The last nine years have been very stressful, given what the former guy has done, is doing and promises to do, as his mental faculties continue to decay and his narcissistic injury goads him to destroy anything or anyone who opposes him. Our country, our democracy, our Constitution, and common decency must all be broken to salve his inner wounds and bigotry. It’s hard to see people who consider themselves Christians fawn on him as savior. Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory was a revelation as to the breathtaking deviancy and degradation of Christians who adore both him and naked power. One of the dreadful side effects, should he and his win, is that a generation of young children will grow up never having known a country that, in its politics, expects decency, respect, reliability, and the Constitution to be the last word. They will see chaos, perfidy, mendacity, cruelty, bigotry, religious hypocrisy, and unhinged behavior as a governmental norms. It grieves and scares me enormously.
Those who argue that they must use “any means necessary” to protect their preferred position miss the key element of both our political life and our Christian life: it’s about the best outcomes for the Common Good. That’s in the preamble to the constitution and in Matthew 25.
Christians fare better on the losing side. Always have and always will. Prosperity and power, apart from extraordinary grace, inevitably lead to spiritual poverty..."It is hard for a rich man..."
First of all, thank you for all you do in this space. Your work is invaluable and encouraging to all of us.
As a total Lord of the Rings nerd, I want to note that the quote is slightly off. What Tolkien wrote is, “together through the ages of the world we have *fought* the long defeat.” The Elves in the Middle Earth remains one of the most heartbreaking stories Tolkien told. They came to save Middle Earth from Morgoth and then Sauron, but in the end they could not save it from death. Those who identify too much with Middle Earth end up dying, and those who cannot accept death have to leave. Tolkien had no time for allegory, so do not expect his works to translate directly to the Christian experience. His Elves are not "Christians". They represent how he thinks a good-hearted immortal race would interact with a world full of mortality.
I do not mean to say that using this quote is a bad idea. Tolkien wrote his books from a Christian perspective even if they are not allegorical like C.S. Lewis's Narnia. Tolkien's long defeat seems to me to align most with the idea of Christians leaning into being a diaspora - a Jesus-following people scattered into a world obsessed with power and domination. We answer power with love, domination with submission - to join Jesus in bearing the cross. This means that we, like the Elves, are fighting a long defeat only if you use the standards of power and domination as your guide. But Jesus' Kingdom is not of this world and his standards are not those standards. Love wins. We may not know what that looks like exactly, but that is our hope and God's promise. So, fight like hell for democracy, but if you don't win, know that your hope is in the love and promise of God.
My dad used to say the Catholic Church was the best show in town. And it turned upside down what I think Jesus gave us with His sending. We think Billy Graham passionately speaking to thousands is the model. When in fact, Jesus sends each one of us to speak to a single other. It's not about filling stadiums or sanctuaries, it's about being present with one other who does not yet recognize Jesus in their life or in that moment.
Adam Grant says "Keeping an open mind is not about lacking moral conviction. It's about maintaining intellectual humility. The people who leave their echo chambers are the ones who know their knowledge is incomplete. A key to lifelong learning is to engage with others who disagree with you." That person is probably sitting next to you in church. Each one of us cannot avoid the conversation in this moment that is uncomfortable. Hanging on the cross is the image of the opposite of comfort. It doesn't have to be physical pain. Fear of sounding stupid or losing a argument keeps most of us silent. And will be the demise of democracy.
So what did Bonehoeffer really do? What did he say or write about before he left the USA to get into Hitler's Germany and certain death. Why did it have to get that bad before he could see it and go. Why did people wait? Why do people follow. Don't you find it odd that people who think they would follow Jesus will follow Trump? A liar, says he's "pro life" then wants immunity so he can murder political opponents, thief, assaults women. Could anybody be more opposite than Jesus?
Eucatastrophe is a neologism coined by J.R.R. Tolkien from Greek ευ- ("good") and καταστροφή ("sudden turn").
In essence, a eucatastrophe is a massive turn in fortune from a seemingly unconquerable situation to an unforeseen victory, usually brought by grace rather than heroic effort. Such a turn is catastrophic in the sense of its breadth and surprise and positive in that a great evil or misfortune is averted.
To be resilient against what's coming will be necessary to have wonder and curiosity.
Thank you for bringing this to us. I don't think enough about this kind of occurrence and this pattern, partly because I haven't had a term for it, which is partly because 1) it is more specific than saying "miracle," and 2) I so rarely see anyone from recent centuries using the word "miracle" and speaking honestly that now I cannot help turning away whenever I hear it, and 3) I don't know another word that points near to what "eucatastrophe" says. It is good to have a word that only really needs to exist because many of us do what I do: forget, over and over, that some of our (my) assumptions and predictions that are very discouraging for us (me) and look very reasonable to us (me) nevertheless turn out to be wrong, and sometimes even very wrong. And so I tend not to acknowledge that this kind of unexpected great relief has happened as often as it has, nor acknowledge that it is as plausible in the future as it is. I need to learn to be as well prepared for looming bad stuff to not happen as I am (reliably) well prepared for it to happen.
I'm beginning to resign myself to a Trump win and trying to mentally and spiritually prepare. The American Evangelical church is a slow motion train wreck. I don't see it reckoning with it's own failures (widespread abuse, a worship of power, etc) instead there's an attitude of "vengeance is ours, we've chosen our hero". It's not the way of the Cross, but the way of the sword. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. We need to pray and hope for a truer, more cruciform Christianity to emerge out of the ashes. It will probably emerge in places and ways we least expect.
So helpful. My thinking is "We have to win this one."
But the words of this pastor, Len Vander Zee, do call us back to the suffering Messiah:
“It’s so easy for the church to forget that Christ did not call us to rule but to serve. He called us, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, to come and die. The church’s role in history is to live the way of the King, the way of the cross, the way of self-giving love.”
In 2016 I read an essay by Sarah Kendzior about what to do in the face of authoritarianism. She talked about how people will begin to shift their views and their ways just to get along, about the steady erosion of principles. She advocated for writing down the values that you hold and referring to them repeatedly. So I did. I won't say that I have always stuck to these perfectly, at times I have let my anger boil too hot. But for the most part it has been an anchor to remind me where my faith lies, and has helped me to live in the long defeat. Thank you for this excellent reminder.
Some Christians sacrifice their principles to gain power to advance those principles. But when that power is gained, they’ve lost all influence. And when others fight to get their power back, these same Christians will say, "See, the world hates us because of our principles." No, that's not it.
The Kingdom that Christians hope for will have an authority, but an authority that's anti-authoritarian, because it's a love strong enough to reconcile all things to itself without erasing their particularity. We expect souls to become *better* particular souls in the Kingdom, but that their particularity won't be annihilated by the improvement. A Creator-God is an exnihilating God, not an annihilating one. If, as Iris Murdoch says, "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real", well, God is love. There is no harmony, no polyphony, without difference that is reconciled, not annihilated.
Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is apparently fear of difference, insistence on "oneness and sameness", as Stenner says:
Authoritarianism apparently does not want what's unlike itself to be real. (Defenders of authoritarian politics often appeal to the importance of particularity in the abstract, but practically this means their own particularity, by intolerance toward any other kind.)
