I've encountered a string of odd coincidences recently, and here's one: Last week I decided that I (one of many Americans facing the upcoming 250th birthday of our nation with an amalgamated sense of weary irony and sad trepidation) would benefit from reminding myself of the founding's true meaning. So I picked up a copy of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a book I've long wanted to read. And of course, I had not so much as finished the preface when word broke that the author, historian Gordon Wood, had died at the age of 92.
My inbox and rss feeds have been filled with tributes to the man and his work. He seems the rare sort of person admired across the political spectrum, although I haven't looked at either Twitter or Bluesky, so who knows what the unhinged discourse has to say. What strikes me about all of these memorials is how the manner of the actual death is served up as a sort of postscript: the poor old man was mowed down in a parking lot.
Now, it is likely that many of the tributes were already in the can, so to speak. He was 92 years old, had a lot of admirers, and such copy was bound to be at the ready. But imagine for a moment a Pulitzer-winning historian had been killed in the parking lot of a shopping center … by a stray bullet. Such howls of outrage and grief, not at his death, but the tragic way in which it would have happened. Die by bullet, and your memory will be subsumed forever into the abstract policy debate. Die by car, and … well, we need cars, right?
It would be very easy for me to compare car-related deaths with gun-related deaths and make some half-assed claim about, "Hey, cars kill 40,000 people every year, and guns only 15,000 – well, that's if you take out the 30k or so suicides, and uh – well, yeah, anyway, how come you're not trying to ban cars then, huh?" But I'm not going into all that, because obviously, if we were all firing guns for an hour every day while scrolling through stupid shit on our phones, there would be a lot more gun-related deaths.
No, what makes me particularly sad about the way in which Wood was killed is the symbolism of it all. He died less than a month before the 250th birthday of the country whose origins he had dedicated his life to studying, exploring, explaining. A birthday which is now being celebrated, not with anything like the Bicentennial commemorative coins I remember so vaguely from my earliest years, or the parades, the TV miniseries, the sense that "Hey, gas prices are high, but here's something worth celebrating." Instead, we get, "Hey, gas prices are high, and there's ultimate fighting on the White House lawn." (Maybe there are coins? I don't know, not really the point.)
In his brief introduction to The Radicalism of the American Revolution (remember, that's as far as I've gotten so far), Wood speaks of the "puny" origins of our nation – a scant two million people clustered along the continent's coast, whose revolution came about not because the colonies were poor or oppressed; they were neither. The revolution happened because of ideas and theories, which sometimes did not produce results as the founders intended. The Revolution, Wood wrote over 35 years ago, "made the interests and prosperity of ordinary people – their pursuits of happiness – the goal of society and government."
Well.
Do we see, at the time of this particularly tragic ending, the tentacles of our radical revolution, fingering out toward year 250? There is nothing in the Constitution, after all, to prevent our current state of affairs, whatever your opinion of them might be, and whatever you think I mean by "state of affairs." But that doesn't mean the Constitution caused them. If the revolution was one of ideas, one of ideals and theories, then perhaps we have forgotten the thing about ideals, which is that they are held by people, not by documents. And when people lose those ideals, when ideas are forgotten like dead historians …
Like their areas of study, historians get old; they pass, like, well, academic trends in their area of study. It is unusual for them to reach their latter-most years and get struck down by automobiles (which, unlike corruption and foreign entanglements, were not imagined by the founders). Alas, that's what happened to Wood. And I can't help but think: They pave paradise. They put up a parking lot. And they plow down those who remember why.
My focus can handle only so much, and I have two reading projects going on right now, but I'm going to try and read the rest of Wood's book between now and July 4, anyway. Join me, if you can. Perhaps, like me, you need a good reminder of the why.
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Exploring culture, faith, technology, Kierkegaard, Ellul, etc. Sometimes snarky, sometimes way too earnest.
If Your Religion Teaches the Obvious, Then It's Not Much of a Religion
So a certain elected official in the U.S. recently claimed that it is a "Christian concept" to first "love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community," and then to continue dwindling downward, as if love were a singular sort of thing, available in a diminishing quantity.
This was a silly statement, made by a decidedly un-serious politician, but even sillier were the arguments back and forth that resulted.
Yes, it's obvious that human beings have preferential feelings for certain other people with whom we share blood or some other bond. So, if one actually believes this to be a "Christian concept," then one must think Christianity a very obvious sort of religion. And if, as a religion, it points us to act only in obvious ways that align with natural instincts, then what, pray tell, would be the point of following that religion?
