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Unlike my congressman Doug Lamborn, I didn’t skip the State of the Union out of sheer rudeness. But like him, I did miss it, so I only caught up on it this morning. The speech underlined something; a conversation I’ve had with dozens of social media gurus since 2008; a reason Obama’s going to have a much harder time winning the Millennial vote that helped put him over the top in 2008.

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic says the speech made him realize just how much Obama doesn’t get America. The main reason Friedersdorf came to this conclusion was that Obama framed the speech in military terms; he kept using military analogies for the country, talking about how we need to function more like the military, and so on—the prevailing ideological theme was that America as a nation needs to function more like a well-oiled machine. (Friedersdorf has assembled some good selections from the speech; you can read them over there.)

And that’s what’s so strange.

To review: Obama was elected in large part on the strength of the best campaign use of social media up to that time. Best of all, that use was heavily localized—in other words, you didn’t just join the Obama 2008 national Facebook page; you were plugged in to your local group of Obama fans. The rhetoric of Obama’s campaign told us that if you believed in him, you should not perish but have meaning and influence in your local community again. Scott Goldstein, Obama’s brilliant social media guy, really understood what was attractive about social media—it wasn’t about keeping up with the celebrity; it was about connectedness and the legitimate feeling that you could affect your environment (which is one of the most intoxicating feelings in a functioning democracy). A generation of young people who were cynical about politics, and said in polls (in overwhelming numbers) that they didn’t think their votes had any significance, suddenly thought they might have been wrong—that far-off world of politics-by-the-bureaucrats-and-corrupt-people might finally be coming home to where we could reach it again.

Then we elected Obama, and he quickly made clear he did not understand—I mean at all—why he’d gotten our votes. Most of his major policies have been Democratic wet dreams from the ‘60s, not the cutting-edge ideas he implied and certainly not bringing politics home. He’s appointed more “czars” (i.e. presumably corrupt bureaucrats) than anybody in history; rammed through huge legislation without giving anyone time to even read the bills; made one huge economic decision after another that involved micromanagement from Washington; and generally kept politics as far out of our reach as possible. Millennials firmly believe the 21st century is the century of bottom-up politics—of the Tea Party (eew), of Occupy Wall Street, of people getting a voice again. And Obama’s policies have been more top-down than anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. (Just to be clear: we don’t have a problem with liberal politics or government intervention or the welfare state; but, um, are we allowed any voice in them at all?) We’re stupid, self-important young people; the thing we want most is to feel like somebody’s listening. And we’re pretty sure nobody is.

On top of that, he’s spent half his presidency going on TV to lecture us about how we’re lousy citizens (note to everyone: we do NOT like being lectured). He has realized that people don’t step in line to follow the leader as quickly in real life as they do in a campaign and it clearly drives him nuts. Those stubborn, ignorant masses won’t listen to him, so he lectures some more and then tries to get around them. Clue to Obama: this is a far cry from the two-way dialogue we’re used to; thanks to social media, even those big evil corporations are more responsive to our desires than this.

And just in case we’d missed the message, the State of the Union brought it home—at least to the four or five of us who’ve studied history well enough to notice some similarities. You know who else talked obsessively about national unity and wanted to mobilize the country like an army to solve our national problems? The nationalists. Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt…the Progressives from the 1890s to the 1930s (and their more hardline contemporaries like Mussolini and Hitler and Lenin across the pond). We’re pretty sure the world has changed since 1930. Nationalism is out (Obama reminded us of that when a guy named Bush was president)…we’ve been more into internationalism and globalism for, like, two generations (to us, that’s forever—they didn’t even have cell phones back then). And nowadays, we’re getting into localism. In short, that speech from Mr. I’m-Going-To-Change-The-Way-We-Do-Politics would have been cutting edge about fifty years before we were born.

Today, on the other hand, he’s not only behind the times; he also misreads them dreadfully. We’re the generation that’s been told in graduation speeches and pep talks our whole lives to chart our own course, follow our dreams and passions, and the like. We’ve also been told (or figured out) that if we’re privileged to have a college degree, we’re supposed to give back; to plug in. We’re expressive individualists looking for community, not Russian peasants looking for militant nationalism. We already have meaning in our own lives and communities, and we just want our politics to reflect that—we just want to feel like somebody’s listening, like we can affect the little corner of the world we live in. Our president, though, seems to think we’re just disgruntled, selfish people who need to be offered a Cause. It hasn’t worked for him since January 2009, so his tone is more frustrated and testy than it used to be, but the message is still the same—that he wants to “assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.” (Oh hang on, that quote was from FDR’s first inaugural.)

I wonder if they’d let Scott Goldstein run the country.

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Those who follow the sometimes heated arguments of online publications like Front Porch Republic, First Things, and Humane Pursuits (yes, all six of you) will know there’s been a back-and-forth of late about whether FPR types are unrealistic (and maybe even totalitarian) in their dreams for family farms and organic produce. You can get up to speed by reading this, this, and this; or by reading James Banks’s Humane Pursuits entry into the fray here.

I want to add a few thoughts to Banks’s contribution, because I think he touched on two points that are crucial for Average Joes who wish they lived in a stronger community. The first is the importance of structure, and the second is the difference between community as an ideal and real communities in terms of how we approach them. Both are deeply tied into my story in a city that is the antithesis of FPR’s ideal.

Structure

Banks, citing Mark Signorelli at FPR, mentions Florence’s requirement that all its roofs have red terracotta tiling. To Signorelli, this was a good thing. To Banks, it’s a violation of freedom of conscience, or it would be if anyone in Florence really wanted his roof a different color.

This relates to a fascinating but little-discussed distinction from days gone by. Back when Florence made that law, or back when the American Constitution was being put together, there was a distinction between national laws and local laws. I don’t mean a legal distinction (which of course still exists), but a philosophical or moral distinction that affected how people thought about things.

If George Washington had tried to get an early session of Congress to pass a law mandating red roofs across the nation—or even if Thomas Jefferson had tried to do it in Virginia—there would have been an uproar. But local communities imposed these kinds of restrictions every day. They still do, because as anybody who has studied neighborhood law can tell you, places where people live in close proximity to each other are lousy places for individualistic social policies. That second story I want to build might block my neighbor’s view, and that fence I want to put up at the edge of my yard might cause car accidents because people can’t see around the corner.

The Founders took this for granted. As Joe Postell from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has pointed out in his research, local governments back then would have been considered totalitarian by modern conservatives applying their usual national standard of limited government, or modern liberals applying their modern standard of freedom of expression. But back then, people had an idea that structure was important to a community—that in order for a local community to function well, it had to have some shared values, values that played out in everything from manners to the physical environment of the city. And it’s precisely the working out of those values (sometimes through law, sometimes through custom) that makes a place unique. Chicago recently made decisions to let people build pretty much anything pretty much anywhere…Boston has preferred to heavily regulate construction on its severely limited space. New York has opted for the verticality of tall office buildings…Washington, D.C. has opted for a horizontal city. The American Founders, as Postell argues, were anything but laissez-faire in this respect.

