Article
America
Conspiracy theory
Culture
Politics
5 min read

Will America succumb to the undertow?

A returning expat asks if an exhausted majority is, in fact, asleep.

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

A sleeping voter sits and snoozes next to voting booth.
'Which One?'
Nick Jones/Norman Rockwell/Midjourney.ai.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously made a decision to return to Germany before the outbreak of the Second World War. The year was 1938, and he was visiting America for a second time. Instead of taking a theology teaching position in New York that would’ve kept him above the fray of a deteriorating social world in Germany, Bonhoeffer’s sense of spiritual responsibility drove him to solidarity with the German situation.  

I’ve thought about Bonhoeffer a lot these last few months as our family is making a transition back to the States during an election year. Not because I’d ever directly compare our move with Bonhoeffer’s. But because I’m anticipating the “shock” of returning to a deteriorating social world. Unlike him, our decision to return is far more modest and expedient. Still, we’re often asked by our friends here in Scotland, “why go back?” 

My immediate answer is straightforward and entirely different than Bonhoeffer: we did what we came here to do. Our visas are up; I’m defending my PhD this month. But behind these questions of expediency, I do feel the weight of an existential question, one directed towards myself as much as it is towards America. 

And that question is “who is going back?” Because after three years, America has changed to us as we’ve changed ourselves.  

The persecution confronting white Christians in America is the soft persecution of opulence diffused in the ordinary.

With that change comes new choices and new questions that didn’t confront us years ago. Returning to America has us asking questions like, how do you talk to your school-aged kids about active shooter drills in their new school? How will we navigate the racialized social scripts that pervade not just American communities, but also American churches? How will we re-enter a job market that ties production to basic health care? 

We’re bracing for the shock of going back to America. It will be more difficult than leaving ever was. Not just because we’ve changed, but also that the American situation has grown more extreme while paradoxically denying that change.  

We’ve discovered that if American Christians are persecuted at all, it’s not from President Biden’s “corrupt regime” seeking to jail Trump or secure power through another “rigged election.” No, the persecution confronting white Christians in America is the soft persecution of opulence diffused in the ordinary. 

As an expat returning to America, I wonder if this exhausted majority is, in fact, asleep. 

Perspective changes everything. The outsider’s view of America careening towards a crisis of democracy and a social fabric rent at the seams isn’t felt as much by those who live within its social world, whose experience of the mundane obscures the poly-crisis pressing our social fabric at the seams. How did we get here? 

Researchers discovered an interesting demographic cohort in American life, you might have heard of it. It’s called the “exhausted majority.” It refers to an ideological diverse cohort at the center of American life that has all but disengaged politically. Researchers began to talk about this “exhausted majority” in 2018, before the pandemic, before a less-than-peaceful transfer of democratic power. The hope was, then, that this “exhausted majority” might be mobilized to fend off polarization and extremism. As an expat returning to America, I wonder if this exhausted majority is, in fact, asleep. 

What has become of this exhausted majority? In the wake of 2020, America underwent significant backlash and retrenchment. This affected churches, too. Friends who are pastors tell me churches in their communities have “re-sorted” along partisan lines. One pastor suggested the election might not divide churches this time, as much as partisan-determined churches might contribute to social division. Polarization has worked its way from the outer edges of American life to the very center. It does this work silently, mediated by our reliance on algorithms, a life conformed to and captured by digital architecture. 

There’s an element of surprise here, at least for us as we return. Because what we experienced as the collapse of our social world in white evangelicalism—a world that we no longer are at home in— I’ve found is still very much active, very much automated—like survival reflexes—still providing an artificial coherence and plausible deniability amidst a deteriorating social situation. 

This retrenchment and backlash creates a dangerous condition: an undertow. For so many, life goes on as normal on the surface, while democratic institutions are pulled apart beneath. America is caught in a rip current, but asleep on the surface. This undertow partly explains, at least to me, why all the talk of “the crisis of democracy” doesn’t register with many Americans.  

A recent survey found that more than half of Americans haven’t heard the term “Christian Nationalism”—in spite of a flurry of academic and popular discourses on the term, often at the center of “crisis of democracy” rhetoric. 

The fact is, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t fall in a day, either. The Senate handing over power to Caesar one day didn’t do much to alter the mundane early morning routine of bread makers in Rome the next day. Tyranny dawns, but the ordinary continues. The routine of the mundane and ordinary, of bread and circuses, makes talk of a democratic collapse seem just another political game, a distraction from all the amusement that Neil Postman observed might be our death. 

As we return to America, reflecting on who we’ve become and the responsibility of faith, I’ve found myself considering the difference between being fated and being holy.  