Of course, this is not a Christian concept at all, because Christianity (as described in the New Testament, as opposed to the "Christendom" that developed and still exists) is not as stupidly obvious as all that.
Perhaps if this particular politician's party were as enamored of the New Testament's Beatitudes as they are of the Old Testament's Ten Commandments, he might have paused to remember a certain someone (alleged to be of central importance to the politician's claimed religion) saying, "For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?"
It's sad proof of the paganism of American Political Christianity that "conservative" pundits have rushed into the breach to "defend" the primacy of a preferential love (which all humans instinctively feel, and thus needs no defense) against the love to which Christ calls us all – the love of neighbor (which runs counter to all natural human instincts).
Neighbors, after all, are not people in particular, but people in general; your neighbor is not the person you live next door to, or the person in the next room, or the person on your television set offering views with which you agree, but literally anyone. And it is the idea that God is commanding us to love, not just the people we want to love, but anyone in general, which means anyone in particular – even your enemies! even smug, not-terribly-bright politicians! – well, this is the very radical difference between Christianity and paganism.
As Kierkegaard points out in Works of Love/,/ preferential love is not in and of itself a bad thing, but it is not "the highest" of loves, because "erotic love and friendship … contain no moral task."
It's good fortune to fall in love, good fortune to find a friend, good fortune to have a family, which is why it's nonsensical to suggest that it's your task as a human being to find a lover, find a friend. What is the point of a Christianity that tasks you to do something that a) you want to do anyway, and b) is literally dependent on pure happenstance?
But our culture is utterly obsessed with preferential love; it's why so much digital ink is wasted on "the epidemic of loneliness" … why online communities are forged in the fires of anger shared by people who feel they've been denied the "right" of sexual companionship … why American Political Christianity is stupefyingly fixated on an idea of "marriage" that is as un-Biblical as the indulgences that led to the Reformation.
Note that I'm not even choosing to discuss this particular topic because I want to weigh in on the specific policy matters on which this politician was pontificating. This is not a matter of one political side being right and the other wrong. After all, the policies in question, which are being upended and argued about, were not created in the first place out of any sense of morality or "neighbor love," but to support the interests of the state, and its various administrations in and out of power.
What offends me is that this particular Vice President – an adult convert from one form of Christianity to another, no less – has such a weak grasp of his professed faith that he believes directing people to "Google" ordor amoris is sufficient to support his statement – which it wouldn't be, even if were somehow representative of a settled theological argument. (Someone please tell First Things that "charity begins at home" is as Christian a statement as "God helps those who helps themselves," which is to say, not at all. Oh, on second thought, don't bother.)
Unfortunately, many of this particular politician's opponents are not on any sturdier ground. Certainly there are organizations and ministries devoted to the service of migrants and the following of Christ's commandments; those people can only be commended, and I like to think they will continue their missions no matter the government policy.
But then there are all the people clamoring online in (rightful) opposition to this politician's statement, but not because they are filled with a zeal to follow what is, in real life, an incredibly awkward, difficult, if not downright impossible commandment, to love the neighbor; but because they clearly believe that supporting a particular party or policy position is really all that they have to do to fulfill the task Christ has given us all.
I wish it were that easy.
What to Expect When You're Expecting Victory
To those of us who follow the Gregorian calendar, today (January 1) is the only day that we pretend exists in its own unique space within time – where what is "present" shifts into some sort of soft focus so that something we call "possibility" can become visible to the camera.
Oh sure, every day is the first day of the rest of your life, but only literally. You can quit smoking on July 10 but, figuratively, that doesn't carry the same emotional weight we place on stubbing that last one out at 11:59pm on New Year's Eve. (Even if July 10 probably carries more likelihood of success.)
Today, as Kierkegaard wrote, "A year has passed, and a new one has begun; nothing has happened in it yet. The past is finished, the present is not; only the future is, which is not." (Quotes and references in this post are from and to Soren Kierkegaard, "The Expectancy of Faith," in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. Howard & Edna Hong (Princeton University Press, 1990), 7-29.)
Tomorrow we'll awake again solidly in the present, the possibilities of that future diminished – as they diminish every day; or at least, that's how it seems to most of us. We experience the end of even the most wonderful, fortunate, very good days as a reduction of time, a narrowing of choices.
We can't live in the future, as much as we like to imagine ourselves there: "the complaint so often heard that people forget the present for the future," Kierkegaard wrote, "is perhaps well founded."
Speaking for myself, January 1 looms large over December, sometimes even earlier. At spare moments I find myself wondering about goals, budgets, fancies – ideas for things I might like to accomplish in the coming year. Should I write them down? In what form? A piece of paper on the front of the fridge, a text file saved to my phone?
