Calling It Part 2

My last blog post declared the death of mainline Protestantism.  Now in my next grandiose move I’ll do the same for politics, specifically the Democratic Party and the idea of a middle way as a pathway to a better society.

I’ve always understood myself to adhere to left wing politics. Not sure I have a legitimate claim to that or not.  When I was younger I flirted with left wing parties and had solid associations with people in them, but never joined one.  At the end of the day each seemed enveloped by its own pathos of irrelevance.  Increasingly I put my mental energy into the Democratic Party, but more importantly, towards institutionalism. It would be through realistic politics—finding common ground with market-based forces as long as there was also room for some humanity, supporting lots of people and positions that were OK but at least not evil.  The catchphrase is lesser of two evils, but I do think that in many cases the compromise and compromised position was not necessarily evil, just moderate, a partial solution, uncommitted.

This approach was always troubled. After 12 years of Reagan and Bush, the Clinton-Gore victory was welcome, Clintonism firmly embraced neoliberal governance.  NAFTA, welfare reform, the 1994 crime bill.  Refusal to push for single payer healthcare.  It’s not unreasonable as seeing all of the administrations since 1988 as continuations of Reagan. Those policy compromises, that worked to provide some relief from the awful administrations that would otherwise have been in place, were a thing that happened in the years that led up to where we are today.  A majority voted for authoritarianism. All those compromises have nothing to show for them, and show no signs of building support for this party.

The media is filled with pieces on what the Democratic Party needs to do to regain strength and relevance, but I don’t see why we should care about the preservation of the party.  I'm ready now to agree with Hardy and Negri:

"For well over a century now reformism is posed as the only reasonable and effective path according to the supposed political realism of the official and socialist Left. Realism dictates, according to them, accommodating to capitalist rule, that is, participating in government, respecting capitalist wages, work conditions, and social well-being can be slowly but surely improved. This realism has turned out to be entirely unrealistic. Reformism in this form has proven to be impossible and social benefits it promises are an illusion."  Assembly p. 251

If you think of the time since Carter (may he rest in peace--his death was announced today) as the key period for reformism, few of the goals one would hope for from some clever compromise have been realized.  Our society is more unequal, more brutal.  Our wars pervasive. Deaths of misery abound.  

So who really cares about the future of the Democratic Party. It is true that our political system (particularly in the US, but to some extent in the UK and Germany) has certain game theory qualities that favor organization in the political sphere around two poles. For the time being the Democratic Party is the primary vehicle for someone other than an authoritarian to run for office. But there’s no good reason after what we’ve seen the last 50 years to think that the Democrats can come back to power rejuvenated and recommitted to broad social goals. If anything, in the US we are devolving to a single party, or one where the parties are factions of the authoritarian force.  In Tennessee, outside of some city offices, there is nothing other than Republicans devoted to installing their form of contemporary Christian authoritarian order as far as possible. It's becoming increasingly clear that electoral politics offers little role for people with convictions like mine.  It is great to have people like Aftyn Behn in the legislature, but their role is more as witness than legislator.  

You could hold to the idea of blue dots, like Nashville, but I'm not sure they are long for the world. I think even cities will start to get taken over by authoritarian entertainers.  Nashville certainly has that potential. There's a strong current here that looks much like our suburban and collar counties, but with more stylish haircuts and taste in cocktails. Once upon a time the arrival of a technology HQ here would be bringing an influx of west coast people with "blue" ideas, but increasingly it means an influx of the tech bros that are powering Trump.  The fact this HQ is Oracle probably doesn't help. I would not be surprised if Freddie O'Connell is Nashville's last Democratic mayor.  I think he'll be able to win the customary second term of an incumbent mayor, but the end of that term puts us in 2031 and I think all of the city will be primed to get behind an entertaining person with a podcast. There's a number of these types who tried to run in various elections last cycle but got disqualified for residency issues.  They've got 6 years to get that stuff lined up.              

