By Laurie M. Johnson
My latest book will be published by Wipf & Stock later in Summer 2024. My hope is that this book will help readers gain perspective on the political/culture wars that hold our societies back. While the focus is on the US and the causes of its economic, cultural, political and religious divisions, the information and theories in it can be applied to many places in the world experiencing similar upheavals and discontents. My aim is not just to explain the longer view on our culture wars, but by doing so, to indicate possible solutions, and my conclusions are fairly specific.
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Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1: Theory Streams
Chapter 2: Unsettling I: Leaving the Farm
Chapter 3: Unsettling II: Acceleration
Chapter 4: Secular v. Sacred
Chapter 5: Ideological Strong-Arming: Free to Choose
Chapter 6: Religious Strong-Arming
Chapter 7: The Role of the Church and Christian Economies
Conclusion
Excerpts From the Introduction:
The Plan
“The first chapter will appeal immediately to bridging divisions by showing how seemingly very different ideas can work together and be brought to bear productively on major social problems. As we all know at some level, refusal to ever fraternize with “the enemy” leads to imprisonment in looping arguments and dramas that go nowhere, and therefore support the status quo. If you want to make sure that you will not be a part of any solution, enjoy the social benefits of being a team-player, and the psychological benefits of feeling a certainty that does not exist. Just don’t expect to win even the histrionic spats that now characterize the American “culture wars.” I hope to get across that this type of Facebook and Twitter (X) “winning” is losing, which hopefully will pique the reader’s interest in learning more about how these major theoretical streams can be combined.
In the second chapter, whose title “Unsettling I: Leaving the Farm” is inspired by Wendell Berry, I’ll turn to a story of displacement in the United States, one that has had huge ramifications for our political scene. A mere 60 years ago, rural life in KS, my home state, was close to what people today (wrongly) might consider communalism/communism. I will base this surprising claim on social science research, but also the stories of people who grew up in rural areas and lived through the transformation of the food production system from diversified family farms to large-scale agricultural industries. Now, rural areas have been decimated and deracinated by the “get big or get out” trend in agriculture and business. Back then, when there were more people and intact families, apparently, it was possible to ask a neighbor not only for equipment but also for free labor at certain crucial points of the year, such as harvest, or when there was some sort of crisis. In fact, sometimes people didn’t even ask–help was just expected and miraculously appeared. Labor and goods were often provided freely, without money exchanging hands, and with no expectation of repayment other than the knowledge that those who gave would receive if they needed help.
Rural small-town life was inconvenient by today’s standards, but it did tend to bring out a naturally communal mentality in people who knew that they needed each other, not the “wild West” way of thinking the US is best known for idolizing now. The role of the church was a bit different, but not as much as people think. What was different was the level of simple neighborliness. While we can’t and probably don’t want to go back to the “good old days,” examining earlier lifeways suggests that people can think far differently about privacy, private property, and “success” than they do now. Exactly how and why did rural America change so rapidly and fundamentally, displacing so many people, and causing the major cultural shift that we’re struggling with today? In addition to providing statistics and facts to try to answer that question, I’ll look at how this shift was justified and even glamorized in our entertainment industry, via a look at America’s beloved nuclear family, the Cleavers of “Leave it to Beaver.” This was the birth of the “white picket fence” ideology of a wholesome family with a professional man at the head, who could provide for his family all on his own income, without getting dirty and without asking his neighbors for help. What allowed this development?
Also inspired by Wendell Berry’s scholarship, and insights from classical conservatism, the third chapter is “Unsettling 2: Non-Stop Change.” It will further track the story of displacement via rapid and drastic change in our economy through a discussion of the impact of ever-increasing automation. Automation, of which industrial agricultural practices are a subset, has instigated a social dislocation and disembedding (Charles Taylor’s usage) that has had real and long-lasting economic and cultural consequences, which in turn have led to psychological and spiritual disruptions in rural and suburban areas where the political maps trend red. In an environment of stress, people look for answers and stability, and often find them in strong ideologies that engage in scapegoating. I use some of the data and information Jakob Hanschu and I collected in 2019, along with other studies, to show that there’s been a cataclysmic shift in a short period of time, depopulating and impoverishing rural America and sending many people into suburbs and cities to do low paid/low security work. All this dislocation has been, and continues to be, promoted by Republican and Democratic policies alike, for decades. I will use the latest electoral results as a backdrop to clarify why these demographic shifts are extremely relevant for understanding the deep divisions that we face moving forward.