Stenner also claims, "under the right conditions, conservatives can be a liberal democracy’s strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by authoritarian social movements."
Much thoughtful critique, including "Jesus and John Wayne", has investigated why US conservatism operating through the GOP failed so badly to cultivate "the right conditions" for conservatives to serve as their "liberal democracy’s strongest bulwark" against authoritarianism. Avik Roy's and Matt McManus's brief reflections on the failure of movement conservatives and "classical liberals"/libertarians to come to grips with the reactionary elements willing to co-opt them are also worth a read:
How whatever remnant of the US right that *does* want to serve as a bulwark against authoritarianism actually creates the right conditions to achieve this is a pretty bleak question right now. It's easy enough to scold religious conservatives and laissez-faire sorts that, if they really had the courage of their convictions, they'd stay off the Trump Train. Harder for the scolding not to be dismissed, for various reasons, some bad-faith, others the wishful thinking that even good faith is prone to.
It's heartening to see a conservative confessional orthodox Protestant like Trueman, whose prior complaints about expressive individualism I worried gave cover to authoritarianism (and maybe still do, even if they're not meant to: authoritarianism uses what it can because it can), remind his fellows they have a calling off the Trump Train.
Midge, I thought these sentences at the end of Stenner's article show the difficulty of our problem: "But [the progressive policy agenda] is achievable if the Biden administration recognizes that even creating the mere feeling or appearance of oneness and sameness can be reassuring to authoritarians. Critically, authoritarian predispositions are not a problem that can just be educated away: In fact, liberal democracy’s loud and showy celebration of freedom and diversity drives authoritarians not to the limits of their tolerance but to their intolerant extremes. For this reason, a strong rhetorical focus on a unified Americanness can play a vital role in reassuring and deactivating the innately intolerant."
This was written at the beginning of Biden's administration. Think of how hard such a thing would be to achieve. One thought I've had is that we Americans need to give up the idea of "America's greatness." The problem is that we have no consensus about what the greatness could be. People on the left say it's freedom and diversity. People on the right often think it's our military. I don't see how it would be possible to mediate between those two conceptions.
"[W]e can understand authoritarianism as extreme 'groupiness'." Authoritarians' comfort "cannot be achieved without a shared concept of the boundaries of that collective (who is 'us') – typically rooted in some legend or lore about what and how 'we' are – and of the authorities, rules, customs and norms by which we exert collective control over other people’s behaviour."
On the one hand, authoritarian-ism is morally wrong. It is not the way of Love. On the other, Stenner asserts, "We must recognise that authoritarians are not inherently evil... We must tolerate diversity of personalities just like we tolerate all other kinds of difference. We cannot enemify or exclude a third of the population. At least, we can’t do these things while claiming to be a democracy" since, under democracy, "The needs and preferences of authoritarians are of equal weight to our own".
Stenner believes, "One of the most important things a society can do to enhance tolerance is to increase economic equality, which is a kind of oneness and sameness we should all be able to get behind." (Maybe not all of us: the laissez-faire among us have some – I think justifiable – concerns.) But "Most of all, we need to reduce our enemies list. We cannot set purity tests and simply reject and exclude all who fail them". Still, "We must keep in mind that authoritarians are better able to tolerate racial and ethnic diversity if we increase... the appearance and feeling of oneness and sameness." Apparently, authoritarian action feels less necessary when a society's rituals of oneness and sameness are both broader and shallower, both more conspicuous and with fewer purity tests.
Religious sincerity is a deep matter, not served by shallowness. But apparently social cohesion *can* be served by shallowness. The authoritarian disposition is uninsightful. Shallow ritual may satisfy authoritarian concerns. This puts Christians who feel moved to repent of Christian complicity in various forms of authoritarianism in a bit of a bind. When we witness how much evil has been enabled by Christian institutions' undue concern for "the shallow stuff" – institutional reputation, maintaining familiar worldly hierarchies, flattery about what makes "us" so "great" and better than the "heathen" – we become less inclined to tolerate what authoritarians crave to feel reassured and at peace. "Repent of your comforts!" is a common religious message – but also, obviously, an uncomfortable one! And people understandably become suspicious when someone who does not find comfort in what comforts them tells them to repent of their comfort.
(I, too, find myself annoyed when flamboyantly left-leaning preachers call me to repent of supposed sins that sound to me mostly like not being far left enough. I would feel similarly uncomfortable in MAGAfied churches, but don't have reason to attend them. But hey, the burdens Christians bear for one another include lack of self-awareness – and discerning between political difference and sin is *tough*. If I continually let myself get outraged by others' apparent lack of humility on that front, I'm not practicing humility.)
Maybe the good news is that several shallow but comforting "unity" rituals tend to be fairly innocuous, like flag-waving and grilling stuff. Love wouldn't call us to those rituals as ends in themselves. But as a means of neighborliness, a way to "If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone", perhaps love does. Perhaps such rah-rah "unity" rituals are the "authoritarian tribute" we pay to preserve more meaningful difference.
Stenner adds some more good news: "I’ve rarely seen even direct racial threats activate authoritarians to the same degree as the classic normative threats. Feeling let down by institutions, leaders and compatriots, feeling like 'no-one agrees on anything any more', like 'we’ve lost the things that once made us great'" apparently activate authoritarian intolerance more than racial difference does. Authoritarian politics include white nationalism, but are hardly limited to it, and authoritarians don't necessarily need racial homogeneity to feel reassured. Other forms of surface homogeneity may do.
Midge, those articles about housing and development patterns were interesting. I'm sympathetic to the Strong Towns piece that said poor neighborhoods subsidize rich neighborhoods, but I wonder if that's always true. Maybe it depends on how poor. The writer gave examples of compact, walkable, low- or modest-income areas that produce good tax revenue. However, if you go to a city like Birmingham where I live, there are large areas of the city that have become depopulated. I'm from the West Coast, so I was surprised to see this kind of thing. In my hometown there was an African American area where people were often poor, but the properties always had value. In some parts of Birmingham you couldn't give away property for free. I understand there are even people who paid off their houses and had to abandon them because they couldn't afford to maintain them, and no one would buy them. A big part of what Birmingham city government does is tear down abandoned buildings. So obviously these low income areas are not going to produce tax revenue.
For awhile we had an Occupational Tax, where everyone who worked in Birmingham had to pay a tax to support the city. This was a just thing in my opinion, because a lot of people live in the suburbs but make their living in the city. But the state legislature repealed that.
I agree with you that we have to let affluent people live together, but they should be taxed more to support lower income people. Alabama has some of the lowest property taxes in America.
I would like to believe with Stenner that some "shallow" rituals could bring everyone together. But I think we've reached a place where that's pretty hard. Though I am a liberal, I try to counteract exaggerated criticisms of conservatives whenever I can. For example, several years ago there was the claim that President Trump refused to go to a French military cemetery because the people buried there "were losers." I thought that can't be true. I believe Trump is a jerk, but you could hardly be president and be that much of a jerk. It's true that he has made some disparaging remarks about servicemen sometimes, such as when he said John McCain wasn't a hero because he got captured. That's a cartoonish image of war, and it amazes me that so many veterans weren't outraged by it. But I cannot believe he ever said to Emmanuel Macron that the people buried at the cemetery were "losers." I looked into it, and what really happened is he had already gone to one French veterans' cemetery on the trip, and when asked to go a second time, he said, "do I have to go twice?" That's not as outrageous as saying veterans are losers.
