Hope in historical unpredictability

The fellas over at First Things--along with their allies and fellow travelers (and, uh, frenemies) are quite a gloomy lot these days. There's a distinct sense that orthodox Christianity is doomed in American society. Many in this cohort have shifted their attention from strategies of engagement in the public square to how best to deal with impending exile from mainstream American life. The so-called "Benedict Option," articulated most popularly by Rod Dreher, has been gaining traction. Michael Hanby's profoundly despairing essay on "The Civic Project of American Christianity" was widely and heatedly discussed.

It is in this context, then, that I find Michael Brendan Dougherty's most recent column at The Week rather refreshing. Dougherty essentially says two things.

He points out how many seemingly unstoppable trends in the past half century or so were reversed or undone in ways no one predicted:

But history has surprising turns, ones that can be hard to see even in retrospect. It is possible to imagine a future in which 2015 doesn't augur the beginning of conservatism's final descent, but instead represents a temporary nadir. 

...Many Cold War conservatives were convinced that communism would triumph over the West. Conservatives of the late 1980s and '90s thought that the increasing crassness of popular culture and the rise in crime were related and unstoppable. Entirely wrong, all.

Dougherty then highlights many societal trends that, while apparently secular and anti- or post-Christian in nature, have surprising resonance with the concerns of conservative Christians. He points to feminism's relatively recent turn away from unfettered sexual libertinism and towards a genuine concern over the destructiveness and danger of casual sex. He notes that "the desire for organic, natural, and sustainable products" should be very amenable to true conservatism--which should be about conserving, after all. He highlights the ways that union organizers resists statism and New Urbanism emphasizes humane scale and beauty. In short, not all is bleak.

A decade ago, historian John Lukacs saw these surprising convergences. "A great division among the American people," Lukacs wrote, "has begun--gradually, slowly--to take shape: not between Republicans and Democrats, and not between 'conservatives' and 'liberals,' but between people who are still unthinking believers in technology and economic determinism and people who are not." Later in the same book, he quoted Wendell Berry's similar thoughts. "It is easy for me to imagine," said Berry, "that the next great division will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines."

Ultimately, though, the particular hopeful trends Dougherty mentions are less important than his other, more basic concept. History is unpredictable. Trends that seem unstoppable stop. New trends emerge from totally unexpected places.

Some years ago I wrote some thoughts about Tina Fey, Mark Twain, and racism:

Consider: if we today have problems discerning whether 30 Rock is racist, imagine how much more difficult this would be in a century. When people with inevitably different perspectives from another culture with its own constructions of race and society attempts to parse commentary, humor, and racism within 30 Rock, some of them are likely to think, wrongly, "Wow, that is actually pretty racist." And if, in one hundred years, that discussion actually is occurring, Tina Fey's work and legacy will have approached Mark Twain's. 

I later connected that thought with a broader point about the unpredictable judgments of our progeny--the frightening reality that what we see as our best, most "forward-thinking" qualities might come in for vociferous condemnation somewhere down the line:

At the end of last year I wrote that Tina Fey's not-controversial-except-to-neocon-pundits joke about Mark Twain might actually be a brilliant anticipation of the totally unfair ways we'll be judged by our descendants. And it's that unpredictability--turning a prescient, humane condemnation of racism into racism itself--that makes me think worrying too much about our grandchildren's judgment is a waste of time. They'll probably have bad taste.

More to the point today: we surely needn't worry about those proclaiming right and wrong sides to history. After all, they aren't making "historical" claims, in the sense that they can be proven or supported with reference to past history. Whether the proclaimers recognize it or not, such assertions are fundamentally prophetic. That is, they are making a claim about the purposes and intentions of the author of history.

And the author of history either does not exist or he is God Almighty.

