I have a thread up about reassessing Reagan, whom conservatives worship (they also tend to worship Theodore Roosevelt, oddly, who was a radical liberal, but anyway).
I've never been particularly certain on my views on Reagan, as I've noted here before. I am a conservative, but something about Reagan has made me long uncomfortable. In part, it might frankly just be because he was an actor, and I find actors to be fake. I never bought off on his persona, I guess.
I've noted here several times that Ronald Reagan started the process that gave us Donald Trump.
The Guardian just ran an article on the psychology of our political times, starting off with this:
Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.
Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
I'm not sure what I think of The Guardian either, which is a British left wing newspaper working hard to break into the US market. But this article has some interesting points, starting with this generalization:
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.
Interesting. And:
Trump exemplifies extrinsic values. From the tower bearing his name in gold letters to his gross overstatements of his wealth; from his endless ranting about “winners” and “losers” to his reported habit of cheating at golf; from his extreme objectification of women, including his own daughter, to his obsession with the size of his hands; from his rejection of public service, human rights and environmental protection to his extreme dissatisfaction and fury, undiminished even when he was president of the United States, Trump, perhaps more than any other public figure in recent history, is a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values.
That is in part what has made the "left behinds" fanatic devotion to Trump so hard for me to grasp. People declaring themselves average patriotic, Christian, middle class, Americans are fanatic in their devotion to somebody who expresses none of those values whatsoever. This is so much the case, that extreme efforts have to be taken to project those onto Trump.
But here's where it gets really interesting:
We are not born with our values. They are shaped by the cues and responses we receive from other people and the prevailing mores of our society. They are also moulded by the political environment we inhabit. If people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalise and internalise it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into extrinsic values. This, in turn, permits an even crueller and more grasping political system to develop.
If, by contrast, people live in a country in which no one becomes destitute, in which social norms are characterised by kindness, empathy, community and freedom from want and fear, their values are likely to shift towards the intrinsic end. This process is known as policy feedback, or the “‘values ratchet”. The values ratchet operates at the societal and the individual level: a strong set of extrinsic values often develops as a result of insecurity and unfulfilled needs. These extrinsic values then generate further insecurity and unfulfilled needs.
I think there's a lot more that can be analyzed as to these statements, but at an elemental level, there's a large measure of truth to them. Norwegians today are a kindly, non-threatening group. That reflects a lot of things, but one of them is the Christianization of the country in the Middle Ages. That took them from a brutal society where murdering your own children was accepted, to what we have today.
Continuing on with The Guardian;
Ever since Ronald Reagan came to power, on a platform that ensured society became sharply divided into “winners” and “losers”, and ever more people, lacking public provision, were allowed to fall through the cracks, US politics has become fertile soil for extrinsic values. As Democratic presidents, following Reagan, embraced most of the principles of neoliberalism, the ratchet was scarcely reversed. The appeal to extrinsic values by the Democrats, Labour and other once-progressive parties is always self-defeating. Research shows that the further towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum people travel, the more likely they are to vote for a rightwing party.
That' is absolutely the case.
Most voters, and most conservatives alive today, don't recall the country before Reagan. They don't even recall that George Bush, who urged a "kinder, gentler, conservatism" in the race he won for the Oval Office, ran against Reagan in the 1980 GOP contest.
Reagan had a charming smile and a personal "oh shucks" type of presentation. He was running against a widely personally admired man, Jimmy Carter, whose policies had failed. He was also running at a time at which the country was desperate on inflation, and trying to figure out what had happened in the 1960s, and how the Vietnam War had gone so wrong. Hard hat Americans were losing their jobs to Japanese manufacturing. Southerners were grasping to figure out what had happened to the Old South.
It wasn't a really good time in the country.
From the election of 1912 all the way through the election of 1980, the county had been on a much different path. The three-way race of 1912 saw a Progressive (Roosevelt) dragging along a conservative (Taft) against another somewhat Progressive (Wilson). Progressivism, which first really started to come into its own during Theodore Roosevelt's administration, was on the rise and in fact became ingrained in American politics. The Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations really didn't change that, but the Franklin Roosevelt administration very much did, ramping it up enormously. The setting on the dial that Roosevelt put the country on was only turned down a couple of notches post-war, and the difference between post-war Republican Administrations and Democratic ones was slight in regard to these issues for the most part, at least until Lyndon Johnson, who tried to set the dial back up. Nixon may have set the dial back down, but by modern Republican standards, Richard Nixon was a liberal RINO.
Reagan started to pull the dial off the settings, much of it in a budget fashion. The mentally disturbed were set out on the streets as state's lost funding from the Federal Government for them. Support for education at the Federal level, a major feature of the World War Two/Cold War Federal governments, started to evaporate.
With this, a sort of fend for yourself individualism came in. The promise is that everything would improve, and everyone's lives with it. And because Reagan did tackle inflation, and he did face down the Soviet Union (which of course is more or less unrelated), things did improve.
But that's stopped.
The left deserves much of the blame as well, as it got goofy, frankly, and started to take on a universalism approach that doesn't appeal to hardly anyone, and which in fact is detrimental to the country.
But Reagan took us down a path that involved hating the government, and incorporated the disaffected into the party to be used, but not really supported. Lots of people ended up being left behind.
There were signs. His political career had been launched by his A Time For Choosing speech in favor of Barry Goldwater, who was in some ways an earlier version of the Anti Republican, Republican. As Governor of California, he had been a proponent of tax cuts, and he cut the number of individuals in California's mental institutions.
But all that is forty years ago. Hating the government has become institutionalized on the right, along with a belief that all those in government service are enemies of the people. A Lord of the Flies type of view towards economics has been accepted. The ignored are angry An acceptance of politicians whose personal lives don't reflect their professed Christianity is now fully accepted, particularly by a public that claims to want to turn back the clock, but doesn't recall what the prior clock settings were.
Changing this requires an change on an existential level. There's no reason to believe that any current Republican, save perhaps for Christie and Romeny, could affect the start of it.
I should note, if you look at the items linked in on this site, over on the right, in the general interest category, there are things from the right and the left. If you only looked at some of my posts, you would assume that I'm a flaming liberal, maybe even a progressive. If you look at others, you'd assume I'm a conservative (you wouldn't assume I'm a populist, and I'm not). That probably means that I'm something else entirely, and indeed my views span right and left.