Fate confronts us as necessity. The holy confronts us as something other. And this “other”—at least for Bonhoeffer—was the freedom of God. And I can think of no better prayer for the church in America in the coming years to maintain in ourselves the crucial distinction between fatedness and holiness. To not confuse the expediency of partisan games with the responsibility made visible in the light of the central claim of Christian faith in the body of Jesus Christ. The Crucified One, not the fate of Western Civilization, determines what it is to be the ekklesia, the “called out” community, both free and responsible, never fated. 

Article
Comment
Conspiracy theory
Freedom
Justice
4 min read

Why free speech might just need a crime of passion defence

Horrific crimes against our humanity tell us we must protect our freedoms, not constrict them.

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

A protester stands with back to the camera, his baseball hat is turned backwards, it reads 'freedom'.
Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash.

One of the silliest legal defences ever must be the “crime of passion”. Or crime passionnel, as the French knew it for centuries, which should really appear on a menu as one of those haute cuisine desserts they so adore, featuring poached passion fruits in Chantilly sauce: “Non, garcon, tenez-vous la Crepe Suzette. Aujourd’hui je voudrai la crème passionel, s’il vous plait. Et vite – ma femme arrive bientot.”

But to digress in a first paragraph is a crime journalaise, which incidentally is a piece of Franglais that should apply to everything in Le Figaro. So back to crimes of passion. The idea was that an act of spousal infidelity could arouse such a passionate rage that the romantic interloper deserved what they got. First-degree murder could be downgraded to manslaughter, because obviously there can be no malice aforethought in the heats of passion. 

The crime of passion’s bastard offspring is the “gay panic defense”. Note the tell-tale “s” there (though, breathtakingly, interpretations of this defence remain available in both the UK and the US). It runs that a defendant may allege to have found a same-sex sexual advance so offensive or frightening that they were provoked into murdering or otherwise injuring their alleged seducer. Victim-blaming or what?  

Anyway, we might want to dust off crime of passion defences because a leaked report from the Home Office suggests that the definition of extremism in law could be extended to cover “extreme misogyny”, “environmental extremism”, “left-wing, anarchist and single-issue extremism” (it even has its own acronym, LASI) and “conspiracy theories”. 

Now, I’m all for catching misogyny before anyone gets hurt, but all these things are covered by existing laws. And some of them are just plain bonkers. Were I to be charged with holding an extremist environmental opinion or an extreme left-wing, anarchist or single-issue view, I think I’d want to say that it was a crime of passion.  

By which I would mean that there was no malice aforethought because I was acting in the heats of passion for my cause at a time when my balance of mind was impaired. Otherwise, I could get nicked for simply thinking or saying something. Sticks and stones and all that.

But horrific crimes against our humanity tell us we must protect and defend our freedoms, not constrict them. We want to prevent murders, not the saying or thinking of both silly and vile things.

To adopt Serious Face for a moment, I’m aware that hate crimes are a very big thing indeed. How could it be otherwise when we’ve just commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day. And we’ve also the other week had the sentencing of someone – I wouldn’t even spellcheck his name – for the murder of three little girls in Southport. 

But horrific crimes against our humanity tell us we must protect and defend our freedoms, not constrict them. We want to prevent murders, not the saying or thinking of both silly and vile things. Our concentration should be on that prevention, not the forbidding of attitudes that might (but probably won’t in the vast majority of cases) lead to a violent crime. 

Don’t get me started on Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs). Oh, you just did. Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson was visited by police last Remembrance Sunday and, surprisingly for someone who has built a career on telling snowflakes to grow a spine, came over all oppressed and persecuted. They were following up a photo she’d posted, claiming it was of Metropolitan Police posing with what she called “Jew-haters” at a London rally in support of Palestine. 

In reality, the photo was taken in Manchester and featured Pakistanis, not Palestinians. There was a clue in their flag having “Pakistan” written on it. But that makes her not a very good journalist. Not a bad, far less a criminal, person. 

A saying usually ascribed to St Augustine, in one of his letters, is that we are to “hate the sin and love the sinner”. Similarly, we must try to hate the crime, but love the criminal. That must remain humanly impossible for the crimes already mentioned in this column. (Though, astonishingly, history records some Jews finding it in their hearts to forgive their Nazi persecutors). 

But we acknowledge that this is where the gospel bar is set. We’re to love our enemies, even if we don’t like them and we condemn their actions. In practice, that means preventing crime in law and holding perpetrators to justice. What it does not mean is going after people who say hateful and stupid things, while other people are actually doing hateful things. The former may and should be about sound intelligence gathering; the latter is effective policing. 

This principle is rooted in our culture, founded on the golden rule of loving our enemies and our neighbours as ourselves. There’s always room for forgiveness as well as justice, as crimes of passion demonstrate.  

And if that sounds recklessly self-sacrificial, we might look at the Passion of Christ and the crimes of passion that were committed during it. As he said himself, tout est accompli.  

 

* "No, boy, hold the Crêpe Suzette. Today I would like the passion cream, please. And quickly – my wife is coming soon." 

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