The News: The Ship of Theseus, Theocratic Religion Edition

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

It was unnecessary for anyone to adopt a fake identity and secretly tape conversations with Supreme Court justices to find out what they really think. “By their fruits ye shall know them”.

Roberts is plainly a conventional justice within the norms of the last century of American jurisprudence who takes his oath to the Constitution of the United States of America seriously and who defends the basic premises of American democracy within their contemporary norms and in terms of the core ideas that underlie that democracy.

Clarence Thomas is equally easy to read: his jurisprudence is the same as an Internet troll’s would be. He does whatever he thinks will maximally piss off the people who opposed his confirmation. Most of the time that aligns with his wife’s more philosophically coherent far-right beliefs, but the alignment is almost a coincidence. Thomas is a judicial supervillain seeking vengeance for a trauma of his own making. He might as well sign his opinions “REED RICHARDS WILL PAY” rather than his own name.

Samuel Alito? Even before the news of this week, it was plain that Alito is closer to Thomas’ wife than Thomas, in terms of his view of law, society and government. He is lawless, in fact, in the sense that he will rule in whatever way he needs to in pursuit of his real agenda, which is the establishment of a conservative theocracy and the permanent disempowerment of modern liberalism. His jurisprudence is unabashedly expedient, almost a parody of the already intellectually-thin logic of “originalism”, where English common law from the 16th and 17th Century will do as well as anything from 1789 onwards as an alleged precedent. I don’t think he would hesitate to use medieval canon law if need be, or perhaps even to dispense with the parlor game of basing judgments in precedent and in the Constitution altogether. That is what many versions of natural law do, after all.

It may be that the other three conservative justices would find a slightly different way to get to the same ends, but at this point, it’s a fair bet that should they preside over a case that might threaten Donald Trump’s ascension to power, they will all find a way to justify relieving him of that danger and granting him superiority over the law, of making the law strictly an instrument that applies to their enemies, never to their own. All of them have already demonstrated that evidence and precedent in the cases they hear are of little importance. Gorsuch, for example, in Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, unashamedly lied in his majority opinion in a way that was almost cartoonishly indifferent to the evidence presented to the court.

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I’ve been struggling as a historian this past week with the question of whether I’ve believed for much of my life in an understanding of modern Christianity in American life that was a polite lie.

There is a familiar kind of dance that secular liberals have done in American public culture for the last seventy-five years. We argue that religion is a matter of private conviction while granting that churches and congregations should have a public role in civil society. We say nice things about the content of Christian life, identifying elements of Biblical scripture, particularly the Gospels, that we find inspiring or wise. We appreciate the devotion and commitment of our fellow citizens who are religious.

In the same interval, however, secular Americans have also strenuously insisted on giving the establishment clause a much bigger weight in any part of public or civic life that depends on government funding or authority. We’ve also distributed our appreciative thoughts about various religious traditions: we have nice things to say about Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, African and African-diasporic religious traditions, and so on.

Additionally, many secular liberals have found militant atheists rather distasteful or provocative, even if we find a way to treat them as yet another religious tradition entitled to their say. They seem to perturb that tolerant welcome to all spiritual communities, that intellectually sagacious interest in the wisdom that various religious have to offer to all the world.

Secular more-or-less liberals in many other post-1945 and postcolonial societies have had their own forms of imagined rapprochement with religion. In many of the state socialist regimes of the Cold War, that shrank down to a bare minimum tolerance in the face of official atheism. Many postcolonial states adopted a kind of secular norm both to contain potential antagonisms between religious communities and to communicate their modernity. In the 1990s, in many places, that official secularism has eroded or evaporated, and liberal intellectuals have found themselves on the outside looking in.

I’ve been reading Anthony Kaldellis’ new history of Byzantium over the last week or so. I’ll probably have a few more things to say about it in the coming weeks, as it is helping me to think about a time and place I don’t know that much about, but also stimulating some thoughts about the nature of empires and sovereignties.

