Black patriotism should not be mistaken for Christian nationalism

A recent PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute)/Brookings study of the Threat of Christian Nationalism in the United States has been getting a good amount of mainstream media coverage. There probably are as many as thirty percent of us who proclaim their adherence to Christianity (usually of the white evangelical Protestant variety and its offspring) and combine that belief/culture with aggressive nationalism. These folks are a menace to their neighbors and to our democracy.

But I felt drawn to dig a little into the methodology of the study. Researchers used the answers to a battery of five questions to identify "adherents" and "sympathizers" with Christian nationalism. Did respondents agree or disagree with the following questions?

• The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
• U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
• If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
• Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
• God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

I have to admit that I have some sympathy with the second of these statements. I believe U.S. laws should be based on Christian values -- and Jewish values, and Muslim values, and Hindu values, and Buddhist values, and Wiccan values, and all other historic sources of morals -- because I think all religious traditions lead to reverence for humanity and the earth, whatever culture they derive from.

But obviously, I'm not a Christian nationalist sympathizer. I'm not a nationalist at all. But I'm not ready to deny that religions have some good ideas that might inform how we structure our lives together. 

I find it easy to imagine that a goodly lot of people who might have some sympathy for these statements might be far more nationalist than Christian. Researchers have documented that plenty of Trump and Republican supporters who loudly proclaim their Christianity aren't regularly to be found in churches.

Washington Post data journalist Philip Bump asks what seem to me a relevant question about the PRRI study:

What isn’t clear from the research is the extent to which these religious views are the motivator for political or cultural views. Are these Americans centering their beliefs on religion, or do their views broadly lead them to agree with questions centered on the primacy of Christianity? To put it another way, if Christian nationalism is the chicken and right-wing politics the egg, which comes first?

PRRI and Brookings may simply be measuring the same right-wing group in another way. Of course, this doesn’t diminish how unsettling the findings might be in the least.

One of the oddities of these PRRI findings is that, on this survey's metrics, Black Americans are no less likely to be Christian nationalist "adherents" or "sympathizers" with Christian nationalism than white evangelicals. That simply seems wrong. 

To PRRI's credit, they addressed this discordant finding with a short talk at the study's public launch event by Jemar Tisby, president of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, where he writes about race, religion, and culture.  This is preaching to be savored ...

"White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the Church in the United States today.

"I define Christian nationalism as an ethnographic-cultural ideology that uses Christian symbolism to create a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control.

"Black Americans as a group are a highly religious group. Ninety-seven percent of Black Americans believe in God or a higher power. And the vast majority of those folks are Christians, Protestant at that. ... it wouldn't surprise us that this language of God and Country resonates with Black people. ..

"The difference is, what do we mean? ... I contrast white Christian nationalism with Black Christian patriotism. ... When you are talking about white Christian nationalism it tends toward a rigid, narrow, authoritarian politics. When you are talking bout Black Christian patriotism, you are talking about an expansive, flexible, inclusive politics ... White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to a multiracial inclusive democracy."

Great news -- amid a revealing frame

Ruth Maclean reports from Senegal that legislators in the nearby West African nation of Sierra Leone have voted to abolish the death penalty. In this, they follow the trend among African countries. 

The vote in Sierra Leone came against the backdrop of a steady march in Africa to discard brutal laws imposed by past colonial masters. In April, Malawi ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. In May of 2020, Chad did the same.

Nearly half of Africa’s 54 independent countries have abolished the punishment, more than double the number from less than two decades ago.

Sabrina Mahtani, the co-founder and former executive director of AdvocAid said Sierra Leone’s decision to do away with capital punishment was remarkable especially because it is still recovering from the 1991-2002 civil war that was characterized by intolerance, atrocities and extreme violence. ...

“Here’s a small country in West Africa that had a brutal civil war 20 years ago and they’ve managed to abolish the death penalty,” Ms. Mahtani said. “They would actually be an example for you, U.S., rather than it always being the other way around.”

African anti-death penalty activists hold on to hope that Ghana and Nigeria might follow their smaller neighbors. 

