will the real (il)liberalism please stand up

Gregory Thomson’s review of Rod Dreher’s new book is spot on and very accurately describes and denounces the “bespoke dissidence” that characterizes much of “Christianity” and “conservatism” today.

While, as the Cold War films of the 1980s showed us, this Manichaean rendering of history makes for inspiring theatre, as a serious account of contemporary American culture, it is profoundly misleading. In the end, Dreher’s account is the fruit of neither careful labour nor of chaste discernment, but of curated anxiety. And all who seek to clearly understand and faithfully engage our own cultural moment ought to renounce it. This is because in addition to being historically reductive and rhetorically self-interested, it is finally self-defeating. Why? Because it places Dreher in the position of cultivating hysterical fear over a hypothetical totalitarian regime while remaining utterly silent about the illiberalism of the regime that we actually have. And this, of course, is not dissidence. It is complicity. . . .
…Dreher’s account of the church is inescapably embedded in and instrumental to his larger project of self-protective withdrawal. This is yet another occasion when Dreher knows the words but does not know the tune. The fruit of this is to take some of the most beautiful aspects of Christian faithfulness—aspects that we absolutely must cultivate—and to twist them by turning them inward, by reinterpreting them not through the joyful light of Christ’s love but through the haunted shadows of Cold War terror. The distressing effect of this reinterpretation is that at the very moment when our culture most needs a missional church, a self-sacrificial community driven by the joy of the resurrection, Dreher prescribes its virtual opposite: a self-protective community driven by a fear of the cross. . . .
It is this commitment [to the work of reimagining both the world and our lives within it] that leads me so forcefully to reject Dreher’s book and to urge the church to do the same. Why? Because it nurses fears of propaganda even as it misrepresents history. Because it invokes liberalism while holding others in contempt. Because it denies the oppression of others while heralding its own victimization. Because it decries therapeutic culture while indulging in self-actualization. Because it affects dissidence while remaining silent before a destructive regime. Because it assumes a Christian identity while failing to embody Christian practice. Because, in sum, Dreher has produced a historically reductive, relationally tribal, intellectually superficial, and profoundly self-absorbed work that actually performs what it protests. In the end, this is not a work of Christian dissidence, but of Cold War anxiety. It is the work not of Vaclav Havel’s heir but of J. Edgar Hoover’s. Because of this, Dreher’s book, far from being dissident, actually reflects the essence of the spirit of our age. Living not by lies, it turns out, is not quite the same thing as living by the truth.

“a shadow is not nothing”

David Bentley Hart:

In America, even democratic socialists often have only a very hazy notion of what the full spectrum of socialist thought has been in the past, and what it might be in the future. There is always the likelihood that much of the mainstream of American democratic socialism will ultimately turn into just another form of classically liberal social philosophy. I have, in an inconstant and largely flirtatious way, been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America over the years. I admit, however, that certain recent tendencies of the DSA make me suspect that, as time passes, it will look less and less like the kind of pro-labor, anti-capitalist organization it purports to be, and more and more like simply another incarnation of sanctimonious, ethically voluntarist, pro-choice American liberalism (with all its bourgeois narcissisms, morbid psychological fragilities, and lovingly cultivated neuroses), which I like no better than sanctimonious, ethically voluntarist, libertarian American conservatism (with all its bourgeois narcissisms, morbid psychological fragilities, and lovingly cultivated resentments). Just as we Americans have succeeded in turning “Christianity” into another name for a system of values almost totally antithetical to those of the Gospel, I have every confidence that we will find a way to turn “socialism” into just another name for late-modern liberal individualism. I still support most of the genuinely communitarian aims of the democratic-socialist movement. But, in the end, it is that tradition of Christian socialism mentioned above to which I remain loyal. And I do not know if it could now flourish here. . . .
Inasmuch as the two major political parties in America are both “liberal” in the classical sense—the one devoted a bit more to something like John Stuart Mill’s economic philosophy, the other a bit more to something like his social philosophy, and neither of them to the communal ethics of Christian tradition—it is hard for most Americans to make sense of such views. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon. . . .
…it should be obvious that certain moral ends can be accomplished only by a society as a whole, employing instruments of governance, distribution, and support that private citizens alone cannot command. We, as individuals, can often aid our brothers and sisters only by acting through collective social and political structures. I admit that the New Testament makes still more radical demands upon Christians (Matthew 5:42; 6:3; 6:19–20; Luke 6:24–25; 12:33; 14:33; 16:25; Acts 2:43–46; 4:32; 4:35), and I would certainly agree that it is just as bad to relinquish all one’s moral responsibilities to the state as it is to promote policies that do not oblige human government to obey the laws of divine charity. I know that Christ in the Gospels calls his followers to a different kind of “politics” altogether—for want of a better term, the politics of the Kingdom. Of this, even the wisest, most compassionate, and most provident form of democratic socialism could never be anything more than a faint premonitory shadow.
Even so, a shadow is not nothing.

temporal sacraments

Eugene McCarraher:

Weil’s gesture toward a “true knowledge of social mechanics” suggested a politics of the sacramental imagination. “Sacramentality” is a key but somewhat amorphous and elusive concept in Christian theology, referring not only to the official roster of sacraments but to the character of created reality as well. Just as a sacrament is a visible, material sign and vessel of divine grace, so matter itself is similarly “trans-corporeal,” as theologian Graham Ward puts it. As Rowan Williams explains, sacramentality entails the belief that “material things carry their fullest meaning … when they are the medium of gift, not instruments of control or objects for accumulation.” In what I am calling the sacramental imagination, “the corporeal and the incorporeal do not comprise a dualism,” as Ward asserts; the visible, material realm “manifests the watermark of its creator.”
This sacramental critique of Marxist metaphysics would not be that it is “too materialist” but rather that it is not materialist enough—that is, that it does not provide an adequate account of matter itself, of its sacramental and revelatory character. Sacramentality has ontological and social implications, for the “gift” that Williams identifies is “God’s grace and the common life thus formed.”

bona fide

Czeslaw Milosz:

When I was, as they say, in harmony with God and the world, I felt I was false, as if pretending to be somebody else. I recovered my identity when I found myself again in the skin of a sinner and nonbeliever. This repeated itself in my life several times. For, undoubtedly, I liked the image of myself as a decent man, but, immediately after I put that mask on, my conscience whispered that I was deceiving others and myself.
The notion of sacrum is necessary but impossible without experiencing sin. I am dirty, I am a sinner, I am unworthy, and not even because of my behavior but because of the evil sitting in me. And only when I conceded that it was not for me to reach so high have I felt that I was genuine.

Road-side Dog

cultural proceduralism

John Halldorf:

It seems like churches that are at arm’s length from power and the cultural mainstream are in a better position to develop the Christian virtue of hospitality. As a majority religion intertwined with the state, Christianity often becomes more rigid, less hospitable, and at times hostile—even to other Christian minorities. Pluralism is seen as a threat, since it might mean that Christianity will lose its privileged position. In contrast to this, a minority can never expect to set the rules for any encounter. Instead they must find ways to negotiate and live with difference. Accordingly, they become well equipped to live as a creative minority in a pluralistic society.
This explains why Swedish evangelicals are less threatened by immigration, pluralism, and the growth of Islam than are their US evangelical counterparts, to say nothing of the Swedish secular majority. To a minority, pluralism is not the big threat. In this case, diversity is a step up from the traditional homogenous secular-Lutheran society. It levels the playing field, and makes clear that there is no neutral ground, only competing perspectives. The development of what Jürgen Habermas called the post-secular society is a welcome development to a minority. Swedish evangelicals are aware that any attempt to homogenize the culture would marginalize them.

a faith of unease

“Being Left Behind: The Discourse of Fear in Technological Change,” from Felicia Wu Song at The Hedgehog Review:

While one would be hard pressed to establish any direct relationship between the popularity of these Rapture narratives and the fear of being technologically left behind in business and global contexts, on several counts it is clear that they do share more than merely their semantic similarities. First, they share a crisis-oriented psychology. In Rapture narratives, the focal point is always the moment of crisis, when family members, neighbors, colleagues, and friends discover that an unexpected cosmic judgment has been made between those who were raptured and those who were left behind. Because these Rapture narratives aim to motivate individuals to prepare themselves to face a cataclysmic moment that determines the eternal fate of their souls, critics point out that these stories often encourage an implicit “theology of crisis, without much patience for peace and ordinary life.” The resulting preoccupation with being prepared for such apocalyptic crisis bears considerable likeness to the motivation underlying the consumption of technology by business executives, government officials, and individuals.

deep anxieties

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a sermon in Barcelona: “Both the most grandiose and the frailest of all human attempts to reach the eternal out of fear and unrest in the human heart is religion.”

To which, Jeffrey C. Pugh adds,

A cursory glance at humankind provides us with ample evidence that this is true, [that humans tend to create God, the gods, in their own image]. So much of what we label with the term ‘religion’ appears to be the hopeless attempt to root ourselves and all the extensions of self found in family, nation or state, within the absolute. Once religion is rooted there anything becomes possible in the name of God, even the death and annihilation of others who do not share our particular idea of the absolute. The gods are seldom found on the sides of our enemies after all.
Religion creates the conditions not only for individuals to wear the cloak of self-righteousness, but entire cultures to don it as well. Then everything becomes justified on the basis of transcendent command. God is easily employed for privileging my tribe, my community, my culture. Thus my society acquires the authority of the ultimate where life is rooted not in the vagaries of history, but in the solidity of the absolute.
In this sense, religion has the potential to construct the deepest part of myself, the core of my identity, for my identity is shaped and formed by the host of social arrangements I find myself within. The depth of this is so deep, the power of this so vast, that we accept the constructs of our culture as self-evident truths. When sociologists write of religion as constructing a ‘sacred canopy’ over society they are indicating that all the dynamics that go into shaping culture are shaping our deepest identities as well, and tying those identities to the transcendent. This identification can be so deep that any questioning of those identities of culture or self, either from within the culture, or outside of it, will elicit the strongest possible response, even unto violence and death. When we begin to question the most fundamental aspects of our lives, the ones that are so deeply held they are not even conscious to us, the resultant anxiety does spawn significant resistance.