The point is this: what a city values will (partly through its democratically elected leaders) affect how the city is built, and what kinds of behavior are encouraged or discouraged (or required or outlawed). Since values shape structures (physical and behavioral), and structures exist to maintain values for future generations, a city will by its very nature be a mostly continuous cycle of the two.

For normal people, this plays out in ways they probably don’t notice day to day unless they are dissatisfied with them. My city, Colorado Springs, has long valued independence, privacy, and material convenience. As a result, it’s very spread out, with space for each family to have a big home and its own yard, in clusters of houses centered around big-box shopping areas the size of Disneyland. (I’ve written about this at more length in “United We Shop.”) All of that is unquestionably an expression of the city’s common values over the past couple decades; something I know for a fact by the conversations I’ve had with people and the decisions the city council has made.

A Real Community

This if course raises the question: what if I don’t like my city’s values? This isn’t a hypothetical question for me—I do disagree with my city’s values. Part of the reason the Founders didn’t mind localities expressing their unique features through manners and laws (besides the fact that they’d done so for all of history) was that if you didn’t like a city’s values, you could move.

But perhaps that’s not possible at a given time, or not convenient. It’s not for me. A number of things come into play here.

On the large-scale level, we have the natural law factor—when people live in places that fight against their natural social inclinations, they often do aspire to community as an ideal. And cities built in silly, unsustainable ways that go against human nature sooner or later feel the consequences. In my case, the city council has realized that a lot of its zoning decisions in affording people that ostentatious independence are very expensive to maintain. Its downtown area isn’t a draw for companies and young people, which is hurting the local economy. And a lot of the young people who are here dislike being so disconnected from a community. This is what FPR often gets right; there are some things for which humans are just hard-wired.

Also on the large-scale level, we have this thing called democracy. In it, you vote for the people who represent your values and your desires for the city, and if you get enough people to vote for them, they get into power and make changes you want to see happen. (You also have to get involved in local politics yourself and talk with those yucky people who don’t have a degree in philosophy or value a good syrah.)

But social change is slow (and that’s a good thing). On the small-scale level, I have to live in Colorado Springs right now (rather than later when we’ve fixed all the problems), and I may not be able to vote in the good people any time soon. So what do I do?

And this is where I agree with Banks: people like me have a choice between pining for community (the ideal), or making a choice to live in a real community and deal with its imperfections in context. For a while, I was doing the former; making what I think Banks would term the “FPR choice.” I enthusiastically criticized the Springs to anyone who would listen. I moaned every time I saw the big box stores or the dead downtown. I wrote blog posts blasting the suburbs as an inhumane way of life. I pined for the days in college or a brief period I spent in a kind of co-op, where (contrary to Banks’ assumption) I really did live with people who made a choice to live “in community” as an ideal, and even used the term. Frankly, I think doing all this is pretty common for educated people my age, and it’s not all bad–after all, sometimes it’s hard for people to have a vision of an alternative unless someone paints the picture for them.

But I’m still here. I eventually decided not to make the FPR choice. Buying organic, turning a suburb into a beautiful Italian town square, and finding a sort of monastery to live in weren’t the answer (turns out real places don’t change as fast as my desktop background). I had to get out and make friends with real people who lived in the same setting I did. I had to learn to appreciate the good things about the city (although my wife had to tell me that a lot of times before I got it). I had to plug in to my specific community in the ways it offered. Sometimes I had to have dinner with people I didn’t like, or talk local politics with people I didn’t respect, or get involved with charitable organizations that weren’t sexy.

In short, I had to learn to love a place and its people, and work to improve them in the small ways that were partly consistent with their character and partly designed to improve that character. Banks put it beautifully: “[The beloved things in a city were] not loved because they were common; they were common because they were loved.” Colorado Springs will never be covered with gorgeous red terracotta tiling. But at this point in time, it’s my home—it’s not a place in which to tread water till I get to live in Small Town, Tennessee. If I ever do live in such a place, it’ll have problems too. I have to work with the ones in front of me.

This story doesn’t have a blissfully happy ending, at least not yet. But there is a community here—both a small “c” community in the friends I’ve made, and a large “C” community that is the city itself. The structures that shape this city matter, and I doubt I’ll ever stop working to change them. But I am a citizen, not a philosopher. I don’t work to improve the city in order to make it become my ideal of Community. I do it for the community.

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Theory can kill, Edmund Burke told us. It is a good assumption to keep in mind when approaching the recent debate between the localist website Front Porch Republic and First Things web editor Joe Carter. I haven’t been in the middle of the Front Porch Republic/Carter debate, but I have been commenting from the sidelines. The primary objection to Mr. Carter’s arguments that FPR has raised so far is that Carter criticizes their perspective from a vantage point which presumes “certain liberal assumptions.” Mr. Carter’s critique, on the other hand, has worked to point out that the FPR’s theoretical musings on “place, limits, and liberty” would eventually have totalitarian implications if it were ever applied in the real world.

The Flaws in the Arguments Thus Far

When I weighed in a few days ago at “Literary Lawyer,” I generally expressed sympathy for Carter’s perspective. Nonetheless, his argument relies too much on the potential effects of FPR’s ideas. While I believe that many of FPR’s points have merit, I want to aim for the center; not the world that the ideas lead to, but the ideas themselves. The responses that FPR’s authors have posted so far are not interchangeable, but they do form assort of progressive narrative; therefore, I will concentrate on the most recent contribution, by Mark Signorelli.

One of the weaknesses of the FPR position is that they have set up straw man arguments, though I doubt that it was their intention to do so. For example, Mr. Signorelli begins by arguing that all government is inherently coercive, as though to suggest that all of those who hold to a classical liberal view believe otherwise. Mr. Signorelli writes:

“One cannot escape governmental coercion without escaping government itself; abuse of such coercion, in the form of tyranny, is of course deplorable, but so is the absence of such coercion, in the form of anarchy. The more candid we are about this fact, the better. The alternative is to escape into quasi-Rousseauistic fantasies about the “general will,” which, as they disguise the authentic exercise of coercion behind a veil of fictional consent, afford all the more scope to the raw imposition of power.”

I agree that government is by definition coercive, but to admit that some governmental coercion is inevitable is not to cede that it should govern in ways that FPR’s society of “place, limits and liberty” would prescribe. Certainly, FPR and I would agree that there are some things that the government should coerce—such as acquiescence to speed limits—and, hopefully, we would agree that there are others things which the government (even at the local level) should not enforce—such as religious belief. The disagreement between advocates of democracy and FPR is not, as FPR continually suggests, over whether government will govern but rather over how government should govern.