A full reader of this blog would know that I'm a Catholic, however.
One thing that I think is obvious to serious observant Catholics, and likely observant Orthodox, is that this is a Protestant Country. It really is. That's different from a "Christian Country". It's Protestant. Even people who like to spout off that this country doesn't have a religious founding of some sort are, actually, some sort of cultural Protestant, by and large. It's pretty obvious if you are a dedicated member of one of the minority religions, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, etc. As Protestants live in a Protestant culture, they don't realize that the culture is Protestant. Indeed, one of the charming things about Americans in general is the belief that everyone all over the globe thinks just like we do.
To take it a step further, quite a few sort of adherent members of other faiths, or maybe just not really well-informed members of other faiths, are heavily Protestantized. So you'll find Catholics that have heavily Protestant views, for example.
The deeply Protestant culture of the country impacts almost everything about it, from our economics to our foreign policy. It may not be at all evident to average people, but an example of that can be found in the country's overall reaction to the two major ongoing wars being fought right now.
I've supported, as people here would note, the Israeli war against Hamas, which Hamas started. But to be brutally honest, a lot of American support for Israel comes from two sources. One is the country's Jewish population, which is actually quite small, but which has been historically influential since some point in the mid 20th Century. The other is due to Evangelical Christians who see the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 as a fulfillment of a promise in the book of Revelation, although they aren't the only Christian's, or perhaps individual Christians, to see that, that way. Evangelical Christians, however, tend to see Israel in absolutist terms and many see supporting Israel as a way to directly bring about the Second Coming. For its part, the Israeli government, which actually tends to be highly secular, has worked that pretty heavily over the years.
Catholics and the Orthodox have a much more nuanced view of this topic, however, as their relationship with the region goes all the way back. Apostolic Christians were present in the region since day one. Early on, Apostolic Christianity won many converts of the Jews in the region, but also of Arabs and other regional populations. Christianity, and by that we mean Apostolic Christianity, largely converted the entire region before the Arab conquests of the 5th and 6th Century brought in Islam, but even then huge populations of Christians, and again we mean Apostolic Christians, as that is all that there were, remained. What Protestants, not Apostolic Christians, termed the Crusade when they began to falsify history came about originally to try to protect the pilgrimage routes to the very region that is now being fought over. At least up until fairly recently, 10% of the Palestinian population remained Catholic, and to the north, Lebanon was, up until fairly recently, predominately so. Large populations of Orthodox Christians were also to be found. Israel, in its relationship with out of the region Christians, however, reaches out mostly to Evangelical Christians who are pretty much completely foreign to the region.
The English Colonies were of course colonized by residents of Great Britain, who were, at the time they began to do that, Protestants. They were not all members of the Church of England or the Church of Scotland, however, and that very much has its ongoing impact today. Dissenters from the Protestant state churches, such as the "Pilgrims", took refuge in North America from whichever Protestant church was in control at the time, which was usually the Anglican Church in England, and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in Scotland. Immigrants from minority Protestant faiths didn't tend to have a concept of extending religious liberty in the New World, but rather escaping oppression for their minority views in the Old. Once in North America, they tended to be just as intolerant as the established churches they had escaped from. The one thing they could all agree on, however, is that they hated Catholics.
That was in large part because the English Protestant churches of all types had to rely on myths to justify their existence. The Church of England hadn't even really intended to separate long from the Catholic Church at first, but once things got rolling, it was hard to go back. This was for a variety of reasons, and to at least some degree the Church of England remains uncomfortable with its separation. It's made several attempts towards reversing it, and some significant sections of it basically pretend it didn't occur to a certain degree. But an early feature of it was an attempt to justify what it had done, which it never really came up with a good thesis for. Part of that simply devolved to creating a mythical history of Medieval Catholicism, a different approach than that taken by the norther European principalities that followed Luther, who also didn't mean to really separate at first.
Over time, the mythical history of the Medieval Church that the English created passed away in the UK itself. Brave Catholic remnants hung on, and the fact that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom always meant that the fables had objections to them. But in the English colonial experiments in North America, this was largely untrue. Immigrants to the colonies were overwhelmingly Protestant, if in some areas not overwhelmingly Anglican. Fables developed during the Reformation were carried over and instituted into the telling of American history and into American culture, which is why even now students at higher levels will hear stories of bloody Inquisitions and naked aggression in the Middle East that are simply untrue.
Part of the fable is that the country has always been supportive of "freedom of religion" and even that this is enshrined in the Constitution. It isn't, and it hasn't been.
At the time of the Revolution, almost all American colonist were Protestants. Certainly exceptions existed, but Catholics were a distinct minority and members of other religions, such as Judaism, were nearly non-existent. A significant exception had been Africans brought over as slaves prior to the 1700s, but during the 1700s they largely converted to Protestant faiths, reflecting the religion of where they were held, although often not the same varieties, exactly, of Protestantism of those who held them in bondage. Certainly slaves when first brought over, which was still occurring at the time of the Revolution irrespective of its illegality, were members of African animist religions by and large. About 1/3d were Muslim, however, and a few were Catholic. In terms of cultural myth, this is interesting in that it's commonly forgotten that most African slaves were animists at the time of their enslavement and also that the common excuse at the time that they would be introduced to Christianity actually wasn't true for all of them, some already being Christians. Be all of that as it may, the legacy of pre enslavement religions dissipated relatively rapidly, although some remnant of it remains even today in terms of folk beliefs.1
In 1776 when the nation rebelled against its Anglican monarch, King George III, most of the rebellious leaders in the Continental Congress were solidly Protestant. Indeed, one of the Intolerable Acts they passed as causi belli was the Quebec Act, which allowed the Québécois to remain Catholic, which says volumes about just how anti-Catholic the country was. A popular myth had developed that the founders of the republic and its constitution were largely non-Christian theists, but it's largely baloney. The article linked in above sort of adopts that view, without really fully expressing it, in order to avoid, most likely, that the Founders founded a Christian nation, or a Protestant one.
That aside, they certainly did found a theistic republic, and their early thoughts and documents are shot through with it. Nearly all of them, if not in fact all of them, believed in "natural law" which, as the article notes shows up in the Declaration of Independence, which states:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
And it goes on from there.
Okay, well so what?
