The ‘Dangerous Inversion’

W riting in the New York Times, my colleague Nate Hochman argues that the era of what we used to call the Religious Right has passed. There are a half a dozen minor points that I might argue with in his essay, but it seems to me that he is entirely correct to observe that “the new coalition is focused on questions of national identity, social integrity, and political alienation.” He goes on to note that:

Although it enjoys the support of most Republican Christians who formed the electoral backbone of the old Moral Majority, it is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, revolving around race relations, identity politics, immigration, and the teaching of American history. . . .

Today’s right-wing culture warriors think in distinctly Marxian terms: a class struggle between a proletarian base of traditionalists and a powerful public-private bureaucracy that is actively hostile to the American way of life.

What has happened is that the Christian sense of collective identity has persisted even among those hollowed-out Christians who have abandoned Christian orthodoxy, reducing the Christian confession to a demographic box to check, one of many constituent parts of an American “national identity.” Never mind, for the moment, that one of the hallmarks of the authentic American identity is approaching Christian orthodoxy and Christian observance with a seriousness that brushes up against fanaticism: The story of the United States does not begin with the arrival of the first slave, as the 1619 Project would argue, but with the arrival of the first Separatist. And never mind that the American credo is a theological proposition (“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”). The Christianity of politically engaged Christians is vague, but this vague sense of Christianity will do well enough to bolster equally vague notions of tradition and national identity. Modern Americans have long preferred vagueness and sentimentality to the clarity of theology or the rigors of ideology, which is why Kirkian conservatism (“the negation of ideology”) remains the most long-enduring habit and first instinct of American political thought.

(The beauty of Kirkian conservatism for the vague-minded is that you can take up the banner without ever reading all the way through one of Russell Kirk’s books — or, indeed, even cracking one open.)

For a century or so, Americans have had friends and countrymen who are “culturally Jewish.” We know what that means: a Jewish sense of communal identity bound to that vague American religious sensibility that sits somewhere between Protestant and agnostic — not atheistic, but operatively secular. I have not heard many Catholics call themselves “culturally Catholic” — Catholics who have given up Catholicism mostly just continue to call themselves “Catholic,” with the “cultural” qualifier being understood. In the case of Catholics, the communal identity is not in the end religious at all but is instead only the detritus of immigrant ethnic identities that have been dissolved in the hot soup of modernity. Conservatives used to be the ones who preferred the “melting pot” model of communal life to ethnic and religious particularism, but the rightist element Hochman writes about has, to some considerable degree, abandoned that. And so we have that new thing, the “cultural Christian.” I believe the first time I ever heard the term used was by Richard Spencer, the white nationalist, who found his parents’ Episcopalianism insufficiently invigorating.

But the pilgrims did not arrive on these shores for reasons of culture and tradition — indeed, they had previously abandoned their homeland to live among foreigners who shared neither their faith nor their culture nor their language. No, the pilgrims set up their colonies in New England because they took their Christian orthodoxy so seriously that they could not abide by one of the central pillars of their national identity: the too-aptly named Church of England. The pilgrims became Americans because they were Christians — it wasn’t the other way around.

Evangelicals, particularly white Evangelicals, are an important part of the new coalition that was formed around the campaign and cult of Donald Trump, but Christian thinking per se plays almost no role in that cult. Indeed, it would be very difficult for these Christians if it were otherwise: Donald Trump is an idolator and a heretic, a blasphemer and a perpetrator of sacrilege, and much more. Trump himself obviously does not know any better, never having received any meaningful religious instruction, but the pastors who have taken up his cause really ought to know better, and the worst of them do. Trump the leering libertine and tabloid agoniste was just about bearable in the happy-go-lucky 1980s, but Trump the 21st-century pseudo-Calvinist is another matter entirely. Trump claimed to be affiliated with Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, but the church reported during the 2016 campaign that Trump was not actually a member, though its ministers had presided at several of his weddings. Marble Collegiate is the right church for mushy-headed populists: It is famous for being the pulpit of Norman Vincent Peale, whose The Power of Positive Thinking is consumer-grade American vagueness.

