Is America just ‘an idea’?
The debate centers on whether American values, however they may be defined, are a legacy of the Western heritage or whether America is “an idea,” as Fallows puts it, that transcends any concept of civilization or the people who created it. Indeed, in the Beinart-Fallows view, merely an overly abundant mention of “the West”’ or “our civilization” constitutes a kind of white nationalism or tribalism.
.. Fallows assaults Trump for giving a speech “that minimized the role of ideals in American identity, and maximized the importance of what he called ‘civilization’ but which boils down to ties of ethnicity and blood.”
.. Trump then identified two other threats to the West—first, “the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people”; and second, “powers that seek to test our will, undermine our confidence, and challenge our interests”—a veiled reference to Russia.
.. What’s missing is any recognition of—or certainly any manifest appreciation for—the fundamental elements of the Western heritage: the theology of Christianity; Western artistic painting, employing light and shadow to burst throughs space and time; the soaring Baroque music; the Gothic cathedrals with their relentless drive toward space; the penetrating sense of tragedy in literature; the regard for the individual, for freedom, for carefully crafted government, free expression, and free markets.
.. Samuel Huntington of Harvard, hardly an alt-right provocateur, once wrote, “Some Westerners…have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”
.. It was only recently that commentators such as Beinart and Fallows attacked the Western heritage as an impediment to new arrivals being who they want to be, retaining their own cultural sensibilities and impulses while diminishing America’s through numbers and defiance.
.. There are elements within the West bent on destroying any civilizational consciousness because they don’t consider their civilization to be particularly hallowed.
.. I haven’t looked at Fukuyama’s piece since it appeared but if memory serves, he pretty much nailed it. He didn’t say that with Communism defeated, the world was to be conflict-free, just that liberal democracy no longer faced any serious ideological rivals. Islamic fundamentalism, as an ideology, is not a credible challenger to liberal democracy, not in the industrial world or even in the Islamic world. I’m not saying it doesn’t have followers or isn’t a security threat. But it offers nothing to people who aren’t already Muslims or from that part of the world.
Fukuyama was making a more narrow argument than he’s been credited. That end of history business really threw people off.
.. No one in this debate has claimed that American values are not a legacy of Western heritage. But Jefferson didn’t write “all Western men are created equal.” The Declaration is a universalist statement, even though it comes from a specific culture.
The difference between America and pretty much every other nation on Earth, as American presidents used to say on a regular basis, is that America is the only nation on Earth founded on an idea. France, and Germany, and England, and China, and Poland weren’t founded on ideas; they were founded on the basis of ethnic and linguistic ties. The point that Fallows and Beinart were making is that Trump gave no recognition to that at all.
.. Many Americans, perhaps most, hate to see their national and civilizational heritage coming under attack…
As do I. Trump is an attack on our founding ideals. He holds the values and ethics of Western culture in contempt, as a long lifetime of bad conduct and vicious speech make abundantly clear.
Is it really still necessary, some 80 years later, to forswear any use of the word “will” in discussing politics or geopolitics because of this German film? And, if someone uses the term, is that prima facie evidence of fascistic tendencies?
When a speech contains a (completely false) statement that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive” and ends with “and our civilization will triumph,” it’s entirely legitimate to suspect that dog whistles are being used. Someone as loved by the alt-right as is Trump can’t directly quote from a Nazi propaganda film and be considered innocent of having made a deliberate shout-out to the blut-und-boden crowd.
.. The fundamental flaw of the Fukuyama viewpoint, which has been the Bush/Clinton consensus of “globalization” for the last quarter century, is the fictional belief that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism can exist and spread, divorced from their cultural and civilizational foundations.
And the primary foundation is Christianity. The ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence would never have come into being, or been taken seriously, without the cultural context of Christian teaching. It was not Thomas Jefferson, but Jesus Christ, who first stated that “all men are created equal”.
Incarnation instead of Atonement
Franciscans never believed in the sacrificial atonement theory because it wasn’t necessary. Christ was Plan A, not Plan B. Atonement implies that God had a plan, we messed it up, and then God had to come back in to mop-up our mistakes.
