Politics Is the Art of Carrying Out a Folks Struggle for Its Earthly Existence
This article was published online on March 10, 2021.
The U.s. had long been a holdout among Western democracies, uniquely and peradventure even suspiciously devout. From 1937 to 1998, church membership remained relatively constant, hovering at about 70 percent. Then something happened. Over the past two decades, that number has dropped to less than 50 percent, the sharpest recorded pass up in American history. Meanwhile, the "nones"—atheists, agnostics, and those challenge no religion—have grown rapidly and today correspond a quarter of the population.
But if secularists hoped that failing religiosity would make for more rational politics, drained of organized religion'due south inflaming passions, they are likely disappointed. As Christianity'southward hold, in particular, has weakened, ideological intensity and fragmentation have risen. American organized religion, it turns out, is as fervent every bit ever; it's only that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political conventionalities. Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what organized religion without religion looks like.
Non then long ago, I could comfort American audiences with a dissimilarity: Whereas in the Middle Eastward, politics is war past other means—and sometimes is literal state of war—politics in America was less existentially fraught. During the Arab Jump, in countries similar Egypt and Tunisia, debates weren't about health care or taxes—they were, with sometimes frightening intensity, virtually foundational questions: What does it mean to be a nation? What is the purpose of the state? What is the part of religion in public life? American politics in the Obama years had its moments of ferment—the Tea Party and tan suits—simply was still relatively ho-hum.
We didn't realize how lucky we were. Since the end of the Obama era, debates over what it ways to be American have go suffused with a fervor that would be unimaginable in debates over, say, Belgian-ness or the "meaning" of Sweden. It'due south rare to hear someone accused of being un-Swedish or un-British—simply united nations-American is a common slur, slung by both left and correct against the other. Being called un-American is like beingness called "un-Christian" or "united nations-Islamic," a accuse akin to heresy.
This is because America itself is "almost a religion," as the Cosmic philosopher Michael Novak once put information technology, particularly for immigrants who come to their new identity with the zeal of the converted. The American borough religion has its ain founding myth, its prophets and processions, likewise as its scripture—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, Martin Luther Rex Jr. wished that "ane day this nation will rise upwardly and live out the true significant of its creed." The very idea that a nation might take a creed—a give-and-take associated primarily with organized religion—illustrates the uniqueness of American identity equally well as its predicament.
The notion that all securely felt conviction is sublimated organized religion is not new. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian who served as the prime government minister of holland at the dawn of the 20th century, when the nation was in the early throes of secularization, argued that all strongly held ideologies were finer faith-based, and that no human being beingness could survive long without some ultimate loyalty. If that loyalty didn't derive from traditional religion, it 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 religion": In any given club, there is a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and where it is expressed.
No longer explicitly rooted in white, Protestant dominance, understandings of the American creed take become richer and more than various—only also more 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 finality, that they are faithful to the American idea and that conservatives are betraying it. Without the common ground produced by a shared external enemy, equally America had during the Cold State of war and briefly afterwards the September 11 attacks, mutual antipathy grows, and each side becomes less intelligible to the other. Too oftentimes, the most bitter divides are those within families.
No wonder the newly ascendant American ideologies, having to fill the vacuum where religion once was, are so divisive. They are meant to exist divisive. On the left, the "woke" take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends. Adherents of wokeism run into themselves as challenging the long-dominant narrative that emphasized the exceptionalism of the nation'due south founding. Whereas religion sees the promised land as being to a higher place, in God's kingdom, the utopian left sees it as existence alee, in the realization of a just society hither on Globe. After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September, droves of mourners gathered outside the Supreme Courtroom—some kneeling, some property candles—as though they were at the Western Wall.
On the correct, adherents of a Trump-axial ethno-nationalism yet drape themselves in some of the trappings of organized religion, simply the upshot is a movement that oftentimes looks like a tent revival stripped of Christian witness. Donald Trump's boisterous rallies were more focused on blood and soil than on the son of God. Trump himself played both savior and martyr, and information technology is easy to marvel at the hold that a homo so imperfect can take on his soldiers. Many on the correct find solace in conspiracy cults, such as QAnon, that tell a religious story of earthly corruption redeemed by a godlike force.
Though the Us wasn't founded every bit a Christian nation, Christianity was always intertwined with America's self-definition. Without information technology, Americans—conservatives and liberals alike—no longer have a mutual culture upon which to fall back.
Unfortunately, the various strains of wokeism on the left and Trumpism on the correct cannot truly fill the spiritual void—what the announcer Murtaza Hussain calls America'southward "God-shaped hole." Religion, in role, is nigh distancing yourself from the temporal earth, with all its imperfection. At its best, organized religion confers relief by withholding final judgments until another time—perhaps until eternity. The new secular religions unleash dissatisfaction non toward the possibilities of divine grace or justice but toward one'south 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 earth and this world lonely. "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, "merely there are as well days for solemnity, or fasting, or worship, or feasting—things that remind us that the world is bigger than itself."