Part of this is just historical. It's important to be accurate about a nation's history, and frankly the country was founded as a Protestant republic in which everyone, almost, was a Protestant. That was its culture, and to an enormous degree, it remains its culture today. Countries always have a culture, and beyond that, they deserve one.
But (and there's always a but), this also raises some important cultural, let alone, religious topics.
As to Protestants, one thing to keep in mind that while various Protestant denominations made up the majority of practice for Americans, there was not one single Protestant church and as the nation grew, this very much became the case. At the time of the Revolution, it would have been highly likely that almost everyone in a community in which any one person lived was the same type of Protestant. In Appalachians regions, for example, most were some type of Protestant. In New England, most were (although not all0 were likely Anglicans. There were Quakers and other sects of course, but people largely lived in a community in which everyone was a member of that sect, unless you were of a distinct minority community like Catholics and Jews.
As the country expanded, however, this began to change, a fact aided by the separation from the United Kingdom which now meant that immigrants from Norther Europe in general, rather than Great Britain in particular, were widely accepted.. European Protestant faiths that had not been in the country in large numbers began to come in, with no real opposition to that. Lutherans became very common in areas with large communities of Germans. Various Anabaptist groups, always present, likewise expanded and became very influential in some regions of the country, particularly the American South.
And into this distinctly American brands of Protestantism developed, something that Americans seem particularly ignorant of today. The "village preacher" or the church that was only loosely affiliated with a denomination became common.
Gather at the River in eight different John Ford films. Ford was a devout Catholic, and obviously saw this song as emblematic of American, and Protestant, Christianity. I've heard it in a Catholic Mass exactly once, in Pennsylvania.
This in fact became a feature of American life. Well into the 1980s, of course, most American towns were heavily represented by a wide variety of American Protestant churches, but almost all of them had what is now called "non-denominational" church headed up by a pastor who likely also worked five days out of seven in something else. That figure became such an iconic American that such pastors are portrayed again and again in American films, such as those noted above, but even in much more recent ones.
The fact that American Christianity became sufficiently separate from European Christianity mean that a sort of do it yourself Christianity took particularly strong root in the US, and also in Canada, in a way that it didn't elsewhere. Those who separated, for example, from the Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia tended to become Old Believers, or even Catholics, although populations of refugee Anabaptists came into the country as well. You don't find big populations of minority in Protestant religions anywhere else, however, in North America, save for areas that American Protestants have sought to proselytize in, some of which are areas that are already heavily Catholic or Orthodox. Unique nearly wholly American strains of Protestantism, or religions that came out of Christianity, developed.
As this occured, it had an impact on the culture noted above, and still very much does. Demographers have wondered about the rise of the "nones", but in fact they've always been there. Rank and file Protestants have often not worried much about pew hopping. People baptized in a Baptist Church will go to an Assemblies of God Church, and not think much about it. Beyond that, a fairly large group of Americans feels that they are really God-fearing Christians, even though they very rarely go to Church. I've heard people who never darken the door of a church save for a funeral or wedding discuss in earnest terms how the country needs to turn back to its Christian values, and in fairness, some do in fact practice Christian virtues fairly notably.
As the same time, however, people who claim this sort of loose ill-defined American Christianity often have completely jettisoned huge tenants of actual Christianity. People will live together without being married or otherwise engage in conduct that any conventional strain of Christianity regards as gravely sinful. Divorce, specifically prohibited by Christ, is widely practiced by American Protestants who don't give it a second thought. In some ways, the easy practice of the very loose American Protestantism ranges from religion made very, very easy, to those denominations which have very strict rules that never actually appear in the New Testament, or Old, at all.
The Pine Tree Flag, one of the flags used by American revolutionaries during the war for independence. People can say what they like, but a rebel army flying a flag like this is not battling for a secular republic. Currently, this flag is associated with a group of far right wing Evangelicals of the New Apostolic Reformation who are inaccurately defined as Christian Nationalist, but who do share significant amounts of their goals including the restoration or imposition of a Christian, by which they really mean Evangelical Protestant superstructure on the country.
Into this mix, however, we now have the New Apostolic Reformation, a Protestant movement that is confused by commentators with Christian Nationalism and even sometimes confused at to its American Protestant status.
The New Apostolic Reformation comes out of that branch of American Protestantism that has the concept that the United States itself has a particular Devine mission. This sort of thinking has roots in American Protestantism that go fairly far back in the 19th Century, and it still is particularly strong in some branches of non-mainline, if that is a word, Protestantism, and also in Great Awakening religions that came out of Protestantism. The followers of such thoughts tend to believe, for example, that certain figures (often George Washington) were charged by a Devine mission at the time of the Revolution, and also tend to believe that the U.S. Constitution was divinely inspired. You can find such thoughts today amongst various American Protestant religions outside of those which have retained strongly European roots, and also, as noted, as offshoots from Christianity. For example, you will sometimes hear the words common to the belief quoted by some Mormons, although it is not a tenant of the Mormon faith itself.
It was partially this line of thought that gave rise to the Manifest Destiny belief that many Americans held in the 19th Century, but it carried on until the 20th Century. Consider, for example, this 1900 statement after the US had taken the Philippines during the Spanish American War:
Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever, "territory belonging to the United States," as the Constitrltion calls them. And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens, but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength, and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.
* * *
Mr. President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics: deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing hut vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given its the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: "Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many thing."
From Congressional Record(56th Cong., 1st Session) Vol XXXIII, pp.705, 711.
The concept of the US as a New Testament "chosen people" remains surprisingly strong in some quarters of American Protestantism.
The New Apostolic Reformation, faced with a United States of the early 21st Century in which the openly strong Protestant connections are now highly muted in many places, have taken this one step further than most did in the past and openly seek to establish a new wing of Protestantism which advocates for the "restoration" of perceived "lost offices" of what they conceive to have been, inaccurately, in the early Church, such as prophet and apostle. There were indeed, of course, prophets in Judaism. And there were apostles during the Apostolic Age. Indeed, as a distinctly Protestant movement, it ironically fails to grasp that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches are true Apostolic Churches, and they were founded by the apostles. Restoring the "office" of apostle is not possible, as the Apostolic Age is over and Apostolic revelation fixed, something acknowledged not only by the Apostolic Churches, but also those churches of the Protestant Reformation which arose during the Reformation, the latter of which differ on that point from the Apostolic Churches only in regard to their relationship to the Apostles.