.. As I mentioned earlier this month, Franciscan John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) said the plan from the beginning was to reveal Godself as Christ. Jesus didn’t come as a remedy for sin—as if God would need blood before God could love what God created. The idea that God, who is love, would demand the sacrifice of his beloved Son in order to be able to love what God created is the conundrum that reveals how unsatisfying that quid pro quo logic really is.
Franciscans believe that Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity. It didn’t need changing: God has organically, inherently loved what God created from the moment God created. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.
.. For now, just realize that the Church in the thirteenth century was broad-minded enough to accept this alternative orthodoxy as a minority position.
Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads
But then the grumpy drunk stumbled over, pointed at the beanie on George’s head and barked, “Why don’t you take that hat off. You look like a fucking terrorist.”
The white partygoers grew silent and waited for George to react, which he eventually did, diffusing the conversation with politeness. Though he lowered the heat a few notches, the man continued to call him a terrorist so many times that George realized something that hadn’t occurred to him, “He was concerned that I might have actually been a terrorist.” Still, nobody came to George’s defense, leaving him alone with this angry, potentially-armed man. “I didn’t feel like he was going to kill me,” George says, “but he wanted to intimidate me.”
.. So while white evangelicals captured the election, they may have lost their fellow believers
.. Their endeavors run the gamut, but the ones gaining steam include leaving evangelicalism altogether, reframing the evangelical world as a mission field as opposed to a place for spiritual nourishment, creating ethnic safe spaces or staying firmly planted in evangelical community to combat racism from within.
.. Many describe these moves as “divestment” from white evangelicalism: they’re moving money, bodies and souls elsewhere.
.. “I was working on a book that was marketed toward evangelicals and I’m no longer doing that because I think it’s a waste of time. I don’t think they’re ready. I’d rather work with folks who are ready.”
.. White male evangelical neglect of issues concerning black evangelicals and evangelical women prompted these groups to turn to their own coalitions. As a result, the progressive movement lost its minority and female constituency and faded into the shadows just as the religious right was born.
.. Bill McCartney, the white leader of Promise Keepers, made this subject a focal point at his stadium-packed events in 1996, he reported that about 40 percent of participants reacted negatively to the theme, likely leading to the drop in attendance the following year.
.. white evangelical “racial reconciliation” lacked rigor. It focused on building personal relationships between races, not addressing the systemic inequalities that devastate communities of color. This led minority evangelicals to question whether “racial reconciliation” was simply a convenient vehicle for white absolution and, given the long history of white oppression within the church (using the Bible to justify slavery, supporting Jim Crow segregation, condemning the Civil Rights Movement, to name a few), to what exactly were they “reconciling” in the first place.
.. “For those of us who have been doing this for a while – making the circuit, speaking to crowds – it almost feels like it was all for nothing,”
.. “It was a blatant ignoring of everything we’ve been trying to teach for decades now. Maybe I was being naive; I thought after the election people would have a little more remorse…this is white evangelicalism revealing itself in ways that are deeply dysfunctional.”
.. these groups never invited her to create something that actually corrected the problems she called out; they listened to her critique and they thought that was enough.
.. While Johnson believes that folks in her circles “didn’t necessarily vote for Trump,” they are part of a larger culture that made widespread white evangelical support for Trump possible. By staying in this environment, she hopes to attack one of the root causes of this problem: “An impoverished theology where people don’t understand a ‘God of the oppressed.’”
Whereas, “as black folks, we’ve always had to hold onto this God of the oppressed…a God who interacts with the systems around us.”
.. If anything, white evangelical support for Trump has prompted a “big ideological shift” in her work, from an interest in producing “do gooders” to a generation of Christians willing to work for the liberation of other people.
.. “everyone is reconsidering whether or not they want to remain under the moniker ‘evangelical,’” including minorities, white people, the young and the old, “because the word ‘evangelical’ has been truly hijacked by a movement to maintain the political, economic and social supremacy of whiteness.”
.. her desire to reclaim “a movement that was about the coming of the Kingdom of God and the flourishing of the image of God on Earth,” as well as the release of the image of God from captivity
.. For those staying, they must contend with a dominant white theology, shaped in the cauldron of privilege, which suggests that a successful life springs from an individual’s good, moral choices alone. It fails to recognize how unfair policies and societal structures harm the economic and social wellbeing of those subject to those systems.
