ADSX: Day Thirty-Seven
Jasmine's Boyfriend Takes a Rest, but The Road Goes Ever On and On
It’s hard to believe that it’s already been over a month since we wrapped ADS Tour X, and I am sure some of you may be—like me—wondering where it all went. I apologize for the hiatus this last month; we did have to cut the trip short by a couple of days, and (speaking of wondering where all the time went) when I returned home I immediately dove back into getting our eldest son ready to start college. So thank you for sticking around for every fit and start of this mysterious journey.
I mentioned way back on day one that I was thinking a lot about this phenomenon we are calling “Christian Nationalism,” and on Tour Ten I was looking for counter-narratives, shapes of religious life that do not conform to this peculiarly American form of civil religion.
“…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
—George Eliot
“Christian Nationalism” is still very much in the news at the moment, particularly in the figure of one particular member of the current administration who embodies both Christian Nationalism and reactionary defense of Lost Cause Confederate memory, who has decided against all good sense and historical scholarship to return the Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery. That these two ideologies would so powerfully collide in one person is not at all an accident. More on that later.
For a while now, I have been uneasy with the term “Christian Nationalism” itself as a label for this particular phenomenon. As I have said before, I do not want to let Christianity off the hook tout court, since Christians of many denominations bear some responsibility for either creating or enabling it. But something about the term seems inapposite.
“American Biblicist Nationalism” would be a better, but not perfect, term for the phenomenon we call “Christian Nationalism.” That phenomenon is based on a particular, selective, and very American way of reading the Bible, but is not recognizably Christian in a meaningful sense.
A good way to test if a movement or ideology is Christian in a meaningful sense is to ask, “does this movement or ideology need to refer to the person of Jesus Christ?” or, “does the storied person—incarnation, ministry, Passion, and resurrection—of Jesus substantially inform this movement or ideology?”
Or, “Can the vision of Christian Nationalists be communicated accurately without mentioning the story of Christ?” Even more simply, “does Christian Nationalism need Jesus?”It’s clear to me, at least, that the answer to the last question is emphatically “No.”
Hence “American Biblicist Nationalism:” it needs the Bible but it does not need Jesus Christ.1
I know I have not typically engaged directly in the political fracas de l'heure, but it’s hard not to these days. The South and its history—and by extension the history of the nation—is increasingly up for grabs in an approaching sesquicentennial year and under an administration intent on making national history conform to the pathological insecurities of its leader. You will have read lately of the President’s intention to review all exhibits under the purview of the Smithsonian Institution in the interest of “getting rid of woke” from the reservoirs of national memory. See for yourself the initial inventory of offending items, published by the White House two days ago. It’s chilling.
It’s all of a piece with a protracted campaign of cultural warfare going back half a century at least. What was once “political correctness” became, in the last decade, “CRT” and now, because apparently we live in an age too lazy to identify its bogeymen with anything more than three or four letters, simply “WOKE.” As a rule, the Brand Names for these au courant avatars of cultural fears tend to be as long as the amount of time their enemies devote to thinking seriously about the phenomena they supposedly represent.
This ongoing controversy about national history—roughly summarized as a contest between the 1619 Project and the “1776 Commission”—is especially within the wheelhouse of The Detourist and A Deeper South, since the importance of an honest mode of national self-reflection has been one of my main themes for nearly a decade now. One could describe the Trump Administration’s intent “to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions" as propaganda masquerading as history, except that it’s not even making a pretense of masquerading. It is a nakedly propagandistic attempt to tell the story of ourselves that we would most like to believe. But not all of our selves.
It’s not the only recent news item that intersects with my work here. Last week in a speech in Peachtree City, Georgia, a mostly-white planned community established in 1959, thirty-six miles south of Atlanta, Vice President J.D. Vance said that “I don't know why we accepted that it was reasonable to have crazy people yelling at our kids. You should not have to cross the street in downtown Atlanta to avoid a crazy person yelling at your family.”2
I am not especially in favor of crazy people yelling at my kids, especially when they are yelling from behind a podium emblazoned with the Great Seal of the United States. It’s hardly necessary to point out Vance’s prodigious ignorance—everyone knows that no one walks in downtown Atlanta. But in seriousness: panhandling is not a new problem in downtown Atlanta, and it certainly didn’t begin with the previous administration. And forget that most residents of Peachtree City are not likely to drive to downtown Atlanta to go out to dinner; the barely-coded rhetoric is familiar enough by now. But the moment reminded me of one hidden life.
I once met one of those “crazy people” on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta, my hometown. His name was Mustafa. He had been in prison for stabbing his sister’s boyfriend in the neck. While in prison, he learned to make rosaries as a form of penance. He used these heavy black cubic beads, as if each bead were a box densely weighted with grace. I bought one of them from him for $20, and it is one of the most beautiful objects ever to have found me.
This week, you can get a copy of A Deeper South at 40% off as part of The University of South Carolina Press’ Back to School Sale. Use discount code JBACK25 when you order here.
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I use the term “biblicist” as opposed to “biblical,” because the former denotes a severely literalist mode of reading Scripture that is a relatively recent invention within Christian history. “Biblical” interpretation going back to the early church practiced a mode of reading that 1) thought of the “literal” sense as thicker and more layered than the modern literalistic mode does, because as St. Gregory the Great said, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery.” 2) This ancient mode of reading—drawing upon a long Jewish tradition of Midrash—understood that interpreting Scripture only ad litteram (“according to the letter”) was to misunderstand it. As St Augustine of Hippo wrote, “Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although ‘they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.’” (1 Tim. 1:7)
Peachtree City is a pretty fascinating place in its own right, and probably worth writing about more in the future. Mark Reinberger has called it “the most pioneer, the most do it yourself of the 1960s American new towns. Like others of its class, it embodied utopian thinking, constituting something of an anomaly for its place and time and even though its utopian qualities would be tempered by its later history” (“Peachtree City, Georgia: Improvisation and Progressivism in a Post-War Southern New Town,” Journal of Planning History XIII.3 (2014), pp. 247-272, at p. 267.