- Exodus 23: 20-33

When Hernan Cortes first arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs he met with thought he was a long-awaited god, whom their prophets had said would come in that very year. They thought he was Quetzalcoatl, the son of god, and honored him in a manner befitting a god. He was received with great pomp and ceremony by Monteczuma II, king of the Aztecs. What happened afterwards is, of course, a matter of dispute, but both sides agree is reeks of opprobium. The European conquistadors and colonialists in the 16th through the 19th centuries claimed they were planting flags in foreign countries for “Gold, God and Glory“. From the accounts of Las Casas, a Spanish priest who was horrified that Spanish soldiers were raping native women and spearing their babies on sticks, and decided to write his harrowing account of the genocide that was occurring, since he believed that Spain would be damned if it continued sponsoring these men, “Gold” and “Glory” seem to leave “God” a far-distant third in their motivations. Though of course there were also people like Las Casas, who had the conscience to be horrified.

The Aztecs believed that they were being attacked by invisible arrows that pierced them and made them ill – not too bad a visualization of the works of virulent diseases. By way of explanation for the rape and pillage and inexplicable interest in the fictional “El Dorado”, they came to tell a story that the white man suffered from a sickness that only gold could cure -  that in the absence of gold, they went mad.

The Igbo people of what is now Nigeria (or so I am told) believed that the white men who came to their shores were dead ancestors come to visit, because their own skins turned pale when they died. The cowrie shells traded for slaves represented the bodies of their ancestral dead drowned at sea – they believed they were redeeming their ancestors, which they bought in exchange for the enemies, who were shipped off to the Americas – an efficient, not to mention profitable way of ridding the land of one’s enemies.

All this is painful history, and doubly painful for those who call themselves Christians – because it’s pretty good ammunition for the argument that Christians are no better than non-Christians; that sometimes pagans treat Christians better than vice versa. And to people who whip out this argument, I guess there’s only one thing to say: it’s true. Nominal or practicing, those who have flown the banner of Christ have behaved no better and no worse at their best and worst at various times in history.

So, all this begs the question: Where was God in all this?

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Where was God in the former Yugoslavia, when people (professedly Christian) with extremely minor differences started killing, raping, pillaging neighbouring villages? Where was God when Rwanda descended into chaos? Where was God when the Serbians assassinated the Archbishop Ferdinand of Bavaria, setting off the chain of events that we retrospectively called, first the Great War, and then (because it had a sequel) World War I? Why did God ask the Israelis to commit, in the Promised Land, what sounds like genocide? Why does Steven Pinker have the ammunition to point out that what he considers “Old Testament Morality” frequently involves condemning interracial marriages, slaughtering children, killing livestock, a scorched-earth policy and taking no prisoners?

These are not easy questions to answer. But I will attempt a preliminary answer. You see, arguably, all this was Plan B – the 40 year wander, rather than the straightforward 4-day trip out of Egypt into the Promised Land. Not that the straight-forward trip is easy – it probably involved as much patience, if not more. In the passage from Exodus, it is “fear”, “hornets” and poorer health that are the chosen agents of God’s judgment on a sinful people – not military victory. (And if we look at the military victories actually in Plan B, we’ll realize that a lot of them don’t even involve fighting, and certainly not greater military might or cunning, but that’s another article). I’m not saying that fear, confusion, hornets, starvation and disease are pleasant things, but they are NOT genocide.

So, let’s look at God’s Plan A: His idea of divinely-sanctioned colonialism:

1) You will eat good food.

2) You will not fall ill, and live as long as your body was made for living.

3) All your procreation will be successful.

4) People will get scared of you (people are usually scared of people who eat good food despite not having a whole lot of resources, don’t fall ill, and multiply quickly – sound familiar?)

5) People will start leaving the lands (usually because they’ve exhausted them – remember, we are in a mix of hunter-gatherer/nomadic/agricultural society, and over-farming is a recurring issue in agricultural societies)

6) Hornets!

7) People will be very fed up with hornets, and slowly let the land (which they probably have overworked – remember only Israel was told to keep the Sabbath) lie fallow. When the land has lied fallow, nature will take over and re-grow and re-fertilize and re-irrigate the land (see the World Without Us)

Generally, remember that this will take a long, long, long, long time. Don’t be impatient.

9) I have set apart a limited amount of land for you. I’ve told you where the boundaries are. Keep your sights on that land only and don’t be greedy.

10) Do NOT worship any of the gods of the other peoples around you. Keep yourselves separate spiritually (and since it helps – physically – and only in the portion of the land I’ve designated). Do NOT make compromises with the other peoples (because it will lead you to compromise My law) **

What can I say? History tells us we are not very good at following Plan A (cf. The Garden of Eden). Well, if only God explained himself better – we might protest – but history’s track record of that isn’t too good either. God is kind to us, and sometimes He gives an explanation, but even then we’re not very good at understanding the explanation. Mostly, we are impatient. When God has promised us something, we want it NOW. We’d prefer to speed things up. We don’t like the long-term stuff. We are hardwired to be demanding and mopey and annoying, like small children when they are hungry. The trouble with being God’s child, though, is that he’s a good Father. And good fathers usually demand that their children grow up.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

- St Paul, to the Corinthians, Letter #1: Chapter 13, verse 11

Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men.
- St Paul to the Corinthians, Letter #1: Chapter 14, verse 20

**In the original version of this article, this paragraph read

“10)DO NOT try to speed up the process by intermarrying, because that means your wives will convince you to worship their gods. Also, since women had rarely any choice in the matter, “intermarrying” probably meant rape, abduction, forced marriage to form alliances, polygamy (especially harems for kings and patriarchs), etc.”

but I thought better of it since it was not a helpful embellishment of the passage. I apologize if it was not a helpful speculation.

