it there though. Everett’s other brilliant conceit is a character named Norman. Norman is a black member of a minstrel troupe who passes as white, including to Jim. (More than once Jim wonders if Norman is playing him. The self-doubt in his mind is a welcome repetition of frailty in a character who is otherwise heroic and self-possessed from the start.)

The best parts of James are Jim’s conversations: with Huck, with Enlightenment philosophers, and with Norman. And every scene with Jim as part of the troupe makes for excruciatingly compelling reading—laughing through covered eyes, cringing with anger and discomfort while letting out an involuntary snort. (By the way, painting Jim’s face white before applying blackface to the white paint called to mind another recent revisionist tale: Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, in which Hooded Justice is revealed to be a gay black man—a survivor of the Tulsa Massacre, actually—who applies white around his eyes, dons an executioner’s mask, and fights injustice.)

In any case, because Norman’s character is so well drawn by Everett, his death is all the more bitter when it comes. And tragic, given that Jim must choose to save Norman or Huck, whose paternity we have guessed but do not yet know. One more reason to laud Everett for his wit, style, and wry perceptive slant.

In the end, I didn’t adore the book as much as others did, but I’m glad I read it, and I remain in awe at Everett’s accomplishment. Next time I’d just like to see him let his characters believe in God.

Civil War

I don’t yet know what I think about Civil War, Alex Garland’s latest. I’ve not read a word from others, though I have a vague sense that there are already battle lines drawn, strong readings offered, etc. I have nothing to say about that.

I do know that Garland is smart and makes smart films. I’m hesitant to trust either my or others’ knee-jerk reaction to a film that’s clearly got things on its mind, a film that is surely not what many of us supposed it would be based on trailers and ads.

I also care not one whit what Garland himself thinks about the film. He may have thought he was making a movie about X, intending to say Y, when in fact he made a movie about A, which happens to say B and C.

Like I said, I don’t have a strong take yet. I do have one possible interpretation, which may turn out to be a strong misreading. Here goes.

Civil War is not about American politics, American polarization, impending American secession, or even Trump. It’s not a post–January 6 fever dream/allegory/parable. It’s not a liberal fable or a conservative one.

Instead, Civil War is a film about the press—about the soul of the press, or rather, about what happens when the press loses its soul. In that sense it is about Trump, but not Trump per se. It’s about what happens to the press (what happened to the press) under someone like Trump; what the reaction to Trump does (did) to journalism; how the heart of a free polity turns to rot when it begins to mirror the heartless nihilism it purports to “cover.” Words become images; images become form without content; violence becomes a “story”; an assassination becomes a “scoop.”

It doesn’t matter what Nick Offerman’s president says seconds before he’s executed. It matters that he say something and that someone was there—first—to get “the quote.” The newsroom lifers and war-time photographers documenting propaganda, unable to listen to one more canned speech spouting lies on the radio, themselves become agents of propaganda. They become what they oppose, a photo negative of what they’re so desperate to capture for their audience. (What audience? Who’s watching? There’s no evidence anybody is reading, listening, or watching anymore. Outside of the soldiers and the press, everybody else appears to be pretending the war isn’t happening at all.)

The urban warfare Garland so expertly displays in the film—better than almost anything I’ve ever seen attempting to embed the viewer on the streets and in the cramped rooms of military units breaching fortified gates and buildings, made all the more surreal by its being set in downtown Washington, D.C.—is therefore not about itself, not about the images it seems to be showing, but is instead a Trojan horse for us to observe the “PRESS” who are along for the ride. And what happens between the three leads in the closing moments tells us all we need to know. One gets his quote. One gets her shot. And one loses her shot, as she does her life, having slowly awakened across the arc of the film to the intolerable inhumanity required of (or generated by) her profession. Another propagandist, though, rises to take her place. There’s always someone else waiting in the wings, ready to snap the picture that will make her name.

There, in the Oval Office, staring through a camera lens, a star is born.

Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline

Why do people convert to Christianity? Why do intellectuals and other public figures convert so often to Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) and so rarely to Protestantism? And what is the fate of both Catholicism and Protestantism among American elites and their institutions, given the decimation of the liberal mainline? Could a new mainline arise to take its place, and if so, who would it be and what would it look like?

Dozens of writers have taken up these questions in recent weeks, some (not all) prompted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion and her written explanation for it. Here’s Douthat and Freddie and Tyler Cowen and Alan Jacobs (and Alan again). Here’s Justin Smith-Ruiu. Here are two reflections about why Catholicism instead of Protestantism. And here is a series of pieces by Jake Meador on both the “new mainline” question and the “why Catholicism” question—with a useful corrective by Onsi Kamel.

I’ve got some belated thoughts; in my mind they connect to all of the above.

1. It’s worth making clear at the outset that countless people defect annually from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, whether into unbelief or into some Protestant sect. So the question isn’t about who’s winning or which group people in general prefer or comparing overall numbers. The question is about public figures and intellectuals and their conversions, as adults, from unbelief to faith. Why does that type of person always seem to be joining “catholic” traditions (defined, for now, as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and perhaps also the Anglican Communion)?

2. Summed up in a single sentence, the reason as I see it is that Catholicism is a living tradition embodied in a global institution that stretches back millennia, claims divine authority, and contains both a storehouse of intellectual resources and a panoply of powerful devotional and liturgical practices. Let’s unpack that.

3. Catholicism is a world. Protestantism is not. Protestantism is not anything particular at all. It’s an umbrella or genus term that encompasses numerous unconnected or at best half-related Christian traditions, the oldest of which goes back five hundred years and the newest of which is barely older than a generation. There are not “Protestants,” somewhere out there. No ordinary layperson says, “I’m Protestant.” What he or she says is, “I’m Presbyterian” or “I’m Methodist” or “I’m Pentecostal” or “I’m Evangelical” or “I’m Lutheran” or “I’m Church of Christ” or “I’m Moravian” or “I’m Calvinist” or “I’m Baptist” or some other name. And the thing about midlife conversions on the part of public intellectuals is that they aren’t looking for a sub-culture. They’re looking for a moral and spiritual universe. They don’t want a branch of the tree; they want the tree itself—the trunk, the very root. “Protestantism” makes no exclusive claims to be the trunk as such. Its trunkness is never even in view. The question, therefore, is almost always whether Catholicism East or West is, properly speaking, the Christian trunk. Folks already in the West typically, though far from always, opt for the West’s claim of primacy.

4. Note well that this observation isn’t per se a critique of Protestants or a presumption against them. The fundamental feature of Protestantism is an ecumenical evangelicalism in the strict sense: a Christian whole created and sustained and defined by nothing else than the gospel itself. So that second-order sub-gospel confessional identities are subsumed in and comprehended by God’s singular work in Christ, which is the sovereign word proclaimed by the good news. In this way, according to Protestants, any and all attempts to be, or searches to find, “the trunk” is a distortion of true catholicity.

5. Be that as it may, the catholicity of Catholicism tends to be what wayward, agnostic, restless public intellectuals are after. And so they find it elsewhere than in Protestantism.

6. There is a reason why so many evangelical and Protestant graduate students in theology move toward “higher church” traditions. Intellectually, they discover thinkers and writings their own “lower church” traditions either ignore or lack; liturgically, they discover practices handed down century after century that function like a lifeline in a storm. Reading Saint Ignatius or Saint Justin or Saint Irenaeus or Saint Augustine, it occurs to them that they don’t have to imagine what the church’s ancient liturgy looked and felt like; they can simply visit a church down the street.

7. Speaking only anecdotally, I have never known students of Christian theology to move “down” the ecclesial ladder. I have only known them (a) to move “up,” (b) to move “left,” or (c) to move “out.” That is, relative to where they started, they go catholic, they go liberal, or they go away, leaving the faith behind. This remains true even of those who do not shift from one tradition or denomination to another: Baptists start reading Aquinas, evangelicals start celebrating Ash Wednesday, non-denom-ers start reciting the Creed. Or, if the move is lateral instead of vertical, one retains inherited beliefs and practices but changes on moral and social questions. Either way, “down” is not an option in practice.

8. Once again this fact, or observation, need not mean anything in itself. The populist or evangelical criticism might well be apt: Theological education places obstacles between students and the plain gospel. A student of theology “classes up,” thereby rendered unable to join “lower” classes in the purity of normal believers’ unadorned worship. Perhaps, then, this is an argument against the sort of theological education dominant today!

9. All this applies, mutatis mutandis, to public intellectuals. Put another way, suppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”

10. In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.

11. As for motives, if what I’ve outlined so far is true, then it makes perfect emotional sense for restless brainy seekers whose spiritual midlife crisis is prompted by perceived civilizational decline, torpor, and decadence to turn to catholic Christianity, East or West, as a haven in a heartless, spiritless, lifeless world. They aren’t making a category error, nor are they (necessarily) joining the church in a merely instrumental sense. For all we know, their search for capital-t Truth in a culture that refuses the concept altogether may be wise rather than self-serving. As Alan remarked, “what matters is not where you start but where you end up.” Doubtless there are people who join Christianity as a cultural project; must they remain there forever? I see no reason why we must, as a matter of necessity, say yes, for all people, always, in every circumstance. No adult is baptized without a confession of faith; if a new convert makes an honest confession and receives the grace of Christ’s saving waters, then he or she is a new creation, God’s own child, whatever the mixed motives involved. To say this isn’t to worship the God-shaped hole in our hearts instead of God himself. It’s to acknowledge, from the side of faith, that the hole is real. Because the hole is real, different people will find themselves knocking on Christ’s door—which is to say, on the doors of the church—for every manner of reason in every manner of situation. What Christ promises is that, to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. He does not lay down conditions for what counts as a good reason for knocking. Nor should we.

12. See here the opening paragraph of Christian Wiman’s new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (from entry 1, page 5):
    Thirty years ago, watching some television report about depression and religion—I forget the relationship but apparently there was one—a friend who was entirely secular asked me with genuine curiosity and concern: “Why do they believe in something that doesn’t make them happy?” I was an ambivalent atheist at that point, beset with an inchoate loneliness and endless anxieties, contemptuous of Christianity but addicted to its aspirations and art. I was also chained fast to the rock of poetry, having my liver pecked out by the bird of a harrowing and apparently absurd ambition—and thus had some sense of what to say. One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”

13. Now: Given this apparent movement among once-secular intellectuals toward faith, or at least a renewed openness toward the claims of faith, what about a parallel movement toward a kind of Christian establishment—and in America, a “new Protestant mainline”? Any answer here is always subject to the ironies of divine providence. Christ’s promise to Saint Peter stands, which means that the forces arrayed against Christ’s body will never finally succeed. That doesn’t mean all or even any of our local or parochial ecclesial projects will succeed. But some of them might, against the odds. That’s God’s business, though, not ours. For now, then, some earthbound comments and fallible predictions.

14. I can’t speak to the situation in Europe or Great Britain, though my two cents, for what little it’s worth, is that we will not be seeing anything like a renaissance of established religion among elites and their institutions in our or our children’s lifetimes. In the U.S., I likewise think anything like a renewed liberal mainline is impossible. The once-dominant mainline—mainly comprising Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists—is on life support where it isn’t already dead and buried. As a coherent civic bloc, much less a motive force among elites, it is undeniably a thing of the past. I take that as read.

15. So the only viable question in the American context, if there were ever to be a “new” mainline, is whether it would be Catholic, magisterial Protestant, or evangelical. There was a moment, as many others have written, when American Catholicism was in process of making a bid to function like a new mainline. That period runs basically from the birth of Richard John Neuhaus in 1936 (the height of the Great Depression, the end of FDR’s first term, with World War II imminent) to his passing in 2009 (Bush in disgrace, Obama triumphant, the Great Recession, in the sixth year of the Iraq War). Catholics were well represented in elite universities, in think tanks, in D.C., in presidential administrations, in magazines that fed and fueled all of the above. But between the priest sex abuse scandals, Iraq, the divisiveness of abortion, and rolling political losses on social issues (above all gay marriage), the dream of an American Catholic Mainline proved not to be.

16. As for conservative Protestants and evangelicals, the former lack in numbers what the latter lack in everything else. Here’s what I mean. A genuine mainline or unofficially established church has to possess the following features: (a) so many millions of adherents that they’re “just there,” since some of them are invariably “around,” no matter one’s context; (b) powerful centralized institutions; (c) an internal logic that drives its laypeople to seek and acquire powerful roles in elite institutional contexts; (d) a strong emphasis on education in law, politics, and the liberal arts and their various expressions in careers and professions; (e) an investment in and sense of responsibility for the governing order, both its status quo and its ongoing reform; (f) a suspicion of populism and a rejection of revolution; (g) a taste for prestige, a desire for excellence, and an affinity for establishment; (h) wealth; (i) the ears of cultural and political elites; (j) networks of institutions, churches, and neighborhoods filled with civic-minded laypeople who can reliably be organized as a voting bloc or interest group; (k) groups of credentialed intellectuals who participate at the highest levels of their respective disciplines, whether religious or secular; (l) a loose but real shared moral and theological orthodoxy that is relatively stable and common across class and educational lines; (m) an ecclesial and spiritual culture of thick religious identity alongside popular tacit membership, such that not only “committed believers” but mediocre Christians and even finger-crossing public figures can say, with a straight face, that they are members in good standing of said established tradition.

17. If even part of my (surely incomplete) list here is accurate, it should be self-evident why neither evangelicals nor conservative Protestants could possibly compose a new American mainline. It’s hard to put into words just how tiny “traditional” or “orthodox” magisterial Protestantism is in the U.S. It would be unkind but not unfair to call it a rump. Its size has been demolished by a quadruple defection over the past three generations: to secularism, to liberalism, to evangelicalism, to Rome. It’s arguable whether there ever even was any meaningful presence of magisterial Protestantism in America of the sort one could find in Europe. The four-headed monster just mentioned is a ravenous beast, and old-school Lutherans and Wesleyans and Reformed have been the victims. You need numbers to have power, not to mention institutions and prestige, and the numbers just aren’t there; nor is there a path to reaching them. It’s not in the cards.

