This is a complicated argument, so I’ll do something I don’t normally do: I’ll start with my thesis. What I’m saying is that the problems with our polity right now—our difficulties arguing politics—isn’t just because of the hegemonic dominance of neoliberalism (Wendy Brown’s argument) but because of the resonance between neoliberalism and a particular religious culture—one that premises an ontological shift at the moment of belief, a shift that turns a person into a warrior in the inevitable war between Good and Evil.
Neoliberalism has been described as hegemonic discourse and a political rationality. As Wendy Brown points out, the political rationality of neoliberalism pervades educational policy, Supreme Court decisions, and what we think of as conventionally political discourse, and she (and others) have persuasively argued that one of the consequences is to depoliticize political deliberation insofar as it turns all interactions into market interactions. I’m interested in why it has such power as a cultural rationality.
I’ve been intrigued with this phenomenon in the relationship between religion and politics, since, oddly enough, the pervasion of neoliberalism (a profoundly nonreligious ethos) coincides with the sacralization of politics. Thus, religion has become monetized and politics sacralized at precisely the same time. That’s kind of weird.
The relationship between religion and politics has long been vexed in American public discourse. For instance, in postbellum areas that promoted segregation, religious discourse that supported segregation was considered “normal” and was therefore both common and allowed. It appeared unpolitical. Religious entities that criticized segregation were considered “political” (because “political” and “nonhegemonic” are pretty much synonymous for a lot of people), so major religious organizations were silent about segregation either because they thought it was bad or because they thought it was good. Segregation was explicitly a religious issue, and, because of various religious entities’ agreement to silence their criticism, dominant white religious defenses of segregation were normalized and therefore considered neutral.
That’s a mouthful. To be more clear: in areas with segregation (not just “the south”) white churches either never mentioned segregation or actively promoted it. And it’s hard for people now to understand the extent to which the major southern protestant religions actively supported segregation as Christian. It was central—that’s important to understand. And, because it was central, it was normal.
In other words, American fundagelical Christianity was always already (as they say) deeply implicated in segregation. But, in a weird way: segregation was so religiously normalized that to support it was seen as nonpolitical, and to oppose it was political. (This is a not uncommon misperception about what it means to “politicize” something—people use it when they’re talking about something political being brought into the realm of argument. In this model, “normal” behavior, even oppressive policies, isn’t “political” until there is an argument about it, so the people who object to “normal” policies are the ones seen as “politicizing” an issue. It’s a bad model.)
Thus, and this is important, American religious institutions that decided not to be “political” were, in fact, heavily and thoroughly politicized in regard to segregation to their core, whether they were supporting it or (in theory) opposed.
Paradoxically, then, segregation was protected by the notion that religious organizations should stay out of politics (since supporting segregation wasn’t “political”).
The shit hit the fan with Brown v. Board for southern Protestantism, since segregation was at the core of “southern culture” and southern religion. When Brown v. Board happened, there were multiple pro-segregation responses.
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- Resort to terror. This wasn’t a surprising response, since it had worked for almost 100 years—just lynch, or threaten to lynch, anyone who criticized white supremacy. North Carolina, for instance, had over 100 reported lynchings, meaning ones that made it into the news. Who knows how many black males (a few Jews might have been in there too) were lynched for being disrespectful or successful that didn’t make it into that tally? Every scholar of southern history notes the reliance on state-sponsored terrorism—that the black population would be kept in control by the government allowing terrorism against them. That isn’t to say that every southerner was actively bad, but every white southerner allowed that terrorism to happen.
Everyone knows about this response, and everyone (now) condemns it. But it wasn’t the most common pro-segregation response.
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- Support segregation but not through terror. The idea was that Brown v. Board was the consequence of Marxist infiltration of SCOTUS (you think I’m kidding, but I’m not). So, if we could get a non-Marxist SCOTUS, we’d be good. Let’s just delay as much as we can till we get that SCOTUS. This was considered a respectable and moderate position, and supported by people like Boutwell (who managed a discourse of “civility”).
Since segregation was not a winning argument (Wallace’s bid showed that), fundagelicals decided they couldn’t win on segregation, so they’d go for something else. They went for abortion. The hope was that “abortion” could be used to motivate people to get religiously conservative justices who would then under mind the decisions regarding segregation.
If you think I’m wrong, go the google, and find a fundagelical prior to Roe v. Wade up in arms about abortion. You might actually find a surprising number of fundagelicals advocating abortion (email me, and I’ll send some refs). Short version: every single scholar of birth control issues says this is true. Fundagelicals were not opposed to abortion till after Roe v. Wade.
There was also creationism, and I think that the two forces happened to converge—a desire to maintain creationism, and a desire to maintain segregation by getting “conservative” SCOTUS. That’s how to understand Reagan’s dog whistles about states rights, and Nixon’s Southern Strategy. (It’s important to note that “preventing abortions” did not become a political issue; instead, “outlawing abortions” was the issue.)
In any case, it’s simply clear that, after Roe, fundagelicals became more active at the local level, particularly School Boards. American political discourse has long had an evangelical flavor—think of the controversies about a Catholic president, and the evangelizing narrative behind Wilsonian foreign policy—but it has seemed to me that there has been something different about the kind of religion we’re seeing in two ways: first, the insistence, on the part of a large number of voters, that all candidates be fundagelical (not just Christian); second, open embrace of apocalyptic visions among major political figures and policies.