Part of my issue with reformism and centrism is the fallacy of defining political forces spatially.  We discuss politics in terms of left and right--positions at either end of a two-dimensional line, with the center lying in between. Some people elaborate on this and trade the line for a circle, with left and right stretching all the way around and meeting at a second center.  Or every position on the circle is a center.  It's confusing really. 

The weakness of this metaphor became apparent when I was doing some grad courses in political science.  Scholars were able to use voting patterns to determine things like movement of the parties towards the extremes or towards the center.  The way they did this was by tracking votes, and characterizing them as either left wing or right wing positions.  But how something ended up as a position for one group or the other really came down to whether one party or the other supported it.  There was no underlying theory of why something could be characterized that way.  An example might be gun rights. We take it as a common place that lack of controls on gun ownership is a right-wing position.  But you can imagine an environment in which the "opposite" is true. If there were a strong move for groups that wanted to overthrow authoritarian or racist regimes to get guns in their hands, gun control would be a right-wing priority. 

The spatial model also implies homogeneity of value.  Anyone 3 clicks (whatever that is) left of center would in essence be the same.  But in fact that position on the continuum will be occupied by people or groups with really different commitments.   

So the whole idea that there is a center to balance around is suspect.  Life is networked, multi-dimensional.  There are centers of gravity in these networks, places where power accretes.  Those political positions are better characterized by things like views about authority.  Or borrowing from Hardt and Negri's Assembly, whether you put priority on the social production of value and the central role of the Common in human and planetary well-being. 

In this context, why compromise.  Go for it.  Push for what you and a group of people you trust as humans agree would make life better.  

For years, my step-daughter and I have talked about politics, usually when driving. She pushed hard with questions that seemed well-meaning but naïve. Why aren’t people given the things they need, like food, housing, clothes.  I would argue for realism, that public provision of all of this would require more in taxes than anyone could stand, and it would require an unworkable bureaucracy that would in the end screw it all up. Or she would ask why businesses insist on paying workers (like her and her coworkers) so little when they could afford to pay more, why they insist on hoarding profits. I would try to explain how difficult it is to make a profit, and the need to give people who take on the risk of starting a business the chance to make some profit. But now, maybe the answer to each of her challenges and questions is why not.  Let’s find people who want to start on each of those things.

Calling It Part 1

Christmas, 2024. After a long year.  After long years. 

For my entire life, I've been a member of the Presbyterian church. For those who don't pay attention to these things, it is one of what they call the mainline Protestant denominations, along with the Methodists, Congregationalist, Lutherans, probably the Episcopalians. It's the kind of denomination with big churches on the main streets of most downtowns and large buildings all through your town and suburbs.  When I was a kid, everyone who wasn't Catholic or Jewish was in one of these churches.  They were the establishment. 

We were members of this denomination because my grandfather, a German kid from Nebraska farm country married a young Anglo/Scots-Irish lady from a small town. They were both dedicated to building successful lives in the city (Lincoln) and Presbyterianism was often the top of the socio-economic food chain in a place like Lincoln. Being an active member of this church was part of being a leader in the community. 

I grew up with all this. I took comfort in our somewhat anodyne rituals, found plenty of substance to explore (especially when a minister in my teenage years introduced me to Niebuhr and Tillich), and in general wanted to stay connected--to people in my family, to part of a past. 

We were always vaguely aware there was a different sort of Christianity. More conservative, Biblical literalism, speaking in tongues, televangelists, revivals, all of that.  Various kinds of Baptists and Pentecostals.  Mostly it was associated with places not like where I grew up, in a big city suburb--it was part of rural, southern places.  In high school there was one guy who was "born again"--known as John the Jesus Freak in our halls.  

This changed pretty fast with conservative swings of the Reagan era and the rise of the Moral Majority. Born Again was everywhere, and I got familiar with the names and institutions. 

