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Cult Figures
Conservatives used to say: “America is a Christian nation.” Everybody knows what they meant by that, even if many people pretended not to understand. We are not a country with a national church or a national faith. We are — or were — a “Christian nation” in the sense that the United States grew out of a Christian civilization and found its political basis in Anglo-Protestant liberalism. The Founding Fathers and the influential men of the Founding generation were — like almost everybody else in the colonial era — almost exclusively Protestant Christians, albeit Protestant Christians of varying degrees of orthodoxy and observance. Thomas Jefferson’s religious eccentricities are well-known, and George Washington, a parish vestryman, rarely entered a church once his public career no longer required it of him. Back when the states had established churches, there was never any practical possibility that any of them would have been anything other than Christian. None of this necessarily argues that Christianity should have some special place in American political life beyond the predominance that comes naturally to a religion that still speaks, at least notionally, for two out of three American adults. In that sense, to say that America is a Christian nation should be no more controversial than to say that France is a European nation. Japan is Japanese, even though not everyone who lives in Japan is ethnically Japanese, of Japanese origin, born in Japan, or even a Japanese citizen.
But even though 65 percent of U.S. adults identify themselves as Christian, I am no longer convinced that Christianity is the dominant religious faith of the United States. What most of us profess may be Christianity, but what Americans corporately practice is an imperial cult, a religion that puts the state and its officers at the center not only of national political life but national moral and spiritual life. I do not know many Americans, including very devout Christians, who are losing any sleep about the filioque or transubstantiation, and nobody who is much interested in dispensationalism other than those with a professional interest in the subject.
But there are millions of Americans, tens of millions and maybe more than 100 million, who grieve, lament, and despair when they believe that the wrong man has become president of these United States. Just at the moment, many of those many grieving millions are people who believe themselves to be devout Christians. You’d think that these Bible-reading people would know a golden calf when they see one.
Here is an example of the sort of thing I am talking about, from Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician who is going to run for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania, a state with which he has only the lightest of connections. The good doctor spells out his political agenda thus: “I’m here to promise you one thing: I am going to help reignite the divine spark inside every American and empower us to live better lives.”
Set aside the comical notion of this ridiculous dork taking over for Pat Toomey — what in hell does that gibberish even hope to mean?
Dr. Oz is a fairly interesting figure on the religion front. He is a Muslim of Turkish background, and served in the Turkish army. There was a split in his family between the more traditionalist Islam practiced on his father’s side and the more secular attitude of his mother’s family. He married into a family of Swedenborgians — more on them in a second — and his mother-in-law is a minister in a Swedenborgian sect. When Dr. Oz decided to run for the Pennsylvania seat, he needed an address in Pennsylvania, and the one he chose is in the town of Bryn Athyn, which is the center of the Swedenborgian church. That is probably a matter of pure convenience — Dr. Oz’s address in Pennsylvania is his in-laws’ home — but his association with the Swedenborgian church (or cult, as many Christians would have it) is more than a matter of convenience. He has spoken in interviews about his embrace of Swedenborgian beliefs and his incorporation of what he describes as a Swedenborgian approach to patient relations in his medical practice.
The main contemporary organ of Swedenborgianism is the Bryn Athyn–based General Church of the New Jerusalem, which operates Bryn Athyn College. (Bryn is Welsh for “hill,” as in nearby Bryn Mawr.) Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a mystic who claimed to have special revelations and a unique personal commission from Jesus Christ to reform Christian doctrine. He published an influential book called Heaven and Hell (which is not just a great Ronnie James Dio song!) in 1758. The Swedenborgian churches established in the United States (the General Church of the New Jerusalem is an offshoot from an earlier sect) were part of that great 19th-century burst of religious entrepreneurialism in the United States, which gave us everything from Mormons to Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, Disciples of Christ/Church of Christ, and the Southern Baptist Convention. (The late-18th-century split of the Methodists from the Church of England was a portent of this effervescence.) The spirit of capitalism was very much at work in the church-planting sector in those years. The United States is still probably the best place in the world to start a technology company or a cult.
(The word cult, as Cultish author Amanda Montell reminds us, comes with heavy emotional baggage and no generally agreed-upon definition. I don’t intend to use it here in a derogatory way. There’s an old joke that a religion is a cult plus time and money. I’m sure the Swedenborgians are very nice people. Similarly, I can’t see joining the Mormon church, but I want to have Mormon neighbors.)