18. Evangelicals still have the numbers, even if they’re waning, but as I said before, they lack just about everything else: the institutionalism, the intellectualism, the elite ethos, the prestige and excellence, the allergy to populism—nearly all of it. Evangelicalism is Protestant populism. This is why evangelicals who enter elite spaces slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, lose the identifying marks of evangelicalism. It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such. Consider high-rank Protestant universities with large evangelical faculties, like Wheaton or Baylor or George Fox. Ask the religion, theology, and humanities professors where they go to church. Chances are it’s an Anglican parish. Chances are that not a few of them, if they left, or if the university permits it, have transitioned from evangelical to Anglican to Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. This is just the way of things in higher-ed as well as other elite institutions.

19. Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not. A high-church Episcopalian wasn’t working against the grain by earning a law degree from Princeton or Yale a century ago. That’s what Episcopalians do. It’s what Episcopalianism is. Moreover, if said Episcopalian began as a wide-eyed conservative and ended a enlightened liberal, he would remain Episcopalian the whole time. There’d be no need to leave for some other tradition; the tradition encompassed both identities, indeed encouraged passage from one to the other. Whereas an evangelical who becomes liberal becomes a self-contradiction. A liberal evangelical is an oxymoron. He lacks any reason to exist. Evangelicalism isn’t liberal, in any sense. It is axiomatically and essentially illiberal. To become liberal, therefore, is to cease to be evangelical. That’s not what evangelicalism is for. Evangelicals who become liberal remain evangelical only for a time; they eventually exit faith, or swim the Tiber, or become actual liberal Protestants, where they feel right at home. Which means, for the purposes of this discussion, that every single time evangelicals send their best and brightest to elite institutions to be “faithfully present” there, only for them to become liberal in the process, evangelicalism loses one of its own. The same goes, obviously, for a rising-star evangelical who loses faith or becomes Catholic or Orthodox.

20. The other thing to note is that the “moral” part of “moral and theological orthodoxy” is absolutely up for grabs right now, in every single Christian tradition and denomination in America. No church has successfully avoided being roiled and split in two by arguments over gender and sexuality. Nor is there some happy middle ground where everybody agrees to disagree. One or another normative view is going to win out, in each and every local community and global communion. We just don’t know, at this point in time, where the cards are going to fall. In that light, any ambition for conservative Protestants (or Catholics, for that matter) to form an established religious backdrop for elite cultural and political organs in America is a pipe dream, given what “conservative” means regarding sexual ethics. Whoever is still standing, Christianly speaking, at the end of this century, the wider culture is not going to welcome new overlords who oppose the legality of abortion, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, and artificial contraception. I mean, come on. Most Protestants I know take for granted the legality (and usually the morality, too) of all but the first, and are politically ambivalent about the first as well. Protestants are in numerical decline anyway, a fact I’ve bracketed for these reflections. Put it all together, and the reasons why public intellectuals don’t convert to Protestantism are inseparable from, and sometimes identical to, the reasons why magisterial Protestantism is not poised to become a new American mainline. Do with that what you will.

My latest: a review of Mark Noll in The Christian Century

In the new issue of The Christian Century I have a review of Mark Noll’s latest book, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911. Superlatives fail, as they usually do with Noll’s work. The book is more than a “mere” history, though. It has an argument to make. Here’s how I begin to lay it out:

The United States was, from the start, founded and widely understood as a repudiation of and alternative to European Christendom. Whatever the proper relationship between church and state, the federal government would have no established religion—would not, that is, tax citizens in sponsorship of a formal ecclesiastical body. On this arrangement, most nascent Americans agreed. What then would, or should, the implications be for Christian faith and doctrine in the public square? How could Christian society endure without the legal and political trappings of Christendom?

Answer: through the Bible. Not the Bible and; not the Bible as mediated by. The Bible alone. America would be the first of its kind: a “Bible civilization.” That is to say, a constitutional republic of coequal citizens whose common, voluntary trust in the truth and authority of Christian scripture would simultaneously (1) put the lie to the “necessity” of coercive religious regimes, (2) provide the moral character required for a liberal democracy to flourish, and (3) fulfill the promise of the Protestant Reformation. Sola scriptura thus became the unwritten law of the land. Regardless of one’s confession or tradition, the sufficiency of the Bible for all aspects of life—the canon as the cornerstone for religion, ethics, and politics alike—was axiomatic. For more than a century, it functioned as a given in public argument. Only rarely did it call for an argument itself.

Keep reading for more, including a disagreement with Noll regarding how to interpret prior generations’ disputes over how to read the Bible, in this case about chattel slavery.

Once more, negative world

I sometimes think of what I write on this blog as mostly just drafting off two other, far superior blogs: Richard Beck’s and Alan Jacobs’. Both are friends whose work I’ve been reading for more than a decade, and who have been kind enough, more than once, to link to my own work or to respond to it in some way.

Recently Alan wrote a follow-up to his blistering rejection of Aaron Renn’s “Three Worlds” framework for understanding Christians’ social status in the United States. In the follow-up, Alan mentions both Derek Rishmawy’s and my respective attempts to interpret and commend a version of Renn’s framework. Gently but firmly, he rebukes these attempts and underscores why he finds the whole business—the whole conversation—a misdirect: a futile, self-regarding failure to attend to the main thing, namely following Christ irrespective of our surroundings and their purported (in)hospitality to the gospel. We do not, Alan argues, need detailed plans in order to fulfill this charge. Nor do we need an ostensibly (or fantastically) friendlier society in order to succeed. We just need the will, the resolve, the obedience to Christ requisite to set one foot in front of the other, answering the call of the Lord whatever it may be, wherever it may lead, whenever it may come.

I see that Derek has written his own response to Alan (though I haven’t yet read it). I’m going to attempt my own here, with the aim both of understanding what Alan is concerned about and of clarifying my own position.

The simplest way to put my view is in the form of two broad questions:

1. Do different societies, in different times and different places, treat an individual’s or a community’s public identification as Christian in different ways?

2. If yes, does knowledge of those differences make some relevant difference for how Christians should understand, approach, engage, and inhabit their societies?

I take the answer to the first question as read: yes, obviously. I take the answer to the second to be yes as well.

To me, that settles the matter—at least at the formal level.

The third question descends from the heights of history and missiology, respectively, to applied sociology: Is it accurate to say, all things being equal, that being known publicly as a Christian in the U.S. is less likely to enhance one’s social status than at any time since World War II? Or, to put it differently, that public identification as Christian is more likely to downgrade one’s social status that at any point in living memory? Or, to put it more weakly and less comparatively, that in general “being identified as Christian” is not something a non-Christian would, in our society today, be tempted to pursue nominally for the sole reason of trying to enhance his or her social status?

Granted, the U.S. is a big country. I live in a town of 120,000 in west Texas. Having a nominal membership at a local church one doesn’t actually attend or care much about might still grant a certain cache here. (Though, in most circles, I doubt it.) Any comment, then, about “the U.S. today” is going to be an “in general, on balance, all things being equal, thinking about the country as a whole” comment. If you don’t think such comments can be meaningful, fair enough. But if you do, then this sort of comment is permissible like any other.

Region and subculture are one element here. Institutions and professions are another. Some organizations and careers will be neutral as regards religious identity; others, far from it. Also granted.

The upshot, all qualifications made, is simply that something has changed in the last century regarding how self-identifying as a Christian orients oneself to the wider culture; how one is perceived as a result. And apart from claims about this as a change, the point about the present moment is that, whether or not there ever was such a time (in this society or another) when being seen to be a Christian was something that might raise one’s prospects—marital, educational, financial, professional, political—this time, in this society, is not one of them. We can haggle over whether it’s preferable to say “it is not” one of them versus “it is no longer” one of them. But either way, it’s not.

Suppose Alan agrees with me (though, if I’m reading him correctly, I don’t think he does). Does it matter?

I think it does. But let me say how I don’t think it matters before I say how I think it does.

It does not matter “because America is no longer a Christian nation.” It does not matter, that is, as if this analysis were at heart a declension narrative, according to which things have been getting worse and worse and now, at this moment, we’ve reached the nadir; or at least have crept up to the edge of the cliff. No. The social status of being-seen-as-Christian is simply one among many sociological variables relevant to Christian consideration of the church’s mission.

I also don’t think it matters “because things are really bad out there.” They’re not. It’s bad when Christians get thrown to the lions. It’s bad when Christians can’t vote. It’s bad when certain Christians aren’t afforded basic rights and privileges common to civic society. It’s bad when it is against the law for Christians to gather on Sunday mornings, to pray and celebrate the Eucharist, to read their Bibles and worship without fear, to share the gospel with whomever will listen.

American society does not fit these descriptions, and it isn’t close to any of them. Christians in America are remarkably free; our privileges are innumerable. Words like “persecution” are inapt to our context, and unwise to use—not least since we have sisters and brothers elsewhere in the world who suffer actual persecution at this very moment.

How, then, is the social status of public identification as Christian relevant? In this respect:

The church cannot bear faithful witness to Christ in a given context if she lacks awareness of the particular features that constitute that context, that make it what it is.

Think about different locations and cultures today. Does Christian witness look the same in Riyadh, Nairobi, Beijing, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Miami, Milan? Does it look the same in 2022, 1722, 1422, 1122, 822, 522, 222? Surely not. And surely all Christians would agree that differences of context in each time and place call for different forms of response to those differences? Such that the specific contours of Christian witness actually and rightly look different based on when and where one lives, and how a culture or society in question responds to—welcomes, rejects, shrugs, punishes—public identification as Christian?

Perhaps, again, Alan would agree with this. Let me try to say a bit more, then, to get enough meat on these bones to prompt a meaningful disagreement.

Consider the difference between life under Diocletian, about half a century before St. Augustine’s birth, and life under Honorius, when Augustine was bishop of Hippo. The former was a time when the imperial authorities were your enemy, if you were known as a Christian; the latter was a time when claiming to be a Nicene Christian might enhance one’s political or financial prospects (though not necessarily). How should the church navigate each setting? This was a real question faced by bishops, monks, priests, and laypersons around the Mediterranean. The first was, in Renn’s language, a “negative world”; the second, a (more) “positive world.” I see no reason to declare a priori that such labels, and the analysis underlying and following from them, an inadmissible distraction.

Now for an example closer to home. I teach undergraduate students of all kinds, but every semester I have a class all to myself composed only of Bible and ministry majors: i.e., young persons preparing for a life of formal service to the church in the form of teaching, preaching, pastoring, and so on. These students largely come from the Bible Belt, and many of them come from big churches in big cities where being Christian and attending such churches doesn’t feel abnormal. This experience in turn nurtures in a good number of them a sense of their context, present and future, as either neutrally or favorably disposed toward Christianity. A world of megachurches and popular pastors and celebrity Christians and spiritual influencers is just “the world”: yesterday, today, and forever. The churches they one day will lead will be large, healthy, full, and financially stable. The folks in the pews will lead lives as middle-class American Christians long have (so they imagine): unthreatened and tacitly buoyed by the surrounding culture.

Not for all of them, but for quite a few, it is something of a shock to learn about the declining rates of identification as Christian in America; about the decades-long decreasing numbers of church attendance; about how many churches are closing their doors each month; about some of the modest but real social, political, and professional challenges facing folks known to be Christian in what once were considered mainstream careers and institutions in this country.

In a word, most of my students believe they live in Renn’s Positive World. They really do. Others suppose it’s a Neutral World for Christians. Few to none see it as a Negative World. And I’m telling you, it makes a difference for how they understand their faith, their future, and their eventual ministry in the church.

This is one reason, in my view, why we keep seeing so many pastors quitting formal ministry in their 20s and 30s. It’s hard out there. And many of them are unprepared for what’s awaiting them. As I see it, part of that lack of preparation is a gap between the “World” they expect to inhabit as ministers and the actual “World” they find. And the gap is perpetuated if and when professors and writers like me fail to help them see—clearly, soberly, and accurately. I want them to see the world as it is. Not to scare them. Not to lament the supposed loss of a prior world. Not to remake the world in our desired image, in the image of what it “should” be. Not to be fatalist about the future or to forsake the challenge of persuasion or to give up on faithful witness until the world is nicer to us. By no means. The world owes us nothing, and as the apostle teaches, friendship with the world is enmity toward God.

What I want, rather, is for them to be equipped to minister in the real world, not the cloistered world of their childhoods, or the 1990s/2000s, or a fictional 1950s, or any other time and place. In that sense and to that extent, I find the “Three Worlds” heuristic to be useful. As a starting point. As a conversation starter. As an initial sociological, historical, and missiological framework, by which to help normie Christians and ministers to begin thinking about the particular challenges facing the mission of the church today—here and now, in our setting, not our parents’, not someone else’s: ours.

Maybe Renn’s “Three Worlds” comes with social or political baggage not worth onboarding in this particular conversation. Maybe it’s overdetermined by the uses to which various of its adherents want to put it. Maybe it’s wrong in certain key details, not least its laser focus on the last few decades and specific public events that occurred during them; a myopic legal and juridical cultural frame. Maybe its examples are wrong, such as offering the rhetorical style of Tim Keller as an artifact of a now-past “World,” no longer relevant. Maybe the “pre-1994” timeframe of “Positive World” is far too open-ended, and needs bracketing closer to the World Wars than to the Founding Fathers. Maybe the emphasis on elite institutions combined with a blurring of the lines between “public profession of Christian faith” and “actual discipleship to Christ” renders the framework finally useless at the practical level.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. With the qualifications I make above, I find it useful enough. More broadly, analysis like it seems to me self-evidently helpful, even needful. Not because Alan is wrong, but because he is right: The content of Christian witness is always and without exception the same: the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. But what does imitation of and conformity to those life and teachings require in this time, in this place, by comparison to other times, other places?