The NAR has been particularly associated with current strains of Trumpist populism, and in a vague sort of way helps to explain what is going on. As American Protestantism outside the mainline Protestant churches has always had sort of a "do it yourself" aspect to it, it's free to conceive of a mission like the NAR's while also free to ignore vast tracks of actual Christian doctrine. Looked at that way, the NAR doesn't, at least for the time being, need to worry itself about divorce and remarriage as antithetical to Christianity, or even the requirement that Christians be their brother's keeper. Rather, the thought is, that is, by some, that political success can be achieved, after which a society modeled in their view of Christianity can be imposed from the top down.
In this fashion, the life of a figure like Donald Trump can be flat out ignored in pursuit of what is imagined to be a greater goal, which is distinctly different from the view of some other Christians that they must vote for Trump as they have no other moral choice. Looked at this way, Trump becomes some sort of latter day Cyrus the Great, a non congregant being used by God to achieve a greater goal. It's a radical belief, but it is out there.
Speaker of the House Johnson flies the Pine Tree flag outside of his Congressional office.
The flag of Vatican City. This flag can occasionally be found in Catholic Churches. I can recall at one time a point at which American flags, which also occasionally could be found in Catholic Churches in the US, were removed.
An oddity in the US is that the largest single religion in the United States is a minority religion, that being Catholicism. Most Americans are Protestants, but the single biggest faith is the Catholic faith. And contrary to what some like to suggest, not only are Catholic numbers holding their own, but they're growing. At the same time this is occurring, moreover, the second "lung" of the Church, Orthodoxy, is expanding as well.
Because this is such a Protestant country in culture and outlook, one of the things about at least a lot of Catholics in the US is that they were heavily Protestantized, something that really took off once JFK told the country he could be a Catholic on Sundays, but the country didn't really need to worry about that for the rest of the week. A disaster for Catholics, Catholics rushed to acclimate and went from being seen as vaguely strange and threatening to the rest of the country to being just one denomination. At the same time that this occured, actual reforms in the Church, combined with the "Spirit of Vatican Two" in fact made Catholics seem that way to many "main line" Protestants and also to many rank and file Catholics. Many distinctly Catholic practices that had deeply inserted themselves into Catholic culture disappeared. Catholics Masses were now in English (most places) or Spanish in some. Catholics no longer were bound to eating fish as a penitential observance on Fridays outside of Lent. Distinctive female head coverings started to disappear (prior to Vatican II, we'd note). Unique accordance of respect in a formal way towards Priests ended. A fairly uniform Catholic education ended (one that I hadn't participated in, nor had my father). A weak 1970 Catechetical set of instruction came in, leading to an entire generation, of which I am part, hardly knowing the ins and outs of their Faith by the time they passed through it.
By the 80s and 90s, members of the Church who would never have thought of marrying in a Protestant Church or church shopping were doing so. Divorce and remarriage, something long common in the Protestant churches, also came in.
In some ways, it's now easy, retrospectively, to see how this came about. A lot of this was due to what might be regarded as cultural shell shock, or as one sociologist put it in a different context, "future shock". A generally disdained people for the most part, in much of the country Catholics kept to themselves and lived in "Catholic Ghettos" where their cultural uniqueness wasn't open to the rest of the world up through the middle of the 20th Century. This was never wholly the case, of course, and there were always notable converts to Catholics who were out in the world. In the West, which always tended to break down distinctions, this was much less the case once people were outside of big cities, like Denver and Salt Lake.
Still, in that time period, most Catholics were also blue collar workers and very few, save for some in certain professional occupations, had attended university. Those that did often tried to attend a Catholic university, which in those days were really Catholic. So, in much of the country they worked blue collar jobs, if they were professional their clientele was Catholic as a rule, and they tended to live in Catholic Communities. This was true for the Orthodox as well. And it was also true for Jews. Indeed, in some ways, the overall situation of these communities resembled that of African Americans, all of whom were disdained by the Ku Klux Klan and other nativists.
World War Two started to massively erode this. For the first time large numbers of Catholics attended university and after the war, for the same reason, this continued on due to the GI Bill. The walls of the Catholic (and Orthodox) Ghettos began to come down. Vatican II came along and made institutional changes in the church. Separately, the Vatican change the liturgy to its current form, a definite improvement, and provided that it could be said in the vernacular. Bishops and Priests who assumed a certain directly from this began to expand on it, and a Catholic President came in and told Americans that Catholics were just like everyone else, something a lot of Americans rapidly embraced. Similar developments happened north of the border where the Church itself started the process of dismantling institutional control of large areas of Quebec society, which in turn developed into the Quiet Revolution.
Looking back now, lots of younger Catholics wonder why their grandparents allowed so much to erode. Why did they allow the incidents of Catholic culture to fade? Why did they put up with taking out the altar rails? Why wasn't some Latin retained? Why did the parishioners not balk when the Bishops lift year around penitential meatless Fridays? The shock of it all seems like a likely answer. Having gone from heavily Irish, or German, or Italian communities and practicing a religion that practically had its own language, and that meaning that your future in the larger, Protestant, American society was at least partially laid out for you, and limited, to one in which they were told that they were fully part of the larger consumerist limitless American society where the rules only loosely applied, and then having part of the old culture simply destroyed, they were shell shocked.
Try as the American Church of hte 70s might, the fact of the matter is that CAtholic's remain stubbornly subject to the letter to Diogentus:
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.
They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.
In other words, Catholics that came up after the 80s looked at what the World had given to accommodating Catholics of the late 60s, 70s, and 80s, and found it wholly wanting. Like topics, we're otherwise writing on in slow motion, tradition, which turns out to be grounded in something real, and there's an effort to take it back. As that's being done, it's the case that the reforms that came in are being rejected, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
Trad girls in conservative skirts and wearing chapel veils, young men fairly conservatively dressed, parishioners attempting to secure Latin Masses, or going to Easter Rite Devine Liturgy, aren't seeking to reform the reform, which up until recently was the vanguard of a return to tradition. They're seeking to wholesale bring the incidents of Catholicism back in. In doing that, they're making it plain that they're not just another denomination, and they don't want to really be part of the American religious scene. Whether they're applying the Benedict Option or the Constantine one, they're not only not melting in, they're returning to wholesale different. And that different doesn't look back to 1776, it looks all the way back.
