No wonder the newly ascendant American ideologies, having to fill the vacuum where religion once was, are so divisive. They are meant to be divisive. On the left, the “woke” take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends. Adherents of wokeism see themselves as challenging the long-dominant narrative that emphasized the exceptionalism of the nation’s founding. Whereas religion sees the promised land as being above, in God’s kingdom, the utopian left sees it as being ahead, in the realization of a just society here on Earth. After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September, droves of mourners gathered outside the Supreme Court—some kneeling, some holding candles—as though they were at the Western Wall.
On the right, adherents of a Trump-centric ethno-nationalism still drape themselves in some of the trappings of organized religion, but the result is a movement that often looks like a tent revival stripped of Christian witness. Donald Trump’s boisterous rallies were more focused on blood and soil than on the son of God. Trump himself played both savior and martyr, and it is easy to marvel at the hold that a man so imperfect can have on his soldiers. Many on the right find solace in conspiracy cults, such as QAnon, that tell a religious story of earthly corruption redeemed by a godlike force.
Shadi Hamid, "America without God"
I would argue that Christianity has for almost five hundred years had a very serious Calvinism problem. And that Christianity in societies shaped so deeply by Calvinism as America has been needs to be purged of it before its deeper, archetypal humanizing mythos might actually make sense to people of genuine good will. What is reflected in the first two excerpts above are first the left and then the right wing forms of Calvinism, both of which are in their different ways parodies of Christianity. All cultural phenomena at some point become distorted parodies of themselves, but that doesn't mean that the original thing they parody is beyond retrieval.
But with Calvinism, which is in itself something born of a kind of theological reductionism, a compulsive need for stripping out the metaphorical, the mystery, the depths of human religious experience has more in common with the spirit of Capitalism; with ideas of material progress more than with the spirit of the gospels. Calvinism has reduced Christianity from a deeply moral response to human life to a priggish moralistic, judgmental distortion of it. Catholicism has done it in another way--its legalism and dogmatism share the same fundamental reductionistic neurosis.
So it is no wonder that after the Thirty Years war in the early 17th Century when Catholics and mostly Calvinists went after one another with a brutal violence, unprecedented until the the world wars of the 20th Century, that many decent and thoughtful people said a pox on both your houses. We don't need the kind of fanaticism that follows from confessional theism. The Enlightenment rationalists were not atheists or anti-religion, but they were anti clerical and anti-fanaticism.
But with each successive decade the God who revealed himself in the gospels became evermore remote. He became the deus absconditus that was eventually better understood in impersonal deistic terms rather than theistic or personalist terms. At best he was a clockmaker god who set the world machine a running, and then left it to us to reverse engineer the thing to see if we could improve upon it, and what followed was a remarkable transformation of the material conditions driven by capitalism, scientific discovery, and technological innovation.
Educated elites still believed that there was some kind of ontological foundation, some underlying transcendentally grounded Logos to insure the intelligibility of the cosmos, but there was no personal God, no God that intervened in human affairs, no God who cared, and so there was very little reason to believe in or care about God. Then after Darwin and Nietzsche, even the idea of a foundation fell away.
The whole poststructuralist project, insofar as it emphasizes the surface, talks about language and the text as a prison, i.e., insofar as it justifies the way language becomes a closed, self-referential system capable of only an ironic snigger at even the mention of things like God or truth or goodness or beauty has run its course. This is less true in the halls of some university humanities departments where it's more important to be edgy than to actually care about what is most deeply true. How can they care about such things when their careers depend on their believing there is no such thing as depth?
But such edginess, imo, is no longer au courant or avant garde; it's a spent force, and I think that even academics in the humanities are open to a retrieval of mythos. So that's where we have come from, but clearly change is in the air. Even among the educated elite, there's a growing awareness that religion is just not going to go away, and the question is not when we are going to "outgrow" it, but how can its energies be channeled in a way that promotes true human flourishing. For Being religious is baked into the human condition, and the questions is not whether you are religious but whether your religion is healthy or unhealthy.
Here's McGilcrist on the subject:
I have tried to convey in this book that we need metaphor or mythos in order to understand the world. Such myths or metaphors are not dispensable luxuries, or ‘optional extras’, still less the means of obfuscation: they are fundamental and essential to the process. We are not given the option not to choose one, and the myth we choose is important: in the absence of anything better, we revert to the metaphor or myth of the machine. But we cannot, I believe, get far in understanding the world, or in deriving values that will help us live well in it, by likening it to the bike in the garage.
The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos – a term I use in its technical sense, making no judgment here of its truth or otherwise – for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien – like James Joyce’s God, refined out of existence and ‘paring his fingernails’ – but on the contrary engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement, and like the right hemisphere rather than the left, not resentful (as the Old Testament Yahweh often seemed) about the Faustian fallings away of its creation, but suffering alongside it. At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process. But any mythos that allows us to approach a spiritual Other, and gives us something other than material values to live by, is more valuable than one that dismisses the possibility of its existence.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11562-11569).
If the country ever recovers from its Calvinism, it might be able to entertain the possibility for such a mythos playing a role in shaping it public discourse. I'm not saying that it should be the dominant voice, but one that has something worthwhile to contribute. I grew up in a world where the Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Daniel Berrigan, Thomas Merton, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King, and other Christians played such a role in shaping public discourse. They were respected because of their confessional commitments. There is nobody on the American scene who plays such a role today. Maybe Marilynne Robinson, but while I respect her intelligence and seriousness, I find it impossible to finish any essay or book she's written, and I've tried. Maybe that's on me, but I think it's her Calvinist austerity--and it bears too much of a resemblance to what's described in the first paragraph of the opening epigraph. It's not bloodless, but it lacks elan. There's no mythos in it.
Something else is called for.