I think a big part of what conservatism proved unable to be a bulwark against authoritarianism is that our Constitution no longer works. It's an archaic thing that fit our society maybe 200 years ago but no longer does. France has had 5 constitutions in the time we've had one. Actually, I believe in a way, we have become a victim of our own success. In a way we're unlucky to have won World War II. The countries that lost, Germany and Japan, faced their demons and created a more sensible society. Because we were so successful, we assumed we didn't need to change our system much. When other countries were creating national healthcare systems in the late 40's, Americans assumed we didn't need such a thing. Now healthcare threatens to bankrupt us.
I agree that conservatism can be a bulwark against authoritarianism under some circumstances. I remember I worked as a writing tutor in grad school in the late nineties. We had a group of students who were first-generation college students. One was a black lady who was assigned by her professor to write a paper about politics. I actually said to her "why don't you consider the ideas of Ayn Rand?" I said I didn't really agree with Rand myself, but it was worth considering an alternative to liberalism. I said, "Rand would say why be equal? Why not be superior?" And I guess there actually was a certain anti-racist thrust to Rand's ideas. She thought the only important thing was the merits of individuals. There's no reason to think members of one ethnic group could be superior to another.
I agree that the Constitutionally-mandated Electoral College is damaging our electoral politics now, but I see that as resulting from subsequent apportionment decisions and most states' winner-take-all allotment of electoral votes, not the Constitution itself. I'm not in favor of abolishing the Electoral College – in Stenner's framework, that'd invite reactionary backlash as conservatives averse to change ally with authoritarians who fear greater representation of those different from themselves. Conservative cases for more-representative apportionment can be made. It's apparently not in the GOP's interest to make these cases. Could it be in Democrats'?
If Stenner is right that rapid, disruptive socio-political change entices conservatives to side with authoritarians, repeatedly new constitutions may have provoked even more reactionary politics than we have. Cass Sunstein points out that originalism is a game that the left can play, too:
and I think the reassuring stability of a Constitution that's been around since the country's founding, subject to occasional amendment, may have saved us from even worse reactionary politics. (There has been a new constitution on US soil since our original one: the Confederate constitution.)
Movement conservatives and today's young progressives coincide on a searing hatred of Wilsonian progressivism. Maybe there's something to that coincidence? When the US started to build a "modern" regulatory (including zoning) and welfare state, it was a white-surpemacist one, and we still live with the consequences, whether continued white-identity politics or a civil-rights backlash (which Americans typically agree was at least partly necessary) and whether it went too far.
The US has always had a puritanical streak interested in using state power to reward the "superior" as "deserving" and punish the "undeserving" as "inferior", one entangled with race for obvious reasons. Rather than the modest, impartial social insurance a dynamic nation like ours could probably manage with, we have a fractured system of government aid that's identity-based: Are you retired? A homeowner? A farmer? etc, etc... (Occupational categories tend to become identity categories in our politics.) While many of us think of "minority" (though women aren't, strictly speaking, a minority!) identity politics when we hear the phrase "identity politics", at the start of the US "refounding" as a welfare state, the "deserving" identity was typically white and male. It seems to be true that "affirmative action for white people" was the only way FDR could get welfare passed with the Solid South around. And we live with the consequences.
One consequence is the intuition that, if you count among the "deserving", you don't even count the welfare you receive as "welfare". (Democrats who became Republican through voting Nixon, Reagan, and now Trump may be particularly prone to this intuition.) Corporate welfare? Apparently not "welfare" because "deserving" because "free enterprise!" (conveniently overlooking that enterprise subject to special state favors is no longer "free"). Retirement welfare? Not "welfare" (and to be fair, FDR intended retirement benefits to seem unlike welfare even if they were). "Real America's" self-image that whatever welfare it's using must be "small", while welfare that's "too big" serves someone else, often bears little relationship to reality, facilitated by a "submerged state" that fools many Americans into thinking they're more independent of government benefits than they really are:
And so identity politics pit "deserving" "Real Americans" who receive welfare that's "not even welfare", only "just deserts", against perceived "welfare consumers", often irrespective of the economics involved. For example, the US is majority-urban, with many financially dynamic cities, but "rural" often codes as the more "deserving" "Real American producer" identity to those who feel like "Real Americans".
Even the absurd system of employer-based health benefits arising from WWII wage caps and subsequent tax-code jiggering creates an identity politics – of being "more deserving" than others of health benefits as a person with "the right kind" of employment. If you age into Medicare, you also "earn" the "deserving" category (no matter how small your contributions were compared to the care you receive). Else, maybe you're relegated to state plans for the "undeserving". Though ACA exchanges have changed the mechanics of this somewhat, reluctance to offend the "deserving" helps explain why reform that eliminates the more absurd aspects of US health benefits provision is so hard.
Distress by its nature makes complying with anything, including government assistance, harder, but our assistance systems often compound this natural problem, diverting benefits from the more-needy to those who could perhaps do without but have the compliance resources:
Hating on "neoliberalism" is trendy these days for both left and right. Honestly, though, neoliberalism as Milton Friedman summarized it still sounds fairly good to me, for anti-authoritarian reasons:
"Neo-liberalism would accept the nineteenth century liberal emphasis on the fundamental importance of the individual, but... [t]he state would police the system, establish conditions favorable to competition and prevent monopoly, provide a stable monetary framework, and relieve acute misery and distress."
I don't trust the state (especially one with an identity-politics history as fraught as our own) to regard some as "superior" or "inferior", as "deserving" or "undeserving" – especially if we wish to avoid authoritarian politics! Still, citizens in a prosperous nation demand some degree of social insurance, often from reflexively conservative desires like desire for stability. Perhaps it's politically impossible for a prosperous state to uphold the dynamism of freedom without offering as compensation some state-supported insurance against the risks dynamism permits.
I agree that demand for healthcare wouldn't be fulfilled by the minimalist welfare plans some libertarians idealize, like NIT (negative income tax), with or without UBI (universal basic income): Whatever story we tell ourselves about why US healthcare is what it is, it's nearly impossible to budget for, even for the fairly affluent, much less the poor.
I agree that healthcare access and payment remains a frustrating struggle for Americans (including me), a struggle that shouldn't be dismissed as "just the price of freedom". Even consulting the index of economic freedom the now-MAGAfied Heritage Foundation publishes, several countries with a variety of different national health systems rank as freer than the US:
"For example, the US is majority-urban, with many financially dynamic cities, but "rural" often codes as the more "deserving" "Real American producer" identity to those who feel like "Real Americans".
I think that is actually our fundamental political divide today, between large cities and small towns. Cities are usually prosperous, whereas small towns are often dying. We need a new deal for small towns and rural areas. We also have too many people trying to live in expensive big cities where they can't make it. I think we should pay those people to move to small towns. We could afford to do that. It would help to heal our political divide.