Why did Americans start all those churches? The New World was vast beyond the comprehension of the first pilgrims who landed in New England, and Americans were very far removed from Canterbury — to say nothing of Rome or Jerusalem. As waves of revivalism and awakenings convulsed North America beginning in the early 18th century, it was only natural that believers would start looking for local seats of power and meaning — the First Great Awakening was arguably the first truly “national” experience of the American colonies and an important factor leading to the American Revolution. Here, we can blame the Puritans, at least a little bit: By rejecting church hierarchy and episcopal authority, insisting upon the ability of every properly educated believer to interpret Scripture for himself, they created cultural conditions that almost guaranteed the kind of religious innovation — the start-up mentality — that would lead to the vast multiplication of what they would have recoiled from in horror as heresies. This is deeply embedded in American culture: Our first public-education law, which bears the splendid name of the Old Deluder Satan Act, was written with a mind toward educating Christians up to a level that would allow them to engage directly with Scripture, thereby (the thinking went) giving them an intellectual inoculation against European popery and Anglican crypto-popery. The Puritan enthusiasm for Hebrew came from the same source — not, alas, from any particular tender feeling toward Jews, and Puritan clergy were educated in Greek, where possible, for the same reason.
Armed with literacy and a smattering of theology, looking upon the vastness of America, culturally alienated and physically distant from the institutions of British and European Christianity, Americans looked for spiritual anchors. And unlike their British and European cousins, those Americans did not have monarchies and other ancient institutions to which they might cling. Having ceased to think of themselves as essentially British, they were not part of an ancient nation with a deep foundation in blood and soil. Americans are a particular people — much more so than we often appreciate — but they are not a particular people defined by a shared ethnic history, which is why a Korean can become American but an American cannot become Korean, even if he moves to Korea, speaks Korean, takes Korean citizenship, etc. A big piece of our national identity is a set of generally shared political beliefs (incorporating a religious premise: that men are endowed with their unalienable rights not by the state but by God) and political documents (the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) which have for us a totemic character as well as legal and political significance.
And so, from the very beginning, we were in a peculiar position: that of a nation founded in religious ferment but having political documents and a shared political faith as central elements in our national character. France is on its Fifth Republic, there was an England long before there existed what we now call the United Kingdom, there was an Italian nation long before there was an Italian state, the Chinese people have had many different forms of governmental organization, etc., but the United States isn’t really the United States without the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Politics in the United States is culture war — inevitably.
Depending on how you count, the United States has either a few hundred or several thousand Christian denominations — and there are millions of self-professed American Christians who are associated with no particular church, practicing their own eccentric choose-your-own-adventure models of Christianity, and, beyond there, is the one-third of Americans profess either some other religion or no religion. What that means (among other things) is that Americans looking for a national basis of spiritual and ceremonial life cannot find one in any particular religious mode except one: the imperial cult. Of course, we don’t call our state cult that (or even generally acknowledge the imperialistic and sacramental qualities of the state), and we don’t acknowledge it directly the way the Romans do or even indirectly the way the English do by making their monarch the head of their national church. (National churches are always and everywhere in the Christian world the spiritual wreckage of earlier efforts to reconstitute pagan imperial cults.) But if you doubt that we have a genuine state cult, ask yourself how it is that a man running for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania can launch his campaign by promising to “reignite the divine spark” without getting laughed across the river back to Delaware?
Instead of laughing at this sort of thing, it is precisely what Americans expect of Senate candidates, House candidates, gubernatorial candidates, and, above all, would-be presidents. Joel Osteen and David Remnick both have written about the “Joshua Generation”; Osteen’s sermon was about Christian devotion, while the Reverend Remnick’s New Yorker homily was about Barack Obama.
Every presidential candidate has, for years, promised that his election would lead to a national spiritual revival. Sometimes, the restorationist thinking it put into obvious language (“Make America Great Again”) and sometimes it is part of an explicitly messianic campaign (looking at you, Barack Obama), but it is an element even of the campaigns of such modest republicans as the late Bob Dole, who, no less than Barack Obama or Donald Trump, sought moral histrionics from the American people, demanding “Where’s the outrage?” and offering himself as the necessary instrument (and personification) of their righteous wrath.
(This is not a slight to Bob Dole: The debased Republican Party of 2021 would have to hike up a very steep and difficult hill to look him in the eye. Bob Dole may have ended his days selling credit cards and erection pills, but next to Lindsey Graham he looks like Abraham Lincoln.)
My friend and colleague Jay Nordlinger, reading Dr. Oz’s “divine spark” nonsense, did a very fine job suppressing an eye-roll that no doubt would have seemed like a bit much if Linda Blair had done it in The Exorcist. “Isn’t anyone willing to balance the budget?” he asked.
The difference between a Republican who says that he is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and a Republican who says that he’s going to balance the budget is that somebody might believe the first guy.
A nation that looks to its politicians to provide spiritual nourishment needs that nourishment badly — and it is going to starve.
It is also going to face endless political disappointment and misgovernment. It is important to bring the right tool to the job: Bananas are great, but you can’t hammer in a nail with one.