So why does any of this matter?
Cyrus the Great. Some far right Evangelicals tend to see Trump as a sort of Cyrus figure. Cyrus was not Jewish, but his proclimations favored the Jewish faith in an existential sense.
Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying: 'Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD, the God of heaven, given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whosoever there is among you of all His people—his God be with him—let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD, the God of Israel, He is the God who is in Jerusalem. And whosoever is left, in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help him with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with beasts, beside the freewill-offering for the house of God which is in Jerusalem.'
Ezra 1:1–4
Well, it does, for a variety of reasons, some mild, and some a bit scary.
One thing is this. It used to be particularly noted by some that the English-speaking world was particularly given to democracy, which it was. Those with a limited horizon tended to associate this solely with the United States, but that was in fact extremely inaccurate. The United Kingdom had a functioning parliament in 1776 when we abandoned the UK's overlordship, and in fact that is part of the reason that we did that. They had a Parliament, and they weren't letting us in.
A person can say what they want about that and try to disassociate it somehow from something particularly English, but it is there. France, in 1776, wasn't democratic. Spain wasn't either. You can't really find another major power that was. And all of England's progeny took this path for a long time. Canada never had a non-democratic moment. Nor did New Zealand, or Australia.
Now, English democracy was not perfect, and the franchise was not even particularly large. Major classes were completely excluded based on economic, and also in the case of Catholics, religion. But it was there and that heritage was conveyed. Moreover, when it took root in North America, it expanded beyond what it had been in the UK pretty rapidly.
Which leads us to a more radical proposition.
What was also conveyed early on was a certain culture, and part of that was a political culture. The overall culture, however, was Protestant. And it remains so. It's so Protestant that even the atheists are culturally Protestant.
An essential element of that American Protestantism is the concept of "I can make up my mind for myself and nobody can tell me what to do". Lots of religious "reformers" in the US have done that, but that's a Protestant thing. To Protestants, it's not strange to hop from one Protestant denomination to another, and to even include denominations that claim to have no denomination, even though the they do. Catholics and Jews, on the other hand, are part of one, big, global, faith. Moving from parish to parish, for Catholics, is no big deal, as Catholicism is the Church. But going to another denomination is an extraordinarily radical move and an act of rebellion.
Democracy, of course, as a movement has spread well beyond the English-speaking world and indeed, there were democracies that spring up in various places in the non Protestant world, as for in example Italian city states. Antiquarians will point out the example of ancient Athens, or even Germanic and Nordic raiding bands. On the last item, all people are democratic at the tribal level, pretty much. None of this really counters the point, however.
This brings us to the next reason this is important. The most recent movement, which is threading through American Evangelicalism, is radically exclusionary in a way, and this too is part of the North American religious heritage.
It wasn't until after the Civil War that American society really started to view Catholics as suitable citizens,a and then only reluctantly. The huge Irish and German immigrant populations that fought in the war made Catholics impossible to really ignore. Jewish Americans were really small in number, but they started to be accepted, very reluctantly, about the same time. As this occured the word "Judeo-Christian" was invented to include everyone then in the country in a singular larger American Christian sort of world. But the fact remains that hostility towards both religions, and more recently Islam, has been an ongoing feature of American life.
Catholics, and if there are any, Jews and Muslims (the latter two unlikely in any numbers) flirting with the new concepts of Christian Nationalism and National Conservatism really need to do so at their caution. The New Apostolic Reformation forces may have a similar view on moral matters as mainstream and conservative Catholics do, but the NAR is definitely not Catholic. And the history for Americans of general of politics and religion being welded together, and indeed coopting each other, is not a comfortable one at all. Put another way, Donald Trump is not a deeply religious, or even moral, man, and there's no real reason to believe that he's some sort of Cyrus the Great.
But some clearly see him that way, explaining their actions, and even some of the odd propoganda in the Trumpist camp.
None of this is to say that faith shouldn't inform a person's politics. It should. But they are not the same thing.
Footnotes:
1. Native Americans of course had their own religions, but what was different about their history, up until the early 20th Century, is that unless highly assimilated, they weren't "Americans" at all. It wasn't until 1924, a date which our 100 year retrospective posts haven't even yet reached, that all Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship.
Nearly the Southern Populist anthem, Sweet Home Alabama.
I should start off with a massive series of disclaimers here, particularly as Southern Populism and Southern Agrarianism are not the same thing, although they are related. The terms are easy to confuse.
But confusion is at the core of what we're trying to explore here.
Additionally, Southerners tend to be proud of the South in a way that not all regions of the country are proud of their regions. Native Westerners tend to be very nativist and provincial, and proud of the West, or more often of their particular states. Southerners tend to be proud of the entire South, with Texas and Oklahoma, at least by my observation, particularly proud of their states. Louisiana, which has its own unique culture, does as well. While I put Lynrd Skynrd up above, for a reason, I'd note that perhaps, in this regard, I should have posted the lyrics by Ally Venable to the song she co performed with Buddy Guy, Texas Louisiana:
Texas
Louisiana whew
That's where we come from
Texas
Yeah Louisiana
Always on the run
Well I'm just starting out
I ain't never done
Hey there neighbor
Get on in this house
Like sugarcane and cactus
We're both from the south
Texas
Louisiana
That's where we come from
Texas
Yeah Louisiana
We're both old and young
I'm the farmers daughter
I'm a poor man's son
Love Stevie ray
Little Walter too
Turn it up Buddy
I wanna jam with you
Texas
Louisiana too
That's where we come from
Texas
Whew Louisiana too
Together having fun
Teacher used to tell me
Two heads is better than one
So, I'm not trying to pick on the South, or Southerners.
Recently we've written two posts, both of which related to Susan Stubson's op ed in the New York Times decrying what she thinks is the impact of Christian Nationalism on the Wyoming GOP. Those articles were:
What Stubson's actually writing about, but doesn't know it, is the impact of Southern Populism on Wyoming, including Southern Cultural Christianity, not Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism hasn't really made an appearance in Wyoming and frankly, while it's been floating around in nascent form in the US since Dreher wrote The Benedict Option, it hasn't gathered a strong street level attraction anywhere. It's more of an intellectual movement.