Of necessity, Kaldellis has to spend a fair amount of time early in the book talking about Christianity and Constantine, and how Christianity went from being persecuted to being the official imperial religion. He makes two points forcefully in this analysis. First, that Christianity in the five or six decades preceding Constantine’s embrace was not a religion that shunned political power in favor of focus on the private moral life of its adherents. Given how little we know about Christianity in its first two centuries of existence, it’s still possible to cling to an idea of very early Christianity being a kind of brotherhood of Jews and Gentiles gathered in small, intimate congregations and worshipping largely in secret, with no political or temporal ambitions. But by Constantine’s time, as Kaldellis describes it, the religion had grown considerably, surviving Diocletian’s severe attempts to repress it. It was, Kaldellis concludes, as much an “ethnicity” or “people” within the eastern Roman Empire as it was a religion, and it was the only one that refused incorporation into or accommodation with a pluralistic, multiethnic imperial government. In Kaldellis’ argument, after Constantine, Christianity became Roman more than the other way around—that it achieved temporal power through the empire but became domesticated to the empire’s vision of social and political order.

But both before and after its romanization, Christianity demanded sovereignty over its people, over its territory. You might argue that this is the way religions were generally in antiquity, that they were religions of the state. But there were household religions in Rome before Christianity. There were temples and religions that agreed to render unto the empire what belonged to it, that were obedient to but not incorporated within political authority. To be religious in much of Europe, the Near East and Persia was not necessarily to expect or demand political power or to constitute a people.

Christianity perhaps learned from the Judaism of antiquity the intermingling of peoplehood, political power and religious worship, and Islam learned from them both in turn.

So where am I going with this? Lately I’ve started to feel uncomfortable with the extent of my own axiomatic assumption that modernity is a rupture in history, that the more distant past is disjunctive with the present, and that Western modernity’s incessant attention to fabricating itself and to reorganizing historical time in stages that lead to Western modernity as the determining culmination of a universal human sequence means that we have to mistrust most or all attempts to see continuity between the present and the premodern past.

If you stay with that axiomatic reading, there are a couple of ways to deal with what look like strong resemblances between present situations and distantly historical ones. The most common is to say that modern practitioners are rummaging around in the premodern past as a source of inspiration and legitimacy but are in some fashion misunderstanding what they’re reading or citing. A fair amount of the time, I think that’s correct—contemporary Christians, for example, often misread Biblical scripture because they do not know much about (or care about) both the history of its transmission and the histories (and mythic non-histories) it contains.

Another common move is to say, “Well, if the political Christianity of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE looks in some way like the temporally powerful Catholic Church of late medieval Western Europe or the political imagination of contemporary American conservative Christianity, that’s just a convergence that underlies some underlying comparative dynamic of the relationship between religion, peoplehood and state sovereignty”—essentially to look to the comparative impulses of social science for understanding.

What troubles me now is this thought: what if Christianity’s essence is to claim unitary political power? What if that is a more consistent and in some sense more true understanding of its religious doctrines: to combine Caesar and Christ always, to command all of humanity to its faith, to punish and scourge everything that is not Christian?

Kaldellis points out that at a very early date, the major threat to the universal and harmonious political authority of this newly Romanized Christianity was not paganism but instead the brutal doctrinal in-fighting between Christians, so it is not as if a triumphant Christianity that controlled the kingdoms of this world would be a single faith with a unified will. But what weighs on me is the thought that a secular liberal perspective did not in fact win the match in the 18th and 19th Centuries, that that was only the middle rounds of a fight that has been going on every since. That the sudden repositioning of Catholic theocrats, of political evangelical Protestantism, is not a new turn and not a conservative appropriation of an old order, but instead a continuous history, an unbroken strand. At which point the polite impulses of secular liberalism, the gentle invitation to all people to worship as they will in their private lives and their communal associations, is itself just as ignorant of the history of its own becoming as an evangelical Christian might be in their reading (or non-reading) of Biblical scripture.

In this sense, perhaps Alito is not a man breaking his oath of office or a reactionary grabbing at whatever he can in service to a counter-revolution, but instead a soldier in a forever war, newly unafraid to break cover and be seen for what he and his fellows are and what they purpose to do.

I liked—and still like—that vision of a world where everyone is invited to follow whatever spiritual tradition they like, and no one is entitled to supremacy over all the others. I am still inclined to see world history as discontinuous and modernity as a rupture that separates the last five hundred years sharply from the two or three millennia which preceded them. But it is possible that Christianity has from its very early years sought not just political dominion for its own followers but also universal dominion over all, and that we are just witnessing one more turn of that screw in our own time.

Image credit: By Livioandronico2013, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35143996