FPR’s writers seem to have some sense that this is what the debate is really about, for they mount harsh critiques regarding the coerciveness of the modern state. Mr. Signorelli quotes his colleague Jason Sayler, writing:

“Mr. Sayler raises a very serious point when he expresses doubts about the moral probity of “ordinary folk” in modern America, those who, as he puts it, ‘treat birth-control pills as if they were M&M’s, stand assembled outside Toys’R’Us like ravenous zombies in the wee hours of Black Friday, and think dolls dressed like cheap hookers make nice Christmas gifts for little girls.’”

But FPR puts too much emphasis on the coercive significance of modern life. It is possible to turn off a television, close the shutters or move to small-town America. If nothing else, the growth of Amish culture—which has expanded as far West as Montana—demonstrates that it is possible for traditional community to flourish in the middle of a postmodern society that protects religious freedom. The moral failures of modern life to which Mr. Sayler points are not coercive but rather the outgrowth of abused freedom.  But the fact that freedom is abused does not imply that coercion is the proper antidote. No one denies that a fly on a glass table is an annoyance, but that doesn’t mean that hitting it with a hammer is a wise policy.

Rights and the Totalitarian Temptation

Mr. Signorelli points to Florence as one example of a community which enforces a sort of general or communal will; in this case, Florence dictated that all roofs be made of red terracotta tiling (though, as he suggests, there were probably others who would have preferred to have roofs which were yellow or green.) Building codes like this are not, in my view, a particularly significant threat to liberty. Even in our nation’s capital there are significant height restrictions on new buildings. The problem, however, arises when one individual within the community decides that he wants his roof to be yellow. What is to become of him? Is he to be fined? Have the property confiscated? To be exiled from the city? Fortunately, since most citizens freely choose to have their roofs be terracotta red, this is not a particularly common dilemma. Nonetheless, all of the above forms of state coercion could reasonably be called an abuse of power.

And such abuses, while probably not occurring frequently over the color of a Florentine roof, are nonetheless everyday occurrences: Jews have been persecuted for refusing to eat pork and Palestinian Christians have been threatened for celebrating Christmas. In other words, freedom of conscience may be a “liberal assumption”, but it is one that has very real consequences for public life. FPR would probably oppose the persecutors in such cases, but, as happened with Carl Jung during the rise of Nazism, they may find to their chagrin that their philosophy is poorly suited to combat totalitarianism in the theoretical realm because it shares some of totalitarianism’s logic. Even pirates have communal bonds.

Mr. Signorelli would probably retort that democracy is as likely to persecute in this way as is any other form of government—after all, the Germans elected Adolf Hitler, didn’t they? If a “democracy” is merely rule by the most, then Mr. Signorelli would be correct. But this is to take the definition of democracy too literally. It is true that the world has seen many illiberal democracies, but “liberal” democracy is that which is accompanied by the rule of law, or, as Thomas Mann suggested, it is an order dedicated to protecting the rights of an individual. Occasionally an agency within a liberal democracy will overstep the boundaries of limited government as Mr. Signorelli is correct to point out: “Consider only our own very democratic regime, with its health-code citations for little girls selling lemonade, its militarily-equipped police forces, its President newly authorized to detain any citizen indefinitely on his own suspicion.” However, it is a stretch to assert that these illiberal characteristics of the American scene are the logical outcome of liberal intuitions, especially when they have defined stringently illiberal regimes long before they made their way to America.

A more problematic issue within liberal democracy occurs when rights collide: If the state is to recognize same-sex marriage, should that obligate workers in Catholic adoption agencies to consider the applications of gay and lesbian couples who want to become foster parents? Rights occasionally clash, but government intrusiveness in these cases does not stem from the liberal state’s desire to grow and the principles of liberal democracy can always be invoked against the intrusiveness of the state or violation of rights, though there are times when the invocation is destined to fail.

Community Happens in the Particulars

Communitarian principles are not as reliable. It is true that individuals need some sense of their identity before they will stand up to fight for it. The Estonians and Latvinians could not have pushed for independence from the Soviet Union had they not first imagined themselves as communities. But they were not devoted to the abstract concept of a “nation”. Rather, they were devoted to specific goals which they could only achieve through political and economic independence. The problems with communitarianism arise after it becomes an ideology.  No sincere member of a community has ever committed to living “in community;” rather they strive to live “in a community.”

The aesthetic value of communal life proceeds from the specifics of that life rather than from the abstract community that germinates around those specifics. In northern Idaho, I came to know the aesthetics of such a community as the coffeehouses where every barista knows the each customer’s regular drink order; or the town square which hosted a market for farmer’s produce, political tracts and folk music from April to October; or the old, downtown theater where town residents could catch a showing for less than three dollars.

Yes, these are the trappings of the vibrant community in which I grew up. But they were not loved because they were common; they were common because they were loved. Perhaps FPR could idealize these characteristics until they became disincarnated into an abstraction. However, I am satisfied that the aesthetic remain of earth, fire, air and water—not of aether. Edmund Burke would not disagree.

___

James Banks is a doctoral student at the University of Rochester where he is pursuing studies in English Renaissance and Restoration Literature.  Previously, he worked in nonprofit administration in the District of Columbia and northern Virginia. He is also a contributor at Via Meadia and has written for “The Intercollegiate Review,””First Principles,” “The Foundry,” and other publications. He is an alumnus of the University of Idaho (B.A. 2008) and the University of Rochester (M.A. 2010) and lives in upstate New York where he serves in the NY Army National Guard (though the views he expresses on this blog are his alone).

Every once in a while, a viral video comes along that involves neither the evolution of dance nor finger biting brothers. More rarely still, some of these videos illuminate the passions, interests, and desires of the present moment. It is these videos that offer valuable and penetrating insights into our culture. Such is the case with “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus,” a video that in its nearly two week virtual life has garnered over 16 million views. The argument of the spoken-word performance is straightforward and presents a view dominant in evangelical Christianity: Jesus and religion are not the same thing. In fact, they are in conflict with each other, so much so that “Jesus came to abolish religion.” In this pitched battle between human pieties and divine perfection, the right choice is clear. We must pick Jesus.

There is no doubt that the video is an honest and passionate expression of genuine sentiment, and its popularity is a testament to the prevalence of the grievance it identifies. But, what is most important, it flows from a widespread belief in evangelical Christianity that has serious flaws. For in the rejection of religion comes a decisive turn inward, a repudiation of the external and physical in favor of the personal and spiritual. The immaterial and the self are elevated over the physical and the other. In other words, the message of the video sounds a lot like Gnosticism, a set of beliefs deeply inimical to Christianity.