Redeeming the Oppressor

I'm praying that the church massacre in Charleston will do for some what the Birmingham church bombing did for Dennis Covington's father:

Dad had no use for the Klan. He was a gentle, principled man. But he must have sensed even then that the past he seemed bent on avoiding was bound to be claimed by someone, somewhere along the line. He was, as I've said, in theory if not in practice, a segregationist. Some of his arguments seem tamer now in retrospect, tempered as they are by time. But he was still a segregationist, in an era when legal segregation was our greatest shame. The bombing on the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 broke my father's resistance, and his heart. The girls who died in the bombing were about my age. We hear the news on a small brown radio in the kitchen after church that Sunday. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. The bombing seemed to seal a permanent judgment on the city. 'The shame will be ours forever,' editorialized a local newspaper at the time. But Martin Luther King, Jr., foresaw ultimate salvation in the tragedy. At the funeral for three of the girls, he said, 'The deaths may well serve as the redemptive force that brings light to this dark city.' And it did. What happened in Birmingham in 1963 not only redeemed the oppressed. It also redeemed my people, although we haven't been able to accept that yet. We haven't yet taken that particular snake out and lifted it aloft in the light--the dangerous, unloved thing about us: where came from, what we did, who we are. (from Salvation on Sand Mountain)

Oppression, as Covington (and King) observed, harms the oppressor as well as the oppressed--though of course in very different ways, and the oppressor is unlikely to recognize how participation in evil brings destruction to one's own soul.

Explicit white supremacists may be few and far between today, but there are still many among us who reflexively label young black people as thugs, who ignorantly cast all problems of inner-city poverty as personal failures of moral weakness and in so doing whitewash hundreds of years of institutional racism (along with well-intentioned but effectively disastrous programs instituted as recompense in the 1960s and '70s)--and who defend an antebellum society built on the sweat and blood of the enslaved and a government founded explicitly to defend, perpetuate, and extend race-based slavery.

Let Dylann Roof's evil be turned into some good for those of us who have yet to face where we came from, what we did, who we are.

Things we do and do not know

Responses to the horrifying massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina have been all over the place. Daniel Silliman makes an important point in his short post on shock as a form of denial: 

One piety, commonly expressed in times of tragedy, is that such violence is beyond comprehension. There is always the danger, however, that it is beyond comprehension only because it's easier not to comprehend. 

Shock is sometimes a form of denial. 

In this case, the violence comes in a context. It follows a long history. Violence against black churches is not new in America; violence against this specific church isn't new either.  

"Many are shocked at not only the grisly nature of the shooting, but also its location,"writes Benjamin Park for The Junto. "Yet this experience is unfortunately, and infuriatingly, far from new: while black churches have long been seen as a powerful symbol of African American community, they have also served as a flashpoint for hatred from those who fear black solidarity, and as a result these edifices have been the location for many of our nation’s most egregious racial terrorist acts." 

As Jamil Smith puts it in The Atlantic, "The black church hasn't been safe since there has been a black church." 

Whoever has ears to hear, Jesus said.

Monstrous evil sometimes uncovers insufficiency of language and poverty of thinking. Calling horrific acts--whether this week's terrible shooting or, say, Hitler's Holocaust--demonic or insane often functions as an excuse to leave it at that. In other words, if the devil or madness is to blame, then simply throwing one's hands up is a valid response.

I do believe that evil is at work in the world--and not merely in some kind of impersonal force but in principalities and powers. But like explanations that resort to "human nature," it may be generally true, but it doesn't tell us much about about the particular event, and leaving it at that generally obscures more than it reveals.

It may be the case, moreover, that insanity played a role in this week's shooting. This need not be so, however. We tend to assume that unspeakable evil is necessarily insane--that, in other words, the sane are incapable of such acts. But this, I'm afraid, is not a true description of reality but rather a coping mechanism that puts a safe distance between the truly evil and the rest of us. Right now we do not know nearly enough to discern whether insanity played a role.

But--and this is the key point--even if it did, that would not therefore mean insanity is a complete and exclusive explanation. Studying history attentively should teach us that causation isn't generally singular. Often causes overlap in complex and even contradictory ways.

We do not, as I said, know whether the shooter was insane. But we do know some other things. So perhaps instead of throwing our hands up about things we do not know, we ought to start reckoning with the things we do know.