I think both are explained by some late nineteenth and early twentieth century shifts in American religion. Part of it has to do with seeing American foreign policy in triumphalist and missionary terms. There is a triumphalist narrative about American imperialism: they engage in imperialism in order to oppress others, but we are benevolent.
Oddly enough, instead of the triumphalist narrative of Wilsonian imperialism—we come as missionaries of democratic liberalism, who will free the oppressed from the chains of superstition and bad colonialism—there is now a narrative I find even more troubling, namely that America is taking its place in the world-ending battle between good and evil. When policy debates are framed in that context, then pragmatic discussions of long-term consequences become moot, as do questions of fairness or ethics across ingroup/outgroup boundaries.
For instance, if you look at fundagelical discussions of US Middle East policies, you can see an open rejection of such pragmatic discussions in favor of unalloyed support for whatever policy current Israeli leaders pursue. And such support is framed, not as savvy or pragmatic, but most in line with a belief in Armageddon.
That some people would feel that way doesn’t interest me; that it’s a compelling way for a large number of people to think is interesting.
The evasion of politics, and the reframing of politics as Good v. Evil, doesn’t just trouble Middle East policy. You can see it elsewhere as well—look at how much this election is a question of identity and not policies. Is Hillary a crook? Is Trump a liar? (And notice the first v. last name.) For years I’ve been wondering why we’re so averse to arguing policy. And why all policy arguments end up as identity ones. Why do we think identity is enough?
I want to toss out an explanation: that neoliberalism is a return to the prereformation religious formulation of the relationship of “good” (aka, “justified”) coupled with the reformation model of individualism and political action. Basically, we are now in a world in which many people assume that people who are saved have been ontologically changed. That ontological change guarantees that their works are justified, and that they are part of the elect who will lead the chosen people to salvation. My argument is that that version, a kind of sloppy Calvinism, displaces political deliberation with expression of identity.
It’s not uncommon to argue that liberalism has its roots in reformation notions of justification. Instead of imparted justification—Christ’s righteousness is given to believers—reformers like Luther and Calvin argued for imputed justification—we will act as though it has been given. There is not an ontological shift at the moment of justification; the person, even a believer, remains a sinner.
It’s often argued that this formulation of justification was connected to (caused? was caused by?) Enlightenment and/or humanist notions about the falliability of human perception and belief. You can’t know that you’re saved, nor that anyone else is, but you will act as though good standing members of your church are. Similarly, participation in the civic doesn’t require an ontological shift, and decision-making power can be given to people as though they have the abilities necessary to make good political decisions.
In such a moment, policy arguments would have to be about policy, and not identity (something you see, interestingly enough, in the Putney Debates, where Cromwell of all people argues that everyone has good motives, even though they disagree, and that the true course of action is hard to perceive). After all, that someone is a believer does NOT guarantee that what she is saying is true.
The Reformation didn’t question eschatology—the study of Christ’s church on earth, and the sense that human history is intensely teleological. If anything, it heightened the notion that we can interpret all human history in eschatological term. Hence, at the same moment that there is an introduction of skepticism about goodness and identity, there is the sacralizing of political history—the creation of a community of believers, of the refounding of the state of Israel, is part of the history of Christianity itself, headed toward Christ’s Second Coming. Eschatology—the history of “the church” on earth—is universalized and politicized; and political history becomes eschatology. The troubling consequence of this humanizing of eschatology is that politics is taken out of the realm of argument, compromise, and deliberation, and into a battle of good and evil.
It can be argued that this formulation of identity—imputed justification—implies a certain amount of skepticism; we don’t know who is saved, and being justified and being sanctified aren’t the same thing. Thus, we might be wrong to think we’re saved, or that someone else is. I think it’s harder to maintain a culture of skepticism within a political eschatology. If we’re inevitably headed toward a battle between good and evil, it’s hard to imagine any culture saying, “Hmmm…. are we good? or evil?” as something about which they would be skeptical and value hearing multiple sides.
In a culture of political eschatology all leaders can be divided into the Good (those who are leading us toward the good side of the inevitable battle) and the Bad (those who are deliberately leading us toward evil and the dupes who don’t realize what they’re doing). So, how do we know that a policy is good in this frame? We can look to see whether the people advocating a policy are good…. or evil. We look to their identity.
In the late nineteenth century, American evangelicalism began to slip back toward imparted justification, conflating the moment of belief with the moment of sanctification—to become a “believer” is to experience an ontological shift from sinner to saint. Imputed justification was no longer a part of American fundagelical religion, and with it any skepticism about whether a person who claimed to be saved would do good or bad things.
Thus, speaking as though one is “saved” (as long as it is coincident with endorsing the political agenda fundagelicals now argue is the necessary consequence of being saved) means an endless stack of “get out of jail” cards.
And there was one more factor, famously described by Weber—the equation of success with salvation. This was a kind of sloppy Calvinism, one that accepts the notion of an absolute ontological divide between saints and sinners, but (and?) with the assumption that saints prosper, and that their saintly identity is known to them and others. And, since the saints are, well, saints, they deserve all the good—there is no point in insisting on fairness in a culture—you don’t treat saints and sinners the same way. You give power to saints and take it away from sinners.
What I’m saying is that the problems with our polity right now—our difficulties arguing politics—isn’t just because of the hegemonic dominance of neoliberalism (Wendy Brown’s argument) but because of the resonance between neoliberalism and a particular religious culture—one that premises an ontological shift at the moment of belief, a shift that turns a person into a warrior in the inevitable war between Good and Evil.
We are all preppers now.