I also agree that a judgmentalism is a particularly bad trait of Americans. People can always justify the benefits they and their friends get, but others are bums.
Another thing I would advocate is related to that. We should prohibit affluent communities from separating from poor communities. A good example is the new city of St. George, Louisiana, that will impoverish the rest of East Baton Rouge Parish. Detroit is the most outrageous example of this in America. It is the disgrace of America. People with money moved out and left the poor to take care of the city. But this kind of thing is often justified by that judgmentalism: "they're corrupt and crime-ridden, and I don't have any responsibility to help them."
I hope there's a chance for America to stay together, but I don't know if it will. The big divisive issues today are abortion and guns. Blue and red states will not tolerate each others' positions on those issues. I'm not sure it will be possible to arrive at any compromise.
"We need a new deal for small towns and rural areas. We also have too many people trying to live in expensive big cities where they can't make it. I think we should pay those people to move to small towns. We could afford to do that. It would help to heal our political divide."
Remote work during the pandemic kind of gave some small towns a natural new deal, as former urbanites who could work remotely moved to them. Not all small-town residents appreciate their towns "gentrifying" like this:
The US appears to have, not just an urban housing problem, but a housing problem, period, typically exacerbated by NIMBY zoning and the peculiar development pattern our federal government once worked very hard to subsidize:
"We responded to the economic hardships of the 1930s and 40s by radically shifting our development pattern" to one of suburbs full of detached, homogenized, spread-out housing of a type that had previously been rather uncommon.
"The automobile was one instrument of transformation, but even more important was the federal government’s support for this shift. Programs to promote broad home ownership, investments in infrastructure, and the streamlining of tax and financial structures to achieve macroeconomic efficiency ensured that this experiment was a nationally-coordinated project, one every community participated in."
But "The pervasive fragility this experiment has created in American society has brought about a level of instability that is combustible." And "a consistent feature we see revealed in city after city after city all over North America" is that, at the municipal level, "Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern."
Meanwhile, in other countries whose national governments didn't support the same kind of housing-pattern shift, urban areas that are also "small towns" are apparently A Thing:
Other countries are better able to sustain that small-town feel not necessarily because their land use is "more regulated" than ours. Other countries vary in land-use regulation, obviously, some of which is quite strict. But US land use is astonishingly regulated, too, despite US reputation for "freedom". While "the post-1980 neoliberal era is supposed to be one of deregulation", US "land use regulation has actually become dramatically more stringent, even as population growth has made that regulation costlier":
I don't see how a free society could forcefully keep the wealthy from congregating among themselves, including in their own private residential clubs, weird and gross as those may seem to the rest of us. But it should prevent the wealthy from using the force of government to keep "the poors" out, which should considerably reduce the separation, since so many wealthy are perfectly happy to lobby the government to do their bidding rather than spend their own money on it (leveraging influence over a government who'll do the expensive work for you is hardly the only way to be wealthy, but definitely one of the ways).
After all, it takes government backing for you to forcibly keep your land-owning neighbors from satisfying the demand for affordable housing by developing it on their own land. Because of our impression of ourselves as a free country, it's easy for us to assume that too few developers make an unconstrained *choice* to avoid developing affordable housing, but the reality is their choice is also constrained by NIMBY laws that please the affluent and status-seeking with zoning hostile to mixed and modest development.
The opposite of NIMBY is YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard). While YIMBY ethics influenced my household's decision to buy the particular house it did, I shouldn't flatter myself that I'm "part of the YIMBY revolution" since really being part of it means getting involved, not just in municipal politics, but the especially tedious politics of municipal land use regulation. That tedium forms its own protective thicket against the little fish, who aren't making huge land deals and who typically can't afford the compliance costs to influence municipal decisions. I've got young kids, and some tedious health problems of my own. I deal with my tedium, partly, by reading a lot, but reading isn't the same as active involvement, and, like most of us, there's only so much tedium I can take before going bonkers.
Thank you, Kristin, for sharing this. It brings me to tears, but tears of hope and relief, that though we may not win now, there is hope and light at the end. I've moved away from my church affiliation, and so I'm doubly glad to find myself touched in the spirit by what you have shared. Thank you.
"Politically-active American Christians who defy the enemies of God and wage war against evil, and who necessarily employ crude memes, subterfuge, and even deception toward these ends, will likewise be commended for their faith."
I believe he believes this, and it makes me sad, because it proves just how lost he is. Jesus is pretty clear that the only thing a Christian needs to do to battle evil is to rebuke it, firmly and wherever they find it. Doing stuff like what he's advocating for is telling the whole world "I do not believe God can win this battle using the rules of engagement he has set forth, so I am substituting my wisdom for his." And in so doing, the act that is supposed to testify to his faith does the opposite, and makes everyone around him who doesn't already share his faith look upon him with pity and scorn, and reject him and his God.
And all the above is before one even considers the damage it's doing to his soul. How does Crenshaw imagine that Christ is going to react to him not just breaking the commandment against bearing false witness, but actively rejecting that commandment as a barrier to a just world? How does that end with anything other than "begone from me; I never knew you?" I don't know exactly what this is, but there's no Christ in it.
I have never liked you much. Since reading Jesus and John Wayne, you have annoyed me as a voice that I MUST listen to, because I cannot marshall good arguments to rebut your position.
And then comes today. Your point cuts through the clutter and settles in the heart of the matter. It is truth, regardless of personal position.
Thank you for putting this so fabulously, and so honorably.
I am in that same must-listen position because so much of what KKDM says haunts me (more than directly annoying me) as stuff I largely didn't want to know (💔), and had actively avoided, but must admit I need to hear. About three years now, and I can see how much good it's done me.
In her commentary on The Lord Of The Rings, "The Battle For Middle Earth", Fleming Rutledge, too, focuses on this phrase about the long defeat. It is from her that I first heard this as a Christian focus, and it is from recent prayer times that I have learned to prepare for this time, and thought of challenging my pastor and others, how will we then live?
The last nine years have been very stressful, given what the former guy has done, is doing and promises to do, as his mental faculties continue to decay and his narcissistic injury goads him to destroy anything or anyone who opposes him. Our country, our democracy, our Constitution, and common decency must all be broken to salve his inner wounds and bigotry. It’s hard to see people who consider themselves Christians fawn on him as savior. Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory was a revelation as to the breathtaking deviancy and degradation of Christians who adore both him and naked power. One of the dreadful side effects, should he and his win, is that a generation of young children will grow up never having known a country that, in its politics, expects decency, respect, reliability, and the Constitution to be the last word. They will see chaos, perfidy, mendacity, cruelty, bigotry, religious hypocrisy, and unhinged behavior as a governmental norms. It grieves and scares me enormously.
I think often how the Trump era is all many young people know.
Yes, and the degradation continues to be handed down without awareness.
And I should have used the word depravity to describe these Trump Christians. Read Alberta’s book; nothing can prepare you for it.
Deborah, your words echo my thoughts and grief exactly.
Those who argue that they must use “any means necessary” to protect their preferred position miss the key element of both our political life and our Christian life: it’s about the best outcomes for the Common Good. That’s in the preamble to the constitution and in Matthew 25.