That’s the question I want to answer. And I’ll take all the help I can get.

Evangelical and evangelical

The estimable Timothy Crouch raises a question about my series of posts, not from the CoC side, but from the evangelical:

This intriguing paragraph from Brad East (from the coda of his series of posts on the Churches of Christ: https://bradeast.org/blog/coc-coda), in which he offers a ten-point description of “evangelicalism,” inadvertently suggests that denominations like, say, the PCA are not “evangelical.”

To my mind, this mostly just indicates that we need more language than “evangelical.”There is no use denying that there are real differences (theological *and* sociological) between Stone-Campbellites, the PCA, Dutch Reformed, Southern Baptists, charismatic megachurchers…

… AND there is no use denying that all five of those groups (and many more which I could name) have something important in common, that the non-Christian world — to say nothing of the liberal mainline Christian world — recognizes, dislikes, and calls “evangelical.”

I tend to use the word “evangelical” expansively, to describe whatever that common sensibility is, which (on balance) I share. But being raised Anglican and now part of a Presbyterian church (and studying historical theology), on Brad’s definition I am not an evangelical.

The intriguing paragraph in question is this:

evangelicalism is not a particular confessional tradition. Rather, it is a family of non-traditions, a dominant way or mode or ambient religious culture of being (1) a Christian community (2) in America, defined by (3) biblicism and (4) congregationalist polity, lacking (5) external tradition and (6) holy orders and being led instead by (7) elders, focusing above all on (8) personal faith, (9) the worship experience, and (10) active evangelism.

Timothy’s is a worthy rejoinder, and it calls for comment. Since I talk about evangelicalism a lot, I figured I should put down in black and white what I mean and why.

For starters: I’m neither a historian nor a sociologist. I’m a theologian commenting on sociohistorical categories and terminology. So I have far from the last word on this. But given how disputed the term is in the literature, I think it’s fair to have a “take” on the question as a non-expert.

To me, any definition of “evangelical” that is primarily theological in nature is a nonstarter. It will always include more than it’s meant to, and often exclude groups that are clearly evangelical in the way most people use the word. Rather, “evangelical” names a certain subset of American Christianity, a subculture with marked family resemblances across branching genealogies and descendants. Some of these resemblances include:

• a principled commitment to biblicism;

• a leveling or egalitarian or democratic impulse;

• an association with frontier revivalism;

• an emphasis on the proclamation of the word;

• an emphasis on the event or experience of conversion;

• an emphasis on living personal faith;

• a consistently conservative approach to law, family, and gender relations;

• a certain style of hermeneutical literalism;

• a certain kind of individualism;

• a certain entrepreneurial spirit: a flair for innovation, adaptation, and deployment of new strategies and technologies in the service of the gospel;

• a deep concern for evangelism and world missions;

• a relative lack of emphasis on structures of governance, sacramental administration, holy orders, or patristic-medieval tradition.

It is true that many, perhaps most, of these features may be found, and are historically found, in Christian communions whose polity is neither congregationalist nor dismissive of sacred tradition or historic patterns of liturgy. Here’s what I want to say about that.

On one hand, I’m wanting to use “evangelical” as a meaningful term in the present, not as it was or could be used one or two centuries ago, retrospectively. And it seems to me that, for a number of reasons, the term is better reserved today for those American churches or individual Christians who do not belong to the kinds of creedal/confessional traditions Timothy has in mind. First, because there are just so few of them left, relatively speaking. Second, because evangelicalism is such a different animal than it once was. Third, because so many of those traditions have themselves been colonized by what I’d call “the evangelical style”: diminished emphasis on denominational distinctives, increased emphasis on the musical and emotional experience of Sunday morning worship, etc., etc. Just as many Methodist churches in the south are called “Metho-Baptist,” given how similar they are to their Baptist neighbors, so confessional Protestant churches are effectively post-Protestant in America, just to the extent that they have become “properly” evangelical. This is what Bruce McCormack once called “the slow death of the Protestant churches” in North America.

On the other hand, I’m not actually persuaded that “Stone-Campbellites, the PCA, Dutch Reformed, Southern Baptists, charismatic megachurchers” “have something important in common” that outsiders see, a “common sensibility” evident to the naked eye. A good number of the twentysomethings I know from those groups wouldn’t recognize the others as Christian. I don’t mean they’d condemn them to hell. I mean they would be, and are, utterly alienated by them, almost as if the latter belonged to some other religion altogether. This very alienation was what prompted my first post about “CoC catholicity”: I have never found anything meaningful in common with evangelicals, in terms of spiritual sensibility or theological instincts or sacramental practice, and it took me a long time to figure out why. Furthermore, the very things that annoy and repel nonbelievers and mainline liberals about evangelicals also annoy and repel them about Catholic and Orthodox Christians. (Consider the constant confusion in elite journalism about “evangelical Christians” and pro-life activism. Catholics are constantly written out of the story by classifying them under the unsavory category of “evangelical.”)

Here’s my proposal. As a capitalized noun, “Evangelical” is used with greatest clarity when applied to the kinds of Christians, churches, and communities I’ve been describing, not Presbyterians and Anglicans. But as a lower-case adjective, “evangelical” may be employed with much wider scope, whether modifying conservative mainliners or even Catholics (as in George Weigel’s usage). This sort of distinction would recognize that, at this point in American history, “Evangelical” names a tribal identity, membership in a large and unruly family only partly defined by religious belief or practice. In that sense it is a sociological designation, not a theological one. Whereas “evangelical” as an adjective modifies the mode of any kind of Christian at all, including those who are unconnected to the frontier, undefined by biblicism, unattracted to ahistorical presentism, or otherwise governed by centralized authority, historic confessions, and sacred traditions.

Whether or not that distinction is a satisfying proposal to others, it’s how I aim to use the terms, and why.

CoC: coda

A wee postscript to the series of posts these last few weeks about the churches of Christ (a topic about which I have almost never written!), based on some conversations with friends and colleagues.

1. I trust it is clear that, when I talk about the “catholic” part of CoC DNA, I’m not suggesting that churches of Christ are, or are in any way close to being, Roman Catholic. I take the point of the analogy to be the observation of what is “like” between two entities that are very much “unlike.” The term “catholic” with a lower-case “c” is something of a technical term in my own writing and elsewhere. It denotes, not the church whose head is the bishop of Rome, but the larger phalanx of historic communions that trace their history back through the middle ages to the church fathers and apostles; whose governing structure is episcopal, that is, a succession of bishops; whose sacred tradition bears real and lasting authority; whose preeminent post-biblical authorities are the creeds and dogmas of the seven ecumenical councils; whose liturgy is sacramental and finds its consummation in the celebration of the Eucharist; etc. The communions thus referred to include not only Rome and the Eastern Orthodox but also the non-Chalcedonian churches of the East, not to mention (in my view) the global Anglican communion. It is a certain doctrinal and sacramental sensibility, a latent sense of the centrality of the church, the efficacy of her sacramental ministrations, and the vocation to universal holiness, among other things, that one finds in common between these communions and, I argue, the churches of Christ.

2. What one does not find in the latter is easily stated: a centralized hierarchy, bishops, creeds, dogmas, councils, sacred tradition, church history, saints, icons, martyrs, feast days, a formal liturgical rite, a church calendar, organs of authority beyond the local church, a formal act of canonization (just who did decide what was included in the Bible for Stone-Campbellites, I wonder?), and much more besides. In this respect churches of Christ very much resemble their evangelical cousins, governed as they are by a locally elected group of elders, centered on the exclusive authority of Scripture, with no substantive doctrinal or sacramental connection to any other church, any other time period, any other teaching apart from what any one congregation judges worthy of and demanded by the canonical texts. Lacking holy orders, lacking any authoritative tradition, CoC polity and practice are decidedly biblicist and congregationalist, thereby standing in a long line of American religious piety. This is why, though CoC-ers have always repudiated Catholics as beyond the pale, their real animus has been reserved for Baptists and other evangelicals, who are just close enough to be almost-saved, but just wrong enough to be not-saved. You argue with those you have the most in common with, after all. Hence two centuries of CoC–Baptist bickering and debate. (Hence, too, the more or less total cessation of the same in recent years.)

3. Along those lines, I neglected to mention social, cultural, or political factors in the evangelicalization of churches of Christ. I alluded to a more recent one in the third post, regarding tribal affiliation and political realignment. Another major factor is the ongoing de-Christianization of the public square and the nation as a whole. Note well: This is a descriptive claim; it is neither celebration nor lament, nor still a judgment on the quality of American culture or politics when its Christian identity was at high tide. A civilization might be Christian in the sense that (for example) the Bible suffuses its rhetoric and cultural products, its laws and policy debates, its education and self-understanding. That doesn’t tell us anything of the quality of such saturation, i.e., whether anyone, much less a majority, follows faithfully the way of Christ.

In any event, the apex of Christian confidence and ecclesial power in America was the 1960s, and since then it has suffered one long sustained decline. This is relevant to the CoC/evangelical story because the context in which American churches find themselves makes an enormous difference to how they approach both their own mission and their relationship to other Christian traditions. When (it feels like) everyone in America is a Christian, then a particular church has the luxury to say, and to mean, that every other church is wrong, and it alone is right. When (it feels like) barely anyone in America is Christian anymore, and the churches are at best hemorrhaging members, at worse under cultural and political assault, then that luxury is gone. The CoC-er is stuck in the foxhole with his Baptist brother, and obviously the latter is a fellow believer (if still in error about one or two things…); what matters now is survival, not doctrinal purity. This sort of martial rapprochement is evident in the 1994 statement in First Things by “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” The same dynamic on display there is evident, in microcosm, in churches of Christ beginning to trend evangelical around the same time.

4. One thing I left out in my series of posts is the liberal mainline. That term refers to what once constituted the “mainstream” Protestant establishment in America (the types who were on top in the ’60s): Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists, to list only the big guns. One hears less of them these days, outside of certain enclaves and seminaries, because their numbers have, in the last half century, decreased by the millions. They have neither the political power nor the cultural capital they exercised from the time of the Founding through the Civil Rights Movement. It was to some extent from the American mainline that the Stone-Campbell movement both arose and rebelled, in the beginning. It just so happened that, instead of looking like their Great Awakening peers, Stone-Campbellites followed their restorationist hermeneutic to prioritize different texts, generate different readings, and arrive at different conclusions as to the purpose and fundamental patterns of corporate Christian life. Which, in turn, produced what I have been calling a sort of “catholic” ecclesiology and sacramentology by comparison to typical American evangelicalism.

Be that as it may, what of the mainline today vis-à-vis churches of Christ? I’m inclined to say there is no “vis-à-vis” to speak of, with one exception. As I wrote originally, in my experience there are three types of CoC-er today:

1. Someone satisfied with the old-time, if declining, CoC style;

2. Someone happy to be/come evangelical (whether by leaving the CoC or by remaining in a CoC that is, or is in process of becoming, evangelical);

3. Someone desirous of catholic tradition, liturgy, and practice.

The third group, as I said, consists mostly of folks who’ve earned graduate degrees, especially in a theological discipline. But I inadvertently left out a fourth group, which partially overlaps with the third:

4. Someone drawn to the Protestant liberal mainline.

The force of that “drawn” comes in a few flavors. First, and most prominently, women raised in churches of Christ who, discerning a call to ministry, end up leaving their tradition of origin and serving a mainline denomination as ordained pastors. Second, seminarians and ministers who, remaining in churches of Christ, appreciate aspects of catholic tradition but, at the same time, are socially and politically progressive. Third, the churches of those selfsame ministers (and lay leaders) that, over time and through their leadership, come to resemble neither the CoC nor catholic practice but the liberal mainline instead.

I’m most intrigued by this last group, and I’m glad a colleague pointed it out. So far as I can tell, actual ministers in churches of Christ do not really encompass the “catholic” option canvassed in my earlier posts. Rather, they include (1) true-blue CoC-ers, (2) normie evangelicals, and (3) liberal mainliners. Think of these categories in practical terms: Where would a minister from each group go if his or her church did not exist? I mean: If a CoC was not there to be attended? Answer:

• Minister #1 would be, and would feel, ecclesially homeless (and thus would probably start a house church!);

• Minister #2 would (without a second’s thought) go to the nearest non-denom Bible/community church;

• Minister #3 would (without missing a beat) join the Methodists or Episcopalians down the street.

Usually, you can tell which group a minister belongs to pretty easily. And the interesting thing is, you can often tell by just looking at what his or her church looks like, because the direction in which the church is headed follows closely what the minister views as the ideal. Indeed, conflict arises precisely when the ecclesial vision of a minister or ministry staff and that of an eldership are at loggerheads. If one aspires to the liberal mainline and the other to evangelicalism—not to mention if either wants to ride or die as old-school CoC—you can imagine the fireworks that will inevitably result.

The other observation I’ll make is that ministers in the first category have not only been migrating to the second category; the very boundaries between the two have been blurring for going on two decades, and for all the reasons I outlined in the second post in this series. The upshot is that soon, even very soon, CoC ministers and the congregations they lead will by and large be evangelical in tone, sensibility, doctrine, and liturgical practice, with one or two holdover curiosities from bygone days (like weekly communion or gorgeous four-part harmony)—while, say, 10-15% rep the old line and another 5-10% are stuck in a sort of no-man’s-land, one foot placed in evangelicalism and one foot squarely in the mainline. If you’ve made it this far, you know where I’m putting my money.