Ms. Mahtani is certain she knows the origin of execution laws in West Africa: 

“The death penalty is a colonial imposition, and these laws were inherited from the U.K.”

If anti-colonial national pride can help prompt death penalty repeal, let's hope for more of that sort of sentiment. 

Photo credit: City Center, Kabala, Sierra Leone, October 2009

When wars don't end

I used to think that, if I had had more self-confidence as an unformed girl graduate student in a highbrow history program way back at the end of the '60s, I would have dared study the question that seemed most significant to me in those days: how did an apparently well functioning European civilization come to destroy itself in the barbaric Great War that we date from the assassination of an Austrian archduke in 1914? I suspected such interests were beyond me.

As I have become acquainted with modern popular scholarship on World War I, I have realized that I'm glad I never went that way: my linguistic weakness (I could barely read French and German) as well as scholarly timidity would have meant that I would have merely reinforced prevailing historiographic perspectives which are being usefully revised.

For decades, English speakers, including people in the United States, who thought about the Great War at all, thought about vast armies mired in muddy trenches in France where the Allies (that's us: Brits, French and U.S. doughboys) duked it out against the soldiers of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). Russia was in it somehow too, but then there was a Revolution and then Russia was out of it. And there was all sorts of peripheral action, in the Ottoman Empire, in African colonies, and across the deserts of Arabia with (with camels and T.E. Lawrence). Millions, soldiers and civilians, died. Finally in November 1918 an armistice silenced the guns on the Western front and afterward the Versailles treaty set the contours of Europe that held up until they didn't when Hitler broke Europe's peace again by invading Poland in 1939.

Historians have been hard at work deconstructing this Northern European/English-centered perspective in more recent times. There was an awful lot we didn't feel the need to absorb and remember. The stories of those "peripheral" conflicts have been told, and elaborated, and served the interests of various subsequent contenders for local power. And what the Great War meant in Central Europe, to the peoples of what had been the Austrian Hapsburg empire, the Wilhelmine (German) empire, Balkan kingdoms, the Ottoman empire and the Romanov (Russian) empire continues to demand more understanding as the struggles of the early 20th century continue to have resonance in the 21st.

These are historian Robert Gerwarth's subject in The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End. He argues that outside of Britain, France and the United States, the Great War had no winners. For the wars' losers, he documents that the armistice brought upheaval, wreck, murder and privation that exceeded the war itself.

... the eventful years between 1917 and 1923 are still very much present in the collective memory of people from eastern, central and southern Europe, as well as those from the Middle East and Ireland. For them the memory of the Great War is often overshadowed, if not fully eclipsed, by foundational stories of independence struggles, national liberation, and revolutionary change in and around 1918 ...

... It was in this period that a particularly deadly but ultimately conventional conflict between states -- the First World War -- gave way to an interconnected series of conflicts whose logic and purpose was much more dangerous. Unlike World War I, which was fought with the purpose of forcing certain conditions of peace (however severe), the violence after 1917-18 was infinitely more ungovernable. These were existential conflicts fought to annihilate the enemy, be they ethnic or class enemies -- a genocidal logic that would subsequently become dominant in much of Europe between 1939 and 1945,

What was also noteworthy about the conflicts that erupted after 1917-18 was that they occurred after a century in which European states had more or less successfully managed to assert their monopoly on legitimate violence, in which national armies had become the norm, and in which the fundamentally important distinction between combatants and non-combatants had been codified (even if frequently breached in practice.) The post-war conflicts reversed that trend. In the absence of functioning states, in the former imperial lands of Europe, militias of various political persuasions assumed the role of the national army for themselves, while the lines between friends and foes, combatants and civilians, became terrifyingly unclear.

Gerwarth provides a narrative of horrors that followed: in the civil war between Bolsheviks and Whites in Russia, in new states (like Turkey) and states with old names but diminished territory (like Hungary and Romania), as ideologies, nationalisms, and power-seeking men with guns vied for hegemony. This history is about massacre, murder, torture, and, always lurking, mass starvation. People don't move beyond this kind of radical insecurity unscathed. It seems appropriate to wonder, has eastern Europe ever recovered?