Christians fare better on the losing side. Always have and always will. Prosperity and power, apart from extraordinary grace, inevitably lead to spiritual poverty..."It is hard for a rich man..."
First of all, thank you for all you do in this space. Your work is invaluable and encouraging to all of us.
As a total Lord of the Rings nerd, I want to note that the quote is slightly off. What Tolkien wrote is, “together through the ages of the world we have *fought* the long defeat.” The Elves in the Middle Earth remains one of the most heartbreaking stories Tolkien told. They came to save Middle Earth from Morgoth and then Sauron, but in the end they could not save it from death. Those who identify too much with Middle Earth end up dying, and those who cannot accept death have to leave. Tolkien had no time for allegory, so do not expect his works to translate directly to the Christian experience. His Elves are not "Christians". They represent how he thinks a good-hearted immortal race would interact with a world full of mortality.
I do not mean to say that using this quote is a bad idea. Tolkien wrote his books from a Christian perspective even if they are not allegorical like C.S. Lewis's Narnia. Tolkien's long defeat seems to me to align most with the idea of Christians leaning into being a diaspora - a Jesus-following people scattered into a world obsessed with power and domination. We answer power with love, domination with submission - to join Jesus in bearing the cross. This means that we, like the Elves, are fighting a long defeat only if you use the standards of power and domination as your guide. But Jesus' Kingdom is not of this world and his standards are not those standards. Love wins. We may not know what that looks like exactly, but that is our hope and God's promise. So, fight like hell for democracy, but if you don't win, know that your hope is in the love and promise of God.
Yes, I corrected the mistake, thanks. And I agree with your sense of application, and your takeaway.
My dad used to say the Catholic Church was the best show in town. And it turned upside down what I think Jesus gave us with His sending. We think Billy Graham passionately speaking to thousands is the model. When in fact, Jesus sends each one of us to speak to a single other. It's not about filling stadiums or sanctuaries, it's about being present with one other who does not yet recognize Jesus in their life or in that moment.
Adam Grant says "Keeping an open mind is not about lacking moral conviction. It's about maintaining intellectual humility. The people who leave their echo chambers are the ones who know their knowledge is incomplete. A key to lifelong learning is to engage with others who disagree with you." That person is probably sitting next to you in church. Each one of us cannot avoid the conversation in this moment that is uncomfortable. Hanging on the cross is the image of the opposite of comfort. It doesn't have to be physical pain. Fear of sounding stupid or losing a argument keeps most of us silent. And will be the demise of democracy.
So what did Bonehoeffer really do? What did he say or write about before he left the USA to get into Hitler's Germany and certain death. Why did it have to get that bad before he could see it and go. Why did people wait? Why do people follow. Don't you find it odd that people who think they would follow Jesus will follow Trump? A liar, says he's "pro life" then wants immunity so he can murder political opponents, thief, assaults women. Could anybody be more opposite than Jesus?
Thank you for this.
I'll be carrying this with me to Synod, Kristin. Thank you. -- Rev. Ryan Schreiber, Grand Rapids East
(Also grateful for another comment that introduced me to the term "eucatastrophe" -- a long suffering faith surprised by unexpected Grace.")
Eucatastrophe is a neologism coined by J.R.R. Tolkien from Greek ευ- ("good") and καταστροφή ("sudden turn").
In essence, a eucatastrophe is a massive turn in fortune from a seemingly unconquerable situation to an unforeseen victory, usually brought by grace rather than heroic effort. Such a turn is catastrophic in the sense of its breadth and surprise and positive in that a great evil or misfortune is averted.
To be resilient against what's coming will be necessary to have wonder and curiosity.
Thank you for bringing this to us. I don't think enough about this kind of occurrence and this pattern, partly because I haven't had a term for it, which is partly because 1) it is more specific than saying "miracle," and 2) I so rarely see anyone from recent centuries using the word "miracle" and speaking honestly that now I cannot help turning away whenever I hear it, and 3) I don't know another word that points near to what "eucatastrophe" says. It is good to have a word that only really needs to exist because many of us do what I do: forget, over and over, that some of our (my) assumptions and predictions that are very discouraging for us (me) and look very reasonable to us (me) nevertheless turn out to be wrong, and sometimes even very wrong. And so I tend not to acknowledge that this kind of unexpected great relief has happened as often as it has, nor acknowledge that it is as plausible in the future as it is. I need to learn to be as well prepared for looming bad stuff to not happen as I am (reliably) well prepared for it to happen.
I'm beginning to resign myself to a Trump win and trying to mentally and spiritually prepare. The American Evangelical church is a slow motion train wreck. I don't see it reckoning with it's own failures (widespread abuse, a worship of power, etc) instead there's an attitude of "vengeance is ours, we've chosen our hero". It's not the way of the Cross, but the way of the sword. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. We need to pray and hope for a truer, more cruciform Christianity to emerge out of the ashes. It will probably emerge in places and ways we least expect.
So helpful. My thinking is "We have to win this one."
But the words of this pastor, Len Vander Zee, do call us back to the suffering Messiah:
“It’s so easy for the church to forget that Christ did not call us to rule but to serve. He called us, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, to come and die. The church’s role in history is to live the way of the King, the way of the cross, the way of self-giving love.”
In 2016 I read an essay by Sarah Kendzior about what to do in the face of authoritarianism. She talked about how people will begin to shift their views and their ways just to get along, about the steady erosion of principles. She advocated for writing down the values that you hold and referring to them repeatedly. So I did. I won't say that I have always stuck to these perfectly, at times I have let my anger boil too hot. But for the most part it has been an anchor to remind me where my faith lies, and has helped me to live in the long defeat. Thank you for this excellent reminder.
Yes, I remember that one! Not a bad time to revisit.
Some Christians sacrifice their principles to gain power to advance those principles. But when that power is gained, they’ve lost all influence. And when others fight to get their power back, these same Christians will say, "See, the world hates us because of our principles." No, that's not it.
The Kingdom that Christians hope for will have an authority, but an authority that's anti-authoritarian, because it's a love strong enough to reconcile all things to itself without erasing their particularity. We expect souls to become *better* particular souls in the Kingdom, but that their particularity won't be annihilated by the improvement. A Creator-God is an exnihilating God, not an annihilating one. If, as Iris Murdoch says, "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real", well, God is love. There is no harmony, no polyphony, without difference that is reconciled, not annihilated.
Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is apparently fear of difference, insistence on "oneness and sameness", as Stenner says:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/11/capitol-insurrection-trump-authoritarianism-psychology-innate-fear-envy-change-diversity-populism/
Authoritarianism apparently does not want what's unlike itself to be real. (Defenders of authoritarian politics often appeal to the importance of particularity in the abstract, but practically this means their own particularity, by intolerance toward any other kind.)
Stenner also claims, "under the right conditions, conservatives can be a liberal democracy’s strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by authoritarian social movements."