5. A final word, though. If I’ve only tangentially mentioned the mainline in this series, I’ve not at all mentioned the Anabaptists. Although churches of Christ lack a genetic connection to Mennonites or Brethren, there is a real family resemblance, and for many of us—especially readers of King, McClendon, Yoder, Hauerwas, Stringfellow, Camp, and other radical types—there has always been a dream that, steering between the Scylla of evangelicalism and the Charybdis of catholicism, some segment of CoC congregations would reclaim their pacifist, primitivist patrimony and pursue a third path, Anabaptist style. Alas, it was not to be. The catholic genes were too weak, the siren songs of the evangelicals too strong. (Sirenum scopuli: the birthplace of CCM!) The truth is, even the Anabaptists have authoritative tradition. An anti-tradition tradition can maintain itself as a tradition for only so long. Eventually, a pull from without or a push from within will break the spell; and once it’s broken, there’s no means of recasting it. Tradition necessarily requires concrete, practical means of perpetuating itself in recognizable continuity across generations and geography. All the more so when, as in the case of Anabaptists, the community’s self-definition requires unanimous agreement to forsake violence in all circumstances. Given the history of congregational conflict in churches of Christ, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that they aren’t going to spontaneously become pacifist tomorrow.

In other words, the lesson reiterated in earlier posts remains true: Try as you might, you can’t change yourself from having been one particular tradition into having been a different tradition all along. You are what you are. Yet change, perhaps counterintuitively, remains a possibility. How so? Let me put it this way. It is possible to “be changed” from what one was—in this case, a sort of catholic restorationist sacramental free church—“into” evangelical because evangelicalism is not a particular confessional tradition. Rather, it is a family of non-traditions, a dominant way or mode or ambient religious culture of being (1) a Christian community (2) in America, defined by (3) biblicism and (4) congregationalist polity, lacking (5) external tradition and (6) holy orders and being led instead by (7) elders, focusing above all on (8) personal faith, (9) the worship experience, and (10) active evangelism.

And this is why, to bring matters full circle, I made clear in the third (“and final”—ha) post why so many CoC-ers welcome the evangelical transition and, just so, why that transition has been so apparently frictionless. Very few people see it as a negative thing, much less a betrayal. It just seems like being, well, Christian. And once non-denom evangelicalism becomes synonymous with being Christian, it’s the only game in town.

CoC: past, present, future

My two posts on churches of Christ—the first on CoC-past as not-evangelical-but-catholic, the second on CoC-future as no-longer-catholic-but-evangelical—were intended to be merely descriptive, but I think their overall effect was something of a downer.

On one hand, many people reached out to say how much the “catholic” piece resonated with them, giving words to something they’d never quite been able to articulate. Most of these comments were tinged with lament, however. They came from people who either (1) ended up leaving churches of Christ for catholic traditions or (2) have remained, but regret and mourn the loss of the very elements that once distinguished the CoC from evangelicalism (which elements are now receding in the rear view mirror). On the other hand, the second post seemed to pour cold water on the whole thing, framing the potentially positive way of telling the “free church catholic” Stone-Campbell story as a sort of declension narrative: i.e., a tale of a movement “falling” from its evangelical-distinct origins into evangelical-adjacent status before eventual, total evangelical absorption (or acquiescence).

It turns out there are a lot of people who love what historically made the CoC distinguishable from evangelicals, and it stirs up a lot of emotions to see that passing away.

I wanted to add a few final comments along these and other lines, based on some questions and comments I received.

1. There’s an inevitable imbalance in my presentation of the “catholicity” of churches of Christ. More than one reader argued that, while the “CoC as more catholic than evangelical” frame might be on to something at the historical-theological level, the super-majority of actual CoC-attending Christians would never dream of darkening the doorstep of a catholic church (certainly Roman, but also Eastern or Anglican). That’s true. Also true: There is no mass exodus at present from churches of Christ to catholic traditions. At first I worried I’d overstated this point, but actually, you’ll see in the original post that I carefully qualified my claim:

When I was in seminary, surrounded by mainline liberals, I quickly realized that the simplest way to explain the CoC sensibility is to describe it as catholic, not evangelical. Indeed, of those I know who were raised in the churches of Christ who have earned degrees in graduate theological education, not one (of whom I’m aware) has “gone evangelical,” or even magisterial Protestant. They have either remained CoC, or left the faith, or joined a high-church tradition: whether swimming the Thames, the Bosporus, or the Tiber. And no one “in house” is surprised by such a move.

I’ve emphasized the relevant clause. It’s clear that I don’t have in view normie CoC-ers. They’re not headed in droves for Rome or Constantinople. Rather, the people I’m thinking of are CoC-ers who’ve earned graduate degrees, particularly in a theological discipline. Minimally, they no longer fit the typical CoC mold: they’re pro-creed, or pro-tradition, or pro-icons, or pro–feast days, or high-liturgical, or post-biblicist, or in love with the church fathers or medievals, or what have you. Maximally, they end up converting. (Anecdotally, the more progressive go Episcopalian and the more conservative go Roman or Orthodox.)

In any case, that should clear up, if it wasn’t clear before, the subset of folks I have in mind. Which leads to the next point.

2. My broad thesis can be stated plainly:

Those churches of Christ that still exist today are increasingly evangelical in doctrine, practice, and worship; the members of such churches, especially Millennials and Gen Z, are increasingly evangelical in both style and substance; and these trends are picking up speed with every day.

I take this as given. I’ve run it by multiple scholars of CoC history. No one has gainsaid it. Every piece of anecdotal evidence confirms it. Unless and until someone objects to it as a true description of a social phenomenon, I will assume everyone agrees to its truth, however they may feel about it.

An additional anecdotal observation: For five years I have been teaching 18-22-year olds who are, nine times out of ten, the products of Bible-belt low-church traditions. In nearly every case the CoC-ers are indistinguishable from their Baptist and non-denom peers. This is because, at root, Millennial and Gen Z Baptists and CoC-ers alike have become non-denom-ers in all but name. For this reason, likewise, the “members” of each of these categories church-hop between Baptist, CoC, and non-denom congregations (without, naturally, placing actual “membership,” which now also appears to be a thing of the past), and they see no discrepancy or oddity in their doing so. And this, finally, is because, mostly to a person, they are DIY evangelicals at heart. The name or tradition on the side of a church building (or, as they might say first, in the URL of the church website) means next to nothing; for someone who attends there, at least from these generations, such an identity is only skin deep. Beneath the skin lies the soul of non-denom evangelicalism. And it is strong; it is a force to be reckoned with.

So: The flip side of being clear (negatively) that the catholic vein of CoC-dom has nearly run dry is being clear (positively) that there is a theological sensibility winning out in churches of Christ. That sensibility is evangelical. It is found in the pews, in the pulpits, in the worship, and in the doctrines (or lack thereof) that one finds on the websites and in the elderships and classrooms of CoC congregations.

3. A friend asks: Why so certain? Even if I’m right about the trajectory, is my confidence about the future warranted?

Theoretically, I grant the point. No one knows the future. In this case, though, I think I have very good grounds for confidence. Here’s why.

First, I’m not so much predicting the future as commenting with honesty about the present. There are approximately one-seventh as many CoC-ers in America as there are Mormons. That number has been declining for a long time. Covid only sped up the process. Some churches are closing their doors; some are changing the name over the doors; some are losing their younger members, not only to unbelief, but also to the local community church; and most of those that remain are changing so as to look more like said community church. In a few pockets (Abilene, Searcy, Nashville, et al) the old-school persists, and some congregations that look like “traditional” churches of Christ continue to flourish. But even these, while retaining the trappings of the old line, are different than they once were, in subtle but significant ways. The most important difference is an overt political and cultural realignment with American evangelicalism. Which means that, for them, their evolving sensibilities may, for now, be located less in worship style or explicit doctrine than in tribal affiliation. But the latter will begin to manifest in the former sooner rather than later.

Second, there are simply no reasons I have ever encountered, in any context, to believe that any of the trends identified above is likely to cease. This is because, while it may sound like I am sounding the death knell of churches of Christ, that’s not in fact what I’m doing. So far as I can tell, most adult believers in CoC congregations today, and many of their children, will remain Christian in twenty or forty years, just as a sizable number of the congregations they inhabit will still be around. The question is not a matter of wholesale denominational disappearance or widespread apostasy. The question, instead, is: Will they—will any of them—identify as “church of Christ”? And even when they do, will such an identification entail a substantial resemblance to CoC doctrine and practice 150 years prior? Or will the resemblance be far closer to their evangelical neighbors? The question answers itself.

Third, then, while it may be the case that “trending evangelical” is something to bemoan on the part of old-timers, catholic weirdos, and Stone-Campbell eggheads, what is evident is that most ordinary CoC members, leaders, and congregations don’t see it that way. They see their evolution as both consistent with their past and desirable as their future. Such persons would, I think justifiably, roll their eyes at my reflections in these posts. They don’t see American evangelicalism as a fate worse than death. They see it as an imperfect but nonetheless healthy expression of the gospel in our context. Now, it is undeniable, at the historical, sociological, and theological level, that for churches of Christ to complete their annexation by evangelicalism would mean, in one sense, the end of churches of Christ as we have known them. But from death comes life; resurrection follows crucifixion; organic, healthy change sometimes requires painful pruning. That’s what mainstream evangelical-trending CoC-ers would say and do say. They’re perfectly within their rights to do so, and nothing in principle makes their judgment problematic. It’s only old-school and/or catholic oddballs and academics who find themselves squirming in their pews.

4. What then? After all this analysis, is there anything constructive to be said or done? Let me close by making a few gestures in this direction.

(a) Many churches of Christ are not in a good way. I know multiple consultants who receive weekly calls from congregations asking for help, and all the consultants can offer is wisdom about how to die well. This is a fact on the ground that anyone plugged into CoC networks knows full well, and it’s neither pessimistic nor alarmist to say it out loud. As I have written elsewhere, what many churches need today from their elders and pastors is nothing so much as hospice care. They’re going to die anyway. A church can die faithlessly, grieving as those without hope, or it can die faithfully, with hope in Christ our Savior. Aiding communities in doing the latter is good, sacred work. We need more ministers willing to do it and trained in the art of how to do it well. And we’re aren’t doing anyone a favor by putting our head in the sand, pretending it’s not happening.

(b) There is a fundamental misdiagnosis I have also written about elsewhere. That is, pastors and elders—always fighting the last generation’s war—suppose that what ails their churches is too much: too much doctrine, too much orthodoxy, too much firmness, too much concreteness, in short, too many answers and not enough questions. This is wrong. What bedevils churches today, and above all the under-30 crowd, is too little: too little doctrine, too little liturgy, too little substance, too little stability, too little confidence, too few answers. Young people today are begging for answers and what they’re receiving is mostly scraps and shrugs. They are drowning, and no one is throwing them a life raft. Instead, they hear a voice calling to them: “I’d try to help, but I wouldn’t want to presume!” Presume away. If the church lacks confidence in the truth of the gospel, then of all people we are most to be pitied. Preach the truth in love. That’s the answer now, as it always was and always will be, because both truth and love are synonymous with Jesus himself, and Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

(c) Evangelicalism is not a monolith. It includes charismatics, prosperity preachers, entertainment mega-churches (think: spotlights and smoke machines), generic DIY-ers, and confessional traditions. For CoC-ers trending evangelical, it is certainly possible to find prudent ways to avoid the first four and aim for the fifth. It’s possible, I say, but difficult. The reason is that confessional traditions belong, as the name says, to traditions defined by confessions. Those confessions may be broadly Reformed, or Anglican, or Lutheran, or Wesleyan, or other. They are embodied in books of discipline, common prayer, catechisms, institutes, seminaries, synods, and more. They characterize an entire ecclesial culture, rooted in a particular history out of which the tradition itself and its manifold churches spring forth and from which they continue to be nourished.

That’s what makes “becoming” confessional-evangelical difficult for churches of Christ. Not only would a congregation need to be led by a wise and trusted pastor. The elders would all have to be on the same page. And they, together with the pastor and the rest of the ministry staff, would have to guide and catechize the congregation such that folks in the pews—not only formed as CoC-ers but trained, as levelers, to think like egalitarian biblicists—would consent unanimously to become, or even to join, a preexisting confessional tradition. Doubtless such a process could begin incrementally, without many people realizing it. And a partial move in this direction is easy to imagine. But a comprehensive transformation? Possible in theory, I suppose, but difficult in practice.

(d) Having said that: You’d be surprised, if you know anything about churches of Christ, what you’re liable to find in some of them today. I know one that recites the Apostles’ Creed. I know another that practices corporate confession and absolution of sin in weekly public worship. I know another that says the Lord’s Prayer. Others process to the front to receive communion; still others locate communion at the climax of the liturgy, following the sermon. Many have begun following the church calendar and/or preaching according to the lectionary (goodbye, sermon series!). Taken together, these are rather radical changes to two centuries’ worth of habits; these habits amounted to a default setting for Sunday morning once assumed to be an immutable blueprint. So perhaps I am overestimating the potential resistance to change and underestimating the hunger for sacred tradition and historic liturgical patterns.

(e) The challenge that remains is this. If part of the underlying problem is DIY-ness, how does a congregation opt, with radical autonomy, to submit to an authority beyond itself? How, in a word, can a church use its autonomy to undo its autonomy? And with lasting effects? No one wants to make a change today that’ll probably by reversed tomorrow. Nothing could be more enervating for the task of reform.

In this case, I have little to offer. It feels like an intractable problem. But perhaps it is not. Here, as always, we are reduced to prayer, specifically to invocation of the Spirit. The church is dead apart from the life the coming of the Spirit brings. What we must do, then, besides our analysis and our planning and our working, is beg the Spirit to come to our aid.