Yes. Five years of Cambridge, Massachusetts with its white steepled churches and its air of vague Unitarianism has definitely rubbed off on me. There are bits I’m personally not proud of – play-acting the New Yorkery sophisticate dodging the hard questions, swirling cheap wine in dirty glasses, trying on different affectations, flipping through fashion magazines with a worshipful intensity that made me hate my body, and above all, intellectual snobbery and pure, blind prejudice. Prejudice that made me hold anyone who called themselves Republican or tacked up a Bush family photo in their dorm in mild contempt, when it was always my philosophy to treat everyone as equal, beautiful, and valuable. I guess it was not until I shipped myself off to my supposedly dream-job in Manhattan itself that I realized this stuff would crush me. The refinement, the condescension, the pretty phrases turned at elite tables, the self-congratulation on one’s own openness and cosmopolitanism. The ironic conviction that you are the most tolerant of the tolerant, and that therefore everyone else should be like you.

But I am liberal. Because beneath that supersubtle veneer, I am dispossessed. I am poor. I am needy, and I need help. I need lifting up.

I glower with resentment that my particular gifts and vocation have always immediately conjured pictures of abject poverty (cf. Avenue Q’s opening number…”What do you do with a B.A. in English?” Seriously, the most depressing 3 minutes of my Manhattan summer…). That is, unless you throw in the towel and become a consultant. Not that I have anything against consultants, it’s the salary that’s the problem for me. You see, I would much rather carry the burden of poverty – for now – than the burden of riches. It’s simply a matter of what temptations I’m more liable to yield to. I know myself. I would be a workaholic. I would not keep the Sabbath. As it is, my eye for beauty gets me into all sorts of trouble with gluttony and lust and pride – I do not need to stoke those fires. I would get obsessed with fashion. I would be filled with anxiety. I would die a slow death in Manhattan, like Madam Bovary, surrounded by exquisite things. I loved New York, but New York couldn’t care less. And I’m not mature enough to opt out of something my dear friends will no doubt find themselves legitimately enjoying – the wonderful restaurants, the museum openings, the fabulous fashions, the privileged refinement of the thing.

How is it fair that my friend is gifted with the vocation of being a Goldman Sachs trader, who enjoys every second of making 20% profit on any given capital, who fits easily in with the New York set, and I am equally gifted but in the bizzaro-artist-writer vocation? Why should I pay for the sins of a society that values one category of gifts more than another? Why should I pay for the fact that I am simply a very very long term (as in, in undiscovered time, a couple of centuries later, when they unearth my poems from a little drawer, if at all, sort of long-term) investment? Or that ultimately, my work will only be recognized in heaven? I mean, I would simply be happy with the dole. But nope, no dole. Also, I’m not even a citizen. So even though I’ve been through this marvelous Harvard education, in two months, grace period on my visa is up, and yup! Deportation to Mexico or Canada.

And I come from a long line of those who were dispossessed, sometimes very obviously because of this artistic disposition. My great grandfather, who goes by the label of “useless poet” in the family oral history, eloped with someone else’s betrothed. To avoid being drowned by the village, they escaped from China to Malaya, where they scratched out a living (or rather, she did) selling cakes and writing name-poems on commission. They gave away two daughters because they didn’t have enough money. Their only son was snatched away by a wealthy landlord. My great-grandmother died of a broken heart, and her husband walked distractedly out of the house, trailing my grandmother and her sister, aged 5 and 7. They walked all the way down the peninsula to Singapore, only to have the girls kidnapped and sold off at a temple where their father had left them in trust.

On the other side of my family, my great-grandfather came to America as an indentured laborer from China. He planted rice in Hawaii, then made good and opened a small tailoring business. He sent for my great-grandmother, and they had a whole string of children who were born American citizens. Not wanting them to lose touch with their culture, he sent them back to China for schooling. Then America passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (I still remember reading about this with tears in my eyes, in the Tozzer Library at Harvard – in that moment, history became unbearably personal – ), and my great-grandfather hurried back to prevent losing everything he had built. But then war broke out, and the family in Asia lost their papers. They had no proof they had ever lived in America. Eventually, my great-grandfather died alone in the mountains of Hawaii in 1940. He did not know what had happened to his wife or children. His grave is there – I visited it, left him a freshly-cut bird of paradise. Meanwhile, the family moved south and south as the Japanese advanced from Manchuria into Hong Kong and into Malaya and finally Singapore. They lost two brothers along the way. They starved in that war, getting bloated cos there was only tapioca to eat, but my grandmother also fell in love and married my grandfather.

So you see, between slavery, immigration, kidnapping, debilitating depression, war, sickness, separation, homelessness, spontaneous poetic elopement and the final, inevitable fall, I can’t help but sympathize with the poor, even though I was born into the fortunate generation that attained comfortable upper-middle-class-ness. It is my legacy. I am homeless myself – but in good company. “Foxes have dens to live in, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place even to lay his head. (Luke 9:58)”. Jesus lived a life of radical dependence on charity, sponsorship, donations – often from rich women, who would open their homes to him. This is not to say he wasn’t also royal, authoritative, just, wholesome, honorable, and the greatest warrior who ever lived. But he was gentle as well as severe, merciful as well as just, beautiful as well as terrible. I wouldn’t say he was liberal – I prefer the word Generous. In Chinese, there is a proverb that says a good man is one with a stomach so big it could hold a boat: this is a picture of generosity. A boat is also a generous thing – it is always headed outwards, its prow facing the world – it represents hope, always containing something else for someone else – Jesus was like that. He was a truly Generous soul.

