Reactionary Politics Make America Great Again
This article was published online on March 10, 2021.
The United states of america had long been a holdout amongst Western democracies, uniquely and perhaps fifty-fifty suspiciously devout. From 1937 to 1998, church membership remained relatively constant, hovering at most 70 percent. Then something happened. Over the past 2 decades, that number has dropped to less than 50 per centum, the sharpest recorded reject in American history. Meanwhile, the "nones"—atheists, agnostics, and those claiming no religion—accept grown rapidly and today represent a quarter of the population.
But if secularists hoped that declining religiosity would make for more rational politics, drained of faith's inflaming passions, they are likely disappointed. As Christianity's hold, in particular, has weakened, ideological intensity and fragmentation have risen. American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as always; it's just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief. Political debates over what America is supposed to hateful have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what faith without religion looks like.
Non so long ago, I could condolement American audiences with a contrast: Whereas in the Middle Due east, politics is war past other means—and sometimes is literal state of war—politics in America was less existentially fraught. During the Arab Spring, in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, debates weren't about health care or taxes—they were, with sometimes frightening intensity, about foundational questions: What does it mean to exist a nation? What is the purpose of the state? What is the function of religion in public life? American politics in the Obama years had its moments of ferment—the Tea Party and tan suits—but was still relatively tiresome.
We didn't realize how lucky we were. Since the cease of the Obama era, debates over what it means to be American have become suffused with a fervor that would be unimaginable in debates over, say, Belgian-ness or the "meaning" of Sweden. It'south rare to hear someone accused of being united nations-Swedish or united nations-British—simply un-American is a common slur, slung by both left and right against the other. Being chosen united nations-American is like beingness called "un-Christian" or "united nations-Islamic," a charge akin to heresy.
This is because America itself is "most a religion," as the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak in one case put information technology, particularly for immigrants who come up to their new identity with the zeal of the converted. The American civic religion has its own founding myth, its prophets and processions, too equally its scripture—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. In his famous "I Have a Dream" spoken communication, Martin Luther Male monarch Jr. wished that "ane day this nation will rise upwards and alive out the true pregnant of its creed." The very thought that a nation might accept a creed—a word associated primarily with organized religion—illustrates the uniqueness of American identity equally well as its predicament.
The notion that all deeply felt conviction is sublimated faith is not new. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian who served as the prime government minister of the Netherlands at the dawn of the 20th century, when the nation was in the early on throes of secularization, argued that all strongly held ideologies were effectively religion-based, and that no man could survive long without some ultimate loyalty. If that loyalty didn't derive from traditional religion, information technology would find expression through secular commitments, such as nationalism, socialism, or liberalism. The political theorist Samuel Goldman calls this "the law of the conservation of organized religion": In any given society, there is a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and where information technology is expressed.
No longer explicitly rooted in white, Protestant authorization, understandings of the American creed have become richer and more various—merely besides more than fractious. As the creed fragments, each side seeks to exert exclusivist claims over the other. Conservatives believe that they are faithful to the American idea and that liberals are betraying it—but liberals believe, with equal certitude, that they are faithful to the American idea and that conservatives are betraying it. Without the mutual ground produced by a shared external enemy, as America had during the Cold War and briefly after the September 11 attacks, common antipathy grows, and each side becomes less intelligible to the other. Too often, the most biting divides are those within families.
No wonder the newly ascendant American ideologies, having to make full the vacuum where religion once was, are so divisive. They are meant to exist divisive. On the left, the "woke" have religious notions such as original sin, amende, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends. Adherents of wokeism see themselves as challenging the long-dominant narrative that emphasized the exceptionalism of the nation's founding. Whereas religion sees the promised land as being above, in God's kingdom, the utopian left sees it as being ahead, in the realization of a just lodge hither on Earth. After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September, droves of mourners gathered outside the Supreme Court—some kneeling, some holding candles—as though they were at the Western Wall.
On the correct, adherents of a Trump-axial ethno-nationalism still drape themselves in some of the trappings of religion, but the result is a movement that oft looks similar a tent revival stripped of Christian witness. Donald Trump's bouncy rallies were more focused on claret and soil than on the son of God. Trump himself played both savior and martyr, and information technology is easy to marvel at the concur that a man so imperfect tin have on his soldiers. Many on the right find solace in conspiracy cults, such equally QAnon, that tell a religious story of earthly corruption redeemed past a godlike force.
Though the United States wasn't founded every bit a Christian nation, Christianity was always intertwined with America'south cocky-definition. Without it, Americans—conservatives and liberals alike—no longer take a mutual culture upon which to autumn back.
Unfortunately, the various strains of wokeism on the left and Trumpism on the right cannot truly fill the spiritual void—what the announcer Murtaza Hussain calls America's "God-shaped pigsty." Religion, in function, is about distancing yourself from the temporal world, with all its imperfection. At its best, religion confers relief by withholding final judgments until another fourth dimension—maybe until eternity. The new secular religions unleash dissatisfaction not toward the possibilities of divine grace or justice but toward one's fellow citizens, who become embodiments of sin—"deplorables" or "enemies of the state."
This is the danger in transforming mundane political debates into metaphysical questions. Political questions are not metaphysical; they are of this world and this earth alone. "Some days are for dealing with your insurance documents or fighting in the mud with your political opponents," the political philosopher Samuel Kimbriel recently told me, "but in that location are also days for solemnity, or fasting, or worship, or feasting—things that remind us that the world is bigger than itself."