To deal with the real reason automation is a problem for us, when it should be a blessing, I take a step back in this chapter to explain the agrarian origins of capitalism as it developed out of enclosure of the land and tenant farming in England. The emergence of “market imperatives” in rent and farming, in a dynamic, competitive environment, began to force people even back then to “get big or get out.”
In Chapter 4, “Secular vs. Sacred,” I will turn back more explicitly to political theory by exploring the nature and impact of the turn towards secularity in the modern world through four thinkers: Carl Jung, Leo Strauss, Charles Taylor, and D.C. Schindler. Jung was at the center of my last book, Ideological Possession and the Rise of the New Right, in which I traced his theory that the archetypes of the collective unconscious were functionally well-expressed by genuine religion, especially Catholicism, but had become expressed in a dysfunctional way in modern times, in destructive ideological mass movements.[1] Many would not tie him to insights from Strauss, Taylor and Schindler, and indeed none of these authors would necessarily enjoy each other’s company, and yet all of them are trying to explain the reasons for, and the impact of, the Western world’s modern turn, a secularizing turn which changed the human trajectory in remarkably positive but also shockingly negative ways. Each in their own way is dismayed by the collectivizing tendencies of the modern state, and the ways in which we have come to treat human beings, not as spiritual and social animals, but as malleable cogs in organizational and economic structures which they fuel but over which they have little control. The ideas of Jacques Ellul will also enter the discussion of the dehumanizing effect of human management “technique.”
Continuing the line of argument that began in a previous chapter, the fifth chapter, “Ideological Strong-Arming: Free to Choose,” will detail how major economic interests were and are benefited by the promotion of a certain type of “free market capitalism” ideology, an ideology that resembled a religion. Perhaps unwittingly, proponents of this ideology promote a narrative about the US economy that isn’t true anymore, if it ever was, but that expresses the aspirations and hopes of people who are increasingly on the economic outs (part of the ‘precariat’ rather than the professional elites). This imaginary, compellingly formulated by the father of neoliberalism Milton Friedman for a PBS audience in the 1980’s, is so strong, and so attached to the pride and desire for self-reliance of people in danger of being left behind, that it obscured the reality of their relative and growing poverty, aggravated by the same sort of social ills that plague the urban poor. Friedman consciously promoted this ideology as a “faith.” This imaginary has served over the years to aim “red” people’s ire at imaginary “socialists” who want to change the economy in a totalitarian direction. The US economy, however, is highly socialized and arguably trending totalitarian already, so part of the aim of this chapter will be to show how the type of socialism we have adopted amounts to corporate socialism—i.e.., the state’s propping up big agriculture and big business at the expense of the poor and middle-class citizens. The question should not be whether we want government involvement in our economy, but what kind involvement, because there is no turning back the clock to a time when the government was not heavily involved.
Next, I will explore how American Christianity has picked up on the religious nature of Friedmanian neoliberal ideology and made it their own, melding it in certain ways with their previous faith. This is not a surprising move–human beings are religious creatures, and the neoliberal narrative resembles the mythologies and belief systems people have and continue to believe–good v. evil, the need to expiate evil and sin by “responsiblization” (more about this later, too), the motive to remove the unclean by scapegoating, the tendency to color every part of life with religious meaning, purification of public spaces, the promise of perfect peace, security, justice and abundance for those who stay faithful, etc. These dynamics help explain the meteoric rise of a new kind of ideological leader–the information technology-abetted warrior–from Rush Limbaugh to Nick Fuentes, the ideological TV preachers of our divisive era.
The sixth chapter, “Religious Strong-Arming,” will deal with the problem of Christian nationalism, which largely reflects the ideological strong-arming described in the previous chapter. I will argue that this development is a result of the need for an ideological explanation/handling of the economic changes that are impacting so many Americans, leading to precarious employment and a deep feeling of insecurity and lack of community. In this environment, we have Christians who are confusing the imaginary of “free market capitalism” and American patriotism with the tenets of Christianity, leading to events like the one in Lebanon, KS in which Americana iconography replaced Christian imagery as the visual focus of a Christian rally.