And His Generosity is wise and extravagant. Of course if you give the homeless man on the corner a quarter you don’t know if it will go towards drugs or his next meal. But if you give him a sandwich, or even better, piece after piece of the most exquisite Swiss designer chocolate, you know exactly what he’s going to do with it, and it is a tiny glimpse of the Kingdom of God. I mean, it’s actually a completely sound application of Diminishing Marginal Returns. How monotonous that chocolate is to someone who feasts upon it every day! But to the homeless man, it is a revelation! Because so much lies buried, so much human potential, so much light and heat and power that goes untapped and is dispersed dimly because of a lack of opportunity. But beyond lack of opportunity there is a larger sin at hand – that ancient sin that blinds us from looking that crazy muttering bag lady in the eye and seeing Jesus.

My grandmother, whom I have never met, passed on to me her insatiable hunger for knowledge. Sold into slavery, she listened secretly behind the curtain as the two sons of the household were educated, and taught herself to read and write. By the time she was married at 16, barefoot and pregnant with 6 children and one adoptee, she was reading the Chinese classics – Dream of the Red Chambers, Journey to the West, and her personal favourite, the epic of war and war strategy, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Did she go to Harvard? Nope. But she sure deserved to be here. I mean, talk about admissions essay material.

I am their representative. My grandmother was one of the most generous people I know. She gave her house to the church when she died – she was my maternal grandmother, and my paternal grandfather was the one who founded that church and served as its first pastor. My parents were married in this church founded upon the backs of their two families, whose stories magnificently intertwined. I am their daughter.

And I realize it is only because of them that I can afford to be generous. It is only because, by a complicated string of Providences, I don’t have to worry about supporting my parents or my siblings, despite being the eldest child (and suffering subconsciously, through no fault of my parents, from the Chinese First Child syndrome). How can I, with all I have received from my family, my culture, my country, fritter it away on acquiring rather than giving? It is a calling that has blown through generations, a realization of the hopes and dreams held beyond even them by unknown, nameless, illiterate ancestors – to tell stories, to discern the meanings of names, to sing hymns, to love wisely and fiercely and well, to read and to know and to do and make new things -

How can I, knowing these things, then turn away and ignore such a siren call? How can I, seeing these things, then turn away and not spread my wings? Hopefully, by the Grace of Christ Jesus our Lord, by the Grace that calls men and women to Himself from generation to generation, the apple will not fall too far from the tree.

It’s been sweltering down here in the Lower Regions – you would think you were in the high summer of Boston, but no, it’s just hell. Anyhow, outbreaks of gonorrhea and florescent mosquitoes aside, things plod along as usual. But enough about the weather.

I note with some consternation that your charge has graduated from Harvard. How she managed this I am not entirely certain, given our strenuous efforts to achieve the exact opposite. Yes, we did a little grind of victory when she took a year off, but look what that did – she merely slipped further from our grasp thanks to the humiliation the disorientation produced! Again, the Enemy’s ways are clearly not our ways – curse his Heavenly Highness and his Unendurable Everlasting Sneakiness! I swear, He truly hits Below the Diabolical Belt! Not even our brightest philosophers can get their heads around his tiresome Divine Paradoxes. And now she has that awful little diploma, adorned with that noisome blinking “VERITAS” shield (which we can never seem to penetrate, and humans the world over venerate)! I am tempted to despair, Wigglesworm. Sometimes I look at my oeuvre, at my life’s work, and I must confess I am very near Despair.

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We were doing so well! Do you remember those first dark days of freshman year, when her overweening arrogance wafted in sweet waves, producing responsive aversion in all those around her? Her mindless ambition, her directionless hunger for praise and affection and validation? She was all potential! Yes, there was all of that tangled morass of her “conservative Christian background” (we are working on that particular phrase – hopefully the Cliche Factory will get their act together), but here she was, un-moored from her conservative little country, eager to be seduced by “American” “freedom” and “liberalism” (whatever humans mean by these terms! – the UnLit. Critics are still working to establish exactly what, though I am personally skeptical that department will ever get any definitions straight – why those particular faculty are still on the University’s payroll is one of Hell’s Unfathomable Mysteries, as far as I’m concerned). She was so eager to throw off the shackles of parental control! – In short, delightfully corruptible, an ingenue of the first order. You even steered her clear of most of the Christian organizations on campus, as per my advice, fairly successfully, by making them seem “lame”, self-righteous and racially or culturally or economically segregated to her own self-righteous self.

However, even then, cracks were beginning to appear. It was collective hubris of the first order that made the Council of Diabolicals conclude the Enemy had evacuated the liberal spectrum of New England churches – the entire Second Council of the Diabolicals has now retrospectively determined this judgment was entirely wrong-footed (again, never underestimate the Enemy or his infuriating persistence!). That she went to church at all should have set your alarm bells ringing – indeed, I remember expressly forbidding you to let her go! “Oh, Nuncle Screwtape, it’s just an itty bitty ultra-liberal service! The sermon isn’t even ever longer than twelve minutes!” You do recall, of course, that Time is merely one of 88,9087 dimensions? All those Quantum Catechisms! – What was it the Enemy says of himself? “One day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”?

I think He said this through that random fisherman he picked up along the way on which he built the church – it is so annoying when this happens! I mean, here we are, with all the best civil servants in the Lower Kingdom, laboring to understand dimensions, and then this burly bearded fellow who’s been catching fish his whole short human life goes and blurts that out and is handed the very keys to the Kingdom. I mean, it’s one thing to require us to keep tabs on highly educated people like your patient and one excellent ex-servant of Our Father, Saul of Tarsus (who nevertheless turned out disastrously good – cf. pretty much most of the New “Testament”), but fishermen? Come on! No matter, again – I digress!