So we cry: Veni sancte Spiritus!

And it’s a sweet irony, ending there, if you recall the role of the Spirit in Stone-Campbell teaching. Having once shrunk him down to size—to the size of the Bible on the lectern, in fact—we now plead for his sovereign presence once more. Mortification and vivification: that is what we need. To be slain by his fiery power and raised by his might to the only life worth having; his life, which is the unquenchable life of Christ.

CoC: evangelical, not catholic

I’ve had a number of readers reach out to me about my reflection on the churches of Christ as catholic rather than evangelical. I’m gratified to learn that what I was trying to put my finger on is something others resonate with. Some wrote as still-CoCers to say that it helped them articulate “the difference” they had always felt but had never been able to name; others wrote to say that, yes, indeed, they were raised CoC but were now a part of one of the three great episcopal branches of catholic tradition: Anglican, Eastern, or Roman.

So that’s the good news: what I identified is real and recognized as such by others. More good news: CoC theology of the church and her sacraments is both good on the merits and in line with patristic and medieval teaching, rather than merely a recent innovation. Best of all, at least for some: We’re not evangelicals, like we’ve been saying all along!

Now for the bad news.

The bad news comes in two forms, one about CoC past and one about CoC future.

Regarding the former, the thing about CoC virtues, which broadly overlap with catholic tradition, is that they are the flip side of CoC vices. These vices likewise sometimes overlap with catholic vices. A high ecclesiology all too often trades on a sectarian ecclesiology: no one outside this church (rather than the church) will be saved. Hence the CoC’s justly earned reputation for supposing all other Christians to be damned, or at least very unlikely to be saved. The same goes for sacramental practice, which can verge on the obsessive, the mechanical, or both. If it’s even thinkable for a well-formed member of your ecclesial tradition to wonder seriously whether a person who died in a car accident on the way to being baptized would, as a result of thus not being baptized, go to hell, then you can be sure that something has gone terribly wrong. Doubly so if your catechesis generates rather than relieves this anxiety. (My students are shocked to learn how open-handed actual Catholic doctrine is on this question: not only are unbaptized martyrs saved, but any person with the sincere intention to be baptized, who for reasons outside her control is kept from being baptized, is received by the Lord in death as though she had been baptized.) The same obsessive-compulsive severity can be found in “re”-baptizing someone whose hand or foot didn’t go all the way under during the first try—taking to a literal extreme the understanding of baptism as total immersion, and just thereby undermining the very point of once-for-all believers baptism.

I could go on: the granular scholasticism of kitchens in church buildings, church buildings in general, instruments in worship, paid parish preachers, and the rest. Anyone who was raised in churches of Christ or who grew up in an area with one on every corner knows what I’m talking about.

No church is perfect, however, nor any church tradition. The wheat and the tares grow together, as do the virtues and vices of any particular movement. That’s to be expected.

The second element of the bad news, though, is related to the first, which is why I mentioned it. It is true to say, as I did in my original post, that the CoC is more catholic than evangelical. That catholic sensibility still lingers on in some congregations, especially in members over 50. But it is dissipating, and fast. As I wrote, churches of Christ are currently in process of being absorbed into American evangelicalism, a process that, if not already finished, will be completed in the next decade or two. It’s a fait accompli; the only question is the timing.

This CoC future is a function of CoC past. There is a reason why churches of Christ are becoming indistinguishable from non-denominational churches. Well, there are many reasons, but here’s one big one: The oldest three generations of CoC-ers finally got fed up with the sectarian fundamentalism in which they were raised. They saw that they were not the only Christians; that church history was not misery and darkness until 1801; that Stone-Campbell tradition was just that, a tradition, one like many others; that “being right” was not synonymous with “doing what we’ve always done”; and that “what we’ve always done” was not sufficient as a reason to keep on doing it.

Those are all true insights, and their fruit, across the last thirty years, has been lifting up mainstream churches of Christ from the sectarian muck in which it had been mired. Many experienced that lifting-up as a deliverance, even a liberation. They were in the light, having been in shadow and twilight for so long. They were grateful for the tradition they’d received; they were willing to remain in it; but they would contribute to its healthy evolution: from sect to tradition, from exclusivism to ecumenism, from dogma to generous orthodoxy. This would, in a way, honor the Stone-Campbell roots of churches of Christ, since those roots were about prioritizing Christian unity above all else.

Many welcomed, and continue to welcome, the resulting changes. But there were unintended consequences. Chief among them was the loss, on one hand, of the features that made churches of Christ distinctive in the larger ecclesial landscape; and, on the other, of the practical means of maintaining and handing on those very features to the next generation.

Here is the great irony. The upshot of rescuing the CoC from its worst vices was the loss of its greatest virtues—of what made it it in the first place.

Hence the CoC’s absorption into evangelicalism. And try as some might, there’s no arresting this process. Why? For the following reasons.

First, the CoC began as an anti-tradition tradition. This means there are no organs of authority for any one congregation besides the Bible, its elders, and its ministry staff. There is, in a sense, no tradition to which such a congregation might be faithful. It doesn’t exist. There’s no “there” there.

Second, even granting that, in one sense, there obviously is a “there” there—after all, churches of Christ have a history and founders and influential leaders—there are no reasons, internal to the tradition, why anyone should care. In a theological debate between two Orthodox theologians, it is valid and weighty to assert that St. Irenaeus, St. Basil, and St. Maximus are on one’s side. They’re not quite Scripture, but they’re close. Not so in a CoC context. If someone in a local congregation says, “I hear what you’re saying, but Stone-Campbell Movement Leader X once wrote Y,” the only reply necessary is, “So?” Moreover, the very point of “moving” the CoC beyond its sectarian postwar malaise was for it to be changed. But if such change is both possible and desirable, then crying “Halt!” because Proposed Change Z doesn’t accord with CoC tradition is nonsensical. You can’t sit on the branch you’ve already sawed off yourself.

Third, there is only one way of being anti-tradition (indeed, anti-creedal) with a congregationalist polity in America: it’s called evangelicalism. By definition you do not belong to a larger ecclesiastical body. By definition you have no larger set of authoritative canons or confessions or doctrines. By definition you are making it up as you go. We have a name for that in this here frontier land. It’s the E-word, God help us all. American evangelicalism is DIY religion through and through, and that’s the only route available to a tradition without a history, a church without a creed, a polity without authority—that is, authority beyond the Bible as read by a local group of staff and elders.

This is why flagship and even normie churches of Christ today look like carbon copies of their next-door-neighbor non-denom churches. (It’s why some of them have dropped the “…of Christ” from their buildings and websites, and why others are soon to follow.) Increasingly they’re ditching a cappella singing for CCM praise music; they’re placing far less of an emphasis on baptism as restricted to adults or as a sacrament of divine action, much less as necessary for salvation; and I’d be willing to wager that weekly communion, already felt to be gumming up the liturgical works, will be the last domino to fall in the coming years. What’s holding all of this together, anyway, is the oldest two generations. Once they pass away, and once younger people start asking (as they already are), “Why does this have to be weekly? Won’t it be more meaningful if we make it monthly instead?” you can set a timer for the eventual change. Remember, “we’ve always done it this way” no longer holds water as an answer.

For CoC leaders who don’t like the look of this trajectory, there are limited options. You can’t bootstrap an ecclesiastical hierarchy into existence ex nihilo. Nor can you DIY yourself out of DIY-ness. That’s the DIY trap. If you make yourself just-a-little-progressive-mainline, you’re not mainline, you’re just progressive evangelical—the worst of all possible worlds. Besides, if the point was to avoid being evangelical, you’ve failed. If, by contrast, you make yourself just-a-little-traditional-catholic, you’re not catholic, you’re just traditional—but what does that mean? You can’t be “traditional” as an optional extra chosen by lay vote or ministerial preference; tradition either is or is not authoritative. And if it just happens to be a congregation’s preference today, who’s to say it will remain their preference tomorrow?

In short, the question isn’t whether churches of Christ already are, or soon will be, one more tributary in the great evangelical delta. They are and they will be. It’s whether they will even exist once the process of absorption is complete. For many congregations are closing their doors, as the CoC rolls in the U.S. decline; many others are dropping the name; others still are dropping the distinctives that make them CoC (whether or not they still claim the name). Doubtless a few will remain, repping the old line. But they won’t amount to a statistically significant number in the scene of American Christianity. At that point—2045? 2060?—this whole conversation will be moot. Mostly there won’t be churches of Christ around anymore; and those that exist won’t look like they once did, a century prior. The transmutation to evangelicalism will be total.

I know plenty of folks in churches of Christ who see this as either a good thing or, at most, neutral. Their CoC catechesis was weaker on the catholic stuff and stronger on low-church ecumenism, marked by things like missionary flexibility, freedom from the authority of tradition, aversion to creeds and confessions, openness to change, inattention to history, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a high priority on spiritual unity and personal faith. American evangelicalism has all these in spades. This helps to explain the curious fact that, for most CoC congregations, the shift from catholic to evangelical has been so swift, so striking, yet so smooth, devoid (for the most part) of dispute and strife. Arguments have centered on culture-war flashpoints like gender rather than creedal doctrine or sacramental theology.

Yet this shift leaves the decidedly non-evangelical folks who remain in churches of Christ more or less homeless, exiles in their own spiritual household. But because the writing’s on the wall—because there’s no putting the evangelical cat back in the catholic bag—there’s nothing, really, to do. You can accept the trend lines, hunker down, and grin and bear it. Or, as I concluded in the previous post, you can leave.

As I see it, by and large those who stay will be those who resonate with evangelicalism, and those who leave will be those who long for catholic doctrine and practice. The sorting has already been happening, quietly, the last twenty years; it should be done, I’d say, in the next twenty. Some will leave who’d prefer to stay, and vice versa. But for the most part, that’s how it’ll shake out.

One note on “negative world”

I’ve written twice on the minor internet dust-up over James Wood’s essay last month on the political witness of the church, an essay that contains some modest criticisms of Tim Keller. There Wood uses a framework taken from an essay published last February by Aaron Renn, which was an expanded version of a piece he originally proposed a full five years ago. Many folks have written about Renn’s framework, including (to my mind) most incisively and critically by Jake Meador a few weeks ago.

A simplified version of the framework is that there are three dominant modes of Christian experience in any given social and political context, in this case the American context. These are positive, neutral, and negative. Each concerns the public profession of Christian identity. The question is: On balance, do the nation’s elite institutions together with the persons who lead and occupy them reward, ignore, or penalize the public profession of Christian identity? If the first, then this makes for a “positive world”; if the second, then a “neutral world”; if the third, then a “negative world.”

Renn has a timeline, relatively compressed, whereby before the mid-1990s, America was—again, in the aggregate, on balance, and concerning the mainstream culture as influenced and governed by elite spheres, professions, persons, and institutions—a “positive world.” Then this ambient context shifted into a “neutral world” for a couple of decades before, sometime in the last decade, another shift occurred and we entered a “negative world” for public profession of Christian identity.

In my view, this proposal should not be controversial. The reasons why it has been taken to be controversial are numerous; here’s a guess at a few of them.

First, the focus seems overdetermined by recent history, in particular the fortunes of white evangelicals. Second, the issues that signal loss of status are culture-war fodder like gender and sexuality rather than, say, racism, poverty, and immigration. Third, the framework is liable to being interpreted as one more American-Christian decline narrative: once things we great (because “we” were on top), now they aren’t (because “we” no longer are). Fourth, some of the examples of writers and pastors held up for critique are beloved or perhaps not worthy of it, as with Keller. Fifth, the descriptive nature of the framework is taken to be normative in character, thereby implying that Renn and Wood want to argue that it is harder to be a faithful Christian today than it ever was before in America.

As I said above, I don’t take Renn’s framework to be especially controversial, because if you don’t worry about haggling over the details, it’s self-evidently true; indeed, unless I’m seriously misunderstanding and therefore misrepresenting it, something like it is taken for granted in all sociology and history of American religion published in the last century.

The framework has nothing—I repeat, nothing—to do with the challenge of living faithfully as a Christian, now or at any time in the past. Likewise it has nothing to do with the nature of the gospel or the demands of Christian discipleship. It is not and does not involve any substantive moral or theological claim whatsoever. It is a purely sociological observation about the public status of Christian identity in American life. What it says is simply this:

• Once, it was reasonable to suppose that, broadly speaking, if you claimed in America to be a Christian (or church-affiliated), then that public claim was more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects;

• now, it is reasonable to suppose the opposite;

• some complex set of factors led from the first situation to the second;

• doubtless a sort of intermediate period covered the time of transition.

That’s it. That’s the framework. Is it false? I confess I’m not even sure what it would mean to say that it could be false.

Note that the proposal as summarized here has nothing at all to do with the substance of Christian faith and morals—nothing to do with orthodoxy. It makes no claim to the “Christianness” of the American republic (or its antecedent colonies) at any point in its history. It’s not about anyone’s heart, mind, feelings, or sincerity. It’s not about a golden age. It’s not about a time we ought to recover or reestablish. It doesn’t even entail that those matters of traditional teaching for which one might be socially or legally disciplined today are either true or of first order importance relative to prior contested issues in American church history.

(It’s worth observing that theological liberalism a century ago would have entailed denial of creedal doctrines—bodily resurrection, virginal conception, divinity of Christ—alongside affirmation of moral doctrines regarding marriage, sexual ethics, and divorce, whereas today the reverse is the case. In other words, the transition from “positive” to “negative” world isn’t per se a transition from “conservative” or “traditional” to “liberal” or “progressive” theology. That particular fight, or dialectic, has been a live one for a full two hundred years, with no signs of abating. For that reason it doesn’t map onto the Renn framework under discussion.)