The history I was raised on elided all this struggle and pain. I'm incredibly grateful to brave and linguistically capable historians, like Gerwarth, who have tried to bring narratives of this time and these places into a less-than-welcoming western consciousness. There is nothing easy about reading this story, but my picture of reality is larger for having been exposed to this history.

Two other accessible volumes which provide this sort of a necessary historiographic cold bath are Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands and Tony Judt's Postwar.

The elephant in our midst

I guess I am one of those despised cosmopolitans that our rightwing nuts aim to purge from our U.S. collective life. It took a graph drawn by a former World Bank economist and explained by a British journalist to ground my understanding of what so many of my fellow citizens are so mad about that they've stuck us with a dangerous, ignorant egomaniac as president. This is what globalization means in our national life, stupid! (Phrasing stolen from James Carville.)

Explaining the impact of globalization on the societies which gave the planet the Industrial Revolution and mature capitalism is the mission of the first third of British journalist Edward Luce's The Retreat of Western Liberalism. The Washington correspondent of the Financial Times, Luce believes the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., and passage of Brexit in his country, demonstrate that Western democracy may have played out its string. Here's the chart that purports to show why:

The global median – the emerging middle classes of China, Vietnam, India and so on – enjoyed income growth of more than 80 per cent in those years. Even the bottom deciles, in Africa and South Asia, saw growth of up to 50 percent.

The key part of the elephant for the Western middle classes is where its trunk slopes downwards – between the seventy-fifth and ninetieth percentiles of the world’s population. These account for the majority of the West’s people. At their mid-point, incomes grew by a grand total of 1 per cent over the last three decades.

...The last part of the elephant is the tip of its trunk, which shoots straight upwards in a suitably celebratory posture. That is the global top 1 per cent. Their incomes have jumped by more than two-thirds over the same period.

For most of the planet's people, life has been getting better for a couple of decades. We should be happy about that; a world where a few enjoy outrageous wealth while masses starve is repugnant. And most people in the U.S. do live unimaginably more comfortably than our grandparents. But our prospects are no longer on an upward trajectory. The losers from globalization are the people who have been the foundation of liberal democracies in the U.S. and Western Europe.

Donald Trump, and his counterparts in Europe, did not cause the crisis of democratic liberalism. They are a symptom. ...The backlash of the West’s middle classes, who are the biggest losers in a global economy that has been rapidly converging, but still has decades to go, has been brewing since the early 1990s. In Britain we call them the ‘left-behinds’. In France, they are the ‘couches moyennes’. In America, they are the ‘squeezed middle’. A better term is the ‘precariat’ – those whose lives are dominated by economic insecurity. Their weight of numbers is growing. So, too, is their impatience. Barrington Moore, the American sociologist, famously said, ‘No bourgeoisie, no democracy.’ In the coming years we will find out if he was right.

... We are taught to think our democracies are held together by values. Our faith in history fuels that myth. But liberal democracy’s strongest glue is economic growth. When groups fight over the fruits of growth, the rules of the political game are relatively easy to uphold. When those fruits disappear, or are monopolised by a fortunate few, things turn nasty. ...We like to believe that our democracies are sustained by a shared commitment to principle. In some respects that is true. But when growth vanishes, our societies reveal a different face. Without higher growth, the return of racial politics looks set to continue.

... We cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination and economic globalisation.

Given the trajectory of the world we live in, that's a dire conclusion. And, as a good Financial Times correspondent, Luce doesn't even address the possibility that economic growth, that engine of relative social peace and heightened well-being for most humans, may be an existential threat to the sustainability of most contemporary life forms on our fragile planet, causing climate change and ecological collapse.

Luce brings historical imagination to our times and the result is not encouraging.

... the parallels between the world today and the world in 1914 should strike us forcefully. Then, as now, the world’s big economies were deeply intertwined. The decades preceding the First World War marked a peak of globalisation that the world economy only regained in the 1990s. Like today, people believed ever-deepening ties of commerce rendered the idea of war irrational. It was thus unthinkable. People had grown complacent after decades of peace.