I expressly forbid you to let her in a church! “But it’s only got old people in it!” you protested, when I pointed out your error. Wigglesworm, sometimes you exasperate me! Old people are some of the most dangerous Beings alive, particularly if they are in the Enemy’s Camp.  Yes, we have caused Human Society to denigrate the elderly; but don’t you see, that was a product of the Dark Lakes of Distortion, and not a reflection of Actuality! We made them obsessed with youth, obsessed with appearance impossible to upkeep beyond the age of 30. We made them worship at the Temple of Eternal Youth. Hell, Our Father Below is old, and wise, and proud of it. The Enemy himself goes by the pretentious, typically self-aggrandizing title of “Ancient of Days” – do not underestimate old people!

Furthermore, there were all those dead people to reckon with! Remember, we are talking about New England here: its very name rank with the memory of headstrong warriors of the Enemy’s Camp, the ground littered with their headstones. We have only begun to grasp the power of the Enemy’s aged fortresses, which seems mysteriously derived from the simple presence of these graves. In fact, our Archeologists (particularly in the Anti-Catholic Department) recently presented a paper on precisely this phenomenon – it seems that hefty generals of the Enemy’s camp, such as that rigidly incorruptible failed tyrant, George Washington, or that annoyingly selfless self-promoter, Martin Luther King Jr, seem to leave impenetrable barriers to diabolic entry in the places where they have blasphemed against Our Father. It is most curious, and we are hoping to harness this power to develop a portable prison-house for our own errant devils. But I digress -

Then there was that whole very fruitful phase when she worshiped at the fair-browed Temple of False Art, ingratiating herself with all the “right” people, breaking commandment after commandment in the name of “exploration” and the seeking of “wisdom”, which we encouraged in everything but the Enemy’s Book. She was so far gone that she even entertained thoughts of transferring to the Second University, thinking that it would have been better to be celebrated there as a writer than panned as a critic in her assigned English department. I was particularly proud of the moment when, realizing with my not-inconsiderable insight that your charge is by nature a ladder-climber, we placed ladder after ladder in front of her, every rung a good intention – ladders of popularity, academics, sophistication, veneration, spiritual purity – chuckling with anticipation as she exhausted herself and bled her hands and feet dry, growing thirstier and hungrier by the minute, the ladders plunging, in reality, into the Flames.

Then, there was that sweet, sweet moment in which we relished victory – her near vanquishing, when her sweet flesh was practically touching the tip of my tongue – her despair so ripe, her corruption so sweet, her devastation so deep and broad like some diabolic hymn. We had destroyed her – we had severed her ties with her family, trashed her friendships to shreds, completely stripped her of every shred of self-worth and dignity, starved her soul with a combination of derision and shame.

But did you seal the deal? Did you obey my instructions to consume her immediately? Oh no, you had to go and simmer that soup, you had to go find that Onion and that Carrot, and etc, etc. We were already warned about the power of Onions by Dostoyevsky, Wigglesworm! You should have known better. Really, if the UnLit Department were not squabbling all the time, and would actually teach the moral implications of true and false fiction, we would avoid a lot of these spectacular failures! This was your fatal flaw, Wigglesworm. In your hubris, in your complacency, you did not guard over her struggling corpse. No! You were bustling about, keen to make it all “perfect”, whatever that means (that must have rubbed off from her! I have warned you never to pick up your charge’s characteristics!). You were eager to impress me, eager to cook me a delicious morsel that would satisfy my ravenous hunger. Well, my dear Wigglesworm, your kind consideration ensures that I will not go hungry. You robbed me of this girl, Wigglesworm, with your silly infatuation with the goodness of a meal and the preparation of it. You allowed yourself to enjoy the process, when in fact you should have grabbed hold of the ends and tore! Ah, my delectable Wiggie, I almost pity you in my shriveled kernel of a heart.

Anyhow, thanks to your negligence, the Enemy sneaked one “true” friend to your charge. I honestly did not see this coming myself. I had thought there would be none of the Enemy’s Camp in the Temple of False Art. I do not know why it is so hard to move with the Enemy’s omnipresence in mind. Perhaps he uses one of those starry Invisibility Cloaks of his to prevent other Beings from sensing it most of the time; whatever it is, we must constantly tack our sails to account for it even if the wind does not fill them, because His presence is always greater than we imagine. Oh, if only we could replicate the technology!

Anyhow, this “true” friend mediated with her and her enemies; also, despite her rejection of them, her family came flocking about (families always do this! Why, I cannot begin to understand), and then there was that whole damned business about her great-grandmother, who passed into the realms of gold when she was a prefrosh, interceding for her. Again this has something to do with the dead lying around – a total nuisance to our work! Because this entire network of communication is sealed off to us, despite the Virulent Wreckers in the Sillycon Valley of the Shadow of Death hacking away at it day and night, we cannot breach or intercept these messages. Believe me, it’s like trying to read Demotic without the Rosetta Stone.

Anyway, we do not fully know how this happened, but somehow, by the skin of her teeth, she was snatched out of our hands. Oh, what howling fury resounded in hell that day! How the Harpies clawed and screeched, how they tore at their hair! How the Crustaceous Crabs scuttled left and right and left and right, pinching our buttocks and nipping at our ears! How the larval lakes boiled, how the boat on the Styx creaked and threatened to splinter to shards! How our stomachs growled, at the loss of this precious morsel!