Now I know that the mere mention of Gnosticism is liable to excite the passions of those who both agree and disagree with the video. It is a weighty charge, one not to be thrown around cavalierly. Thus I must state at the outset that my comments are not criticisms of the video’s creator nor are they cheap shots at evangelical Christianity. Such would be neither appropriate nor productive. Rather, what I say is intended to draw attention to a troubling characteristic of the faith in which I was raised, to which I owe a great debt, and for which I continue to care. I emphatically am not calling evangelicals gnostic. But I am speaking to what I believe is a phenomenon that threatens to engulf a generation of Christians that has become disaffected with religion.

The Inward Turn

I should start by admitting that the video’s central conflict—Jesus versus religion—left me a bit nonplused. I hadn’t thought of them as opposed to each other; I didn’t know I had to choose between the two. But understanding the video requires making sense of this conflict; that is, the constituent parts must be construed so as to be in conflict. So here’s what I think it means: the Christian life consists in an unmediated relationship with Jesus. The rituals and traditions of religion are little more than distractions from what is truly needed, an immediate and personal relationship with Christ. Therefore, the two are opposed and a choice of one must be made.

With the conflict framed thusly, it is clear that the label gnosticism isn’t as ill-fitting as it initially may have seemed. The Gnostics emphasized their possession of a special, saving knowledge (gnosis) unmediated by, and therefore beyond the reach of, external authority and regulation. Likewise, many evangelical Christians claim that the essence of their faith is a personal relationship with Jesus as apprehended by and worked out through subjective experience. This too is beyond the regulating or guiding influence of external authority. For many evangelicals it is one’s personal relationship with the divine that is most important, and who is in a position to question that? Gnostics of yore and a large segment of today’s evangelicals share a fundamental commitment to the primacy of subjective experience. As one observer put it, both Gnosticism and much modern Christianity are “inward, deeply distrustful of institutions, mediated grace, the intellect, theology, creeds, and the demand to look outside of oneself for salvation.”

The Need for Outwardness

The problem with this understanding is that it contradicts—if not directly denies—the first tenet of Christianity: man is sinful and incapable of doing anything to save himself. It’s more than a little odd, then, to consign the arbitration of salvation to that sinful individual. While there are undeniably profound relational dimensions of the Christian’s connection to God, it seems clear that placing the construction and maintenance of that relationship beyond the reach of regulative control is a step too far. (An old adage about foxes and henhouses comes to mind.) At bottom, the view of human nature affirmed by Christianity is at odds with the view implied by the evangelical economy of salvation, in which subjectivity is the ground of faith. With this inward turn comes an added emphasis on the spiritual world—very often at the expense of the material world. So it is that one can repudiate the hard physicality of religion in favor of a spiritual relationship with Jesus.

But this is clearly an unworkable situation, because the reliance on subjective apprehension and regulation of belief is an invitation to the fragmentation of belief. If all can believe whatever and however they please, there simply cannot be any essential requirements of belief. To affirm everything is to affirm nothing at all. So there must be some limitation to this spiritual inwardness, the gnostic impulse of evangelical Christianity.

And this is where religion comes into the picture. The complex structure of beliefs, practices, and traditions that constitute religion orients the self’s focus. Far from obliterating subjectivity, the externality of religion shapes the inward life, habituating the self in the habits of heart and mind that enable one to rightly understand the claims and requirements of Christianity. This pedagogical role belongs to the church. And for this reason one cannot say, as it is said in the video, that he loves the church but rejects religion.

*     *     *

There is merit to this video, not least for the conversation and debate it has set off. As its author points out, it is false religion that moved him to write and perform the poem. That motivation is just and, it must be admitted, there is great need for the forceful dissent he voices. But in our zeal to scrub the grime from the church walls, we must be certain we are not tearing them down around our heads. The self alone is impotent to gain salvation. For that we need God. And the crooked timber of humanity is molded in His image through education in the message of the Gospel and habituation in the practices that enable us to acknowledge it as true. That is the task of the church. And that is why we need religion.

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Recently, my sister purchased a product from an independent online vendor that turned out to be defective. She contacted the company, got a delayed and insufficient initial response, and then lodged a repeat request for assistance. The receipt of a second inadequate reply—a form email, a phone number that reached a service center in India, a stonewall no-replacements-or-returns policy—would have been frustrating, but not exactly surprising; the market is rife with bad customer service.

What actually happened was genuinely shocking. The woman who wrote the second email—who apparently co-owns the small company with the woman who wrote the first email—dug up personal information about my sister and her family (like me, she is a writer with an unusual name, so she isn’t hard to Google) and attempted to shame my sister into repentance for the audacity of requesting professional and competitive customer service from a company with which she had done business. This company is small, run by two women out of a garage so they can be at home with their kids. My sister writes for a Catholic family website. If she were a good Christian, the woman argued, she wouldn’t make unreasonable demands (like the replacement of a defective product) from other Catholic women who are just trying to spend more time with their families.

It’s hard to know where to begin, with a minefield like that. For one thing, the fact that a business is small does not necessarily mean it can’t prioritize customer satisfaction. Businesses with limited resources can build extremely loyal client bases by emphasizing customer service. And the ethical implications of using details about a customer’s personal life to send her on a guilt trip, in a professional communication, are obviously vast. But here’s what struck me most about the whole exchange: this woman wanted to use the Christian faith that she and her customer share as a shield against a legitimate business complaint.

Think about it in another context. I worked for a year as a research assistant for a con law scholar at a prominent DC think tank. I’m Catholic. He happens to be Catholic. It was a nice thing to have in common with my boss. We shared a certain amount of cultural context, we could discuss interesting questions, and he understood why I came to work one Wednesday in early March with black dust smeared on my forehead. But let’s say I had failed to complete an assignment, or submitted shoddy work, and he had asked me to explain myself. Would our common Christian faith have had any bearing on the situation?

In the obvious and immediate sense, the answer to that question is no. The charity that Christianity requires of its adherents does not preclude their holding one another accountable in relationships of subordinate professional responsibility. Nor does it require Christians in the marketplace to choose inferior products and services simply because other Christians are offering them. (There’s another whole post here about Christian books and music and movies like Fireproof, but for the sake of my blood pressure I will leave it for another time.) All Christians are called to be charitable to all people at all times. Beyond that, the fact that an employer/consumer/client shares his Christian faith with an employee or service provider seems to be irrelevant.

But I’m not sure that’s the whole story. Grant that Christianity isn’t an excuse for sub-standard business practices; isn’t it possible that there is still a role that faith should play in the professional lives of Christians, and that—just maybe—it cuts in the opposite direction?

Let’s do a little thought experiment, shall we? Imagine two professors, fresh out of graduate school and in their first jobs, working side by side in the same department. One of them happens to be pretty secular, the other one’s a Christian. The two young teachers share most of their reasons for excelling in their work: simple survival, long-term job security, the desire for prestige, and maybe even a genuine love of learning.

