Essay

America

Comment

Politics

Race

24 October 2024

13 min read

A raging election and the haunting of American memory

Civil War lessons on what ‘we the People’ choose to remember or forget.

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A US flag flutters under a dark brooding cloudy sky.

Roger Hoover on Unsplash.

Foreboding. That’s how my friend described the time between now and the election in America. It’s everywhere, and nowhere. It’s felt, it’s lived, it’s immediate. And it’s true, there is little reason to carry ourselves as though this election will be anything other than consequential—immediately so—for at-risk communities across the United States, from hurricane survivors to Haitian-Americans.

We would do well to pay attention to this. And for me, as an American citizen, I plan on casting my vote against Trump, for what I wager to be a better path towards provisional freedom. But there’s a part of me that remains attentive to the stakes and the perils that lie beneath the immediate.

As you survey the landscape of the American experiment, you will find it marred not just by scars of racial hatred and violence, but the shadows of things forgotten and repressed. Looking over it long enough will reveal the chasm between America’s living memory and its history. It’s here, surveying that great landscape, the gap emerges between what “We the People” choose to remember and what we’ve deigned to forget. And this memory—as much as the polls and the data predict—will influence what is to transpire these next few months.

As we bear witness to the events unfolding before us, we would do well to remember how “We the People” have never truly resolved our Civil War. Our memory of the war is both hallowed and haunted.

If onlookers and participants alike want to understand—really and truly—the crucible of this American election you have to descend to the depths of American memory, into its distortions and attempted preservations. You have to understand not just the Civil War itself, but its ongoing aftermath, from a period called Reconstruction to the century later Civil Rights struggle, and on to today. Recently I heard historian Jemar Tisby share an anecdote of something uttered by a Gettysburg battlefield tour guide, “The north won the war,” he said, “but the south won the memory.”

Who has time for a history lesson? I would submit the stakes are too great, and the need too earnest, to ignore.

Memory is a fickle thing. But it is also a moral thing. Memory gathers the resources from which individuals become a “we.” That is the point where everything begins to change, observes John Steinbeck. That move from “I” to “We,” he called it. Memory can create a people. From it, a “we” can draw strength, clarity, and courage for the present, it can also reap the whirlwind.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas captured the stakes when he observed, “memory is a moral exercise.” And in a moment where the American social fabric seems to be rending at the seams (not at all an unprecedented event), I think part of staying the course involves turning again to the moral power of memory. To remember what we’ve forgotten, to surface what has been buried.

But in the middle of an election cycle endlessly bombarding Americans with hate, disinformation, and propaganda, the turn to memory might seem little more than idealism. Who has time for a history lesson? I would submit the stakes are too great, and the need too earnest, to ignore. The problem is: the American memory is distorted and divided.

Ruby Bridges visits Barack Obama at the White House to view 'The Problem We Have To Live With' on its walls, 2011.

Barack Obama and a middle aged black woman look at a picture of her when she was a child walking between guards protecting her.

In 1960, a six-year-old girl by the name of Ruby Bridges became the first African American to attend William Franz Elementary School in New Orleans. She walked into the school that day surrounded by armed guards, assigned to protect her from public fury in the wake of a federal court order enforcing integration across New Orleans Public Schools.

Ruby became an icon of the Civil Rights struggle of the Sixties. She was canonized by artist Norman Rockwell in a piece aptly titled, “The Problem We All Live With.” Between that painting and hundreds of photographs that captured her bold yet innocent stride up those school steps with books in hand, Ruby Bridges was impressed into American memory.

Consigned to these mists of memory, Ruby Bridges appears as perpetually six years old to many white Americans. But one fact pierces the mists of memory: Ruby Bridges has an Instagram. Though her memory in white America reduces her to an image frozen in time, she is a woman alive today in her sixties with an incredible ongoing career in advocacy and activism. The cries of “woke!” that emerge in every conversation about justice and equity in America cannot silence the reality of time: the Civil Rights struggle is not so distant as white Americans often insist it was. What we remember is tragically the result of what we’ve tried to forget.

But whenever the church settles to serve as a chaplain of empire, it soon confuses the privilege and luxury it secures with its own freedom.

We tend to think of history as objective, as a set of facts. And this obscures how our own memory of history can be distorted and warped. Consider this past month that former US President Jimmy Carter turned 100 while in hospice care. His birthday made mainstream news. An impressive lifespan to go with an incredible legacy as a husband, father, and public servant. But the American memory is strange. Strange because Carter, the oldest living US President, is still with us. Making it all the more startling to remember that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was born 5 years after President Carter. That, if not for an assassin's bullet at a Memphis hotel balcony in 1968, Dr. King could have been celebrating his 96th birthday this coming January. Memory can be distorted, warped, and pressed into service of propaganda.