And now she is off in some untouchable realm (temporarily, but still),  surrounded by that weird little cloud of buzzing insects that the Enemy calls “Grace” – and what’s more, she’s writing and drawing and filming and learning to govern her capricious tongue, singing songs and psalms and trying to be St. Peter and St. Paul and David and Isaiah and oldies of that ilk, as well as George Herbert and John Donne and that terrible mind that violated my psyche some fifty years ago now; silly and dark and bright and powerful and helpless, mourning and comforting and rejoicing and deliriously running around for all the world like some undiscovered child, and in short being fully alive and “truly” herself – and all through no effort of her own.

Oh the howls of frustration! What just really gets me is how utterly inappropriate her behavior is – like David dancing around half-naked like a wild thing at the head of a processional -  there she is, standing in the white-hot sight of the Enemy, feeling for all the world like some white wizard’s only beloved daughter, a wizard who rules a far-away kingdom from a little rock with a Book (even though she’s just a nerdy fresh graduate, unemployed, napping in bookstores, in danger of becoming an illegal immigrant with a homeless bunny) acting as though she’s Blessed continually! In her hand is a bright sword, and she raises on her arm a shield – yes, that very stupid shield with “Truth” written on it in bloody Latin, of all things; and the sword is of course the “Word”, and she runs around talking about “Peace” and “Reconciliation” from Above – complete poppycock, of course – we all know, especially in the Academy, this world contains only War and Division! And she’s not alone, too, there’s a whole bunch of them, swarming around like little bleeping satellites beaming messages around about the University.

This – this was supposed to be our Great Failure*, Wigglesworm! This was our “Godless Harvard*“! What the hell? Where did you go wrong? And worse still, she’s graduating, and she has no fear, for the Enemy is with her? His rod and his staff, they comfort her? It’s just too much to bear. I swear, we were ready to turn on one another and eat, and I believe that’s exactly what we did. And do, my delectable Monsieur Wigg.

You are to report to my chambers at doom doom o’clock this afternoon. You may bring a cardboard box along with you, to collect your things. As you know, in hell, no poor devil is ever relieved. We are tired, but none of us ever retire. Errant devilings like yourself are customarily fired – efficiently and quite, quite literally. Don’t worry about your patient – I will be reassigning her to the far more sophisticated and very accomplished Derthcliffe. If you have any next of kin, which I sincerely doubt, since they are apt to deny you considering your fatal failure, you may write short notices to them. But hasten, and come to the Feast, my little one, my  dove – come to the Feast, and I assure you, this time I will take, and eat.

Yours Hungerly,

Screwtape

* photos from the Harvard Crimson

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor tries to explain what in particular accounts for this presumed difference between America and Europe. At least one of the reasons, Taylor suggests, that may account for the difference is America never had an ancient regime in which a hierarchical social order was given legitimacy by the church. Also at work may be the different role of elites in determining general attitudes toward belief and unbelief. For example, the skepticism of academic elites in British society had more effect in England because elites have more prestige in British society than elites in America.

Taylor suggests that the primary reason for the American difference is due to the development of a common civil religion that allowed Americans, as well as immigrants in America, to understand their faiths as contributing to a consensus summed up by the motto, “E pluribus Unum.” This is in marked contrast to Europe where religious identities have been the source of division either between dissenters and the national church or between church and lay forces. But in America religious difference is subordinated to “one nation under God.” Religious people in America may find they are in deep disagreement about abortion or gay marriage, but those disagreements are subordinated to their common loyalty to America.[1] But that subordination also includes their faith in God; that is, whatever kind of Christian (or non-Christian) they may or may not be, their faith should be in harmony with what it means to be an American.

Taylor observes that this difference also accounts for the respective attitudes Europeans and Americans have toward national identities. Europeans generally are quite reticent about national identity. That they are so Taylor attributes to the experience and memory of the First and Second World Wars that devastated Europe. He observes that war, even wars that seem “righteous,” now make most Europeans uneasy. But that is not the case with Americans. Americans’ lack of unease with war may be, Taylor suggests, because they wrongly think there are fewer skeletons in the American closet when compared to the European closet. Yet Taylor thinks the reason for the American support of war is simpler. “It is easier,” Taylor observes, “to be unreservedly confident in your own righteousness when you are the hegemonic power.”[2]

I have no doubt Taylor is right to think America’s unrivaled power in the world gives Americans a sense of confidence about our role as the “world’s policeman,” but I think Taylor does not make articulate — to use one of Taylor’s favorite words — the relationship between American civil religion, our assumption that we are a “religious nation,” and why war for most Americans is unproblematic.[3] War is a moral necessity for America because it provides the experience of the “Unum” that makes the “pluribus” possible. War is America’s central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.[4] World War I was the decisive moment because it was that war that finally healed the wounds caused by the civil war.

This is well documented by Richard Gamble in his book, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. Gamble provides ample evidence to show how liberal Protestants justified the first World War as redemptive for the nation and church. For example, Lyman Abbott, a well known progressive Protestant who had sought to reconcile Christianity with evolution, argued that America as a Christian nation must be willing to be self-sacrificial in service to other nations. Therefore America rightly opposed “pagan” Germany because Germany is a society in which “the poor serve the rich, the weak serve the strong, the ignorant serve the wise.” By contrast America is a society of “organized Christianity” in which the “rich serve the poor, the strong serve the weak, the wise serve the ignorant.”[5]

Harry Emerson Fosdick, the exemplification of Protestant liberalism, went so far as to suggest in an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1919, that the returning troops would present a special challenge to the nation and the churches. He argued that the soldiers would have learned the meaning of self-sacrifice through the experience of the war. Moreover they would have experienced the potential of cooperative action through the regenerative power of devotion to a higher cause. Accordingly the returning soldiers would challenge reactionary views of society and the church because they would expect to remake the world to which they returned to correspond to the lessons they learned from the war.[6] War, in short, was seen as the laboratory for more egalitarian social policies advocates of the Protestant social gospel so desperately tried to achieve.