But the Christian, if he’s well catechized, has something else: he has a sense of vocation. He is aware that his abilities are not his own. He knows that he has been entrusted with his talents for the sake of something greater than himself, and that someday he will have to account for his use of those gifts before the throne of his Creator. So he works, just like his colleague, to feed his family and contribute to the body of knowledge in his field—but he also works to fulfill a purpose.

And this, at the end of the day, is the real problem with the attitude evinced by my long-suffering sister’s misguided interlocutor—an attitude, to be frank, that a lot of Christians share. Christianity is not an excuse for mediocrity, and it’s not a professional get-out-of-jail-free card. The more important point, though, is what Christianity is: a call to excellence. To virtue. A call to infuse even the most mundane of tasks—shipping a package, formatting a footnote!—with an awareness of its eternal significance: that here, even here, we can glorify our God.

Raised Right: How I Untangled My Faith from Politics by Alisa Harris. WaterBrook Multnomah, 2011. 240pp.

The Betrayal of Charity: The Sins that Sabotage Divine Love by Matthew Levering. Baylor University Press, 2011. 229pp.

Anne Snyder

The confessions of a political pilgrim and a theological probe into charity may seem like strange bedfellows. I certainly thought so while alternating reads of Alisa Harris’s Raised Right and Matthew Levering’s The Betrayal of Charity. But the longer I retraced the steps of one woman’s political journey while considering the intricacies of divine love in light of the sins that weaken it, the more an age-old puzzler tickled. Can love, Christianly conceived, stake a claim on political life and deliberation? Has love ever transacted business with Caesar without cost to itself—without its purity getting defiled in the process?

These are unsettling questions, and I nearly shut down my brain in surrender to the hopelessness of a fallen world. But something about the mix of Levering’s ambition with Harris’s more personal honesty encouraged me to look at today’s political climate and find the pockets still welcome to redemption.

“For nearly all my childhood and adolescence, on into early adulthood, politics gave my faith meaning,” says Harris. “Politics expressed my faith. Politics was my way of fighting for ‘a future and a hope,’ my way of proving I believed what Jesus said: ‘Take heart! I have overcome the world.’”

And so begins a tale of political idolatry swallowed, nurtured, and snapped. As far as referendums on the religious right in America go, Raised Right is a latecomer, but its autobiographical tenor provides a helpful window into the thousands of young evangelicals who are still wrestling with the inheritance of a theo-political marriage they never chose.

Good-humoured and heartfelt, Harris (who is 27) relives her evangelical, conservative upbringing with a gracious but critical eye, unflinchingly describing the campaign signs she carried, abortion clinics she picketed, and Federalist Papers she absorbed from church pulpits. A “child soldier on the front lines,” she defended Republican platforms for God’s glory until entering Hillsdale College in 2003. With the backdrop of a contentious Iraq War and her growing recognition of a contradictory world full of greys, Harris’s spiritual yearnings began bleeding beyond the political creed she had been told would protect them. It’s unclear when exactly the bottom dropped out for her, but somewhere in attending this conservative institution, politics started to feel hollow. Gospels were being crossed, and Harris wanted out.

She graduated and moved to New York City, where the tensions grew as she met Christians who were Democrats and confronted urban poverty. While writing for the conservative evangelical newsmagazine WORLD, she became a victim of dogmatism, condemned and “prayed for” by her readers for expressing feminist positions. Every encounter brought Harris closer to dismissing political activism as cowardly, its method of choosing principles over people unable to heal the pain of a neighbour in need. “I was looking for a more incarnational love,” she writes, “and while I couldn’t define it in so many words, I knew it when I saw it.”

Alisa’s story, while extreme in some ways, will find echoes in the political trajectories of thousands of “millennial” evangelicals who are rejecting traditional institutions out of disillusionment that they will draw us any closer to the ends a Christian imagination demands. Some have shifted leftward. Many (especially post-Obama) want to give up on politics altogether.

Read the rest of the post at Comment Magazine. Then stay there and check out some of their other good stuff.

Anne Snyder lives and works in Washington, D.C., where she has the privilege of supporting several columnists at The New York Times.

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Back in October, fans of subsidiarity, state sovereignty and localism received something of a shock when the Vatican’s Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace published its note on the global financial disarray of recent years. Its call for a “supranational authority” with “global reach” caught the attention of writers from Rod Dreher to George Weigel to Sam Gregg. The shock was short-lived, however, as a brief Vatican brouhaha ensued in which the Secretary of State disowned the document, and the “Justice and Peace department,” as CNBC termed the Council, was required to pass future notes by the cardinal before publication

So perhaps the transnational fear-mongering is done for the moment. But on second thought, maybe not. For Catholics, it’s hard to ignore the fact that numerous popes have issued clarion calls for transnational authorities (cf. Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris at 71-74, as well as Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, at 67, inter alia). But even beyond Catholic social teaching, what are we to make of transnationalism? By and large, conservatives tend to greet things transnational with a range of reactions spanning from a yawn to outright scorn. And this is not without reason. It is certainly tempting to dismiss any call for transnational justice as yet another naïve attempt at attaining a Kantian perpetual peace. On the scorn end of the spectrum, there is ample reason to be wary of, say, international courts’ attempts to pronounce ‘justice’ in domestic concerns as blatant violations of subsidiarity. (French philosopher Chantal Delsol has argued similarly.)

Getting terms straight

Upon closer examination, though, not only is some transnational authority inevitable, it may be desirable – even for subsidiarity advocates. To see why, we should first clear up a few matters. ‘Transnational’ often gets confused with ‘international,’ ‘supranational’ or even ‘global,’ each of which is conceptually distinct. ‘International,’ technically has to do with matters pertaining across nations, with the unit of study or action as the nation-state. The United Nations, NATO, and the British Commonwealth are international institutions. ‘Supranational,’ on the other hand, indicates a vertical relationship to national, meaning that a supranational institution claims some inherent authority over individual nation-states. The International Criminal Court does just this. ‘Global’ simply implies an effectively ubiquitous presence across the globe – English is thus said to be a global language. ‘Transnational,’ however, has to do with norms or structures that transcend the boundaries of nation-states, such that NGOs or communities or even individuals make up the primary actors. The Red Cross is an oft-touted example of a transnational organization.

Secondly, we have to ask what it is that is transnational, supranational, global, etc. ‘Government,’ ‘governance,’ ‘institutions,’ ‘authority,’ and ‘power’ are also, of course, conceptually distinct. “Transnational authority” can have a radically different meaning – and consequences – than “supranational government” and “international governance.” For example, Standard and Poor, in rating entire nations’ credit ratings, quite clearly exercises a form of authority over them by virtue of its reputation and expertise. But this is hardly a world government out to destroy state sovereignty (meriting scorn), nor is its authority something to be dismissed (with a yawn).

