Cutting America to the bone

Civil War warns against worshipping civic and political violence.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

An explosion occurs at the Lincoln Memorail

Civil War's finale in Washington DC.

A24.

The president of the United States is dead. The film Civil War culminates with soldiers of the Western Forces (a fictional secessionist group composed of California and Texas) posing for pictures with a presidential corpse just minutes after executing him. It’s a chilling climax, with optics reminiscent of American soldiers capturing deposed president of Iraq Saddam Hussein in 2003. The film ends with a warning. No democratic country, no matter the perceived strength of its institutions, is immune from tyranny, civil violence, and the bloody process of state failure. Collapse follows when states lose the capacity to provide solutions to the linchpin challenges negatively affecting their citizens.

A strength of Civil War is the way it articulates a universal political message without defiling itself with the toxic hyper-partisanship asphyxiating real-world American society.

It features a number of loyalist and secessionist geopolitical groups each motivated by a distinctive combination of social, economic, and political interests and goals. These groups include the Western Forces, Florida Alliance, New People’s Army, and Loyalist States.

The film’s storyline prioritises a violently unfolding near future civil war in a United States whose president bucked constitutional tradition by remaining in office for a third term. The president, whose character is modelled after Donald Trump, is the villain of the film, despite being supported by over half of the 50 American states. The Western Forces function as the film's hero group. Unlike the mercilessly murderous and viciously xenophobic soldiers affiliated with the Loyalist States, the soldiers of the Western Forces treat an eclectic team of journalists and war photographers (the film’s main protagonists) with kindness and respect, allowing them to accompany them during the final stages of their assault on the White House and entrance into the belly of the beast, the Oval Office.

The film includes shocking scenes that would make the most patriotic Americans shudder. Shortly after it begins, a suicide bomber associated with the Loyalist States, proudly carrying a large American flag, sprints into the centre of a group of vulnerable people, pleading with agents charged with guarding a water tanker, and detonates a bomb. Dozens of people including children are killed, many of whom were non-White Americans. This scene's power is that it bring home the threats Americans associate with foreign lands. Suddenly the menaces Americans instinctively link with states like Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, and Venezuela exist in cities like Charlottesville, New York, and Washington DC. America is no longer safe, and the threats have come from within instead of from abroad.

The message of Christ applies to theocracies and secular states alike. Every state, regardless of its attitudes toward religion, has an interest in its people living together peacefully.

As an American watching this film from a cozy cinema in Oxford, I thought about how the violence, polarisation, and civic rage depicted in the film already exists in many forms in the country I love from a distance. Shootings, many of them mass in nature, happen every day in an America whose citizens are comfortable with violence but afraid of each other. The United States suffers from an embarrassingly high association with mass shootings, far more than whichever county manages to claim an ignominious second place. Whilst it is unlikely tanks and attack helicopters will surround the White House anytime soon, the casual spirit of violence that has overtaken American society already fosters a level of violence far above the threshold any twenty first century democratic state should tolerate.

I watched this film as a proud American and as a committed Christian, a faith I share with many of my fellow American citizens. My Bible, and theirs, does say we are “citizens of heaven” destined to enjoy an eternal posterity in a New Creation marked by perfect peace and prosperity. However, until Christ returns, and God remakes the cosmos, Christians do have a vital role to play in their everyday civic communities. Whilst Civil War offers a grim view of America’s immediate political future, that message of Christ contains the content needed to cure the gravest challenges bedevilling the United States. I remain optimistic.

Not all Americans identify as Christians or even with organised religion; nevertheless, twentieth century history confirms that states that altogether ignore God will soon wither into an ecosystemic abyss of state-sponsored moral relativism that endorses the use of violence for an increasing, arbitrary range of unsuitable, injudicious, and illegitimate purposes. The message of Christ applies to theocracies and secular states alike. Every state, regardless of its attitudes toward religion, has an interest in its people living together peacefully. Humans need a moral system to provide them (as well as their societies at large) with at least a perceived sense of moral structure. Christ’s message articulates a concept of civic love that challenges the existing worship of civic and political violence. Christ argues that violence in moments of disagreement or dismay is never the appropriate option; the mark of genuine Christian devotion is revealed in the avoidance of violent action even when the use of violence would not categorically be condemned by observers.

Civil War explains how multiple, competing Americas exist. These Americas have different cultures, economic capacities, and sociopolitical ideologies. It teaches that America’s main problem is Americans only love other Americans like them. A number of enclaves exist across American society. Cut off from each other, the development of these enclaves has led to the emergence of micro-Americas so distinctive from each other that some of them no longer view formal geopolitical ties with other micro-Americas as in their best interest.

The same enclavisation portrayed in Civil War exists in the nonfictional, real-life America. However, unlike in the America depicted in the film, the real-life America still has time to solve its sociopolitical troubles and stop the American state from collapsing. I recommend Civil War to anyone interested in being entertained and warned by what a dystopian, worst-case-scenario of near-future American political activity might actually look like.

Article

Culture

Mental Health

Music

25 October 2024

5 min read

Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us

The alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman stand at a mixing desk playing a small keyboard.