And then the day itself appears. It should be eagerly arrayed with promise, this day outside of time, but for me it usually drags itself out of bed already exhausted – not from any revelries the night before, but for having been so roughly handled already in the weeks prior. Any thoughts I might have had about eating healthier, being more productive, even, God forbid, exercise … well. It's a holiday! Let's make waffles.
But Kierkegaard has not joined us on this particular special day to talk of botched resolutions or the setting of realistic quarterly deadlines. Instead he has come to show us something far more valuable: the secret of time.
What is this secret? That we, mere mortals be, live lives constrained within the ongoing single moment of the present (which is also the past), while that ongoing present itself is constrained by "the future." But the hold that the future has on our minds is a "demonstration of our divine origin," because without the future there would be no past, and we would be held "captive to the service of the moment."
Instead, we live each moment in dread or in hope of the future; we make choices based on what we think those choices will lead to in subsequent moments; we "experience" things and assume those experiences will prepare us for when they inevitably repeat themselves.
Our struggle with each present moment is a struggle with something particular, whether it's one damn thing after another, or the same damn thing over and over. Each one is overpowered by this "future" that we simply can't see in its entirety, no matter how soft our focus goes on New Year's Day, because the future is not particular – it is, as Kierkegaard says, "the whole."
"How, then, should we face the future?" he asks, then answers: Like a sailor on the ocean, who "does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing," but instead navigates using the stars in the sky. "Why? Because they are faithful… By what means does he conquer the changeable? By the eternal."
Think about it like this: the present can't be understood until it has become the past, and then we can reflect on it. (Bearing in mind that the way in which the past is viewed then also continues to change with time.) If we don't know what even the next hour holds, let alone the ultimate future of all, then the present itself can only ever be mired in uncertainty.
The only way for us to fathom "the future" is to see it within its own context, or "ground": that is to say, eternity. For simplicity's sake, we can say that time and its segments exist along a continuum, and that continuum must then exist inside of something else; the eternal is that which exists outside of time.
According to Kierkegaard, the eternal is God, and the way in which human beings connect with God is through faith. (And we all have faith, he argues; faith can't be given, granted, learned, or earned, it is something to which we all have access, if we only will it for ourselves.)
Because we have a relationship with the eternal through faith, we are actually not constrained to the present moment, after all – faith endows us with a certain expectation of something beyond the moment, beyond even the future within time.
And what is it that we expect? Victory. Specifically, he quotes Scripture, "that all things must serve for good those who love God."
If a believer has an expectation of this victory, then she has "conquered" the future, and can now actually focus on the present, without being agitated by all that uncertainty.
Doesn't that sound lovely? Everything is going to be all right! You will get that promotion, the tumor will be benign, the knock in the car's engine will work itself out, somehow. All manner of things will be well, etc. Faith expects victory! Who needs a New Year's resolution?
Except… no. That's not how any of this works. Kierkegaard isn't talking about an expectation of victory inside of time – victory for today, victory for tomorrow. No, he isn't even talking about victories (plural), but only victory (singular): "You speak of many victories, but faith expects only one, or, more correctly, it expects victory."
Things still might go quite badly for your job, your health, your car. There will be wars, pestilence, insane people appointed to positions of power over others. All manner of things will be well, etc., but not yet.
So as we begin a new year once again, Kierkegaard shows us to face the future, not by creating a multitude of expectations – goals and resolutions and notions and hopes, some of which might be disappointed and some fulfilled – but by resting in the one expectation that won't be disappointed: that of faith's expectation in victory. This victory, which can't be proven or denied by experience because it arises from our human connection with the eternal, will come, not tomorrow or next week, not even by December 31, but "at last."
How to Have a Real Conversation
The novelist Brandon Taylor, who writes a lot of interesting things in his newsletter, suggested a few weeks ago that he might abandon Substack just to get away from its Twitter-esque "Notes" feature. Later he changed his mind, having been shown how to avoid it.
I've been toying with the idea of testing a newsletter using Substack in 2025 (could that clause be any more noncommittal?), but I agree that Notes is rather terrible even though I haven't quite written it completely off yet, the way I have other social media. I still get that occasional email with a Notes link roundup, and often click on something there just to read a completed thought from someone I follow, then find myself sucked into a bit of time-wasting.
Like this morning, when sifting through Notes, I somehow stumbled on a link to something called "Analog Social." Apparently this is something that one can read on one's phone while also feeling like one is above the sorts of people who read things on their phones.
