It’s Not Christians vs. “Secularists”…

..but a quarrel within the Christian tradition. That is at the heart of the argument historian Tom Holland makes in his book DOMINION. Indeed, as he documents with verve, the very concept of “the secular” is an idea that arises entirely out of the Christian tradition. And so far from it being a shield against Christianity, it is one of the primary ways Christian civilization has propagated itself to non-Christian cultures. That’s why, when those cultures want to get away from western influences, they throw off secularity and reassert, not atheism, but their own religious traditions. It’s what Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, ISIS, and the Iranian Revolution have in common.

This is particularly surprising to Americans who imagine their secularism and even their atheism to be the opposite of Christianity in the US–and it is equally surprising to their conservative Christian foes who are blind to the enormous revolutionary power of the gospel and to the repeated concussive revolutionary explosions it has set off throughout history:

As a result, Holland sees (and is right in seeing) virtually every culture war hot spot in American culture, not as a war between “secularists” and Christians, but as a civil war within the Christian tradition.

Christianity, especially in the United States, is often associated with conservatism. After all, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has spoken to us through the law and the prophets and ultimately through Jesus. Some “conservative” political positions seem to line up with the biblical story, as do ideals like authority, community, freedom, tradition and high moral standards.

But the same God is the God of the New Covenant, who is making all things new. This God is love, and is deeply concerned with justice, compassion, equality, young people and his creation.

If you find troubling the idea that God is neither strictly conservative nor strictly progressive, that might be worth reflecting on.

But this also illustrates Tom Holland’s thesis: the culture wars of the modern West are really a Christian civil war.

A Christian civil war

Of course, Holland does not mean that everyone in the West unknowingly believes that Jesus rose from the dead. He means instead that the values, assumptions and vocabulary of both “conservatism” and “progressivism” are inextricably Christian.

He illustrates the point with two analogies. First, Holland thought that Christian values are like the water we swim in. Over time he came to prefer the image of a nuclear bomb, with radioactivity breathed in long after and far away from the initial explosion.

A popular historian of classical antiquity, Holland was always captivated by the power and glamour of the ancient world. “If I thought about Jesus in front of Pontius Pilate,” he recalls, “I was wholly on the side of Pontius Pilate.” The eagles, togas, power and glamour of Rome were attractive to Holland in his youth.

But the longer Holland’s imagination inhabited a world unmediated by Christian assumptions, the more “alien and frightening” it felt.

Beginning with the sense that the modern West remained profoundly shaped by the pre-Christian influences of classical antiquity, Holland now believes that our Greek and Roman inheritance has been mediated almost entirely through Christianity. In fact, he says, “Compressed within [Paul’s] letters … is pretty much everything that makes Western society today distinctive. You can trace almost everything back to these.”

A Christian comeback

Holland even thinks Christian assumptions have been subtly “making a comeback” over his three decades of writing books. Whatever our opinions on them individually, Holland says modern social movements, like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, anti-colonialism and the gay rights movement, taking their lead from the American civil rights movement of Martin Luther King Jr., rest on “profoundly Christian” assumptions.

“Why do we think it’s wrong for very powerful men to sexually abuse their ‘inferiors’? Why do we think it’s wrong for powerful states to throw their weight around? None of these questions would’ve made any sense at all in the pre-Christian world.”

Accordingly, almost no one thought to question the condemnation of Harvey Weinstein, despite sexual violence being the pre-Christian historical norm, because modern Western culture is so intimately shaped by Judeo-Christian sexual ethics.

This is well-illustrated elsewhere by the weird way in which the MAGA cult is permitted to say things in Christianese jargon that it condemns when brown (or poor) Christians say them:

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1. God Shed His Wrath On Thee

Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House, might represent the party of Great Patriots™ but he sure doesn’t seem to think America is that great. Last week, Rolling Stone reported on remarks he made on a livestream only a few weeks before he flopped into the speakership and well . . . go ahead and read it for yourself:

“This is an inflection point. We are at a civilizational moment. The only question is: Is God going to allow our nation to enter a time of judgment for our collective sins which his mercy and grace have held back for some time or is he gonna give us one more chance to restore the foundation, to return to Him? . . . We will not be able to do it without the Lord’s help, because the flesh and the mistrust, and the sin and everything is so great here that this is going to have to bring people to their knees.”

This livestream—a “prayer call” via Zoom with a right-wing Christian network that Johnson is closely associated with—took place on October 3, just hours before Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the speakership, so the turmoil in the House is the backdrop of Johnson’s remarks. At one point, his interlocutor, the pastor Jim Garlow, asks: Could this be a time of judgment for America? Johnson’s reply:

“You all know the terrible state that we’re in. . . . The faith in our institutions is the lowest it’s ever been in the history of our nation. The culture is so dark and depraved that it almost seems irredeemable at this point. The church attendance in America dropped below 50 percent for the first time in our history since they began to measure the data sixty years ago. And the number of people who do not believe in absolute truth is now above the majority for the first time. One in three teen girls contemplated suicide last year. One in four high school students identify as something other than straight. We’re losing the country.”

So there you go. The speaker of the House thinks that the prevalence of American teen bisexuals is a sign America is so depraved that it deserves God’s judgment and the best we can hope for is that he shows us mercy.

Doesn’t sound like a country Johnson can be proud of to me. In fact it sounds like he thinks America as it actually exists is shit and deserves what it gets (maybe that’s why he’s for Trump?).

What Johnson is offering is not some rhetorical innovation, of course. There has been a long tradition of eschatological fundamentalism among the political influencers on Christian Right. But this type of rhetoric from a leading GOP politician is still a notable departure from the “shining city on a hill” and “America: Fuck Yeah” culture of my childhood GOP.