Lines began to form.  Those other groups told churches like mine we weren't real Christians. Because of the way we talked about Jesus and the content of worship, but also for political reasons.  Our stance on abortion or gay rights and gender, and the rights of groups oppressed by local and global power. And on political party.  Churches like mine saw themselves as holding onto something like the true (in our eyes) spirit of Protestant Christianity, which had an embedded if not always expressed throughline of justice, mercy and peace.  But we also became more progressive, most obviously in gay rights and women's voices, but also in opening our hermeneutics ever wider. 

And we shrank.  Congregations got smaller.  Our denominations had fewer members. Peeople and congregations left for places where they could hold out against the changes our denomination might embrace. Our denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA) has gone from over 3M members in 1983 to just over 1M in 2023.  In the last 15 years or so, the local office here in Nashville (called a presbytery) has gone from having several people on staff and its own leased office space to smaller space, then renting space in one of the big churches and now I think they are completely virtual.  One of the old seminaries in the denomination, McCormick in Chicago (check out the name--McCormick, as in Cyrus the 19th century inventor of the mechanical reaper, and a benefactor of the seminary when the denomination represented the social order to people like him) has shrunk campuses a couple of times and now works from 5th floor office space in someone else's building. 

The other sort of church--we'll call them evangelical for purposes of labeling here, recognizing all names are contested--grew, but also increasingly became attached to the Republican Party and to political power, emerging today in this form that can only be described as Christian Nationalist (or Christianist).  They are married to Trump, Musk and anyone like that who represents an authoritarian order.  Let's support guns, regressive taxation.  Treat refugees with hostility, promote policies that make people more precarious. Celebrate greed.  Combat cooperation and mercy. 

To me part of being Presbyterian increasingly became about trying to build the conditions for a resurgence of Christianity, to reclaim or preserve a claim to what it means, to see our denominations return to health, to continue the line of dialogue with thinkers who led to this moment, to continue to bring the Bible into constructive relationship with movement towards a better life for people and better stewardship of creation.  To preserve a Christianity that responds to the fact of God's existence by cultivating mercy, grace, nurture, and care. This effort faced the growing resistance of those who would convert Christianity into a cult to support national, authoritarian power and make of the churches institutions dedicated to extending punishment and pain.  

After decades at this, I'm ready to call it.  We lost.  Christianity is whatever the nationalist preachers and charlatan politicians say it is.  What we do at my church is an increasingly isolated, private thing. There will always be people who hold on to bits of old practices of devotion and philosophy, and we can keep doing that.  We can keep reading Mary Daly, Gustavo Gutierrez or Walter Brueggemann.  As best we can, worship together.  If we can keep the big old buildings open, fine, but they are kind of ridiculous. There are so few of us.  We don't need that kind of space.  

It's hard in good faith now to ask people of good faith, people who want a more humane order, to come and call themselves Christians. The name and forms of gathering imply an alliance with nationalist forces who thirst for dominance. Subscribing to this name and identity implies a thirst for punishment, a lust to define enemies. In this environment, we have to assume these old churches will continue to shrink. I did some financial modeling for my church recently, and one of the things we have to consider is that the slide might not be reversed, we might not return to where we were.  In lots of phenomena, continued movement along an established trajectory is a common outcome. Many of my scenarios for the congregation show continued, slow decline in participation.  

In this time, where we can say the question of what it means to be a Christian has been answered, put us in a familiar place. Religion, including but not limited to Christianity, in most eras has served as a national cult upholding some dominant political power. Christianity might have experimented with an alternative purpose for maybe a couple hundred years and even then sporadically.  Now we revert to may be religion's natural state.    