The Church as Transnational Authority

It is worthwhile to look at the concept of transnational authority more closely, for one of the most obvious and, dare I say, important, examples of a transnational authority is the global Church, especially (but not only) in the case of the Roman Catholic Church. As José Casanova, a leading scholar on religion and globalization, writes, “As a religious regime, Catholicism preceded and is likely to outlast the modern world system of nation-states.” Importantly, this does not exclude Protestantism from the picture, for insofar as the Christian Church is the Christian Church of the Apostles, it is rightly said to have preceded the state system as well.

In light of the tremendous moral and soteriological claims the Church makes, and not on the basis of her territorial jurisdiction, the question must be asked: Why should the locus of authority always be territorial? Is this in keeping with the principle of subsidiarity, namely, that matters ought to be handled by the lowest competent authority? What if the lowest competent authority is global or transnational? The modern Westphalian nation-state rests its authority on the idea that it is sovereign over everything and everyone within its geographical boundaries. In the original version, this included the religion of the people (cuius regio, eius religio). And the nation-state has worked quite well throughout much of modern history – the advantages of clearly demarcated authority, legal jurisdiction and identifiable armed forces are inestimable.

Still, we should keep in mind that it is, in fact, an innovation of modernity rather than an inevitable outgrowth of natural law. Furthermore, for Christians, and for anyone who believes in something higher than Caesar, it is a good thing to have limitations to state sovereignty. For to hold that state sovereignty is the end of authority is to ultimately adhere to a form of moral relativism, one which the trials at Nuremberg rejected in concluding that following state orders is no excuse for gross inhumanity. Human beings have always sought, rightly, a good that both transcends political authority, and it is for this reason that transnational authority is rightly an inevitable part of our political landscape. (As a side note, this principle of a higher authority than the state also helps to explain why battles over the use of shari’a are more than matters of Muslims versus non-Muslims.)

Of course, there is a second reason for the prominence of transnational authority and even governance today, namely, the effects of globalization. Information is readily transmitted instantly across state boundaries, and the market subsumes most of the globe. Unmanned planes directed from across the globe ‘fight’ wars, genocide all but requires intervention, and protestors against their Arab ruler make camera-visible signs entirely in English for the world to see – and to “do something.” State sovereignty over such conceptual ‘territories’ is ambiguous at best; it rarely seems competent to arbitrate justice in such globalized matters. But what kind of authority would be competent?

I suggest that sometimes, it might just take a transnational form of authority to speak competently in such matters. As Casanova writes, “Ongoing processes of globalization offer a transnational religious regime…which never felt fully at home in a system of sovereign territorial nation-states, unique opportunities…to assume a proactive in shaping some aspects of the new system.” The form that this would take remains to be seen. But even should the global Church (“transnational religious regime”) successfully exercise a high degree of transnational moral authority in molding our world order (and I fully grant that this doesn’t always look too likely), this would not be the mere exchange of one scary global power for another. In Caritas in Veritate, just after the seemingly alarming point that “there is urgent need of a true world political authority,” Pope Benedict XVI writes that “such an authority would need to be regulated by law, to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good, and to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth” (emphasis original).

Conclusion

If this is the case – i.e., if transnational political authority is to commit itself to ‘authentic integral human development’ as defined by the precepts of the Christian faith, and if such authority respects the very principles of subsidiarity and solidarity that stand at the core of much Christian and conservative tradition – then perhaps a looming transnational age would be, a bit paradoxically, a return to an earlier, more conservative transnational world.

Karen Rupprecht is a doctoral student in political theory at Georgetown University.

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For at least two decades, evangelicalism was associated with the politics of the Right–to the point where for most evangelicals, being pro-life, pro-marriage, and pro-military was synonymous with conservatism. More recently, a revitalized evangelical Left has arguably held far more sway with evangelical youth. In “From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism,” D.G. Hart recently argued that this counterswing was inevitable. Except for the 1980s-90s, evangelicalism has been politically liberal for most of its existence in America–and because of its theological values, it has always been temperamentally liberal.

In this brief symposium, we consider the value of Hart’s contribution to the discussion about evangelicalism and conservatism, and the future of the erstwhile bedfellows.

Hart Nails the Problem, Not the Solution

Jace Yarbrough

If I had read From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin four years ago, I would have come away very surprised. “What? Evangelicals aren’t really conservatives? Nonsense.” Since then I’ve been introduced to Edmond Burke and have tried (unsuccessfully) to convince my family that being a Southern Baptist is a rather liberal thing to do. D.G. Hart’s book argues the same point by providing a brief history of the relationship between evangelical thought and conservatism in America.

Hart’s work posits that in the past, intellectual leaders of the born-again crowd tend to shun conservatism. Evangelicalism is primarily concerned with the salvation of the person; it likes arguing from natural, God-given rights; and, when push comes to shove, it trusts only the Bible. So instead of being suspicious of large-scale change and jealous for the common good, it embraces revolution (given the right goals) while focusing on individual holiness.

My experience with other Generation Y evangelicals—for most of whom “radical” is anything but a four letter word—coincides with one of Hart’s main contentions: after three decades of being “conservatives” evangelicals haven’t changed much. We make political decisions based mainly on immediate, moral issues instead of working upstream. That’s why a number of my very godly and devout evangelical acquaintances are unabashedly supporters of our current president. It’s not that they don’t care about families or the unborn, but that they approach politics by picking a set of issues. This time they picked his.

The final chapter of Hart’s book is an attempt to facilitate a continuing coalition between evangelicals and the right. But strangely enough, many of his recommendations are a combination of natural rights talk and pre-1970s evangelical apathy towards all things political. To me they sounded something like, “Other religions deserve legal protection too, and besides, petty politics aren’t that important anyway.” Let’s hope this book isn’t part of the last chapter of the history it captures well.

Jace Yarbrough, an officer in the U.S. Air Force, is a staff writer for Humane Pursuits. More by Jace Yarbrough.

Someone Buy This Man A Copy Of Centesimus Annus

Miriel Thomas

The bulk of my previous interactions with D. G. Hart had all been in person–he lectured at, and facilitated, several ISI conferences in which I participated as an undergraduate. My familiarity with his written work extended to one FPR post about pushing cases of beer through the streets of Center City Philadelphia with a shopping cart. Accordingly, the context in which I encountered From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism was a tenuous one. I suspected I would be disinclined to agree with several of his fundamental premises, but I wanted to give the book a fair shot, so I went in with limited expectations. I was unsurprised.

Why the Kids of the Religious Right Aren’t Conservative

Brian Brown

D.G. Hart’s book is methodologically weak and often unfair to its subjects. Evangelicals aren’t as homogenous as Hart sometimes makes them out to be, and the solution isn’t to act like Christianity has no implications for culture. But Hart’s history is generally accurate, and he is right about one important thing: evangelicalism has contributed little if anything to the conservative mind. The leaders of the Religious Right might have had some values in common with conservatives, but even they didn’t think like conservatives.