To take a concrete example, one offered by Alan Jacobs, it was damn hard to be a faithful Christian in the Jim Crow South. A lot harder by comparison to today, with far harsher penalties for following Christ (whatever one’s race) than nearly anyone faces at present. I take that as read. Nevertheless it remains true at the descriptive level, as a sociological fact that publicly professing to be a Christian in the 1950s was—on balance, no matter who you were or where you lived, with relatively minor exceptions—more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects.

Consider, finally, that this claim does not of itself require approbation (nostalgic, reactionary, or otherwise) of the erstwhile “positive world.” Plenty of Christians might suppose the “positive world” was, on the whole, a bad bet for Christians and/or a raw deal for Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and other non-Christians. Perhaps it created pressure for countless businessmen and politicians to voice aloud a fake faith or a merely civil religion all the while living as pagans in their personal lives. Perhaps this sullied the church’s witness. Perhaps Christians should be grateful to inhabit a “neutral” or “negative” world. Perhaps!

My only point is that it doesn’t matter what one makes of these shifts, nor how one might revise the minor details (dates, epochal events, how hostile contemporary “negative world” really is, and so on). The shifts are real. I’d go so far as to say they’re undeniable. It’s only once we agree about that that we can hold a meaningful conversation—or argument—about the significance, implications, challenges, and opportunities created by the shifts in question.

One long thought on Wood v. Keller

It seems to me that there is a single pressing issue raised by James Wood’s essay (and follow-up) on Tim Keller: namely, the social and political fortunes of evangelical churches under social and political conditions that are truly post-Christendom.

For seventeen centuries Christianity in the main has not been averse to seeking, maintaining, and deploying political power in the name of and in the service of explicitly Christian convictions, purposes, and interests. Even those offshoots of Christianity, beginning some five centuries ago, that to some degree expressed concerns or hesitancy about the Christian exercise of political power—and these have always been minority traditions in any case—have continued, broadly speaking, to operate under the conditions laid down by Christendom, and even to presuppose certain fundamental features of a Christian or semi-Christian regime. Even when, in the last two centuries or so, the overt Christian elements of “Western” political regimes have dried up, it is unquestionable that most of those elements remained, covertly, in one form or another. It is only in the last century, and in the U.S. in the last half-century, that the lineaments of a genuinely and comprehensively post-Christian political order have come into view and begun to be implemented. Whether or not that order has fully arrived in certain European nations, it has not yet here in the States. It is coming, though, and about that there should be no illusions.

Here is the point. Magisterial Protestantism was never anti–political power. It retained a vision, rooted in Christendom, for what it means for a nation (or state) to “be” Christian. That vision concerned both the character of leaders and the content of laws. As forms of populist, non-magisterial Protestantism grew, developed, and expanded—let’s just call these groups “evangelical” for lack of a better word—even where the magisterial political vision went unclaimed or repudiated, the political order created and maintained by it remained in place. In other words, evangelicalism in all its varieties knows no other regime in the West other than Christendom, semi-Christendom, or covert-Christendom. Post-Christendom is a new beast altogether.

(To be sure, evangelical churches have existed and do exist in other parts of the world, where Christendom never took root; some of these places are actively hostile to the faith. I leave to the side all the very interesting issues that attend this intersection of evangelicalism and non-Christian or anti-Christian contexts.)

The question posed by this confluence of factors is the following: How is evangelicalism supposed to operate politically in a truly post-Christian civilization? I take this to be the fundamental issue Wood is raising for us; bracket all that he says about Keller, and how you might feel about that. The heart of the matter is how both (evangelical) Christians and the (evangelical) church ought to comport themselves politically in relation to a full-bore, actually realized post-Christian culture.

Here’s the problem I think he’s putting his finger on. Historically, Christians have not had an ideal-typical, above-the-fray political program for society. Their program has been actionable, and they have acted upon it. They have commended it to the wider society; they have executed it in the courts of kings and magistrates; they have expanded on it in legal and theological texts. In no sense was the Christian vision for political order a “trans-partisan” affair. It was partisan all the way down. It could not help but be so if it would be concrete, which every political platform must be.

Roman Catholicism has not abandoned this approach to politics, though the reception of the Christendom vision is a matter of enormous debate since Vatican II. In principle, though, Rome rejects the wholesale privatization of religion and does not renounce its having a role in public affairs, even (at times, past or present or future) being established as the faith of the land.

Likewise, magisterial Protestantism has not abandoned a modified version of the Christendom project. Yet—and I don’t mean this to be as harsh as it sounds—magisterial Protestantism is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Those Protestants who seek to maintain or to recover the magisterial and confessional traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may well be performing admirable and good work; but as a living institution with either ecclesial or political power, it’s a thing of the past. Whether they like it or not, they’re all evangelicals now.

Which brings us back to where we started. I understand the ecclesio-political program criticized by Wood to be one that keeps the (evangelical ) church qua church apolitical, while encouraging individual Christians to be faithfully engaged in democratic politics, where “faithful engagement” means (a) keeping political activity penultimate by (b) permitting Christians to be on both sides of most/all political questions, which in turn requires (c) avoiding partisanship, because (d) the gospel stands above and in judgment upon all political endeavors, inasmuch as (e) neither the gospel nor the church is fully aligned with any political party, platform, or policy. The upshot is a modest, even ambivalent, investment in political activity, characterized by gentleness, civility, and the self-critical admission of a general fallibility.

Many of us may find this picture of Christian participation in politics to be an attractive one. What Wood wants us to see, however, is three things.

First, it has little precedent in Christian history. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But we should realize just how new it is. Its newness should caution our sense that it’s self-evidently “the” “Christian” approach to politics; it is certainly a such approach. Prima facie we can’t say much more than that. In historical perspective, it’s something of a novelty.

In part that’s because, second, our circumstances are radically new—and, again, without precedent in the church’s past. The church once found itself in a pagan world that judged it worthy, at best, of benign neglect and, at worst, of legal and social punishment. But the church has never faced a post-Christian legal-cultural regime. So even those politics-reticent ecclesial traditions that have arisen since the mid–sixteenth century have no previous experience of what we are (currently or imminently) facing.

Third, Wood believes this picture of winsome, faithful presence is bound to fail—that is, as a social and political program. That doesn’t prejudge whether it’s what Christ demands of us. Nor does it amount to a suggestion that the tasks of Christian discipleship are measured by (likelihood of) sociopolitical success. Instead, it’s meant to draw attention to the fact that “faithful discipleship” and “faithful political engagement as outlined in this particular proposal” are not synonymous. The latter is a contingent suggestion that may or may not be (a) good in the merits and/or (b) apt to specific material conditions. I take Wood’s bedrock claim to be that, as a concrete but intrinsically contestable proposal, this vision of political engagement is good on the merits and was apt to the conditions of its time and place when it was proposed. But, given a change in social and political conditions on the ground—being an at least partly empirical question subject to all manner of analysis—the practical question of what faithful discipleship requires of American Christians today, in terms of active political engagement, calls for a rethinking of said proposal in favor of a revised or even altogether new vision. Not, I repeat, because the former was or is ineffective, but because, given certain cultural mutations, it is inapt (unfitting, unresponsive) to the needs and demands of Christian life and witness in this moment, in our context as it stands.

If this is granted, then the question is not whether (what Wood takes to be) Keller’s project is “good” or “faithful” or “worth defending.” The question is whether, as a contingent proposal for how Christians in a particular time and place ought to comport themselves politically, it continues to be properly responsive to the social, political, and missional challenges facing the American church today. Perhaps it does; perhaps it doesn’t. Much of one’s answer will turn on the logically prior question regarding the state of those challenges and whether, across the last four decades, they have changed, or are currently in process of changing, as substantially as Wood believes.

This is where the historical backdrop I offered above is meant to give some credence to Wood’s argument—which is, recall, about Protestant evangelicalism in America. There is no one-size-fits-all “Christian relation to politics.” (And if there were, it would be of the Christendom variety, not the belated liberal-democratic variety.) Christians have always adjusted, with impressive flexibility, to countless regimes and types thereof. In our case, this means (on one hand) that what has “worked” in the recent past will not necessarily be what works in the present or the future; and (on the other) that we ought to hold before us a far greater variety of Christian approaches to politics than what we are lately used to. If we are truly entering a post-Christian period, we’re going to need all the help we can get. Some of that help, therefore, may turn out to come from the distant rather than the recent past. Some of it may look wholly unfamiliar to us. We cannot know in advance what may prove useful or apt to the moment. Everyone is agreed that no proposal is licit that contradicts the teaching or authority of Christ. Granting that criterion, the floor is wide open. The moment is unprecedented, the terrain uncertain. Only by hearing from everyone and taking into consideration what surprises or even confounds us can we move forward, together, into the unknown.

The uses of conservatism

In the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back Barton Swaim wrote a thoughtful review of two new books on political conservatism, one by Yoram Hazony and one by Matthew Continetti. The first is an argument for recovering what conservatism ought to be; the second, a history of what American conservatism has in fact been across the last century.

Swaim is appreciative of Hazony’s manifesto but is far more sympathetic to Continetti’s more pragmatic approach. Here are the two money paragraphs:

The essential thing to understand about American conservatism is that it is a minority persuasion, and always has been. Hence the term “the conservative movement”; nobody talks of a “liberal movement” in American politics, for the excellent reason that liberals dominated the universities, the media and the entertainment industry long before Bill Buckley thought to start a magazine. Mr. Continetti captures beautifully the ad hoc, rearguard nature of American conservatism. Not until the end of the book does he make explicit what becomes clearer as the narrative moves forward: “Over the course of the past century, conservatism has risen up to defend the essential moderation of the American political system against liberal excess. Conservatism has been there to save liberalism from weakness, woolly-headedness, and radicalism.”

American conservatism exists, if I could put it in my own words, to clean up the messes created by the country’s dominant class of liberal elites. The Reagan Revolution wasn’t a proper “revolution” at all but a series of conservative repairs, chief among them reforming a crippling tax code and revivifying the American economy. The great triumph of neoconservatism in the 1970s and ’80s was not the formulation of some original philosophy but the demonstration that liberal policies had ruined our cities. Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972 not by vowing to remake the world but by vowing to clean up the havoc created by Lyndon Johnson when he tried to remake Southeast Asia. George W. Bush would draw on a form of liberal idealism when he incorporated the democracy agenda into an otherwise defensible foreign policy—a rare instance of conservatives experimenting with big ideas, and look where it got them.

The three sentences in bold are, I think, the heart of Swaim’s point. Here’s my comment on his claim there.

At the descriptive level, I don’t doubt that it’s correct, if incomplete. At the normative level, however, it seems to me to prove, rather than confound, Hazony’s argument. For Hazony represents the conservative post-liberal critique of American conservatism, and that critique is this: American conservatism is a losing bet. It has no positive governing philosophy. It knows only what it stands against. Which is to say, the only word in its political vocabulary is “STOP!” (Along with, to be sure, Trilling’s “irritable mental gestures.”) Yet the truth is that it never stops anything. It merely delays the inevitable. In which case, American conservatism is good for nothing. For if progressives have a vision for what makes society good and that vision is irresistible, then it doesn’t matter whether that vision becomes reality today versus tomorrow. If all the conservative movement can do is make “tomorrow” more likely than “today,” might as well quit all the organizing and activism. Minor deferral isn’t much to write home about if you’re always going to lose eventually.

Besides, in the name of what exactly should such delay tactics be deployed? Surely there must be a positive vision grounding and informing such energetic protest? And if so, shouldn’t that be the philosophy—positive, not only negative; constructive, not only critical; explicit, not only implicit—the conservative movement rallies around, articulates, celebrates, and commends to the electorate?

Swaim is a prolific and insightful writer on these issues; not only does he have an answer to these questions, I’m sure he’s on the record somewhere. Nevertheless in this review there’s an odd mismatch between critique (of Hazony) and affirmation (of Continetti). If all the American conservative movement has got to offer is the pragmatism of the latter, then the philosophical reshuffling of the former is warranted—at least as a promissory note, in service of an ongoing intellectual project. That project is an imperfect and an unfinished one, but it’s far more interesting than the alternative. Whether we’re talking politics or ideas, we should always prefer the living to the walking dead.

Misdiagnosis

A running theme has emerged on this blog over the last few years, but especially the last 18 months or so. That theme is the sorry state of the church in the U.S., in particular “low church” traditions: non-denominational, baptist, evangelical, and other similar communions (like my own, churches of Christ). The focus is on those traditions because those are the ones that compose my world: the Christians I know, the neighbors I live among, the students I teach. I stay abreast of analogous problems in Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline churches, but they’re farther afield in terms of my lived daily circles.

Lately I have found myself struck by a commonality that unites so many of the objects of my critique and frustration within this lagging, sagging, tattered sub-world of American Christendom, such as it is. That commonality I will call a fundamental misdiagnosis of the situation, that is, of the root problems besetting the churches today. So far I can tell—granted that this is an untrustworthy mix of anecdote, hearsay, reading, and guesswork—a certain framework and diagnosis is shared among an enormous unofficial and unconnected network of pastors, church leaders, writers, and academics. When these folks look at the churches today, what they see is a surfeit of errant but otherwise strong, and strongly held, beliefs. This surplus of conviction is a problem for one of two reasons. Either the content of the conviction is wrong or the confidence in its truth is overweening. In both cases it is the pastor’s, the church’s, or the seminary’s job to exercise discipline—that is, to transform the content or to undermine the confidence. Sometimes the act of discipline is self-directed; sometimes the passion of directing it outward stems from autobiography. In any case, frustration results when laypersons do not take kindly to the attempt at discipline. Mutual distrust lingers like an aura, even in the absence of such an attempt. Each side wonders when the other will make a move.