Those who stay must also contend with a politicized evangelical movement fundamentally shaped in the late 1970s by a desire to preserve segregation. As documented by historian Randall Balmer, the religious right galvanized evangelicals into a political movement when the IRS threatened to revoke the tax exempt status of racially discriminatory Christian schools. Today, evangelicals of color staying to “combat racism from within” are working against a deeply entrenched culture.
.. But even if a demographic shift seems inevitable, the question is: will the power shift be inevitable? Do white evangelicals have the capacity to share power at scale?
.. baked into the culture of evangelicalism is a distrust of non-evangelical voices, even those who have been doing the work of social justice for decades. But the threats of this new administration might change all that.
.. George Mekhail struck an invitational tone in an attempt to “figure out this guy’s deal.” Sure, George felt “humiliated” by the man’s insistence that his hat made him look like a terrorist, but what could he say? Only a white partygoer could rebuke the man because, “as the brown guy in the room, I can’t be that voice [without coming across as] the agitator.” In a final act of submission, George yanked the beanie off his head and asked, “There, is that better?” The man took a good look at George, his youthful brown eyes, his thin trail of a beard and his short black hair unwinding from hat head.
“No,” the man replied. “You still look like a terrorist.”
.. George decided to leave evangelicalism, though he remains firmly in the Christian tradition, working to hold the faith community to a higher standard.
.. Ambiguous church policies hurt congregants, George argues. For example, most churches claim to “welcome everybody,” but quietly hold policies that exclude particular communities. For the gay person who devotes his life to a church only to discover years later that their pastor won’t baptize him or marry him, “just create[s] so much humiliation and shame
.. Demand clarity without judgment. He’s not trying to convince anyone to change their policies, even if he disagrees with them
.. His long-term vision includes a database that houses the policies of churches. “If we can do that, then we let people vote with their feet.”
.. George, who has lately been asking, “if there is anything redeemable about evangelicalism.”
“I think evangelicalism is the empire that’s about to fall,” he says. “It needs to be dismantled because it’s too powerful and it’s all about money.” Rather than centering the needs of the marginalized and justice work, George sees a toxic faith system that platforms capitalism, unsustainable growth, a prosperity narrative, flashy services and pastors who hang with celebrities. To George, “everything” is at stake.
“We’re at the part of the story where Jesus goes into the temple and flips over tables.”
Richard Rohr: Images of God: God as Flow or Relationship
You become the God you worship. In other words, your image of God creates you. If you get the image of God wrong, everything else that builds on it is going to be rather inadequate.
The operative image of God for most Christians (except for the mystics) is a powerful monarch, usually an old white man sitting on a throne. It’s no accident that the Latin word for God, Deus, came from the same root as Zeus. At the risk of shocking you, let me say that Christianity hasn’t moved much beyond the mythological image of Zeus. Yet this is not the image of God revealed to us by Jesus—a vulnerable baby born in an occupied and oppressed land; a refugee; a humble carpenter whose friends were fishermen, prostitutes, and tax-collectors; a political criminal executed on a cross. In other words, Jesus shows a vulnerable God much more than the almighty one Christians often assume.
The Creation story in Genesis gives us a wonderful insight into God’s character by using plural pronouns: “Let us create in our image” (Genesis 1:26-27). Of course, this is problematic for monotheistic Judaism and Christianity. It took centuries to develop the doctrine of the Trinity. The Cappadocian Fathers (including Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen) of fourth century eastern Turkey finally turned to a word from Greek theater, perichoresis—circle dance—to describe the foundational quality of God’s character: relationship and communion. In the beginning was relationship.
God is not the dancer but the dance itself! God is much more a dynamic verb than a static noun. God is constant flow. You don’t even need to understand it intellectually or theologically to participate in the flow of God. You are already there. Within your heart, body, and mind is an implanted flow toward life, goodness, love, communion, and connection. “Sin” is quite simply any resistance to that flow.
Trinity is saying, “In the beginning is the relationship.”