Evangelicals were pretty solidly Republican for a couple decades, mainly because of what they thought. Roe v. Wade, radical sexual politics, militant secularism, and incompetent foreign policy from the Dems were too much of a direct assault on their values and their common sense.

But evangelicals and conservatives have never had much in common in terms of how they think. Evangelicals Left and Right throughout American history have been taught to value the Bible, but not tradition; to understand universal truths, but not the crucial contexts of time and place; to oppose radical change by the bad guys, but not radical change by the good guys.

This has tremendous importance for anyone thinking about what relationship today’s evangelical college kids will have with conservatism, or the Republican Party (not the same thing, of course). At the end of the day, for the evangelical, it tends to boil down to the Bible and Me, and when my professor is busy teaching me how to think, he can shape what conclusions I draw about social justice and greedy Republicans without ever bringing up those Marxist arguments Summit Ministries prepped me to counter. Next thing I know, I have to choose between my parents’ religion and my parents’ politics, because they don’t seem to jive.

And because they taught me so well to love Jesus and read my Bible, I go vote for Obama.

Brian Brown, editor of Humane Pursuits, is CEO of Narrator. More by Brian Brown.

A Translation Problem

Anne Snyder

Conservatism as this blog knows it was foreign to me four years ago. Well, foreign as conservatism. The conclusions I had drawn from various life experiences, upbringing, and a more recent explosion of Christian thought knew conservatism, they just never would have claimed that address. I pretty much equated the c-word with overalls, unoriginality and the GOP, and so I chose political homelessness over partisan claustrophobia.

Then a job and the other minds it attracted exposed me to Oakeshott, Burke, Kirk and others, and I found myself in kindred company. Some of these folks were Christians, some weren’t. Their thought didn’t touch every truth I had glimpsed, nor did it illicit the sort of sacred longing a C.S. Lewis discussion could. But what attracted me then and now was a shared appreciation for beauty, modesty, and bounded time and place. Eternal gifts meeting finite world, working out the tensions from there.

I share something personal because I don’t think I’m unique here. My cherished Christianity was faith nurtured loosely in the evangelical tradition, but it took landing at a Washington think tank to discover a political philosophy that could provide a vocabulary for the texture of Christian freedom to find ordered, robust life within defined social structures. I had somehow misunderstood what conservatism meant! But who’s to blame?

When D.G. Hart laments the “untold” disconnect between evangelicals and conservatism he tells a true story, even if it is a political rehashing of Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. But he’s too one-sided in condemnation, almost uppity. Evangelicals may get hung up on a “hyper-Biblicized political theory,” and their defining experience of individual transformation certainly encourages a questioning of time-tested social structures, but conservatives need to recognize a messaging problem.

I’m not referring to Fox News’s inability to branch beyond beach blonds and patriotic colors. It goes deeper. Why aren’t there Burkean conservatives out there translating their beloved fabric into language the everyday citizen can digest? Why do so many seem cocooned between the think tank and the bourbon book club? Humility aside for a second, why do conservatism’s greatest proponents allow it to become so badly caricatured? Is it because conservatism is being, not telling (I actually kind of believe this, but then evangelicals and conservatives should have much more in common than Hart allows). Remaining a student (not a card-carrier) of the conservative tradition, I don’t know if Hart’s hope is worth pursuing. The world’s too big to say. But if he really wants evangelicals to restore conservatism’s intent, he’s going to have to begin by re-educating the masses, among whom evangelicals assume a hefty slice. A Mumford & Sons concert isn’t a bad place to begin. Just try explaining their conservative lilt on the way home. That’ll spark something.

Anne Snyder works to keep levity and gravitas see-sawing from her window along the columnist corridor at The New York Times in Washington, DC. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy and International Relations from Wheaton College (IL).

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“Think globally. Act locally.” The phrase has been chic for a while now. I’m not sure where it originated, but it’s often used in environmentalist or city planning campaigns. The funny thing is, the concept (if not the phrase) has a long history of almost two centuries, and it has never worked. It’s a relic of a bygone age, and it didn’t work in the bygone age for the bygone people either. In fact, its opposite is more true, because oddly enough, the more the world gets connected via social media, the more the local matters.

Thinking Global: The Oversized Past

If you think about it, “think global/act local” is based on a pretty awful assumption: that we can only get you to care about your own neighborhood if we appeal to the fact that you care about people far away. That’s nauseating. What kind of people can only be bothered to care about actual human beings if they’re convinced it’s generically good for Humanity (or Earth) in the abstract?

The answer is people whose lives are characterized by centralized institutions—big governments, big businesses, and so on. Social innovators for 400 years have believed that the future of solving social problems would come through huge centralized programs. Cardinal Richelieu (of Three Musketeers fame) and the French kings tried it in the 1600s. It caught fire in Europe (which had large-scale social welfare by the 1700s), and was made famous in the mid-1800s by the Prussians under Bismarck. Despite endemic failure in Europe, the early Progressives got America into the act, and the GOP and the Dems have tried to keep us interested ever since with wars (usually “social wars” against ills like poverty, but hey, Kruschev and Saddam sure helped). People tend to lose interest when their caring is done for them by professionals, so “think global/act local” was crucial, because act local didn’t even work on its own any more.

“Think global/act local” didn’t really work either, of course; even wars only capture our imagination for a year or two, and we lose interest in “social wars” even before the end of the headlines the new program gets (No Child Left Behind, anyone?).

Hannah Arendt was a woman who escaped the Nazis and ended up teaching philosophy in a number of Ivy League schools. She knew a lot about nationalism and big programs from firsthand experience. She wrote in 1963 that the reason social wars are no replacement for local commitments is that compassion—the virtue assumed in all those social wars—doesn’t work in the abstract. The word literally means feeling with someone, which can only be done for a person, not for an idea or group.

The American system of government was designed with similar things in mind—Thomas Jefferson thought people would care about their far-off federal government only because they understood and participated in their local governments. They would understand the economy because they ran their own farms and businesses. Jefferson would have said “Think local, act local.” People should relate to the big through the lens of the small, which could only be done if the small mattered to us for its own sake.

In the 20th century, we ditched this idea and flipped it on its head, relating to the small through the lens of the big. We followed Europe. It was the century of mass politics (communism, fascism, progressivism, etc.), of mass business (trusting the local McDonald’s because you trusted the big brand), and of mass media (one-way news blasting like billboards, radios, and televisions). It was the century of “think global/act local,” or maybe “think global/act global.”

