Make America Great Again Hat White Pride
This article was published online on March x, 2021.
The United States had long been a holdout among Western democracies, uniquely and maybe even suspiciously devout. From 1937 to 1998, church membership remained relatively constant, hovering at most 70 per centum. Then something happened. Over the past two decades, that number has dropped to less than fifty percentage, the sharpest recorded pass up in American history. Meanwhile, the "nones"—atheists, agnostics, and those claiming no religion—have grown rapidly and today represent a quarter of the population.
But if secularists hoped that declining religiosity would make for more than rational politics, drained of faith's inflaming passions, they are likely disappointed. As Christianity'southward hold, in particular, has weakened, ideological intensity and fragmentation have risen. American faith, it turns out, is as fervent equally 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 hateful have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what faith without religion looks like.
Not then long ago, I could comfort American audiences with a contrast: Whereas in the Middle E, politics is state of war by other means—and sometimes is literal war—politics in America was less existentially fraught. During the Arab Bound, in countries like Arab republic of egypt and Tunisia, debates weren't most health intendance or taxes—they were, with sometimes frightening intensity, about foundational questions: What does it mean to exist a nation? What is the purpose of the state? What is the role of religion in public life? American politics in the Obama years had its moments of ferment—the Tea Party and tan suits—just was still relatively ho-hum.
We didn't realize how lucky we were. Since the end of the Obama era, debates over what it means to exist American have go suffused with a fervor that would exist unimaginable in debates over, say, Belgian-ness or the "meaning" of Sweden. It's rare to hear someone accused of beingness un-Swedish or un-British—only united nations-American is a mutual slur, slung by both left and correct against the other. Being chosen un-American is similar existence called "united nations-Christian" or "un-Islamic," a accuse akin to heresy.
This is because America itself is "nigh a faith," equally the Cosmic philosopher Michael Novak once put it, particularly for immigrants who come to their new identity with the zeal of the converted. The American civic religion has its own founding myth, its prophets and processions, also as its scripture—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, Martin Luther King Jr. wished that "one day this nation will rise up and alive out the truthful meaning of its creed." The very idea that a nation might have a creed—a give-and-take associated primarily with religion—illustrates the uniqueness of American identity as well as its predicament.
The notion that all deeply felt conviction is sublimated faith is not new. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian who served as the prime minister of the Netherlands at the dawn of the 20th century, when the nation was in the early throes of secularization, argued that all strongly held ideologies were effectively organized religion-based, and that no human being could survive long without some ultimate loyalty. If that loyalty didn't derive from traditional faith, it would find expression through secular commitments, such every bit nationalism, socialism, or liberalism. The political theorist Samuel Goldman calls this "the police of the conservation of religion": In any given society, 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 have go richer and more diverse—but as well 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—merely liberals believe, with equal certitude, that they are faithful to the American thought and that conservatives are betraying it. Without the common basis produced by a shared external enemy, as America had during the Cold State of war and briefly subsequently the September 11 attacks, common antipathy grows, and each side becomes less intelligible to the other. Besides often, 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 then 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 see themselves as challenging the long-ascendant narrative that emphasized the exceptionalism of the nation's founding. Whereas religion sees the promised land as beingness in a higher place, in God's kingdom, the utopian left sees information technology as being ahead, in the realization of a just order hither on Earth. Afterwards Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September, droves of mourners gathered outside the Supreme Court—some kneeling, some holding candles—as though they were at the Western Wall.
On the right, adherents of a Trump-centric ethno-nationalism still pall themselves in some of the trappings of organized religion, but the issue is a movement that often looks similar 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 it is easy to marvel at the hold that a human so imperfect can take on his soldiers. Many on the right find solace in conspiracy cults, such as QAnon, that tell a religious story of earthly corruption redeemed by a godlike force.
Though the United states wasn't founded as a Christian nation, Christianity was always intertwined with America'south self-definition. Without it, Americans—conservatives and liberals alike—no longer have a common civilisation upon which to fall back.
Unfortunately, the diverse strains of wokeism on the left and Trumpism on the right cannot truly fill the spiritual void—what the journalist Murtaza Hussain calls America'south "God-shaped hole." Faith, in part, is most distancing yourself from the temporal earth, with all its imperfection. At its all-time, religion confers relief by withholding concluding judgments until another time—perhaps until eternity. The new secular religions unleash dissatisfaction not toward the possibilities of divine grace or justice but toward ane's fellow citizens, who go embodiments of sin—"deplorables" or "enemies of the state."
This is the danger in transforming mundane political debates into metaphysical questions. Political questions are not metaphysical; they are of this world and this earth alone. "Some days are for dealing with your insurance documents or fighting in the mud with your political opponents," the political philosopher Samuel Kimbriel recently told me, "only there are also days for solemnity, or fasting, or worship, or feasting—things that remind us that the globe is bigger than itself."