I will illustrate how churches send the message that members should be good corporate citizens and consumers and should fulfill their Christian duty by voting the right way and writing checks. Not only have churches emphasized easy ways of feeling right with God, but they have largely adopted the corporate model of leadership and provision, treating their members as consumers and followers whose habits, money and time should all be heavily influenced by the church. I will trace how Christian nationalism emerged through the intersection of religion and politics in America through the country’s strong civil religion, which has been there since its founding. America’s civil religion has been substituted for orthodox faith, leading to spiritual abominations like the “Patriot’s Bible,” and the spiritual direction of Pastor Paula White, who assured Donald Trump that America’s evangelical Christians were on his side, though he did not appear to know much about evangelical Christianity.
The metastasizing of this general trend is to be found in the large, politicized megachurch phenomenon. John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, CA becomes a case in point for this chapter. MacArthur’s megachurch embraces the corporate model and fully embraced the MAGA politics of the moment, including a full-throated endorsement of Trump himself and the promotion of vaccine-resistance during the pandemic. Before all that, the church had promoted a right wing political and social worldview that pushed women into second-class status and sometimes publicly called them out for trying to leave their abusive husbands. For the true believer, the church offers everything–answers to all of life’ questions, including financial ones. It offers education for your children, an organized social life, and counseling for your failing marriage or any errant thoughts. It creates a kind of community, but one that seeks to control thought and behavior, and threatens non-conformity with social ostracism.
I will argue that this model is an impoverishment of the Christian way of life that is nonetheless an understandable development in a world in which dislocated, deracinated subjects are looking for answers, belonging, and some sense of higher purpose and meaning. To that end, I will explore how and why people get drawn into abusive relationships and cult-like religion and institutions. This chapter will make a forthright argument that remaining in a cult-like church, or a cult-like mass movement is a fundamental (though understandable) mistake about who to worship. Theological insights from thinkers like Walter Brueggemann, Jurgen Moltmann and Brian Zahnd will provide a background for a different understanding of Christianity that could support the rebuilding of community and a bridging of the ideological and cultural divide between red and blue Christians.
The seventh chapter, “The Role of Christians and Christian Economies,” will critically examine the institution of the church. Having discussed the mistake of Christian nationalism, I will argue here that a re-orienting of the Christian church could yield some very promising results. While church attendance and denominational identification is waning among the young perhaps largely because of the negative trends addressed above, Christian churches remain among the most prevalent and strongest of non-governmental organizations in this country. I will examine here why a growing number of people who used to be church goers are becoming “nones,” or “nonverts,” and how the politicization of churches across the political spectrum is partly to blame. Following on that point, I’ll examine the “exvangelical” movement, focusing on evangelical Christians who are rejecting Christian nationalism. That example will reinforce just how hard it is for American Christians to depart from the liberal political framework. Churches, like businesses, are consolidating. They’re getting bigger and more corporate in nature, while smaller churches struggle and die. Just like the rest of the world, they operate on a largely liberal model that is largely unnoticed and, in the background, even in the application of Christian charity itself. This liberal charity model is better than nothing, but it is arguably not the best Christians could do. If politics weren’t seen as the main means of getting things done at the societal level, and money was not the main vehicle of aiding people at any level, what would have to change?
To begin to answer that question, I will turn to my own experience with trying to engage church leaders and members at the level of direct mutual aid. I will bring in thinkers like Walter Brueggeman and Stanley Hauerwas, and examples of movements whose origins are in anabaptism such as the Amish and Bruderhof. Among the influences in this chapter will be the thoughts and lives of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the founders of the Catholic Worker movement. The movement as it exists in the US today does not fulfill all its founders’ fullest aspirations, having become largely (admirable) houses of hospitality serving the poor on a daily basis but falling short of developing stable self-governing communities. Catholic Workers primarily interact with the poor within the framework of liberal charity rather than mutual aid for a variety of reasons, and they spend much time petitioning the government for redress of grievances. Arguably, a protest that bypasses both of those things in direct mutual aid might be more adaptive to our world today, a world in which it is increasingly clear that protests have not stopped the global war machine, violence including racially motivated violence, homelessness, and generational poverty. These things, if anything, have only grown bigger and harder to stop. Arguably, also, charity with time and money directed to those in need help ameliorate the situation in the moment but also perpetuates the economic system upon which it depends. For these reasons alone, the Catholic Worker movement is a perfect case study for what is right and what is missing in those who are quite serious about Christian action. The fact that the movement exists at all, and the founders’ enduring vision, makes it a great potential source of Christian solidarity.”
[1] Laurie M Johnson, Ideological Possession and the Rise of the New Right: The Political Thought of Carl Jung, New York: Routledge, 2019.
[2]See Kristin Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020.
Political Philosophy 