“If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?”
Something to keep in mind: If you want to understand what the problem is with evangelicals and “nationalism, etc.,” look no further than Psalm 11. Nearly every single thing you see or hear from that American-Christian world (and that includes the Rusty Reno Catholics), all the ‘splaining and justifying that makes up its political face, can be traced back to this problem: they are oblivious to the pure irony with which they quote that psalm. (Very few things that I have ever written or used to explain it or understand it are worth revisiting. But that little essay is.)
Mark Noll famously wrote, in one of the most unburied ledes of all time, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” That mindlessness continues apace. This particular problem, however, is hit more directly when Noll quotes Garry Wills’ 1990 book Under God:
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But, swoll’n with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…The problem with evangelical religion is not (so much) that it encroaches on politics, but that it has so carelessly neglected its own sources of wisdom. It cannot contribute what it no longer possesses.
And that is why Stanley Hauerwas says — hear this — that the most important task of the Church is to “take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America.”
Deconstruction has been one popular (though very understandable) way to escape the rot, but probably every generation of Christians in North America has been stuck with the bitter task of escaping a peculiar darkness intrinsic to American Christianity. The unpopular challenge (as Hannah Arendt also understood, in her own way) is to do it while maintaining the faith delivered, to reconstruct as much as you, however necessarily, deconstruct. And that task is right there in the 3,000-year-old Psalms.
Douthat and Catoggio below are largely approaching the same problem but from different angles (one Christian, one not). They make plenty of good sense of this mess on their own; it’ll make even more sense with Psalm 11 in mind.
And so, if Vance’s tone was that of an angry father warning his adult child to get a job or move out, Rubio’s was that of a concerned mother reminding the child that daddy’s only saying that because he loves you. “We are part of one civilization—Western civilization,” he said on Saturday. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
The only way to defend our shared culture against the forces of “civilizational erasure,” Rubio warned his audience, is for Europeans to embrace nationalism—namely, reindustrialization and tight borders rather than unfettered free trade and mass migration. If “we Americans … sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel” on that point, he added, alluding to Vance’s speech last year and Trump’s perpetual belligerence, it’s only “because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.”
[…]
For postliberals, “civilization” is measured exclusively in terms of culture, not civics; illiberal modes of government don’t affect the calculation.
Absorbing that lesson has been part of Marco Rubio’s own education in nationalism.
In 2019, the then-senator from Florida co-signed a letter warning Trump about a meeting he planned to hold with Hungarian President Viktor Orbán. “In recent years, democracy in Hungary has significantly eroded,” it read, explaining that the country “has experienced a steady corrosion of freedom, the rule of law and quality of governance. … Under Orban, the election process has become less competitive and the judiciary is increasingly controlled by the state.” Sen. Marco Rubio was offended by Hungary’s departure from Enlightenment ideals and worried that the leader of the free world was normalizing that.
Seven years later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio swung by Budapest after his speech in Munich last week to … effectively endorse Viktor Orbán for president. And he did so at a moment when Orbán’s chief opponent is promising to end Hungary’s Putinist foreign policy if elected and reestablish strong ties with Europe.
There’s no way to reconcile that endorsement with support for “Western civilization” without reading liberalism out of your definition of the latter. Orbán, Trump, and Putin are all attempting to redefine “the West” in the same basic way, dialing up their followers’ chauvinism about cultural touchstones like Christianity while dialing down liberal expectations for constraints on their own power. According to that redefinition, the Russian army rampaging across Europe would be a triumph for Western civilization, not a calamity, which probably explains Trump’s and Orbán’s rooting interests in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Reimagining the West without liberalism is a form of “civilizational erasure” all its own. How far is Marco Rubio prepared to go to enable it?
Awfully far, it seems. … Where he and Vance get the nerve to lecture foreign diplomats on their supposed betrayal of Western culture while they preside over the institutional and ethical ruin of the United States, I simply can’t imagine.
The secular mistake has been to assume that every theology tends inevitably toward the same follies and fanaticisms, and to imagine that a truly postreligious culture is even possible, let alone desirable. The religious mistake has been to fret over the threat posed by explicitly anti-Christian forces, while ignoring or minimizing the influence that the apostles of pseudo-Christianity exercise over the American soul. Along the way, both sides have embraced a wildly simplified vision of our culture, in which the children of light contend with the children of darkness, and every inch of ground is claimed by absolute truth or deplorable error.