Much thoughtful critique, including "Jesus and John Wayne", has investigated why US conservatism operating through the GOP failed so badly to cultivate "the right conditions" for conservatives to serve as their "liberal democracy’s strongest bulwark" against authoritarianism. Avik Roy's and Matt McManus's brief reflections on the failure of movement conservatives and "classical liberals"/libertarians to come to grips with the reactionary elements willing to co-opt them are also worth a read:
https://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12256510/republican-party-trump-avik-roy
https://merionwest.com/2019/05/26/conflating-classical-liberals-and-the-alt-right/
How whatever remnant of the US right that *does* want to serve as a bulwark against authoritarianism actually creates the right conditions to achieve this is a pretty bleak question right now. It's easy enough to scold religious conservatives and laissez-faire sorts that, if they really had the courage of their convictions, they'd stay off the Trump Train. Harder for the scolding not to be dismissed, for various reasons, some bad-faith, others the wishful thinking that even good faith is prone to.
It's heartening to see a conservative confessional orthodox Protestant like Trueman, whose prior complaints about expressive individualism I worried gave cover to authoritarianism (and maybe still do, even if they're not meant to: authoritarianism uses what it can because it can), remind his fellows they have a calling off the Trump Train.
Midge, I thought these sentences at the end of Stenner's article show the difficulty of our problem: "But [the progressive policy agenda] is achievable if the Biden administration recognizes that even creating the mere feeling or appearance of oneness and sameness can be reassuring to authoritarians. Critically, authoritarian predispositions are not a problem that can just be educated away: In fact, liberal democracy’s loud and showy celebration of freedom and diversity drives authoritarians not to the limits of their tolerance but to their intolerant extremes. For this reason, a strong rhetorical focus on a unified Americanness can play a vital role in reassuring and deactivating the innately intolerant."
This was written at the beginning of Biden's administration. Think of how hard such a thing would be to achieve. One thought I've had is that we Americans need to give up the idea of "America's greatness." The problem is that we have no consensus about what the greatness could be. People on the left say it's freedom and diversity. People on the right often think it's our military. I don't see how it would be possible to mediate between those two conceptions.
Stenner claims, "[L]iberal democracy has now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate it. Until we fix this central problem, nothing else works."
https://hopenothate.org.uk/2020/11/01/authoritarianism/
"[W]e can understand authoritarianism as extreme 'groupiness'." Authoritarians' comfort "cannot be achieved without a shared concept of the boundaries of that collective (who is 'us') – typically rooted in some legend or lore about what and how 'we' are – and of the authorities, rules, customs and norms by which we exert collective control over other people’s behaviour."
On the one hand, authoritarian-ism is morally wrong. It is not the way of Love. On the other, Stenner asserts, "We must recognise that authoritarians are not inherently evil... We must tolerate diversity of personalities just like we tolerate all other kinds of difference. We cannot enemify or exclude a third of the population. At least, we can’t do these things while claiming to be a democracy" since, under democracy, "The needs and preferences of authoritarians are of equal weight to our own".
Stenner believes, "One of the most important things a society can do to enhance tolerance is to increase economic equality, which is a kind of oneness and sameness we should all be able to get behind." (Maybe not all of us: the laissez-faire among us have some – I think justifiable – concerns.) But "Most of all, we need to reduce our enemies list. We cannot set purity tests and simply reject and exclude all who fail them". Still, "We must keep in mind that authoritarians are better able to tolerate racial and ethnic diversity if we increase... the appearance and feeling of oneness and sameness." Apparently, authoritarian action feels less necessary when a society's rituals of oneness and sameness are both broader and shallower, both more conspicuous and with fewer purity tests.
Religious sincerity is a deep matter, not served by shallowness. But apparently social cohesion *can* be served by shallowness. The authoritarian disposition is uninsightful. Shallow ritual may satisfy authoritarian concerns. This puts Christians who feel moved to repent of Christian complicity in various forms of authoritarianism in a bit of a bind. When we witness how much evil has been enabled by Christian institutions' undue concern for "the shallow stuff" – institutional reputation, maintaining familiar worldly hierarchies, flattery about what makes "us" so "great" and better than the "heathen" – we become less inclined to tolerate what authoritarians crave to feel reassured and at peace. "Repent of your comforts!" is a common religious message – but also, obviously, an uncomfortable one! And people understandably become suspicious when someone who does not find comfort in what comforts them tells them to repent of their comfort.
(I, too, find myself annoyed when flamboyantly left-leaning preachers call me to repent of supposed sins that sound to me mostly like not being far left enough. I would feel similarly uncomfortable in MAGAfied churches, but don't have reason to attend them. But hey, the burdens Christians bear for one another include lack of self-awareness – and discerning between political difference and sin is *tough*. If I continually let myself get outraged by others' apparent lack of humility on that front, I'm not practicing humility.)
Maybe the good news is that several shallow but comforting "unity" rituals tend to be fairly innocuous, like flag-waving and grilling stuff. Love wouldn't call us to those rituals as ends in themselves. But as a means of neighborliness, a way to "If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone", perhaps love does. Perhaps such rah-rah "unity" rituals are the "authoritarian tribute" we pay to preserve more meaningful difference.
Stenner adds some more good news: "I’ve rarely seen even direct racial threats activate authoritarians to the same degree as the classic normative threats. Feeling let down by institutions, leaders and compatriots, feeling like 'no-one agrees on anything any more', like 'we’ve lost the things that once made us great'" apparently activate authoritarian intolerance more than racial difference does. Authoritarian politics include white nationalism, but are hardly limited to it, and authoritarians don't necessarily need racial homogeneity to feel reassured. Other forms of surface homogeneity may do.
Midge, those articles about housing and development patterns were interesting. I'm sympathetic to the Strong Towns piece that said poor neighborhoods subsidize rich neighborhoods, but I wonder if that's always true. Maybe it depends on how poor. The writer gave examples of compact, walkable, low- or modest-income areas that produce good tax revenue. However, if you go to a city like Birmingham where I live, there are large areas of the city that have become depopulated. I'm from the West Coast, so I was surprised to see this kind of thing. In my hometown there was an African American area where people were often poor, but the properties always had value. In some parts of Birmingham you couldn't give away property for free. I understand there are even people who paid off their houses and had to abandon them because they couldn't afford to maintain them, and no one would buy them. A big part of what Birmingham city government does is tear down abandoned buildings. So obviously these low income areas are not going to produce tax revenue.
For awhile we had an Occupational Tax, where everyone who worked in Birmingham had to pay a tax to support the city. This was a just thing in my opinion, because a lot of people live in the suburbs but make their living in the city. But the state legislature repealed that.
I agree with you that we have to let affluent people live together, but they should be taxed more to support lower income people. Alabama has some of the lowest property taxes in America.
I would like to believe with Stenner that some "shallow" rituals could bring everyone together. But I think we've reached a place where that's pretty hard. Though I am a liberal, I try to counteract exaggerated criticisms of conservatives whenever I can. For example, several years ago there was the claim that President Trump refused to go to a French military cemetery because the people buried there "were losers." I thought that can't be true. I believe Trump is a jerk, but you could hardly be president and be that much of a jerk. It's true that he has made some disparaging remarks about servicemen sometimes, such as when he said John McCain wasn't a hero because he got captured. That's a cartoonish image of war, and it amazes me that so many veterans weren't outraged by it. But I cannot believe he ever said to Emmanuel Macron that the people buried at the cemetery were "losers." I looked into it, and what really happened is he had already gone to one French veterans' cemetery on the trip, and when asked to go a second time, he said, "do I have to go twice?" That's not as outrageous as saying veterans are losers.