I do not doubt that there are communities in which this description obtains. I do not doubt, in other words, that there are churches in this country filled to the brim with self-assured, belief-suffused Christians who sniff and snarl at the faintest whiff of a notion that they are not one hundred percent right in their every opinion—and, what is important to add, that many of those opinions have next to nothing to do with the gospel.

As I say, I do not doubt this. Nevertheless, as a diagnosis of what ails the churches in the aggregate, I think it is mistaken.

The problem, at the macro level, is not a surfeit of strong belief. The problem is the social, moral, and theological acids corroding every belief in sight. These acids are everywhere, affecting everyone. Marx’s description of the effects of capitalism on the wider society apply equally well here:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…

Fast forward to the present and it is the selfsame phenomenon. In a word, it is liquid modernity that is sucking believers down into the depths. It is not some mass illusion of stability. The ground is breaking up beneath our feet as we speak. Or rather, it’s been broken up for some time, and only now are some of us peering down to see what little remains. Individual by individual, community by community, believers are falling through the cracks.

And what do they hear from their ostensible leaders? From the books and blogs, pulpits and classrooms, profiles and influencers? They see a finger pointing in accusation; they are told that the problem is too much belief held too tightly. Nein! I don’t know a soul in the churches under 45 years old for whom such a label fits. To a man, to a woman, they’re barely keeping their heads above the waters. And all they see is tidal waves coming for their children.

What we need, accordingly, is a shoring up of the foundations, not a tearing down of the walls. What we need, as I have written elsewhere, is not deconstruction. It’s reconstruction—or just plain construction, starting with what we have. From the raw soil and the still-smoking ruins, a shelter can be built. But we have to see what’s in front of us if are going to build at all, much less wisely, and we’ll never get around to the job if we project onto the smoldering wreckage the image of an impregnable fortress. Perhaps that’s what once was there. No longer.

A church in tatters

In my review of Rodney Clapp’s new book on neoliberalism a few months back, I write the following:

Clapp sometimes partakes of a certain Hauerwasian grammar, whereby the indicative is used to describe what the church ought to be but is not (yet). Call it the eschatological indicative. Such language can function prophetically, calling the church to enact its baptismal and pentecostal identity, whatever its past or present failings. But it can also mystify the facts on the ground. Those facts are plainly put: The American church is in tatters. Our witness is shredded, our integrity a joke, our children bereft of a heritage and leaving the faith in droves. Reading Clapp’s book, at least until I reached the restraint of the epilogue, I simply did not recognize in his rhetoric the church as it currently exists. The rot, neoliberal and otherwise, runs deep. I want to amen the confidence of Clapp’s homiletic. But mostly I just find myself sighing in lament and anguish.

That passage has stuck with me, partly because it surprised me when I wrote it, partly because it gave words to an unexpressed emotion that, the moment it was on the page, I realized articulated exactly how I had been feeling for some time. The church is in tatters: lament and anguish. That’s it, right there. That’s the alternately benumbed and depressed sensibility I find in myself as I survey the church in America today, a sensibility I detect in many others.

Most folks I know who are in their 30s and 40s and who were raised in the church fall into only a few categories. One is ex-Christian: they’ve left the faith. Another is ex-church: they like Jesus but they don’t do the public-worship-and-assembly thing. A third is deconstructing: they’re currently in the midst of a sincere and long-ranging reconsideration of all they’ve been taught, about God, Scripture, Jesus, religion, ethics, politics, family, what have you. A fourth is imploding: their marriage or job or kids or personal life hit some wall or obstacle and a metaphorical IED blew it all to smithereens, and they’re doing their best to pick up the pieces. The fifth and final group comprises those whose faith as well as church membership are living and active and relatively stable, but who are hanging on by a thread. A single modest financial or family crisis, a lost job or a sick parent, a church scandal or a friend’s move away—a real but not life-altering event—would cut the thread and send them spinning into one of the first four categories.

And that’s about it. If I were to select a single word to unite all of these groups, it would be exhausted. And that exhaustion is ecclesial and spiritual as much as it is economic, professional, political, medical, familial, marital, or social. Even the best and most faithful Christians I know in this demographic are spent, tired, struggling with mental health, terribly lonely. They are, in a word, suffering a kind of sustained desolation while clinging to Christ with all they have—which is not much.

Is it always like this? Has it ever been thus? If I went back and polled our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents at this stage in life, would they report the same? Yes, granted, life happens, and life includes pain and suffering, job loss and cancer, divorce and broken friendships and the rest. Life has always happened. But this feels more specific. It is not as though the church has never been well, in this or that time and this or that place. I know enough of church history to tell you about some of those times and places. Some of them were recent. The church and its members sometimes are brimming with confidence, catechesis, and overall health.

This does not seem to be one of those times, whether one looks at the hard data (the sociological research is rather devastating here) or the anecdata (i.e., one’s neighbors and friends and community). The Lord’s promise to the church is that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. But as I’ve written elsewhere, that promise applies to the church, not to yours or mine, not even to a regional or national collection of believers. The Lord will remain faithful to his people even should it be depleted to a remnant of one. Sometimes, though, it feels like that’s precisely what’s happening in America, a winnowing and whittling down, until there’s none of us left, not even one.

David Walker on slavery and the justice of God

And as the inhuman system of slavery, is the source from which most of our miseries proceed, I shall begin with that curse to nations, which has spread terror and devastation through so many nations of antiquity, and which is raging to such a pitch at the present day in Spain and in Portugal. It had one tug in England, in France, and in the United States of America; yet the inhabitants thereof, do not learn wisdom, and erase it entirely from their dwellings and from all with whom they have to do. The fact is, the labour of slaves comes so cheap to the avaricious usurpers, and is (as they think) of such great utility to the country where it exists, that those who are actuated by sordid avarice only, overlook the evils, which will as sure as the Lord lives, follow after the good. In fact, they are so happy to keep in ignorance and degradation, and to receive the homage and the labour of the slaves, they forget that God rules in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, having his ears continually open to the cries, tears and groans of his oppressed people; and being a just and holy Being will at one day appear fully in behalf of the oppressed, and arrest the progress of the avaricious oppressors; for although the destruction of the oppressors God may not effect by the oppressed, yet the Lord our God will bring other destructions upon them—for not unfrequently will he cause them to rise up one against another, to be split and divided, and to oppress each other, and sometimes to open hostilities with sword in hand. Some may ask, what is the matter with this united and happy people?—Some say it is the cause of political usurpers, tyrants, oppressors, &c. But has not the Lord an oppressed and suffering people among them? Does the Lord condescend to hear their cries and see their tears in consequence of oppression? Will he let the oppressors rest comfortably and happy always? Will he not cause the very children of the oppressors to rise up against them, and oftimes put them to death? "God works in many ways his wonders to perform."

—David Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (1829), from the Preamble

Tony Judt on the New Left in the '60s

It was a curiosity of the age that the generational split transcended class as well as national experience. The rhetorical expression of youthful revolt was, of course, confined to a tiny minority: even in the US in those days, most young people did not attend university and college protests did not necessarily represent youth at large. But the broader symptoms of generational dissidence—music, clothing, language—were unusually widespread thanks to television, transistor radios and the internationalization of popular culture. By the late ’60s, the culture gap separating young people from their parents was perhaps greater than at any point since the early 19th century.

This breach in continuity echoed another tectonic shift. For an older generation of left-leaning politicians and voters, the relationship between ‘workers’ and socialism—between ‘the poor’ and the welfare state—had been self-evident. The ‘Left’ had long been associated with—and largely dependent upon— the urban industrial proletariat. Whatever their pragmatic attraction to the middle classes, the reforms of the New Deal, the Scandinavian social democracies and Britain’s welfare state had rested upon the presumptive support of a mass of blue collar workers and their rural allies.

But in the course of the 1950s, this blue collar proletariat was fragmenting and shrinking. Hard graft in traditional factories, mines and transport industries was giving way to automation, the rise of service industries and an increasingly feminized labor force. Even in Sweden, the social democrats could no longer hope to win elections simply by securing a majority of the traditional labor vote. The old Left, with its roots in working class communities and union organizations, could count on the instinctive collectivism and communal discipline (and subservience) of a corralled industrial work force. But that was a shrinking percentage of the population.

The new Left, as it began to call itself in those years, was something very different. To a younger generation, ‘change’ was not to be brought about by disciplined mass action defined and led by authorized spokesmen. Change itself appeared to have moved on from the industrial West into the developing or ‘third’ world. Communism and capitalism alike were charged with stagnation and ‘repression’. The initiative for radical innovation and action now lay either with distant peasants or else with a new set of revolutionary constituents. In place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of ‘blacks’, ‘students’, ‘women’ and, a little later, homosexuals.

Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separately represented in the institutions of welfare societies, the new Left presented itself quite consciously as opposing not merely the injustices of the capitalist order but above all the ‘repressive tolerance’ of its most advanced forms: precisely those benevolent overseers responsible for liberalizing old constraints or providing for the betterment of all.

Above all, the new Left—and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency—rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor. To an earlier generation of reformers from Washington to Stockholm, it had been self-evident that ‘justice’, ‘equal opportunity’ or ‘economic security’ were shared objectives that could only be attained by common action. Whatever the shortcomings of over-intrusive top-down regulation and control, these were the price of social justice—and a price well worth paying.

A younger cohort saw things very differently. Social justice no longer preoccupied radicals. What united the ’60s generation was not the interest of all, but the needs and rights of each. ‘Individualism’—the assertion of every person’s claim to maximized private freedom and the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires and have them respected and institutionalized by society at large—became the left-wing watchword of the hour. Doing ‘your own thing’, ‘letting it all hang out’, ‘making love, not war’: these are not inherently unappealing goals, but they are of their essence private objectives, not public goods. Unsurprisingly, they led to the widespread assertion that ‘the personal is political’.

The politics of the ’60s thus devolved into an aggregation of individual claims upon society and the state. ‘Identity’ began to colonize public discourse: private identity, sexual identity, cultural identity. From here it was but a short step to the fragmentation of radical politics, its metamorphosis into multiculturalism. Curiously, the new Left remained exquisitely sensitive to the collective attributes of humans in distant lands, where they could be gathered up into anonymous social categories like ‘peasant’, ‘post-colonial’, ‘subaltern’ and the like. But back home, the individual reigned supreme.

However legitimate the claims of individuals and the importance of their rights, emphasizing these carries an unavoidable cost: the decline of a shared sense of purpose. Once upon a time one looked to society—or class, or community—for one’s normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What is good for one person may or may not be of value or interest to another. Conservative philosophers of an earlier age understood this well, which was why they resorted to religious language and imagery to justify traditional authority and its claims upon each individual.

But the individualism of the new Left respected neither collective purpose nor traditional authority: it was, after all, both new and left. What remained to it was the subjectivism of private—and privately-measured—interest and desire. This, in turn, invited a resort to aesthetic and moral relativism: if something is good for me it is not incumbent upon me to ascertain whether it is good for someone else—much less to impose it upon them (“do your own thing”).

True, many radicals of the ’60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little. Looking back, it is striking to note how many in western Europe and the United States expressed enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung’s dictatorially uniform ‘cultural revolution’ while defining cultural reform at home as the maximizing of private initiative and autonomy.

In distant retrospect it may appear odd that so many young people in the ’60s identified with ‘Marxism’ and radical projects of all sorts, while simultaneously disassociating themselves from conformist norms and authoritarian purposes. But Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together—not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But under that awning, and served by that illusion, the Left fragmented and lost all sense of shared purpose.

On the contrary, ‘Left’ took on a rather selfish air. To be on the Left, to be a radical in those years, was to be self-regarding, self-promoting and curiously parochial in one’s concerns. Left-wing student movements were more preoccupied with college gate hours than with factory working practices; the university-attending sons of the Italian upper-middle-class beat up underpaid policemen in the name of revolutionary justice; light-hearted ironic slogans demanding sexual freedom displaced angry proletarian objections to capitalist exploiters. This is not to say that a new generation of radicals was insensitive to injustice or political malfeasance: the Vietnam protests and the race riots of the ’60s were not insignificant. But they were divorced from any sense of collective purpose, being rather understood as extensions of individual self-expression and anger.

 These paradoxes of meritocracy—the ’60s generation was above all the successful byproduct of the very welfare states on which it poured such youthful scorn—reflected a failure of nerve. The old patrician classes had given way to a generation of well-intentioned social engineers, but neither was prepared for the radical disaffection of their children. The implicit consensus of the postwar decades was now broken, and a new, decidedly unnatural consensus was beginning to emerge around the primacy of private interest. The young radicals would never have described their purposes in such a way, but it was the distinction between praiseworthy private freedoms and irritating public constraints which most exercised their emotions. And this very distinction, ironically, described the newly emerging Right as well.

—Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010), pp. 85-91

Anonymous Americans

Perhaps someone else has made this connection before, but it seems to me that there is a secularized form of Rahner's so-called "anonymous Christians" at work in American political discourse. It has right and left variations, but the theme is the same: In principle, the world is always already America; persons from other places, citizens of other nations, are Americans in embryo: the potential merely needs to be made actual. In this way non-Americans are in fact anonymous Americans, Americans without knowing it, Americans of the heart: related to and defined by America simply in virtue of who they are and how they live. And though they may lack this knowledge, we Americans, we explicit, public Americans—we know it on their behalf.

On the right, this takes the form of speaking as if other countries are good places to live just to the extent that they approximate the American way of life; so that any person or family beyond America's borders would, if given the chance to become American (without cost, risk, etc.), take the opportunity in a heartbeat. The American polity lies at the end of history, toward which horizon all the nations stream to receive instruction and pay homage.