Christianity and democracy in America were and continue to be, through the experience of war, inextricably linked. Thus Arthur McGiffert, the president of Union Theological Seminary, argued that religion was necessary “to promote and sustain democracy.” Religion, according to McGiffert, had to dispose of its “egoistic and other-worldly character” by becoming socially responsible. “The religion of democracy” he warned, “must cease to minister to selfishness by promising personal salvation, and must cease to impede human progress by turning the attention of religious men from the conditions here to rewards elsewhere.”[7] Such was the lesson to be learned from war.

I call attention to how Americans understood the theological and moral significance of World War I because I think we fail to appreciate what Taylor identifies as the American civil religion if we do not take the American understanding of war into account. For example, Taylor observes that the traditional American synthesis of “civil religion” associated with a non-denominational Christianity with a strong connection to civilized order is still, unlike its British counterpart, in its “hot” phase. That it is so, however, has everything to do with the American experience of war as constitutive of the substance of our civil religion.

The significance of war for American civil religion can be missed even by political theorists as insightful as C.B. Macpherson. Macpherson identified two versions of liberal democracy, which he argued shape American democracy but are in conflict with one another. The first form of liberal democracy is one in which a capitalist market society is assumed to be compatible with democratic processes. This form of democracy, no matter how modified it may be by the rise of the welfare state, remains dominant — particularly in America. It has, of course, been given renewed theoretical legitimacy with the development in American political science of various accounts of balance of power models between groups.

The other version of liberal democracy Macpherson associates with John Stuart Mill’s attempt to moralize liberalism by arguing that a liberal society must be one in which all the members of the social order are equally free to realize their capabilities. From Macpherson’s perspective, liberal democracy, particularly the democracy of the United States, has tried to combine both forms of liberalism.[8] Thus at times “liberal” means the stronger can dominate the weak as long as they follow market rules, while at other times it means the attempt, usually through state agency, to achieve freedom for all to develop their capacity. As a result American politics cannot help but appear incoherent as different and contradictory policy alternatives are put forward in the name of “freedom.”[9]

For example, the right of abortion is defended in the name of an individual’s right to have control over her body, but it is still assumed that laws against suicide make sense in the name of preventing harm. Moreover, that portions of the American society think it legitimate to appeal to their religious convictions to address such issues is seen by some to be a threat to the consensus that makes America work. Thus Taylor’s observation that even though the Protestant character of the original American civil religion has been broadened to include “all faiths” or “no faiths” there is still a strong “religious” character to American public life. That such is the case is confirmed by the very existence of secularist and liberal believers who seek a more secular America.[10]

I have no doubt that Macpherson is right that both forms of liberalism shape American life, but the tension between them can go unnoticed exactly because America is so wealthy and has the common moral experience of war. Of course it turns out that wealth makes war necessary. Yet Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy. From such a perspective, September 11 was absolutely necessary for the moral health of the republic. That America must fight an unending war against terrorism means Americans have a common enemy that unites us.

If I am close to being right about the place of war for sustaining the American difference I find that as a Christian I wish America as a nation was more “secular” and the Christianity of America was less American. Put differently I wish America was more like Europe. For I fear the Christianity of America, a Christianity that from a European perspective seems vital, is not capable of being a political challenge to what is done in the name of the American difference. In short, the great difficulty is how to keep America, in the proper sense, secular.

In order to elaborate this observation, I think it helpful to call attention to Mark Lilla’s important new book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West. Lilla begins his book by giving voice to a sentiment raised after September 11, 2001 and occasioned by the Bush presidency. They simply cannot believe what they thought had been left behind has returned. Lilla observes he had assumed that battles over revelation and reason, dogmatic purity and toleration, divine duty and common decency had been relegated to the scrap heap of history. So “we,” that is, people like Lilla, “find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.”[11]

Lilla seeks, therefore, to do nothing less than to defend what he describes as the great separation, that is, “to develop habits of thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms without appeals to divine revelation or cosmological speculation.”[12] Lilla understands this separation to be an extraordinary achievement because political theology is a “primordial form of thought” which for millennia provided the well of ideas and symbols for organizing society and shaping moral lives. In the West Christianity was the source of political theology even though the political theology Christianity represented could not help but create political societies that were and are inherently unstable. The instability is the result of the Christian presumption that they are at once in the world but not of it. For example, Christians have always had trouble making sense of an empire they accidentally acquired.[13] Lilla argues it was Hobbes who found the way, after a millennium of Christian political theology, to discuss religion and the common good without making reference to the nexus between God, man, and the world. He was able to do so because Hobbes, anticipating Feuerbach, had the wisdom to turn questions about God into questions about human behavior; to reduce that behavior to psychological states, and then to portray those states as artifacts of desire, ignorance, and the material
environment.[14]

For Hobbes the gods are born out of fear of death, poverty, and calamity; but Hobbes knew better than to try to deny such fear. Rather he focused fear on one figure alone, the sovereign. Such a sovereign,
Hobbes called him an “earthly God,” could ensure that his subjects should fear no other sovereigns but him. No longer would there be a tension between church and crown because now the sovereign would make clear that salvation depended on obedience to himself.