Words About Words
Peter Lake, the chairman of the Texas Public Utilities Commission, tried to reassure Texans that there would be no repeat of last winter’s catastrophic power-grid failure, saying: “It’s hard to understate how much reform we have implemented in such a short amount of time.”
I do hope that he did not mean what he said.
What Lake meant to say — I hope! — is that it would be hard to overstate how much reform Texas has implemented since last winter. But what he actually said is that it would be hard to understate that, meaning that it would be difficult to describe the PUC’s progress as less than it actually is, implying that not very much had been done. (The question of how much actually has been done is beyond my scope here, though I will say I am skeptical of Lake’s claims.)
This is one of those things that we often get backward, probably because the word cannot mixes us up. Writing in That August Journalistic Institution some years ago, Barbara Wallraff suggested:
Cannot understate and cannot overstate are like architectural elements in an M.C. Escher drawing: if you like, you can flip-flop them in your mind. The trick is done by cannot, which has two meanings. Think of Parson Weems’s tale in which the young George Washington declared, “I can’t tell a lie.” Of course Washington was physically capable of uttering a false statement; by can’t, he meant he chose not to. Can’t, or cannot, can mean something very much like must not — and if it means that, cannot understate the importance of makes sense.
For comparison, consider: You can’t take it for granted or You can’t pretend you don’t see it. Of course you can — what’s being said is you shouldn’t.
The opposite of this is at work in phrases such as can’t be too careful, which means, “You should be extraordinarily cautious” rather than, “You should not go overboard with the caution.” Can’t be too in that case means that excess is practically impossible. The same holds for You can’t be too rich or too thin.
I do hope that, come February, I am not reporting to you that Peter Lake was more right than he knew.
Some more words about words . . .
In the film Carrington, the screenwriter Christopher Hampton had the difficult task of writing dialogue for the famously sharp Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians. One of the most memorable lines comes when Strachey is lamenting his lack of achievement in life: “I’m obscure, decrepit, terrified, ill-favored, penniless, and fond of adjectives.”
Rampant Prescriptivism
A while back, I was watching the (very enjoyable) new film The Harder They Fall, and I found myself wondering how old the great British-born actor Delroy Lindo is. He is a sprightly 69, as it turns out, but he is one of those actors who seems to have looked approximately the same age for a very long time. (The qualifiers can get a little complicated: Lindo was born in the United Kingdom to parents from Jamaica. He is a black Anglo American in the same sense that Elon Musk is a white African American.) He is a great talent, one of those guys who plays a lot of very different characters but makes each of those characters feel like the role was written for him. Which, I imagine, in at least some cases, it is.
Anyway, I was thinking of another Delroy Lindo role, that of the entrepreneurial mob enforcer in Get Shorty, who has this to say about Rampant Prescriptivism as applied to screenwriting:
There’s nothin’ to know. You have an idea, you write down what you wanna say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and sh** where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words, although I’ve seen scripts where I know words weren’t spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it at all. So I don’t think it’s too important. Anyway, you come to the last page you write in ‘Fade out’ and that’s the end. You’re done.
I am always a little surprised by how many intelligent and well-educated people — including graduates of Ivy League colleges — have trouble with precisely that question: where to put the commas.
One of the rules of grammar you surely have heard repeating a million times is: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction joining two independent clauses. The simpler way of saying that is: Use a comma before “and” or another conjunction where you have the makings of a complete sentence on both sides. E.g.: “He asked for a favor, and I was happy to help.” “It was cold outside, so I put on a coat.” “Jerry ran, and Tom chased him.” Etc. You don’t use a comma when you don’t have the makings of a complete sentence on both sides, as when you have two verbs sharing the same subject: “I got up early and went for a hike,” not “I got up early, and went for a hike.”
Send your language questions to TheTuesday@NationalReview.Com
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Recommended
Amanda Montell, the linguist mentioned above, has a podcast called Sounds Like a Cult. You might enjoy it.
Beast News
Waiting in ambush:
In Closing
During the 2008–09 financial crisis, I generally opposed the bailouts, and many New York financial types who disagreed with me insisted that, without intervention, the financial-services sector would more or less cease to exist. I didn’t believe that and still don’t. As I told my Wall Street friends at the time, I am confident that moneylending will always be with us, because anything old enough to be the subject of an Old Testament prohibition is built to last. Every time I write about our weird idolatrous attitude toward presidents and other politicians, I can’t help but think the same thing.
If a progressive is someone who believes that there is no such thing as human nature, maybe a conservative is someone who believes that there is really no such thing as human progress — that, in spite of our technological wonders and vast abundance, we are basically the same savages we have always been, barely improved monkeys requiring education and civilization anew every generation. As Hannah Arendt once put it: “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians — we call them ‘children’.”
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