And that’s where this gets interesting. Because the reaction to these comments and how it compares to another man of God who had a similar analysis of America’s scriptural health provides a telling insight to the state of politics in America.1

2. ‘God Damn America’

Back in the halcyon days of 2008 the political world went into upheaval when video leaked showing then-candidate Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, giving a sermon in which he said: “God damn America.”

To be honest, when Johnson’s remarks called this speech to mind, I couldn’t remember a single line in Wright’s sermon besides that one. And when I went back to find it, I was reminded that Wright said and did a lot of other objectionable shit that merited criticism but which isn’t relevant here. (Here’s Salon editor Joan Walsh with a contemporaneous and fair-minded liberal critique of Wright if you are interested. NB: Joan was awesome in our Sunday interview a few weeks ago if you haven’t watched).

But for present purposes, I want to set aside the other (deserved) criticisms and just focus on the “God damn America” sermon. Here is a good chunk of it:

“And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.” No, no, no. Not “God Bless America”; God Damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme! The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent. . . .2

But I’m fitting to help you one last time. Let me tell you something. Where governments fail, God never fails. When God says it, it’s done. God never fails. When God wills it, you better get out the way. ’Cause God never fails. When God fixes it, oh believe me, it’s fixed. God never fails. Somebody right now, you think you can’t make it, but I want you to know you are more than a conqueror, through Christ you can do all things, through Christ who strengthens you.”

In one sense there is an overarching similarity in Johnson’s and Wright’s observations. Both men believe that America is sinful and needs to turn to God. Both explore the possibility that we deserve his judgment. And both express optimism that through God we can be redeemed. But the differences are more interesting than the similarities.

Johnson is saying that the American people are sick, present tense. That our culture is dark and irredeemable. That non-binary youth and people not attending church are causing us to fall from grace.

Wright argued that our government is sick. That those in power have marginalized certain groups and failed them.

Johnson is damning the American people, while Wright is damning the American government. So if you were inclined to be offended by one of these statements on behalf of our nation’s honor and dignity, on its face it seems Johnson’s critique was more sweeping and censorious.

But only if you dismiss the racial subtext.

In the dominant American culture, black men aren’t given the same leeway to criticize America that whites are. A white Christian patriot can talk about how things in America have gone to shit because of our sinfulness and his fellow white Christian patriots understand that they are not the ones being criticized. The connotation in his remarks does not point the finger at themselves or at the foundational core of the nation. Johnson is saying that Those People Over There Are Taking America Away From God. “We” are losing the country to “them.”

The “them” might be gays or critical race theorists or people with nose rings or liberals or Jews or Bud Light PR reps or woke teachers or atheists or someone else entirely depending on the day. But the not-quite-explicitly-spoken-but-completely-understood argument is: They are bad. We have done nothing. We are being punished for their sins.

So for Johnson’s allies there is nothing to be upset about in this condemnation of America, obviously. And Johnson’s foes don’t really care much about the moral judgment of someone they find morally repulsive.

But when a black pastor damns America that’s a different ball of wax.

For Wright to say that these actions of the American government are fundamentally sinful hits at the heart of the national story, ego, and identity.

His point, which white America heard loud and clear, is that we should feel shame about our country’s past and the way we’ve treated our citizens. When white Americans heard “God damn America” it was not just a critique of the government (though it was that), but a reminder that Americans should feel ashamed about something that many feel is central to their identity. Wright was not merely saying that America did bad things via its government but that we ourselves in some sense are bad. For a little dime-store psychotherapy: This is the difference between guilt and shame and Wright is going straight at it.

Nobody likes to be told to feel shame. Especially when their subconscious knows they—or in this case their country—might be guilty. And this becomes even more acute when it is about something that defines their sense of self.

This, in addition to crass political considerations, is why the response to Wright was apoplectic.

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Again and again, white Christian Nationalism tells the perfectly Christian prophetic voices in the communities they like to oppress that brown people should be ‘”grateful” for what America has “given” them, all while shrieking that America is “taking” from white Christian Nationalists what is theirs by divine gift and it is their absolute right to yell and scream in protest at the oppression white Christian nationaliststs are suffering by having to do things like pay taxes, make provision for the common good by wearing masks during a pandemic, show consideration for their neighbors and children by enacting sane environmental policies, or face their long history of benefitting from the structural inequalities that keep their neighbors down. This is achieved by simply reducing the communitarian ethos that is at the core of the Christian moral tradition to a few pelvic issues that don’t get in the way of Republicans shagging porn stars, all while utterly ignoring and denying the abuses of power and money that are, overwhelmingly, the focus of Jesus’ actual moral preaching.

The result is two fragments of the Christian tradition at war. One portion of it, so-called “secularists”, are no longer aware that their moral presuppositions about the dignity of the human persons are deeply rooted in the gospel and the other portion is unwittingly doing all it can possibly do to make sure the “secularists” they regard as their enemies never discover the connection since the Greatest Christians of All Time now regard huge swaths of the gospel as Komminnissism and are stone blind to the fact that most of the people they regard as Damn Libruls are, at the end of the day, begging for Christians to show them Christ.

Indeed, the patristic tradition of the Church is crammed with stuff that would make most Reactionaries throw up their hands in despair at the Great Liberal Apostasy if they only knew about it:

However, being almost entirely ignorant of it, Reactionaries are now at open war with the so-called “Red Pope” for reminding us of what the Saviors of the Church from the Pope have jettisoned in their conviction that Libertarianism is the Tradition and the GOP is the Magisterium and as long as you vote Republican, hate the gays, rub your Precious Feet pin, and cultivate a taste for the Latin Mass, nothing else matters.