Lilla thinks Hobbes’ great achievement, this great separation which is crucial for the art of living in a liberal democratic order, is secured by three developments. The first is the intellectual separation made possible by the scientific revolution in which a now-mute natural world is separated from its creator. As a result investigations of nature can be separated from thoughts about God. Secondly, the crucial distinction between the public and the private is developed, relegating religious convictions and practices to the latter. To be sure, Lilla acknowledges, Hobbes made the sovereign responsible for public worship, but not for actually mounting an inquisition to determine if citizens actually believed “Jesus is the Christ.” Thirdly, perhaps less obvious but equally consequential, is Hobbes’ argument for separating academic inquiry from ecclesiastical control. Thus one of the achievements of Hobbes’ project can be seen in theology’s becoming, as it has in modernity, but another academic discipline relegated to divinity schools.[15]

Though Hobbes is often thought to legitimate a violent understanding of politics, that is, human existence as a war of all against all, Lilla argues that Hobbes is actually trying to limit the violence that is unleashed by political theology. For when war is undertaken in the name of God there can be no limit to killing because so much is allegedly at stake. That is why human beings who believe in God commit acts in war no animal would commit. Animals kill only to eat and reproduce, but humans fight to get into heaven.[16] Hobbes, on Lilla’s reading, is the first great realist in international affairs. After Hobbes, war at least has the potential to be humanely limited because it can be fought for selfish
reasons.

Lilla suggests Locke and Hume provided softer accounts of Hobbes’s Leviathan but in doing so they remained fundamentally Hobbesian. Like Hobbes they wanted to protect modern man from the superstition and violence associated with political theology by developing liberal habits of mind. In particular, Locke thought it possible and necessary to liberalize Christianity itself, which Lilla suggests bore fruit in the work of Rousseau, Kant, and Protestant liberals such as Schleiermacher and Troeltsch. Yet Lilla judges the attempt of Protestant liberals to ground religion in human experience to be a failure because:

It failed to inspire conviction about the Christian faith among nominal Christians, or attachment to Jewish destiny among nominal Jews. Once liberal theologians succeeded, as they did, in portraying biblical faith as the highest expression of moral consciousness and the precondition of modern life, they were unable to explain why modern men and women should still consider themselves to be Christians and Jews rather than simply modern men and women.[17]

Such is the dilemma of Christians in America. Just to the extent Christians try to be “political” by playing by the rules set down by “the great separation” they cannot help but become unintelligible not only to their neighbors but, more importantly, to themselves. I think this helps account for the strident character of the rhetoric of the religious right in America. Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the religious right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism. The religious right makes a fetish of this or that belief, e.g. the substitutionary account of the atonement; they think is the hallmark of Christianity, but by doing so they play the game determined by the great separation, that is, Christianity has become primarily a matter of “belief.”

Yet secular people in America fear the religious right. They do so because they think that the rise of the religious right and Islam threaten the “great separation.” Thus Lilla ends his book reminding those who are like him committed to Hobbes’ great achievement that they are the exception. They cannot expect other civilizations to follow the path of the West. But according to Lilla the West has made the choice to protect individuals from the harms they can inflict on one another in the name of religion. It has done so by securing fundamental liberties and by leaving the spiritual destinies of each person in their own hands. In short, Americans have chosen to keep our “politics unilluminated by the light of revelation. If our experiment is to work, we must rely on our own lucidity.”[18]

But Lilla’s account of the great separation does not explain how a country allegedly shaped by Hobbes and Locke is, particularly in reference to war, a nation which understands itself in religious terms.[19] Americans are said to be the beacon of hope for all people, requiring sacrifices for the good of the world. In short, Lilla does not explain why it is very hard to keep the secular secular in America. Once the church has been relegated to the “private” it turns out the nation takes on the language of the church. It is not Christians and Muslims that challenge the great separation, but rather it is “America.”

Yet Lilla’s sense that Hobbes’ achievement may be threatened is widely shared by others in America. For example in his book, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up On the Meaning of Life, Anthony Kronman sounds themes very similar to Lilla. The
university, as Lilla suggested, is the key agent for sustaining the great separation. According to Kronmen it was, of course, true that the early universities in America would have been shaped by Protestant piety. But after the civil war, Kronmen argues, universities in America were organized to be institutions to sustain a secular and humanistic account of life. Students would be initiated into a secular humanistic way of life through reading the great texts of the Western tradition. Through such reading students would learn “that it is possible to explore the meaning of life in a deliberate and organized way even after its religious foundations have been called into doubt.”[20]

This perspective supplied the grounds for those in the humanities to believe they had the competence and the authority to lead students in a disciplined study of the human condition in order that they might pursue their own personal search for meaning. Such pedagogy assumed that no fixed conception of the end of human life or a single right way to live can be sustained. For according to Kronman there simply is no “vantage point we can ever occupy from which our lives can be seen as a whole.”[21] Secular humanism does not require that God be rejected or even thought to be irrelevant to life as long as such judgments are left to the individual.

Kronman acknowledges that death is the most determinative challenge that confronts the secular humanist. “We all die, and know we will, and must adjust ourselves to the shadow which the foreknowledge of death casts over the whole of our lives.”[22] Yet death also forces us to recognize that whatever meaning life may have depends on us. Accordingly, life for the secular humanist is self-contradictory. For the secular humanist seeks to abolish the limits that give their longings meaning, that is, they seek to be in control, yet in the attempt to seize control they come to recognize that without the limits they seek to overcome the ends they seek could not exist.[23]

Sounding very much like Lilla’s account of Hobbes, Kronman argues that religion, drawing on our fears, seeks to have us revalue the limits of life by accepting those limits as an occasion for gratitude rather than rebellion. The smug cosmopolitan and secular observers of the rise of this religious revival think this development to be shallow and mindless. Kronman thinks such an attitude fails to recognize that the problem is not the death of God but the death of man. It is the task of the university to be the church for the rebirth of a humanism that is more honest and honorable than any religion can offer.[24]

Kronman’s understanding of secular humanism assumes what Lilla calls the great separation, thus confirming Lilla’s contention that the university is the crucial institution to sustain liberal social orders. Yet Kronman fears that the secular university has lost its way by becoming a research university beset by the demands of the politically correct. I certainly think the humanities have lost their centrality in the modern university, but I think that loss is due much more to the humanism Kronman advocates. For once the “great separation” is accepted then a Hobbesian world cannot be avoided, that is, a death determined world committed to the defeat of death. In such a world the university cannot help but become the home of technologies designed to increase our power over fate.