... Can the West regain its optimism? If the answer is no – and most of the portents are skewing the wrong way – liberal democracy will follow. If the next few years resemble the last, it is questionable whether Western democracy can take the strain. People have lost faith that their systems can deliver. More and more are looking backwards to a golden age that can never be regained. When a culture stops looking to the future, it loses a vital force.

This lucid little book can be read, and understood, in about three hours. It is bracing -- an ice water bath, if you care about democracy and our troubled world. Yet even this determined "realist" can imagine unexpected sources of hope. Before being employed in Washington, he was for several years a correspondent in India. He is convinced, as everyone more observant than Donald Trump must be, that the center of international gravity -- economic and political power -- is shifting to Asia. And much to his surprise, he sees a "natural experiment" taking place on that continent. From personal observation, he is pretty sure that India, though currently lagging China, points to a more encouraging future vision:

So ingrained is India’s culture of noisy dissent and sheer pluralism that I would rate democracy as now safer in India than in parts of the West.

Perhaps both the English language and democracy have their future in the sub-continent. So much for the raj indeed. History is funny that way.

When nations come apart ...

Despite having traveled for a month in Spain this fall, I don't have any very clear idea what I think about Catalan independence.

My friends in Spain, good lefties who live in Madrid and despise the corrupt right-wing government of premier Mariano Rajoy, nonetheless dismiss Catalan separatism as petulant and unrealistic. What do I know? I've learned to look at the English version of El Pais, a social-democratic paper that is the country's top selling daily. El Pais tilts hard against Catalan secession, treating the effort as anti-democratic and nativist.

With this background, I found Washington Post correspondent Ishaan Tharoor making points that seem highly relevant:

Catalan aspirations are deep-seated, anchored in the region's distinct history and cultural identity. But the momentum for independence catalyzed only in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, as Catalans saw their robust region being dragged down by a cratering Spanish economy. Catalan officials say the region still pays about $12 billion more in taxes each year to Madrid than it gets back.

These frustrations are not exclusive to Catalonia. A number of fledgling secessionist or autonomy movements in other parts of Europe, from Lombardy in Italy to Flanders in Belgium to Scotland or even London in Britain, are grounded in the belief that their regional interests are not being served by the national politicians who call the shots. Over the past year, we've tended to think of nationalism in the West in the context of angry, right-wing populist movements, fueled by disaffection with elites and hostility to immigrants.

But another trend to watch ought to be the impatient regionalism of more metropolitan parts of Europe, frustrated by the backward politics of their nation-states.

Tharoor points to a Guardian column by Paul Mason which makes a thought-provoking argument:

... the positive factor driving progressive nationalisms, from Scotland to Catalonia, is technological change. Information-rich societies reward the development of human capital; so the ability to study in your first language, to participate in a rich national culture, to create unique local selling points for incoming foreign investment is more important than ever. If the regions, peoples and nations currently demanding more freedom seem to be driven by “cultural nationalism”, that in turn is driven by technological change plus global competition.

The second impact of these forces is the emergence of successful big cities and devastated small towns. In large cities with dense networks of information and culture, you can survive globalisation. In small towns it is harder. So the logical economic strategy is to create a “region” or small nation focused on one big city, and develop the suburban and rural economy in synergy with that city, not the bigger unitary state. If Barcelona were not a massive global success story, the impetus behind Catalan nationalism would be smaller.

This should not seem foreign to us in the United States. One of the most mind-boggling aspects of last year's presidential election, according to Mark Muro and Sifan Liu was that:

The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output—just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.

... with the exceptions of the Phoenix and Fort Worth areas and a big chunk of Long Island, Clinton won every large-sized county economy in the country.

Another way of saying this is that California (Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas), New York (the city and environs), and Illinois (Chicago metro area) are thriving; meanwhile vast areas of the United States are accumulating grievances that Republicans exploit. Historically, more prosperous regions have been the tail that wagged the dog. It seems unlikely that the converse will endure for long.