I think a big part of what conservatism proved unable to be a bulwark against authoritarianism is that our Constitution no longer works. It's an archaic thing that fit our society maybe 200 years ago but no longer does. France has had 5 constitutions in the time we've had one. Actually, I believe in a way, we have become a victim of our own success. In a way we're unlucky to have won World War II. The countries that lost, Germany and Japan, faced their demons and created a more sensible society. Because we were so successful, we assumed we didn't need to change our system much. When other countries were creating national healthcare systems in the late 40's, Americans assumed we didn't need such a thing. Now healthcare threatens to bankrupt us.
I agree that conservatism can be a bulwark against authoritarianism under some circumstances. I remember I worked as a writing tutor in grad school in the late nineties. We had a group of students who were first-generation college students. One was a black lady who was assigned by her professor to write a paper about politics. I actually said to her "why don't you consider the ideas of Ayn Rand?" I said I didn't really agree with Rand myself, but it was worth considering an alternative to liberalism. I said, "Rand would say why be equal? Why not be superior?" And I guess there actually was a certain anti-racist thrust to Rand's ideas. She thought the only important thing was the merits of individuals. There's no reason to think members of one ethnic group could be superior to another.
I agree that the Constitutionally-mandated Electoral College is damaging our electoral politics now, but I see that as resulting from subsequent apportionment decisions and most states' winner-take-all allotment of electoral votes, not the Constitution itself. I'm not in favor of abolishing the Electoral College – in Stenner's framework, that'd invite reactionary backlash as conservatives averse to change ally with authoritarians who fear greater representation of those different from themselves. Conservative cases for more-representative apportionment can be made. It's apparently not in the GOP's interest to make these cases. Could it be in Democrats'?
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/when-it-comes-to-the-house-bigger-might-be-better/
If Stenner is right that rapid, disruptive socio-political change entices conservatives to side with authoritarians, repeatedly new constitutions may have provoked even more reactionary politics than we have. Cass Sunstein points out that originalism is a game that the left can play, too:
https://home.uchicago.edu/~csunstei/originalism.html
and I think the reassuring stability of a Constitution that's been around since the country's founding, subject to occasional amendment, may have saved us from even worse reactionary politics. (There has been a new constitution on US soil since our original one: the Confederate constitution.)
Movement conservatives and today's young progressives coincide on a searing hatred of Wilsonian progressivism. Maybe there's something to that coincidence? When the US started to build a "modern" regulatory (including zoning) and welfare state, it was a white-surpemacist one, and we still live with the consequences, whether continued white-identity politics or a civil-rights backlash (which Americans typically agree was at least partly necessary) and whether it went too far.
https://www.prrac.org/newsletters/marapr2006.pdf
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/
https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/does-zoning-cause-racism-does-negative
The US has always had a puritanical streak interested in using state power to reward the "superior" as "deserving" and punish the "undeserving" as "inferior", one entangled with race for obvious reasons. Rather than the modest, impartial social insurance a dynamic nation like ours could probably manage with, we have a fractured system of government aid that's identity-based: Are you retired? A homeowner? A farmer? etc, etc... (Occupational categories tend to become identity categories in our politics.) While many of us think of "minority" (though women aren't, strictly speaking, a minority!) identity politics when we hear the phrase "identity politics", at the start of the US "refounding" as a welfare state, the "deserving" identity was typically white and male. It seems to be true that "affirmative action for white people" was the only way FDR could get welfare passed with the Solid South around. And we live with the consequences.
One consequence is the intuition that, if you count among the "deserving", you don't even count the welfare you receive as "welfare". (Democrats who became Republican through voting Nixon, Reagan, and now Trump may be particularly prone to this intuition.) Corporate welfare? Apparently not "welfare" because "deserving" because "free enterprise!" (conveniently overlooking that enterprise subject to special state favors is no longer "free"). Retirement welfare? Not "welfare" (and to be fair, FDR intended retirement benefits to seem unlike welfare even if they were). "Real America's" self-image that whatever welfare it's using must be "small", while welfare that's "too big" serves someone else, often bears little relationship to reality, facilitated by a "submerged state" that fools many Americans into thinking they're more independent of government benefits than they really are:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo12244559.html
And so identity politics pit "deserving" "Real Americans" who receive welfare that's "not even welfare", only "just deserts", against perceived "welfare consumers", often irrespective of the economics involved. For example, the US is majority-urban, with many financially dynamic cities, but "rural" often codes as the more "deserving" "Real American producer" identity to those who feel like "Real Americans".
Even the absurd system of employer-based health benefits arising from WWII wage caps and subsequent tax-code jiggering creates an identity politics – of being "more deserving" than others of health benefits as a person with "the right kind" of employment. If you age into Medicare, you also "earn" the "deserving" category (no matter how small your contributions were compared to the care you receive). Else, maybe you're relegated to state plans for the "undeserving". Though ACA exchanges have changed the mechanics of this somewhat, reluctance to offend the "deserving" helps explain why reform that eliminates the more absurd aspects of US health benefits provision is so hard.
Distress by its nature makes complying with anything, including government assistance, harder, but our assistance systems often compound this natural problem, diverting benefits from the more-needy to those who could perhaps do without but have the compliance resources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/how-government-learned-waste-your-time-tax/619568/
Hating on "neoliberalism" is trendy these days for both left and right. Honestly, though, neoliberalism as Milton Friedman summarized it still sounds fairly good to me, for anti-authoritarian reasons:
"Neo-liberalism would accept the nineteenth century liberal emphasis on the fundamental importance of the individual, but... [t]he state would police the system, establish conditions favorable to competition and prevent monopoly, provide a stable monetary framework, and relieve acute misery and distress."
https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/214957/full
I don't trust the state (especially one with an identity-politics history as fraught as our own) to regard some as "superior" or "inferior", as "deserving" or "undeserving" – especially if we wish to avoid authoritarian politics! Still, citizens in a prosperous nation demand some degree of social insurance, often from reflexively conservative desires like desire for stability. Perhaps it's politically impossible for a prosperous state to uphold the dynamism of freedom without offering as compensation some state-supported insurance against the risks dynamism permits.
I agree that demand for healthcare wouldn't be fulfilled by the minimalist welfare plans some libertarians idealize, like NIT (negative income tax), with or without UBI (universal basic income): Whatever story we tell ourselves about why US healthcare is what it is, it's nearly impossible to budget for, even for the fairly affluent, much less the poor.
I agree that healthcare access and payment remains a frustrating struggle for Americans (including me), a struggle that shouldn't be dismissed as "just the price of freedom". Even consulting the index of economic freedom the now-MAGAfied Heritage Foundation publishes, several countries with a variety of different national health systems rank as freer than the US:
https://www.heritage.org/index/
And I'm fairly confident our identity politics makes our healthcare politics worse, too.
I thought you brought up an important point here:
"For example, the US is majority-urban, with many financially dynamic cities, but "rural" often codes as the more "deserving" "Real American producer" identity to those who feel like "Real Americans".