Given that the overall terms here are poorly defined, particularly in regard to Christian Nationalism, it's easy to see why the authors of these articles are confused. It's all the easier to see why Stubson would be confused, as she's a Reagan Republican and a fallen away Catholic who fell into Evangelical Protestantism. There's a straight line between Ronald Reagan and Southern Populism's spread into the GOP at large, and therefore, even though I'm sure he would be personally horrified, there's a straight line between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. One, basically, begat the other.
Christian Nationalism, like it or hate it, is an intellectual movement, and is one in the same with National Conservatism. Its founder in American politics, if not its overall founder, is Patrick Deneen and its backers can be found in the pages of R. R. Reno's First Things. Quite frankly, that puts it in the intellectual heavyweight category. It's issued a manifesto, and the signers of it include some well known conservative thinkers. Deneen has issued at least two well regarded books on the topic. Its central thesis is that liberalism has failed, in part due to its success, and is now consuming itself, and the entire culture of the West with it, by a frenzied orgy of libertine, mostly sexually focused, individualism. What needs to be done, it holds, is the preservation of democracy, but Illiberal Democracy, with the boundary lines of the culture externally enforced. It sets its manifesto out as follows:
1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression.
2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image.
3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.
4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.
5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.
6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.
7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs.
8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.
9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.
10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.
That's not what the leaders of the Wyoming GOP hold dear to their hearts, although they'd likely say they're for all of that.
Emperor Constantine and the bishops of the First Council of Nicaea (325) holding the Niceean Creed, something that has more to do with Christian Nationalism than anything coming out of the populst wing of the GOP.
And, again, like it or not, Christian Nationalism looks more to Antioch of the 1st Century, and then to Rome, and Constantinople. Its founders, the way it views itself, would be, it imagines, are found there, not in Philadelphia in 1776, or in Richmond from 1860 to 1865.
They wouldn't be getting down to Sweet Home Alabama or Texas Louisiana.
Southern Populism, however, grows out of the same soil that Southern Agrarianism did, coming up from part of the same culture. A person might be tempted, therefore, to look to I'll Take My Stand as its manifesto, and they'd be partially correct in doing so, but not fully so. The authors of that agrarian manifesto were correct in noting that the South had an Agrarian culture, and a Christian one. Many American agrarians have thought, with some justification, that one must be the other, although oddly it's rarely noted that one of the most successful North American agrarian cultures was just that, but not Protestant. The Quebec culture prior to the Quiet Revolution was agrarian, and Catholic. For that matter, the Red River Rebellion was an uprising of Catholic agrarian Métis against the intrusion of Protestant English culture in the form of the English cultured Canadian government.
Councillors and officers of the Provisional Government of the Métis Nation, circa 1869. Front row, L-R: Robert O'Lone, Paul Proulx. Centre row, L-R: Pierre Poitras, John Bruce, Louis Riel, John O'Donoghue, François Dauphinais. Back row, L-R: Bonnet Tromage, Pierre de Lorme, Thomas Bunn, Xavier Page, Baptiste Beauchemin, Baptiste Tournond,
Therefore, the point raised by the Southern Agrarians isn't incorrect, but misunderstood, perhaps even by themselves.
Christianity in the American South was heavily impacted by the Civil War. Going into the war, the Episcopal Church was the central Christian denomination of the South, even contributing a Bishop to the ranks of Confederate generals. Behind it was the Presbyterian Church, the church of displaced Scots from Ireland. Always present in the South, however, and to a smaller degree in the North, were numerous informal Christian pastors and pastors and congregations descendant from earlier dissenters.
Confederate Lieutenant-General Leonidas Polk, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana and founder of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America. Popular with his troops, he was such a bad general that one historian has noted that the shot that killed him in battle was one of the worst shots of the Civil War, as it removed him from leadership.
The war brought these individuals to the forefront in Southern religion. Episcopalianism was the Church that was associated with the Southern elite and hence failure. Just as some poorly catechized Catholics have abandoned their church in the wake of priest scandals, average Southerners did so to a large degree following the war.
The rise of certain branches of American Protestantism had occurred before the war, for that matter, which came in the midst of the Great Awakening period. That period was particularly fertile in the US for the advancement of Protestant faiths that were not rooted in a formal structure, although they created new ones or leaned on informal preexisting ones. This was not, by any means, confined to the South, but the war did cause a post-war condition in the South in which the Episcopal church wanted and other strains of Protestantism advanced. The Episcopal Church was simply too associated with the disaster of the Civil War and those who had led the South into it.
The war also had the impact of spreading white Southerners across the county. The Great Migration of black Southerners would wait until the early 20th Century, for the most part, but a large-scale migration of white Southerners started soon after the war, or in reality even during it. It wasn't massive enough to create the same sort of demographic impacts the Great Migration would, but it did result in the spread of Southerners and Southerners attached to informal strains of Protestantism across the country. It did not, however, result in a big cultural change. The religious shift did, however, have a significant cultural impact in the South.
Episcopalianism became northern based following the war and when the Civil Rights Era arrived, it backed it. Black churches also, and obviously, backed it. But informal cultural Southern Christianity, which had advanced with its very loose structure, in the South after the war opposed it, and often in an unstructured cultural way. Without the structure of Episcopalianism, or of Presbyterianism, and having adopted certain doctrines that encouraged an anti-Biblical presumption of easy salvation, a certain "do it your own" or individualistic approach, while still very conservative, became the norm such that even people which very loose religious affiliation could feel themselves part of the overall fold and could mix their cultural views with their religious ones easily.
Oil booms of the 50s/60s, 70s, and the very late 20tth Century and early 21st Century had the impact of really bringing up a lot of workers from Texas and Oklahoma during that period, and that in turn really altered the Protestant religious landscape of the oil producing regions of the West at the exact same time that the collapse of the Reformation saw the Mainline Protestant churches in the US became to rapidly contract. The Mainline Protestant Churches had dominated Protestantism outside the South, and in the Rocky Mountain West. IN the Rocky Mountain West, however, lack of religious attachment was remarkably strong, which impacted how this worked. Wyoming was, and indeed remains, the least religious state in the U.S., which in turn meant that religion had a very muted impact on politics. Those who were faithful members of churches were remarkably unwilling to mix faith and politics, and even strongly religious politicians were almost never mention their religious affiliation. A scene like we recently had, with UW student republicans giving an invocation over a right wing Secretary of State, would simply not have occurred. Indeed, an effort by a very conservative LDS legislator in the 1980s to regulate pornography was met without right derision.
