New wine and old wineskins

One of the frustrations that I’m having with our current cultural moment, in the wake of the protests over the death of George Floyd, is that we have essentially turned this incident into an ideological minefield between two heavily-militant versions of the American civic religion. One side is lining up and saying that we need to preserve the symbols and built culture and ideology of America going back to the Founding Fathers. The other side is going through a paroxysm of iconoclasm against these American civic symbols and ideology, and at the same time promoting an alternative civic religion. Yes, I do take a side on the issue of policing: I take the same side as Sayyidnâ ‘Atallâh (Hannâ). But, as the kids say, miss me with this pathetic little religious civil war that’s just starting to heat up.

I’m an American who loves my country, but I have next to zero patience or sympathy for our civic religion. Indeed, my conversion first to Anglo-Catholicism and subsequently to Orthodoxy – including both parts of the political side of that conversion – may in part be explained as a rebellion against the civic religion. Indeed, Berdyaev having figured heavily in that conversion, his understanding of politics as a form of religious expression sensitised me to the ways in which our civic life is configured to redirect worship away from Christ and towards symbols like the Constitution, the flag and the Fathers, or otherwise towards abstract ideas like ‘progress’, ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’.

So we have started to see this cottage industry of articles (like this one by Leithart) trying to do shanzhai rip-offs of Berdyaev, attempting to show how the politics of the protests are starting to resemble a surrogate religion. They attempt to trace the roots of paganism in the protests, or they attempt to characterise the entirety of critical theory as a religion. And in some measure, these characterisations have merit. There certainly is an understanding of sin at play here, and there absolutely is an attempt at theodicy that the ideology of critical theory tries to address. We see this in particular in attempts at imposing grand historical narratives like the 1619 Project.

The admirable aspect of the 1619 Project is that it is at its root a good-faith attempt to grapple with some of the ‘hard questions’ about our history and its relationship to a legal and cultural legacy of racial inequality. These are the sorts of hard questions posed by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, WEB DuBois, Langston Hughes, Kwame Ture, Cornel West and Margaret Kimberley. The 1619 Project attempts to grapple in a serious, realistic and hard-headed way with the problem of the contradiction at the heart of American identity: a desire for Faustian liberty achieved at the unacknowledged expense of black bondage and servitude. In drawing attention to the ‘least of these’, the principle of the 1619 Project is wholly Christian. But the problem with this Project, as I have noted before, is that it superimposes a fatalistic, even genetic, filter on history. Even in pointing to the historical circumscription of our legacy of racism, this project fails to show any grasp that a solution to racism as a societal problem might be historically possible. It is a narrative of sin without a countervailing hope of salvation.

However, the critics of the 1619 Project, many of whom have been particularly voluble on the question of the broader religious meaning of these current protests, have organised themselves around a rival project, called 1776 Unites. The meaning of this rival date is crystal clear: they mean to assert, over-against the dour historians of a national narrative mired in the primeval sins of racial exploitation and conflict, the providential world-historical mission of the American founding. The choice of the date is meant specifically to appeal to the old civic religion: to the Winthropian myth of the ‘shining city on a hill’ and the exceptionalism of the American messianic mission in the world. Ironically, given the conservative politics of the adherents of this narrative, the ‘theology’ of the 1776 narrative is saturated with the stink of cheap-grace liberalism. It is nothing short of a rejection of any need for public penitence whatsoever, and it heralds a politics of citizenship without either intellectual or moral discipline. It is utterly foreign to any meaningful Christian ecclesiology.

So is 1619 or 1776 the more meaningful date? Is America a nation conceived in the original sin of slavery and racial prejudice, or a nation made for the original blessing of liberty? It should be clear by now that these are indeed two rival civic religions, structured around two very different theodicies, two very different historical teleologies, two very different understandings of the human condition, and ultimately oriented toward two very different gods. It should also be clear that each of these rival theologies bears a certain passing resemblance to Christianity, but that neither of them places Christ at the centre. Indeed, both of them are weakest at precisely those points at which they boast their strength: the 1619 Project offers no meaningful common understanding of history; and the 1776 Project no meaningful conception of disciplined citizenship. Thus neither of them comes close to a full understanding of the truth of the country’s place in time or its rôle in history – which is in truth more limited than either side in this religious civil war would like to think. From an apostolic Christian perspective, neither 1619 nor 1776 ought to be considered the prime reference. Both ‘projects’ should be rejected, insofar as both are doomed attempts to pour the new wine of the revelation of Christ into the old wineskins of American exceptionalism.