America: two nations under God?

Red, blue, and rarely purple.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

a tattered American flag flies against a blue sky.

Mario Sessions on Unsplash.

I've just come back from the USA. A few days on the east coast was a chance to take the temperature of America after its recent election, a brief impressionistic sense from conversations, reading the runes – and the blogs. In short, I had heard much about the divided state of America. I didn’t realise quite how divided it was.

America has always made a great deal of unity. The vision for the USA imagined immigrants from different nations across the world invited to forge a new life in a new continent, leaving behind the divisions of the old world. It was the coming together of varied States across the vast continent into one Union. The language is everywhere. Most cities have a ‘Union Square’, Street or Turnpike. The chosen name itself was the United States of America. The slogan E pluribus unum – “out of many, one” was first featured on the original 1776 design of the Great Seal of the United States and formally adopted by the U.S. Congress as the nation's official motto in 1782. The American civil war of the nineteenth century was such a trauma for the nation precisely because it threatened that union. “One nation under God” says the pledge of allegiance, recited by every American child. Yet today it feels that a more realistic description would be two nations under God. The Disunited States of America.

The split is pretty even. 73.7m people voted Democrat. 76.4m voted Republican. That itself is no great cause for alarm. What does cause alarm is the utter divide between the two groups. New York, for example. is pretty solidly Democrat. Someone who voted Trump told me they would never admit to it publicly because of the public shame it would bring. The same is true in the red states. To admit you voted Democrat in some Southern Baptist churches in Texas would be to invite social ostracism. Many Evangelical pastors who have their doubts about Trump have to keep quiet otherwise they would lose the support of their congregations and quite possibly their jobs. As a result, the only Evangelicals that tend to criticise Trump will be academics or journalists who have little to lose.

As a taxi driver joked, if a young Democrat goes out on a date with someone they've met on Tinder, and discover their partner voted Republican, there is unlikely to be a second date. A Christian visitor centre in Washington DC tells me that they are looking forward to Trump being President again, because the flow of evangelical Republicans visiting the capital dried up during the past four years as they felt it was Biden’s town. It’s well known that nearly 80 per cent of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. Such families were more likely to come to DC to see the seat of government if they knew ‘their guy’ was in the White House.

It seems that in the current version of the USA, who you voted for is the number one identity marker. And the two groups rarely talk. In New York I preached in an Episcopal church. The Bible readings for the day spoke of ‘wars and rumours of wars’ – ‘everything will be thrown down’ – apocalyptic texts that invited me to talk about the election in the light of Jesus. Beforehand I asked the Rector what the voting pattern of the church was. “It’s genuinely purple” he said – “a mix of red and blue, Republican and Democrat, Trump and Harris. At least here they do talk to each other.” That seemed a rare thing in this deeply divided country.

Jesus once said: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.” Trump may well fix the economy and illegal immigration. Yet such deep division, especially in a nation whose identity rests of unity is perhaps a more existential threat.

Column

Comment

Film & TV

25 October 2023

4 min read

Why we watch dark drama

Reviewing The Reckoning, and the reviewing cycle, leads George Pitcher to change his mind on whether to watch such darker dramas and documentaries.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A man in a tracksuit sits in an arm chair smoking a cigar while looking towards a curtained window.

BBC.

The BBC’s four-part drama-documentary about the life and crimes of Jimmy Savile, The Reckoning, concluded. And the media caravan moves on.

Its reviews have been mixed, to say the least. You may have got the gist of them: Steve Coogan was brilliant as Savile. But why would he do it? Other actors around him were equally good, if not better. The BBC was either brutally honest or self-exculpatory about its enablement of the monster. I particularly noticed a review line that emerged which hoped the BBC would concentrate on its safeguarding, rather than gather material for its drama department

There’s a case for taking a breath after the television reviewers have completed their work, of asking what we are left with after all this and whether there is a bigger picture than the one our television screens contained.

The first window I want to look through is the church one forever stained by the hideous image of child sexual abuse. Those priests who over recent years have been exposed for these heinous crimes were not, unlike Savile, celebrities. They weren’t as often, like him, committing them in plain sight. But all child abusers, as adults, occupy a position of trust, either as family members, teachers, people of power or as priests, and they abuse that trust as they abuse their victims.

I have had direct experience, as a parish priest, of two instances of child sexual abuse. In both instances, the clergy who abused are long dead. It may go without saying, but in both cases I have witnessed how the victims, now in late middle-age, have had their lives ruined as a consequence, how nothing can really be healed as such, but how we can only help them to manage.

As for the perpetrators, they’re dead. As with Savile, the knowledge of this leaves a feeling that they got away with it and that justice has not been done, nor importantly seen to be done.

The BBC’s depiction of him had him being tortured, to some degree at least, by his Roman Catholic faith, that he faced consignment to hell for his crimes and that his charitable works were an effort to compensate for his moral turpitude and get him to heaven. This was portrayed partly in a tentative fumbling for absolution in the confessional box.

There’s no way to know whether that’s an accurate telling, but it’s not consistent with my memory of the conduct of his final years, nor with that of the period after his death in 2011, as evidence of his crimes emerged. That time was characterised more by intimidation of journalists with lawyers and calling in favours from police. Being in denial seems to have been more likely than being in the confessional space.

That may have been true of abusive priests too. But it’s axiomatic also of a means to evade justice. One can only hope that they have faced divine judgement. But, then, who throws the first stone?

I refused to watch it on the grounds that I feared it fell into a TV category that could bear the file name “true-crime titillation”

I want to turn to another aspect of the reviewing cycle of The Reckoning: Should it have been made at all? This is not the question of whether it should have been made by the BBC, which harboured Savile’s career, but whether drama should be made out of the most atrocious of crimes.

A very little over a year ago, Channel 5 screened Maxine, a three-part drama miniseries based on the murders of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham at the hands of Ian Huntley, ostensibly from the viewpoint of his girlfriend Maxine Carr, unwittingly coerced into his attempted cover-up.

I refused to watch it on the grounds that I feared it fell into a TV category that could bear the file name “true-crime titillation”. I also felt that the twentieth anniversary of the murders was too soon for these events to be revisited for dramatic purposes.

I want to re-visit those opinions now, in light of The Reckoning. Savile was not a murderer, but he destroyed children's lives. It’s important, ultimately, that we know about him and of what he was capable. I have written recently, with regard to a documentary screened on Channel 4 about the Holocaust in Ukraine, that we don’t have the moral option nor the luxury of looking away.

So this: Hats off to broadcast journalists and dramatists who face up to the darkest of crimes and human nature. Journalists show us (or should try to) that it’s really there. And it’s valid territory for drama producers, because it makes us think about it, if not understand it. That’s what drama does, or is supposed to.

Finally, we acknowledge from dramatised events, perhaps, that no one is defined by a single aspect of the lives they lead. From this, we might pray that they (and we) may be forgiven somehow, by someone, simply because we can’t.