During morning prayer on Saturday, I was struck with an unfamiliar demonic temptation. I’ve been doing this long enough to talk or act my way out of the acute moments of distress, depression, or self-reproach. Passion and high emotion are self-correcting spiritual dangers for me. I experienced this suggestion differently because it was calm, colorless, presented without any interior drama.
The proposal was simply this: what if the Christian Nationalists are, in essence, correct? What if Christianity is really just another pagan civic cult ordered to the anointing of rulers, the sanctification of the state, the sacralization of the ethnos and its land? This is what it has typically looked like, at least everywhere it has been a predominant religion—even, perhaps especially, in respectable liberal 20th century American theology. Maybe that’s just what it, in some Hegelian sense, wants to be, the form toward which it is always driving.
I know, of course—having built my worldview and my work life, to say nothing of everything else, around this fact—that there are plenty of reasons to deny this claim, starting with the words and example of Jesus himself. It would hardly be his fault if nothing enduringly humane and decent could be made of a religion in his name. But for the first time I really considered that assembling a useable tradition out of the dissenting and ironic energies within Christianity, from the critical moments in Augustine’s work to the witness of the monastics, the philosophical asceticism of Kierkegaard, the post-Christendom theology of Bonhoeffer and the rest is all just an absurdity. Not a mistake so much as a misapprehension of the task, like trying to paint a barn with a toothbrush.
The first sally in this particular offensive came during the initial wave of FEMA conspiracy theories, as I watched good church folks embrace absolutely psychotic beliefs about migrants. These are people, I thought, who had been failed by every pastor they’ve ever had (including, at one point, me). The feeling that one has wasted whatever modest talents one has occurs often enough to some of us that we have worked out ways to deal with it, and somehow or other this feeling passed as it always does. Only later, after the initial reaction to the election had been absorbed, did the sense return with these reinforcements. Perhaps the fault was not mine or anyone else’s. Perhaps the implied premise—“Christianity cultivates love of neighbor”—was simply wrong. The toothbrush is real (Jesus of Nazareth really walked this earth and the accounts of his life capture at least something real about him) and the barn needs to be painted (humans need to love one another to survive and thrive) but on what basis could I assume that the one related in any way to the other?
I think a lot about something Bonhoeffer wrote in his prison letters. He says, as I recall, that the corpus christianorum—the “Christian society”—of Christendom had been resolved into its fundamentally distinct constituent parts, the “Body of Christ” and “the world.” Theology and the life of the church would have to adapt to this end of Christendom’s illusion of a Christianized space beyond the church and the sacraments. Bonhoeffer’s radically Christocentric conception of the church, and his radically ecclesial conception of the faith, is the only one that has enduringly made sense to me. But I had never faced the possibility that this super metal rejection of Christendom in favor of the churchly remnant was just a inward projection of a “Christian society,” a distorted self-image, a thin branch posing as a taproot.
I can hardly avoid trying on the assumption that I am wrong about nearly everything: the Trinity, whether the bishops of Rome rule the Church on earth by divine right, whether my views on orders or marriage or the literal meaning of Scripture are offensive to God or dangerous to my soul. I don’t do this from any kind of “rationalist” zeal for “steelmanning” the positions I don’t hold and thus squeezing out any cognitive distortions or errors of fact in my life. It’s just a habit, I suppose, a defense against boredom or a way to try to see things from the perspectives of others. One can hardly expect to sail through life in a hull unbarnacled with errors.
To imagine oneself fundamentally deluded, however, is different, and I found that once I was imagining it, I was keen to elaborate on it. A while ago, I was working on a post I never finished, and for a joke, I re-read Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”1 This prompted me to actually read Don Quixote for the first time in more than twenty years. And as I read the adventures of the Knight of the Rueful Figure—dressing in ridiculously antiquated garb, attacking innocent travelers, causing chaos, and getting his ass kicked over and over again, all in fealty to made-up stories—I found myself thinking of a story by Ruth Graham in the New York Times a few months ago. It was about a group of Christians seeking to revive what they think of as Western Civilization. As far as I could tell, their agenda consisted primarily of moving to rural areas, reading lots of Tolkien, and bringing back business-casual clothing. Don Quixote de la Menswear Department, I thought—fundamentally unserious people acting out their fantasies of a past that never existed.
But now I was considering that I was at least as much the guy playing stylized historical dress-up. Again, not in service of the proposal that Jesus of Nazareth was real (he was/is) or that my verbal portraits of him are at least somewhat plausible, but of the idea that there is, or can be, such a thing as “Christianity” or “the church” that can be anything but a variation on some kind of paganism. To even conceive of a “body of Christ” is to set up something that will either decay into another civic cult or drift away on the wind.