The creator of Analog Social hosts what they like to call "salons" – one can "apply" for an "invitation" to attend (and pay for) a dinner at an expensive DC restaurant. The program follows a rather regimented schedule of "guided conversation" (turn off your devices, please) hosted by "a PhD candidate" who boasts of experience running "dinner parties across the world."
I really am sorry to be so churlish, but this sounds like an uninteresting person's idea of an interesting evening. I mean, it sounds like someone once heard someone else describe something someone else said they had read about 1920s-era Paris, or those 1950s-era Georgetown dinners with whatshername, the Roosevelt niece or daughter or whatever she was, and thought, "There must be a business model here somewhere!"
Still, I wish the creator's potential audience all the best, whether that means one hour of stimulating conversation (exactly one hour, according to the online schedule), or the possibility of meeting someone with whom they can eye-rollingly recount that conversation later.
Look, social awkwardness abounds, but it always has; not everything can be blamed on our phones. If you want to connect with people with whom you can have a good conversation – and it's the connection that matters, not random conversations (perhaps we can blame phones for causing so many people to get the two confused) – then you could sign up for something contrived like this (and perhaps you will have a wonderful time, what do I know), or you could do something like the following:
Do meaningful work. (Meaning is what you bring to it, not what it brings to you.)
Read old books. Secondarily, watch old movies. (The former required, the latter optional.)
Pursue interesting, solitary hobbies that will give you something to talk about other than your work and books.
Be kind, in general.
Sit at the bar (yes, turn those devices off) and introduce yourself to strangers.
Volunteer.
Go to church, or your faith's in-person equivalent.
If you don't have any particular faith, then get one. The faithless (unless they are extraordinarily and generously open-minded) tend to be tediously solipsistic. Plus, they don't have a church to go to.
If your response to the above advice is to ask if I follow all of it myself: Well, good God, no. Jesus Christ was the only human whose example mattered as much, or more, than the words he said, but then, he wasn't only human. If you only took advice from those who followed their own, you'd never take advice at all. (Perhaps, in some cases at least, that might be for the best.)
How to Keep a Christian Christmas
What we celebrate at Christmas is not the birth of a particularly sweet and harmless baby, nor even the welcome possibility of having a few extra drinks in the middle of winter. We celebrate a set of discoveries about God and about humanity. Or, as Christians have regularly said, not so much discoveries, as revelations. We are shown something about God, that the God we believe in is not a God who has to be lured down from heaven, by being very, very polite to him, or behaving extra well. We are dealing with a God who can't help himself overflowing, boiling over into the world he has made; a God who cannot give less than the life that is the divine life. We are dealing, in other words, with a God who doesn't have to be persuaded to be interested in us.
One way of keeping a Christian Christmas might be to look at what relics there are, in our minds and hearts, of an approach to God which still believes that God is essentially rather bored with us, rather removed from us, and always in need of being kept sweet. However long you've been a Christian, or however long you've been looking wistfully at Christianity from outside, that's something that keeps obstinately coming back. I speak as a sinner to sinners, you understand. That's deeply etched in our minds, the mythology of a God who somehow has to be persuaded to be on our side. You might as well try to persuade a waterfall to be wet.
But there's more: the way in which that overflow impacts upon us is not by force, or command; it's by a solidarity, an identification so deep, so serious and total, that we could only say, when we see Jesus, we see God, and we see therefore a God who values our humanity beyond all imagining.
So the second question about how we keep a Christian Christmas, is to ask some awkward questions about how we value human lives: how we value the lives immediately around us, how we value the lives that impact upon us in negative or dangerous and difficult ways, how we value the lives that appear not to be especially significant or effective or efficient …
We ought to be looking with speechless amazement at every human face: God thought this face was worth everything. God thought this person was worth everything. God thought, God thinks, that there is no gift or risk too great to bring full life and joy to this person. And God thought, and thinks, that this person can reflect something of the massive generosity that is God's own act and nature. It's possibly the hardest thing in the Christian faith to accept or understand, that radical sense that wherever we turn, we see a humanity God has believed to be supremely worthwhile.
Of course, day by day we make our little judgments, and we take our sides. We think, unthinkingly, that such-and-such a life is obviously less worthwhile than another. We think the lives of our enemies are less worthwhile than the lives of our friends. And while there are monumentally difficult decisions to make in our world – about the use of force, about defense and war and the like – the one thing the Christian has to be sure of is that wherever we turn, the human life we see is a life as valuable as ours. If our actions diminish or destroy it, that is nothing for triumph and all for tragedy.