Acting Local: Social Media and the Future

The 21st century is shaping up differently. More and more social science is stressing the importance of local activity (for more on the importance of local people and institutions to how we think and succeed, read David Brooks’ “The Social Animal”). More and more technology, business, and city planning is designed to make us more connected at individual and small group levels. It seems in all that 20th century bigness, we lost a lot of the connections that made us better at being human.

A prime example: social media, still heralded by some ignorant professors as an instrument of more globalization, is actually an attempt to fix that (in a partial way). It re-teaches acting local, and applies it to the globalized world.

In Jefferson’s day, you had a lot of spontaneous interaction with your neighbors—in the tavern, in the town square, at church, and so on. They’d see the new shoes you were wearing. They’d hear a lot of your conversations and ideas. They’d know if you were sick. Tony Tanner, a Cambridge professor, wrote of the time period: “It should be remembered how difficult it was, or could be, to find a space or place to engage in sincere, private conversation. [It was] a society in which everything–and every word–was more or less ‘public.’ Privacy was hard to come by.” That spontaneous interaction offends our modern notions of privacy, which in fact we’ve been told is a constitutional right, and which we maintain through car travel, anonymous big box stores, and infrequent dinner parties in the seclusion of our homes.

But we’re social animals: spontaneous interaction is part of being human. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and company were invented by young people who (whether they could articulate it or not) had largely missed that part of being human when growing up. Social media is an attempt to allow people to act local again, both through direct digital interaction and through fostering in-person interaction (for example, I’m better plugged into my local news and government by following and interacting with reporters and city officials on Twitter; another good example is El Pomar Foundation, which I helped build a good local social media presence).

This is just as true in business as in one’s personal life. Dan Rather lost his job because of bloggers. Barack Obama got elected with a huge, heavily localized social media presence. Even many large businesses are starting to get this; Burger King’s Facebook presence is very strong, and some large companies have switched their TV marketing budgets entirely over to social media spending. They understand what federal officials (including, stunningly, Obama) don’t: that the future is about connecting people to the small, not controlling them with the big.

David Meerman Scott, in his book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” says to understand Twitter, for example, you have to think of it like a cocktail party. At a cocktail party, you wouldn’t walk in and yell, “Buy my product!” You’d head for the people you knew, get introduced to other people, and have conversations in which you’d find areas of mutual interest and perhaps provide advice or help to each other. You’d act like you actually cared about the other person; what he wanted, what he was saying. You might get a client, but first, you’d get a friend.

That’s how spontaneous interaction works. It’s how acting local works. And you can’t motivate yourself to do it–online or in person–by thinking, “Okay, I’ll go talk to that guy because it’ll be good for humanity.”

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There’s a face that we wear in the cold light of day -
It’s society’s mask, it’s society’s way,
And the truth is that it’s all a facade.

There’s a face that we hide till the nighttime appears,
And what’s hiding inside, behind all of our fears,
Is our true self, locked inside the facade.

-From Jekyll and Hyde (1997 Broadway Production)

2011 saw many scandals—Anthony Weiner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, much of Penn State’s leadership, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s executives, and a GOP frontrunner all saw their careers suffer devastating blows as their masks of morality fell away. These people had been able to survive for a time under dreadfully beautiful disguises, maintaining faithful followings despite disastrously skewed internal compasses. The mask, the public face that hid their worst wrongdoing, has facilitated the deterioration of the public square.

“Every profound spirit needs a mask,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche.  He recognized that humanity has a love affair with the disguise. The mask is a pervasive part of who we are; we need it and love it. It evolves and grows subtly around the core of our beings, and becomes indistinguishable from our actual selves.  At the same time, our misuse of the mask has consequences for our civic society, manifested in the moral vacuum that now characterizes our politics. We are in need of a paradigm shift—one that recognizes the limited value of the mask while valuing transparency over duplicity.

But such a shift requires more candor about the mask than we often indulge.

Our own masks give us the tendency to accept others who obviously don one. They also spur us to look with suspicion on the apparent absence of such a disguise. Failing public figures capture our imaginations and conversations in ways that no amount of virtue ever can. The failures of such leaders and executives excuse our wrongdoing and simultaneously strengthen the masks that we ourselves wear. Our failures, safe in our memories, dwindle when laid alongside the exposed misdeeds of our leaders.

Those leaders have excuses, of course: the pressures on political candidates cause lapses in judgment; intercollegiate athletics lends itself to systemic ethical shortcomings; the institutional structures of businesses become “too big to fail.” We disdain these excuses from others, and yet prefer them to the alternative recognition that failure is endemic to human nature. Ironically, the failures of those in power spur us on in our own duplicity, giving us hope that we too can be successful behind the mask, like the wartime veteran who responds to another’s death only with the calloused shrug: “Oh well; it wasn’t me.” However much we tut-tut disapprovingly at another’s exposed mask, the fact is we want it ourselves, and the reminder that others have it gives us comfort.

The converse is also true:  those who do not appear to be wearing a mask make us supremely uncomfortable. Tim Tebow hasn’t made headlines because of his athletic prowess or off-the-field behavior. He has become one of the day’s most controversial sports figures simply because he seems to be genuine; honest about his personal life and apparently immune to the temptations of other mortals.

We don’t like that. We want mystery and scandal. When we place our faith in someone, we want a risk. Masks equal risks; uncertainty; paradoxically, their absence is both dull and unsettling.

Partly this is because we know an idyllic world without the mask is not possible. Nor should we want it to be. The beauty of the mask is that it is not a cloak of invisibility. It does not completely hide us. Every mask adopts at least some of the visage of its wearer. The mask can be used for good—not to disguise our worst but to develop our best.

No one expects that the people and personalities they encounter in formal political settings are entirely genuine. Virginia Woolf observed that the human habit of making masks “is so universal that probably it preserves our sanity. If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies we might perhaps dissolve utterly; separateness would be impossible.” Some of those masks, in short, are worn out of an intense respect for humanity; an acknowledgment that the wearer cannot “measure up” to the rest without putting forth extra effort towards worthiness. This wearer is not simply hiding wrongdoing behind a mask; he is admitting his own inadequacies and working to correct them.

The problem, as Woolf further pointed out, is that “the [masks] are in the excess, not the sympathy.” We tend to place unlimited confidence in the mask as a disguise. It has no ability to absolve our consciences or reorient our compasses. The mask is a means of politics, not an end. The destruction of another’s mask can be a source of delight at our own escape, or a sobering reminder of our moral equivalence and the limitations of the mask—but not both.

The ultimate irony is that the mask, originally intended to hide our worst, can display our best only when our worst is acknowledged. We would do well to remember this as we embark on a new year that will surely present all the challenges of the old.

If we’re not one, but two,
Are we evil or good?
Do we walk the fine line -
That we’d cross if we could?
Are we waiting -
To break through the facade?

-From Jekyll and Hyde

Zachary Crippen, a senior at the Air Force Academy, is a 2012 Rhodes Scholar. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.