If I were as learned, clever, and prolific as Kierkegaard, I might be able to stash these temptations in the treatise of a pseudonym. But I simply lack the facility. Posting on main and talking to my therapist divide me without remainder. I don’t even have a spiritual director for moments like these. So I did what anyone would do. I posted about it. I posted about it on Notes, a social network of the most depraved gentility. Phil was kind to chat with me about it, and even wrote a very good post on the topic of vocational crisis. It addressed some of the implications and had lots of good advice like this:
#5. Don’t Make Your Vocational Crisis the Subject of Your Work. All those “writing in the age of Trump” essays aged like milk. I still don’t want to reread them even now that we’re in a Second Age of Trump! I want to read essays about how to slow down or ideally stop a militarized ICE when it tries to purge “illegals” (anyone brown) from my campus. Or I want to read essays about Sir Thomas Browne’s theory of the occult. I do not want to read essays about “Reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Theory of the Occult in an Age of Militarized ICE Purges.”
This wasn’t a particular danger for me personally but the insight is good. And there’s always work to do. Work helps, idle hands being the devil’s playground. I’d have to preach the next day. Let’s see what Jesus has to say to the people in this lectionary week:
He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.’
Such faithful generosity from that widow, such defiance of the world’s logic! Her two coins could hardly matter to the Temple treasury, but they are seen and cherished by God. Of course, what has Jesus just finished saying?
As he taught, he said, ‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honour at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.’
The tradition of the Church has treated Jesus’s constant and unequivocal warnings about religious hierarchy, professionalization, and authority as a special case, a condemnation of the particular corruption of the Second Temple religious settlement, rather than a template that the Church could and obviously did follow. Jesus praises the widow’s impulse, but it’s clear her impulse has been abused and exploited. If the widow wants to share her meager wealth with the poor, she should just give it to someone poorer than her. If she wants to worship God, she should just worship God. I wasn’t going to preach myself out of this. “Disrupting the Scribe Space” was not a project that seemed especially fruitful at the moment.
There’s always pastoral care to do, and as it happened, I needed to see someone in the hospital and then do a renewal of wedding vows in the sanctuary. About this I may say no more—I am at perpetual risk of losing my faith but not my professionalism—except that, blank and empty as I may have been, the moments and the need were real. You can’t really argue with the demons; as they say of wrestling a pig, you end up muddy and the pig enjoys it. Or they become haughty, leaving a fearful insight sitting there and inviting me to spend myself battering against it. You can only defy them in action.
“Don’t let anyone else fail for you,” I tell my children when they are intimidated by a dearth of success among their peers. “Don’t fail in advance,” I tell them when they are intimidated by long odds. “Fail for yourself.” That presumably goes for me as well. You fight the demons until you have to stop, or until you are required elsewhere. Maybe it’s true that Christianity in some essential sense belongs to avuncular well-meaning nihilists like Timothy Dolan and Robert Jeffress. The consensus of the ages and the voice of the majority aren’t everything but they are more than I can claim to have behind me. But no one ever put me in charge of speaking for Christianity. Far be it from me to argue where Jesus refuses to. “Go and do likewise” is his only argument, a friend texted me later, and that’s true. Don Quixote erred only in his choice of theme, not in his desire to make it real through his own actions.
Sunday came—I have noticed that it is in the habit of doing that—and everything goes as it must. It happened to be the occasion of the 500th Sunday/holy day sermon (I’ve kept track, of course) since my ordination. At one point I’d toyed with the idea of a silent auction to set the sermon topic for #500, and in hindsight I was grateful I didn’t get around to it. It was about how we are both saved by faith and scammed by faith, and the only thing we can actually control is to be worthy of the good faith people extend to us. No “church in the age of mass deportation,” no post-election punditry or stock-taking. One of the kids in church, a little girl who has challenges with mobility and speech, was excited to be back after a few weeks away. She got up about two-thirds of the way through my sermon and just stood next to me. I could only be grateful for her patience.
The joke was a series of rejected sabbatical proposals, one of which was to spend my leave time becoming the author of Exile on Main Street, not by mimicking the life paths of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards but by writing and recording it precisely as a past-it suburban dad in 2024.
I hear you. I grew to accept the barnacles over the course of my ministry, but I never really expected the hull to disappear like it has of late. Thankfully, light seems to shine in the space where those looking for the word meet a humble good-faith effort to speak it. That keeps me going right now.
"These are people, I thought, who had been failed by every pastor they’ve ever had (including, at one point, me)."
I have been thinking about this paragraph since you posted, and I wish I had a more eloquent way to say this but this is on us, as laypeople. We the laypeople are responsible for our own faith and morality, which I mean not in a hyperindividualistic sense but in a let's-be-fucking-adults sense. I don't know what you can say to reach people who do not want to be reached.