But the question still remained:

“In this, he can agree with religions critics, but the issue for Bonhoeffer is can he find a way to escape this gravity? Is there a way he can secure his faith from the truth of this critique? . . . Was there any hope for a religion that had become so vacated of anything resembling the spirit of Jesus Christ? If there was such a hope it was going to emerge only when Christianity freed itself from religion.”

messy imaginaries

Taylor again:

Where the [“progressive”] Wendovers think their judgments are unproblematically scientific and rational, many of the orthodox of the day saw this kind of apostasy in equally stark terms as the simple fruit of pride. It is related that [Mary Augusta] Ward attended the first set of Bampton Lectures in 1881, at which the speaker, himself a nephew of Wordsworth, explained the abandonment of orthodox Christianity by a number of intellectual faults, including indolence, coldness, recklessness, pride, and avarice. It was this attack which spurred Mrs. Ward to write her novel [Robert Elsmere], which would show that this was a caricature. And indeed, what emerges from the novel is that good faith and honesty can be found on all sides of this controversy, even though the story awards the ultimate palm for courage and integrity to [the “Arnoldian”] Robert.

This is a place where I might clarify further my own understanding of these conversions and deconversions. I cannot accept the Whiggish master narrative that they are determined by clear reason. They look rational within a certain framework, indeed, but this framework attracts us for a host of reasons, including ethical ones. Among the ethical attractions is certainly that of the free, invulnerable, disengaged agent. Being one of these is something in which moderns take a certain pride. But to leap from this to saying, simply, that the move from orthodoxy is actuated by pride is quite invalid. In some cases, undoubtedly. But what we’re dealing with in talking of these frameworks is complex environing backgrounds of our thought and action, which impinge on our lives in a host of ways. In one respect, yes, this modern sense of impersonal orders can give us a sense of our dignity as free agents. But it also offers us powerful ideals, of honesty and integrity, as well as of benevolence and solidarity, just to name some of the most prominent. In the whole aetiological story of how these frameworks arose, pride has its place. But in individual cases, the stories can be as many and as different as there are people who inhabit them. In some cases, for a variety of reasons, the sense of an alternative was so far off the screen, that the principal response was determined by the ideals: say, honesty, integrity, and a sense of the human potential for moral ascent. This is what one sees with T. H. Green; and this is what Mrs. Ward shows us in her protagonist.

We are in fact all acting, thinking, and feeling out of backgrounds and frameworks which we do not fully understand. To ascribe total personal responsibility to us for these is to want to leap out of the human condition. At the same time, no background leaves us utterly without room for movement and change. The realities of human life are messier than is dreamed of either by dogmatic rationalists, or in the manichean rigidities of embattled orthodoxy.

muffled resonances

Charles Taylor:

To get farther with this, and bring out more what it involves, we have to venture on some phenomenology, and this is always hazardous. How to describe this sense? Perhaps in terms like these: our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.

This is the kind of lack which can show up with adolescence, and be the origin of an identity crisis. But it can also show up later, as the basis of a “mid-life crisis”, where what previously satisfied us, gave us a sense of solidity, seems not really to match up, not to deserve what we put into it. The things which mattered up to now fail.

This is just an attempt to give some shape to a general malaise, and I recognize how questionable it is, and how many other descriptions could have been offered here. But the malaise also takes a number of more definite forms, in terms of defined issues, or felt lacks.

One way of framing this issue is in terms of “the meaning of life”, Luc Ferry’s “le sens du sens”, the basic point which gives real significance to our lives. Almost every action of ours has a point; we’re trying to get to work, or to find a place to buy a bottle of milk after hours. But we can stop and ask why we’re doing these things, and that points us beyond to the significance of these significances. The issue may arise for us in a crisis, where we feel that what has been orienting our life up to now lacks real value, weight. So a successful doctor may desert a highly paid and technically demanding position, and go off with Médecins Sans Frontières to Africa, with a sense that this is really significant. A crucial feature of the malaise of immanence is the sense that all these answers are fragile, or uncertain; that a moment may come, where we no longer feel that our chosen path is compelling, or cannot justify it to ourselves or others. There is a fragility of meaning, analogous to the existential fragility we always live with: that suddenly an accident, earthquake, flood, a fatal disease, some terrible betrayal, may jolt us off our path of life, definitively and without return. Only the fragility that I am talking about concerns the significance of it all; the path is still open, possible, supported by circumstances, the doubt concerns its worth.

darkly through the glass

Christian Wiman:

HARD NIGHT
What words or harder gift
does the light require of me
carving from the dark
this difficult tree?
What place or farther peace
do I almost see
emerging from the night
and heart of me?
The sky whitens, goes on and on.
Fields wrinkle into rows
of cotton, go on and on.
Night like a fling of crows
disperses and is gone.
What song, what home,
what calm or one clarity
can I not quite come to,
never quite see:
this field, this sky, this tree.