Absent some new religious enkindling, what are we left with? 1 alternative to American intensity would be a world-weary European resignation. Violence has a way of taming passions, at to the lowest degree as long as information technology remains in agile retentiveness. In Europe, the terrors of the 2d World War are not far abroad. Only Americans must get back to the Civil War for violence of comparable calibration—and for most Americans, the violence of the Civil War bolsters, rather than undermines, the national myth of perpetual progress. The state of war was redemptive—it led to a place of hope, a place where slavery could be abolished and the nation made whole again. This, at to the lowest degree, is the narrative that makes the myth possible to sustain.
For better and worse, the United States actually is nearly one of a kind. French republic may exist the just land other than the United States 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 being French over their religious commitments when the ii are at odds. With the rising of the far right and persistent tensions regarding Islam'due south presence in public life, the meaning of laïcité has become more than controversial. But virtually French people still agree firm to their country'south founding ideology: More than than 80 percent favor banning religious displays in public, co-ordinate to one contempo 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. It can be hard for outsiders and immigrants to embrace a national identity steeped in ethnicity and history when information technology was never theirs.
Take postwar Germany. Germanness is considered a mere fact—an accident of birth rather than an aspiration. And considering shame over the Holocaust is considered a national virtue, the country has at one time a potent national identity and a weak i. There is pride in not being proud. Then what would it mean for, say, Muslim immigrants to love a German language linguistic communication and civilisation tied to a history that is not theirs—and indeed a history that many Germans themselves hope to exit behind?
An American who moves to Deutschland, lives in that location for years, and learns the language remains an American—an "expat." If America is a civil faith, it would make sense that information technology stays with yous, unless you lot renounce it. As Jeff Gedmin, the former head of the Aspen Constitute in Berlin, described it to me: "You lot tin eat strudel, speak fluent German, accommodate to local culture, but many will notwithstanding say of yous Er chapeau einen deutschen Pass—'He has a High german passport.' No one starts calling you German." Many native-born Americans may live abroad for stretches, merely few emigrate permanently. Immigrants to America tend to get American; emigrants to other countries from America tend to stay American.
The last time I came back to the U.s. after beingness abroad, the community officeholder at Dulles airport, in Virginia, glanced at my passport, looked at me, and said, "Welcome home." For my customs officer, it went without saying 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 clearing officer at Heathrow had ever said 'Welcome home' to me," Zafar says, "I would have given my life for England, for my land, in that location and so. I could kill for an England like that." The narrator reflects later on that this was "a bitter plea":
Embedded in his remark, there was a longing for existence a office of something. The forcefulness of the argument came from the juxtaposition of two apparent extremes: what Zafar was prepared to cede, on the one hand, and, on the other, what he would have sacrificed it for—the coincidental remark of an immigration official.
When Americans have expressed cloy with their country, they have tended to frame it as fulfillment of a patriotic duty rather than its negation. Every bit James Baldwin, the rare American who did go out for expert, put it: "I dear America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the correct to criticize her perpetually." Americans who dislike America seem to dislike leaving it even more (witness all those liberals not leaving the country every time a Republican wins the presidency, despite their promises to do so). And Americans who practise leave still observe a way, similar Baldwin, to dear it. This is the skillful news of America's creedal nature, and may provide at least some hope for the future. Just is love enough?
Conflicting narratives are more likely to coexist uneasily than to resolve themselves; the threat of disintegration will always lurk nearby.
On January 6, the threat became all also existent when insurrectionary violence came to the Capitol. What was once in the realm of "dreampolitik" now had physical force. What tin can "unity" perchance hateful later that?
Can religiosity be effectively channeled into political belief without the structures of actual organized religion to temper and postpone judgment? There is footling sign, then far, that it can. If matters of good and evil are not to be resolved by an omniscient God in the future, and so Americans will guess and return penalisation at present. We are a nation of believers. If only Americans could brainstorm believing in politics less fervently, realizing instead that life is elsewhere. Just this would come up at a cost—because to believe in politics also ways believing nosotros can, and probably should, be better.
In History Has Begun, the author, Bruno Maçães—Portugal'due south onetime Europe minister—marvels that "perchance alone amidst all gimmicky civilizations, America regards reality as an enemy to exist defeated." This can plainly be a bad thing (consider our ineffectual fight confronting the coronavirus), only it can also be an engine of rejuvenation and creativity; it may not always be a good idea to accept the world equally information technology is. Fantasy, like belief, is something that humans desire and demand. A distinctive American innovation is to insist on assertive fifty-fifty every bit our fantasies and dreams drift further out of reach.
This may hateful that the Usa will remain unique, torn betwixt this earth and the alternative worlds that secular and religious Americans alike seem to long for. If America is a creed, then as long equally enough citizens say they believe, the civic organized religion can survive. Like all other faiths, America's volition continue to fragment and divide. All the same, the American creed remains worth assertive in, and that may be enough. If information technology isn't, and then the only hope might be to get down on our knees and pray.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/america-politics-religion/618072/
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