Absent some new religious awakening, what are we left with? One alternative to American intensity would be a world-weary European resignation. Violence has a way of taming passions, at least as long equally it remains in active memory. In Europe, the terrors of the 2d World State of war are non far away. Just Americans must go back to the Civil State of war for violence of comparable scale—and for most Americans, the violence of the Civil War bolsters, rather than undermines, the national myth of perpetual progress. The war was redemptive—it led to a identify of promise, a identify where slavery could be abolished and the nation made whole again. This, at least, is the narrative that makes the myth possible to sustain.
For improve and worse, the United States actually is nearly 1 of a kind. France may be the only country other than the Usa that believes itself to exist based on a unifying ideology that is both unique and universal—and avowedly secular. The French concept of laïcité requires religious conservatives to privilege existence French over their religious commitments when the 2 are at odds. With the rising of the far right and persistent tensions regarding Islam'south presence in public life, the pregnant of laïcité has become more controversial. Merely most French people still hold firm to their land's founding ideology: More 80 percent favor banning religious displays in public, according to one recent poll.
In democracies without a pronounced ideological bent, which is most of them, nationhood must instead rely on a shared sense of beingness a distinct people, forged over centuries. Information technology can exist hard for outsiders and immigrants to embrace a national identity steeped in ethnicity and history when it was never theirs.
Have postwar Federal republic of germany. Germanness is considered a mere fact—an blow of birth rather than an aspiration. And because shame over the Holocaust is considered a national virtue, the country has at once a strong national identity and a weak one. There is pride in not beingness proud. So what would information technology mean for, say, Muslim immigrants to dearest a German linguistic communication and culture tied to a history that is non theirs—and indeed a history that many Germans themselves hope to leave behind?
An American who moves to Federal republic of germany, lives there for years, and learns the language remains an American—an "expat." If America is a civil religion, it would brand sense that it stays with you, unless you renounce it. Every bit Jeff Gedmin, the former head of the Aspen Found in Berlin, described it to me: "Yous can consume strudel, speak fluent German, adapt to local civilization, simply many will however say of y'all Er hat einen deutschen Pass—'He has a German passport.' No one starts calling you High german." Many native-built-in Americans may live away for stretches, but few immigrate permanently. Immigrants to America tend to become American; emigrants to other countries from America tend to stay American.
The last fourth dimension I came dorsum to the United States after being abroad, the community officer at Dulles airdrome, in Virginia, glanced at my passport, looked at me, and said, "Welcome home." For my customs officer, information technology went without maxim that the United States was my home.
In In the Light of What We Know, a novel by the British Bangladeshi author Zia Haider Rahman, the protagonist, an enigmatic and troubled British citizen named Zafar, is envious of the narrator, who is American. "If an immigration officer at Heathrow had e'er said 'Welcome home' to me," Zafar says, "I would have given my life for England, for my country, in that location and and so. I could impale for an England like that." The narrator reflects later that this was "a bitter plea":
Embedded in his remark, at that place was a longing for existence a function of something. The force of the statement came from the juxtaposition of 2 apparent extremes: what Zafar was prepared to sacrifice, on the ane mitt, and, on the other, what he would have sacrificed information technology for—the casual remark of an clearing official.
When Americans take expressed disgust with their country, they have tended to frame information technology as fulfillment of a patriotic duty rather than its negation. As James Baldwin, the rare American who did leave for good, put it: "I love America more than than whatever other country in the globe, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Americans who dislike America seem to dislike leaving it even more than (witness all those liberals not leaving the country every time a Republican wins the presidency, despite their promises to do and then). And Americans who do leave even so find a way, like Baldwin, to love information technology. This is the good news of America'southward creedal nature, and may provide at to the lowest degree some hope for the future. But is dear enough?
Conflicting narratives are more likely to coexist uneasily than to resolve themselves; the threat of disintegration will always lurk nearby.
On Jan vi, the threat became all too real when insurrectionary violence came to the Capitol. What was one time in the realm of "dreampolitik" now had physical force. What tin "unity" possibly mean after that?
Can religiosity be effectively channeled into political conventionalities without the structures of actual religion to atmosphere and postpone judgment? There is lilliputian sign, and then far, that it tin. If matters of skilful and evil are not to exist resolved past an all-seeing God in the time to come, then Americans will judge and render penalty at present. We are a nation of believers. If only Americans could begin believing in politics less fervently, realizing instead that life is elsewhere. But this would come at a price—because to believe in politics also ways believing we can, and probably should, be improve.
In History Has Begun, the author, Bruno Maçães—Portugal's former Europe minister—marvels that "peradventure lonely among all contemporary civilizations, America regards reality every bit an enemy to be defeated." This tin obviously be a bad thing (consider our ineffectual fight confronting the coronavirus), but it can also be an engine of rejuvenation and creativity; it may non ever be a good idea to take the world as it is. Fantasy, like belief, is something that humans want and demand. A distinctive American innovation is to insist on assertive even as our fantasies and dreams drift further out of attain.
This may mean that the U.s.a. will remain unique, torn between this world and the alternative worlds that secular and religious Americans alike seem to long for. If America is a creed, and then as long every bit enough citizens say they believe, the borough faith tin can survive. Like all other faiths, America's will go on to fragment and divide. Still, the American creed remains worth believing in, and that may be plenty. If it isn't, then the only promise might be to get downwards on our knees and pray.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/america-politics-religion/618072/
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