Whether this is good or bad is, perhaps, dependent upon your religious views, but it was an aspect of life in Wyoming in particular, and in much of the Rocky Mountain West. It is not as if there were not many churchgoers, there were, but openly incorporating religious beliefs into political positions just didn't occur.
That something was changing should have been obvious, perhaps, by the growth of local mega churches, even in this region. Prior to the 1990s, loosely defined Protestants tended to gravitate towards an established church, often a Baptist Church, which had loose affiliations, or oddly enough, if they attended church once or twice a year, a Catholic Church. But with mega churches that muted their denominational affiliation or which claimed none (something that is in fact never really true), they started to gravitate in that direction. This became obvious first with funerals, oddly enough, which were often held in one of these churches for people who had no real religious affiliation other than a loose or even informal Christianity. It became a little easy to tell who these people were simply by reading in their obituaries where the funerals would be.
At the same time, however, this new strain, or rather newly imported strain, of Christianity did very much take root. People who would have previously gone to a Baptist or Presbyterian Church started attending these, with the latter two suffering as a result. A partial example of this is here:
This is City Park Church, and was formerly, as noted below in the original entry, the First Presbyterian Church.
This Presbyterian Church is located one block away from St. Mark's Episcopal Church and St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, all of which are separated from each other by City Park.
The corner stone of the church gives the dates 1913 1926. I'm not sure why there are two dates, but the church must have been completed in 1926.
This century old church became the home of the former First Baptist Church congregation on February 28, 2020, and as noted in a thread we'll link in below, had been experiencing a lot of changes prior to that.
The original entry here was one of the very first on this blog and dated at least back as far as January 25, 2011. While the architecture hasn't changed at all, with the recent change our original entry became misleading to an extent.
That this had crossed over into politics became obvious with the candidacy of Foster Freiss. Extremely wealthy, and with little connection to Wyoming other than maintaining a home in Jackson, the Wisconsin born Freiss had connections with Texas, and campaigned in a style that recalled the South of the 1970s. Daisy Duke, t-shirt clad, young women appeared, freezing, in campaign rallies for the first time in the state's history, and so far the only time. A car that appeared in town, with Colorado license plates declaring "Christians for Freiss" made it obvious what was occurring.
And that's where the state's GOP went.
Not that it's done so cleanly. A person who knows the state's demographics would note that in certain regions of the state, another religion has a strong representation in the GOP. Some newly imported members of "Freedom Caucus" are likely members of Mainline or Apostolic Churches, with one probably being Catholic. Chuck Gray is Catholic. To an extent, this shows how lines blur along religious and political lines, and it's always difficult to draw bright lines. To another extent, however, it might also show had American Catholicism has become Protestantized at the pew level with some people.1
This isn't Christian Nationalism.
Christian Nationalism looks very much outwards, rather than inward, in its view, and if the Christianity of Wyoming's GOP, and that of the nation writ large right now, looks towards South Carolina in 1865 without realizing it, Christian Nationalism looks toward Rome, Constantinople, Canterbury, and to some extent, Moscow via Kyiv in 988.
Large revival meeting, 1909, in a National Guard Armory
Put another way, the Christianity of the current GOP really looks towards a rural Southern Christian revival meeting, or at least a revival meeting, of the 1950s, while Christian Nationalism looks either to the WASP past prior to 1950, or to an Apostolic Christian ghetto of the same period.
They aren't the same at all.
Which is why Stubson's commentary was off.
The intellectual heavyweights of the Christian Nationalist movement show that. Rod Dreher was perhaps there early, and he's a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian, having converted from Catholicism, which he had converted to from Protestantism. Patrick Dineen is a Latin Rite Catholic. R. R. Reno is a Catholic convert from Episcopalianism. You can find non-Apostolic Christians in the movement, but you have to hunt for them.
Moreover, for nationalist, they're surprisingly international. Dreher has self exiled himself to Hungary, which many in his camp look towards as a model.2 Poland is held up as an example as well. Christian Nationalist heralded the election of Giorgia Meloni, who claims to defend "God, fatherland, and family and defines herself as “a woman, a mother, an Italian and Christian”. Meloni, of course, comes from a Catholic country, Italy, and while her actual adherence to the Faith would seem to be questionable, whatever brand of Christian she is, she's likely culturally Catholic.
What the essential essence of Christian Nationalism holds is that the West, by which it means countries in Europe, made up of European descended people, or countries which have a European culture by whatever means, are essentially (Apostolic) Christian in culture, above everything else. Next to that, each nation, they'd hold, has its own individual culture. After that, but only after all of that is accepted, they're for democracy.
Hence, they are National Conservatives, or Illiberal Democrats. Their attachment to democracy comes after 1) an attachment to (Apostolic) Christianity and 2) national culture (formed by an attachment to Christianity), but it is there.
That's distinctly different from modern Populism, which doesn't seem to have a strong real attachment to democracy right now, or to the extent that it does, it's exclusionary.3 Democracy is for the right people, who are of the right culture, and who espouse the American Civil Religion.
Put in terms stated by Dinneen:
As Montesquieu pointed out long ago, democracy is the most demanding regime, given its demands for civic virtue. The cultivation of virtue requires the thick presence of virtue-forming and virtue-supporting institutions, but these are precisely the institutions and practices that liberalism aims to hollow and eviscerate in the name of individual liberty.
Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed.
National Conservatives would seek the thick preservation of virtue forming and virtue supporting institutions. Liberals would rip them down. Populists, right now, would simply dictate their views, expecting them to be accepted. As Dinneen notes, and correctly, about Liberalism, and by extension the opposite views of National Conservatives/Christian Nationalists:
[W]hat is bemoaned by the right is due not to the left but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to liberal economics. And it seeks to show that what is bemoaned by the left is due not to the right but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to the dissolution of social norms, particularly those regarding sexual behavior and identity. The “wedding” between global corporations and this sexual agenda is one of the most revealing yet widely ignored manifestations of this deeper synergy.
Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed
That's also why, quite frankly, these two movements, while they are overlapping right now, are in actuality deeply antithetical to each other, and it's also why, ironically, the very thing that Stubson misidentifies and fears grew out of and is part of the thing that she claims to wish to preserve.
Because National Conservatism/Christian Nationalism is, at the end of the day, rooted in the same concern that caused Dreher to write The Benedict Option, it looks at something much larger than the nation. The nation that National Conservatism/Christian Nationalism seeks to preserve, overall, is Christendom, with various nations just subparts of that. Christian Nationalism, or once again National Conservatism, look at nations the same way that Carolingians did. Yes, there are countries, and yes they do matter, but not as much as something else does. Southern Populist, however, are America Firsters.
Autograph of Charles the Great.
Put another way, Christian Nationalist feel that the Council of Nicea is of paramount importance, but would reject the concept that the U.S. Constitution is some sort of religious document. They aren't "Constitutional Conservatives", confident that this somehow equates with religiosity, but rather Council Conservatives confident of their religious grounding.
If that's understood, there really aren't any Christian Nationalist in Wyoming politics, openly. There may be, without their realizing it, but they aren't the same group as the Freedom Caucus. The Wyoming Freedom Caucus is made up of populist strongly influenced by Southern Populism, which is where their religiosity comes from. It's why they can speak in religious terms with such confidence and also support somebody who is a serial polygamist and have a leader who has been accused of serious moral misconduct at some point in the past. The movement can, at its core, believe that its members were once saved and therefore always saved, and battle with certainty, whereas Christian Nationalist worry about the entire West losing its soul.
All of this undoubtedly sounds like an endorsement of Christian Nationalism, but it isn't. It is a condemnation of current American populism. And we are expressing some sympathy with Christian Nationalism in its recognition of what Patrick Dineen has written in regard to liberalism and how it is destroying Western culture, which it is. Liberalism has succeeded so well, it's now consuming itself by consuming reality.
Its warning would be simple, recalling its oldest lessons: at the end of the path of liberation lies enslavement. Such liberation from all obstacles is finally illusory, for two simple reasons: human appetite is insatiable and the world is limited. For both of these reasons, we cannot be truly free in the modern sense. We can never attain satiation, and will be eternally driven by our desires rather than satisfied by their attainment. And in our pursuit of the satisfaction of our limitless desires, we will very quickly exhaust the planet.
Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed.
So if this isn't an endorsement of National Conservatism or Christian Nationalism, why?
Well, because prior experience shows that mixing politics with religion, officially, can have unintended results. It fails, I suppose, to take heed of the council given in the letter to Diognetus, it not immediately, sooner or later.
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.
They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.
That last line is particularly distinctive, "As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself."
A lot in the Populist right, like those practicing American Civil Religion itself, have excused themselves from an awful lot. Apostolic Christians really can't.
And if the West's needs to be rescued from liberal excess, National Conservatism/Christian Nationalism needs to be careful. For one thing, it would need to be serious about this item in its manifesto:
6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.
That gets directly to this:
[W]hat is bemoaned by the right is due not to the left but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to liberal economics. And it seeks to show that what is bemoaned by the left is due not to the right but to the consequences of its own deepest commitments, especially to the dissolution of social norms, particularly those regarding sexual behavior and identity. The “wedding” between global corporations and this sexual agenda is one of the most revealing yet widely ignored manifestations of this deeper synergy.
Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed.
That will be a tall order for conservatives who have held for decades that free enterprise equals corporate capitalism, and still do. Right wing populists basically, and contrary to their tradition, hold the same thing.
Moreover, National Conservatives will have to be careful not to so blend their faith with their politics that the politics takes over and damages the faith. Ultimately, that's the lesson, maybe, of Quebec. Ireland, and Spain, all of which have been down a type of this road before. It might well prove to be the lesson of contemporary Russia as well.
Charles DeGualle was a devout Catholic, but he did not attempt to force France into being a religious state. Éamon de Valera basically did. Now, having said that, in spite of the news regarding Ireland, Ireland is still a very devout Catholic state, so it can be argued that De Valera was right. In both instances, democratic systems were preserved, which meant that the state's allegiances could be changed. It's notable that they have survived that with a retained, if bruised, conservatism that might not otherwise be there. Of course, once again, you can argue that about Spain.
Deneen seems less keen about preserving democracy, and that a danger here.
Elections provide the appearance of self-governance but mainly function to satiate any residual civic impulse before we return to our lives as employees and consumers.
Patrick J. Deneen. That suggests a willingness to disregard democracy as being unreal. History has shown, however, that to be incorrect.
Moreover, a close association with the state can be damaging to the very values that are sought to be protected. Quebec's religious conservatism suffered heavily when the Quite Revolution came about, in no small part because the guardians of that tradition turned out not to be as loyal to it as thought.
And, finally, we have to recall that in some quarters, namely the US, and perhaps to a lesser extent Canada, well. . . in other places too, a close association with the state by Apostolic Christians can be corrosive. In the end, Protestants don't really like us, and in the end, we have to make compromises with the state if we're really intending to govern from the pews, so to speak.
So does this mean that the Christian Nationalist have no point, and all is folly? We must descend into Gomorrah unimpeded?
No. But there are dangers here. And probably the first thing we need to do is to be simply clear about our values in a secular society, and even in the pews, where there are also plenty who are willing to compromise Christianity.
These are, any way you look at it perilous times.
Footnotes
1. Javing said that, at the pew level, and influenced by the net making things more available now than at any time in the world's history, the direction is toward 1) orthodoxy or 2) Catholic traditionalism. The
2. Viktor Orbán is a member of the Protestant Hungarian Reformed Church, which might be compared to Presbyterianism, but his wife is Catholic and their children were raised as Catholic. Katalin Novak is also a member of the same church. Hungary has a surprisingly diverse religious make up, with the Catholic claiming(37.2% of the population, Calvinist 11.6% , Lutheran's 2.2%, Eastern Catholic's 1.8%. 18.2% claim no religion and 27.2% simply won't respond to a question on the matter.
3. Many hardcore right wing populist assert right now that elections that have not gone their way were stolen, which they were not. However, just below the surface on some of this rhetoric is the suggestion that those who vote the other way are illigitimate voters. Illiberal Democrats would seek to stifle "progressive" views anti democratically, but right wing populists take a more frightening position that those who hold the opposite views don't count at all.
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