This space, where I can assume irrelevance, is in its way liberating.  For one thing, it opens up doctrinal space. For me, it makes sense that in addition to holding and continuing in dialogue with the ideas and practices of the past centuries of Christians, we also reach further back to the older, Earth-based practices that seem to be what held sway for those of us with roots in Europe before the priests showed up at our villages and towns and got us on board with the new religion, the religion of the rulers and lords. Those practices, of marking the seasonal cycle, giving weight to the other living things in our environment, and honoring the landscape itself, have real benefit to to us and our neighbors.  I'm happy hybridizing.  With the denomination withering , it serves as less of home, and we no longer need to defend it doctrinal boundaries.  

We don't really have a label any more. A name has some power (though actually fleeting) to fix the qualities of a thing or a category.  Without a name, the thing floats.  It can configure and reconfigure, it can, like experience, change shape constantly.     

Solstice 2024

Yesterday was Solstice. This seems like a year when it's important to mark it.  The darkest point in the year.  And a quiet point.  A shadow has descended on many of us.  The backdrop of what the last few years mean--politics, climate (physical and social), religion--looms behind us. A friend's annual holiday party deferred.  Just couldn't do it this year. Conversations about the overtones.  Gallows humor.  And an eerie quietness.  The contest is over.  In the venues where we expect contestation--the ballot box, Congress or state houses--there are not opposing forces arrayed on the field. In our personal lives we're turning off the news, tuning out the politically charged comedians. 

We usually celebrate Solstice in the frame of the light will come, the days get longer from here.  I don't know that we can really expect that in our climatic, political, and social darkness.  A friend yesterday who was a teenager in the 1950s said it reminded him of that decade, but not.  There is not a good sense that a counter-trend is on the way.  It seems more likely that we are in for a long haul.  I've also been reading Anna Seghers' Transit, picked at random from a literal pile of to-be-read books.  It's about more or less internal refugees in Marseilles in the Winter of 1940-41, after the German victory in France. The previous order is broken, and individuals are cut loose to find a way out into an amorphous space, or caught cycling in the liminal space.  It's not completely analogous historically, but she captures the quality of the world being an anteroom to something not understood.    

This year, at this moment in history, Solstice is about recognizing and living into this moment, the time of darkness.  This Solstice may last a long time. 

So we light a fire. The fire tonight is not to remind us of the full force of summer sun, but to bring out the light and flames that we can summon in this moment.  

In church today, my pastor preached on hope. There was a time when I loved the passages on hope, particularly Romans 8:24-25: "Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." The idea that we don't have foresight and through-sight made so much sense to me. When we try to spell out the desired/necessary outcome and future, we move away from hope. But today listening to Zach, my feeling was that I am much less interested in Hope than in Revelation.  I don't have a strong sense that through our efforts we can push our society and community to take care of those who are weak, and keep our systems of authority and power from being on a constant search for people to punish. There isn't really a future state I see myself waiting for.  I think we've arrived at the future. In the last few months people have commented on how negative I am. I think something bad happened, and it won't be reversed soon. Some trends will continue in this direction. But I'm OK. I'm content. We can now look at where we are with clarity and just deal with this.  

I believe this encourages us to be in our current moment intensely, attentively.  What do we find there, when we look this closely? Revelation of everything God has to offer. The Second Coming has occurred. It has occurred since the Resurrection. There is not an after-life--after-life, past-life and now-life are here and now. Everything God has to bring is here.  Now.  Our job is to see it and coax it into visibility.  To build a fire and tend it.  This can devolve into Cultivons notre propre jardin fatalism, but it also allows us to fulsomely embrace the places and moments when communion blooms and not dismiss it because the over-weaning power of demonic forces stays in place. Moments of mutual aid.  Spaces outside the fallen political structures. Glimpses. Festivals. Sabbath. 

The fire in my backyard is not (or not just) a harbinger of a better time later.  It illuminates and vitiates the present time.  The fire is warm. It leaps. 

The blessing of Solstice is that it gives us time to find the elements of redemption in our current moment.  To slow down, get quiet, listen, and tend. To be here.  Sure, longer days of sunlight will come.  But don't rush it.  We need to learn Solstice-time practices.