Too often, the white church in America has made itself fit for service as a chaplain of empire. Willingly producing, baptizing, or consuming memories which obscure the truth that brings about reconciliation. In so many words, we have in America today a more reactionary and partisan element of the church. One that cannot take the moral responsibility of memory seriously because it finds itself too invested in its role of reifying and deifying America. And whenever the church settles to serve as a chaplain of empire, it soon confuses the privilege and luxury it secures with its own freedom. Because many white churches confuse this power with freedom, the memory of America is captive to its own ends. It is not free. It does not know the freedom which liberates the church to the moral task of memory.

I think here of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s claim that the church can never take immediate or “direct” political action as church because, as the community of God’s people it “does not know the necessary course of history.” The church does not possess special access to the ideas of the future, nor does it consign the world to fate. What the church is, it is as witness. It testifies in the bread, the wine, the water of the liberating presence of God. But when the church acts apart from this vocation it risks becoming what Ernst Kasemann called the “anti-church” which replaces the cross with power.

I find this a broadly accurate depiction of what the white American church presently offers to the American public. It is not the beloved community and conscience of the nation to which Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, rather it is a chaplain of empire. And in this role, the church finds itself both a producer and consumer of a distorted memory, filled with a mixture of sentiment, propaganda, and raw fact. A story of America in service of a particular vision of America which never existed.

Is this not too political for the church? Mustn’t we keep religion and politics separate? All theology is political. That is, all human talk about God involves consequences—for good or ill—concerning fellow human beings. James Cone puts it more directly: “Any talk about God that fails to make God's liberation of the oppressed its starting point is not Christian.” The difference then is not whether the church is political, but rather whether its talk about God is indeed talk which remembers in a living way the God of Jesus Christ, and whether or not it opens itself up to the critical examination of its own god talk. And this is where we find a good deal of the white American church today.

Even the mention of the “white church” in America should stir up the paradoxes and contradictions which persist in the field of American memory. But perhaps we too easily confuse “history” with “memory.” Memory is living, fluid, and potent. I like how Robert Jenson puts it, “so long as a people is alive, there will be an exchange between how it remembers its history at any given time and its needs, concerns, and goings-on in the present. There is thus usually a difference between a people’s own living memory…and the accounts constructed by historians…” Jenson was talking about the Old Testament. Here, we reflect a bit on the American experiment.

I remember in 2020, as a pastor, I sat in a prayer night at the church where I served on staff. But there was not much praying. Instead, we were shown a video selected by our senior pastor. The video was a tour of Washington D.C. highlighting all the Christian imagery and inscriptions scattered across the American capital. I’ll never forget the words that came from my pastor: “The next time,” he said, “anyone tells you America isn’t a Christian nation, you tell them about what you learned here tonight.” And that was it. The video never mentioned many of the buildings were built by the hands of people enslaved in an institution justified by a most bankrupt faith.

I’ve come to understand that every church in America, even with the Christian story on its lips, tells a story about America, too. And the memory of that story carries with it theological consequences. After all, there can be no quicker way to discredit human words about the God of Jesus Christ than to attach those words to a false memory of America masquerading as dogma.

The statute of General Longstreet, Gettysburg battlefield.

An equestrian statue of an American Civil War general wheeling his horse.

Stranger still was realizing the church I served was constructed on a piece of land in Virginia’s Spotsylvania County lined with historical markers. One identifies the land as the camp site of Confederate General James Longstreet during the Fredericksburg Campaign of the Civil War. Tellingly, Longstreet’s own life and legacy gives witness to the enigma of memory and also the possibility of change that arises from the wedding of truth and reconciliation.

Longstreet was long known as General Robert E. Lee’s right-hand man. He devoted himself to the Confederate cause in defense of slavery. And stood by Lee till the end of the war, joining him at Appomattox, Virginia, where he was reunited with his foe and friend, Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Instead of imposing harsh penalties on the Confederates, Grant proved reconciliatory in ways that Longstreet never forgot, according to his biographer, Elizabeth Varnon.

In fact, Longstreet became an ardent supporter of Reconstruction policies and Civil Rights, including the vote, for formerly enslaved people. His transformation made him an enigmatic figure that attracted the bitter hatred of fellow former Confederates seeking a scapegoat for the South’s defeat. They found their sacrifice in Longstreet.