One must wonder what Trump’s devout Evangelical adherents make of his attachment to Marble Collegiate. Per Wikipedia, “The church takes an LGBT-welcoming, open and affirming approach to same-gender relationships and non-cisgender identities. This includes the performing of same-sex marriage ceremonies, a designated queer fellowship, annual participation in the NYC Pride parade and sermons and material on the church website encouraging a historical-critical view of Scripture in opposition to the conservative belief in Biblical Inerrancy.” Not exactly Cotton Mather. But that is the sort of thing that matters only if you take your religion seriously as a religion, rather than as a cultural token. If, on the other hand, “Christian” is just an entry requirement necessary to secure one’s membership in the Good Americans Club, then any old church will do.

“Old news,” will come the reply. “The Trump movement has moved on from Trump.” I do not think that is entirely true or even close to being true, but, even if it were true, it wouldn’t make much difference insofar as the foot-soldiers of the faction that made a mascot of Trump will carry their bad ideas — and their irreligiosity and their immorality — with them as they go forward, irrespective of what kind of mascot they end up rallying around next.

While the Kirkian conservatives are busy not reading Kirk, they also are busy not reading T. S. Eliot, whose thinking formed the terminus of Kirk’s most famous book, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Eliot grappled with questions of identity and meaning in a particularly Christian way, and, like many of the Christian writers of his generation, did so against the backdrop of the rising twin paganisms of National Socialism and Soviet Socialism. Now, once again, those who are dissatisfied with the liberal consensus look for an alternative in two models of state cults: the Chinese Communist Party and the reactionary identitarianism of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, et al.

In many of the details and in all of the angst, Eliot could have been writing today:

Sometimes we are almost persuaded that we are getting on very nicely, with a reform

here and a reform there, and would have been getting on still better, if only foreign governments did not insist upon breaking all the rules and playing what is really a different  game. What is more depressing still is the thought that only fear or jealousy of foreign success can alarm us about the health of our own nation; that only through this anxiety can we see such things as depopulation, malnutrition, moral deterioration, the decay of agriculture, as evils at all.

And what is worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not because it is true, but because it might be beneficial. . . . [We] experienced a wave of revivalism which should teach us that folly is not the prerogative of any one political party or any one religious communion, and that hysteria is not the privilege of the uneducated. The Christianity expressed has been vague, the religious fervor has been a fervor for democracy. It may engender nothing better than a disguised and peculiarly sanctimonious nationalism, accelerating our progress towards the paganism which we say we abhor.

To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion; and we may reflect, that a good deal of the attention of totalitarian states has been devoted, with a steadiness of purpose not always found in democracies, to providing their national life with a foundation of morality — the wrong kind perhaps, but a good deal more of it. It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.

Eliot’s “dangerous inversion” is very much the model for the intersection of religion with politics in our time: Religion is, and is almost universally assumed to be, the junior partner. Christianity is valuable, we are told, because it is useful — because it makes for better citizens and families, and for a happier and healthier society, and because it crowds out all the other competing bases for providing a shared national moral and ethical sensibility. Some of our friends and allies recall one or two sentences from John Adams observing that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people” and conclude, in a reliably vague way, that anything sufficiently “traditional” will serve to satisfy Adams’s criterion.

What remains is, as Hochman observes “a social conservatism rather than a religious one.” But a social conservatism founded on and oriented toward what? Combine two of Hochman’s astute observations — that this faction bases its politics on a Marxian class-warfare model and that its main issues are race, identity, immigration, and political control of the education system — and you have your answer: a model of emerging right-wing politics that is, after all these years, almost everything that left-wing caricaturists hoped it would be. It offers bigotry for religion, propaganda for education, “tradition” that is only pious camouflage for the political-power-seeking of a self-interested class that understands itself in largely (though not exclusively) racial terms.

The Christianity of religious conservatives must be debased to accommodate this agenda, because this agenda is incompatible with Christian morality and Christianity’s universalist assumptions. If you raise this point, you can be confident that you will be met with ironic posturing, which is a sure sign of moral cowardice and a surer sign that, in spite of their posturing, those who would use “cultural Christianity” as a political tool understand that their ambitions are incompatible with unqualified Christianity — incompatible with the real thing. Endowing us good Americans with unalienable rights is not the only thing the Creator has ever done.

“It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.” And it is the truth — not the electorate, not a filibuster-proof majority, not The Power of Positive Thinking — that shall make you free.