Such a world, and the universities that serve it, must go to war in an effort to defeat those forces in the world that threaten our security. Americans are determined to live in a world of safety even if we have to go to war to make the world safe. That project is often justified, and this is Kronman’s list, in the name of ideals of individual freedom and toleration; of democratic government; of respect for the rights of minorities and for human rights generally; a reliance on markets as a mechanism for the organization of economic life; the acceptance of the truths of modern science and the ubiquitous employment of its technological products as aspirational goals all should want. According to Kronman “to be openly opposed to any of these things is to be a reactionary, a zealot, and obscurantist who refuses to recognize the moral and intellectual authority of this ensemble of modern ideas and institutions.”[25] I have little doubt that Kronman believes this, but that he does so means he simply cannot see what the rest of the world sees, namely, that this is an ideology for a culture of death.

Kronman and Lilla are to be commended for their willingness to advocate secular humanism as a moral, educational, and political project. They simply seem to assume that the secular humanist will be more peace loving. But I find it hard to find any evidence that would support such a conclusion.

By calling attention to Lilla and Kronman I hope to have helped us see that if we as Christians are to begin to reclaim the political theology required by the truthfulness of Christian convictions we will need to begin by doing theology unapologetically. In particular that means Christians must reclaim theology as a knowledge central for the work of any university worthy of the name “university.” That will require, at least in America, a recovery of the church as a polity capable of challenging the presumptions that the state is the agency of peace. In short, if the analysis I have tried to develop concerning the American difference is close to being right, it should make clear that a commitment to Christian nonviolence is the presumption necessary for the church to reassert its political significance.

In Veritatis Splendor John Paul II claimed that there is an inseparable connection between truth and freedom which if broken results in totalitarianism. America is a society built on the assumption that freedom must precede truth. Therefore America is presumed to be the alternative to totalitarianism. However, if my account of the American difference is correct I think that presumption needs to be reexamined particularly in light of the way war sustains American political life.

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[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp.b522-527.

[2] Taylor, p. 528.

[3] For Taylor’s emphasis on the significance of being articulate for locating our lives morally see, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 92-107.

[4] I develop this account of war in my essay, “Sacrificing the Sacrifices of War,” Criswell Theological Review, 4, 2 (Spring, 2007), pp. 77-96. The significance of the civil war is crucial in order to understand the liturgical significance of war in American life.

See. For example, my essay, “Why War is a Moral Necessity for America or How Realistic is Realism?” Seminary Ridge Review, 9, 2 (Spring, 2007), pp. 25-37.

[5] Richard Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2003), p. 155.

[6] Gamble, p. 211.

[7] Gamble, p. 214.

[8] C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 1.

[9] Thus Alasdair MacIntyre’s now classic description in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) of the inability in liberal societies to know what might count as an argument.

[10] Taylor, p. 528.

[11] Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the
Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 3.

[12] Lilla, p. 5. Charles Taylor, in a very interesting review of Lilla’s book, argues Lilla’s understanding of political theology fails to do justice to the natural law justifications of early modern thought that did not appeal directly to revelation or to premises drawn from revelation. Taylor observes Lilla’s argument depends on his view of political theology suggested later in his book that a genuine secular politics presumes a mechanistic understanding of the cosmos. Taylor, thus, challenges Lilla’s presumption that“the great separation” has ever been quite the achievement Lilla assumes. Taylor’s review is in the “Immanent Frame” sponsored by the Social Science Research Council.

[13] Lilla, pp. 42-45. Lilla observes that although Christianity “is inescapably political, it proved incapable of integrating this fact into Christian theology. The political organization of medieval Europe, tottering on that theological ambivalence, could not have been more perfectly arranged to exacerbate the conflict inherent in all political life…Perhaps if Christianity had seen itself as the political religion it really was, presenting the pope as an earthly sovereign with full authority over secular matters, some bloodshed could have been avoided. But living as a Christian means being in the world, including the political world, while somehow not being of it. It means living with a false consciousness.” (p.86) Lilla associates this instability in Christian political theology to the dialectic between transcendence and immanence at the heart of the incarnation. For such an astute reader of Barth it is surprising Lilla fails to understand that what is meant by such a dialectic must be Christologically determined.

[14] Lilla, p. 88.

[15] Lilla, pp. 89-91.

[16] Lilla, pp. 84-85.

[17] Lilla, p. 248.

[18] Lilla, pp. 308-309.

[19] See, for example, Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).

[20] Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up On the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 74.

[21] Kronman, p. 34.

[22] Kronman, p. 76.

[23] Kronman, p. 232.

[24] Kronman, p. 243. Kronman is more than ready to declare that any “religion” at some point must demand a sacrifice of the intellect because a religion finally insists that at some point thinking is not adequate to questions of life’s meaning. So every religion in a basic sense must be fundamentalist because the answers it is prepared to give to life’s questions are anchored in its own convictions. (pp. 198-199.) Kronman does not supply the necessary philosophical defense of his understanding of rationality.

[25] Kronman, pp. 172-173.
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Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School of Duke University with a joint appointment at Duke Law School. He was named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time magazine in 2001.