After the war, Longstreet settled in New Orleans for business. In 1872, there was a disputed election between pro-Reconstruction Republican governor and the Democrats. Longstreet answered the call from the Republican governor to lead a “mixed” regiment of African Americans and white Americans against a renegade paramilitary force comprised mainly of disgruntled Confederate veterans. These paramilitary groups opposed the African American vote and Reconstruction policies in general to the point of violence.

In a historical episode that echoes January 6, 2021, Longstreet, a former Confederate General, led this Reconstruction regiment against white paramilitary insurrectionists seeking to subvert the election and install their own governor. The clash became known as the Battle of Canal Street. But its original name was given by the nearly successful Confederate paramilitary: “The Battle of Liberty Place.” This was the name affixed to a monument erected in 1891, which stood in New Orleans until it was removed under cover of darkness for fear of political violence in 2017.

The stark transformation of Longstreet’s life and career does not make the man a saint. He clung to racist ideologies until his death. To emphasize his support of Reconstruction is not to canonize him as much as it is to highlight the enigma of American memory. That, in the wake of the Civil War, the conflict over Reconstruction proved so destructive that eventually whites from the North and the South opted to reconcile at the expense of Civil Rights. In the contested Presidential Election of 1877, Republicans accepted the Presidency in exchanged for the Democrat’s demand for an end to Reconstruction and a withdrawal of Federal troops. The dealings of 1877 made Jim Crow America possible, and forestalled gains of the Civil Rights movement for nearly another century. And the question remains open: will America ever deliver on its promises? This is the appeal made by MLK and others.

And our failure to remember as Americans is, surely, part of the task of the church in America. For a witness to the Christian story surely involves a freedom to speak truths of our common life and history which make for reconciliation. For me, as the election nears, I’m thinking of the enigma of Longstreet and the distortion of American memory.

For in the very church that claimed America was a “Christian nation” merely by virtue of slogans fixed atop our public buildings, there was along with it a willed ignorance to matters of race in our own community. I experienced enforced silence on just how far a pastor might talk about race before being “too political” or “divisive.” I found there is a tragic irony of failed memory in gathering to worship on land once occupied by Longstreet’s camp, the man who supported Civil Rights and resisted an insurrection. After I left, I learned the church’s parking lot was made available for busses attending the event that metastasized into the January 6 insurrection. And just this past month, thousands of evangelicals descended once again into Washington DC, praying and declaring Trump’s victory against Harris. Here too, the whitewashing of January 6 has its own consequences.

Amid the raging fury of an American election cycle, memory can help provide perspective, so long as we are willing to incriminate ourselves with the sins of forgetfulness and short-sightedness. There are events forever etched into our collective memory, to be sure. We have slogans for them. Like “Remember Pearl Harbor” and “Never Forget” for 9/11. But even here, amidst cries to remember, our memory persists in a state of perpeutal division and distortion. The slogans we create to remember the tragic dead too easily become transformed into a license for our unflinching commitment to the myth of redemptive violence.
Again and again we see, memory carries moral power. And without truth in our memory, there can be no reconciliation. But I remain hopeful precisely because I do not worship fate. The confession which binds Christian community speaks of the God who reconciles. This reconciliation is received as a grace by the truth of Jesus Christ.

Whether or not “We The People” renew our capacity to speak the necessary truths, to live in that light, and so prove reconciliation to be a lived reality not mere sentiment, depends in no small part on the willingness of Christian community in America to take up the fuller and deeper ministry of reconciliation bound up in our confession. Such a ministry cannot be one of external compulsion, of endorsing authoritarian politics and programs in the name of another crusade. Rather, it is one that begins and ends with the question of whether the church will be the church. Whether or not America continues as America does not rest on the church. And freed from this strange, alien imposition, the church may find itself all the more fit to help America remember and so tell the truth and reconcile together.

So long as we Americans allows ourselves the freedom to recognize the inherent relationship between truth and reconciliation, perhaps we can carve out a higher vantage point from which the stakes and perils of this election become a bit clearer and stir in us a bit more courage to persevere in what Lincoln spelled out over a century ago, a new birth of freedom and government of, by, and for the people…all the people. And may the church stand to testify that this temporal freedom is only a fleeting harbringer of a freedom which comes to all humanity through the scandal of a cross and empty grave.

Article

Comment

Community

Politics

8 November 2024

10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.

Reform MPs in the House of Commons.

House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics?

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union.

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence.

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer.

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan.

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them.

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life”

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal.

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible.

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy.

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.