Lleuwen Steffan plays.

In 2012, musician Lleuwen Steffan first came across a trove of lost Welsh folk hymns preserved in the sound archive of St Fagan’s Museum. Knowing they were not in current hymn books, she undertook further research and discovered they had been excluded from earlier hymn books by the then all-male hymn book committees of their time. Instead, they had been passed on orally, and, although recorded for St Fagan’s by the historian Robin Gwyndaf, had become lost with time and secularization.

Steffan was particularly attracted to these hymns as many dealt with the dark side of the psyche including addiction and mental distress. She has said that many of these hymns, some of which date back to the eighteenth century, are “conversational and the lyrics feel so current”. She is currently taking these hymns back to where they were born through a tour of 50 chapels in Wales but this is not an exercise in nostalgia as her focus is on their contemporary resonance: “Musically, I’m not interested in recreating something from the past. That’s missing the point. Yes, the words are old but the message is always new. The music is free form.”

Although the subject matter of these hymns will have been part of the reason for their exclusion from the hymn books of their day, that same subject matter has been part of worship songs from the time of the Psalms to the present. The Psalms are the worship songs of the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament and are the first occasion in ancient literature where the voice of victims is heard and valued.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in his book Spirituality of the Psalms provides an insightful and structured overview of the Psalms using three categories: orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. Orientation is the establishment of structure and order. Disorientation is a place of imbalance and nonsense, which is potentially unjust. New orientation is moving forward away from what was and toward new possibilities. As a result, the Psalms provide us with expressions of suffering and hope in the seasons of everyday life. In his book, Brueggemann explains how Psalms of negativity, cries for vengeance, and profound penitence are foundational to a life of faith, and establishes that the reality of deep loss and amazing gifts are held together in a powerful tension.

“This eerie, intriguing and enchanting music... is infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song.”

Rupert Loydell

With such a collection of worship songs as the foundation of worship in churches, and with plainsong in Western churches providing a means by which to chant the Psalms on a daily basis, it should not be surprising that later hymns, such as those being reimagined by Steffan, tap into the dark side of the psyche. The success of albums such as Officium by saxophonist Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, together with Steffan’s own collaboration with pianist Huw Warren and saxophonist Mark Lockheart on Welsh hymns Duw A Wyr (God Only Knows) which is in a similar vein, show how such music can be made relevant to contemporary audiences.

Ghostwriter’s latest album, Tremulant, inhabits similar sonic territory to Steffan’s current Tafod Arian (Silver Tongue) music. Created over several years by Mark Brend, Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King, this album has also been borne out of a shared love of antique evangelical hymns and spiritual songs. Using English, Welsh, Scottish and American source material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quartet pieced together their reconstructed hymnal through remote collaboration – creating an album that sounds both ancient and modern.

In his review of Tremulant, Rupert Loydell says it is “a strange ambient gospel album, where what used to be called spirituals and hymns are subverted by echo, wheezing organ and spacious musical interludes, which recontextualise, reimagine, stretch and mutate the very idea of song”. This, he says, “is eerie, intriguing and enchanting music” with “echoes of classic Nico (the cold beauty of Desertshore)”. It's ”declamatory poetry, alt-folk, noise and gentle discord” combined with “calm vocals” is “infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song”. As such, it's not what you’ll hear the local worship band playing, more’s the pity!

“Something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.”

Lleuwen Steffan

Like buses, other revisiting’s and reimagining’s of old hymns and gospel songs are also coming along together. Hymn Time In The Land Of Abandon by Over the Rhine is “Music that we grew up singing, music as present in our formative years as the air we breathed”. Their recordings of hymns have been described as “spare, sweet and subtle renderings that transform the familiar into something fresh and new”.

The musical reimaging involved in Over the Rhine’s reinterpretations of hymns takes them into the space that Brueggemann defines as new orientation, while the sounds and, in some cases, content of the hymns chosen by Steffan and Ghostwriter are more in the realm of his disorientation category. The music making of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter and Over the Rhine takes us to places not commonly accessed by the music used in many church services. As is indicated by the story of hymn book committees omitting hymns that tap into the dark side of the psyche, much of the music used in church services can be located firmly in either the orientation or, sometimes, the new orientation categories.

Given that the arc of Christ’s life, death and resurrection takes us on a similar journey to that which Brueggemann sees occurring in the Book of Psalms, when our music and liturgy fail to go on a similar journey, we are only encountering part of the meaning and message of faith. The recent music of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter, and Over the Rhine is therefore profoundly helpful in beginning to redress that loss of balance in worship by taking us back to a fuller appreciation for the original songbook of the faithful, the Book of Psalms.

In speaking about why she has been drawn again and again to church music, Steffan described her teenage experience of drinking with her “mates in Bangor on the Saturday night” then getting “the last bus back home” and rolling “out of bed the following day to go to Sunday School”. She concluded: “That’s a strange paradox but, you see, something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.” It may well be that that something is the arc of orientation, disorientation and new orientation we encounter and experience in the Psalms.