Absent-minded some new religious awakening, what are we left with? I culling to American intensity would be a globe-weary European resignation. Violence has a way of taming passions, at to the lowest degree as long as it remains in agile memory. In Europe, the terrors of the Second World War are not far away. Just Americans must go dorsum to the Civil State of war for violence of comparable scale—and for near 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 promise, a identify where slavery could be abolished and the nation fabricated whole again. This, at least, is the narrative that makes the myth possible to sustain.
For amend and worse, the Usa really is nearly ane of a kind. France may be the simply country other than the United States that believes itself to be 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 two are at odds. With the rising of the far right and persistent tensions regarding Islam'due south presence in public life, the pregnant of laïcité has become more controversial. Simply nearly French people notwithstanding hold business firm to their country's founding credo: More than 80 percent favor banning religious displays in public, according 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 being a singled-out people, forged over centuries. It tin can be hard for outsiders and immigrants to embrace a national identity steeped in ethnicity and history when it was never theirs.
Take postwar Germany. Germanness is considered a mere fact—an blow of birth rather than an aspiration. And considering shame over the Holocaust is considered a national virtue, the country has at once a stiff national identity and a weak one. There is pride in non being proud. And then what would it mean for, say, Muslim immigrants to love a German language language and culture tied to a history that is not theirs—and indeed a history that many Germans themselves hope to leave behind?
An American who moves to Frg, lives at that place for years, and learns the language remains an American—an "expat." If America is a civil religion, it would make sense that it stays with you lot, unless y'all renounce it. Equally Jeff Gedmin, the quondam head of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, described it to me: "You can swallow strudel, speak fluent German, adapt to local culture, only many volition however say of you Er chapeau einen deutschen Pass—'He has a High german passport.' No one starts calling you German." Many native-born Americans may alive abroad for stretches, merely few emigrate permanently. Immigrants to America tend to become American; emigrants to other countries from America tend to stay American.
The last time I came back to the Us subsequently existence abroad, the customs officeholder at Dulles airport, in Virginia, glanced at my passport, looked at me, and said, "Welcome dwelling." For my customs officer, it went without proverb that the United States was my abode.
In In the Light of What Nosotros Know, a novel by the British Bangladeshi author Zia Haider Rahman, the protagonist, an enigmatic and troubled British citizen named Zafar, is envious of the narrator, who is American. "If an immigration officeholder at Heathrow had ever said 'Welcome abode' to me," Zafar says, "I would have given my life for England, for my land, there and and then. I could kill for an England like that." The narrator reflects after that this was "a bitter plea":
Embedded in his remark, there was a longing for being a part of something. The force of the statement came from the juxtaposition of two apparent extremes: what Zafar was prepared to cede, on the one paw, and, on the other, what he would take sacrificed information technology for—the casual remark of an immigration official.
When Americans have expressed disgust with their state, they have tended to frame it equally fulfillment of a patriotic duty rather than its negation. As James Baldwin, the rare American who did leave for good, put it: "I love America more than any other country in the globe, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Americans who dislike America seem to dislike leaving it fifty-fifty more (witness all those liberals not leaving the state every time a Republican wins the presidency, despite their promises to practise so). And Americans who practise leave still find a style, like Baldwin, to love it. This is the good news of America'south creedal nature, and may provide at to the lowest degree some hope for the future. But is love enough?
Conflicting narratives are more probable to coexist uneasily than to resolve themselves; the threat of disintegration volition always lurk nearby.
On January half-dozen, the threat became all too real when insurrectionary violence came to the Capitol. What was once in the realm of "dreampolitik" now had physical force. What can "unity" possibly hateful later that?
Tin can religiosity be finer channeled into political conventionalities without the structures of actual organized religion to temper and postpone judgment? There is petty sign, so far, that information technology can. If matters of proficient and evil are non to be resolved past an omniscient God in the future, and so Americans will estimate and render punishment now. We are a nation of believers. If only Americans could begin believing in politics less fervently, realizing instead that life is elsewhere. Simply this would come at a cost—because to believe in politics also means believing nosotros tin can, and probably should, be amend.
In History Has Begun, the author, Bruno Maçães—Portugal'due south onetime Europe minister—marvels that "maybe alone amongst all contemporary civilizations, America regards reality equally an enemy to be defeated." This can obviously exist a bad thing (consider our ineffectual fight against the coronavirus), only it can also exist an engine of rejuvenation and inventiveness; it may not always be a good idea to accept the globe as it is. Fantasy, like belief, is something that humans desire and need. A distinctive American innovation is to insist on believing even as our fantasies and dreams migrate further out of attain.
This may mean that the United states of america will remain unique, torn between this world and the alternative worlds that secular and religious Americans alike seem to long for. If America is a creed, then every bit long as enough citizens say they believe, the civic faith tin survive. Like all other faiths, America'south will keep to fragment and carve up. Nevertheless, the American creed remains worth believing in, and that may be enough. If it isn't, and so the only hope might be to go down on our knees and pray.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/america-politics-religion/618072/
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