Technology, globalization and cosmopolitanism, and mass migration aren't going to stop (however much the Trumpies want to stop the world so they can jump off). These forces are re-making our society; rote application of leftwing dichotomies derived from a different economy don't adequately capture contemporary conflicts. Eugene Robinson tries to name what this means for Democrats trying to assemble a majority:

Today’s key fault lines may be between metropolitan areas and the exurbs and small towns strung along the interstates; between those who have gone to college and those who have not; between families who have benefited from the globalized economy and those who have not; and between an anxious, shrinking white majority and the minority groups that within a couple of decades will constitute more than half the population.

He thinks Democrats need to convincingly project themselves as the "opportunity" party. That's sounds a bit over-technocratic to me; wasn't that what Hillary Clinton was offering? Winning Democrats will inspire hope that all of us, together, can enjoy the better future that prosperous areas glimpse even now.

There's no "misspoke" here.

As we were discussing what the hell is wrong with presidential flack Sean Spicer's blah-blah about Hitler and poison gas, I ran across this. It starts slow, but builds. Absolutely worth scanning through.

For the single page version, click on this link.

An anti-nationalist for these times

I think of Viet Thanh Nguyen as Steve Bannon's worst nightmare, someone whose being breaks categories of nation, origin, and history. He is the author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, a National Book Award finalist, and far better known as the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, The Sympathizer. I do better with nonfiction than fiction, but if what follows intrigues you, I recommend either book.

Nguyen is no nationalist. He's a man betwixt and between countries, histories, perspectives, and memories.

I was born in Vietnam but made in America. I count myself among those Vietnamese dismayed by America's deeds but tempted to believe its words. I also count myself among those Americans who often do not know what to make of Vietnam and want to know what to make of it. ... Today the Vietnamese and American revolutions manufacture memories only to absolve the hardening of our arteries. For those of us who consider ourselves to be inheritors of one or both of these revolutions, or who have been influenced by them in some way, we have to know how we make memories and how we forget them so we can beat their hearts back to life. That is the project, or at least the hope, of this book.

These nonfiction chapters survey memorials, fiction, film and the memories they collective construct of what people in the U.S. call the Vietnam war and people in Vietnam call the American war. His parents fled the north of his country for the anti-communist south in 1954 and, after the American war collapsed, landed in U.S. refugee camps and finally in what became the Vietnamese section of San Jose. He's been back to his ancestral country to see where relatives live, where battles were fought, and even the killing field of neighboring Cambodia. In this book, he describes crawling through what were once Viet Cong tunnels from which they ambushed U.S. GIs; these have been converted (also spruced up and enlarged) to accommodate tourist tours. He is more bemused than appalled by all sides' morphing memories.

Nguyen insists that only if we can allow ourselves the convoluted, often painful, process of rigorously examining embedded memories can we hope to create a usable past, more peaceful than what we've known. He calls this making "just memories."

...just memory proceeds from three things. First, an ethical awareness of our simultaneous humanity and inhumanity, which leads to a more complex understanding of our identity, of what it means to be human and to be complicit in the deeds that our side, our kin, and even we ourselves commit. Second, equal access to the industries of memory [currently dominated by the wealth and reach of the U.S. capitalist world culture] ... And, third, the ability to imagine a world where no one will be exiled from what we think of as the near and the dear to those distant realms of the far and the feared. ... The nation seduces us, particularly if we happen to be cast out of it as refugees, a population that now numbers at least sixty million, a floating global archipelago of human dispossession. ...

He doesn't think "the nation" is the answer to any of this agony. Everywhere -- on the ground and on the page -- he struggles against the worldwide hegemony of the U.S. view of what happened (this intrudes even within victorious Vietnam) and what it all meant.

... defenders of a homogenous America [have] cried out against the barbarians at the gate, those colored hordes who had climbed their way up the hill of civilization to the city of shining light. Reluctantly or fervently, we [authors from various Asian-origins], the barbarians, are also cultural warriors, demanding to be let in to civilization, haunted by the inhuman wars of that civilization. We, too, wish to tell true war stories, which are impossible to disentangle from the battles we fight to tell the stories.