On the left, this takes the form of speaking as if people from other countries are, in an almost metaphysical sense, already American, and thus owed, indeed entitled, to all the civic, social, legal, and other rights and privileges bestowed upon "official" Americans. If segments of the right envision open borders for the sake of freer movement of ideas and capital, segments of the left imagine open borders nominally as the elimination of the divisions enacted in the nation-state system, but effectively as the Americanization of the world: all are Americans, proleptically speaking; it just so happens that only a small portion of them have formal documentation to prove it at the moment.

No wonder that Americanists right and left so often unite in foreign adventurism, whether of the imperial or the humanitarian variety. Anonymous Americans around the world are living under conditions of great deprivation, definitionally speaking: they are expats of an ontological variety, exiled in advance of the great homecoming. No wonder, too, that the adventurism takes on the veneer of the Great Commission. Not only evangelization but eschatological in-gathering is the driving vision, the basis and the motivation for actions abroad rooted in faith, that is, the substance of things hoped for, the knowledge of things unseen.

On the last day, the great sorting will occur. But instead of Matthew 25, more often it is Isaiah 2, Micah 4, and Revelation 22 that fill out the picture of the End. The dazzling light of final freedom will disclose the hearts of the people, and the people's hearts will be, to a person, American. Even if—especially if—they never had a clue.

Questions for Jake Meador after reading his lovely new book

Jake Meador is one of my favorite writers to read today on the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. (Am I contractually obligated to call him a "young" writer? What are the rules here when you're not sure whether you're older than the young writer in question?) We've yet to meet, but he's been gracious to me over the past few years, posting and soliciting essays I've written for Mere Orthodoxy, which he edits.

I was eager to read his new book, In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World, and I wasn't disappointed. The book will be a boon to a variety of folks, especially pastors, churches, and college students. Indeed, I'm assigning it to one of my classes this fall. Given Meador's politics—a social conservative against racism, an agrarian against abortion, a Christian against the GOP, an evangelical against Trump, a Calvinist against capitalism—his writing makes for nice inroads to conversations with ordinary believers that bypass the partisan binary.

But while I wasn't disappointed, I was surprised by the book. I've been chewing on the reasons for that surprise for the last month. So let me try to boil down my surprise into the form of questions Meador left me with—questions I hope his ongoing work, at Mere O and especially in future books, will continue to grapple with.

1. For whom is this book written? Who is its primary audience? Meador's writing is always clear but it is often pitched "higher," to those who've read the primary sources and know the state of the conversation, and who have the desire or the power to do something about it. The book seems pitched "lower" (not in a pejorative sense), to those who haven't done the reading and aren't familiar with the driving conversations of the day. If so, perhaps the book is meant as a kind of translation or popularization for ordinary Christians, as I suggested above. In that, I think it succeeds; but it was not what I was prepared for.

2. Substantively, what surprised me most was the relative lack of direness in Meador's account of the current civic crisis. Partly a matter of tone, it's more than that too: one doesn't get the sense from the book that American society is an free fall. Sure, things are worse than they could be, but also, things are looking up, or at least, signs of (this-worldly) hope are on the horizon. But this doesn't match what I read in Meador's more regular writing. So just how bad are things? Are we in the midst of a kind of crisis? Or is it less dire than that?

3. Related is the state of the church in the U.S. I had thought, again based on Meador's other writing, that we are currently in a stage of ecclesial emergency. The church's numbers have been declining rapidly and continue to do so; those churches that have changed with the times have apostatized, and those churches that have ostensibly remained orthodox are beset by trials and scandals of a political and sexual nature. But a strikingly sanguine tone characterizes much (not all) of the book's talk of church: the simplicities and ordinary kindnesses of congregational life, etc. Is this just a non-alarmism about an objective emergency situation? Or have I misread Meador? How bad is it, and how bad are our future prospects?

4. Combining the previous two points, perhaps the biggest conceptual gap in the book for me was the relationship between the church and politics. If the church is declining in numbers and the wider culture is secularizing, indeed moving toward a post-Christian hostility to the church, then why continue to presume the ongoing power and influence of the church to effect much of anything in (at least national) politics going forward? There is a sort of running "if...then" momentum in the book, such that "if" X or Y happens within the church or on the part of Christians, "then" A or B may or should or will happen within the culture or the government. But I had thought we'd moved beyond that thinking. What if the church—the faithful, those who worship in parishes and congregations and actively follow Christ (say, 15-20% of the population)—were to be perfectly faithful across the next generation, and American culture and politics simply ignored us? What then? Or am I misunderstanding the nature of the book's vision?

5. By book's end, Meador's cheerful optimism—in one sense an antidote to the hysteria on all sides of cultural commentary today—left me with a vision of non-political politics: witness without agonistes. I had no sense of either the fight I ought to join or the battle from which I ought to retreat; the book describes not so much a field of conflict as a state of affairs in which the good has been leached out of our common life, and those of us who recognize that fact ought to do our best to pour it back in. But is Meador really so optimistic? Does he lack a sense for the conflicts facing our society and Christians therein? I don't think so. So what am I missing?

6. What I want to know (what I was left wondering) is: What is possible, and how do we get there? Does Meador think the "Trump effect" is not so much the ratcheting up of polarization, demonization, racism, reaction, etc., but instead the detonation of past paradigms so that we can imagine, more or less, whatever future we want? The Overton window not only expanded but smashed to smithereens? I doubt he'd put it in quite such extreme terms, but if it's something like that, then what does he (what should we) want at the end of our political and cultural labors? Beyond relative peace, stability, freedom, prosperity, depth of faith, intact families, and the rest. In other words, are we meant to close the book and imagine a radically transformed post-liberal America? Or a small but faithful remnant of Christ's church in the ruins of a decadent, hostile empire? That difference of visions is the ambiguity I felt from start to finish.

7. Put differently once again: Which saint, which option, ought we to choose? Should we opt for Dreher's Benedict Option, strategically withdrawing energy, emotion, time, and resources from political activism in order to shore up the wealth of the tradition and catechize our children for the dark ages? Should we instead follow Jamie Smith's Augustine Option, approaching culture and politics with a holy ambivalence that discriminates between good and evil case by case, refusing alarmist fears for engagement and resistance as the situation requires, without spurning the need for compromise? Or should we choose the Daniel Option, the proposal of Alissa Wilkinson and Robert Joustra, who don't deny the ills of modernity but basically see our time and culture as a benign one, full of signs of progress and opportunity for good, thus requiring our support for and participation in the liberal regime? (We could go on, with saints and options; perhaps Solomon standing for integralism?) I have always thought of Meador as BenOp-adjacent, not quite there but quite close, minus the tenor of Dreher's terror. But In Search of the Common Good, had I never read the author before, would have had me assuming he was somewhere between Smith and Wilkinson.

8. Speaking of saints, let me also mention martyrdom. The lack of an agonistic vision of politics combined with the cultural optimism resulted, in my reading, in a denial of tragedy, an account of political engagement without suffering or loss. I was left wondering what it might mean—not least coming from a person who has written tirelessly about putting principle over winning, means before ends—for the church to follow Meador's vision for Christian sociopolitical witness and still to "lose" or "fail" on the world's terms. What if being faithful means "death," however metaphorical? I'm confident of Meador's response: "Then so be it." But I was surprised by the implicit suggestion in the book that, in general, things will work out. What if things don't work out? What if, in 75 years, the church in America dwindles to one-tenth of the citizenry, despised but ignored, even as a third or more of the population claims the mantle of "Christian" while denying everything Christianity stands for? (Wait, that already sounds too familiar.) Note well, I'm not predicting this future. I'm saying: Christians have grown so used to this country being "theirs," so used to "running the show," to having influence and wielding it, that it is close to impossible for them (for us) to imagine a future in which that is no longer the case. Hence the very real fears of losing that power—fears we have seen manifested in spectacularly wicked ways these last few years (and not only then). What happens once we move beyond those fears to living in that future? Or is that so hypothetical as to be irrelevant to the present time—the spasms of dysfunction visible today signs of nothing seismic or epochal, just the usual bad actors and bad apples? (Answers here bears on answers to numbers two and three above. Just how bad is it?)

9. Shifting gears a bit here, and by way of closing, I sense a disjunction between two modes of thought in Meador. One is the natural, the other the supernatural; let's make their representatives Wendell Berry and St. Augustine. Meador envisions the good life as one in accord with creation, in harmony with the natural world. Hence his emphasis on farming, local community, conservation, the natural family, children, kinship, caring for the elderly, knowing one's neighbors, staying rooted in one place, and so on. This is the moral vision of Port William. Moreover, the natural good life is available, epistemically and otherwise, to all people, not just Christians. Whereas the Augustinian vision, while certainly affirming natural goods and the good of the created order, differs in important respects. The world is fallen, corrupted by sin, and women and men are depraved in their wills, their minds, their hearts, their desires. Driven by disordered love, sinful people neither know nor live in accordance with the highest good or the proper hierarchy of goods under God. They serve idols of every kind. What people need, then, is grace: to cleanse their conscience, heal their hearts, reorder their wills, and guide their lives. Apart from grace they cannot live as their ought nor know how they ought to live. Grace is a necessary condition of the good life, in and after Christ. (Recall too that, for Augustine, as for the catholic tradition after him, not to have children, not to be married, not to serve in civic life is actually the higher form of life in Christ, even if that ideal is not meant for all.) So the question arises: Where does Meador fall between Berry and Augustine here? What exactly is he recommending, and for whom is he recommending it, and on what (epistemic, moral, theological, political) basis? At what point do the theological virtues enter into the natural good life, and when and where and to what extent do they challenge, subvert, or deny aspects of it? And what of our neighbors? Is our concern for their good limited to the natural, or does it extend to the supernatural? If the latter, what social and political shape should that concern take?

That's enough for now. I've presumed too much of your patience, dear reader, as I have Jake's (if he reads this). Lest my questions be misinterpreted, let me be clear that I intend them in a spirit of friendship and of affinity for the book they query, and for the project that book advances. I'm thankful for the book, and I'm eager to see the fruit it bears in the coming years.

A proposal regarding Christians and the Fourth of July

I first published this in 2012, and often re-publish it as July 4th approaches.

For Christians concerned with issues like nationalism, the violence of the state, and bearing witness to God's peaceable kingdom, one might expect the Fourth of July to be a straightforward call to action. An opportunity to debunk American myths; a day of truth-telling about those who suffer as a consequence of American policies, foreign and domestic; a chance to offer a counter-witness to the civil liturgies covertly clamoring for the allegiance of God's people. And there are compelling, laudable voices doing just that sort of thing today.

On the Fourth, however, I find myself wondering whether there might also be another option available. Not as a replacement of those I've listed above, but rather as another way of "being" on the Fourth that, on the one hand, betrays not an inch on the issues (which, of course, do not disappear for 24 hours), yet on the other hand is able to see the holiday as something other than just one more chance for another round of imperial debunking.

To put it differently, I'm wondering whether there might be certain goods attendant to some "celebrations" of the Fourth of July, and whether it might sometimes be a good idea for Christians to share in those goods. If an affirmative answer is appropriate to both questions, I'm wondering finally what faithful participation might look like.

For example, I grew up in a decidedly non-patriotic household. Not "anti-patriotic," mind you, but "non-." It just wasn't an issue. No flag burnings (hence not "anti-")—but no flags around to begin with. Even on a day like the Fourth, while there was probably a dessert lurking somewhere colored red, white, and blue, that was both the extent of it and about as meaningful as having silver-and-black cupcakes when the Spurs won the championship. In other words, not much. Beyond that, we didn't sing patriotic songs or wax nostalgic about the glories of the U.S.A. or thank God incessantly for making us Americans and not communists. We cooked a lot of food, had lots of people over, ate and laughed and napped and swam and ate again, and concluded the night by watching fireworks. Then we crashed.

Perhaps my experience is not representative, but in reflecting on it, I have a hard time getting very worked up by what is generically derided as hyper-patriotic, nationalistic, blasphemous, violence-perpetuating, etc. No doubt there are gatherings and celebrations which do earn those and other descriptors, and Christians shouldn't hold back in truthfully naming them for what they are. My point is merely that not all are like that. And my question is this: Might Christians' sharing in ordinary gatherings like those I have in mind be one faithful option for the Fourth of July?

While I don't see this as some kind of paradoxical subversion of the holiday, the possibility is worth pondering for at least a moment. America's particular brand of individualism and pluralism at times affords some unexpected benefits, not least of which is the notion that the meaning of common set-aside days is not a shared given but rather what each of us decides to make it mean for oneself. Thus we "do" or "do not" celebrate x holiday; or we "don't do it that way," but "this way"; etc.

Well, why can't the church—not as a day off from its witness to the God of peace against the violent idolatries of the state, but precisely as one form of it—make its own meaning on the Fourth? The meaning can be simple: Rest from work is good; time shared with neighbors, friends, and family is good; feasting with others (when done neither every day nor alone—which is generally the American way) is good. I've been part of celebrations like this that go the whole day without waving a flag, memorializing a war, comparing a soldier's sacrifice to Jesus's, or mentioning "the greatest country on Earth"—and that, without anyone present consciously intending to avoid such things! It just happened; and I suspect it did, apart from consideration of the faithfulness of those gathered, simply because of all the good being shared among and between us. Almost like an unconscious tapping-in to that ancient notion of habitual rest and feasting, only we were so preoccupied with one another's company that we forgot "the reason" we were together at all.

So perhaps that can be the understated motto for what I'm suggesting. Let American Christians across the land feel free to "celebrate" the Fourth of July, sharing in its manifold goods with our neighbors with a clean conscience; only let us do so, at every moment and with focused purpose, forgetting the reason for the season.