I think that is actually our fundamental political divide today, between large cities and small towns. Cities are usually prosperous, whereas small towns are often dying. We need a new deal for small towns and rural areas. We also have too many people trying to live in expensive big cities where they can't make it. I think we should pay those people to move to small towns. We could afford to do that. It would help to heal our political divide.
I also agree that a judgmentalism is a particularly bad trait of Americans. People can always justify the benefits they and their friends get, but others are bums.
Another thing I would advocate is related to that. We should prohibit affluent communities from separating from poor communities. A good example is the new city of St. George, Louisiana, that will impoverish the rest of East Baton Rouge Parish. Detroit is the most outrageous example of this in America. It is the disgrace of America. People with money moved out and left the poor to take care of the city. But this kind of thing is often justified by that judgmentalism: "they're corrupt and crime-ridden, and I don't have any responsibility to help them."
I hope there's a chance for America to stay together, but I don't know if it will. The big divisive issues today are abortion and guns. Blue and red states will not tolerate each others' positions on those issues. I'm not sure it will be possible to arrive at any compromise.
"We need a new deal for small towns and rural areas. We also have too many people trying to live in expensive big cities where they can't make it. I think we should pay those people to move to small towns. We could afford to do that. It would help to heal our political divide."
Remote work during the pandemic kind of gave some small towns a natural new deal, as former urbanites who could work remotely moved to them. Not all small-town residents appreciate their towns "gentrifying" like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/comments/16ljj3q/i_hate_remote_workers_they_are_ruining_small/
and even those who don't mind the "gentrification" itself do mind when housing prices skyrocket:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/economics/remote-workers-left-housing-havoc-created-remains-rcna68874
The US appears to have, not just an urban housing problem, but a housing problem, period, typically exacerbated by NIMBY zoning and the peculiar development pattern our federal government once worked very hard to subsidize:
"We responded to the economic hardships of the 1930s and 40s by radically shifting our development pattern" to one of suburbs full of detached, homogenized, spread-out housing of a type that had previously been rather uncommon.
"The automobile was one instrument of transformation, but even more important was the federal government’s support for this shift. Programs to promote broad home ownership, investments in infrastructure, and the streamlining of tax and financial structures to achieve macroeconomic efficiency ensured that this experiment was a nationally-coordinated project, one every community participated in."
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020
But "The pervasive fragility this experiment has created in American society has brought about a level of instability that is combustible." And "a consistent feature we see revealed in city after city after city all over North America" is that, at the municipal level, "Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern."
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment
"We Are All Detroit", in other words.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/11/4/we-are-all-detroit-2019
Meanwhile, in other countries whose national governments didn't support the same kind of housing-pattern shift, urban areas that are also "small towns" are apparently A Thing:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/2/17/walkable-check-urban-check-rural-also-check
Other countries are better able to sustain that small-town feel not necessarily because their land use is "more regulated" than ours. Other countries vary in land-use regulation, obviously, some of which is quite strict. But US land use is astonishingly regulated, too, despite US reputation for "freedom". While "the post-1980 neoliberal era is supposed to be one of deregulation", US "land use regulation has actually become dramatically more stringent, even as population growth has made that regulation costlier":
https://www.slowboring.com/p/yimbyism-can-liberate-us-from-anti
I don't see how a free society could forcefully keep the wealthy from congregating among themselves, including in their own private residential clubs, weird and gross as those may seem to the rest of us. But it should prevent the wealthy from using the force of government to keep "the poors" out, which should considerably reduce the separation, since so many wealthy are perfectly happy to lobby the government to do their bidding rather than spend their own money on it (leveraging influence over a government who'll do the expensive work for you is hardly the only way to be wealthy, but definitely one of the ways).
After all, it takes government backing for you to forcibly keep your land-owning neighbors from satisfying the demand for affordable housing by developing it on their own land. Because of our impression of ourselves as a free country, it's easy for us to assume that too few developers make an unconstrained *choice* to avoid developing affordable housing, but the reality is their choice is also constrained by NIMBY laws that please the affluent and status-seeking with zoning hostile to mixed and modest development.
The opposite of NIMBY is YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard). While YIMBY ethics influenced my household's decision to buy the particular house it did, I shouldn't flatter myself that I'm "part of the YIMBY revolution" since really being part of it means getting involved, not just in municipal politics, but the especially tedious politics of municipal land use regulation. That tedium forms its own protective thicket against the little fish, who aren't making huge land deals and who typically can't afford the compliance costs to influence municipal decisions. I've got young kids, and some tedious health problems of my own. I deal with my tedium, partly, by reading a lot, but reading isn't the same as active involvement, and, like most of us, there's only so much tedium I can take before going bonkers.
Thank you, Kristin, for sharing this. It brings me to tears, but tears of hope and relief, that though we may not win now, there is hope and light at the end. I've moved away from my church affiliation, and so I'm doubly glad to find myself touched in the spirit by what you have shared. Thank you.
"Politically-active American Christians who defy the enemies of God and wage war against evil, and who necessarily employ crude memes, subterfuge, and even deception toward these ends, will likewise be commended for their faith."
I believe he believes this, and it makes me sad, because it proves just how lost he is. Jesus is pretty clear that the only thing a Christian needs to do to battle evil is to rebuke it, firmly and wherever they find it. Doing stuff like what he's advocating for is telling the whole world "I do not believe God can win this battle using the rules of engagement he has set forth, so I am substituting my wisdom for his." And in so doing, the act that is supposed to testify to his faith does the opposite, and makes everyone around him who doesn't already share his faith look upon him with pity and scorn, and reject him and his God.
And all the above is before one even considers the damage it's doing to his soul. How does Crenshaw imagine that Christ is going to react to him not just breaking the commandment against bearing false witness, but actively rejecting that commandment as a barrier to a just world? How does that end with anything other than "begone from me; I never knew you?" I don't know exactly what this is, but there's no Christ in it.
I agree in believing that he actually believes this. What really kills me is his "necessarily." He believes THAT. 🤯 😭
And the consequence of this is... exactly everything you just laid out so incredibly well.
I have never liked you much. Since reading Jesus and John Wayne, you have annoyed me as a voice that I MUST listen to, because I cannot marshall good arguments to rebut your position.
And then comes today. Your point cuts through the clutter and settles in the heart of the matter. It is truth, regardless of personal position.
I have never like you SO much!
Ha, when I started reading this I thought I knew I shoudn't have opened comments to everyone! Sorry to be so annoying. My teenage son agrees.
I am glad you did. After finishing Tim Alberta, I will sit down and re-read J&JW with a “what did I miss the first time” mindset.
Thank you for putting this so fabulously, and so honorably.
I am in that same must-listen position because so much of what KKDM says haunts me (more than directly annoying me) as stuff I largely didn't want to know (💔), and had actively avoided, but must admit I need to hear. About three years now, and I can see how much good it's done me.
In her commentary on The Lord Of The Rings, "The Battle For Middle Earth", Fleming Rutledge, too, focuses on this phrase about the long defeat. It is from her that I first heard this as a Christian focus, and it is from recent prayer times that I have learned to prepare for this time, and thought of challenging my pastor and others, how will we then live?