Our English-speaking cultural arena can be profoundly unwelcoming to artists who insist on mixing their realities; he cites such unequivocally white examples as Kingsolver and Sontag as well as more obvious ones of color. Nguyen's recent acclaim seems a breakthrough in this context; but will it just be more tokenism?

A future post here will take up what Nguyen writes about the essence of war, of cosmopolitanism and compassion, and of the possibility of an effectual peace movement. He has a lot to teach.

"Oh! what a lovely war ..."

Homage to past glories on our national day.

Since we're celebrating "rockets' red glare, bombs bursting in air" today, it seems like a good moment to check in on our wars. It's not a pretty picture.

Bombs have sure been bursting in Istanbul, in Dhaka, and in Baghdad.

Our governments (I'll include among that "us"not just U.S. allies, but also governments at the scenes of carnage) blame ISIS. And I don't think ISIS is denying authorship of these horrors.

Peter Beinart points out the killers are not without pretexts for their atrocities, even though there is no excuse for random murder.

The mid-20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote that, “America was menaced as much by its own pretensions to virtue as it was by world disorder.” Niebuhr was no pacifist, nor did he draw a moral equivalence between the U.S. and Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR. But he urged American leaders to acknowledge that even in just wars, “tyranny [is] defeated with instruments tainted by evil.”

The United States has intervened militarily to prevent ISIS from conquering Iraq and Syria. In that effort, it has carried out more than 10,000 air strikes—strikes that kill many people but go largely unnoticed in the American press. America’s current war may be justified. But America is not innocent. By pretending it is, [Marco] Rubio and other politicians [including Ms. Clinton] mislead Americans about the reasons for ISIS terrorism. And they prevent an honest debate about the costs and benefits of America’s war.

We would rather look away, but we could do with some reminding. The Soufan Group says ISIS is being defeated militarily, but that only points to more suffering and butchery.

Over the past two years, the West has focused on this phenomenon: the persistent and rising threat of attacks such as those in Istanbul, Paris, Tunis, Brussels, San Bernardino, and Orlando, altering policies, laws, and tactics. As the Islamic State enters its third year as a self-proclaimed caliphate, this phenomenon—in which the Islamic State inspires people around the world to act in its name—has completely detached itself from the physical group. This threat to the West will remain, and perhaps grow, as the group suffers increasing losses on the ground. 

But to the millions of Syrians and Iraqis who experience the Islamic State less as a phenomenon and more as a daily existential threat, the announcement of a caliphate was the weary culmination of a long-term corrosion of governance and stability. Life in Raqqa, Mosul, Fallujah, and many other cities and villages was dreadful in the years before the announcement and remains dreadful two years on. Only in the West did the events of June 2014 come as a surprise. 

... As Syria and Iraq mark the second anniversary of the Islamic State, there is reason to hope that a third will not come; however, there is little reason to hope that the group will not re-emerge in some shape or form in the future. The scale of the problem in Iraq—and, even more so in Syria—is beyond comparison and beyond the current capabilities of local, regional, and international actors to resolve. 

Meanwhile, we've got 51 State Department officials calling for deeper U.S. dabbling in the Syrian civil war. Nothing in likely-President Hillary Clinton's past or present pronouncements suggests she knows better. In fact she'd likely embroil us all more deeply. (And yes, we do have to elect her; this is no time for purism.) And then comes word that the Syrian faction allied with al Qaeda has captured the leader of a U.S.-favored "moderate" combatant group -- and presumably all those lovely weapons we've sent him.

Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum got it right when contemplating our leaders' prescriptions:

This stuff never stops. Everyone wants a miracle cure in the Middle East: the mythical "just right" military response that doesn't involve ground troops; won't get any Americans killed; and doesn't take very long — but that will be magically effective anyway. It's nuts. ... It's snake oil.

Very deadly snake oil, mostly for other people.