The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas

In another age, Radersma might have been a revivalist out on the sawdust circuit, playing the old forthright hymns on a wheezy harmonium as the tent begins to fill. In a different time, she might have been a temperance lecturer, inveighing in her passion-raw voice against the evils of the Demon Rum. In days gone by, she might have been a missionary to heathen China, or an author of Bible Society tracts, or the Scripture-quoting scourge of civic indifference—railing to the city-council members that they are like the Laodiceans in Revelation 3:16, neither hot nor cold, and God will spew them from his mouth.

But all such old American Christian might-have-beens are unreal in the present world, for someone like Kim Radersma. Mockable, for that matter, and many of her fellow activists today identify Christianity with the history of all that they oppose. She wouldn’t know a theological doctrine or a biblical quotation if she ran into it headlong. And so Radersma now fights racism: the deep racism that lurks unnoticed in our thoughts and in our words and in our hearts.

The better to gird herself for the struggle, she gave up teaching high-school students to attend the Ph.D. program in Critical Whiteness Studies at Ontario’s Brock University. But even such total immersion is not enough to wash away the stain of inherited sin. “I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply embedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body,” she testified to a teachers’ conference on white privilege this spring. “I have to choose every day to do antiracist work and think in an antiracist way.”

Radersma is hardly alone in feeling this way (except perhaps for the peculiar bit about racist actions in her body). Discussions of the kind of racial privilege that she hates have been much in the news. A Prince-ton undergraduate named Tal Fortgang, for example, received considerable notice for a student newspaper column in which he recounted the Holocaust suffering and hard work of his family, all to explain why he rejected Ivy League demands that he identify himself as racially and economically privileged. Television host Bill O’Reilly mocked a “Checking Your Privilege” orientation program at Harvard, claiming to be exempt from white privilege himself because he had to find jobs while he was young. And the response from any number of commentators was that Fortgang and O’Reilly just didn’t get it. Just didn’t grasp the insidious way the shared guilt of racism appears in the form of white privilege. Just didn’t see their own sinfulness.

So profound is the sin, in fact, that not even its proponents escape. The more they are aware of white privilege, the more they see it everywhere, even in themselves. “There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased,” admitted University of Texas professor Robert Jensen in an essay assigned to Wisconsin high-school students in 2013. At the Daily Beast website, columnist Sally Kohn added that “racial bias is baked” into American history. “It’s just something we all learn to do.” She did note the nearly universal condemnation that met explicitly racist comments from the likes of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and California billionaire Donald Sterling this year. But all that, she insisted, actually distracts from awareness of the real racism that dwells in every white American heart.

Some of this, of course, derives from the perception of actual economic and social effects still lingering in the long aftermath of racial slavery and segregation. But taken just as a concept, considered purely in its moral shape, white privilege is something we’ve seen before—for the idea is structurally identical to the Christian idea of original sin. Indeed, the relation involves more than just a logical parallel, the natural contours of any idea about shared guilt and inherited fault. Historically and genealogically (as Nietzsche taught us to phrase such things), there is a clear path that leads from original sin, in which the most advanced Americans once commonly believed, to the idea of white privilege that they now assume.

In my book An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, I note that the Protestant churches in early America were widely divided on theological and ecclesial issues—and yet they somehow joined to form what Alexis de Tocqueville would call the nation’s “undivided current of manners and morals.” We can debate how long-lasting and all-encompassing that central Protestantism really was, but many of those churches would eventually coalesce into the denominations of the Protestant mainline, and the collapse in recent decades of the mainline churches (from around 50 percent of the nation in 1965 to under 10 percent today) remains one of the most astonishing cultural changes in American history.

And with that mainline collapse, a set of spiritual concerns, once contained and channeled by the churches, was set free to find new homes in our public conflicts. We live in a highly spiritualized age, I argue, when we believe that our ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken but actually evil. We live with religious anxiety when we expect our attitudes toward social questions to explain our goodness and our salvation. The anxiety appears today on too much of both the left and right, but it’s hard to imagine a clearer case of the theological origins of this spiritualizing of secular politics than the perceived guilt of white privilege. 

From the Puritans to the nineteenth century, the central current of American culture held a generally Calvinist view of original sin as injuring the whole of human nature. In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all, as the old New England Primer taught generations of schoolchildren. Corrupted with concupiscence and pride, expelled from the garden, we lost the ability to do the good with proper motives, even if weakened reason were able to discern what that good might be.

Early in the twentieth century, however, the main denominations of liberal American Protestantism gradually came to a new view of sin, understanding our innate failings as fundamentally social rather than personal. Crystallized by Walter Rauschenbusch’s influential Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), the Social Gospel movement saw such sins as militarism and bigotry as the forces that Christ revealed in his preaching—the social forces that crucified him and the social forces against which he was resurrected. Not that Christ mattered all that much in the Social Gospel’s construal. Theological critics from John Gresham Machen in the 1920s to Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1950s pointed out that

the Social Gospel left little for the Redeemer to do: Living after his revelation, what further use do have we of him? Jesus may be the ladder by which we climbed to a higher ledge of morality, but once there, we no longer need the ladder. 

Millions of believing Christians still populate the United States, of course: evangelicals and Catholics and the remaining members of the mainline churches. Demographically, America is still an overwhelmingly Christian country. But the Social Gospel’s loss of a strong sense of Christ facilitated the drift of congregants—particularly the elite and college-educated classes—out of the mainline that had once defined the country. Out of the churches and into a generally secularized milieu. 

They did not leave empty-handed. Born in the Christian churches, the civil rights movement had focused on bigotry as the most pressing of social sins in the 1950s and 1960s, and when the mainline Protestants began to leave their denominations, they carried with them the Christian shape of social and moral ideas, however much they imagined they had rejected Christian content. How else can we understand the religious fervor with which white privilege is preached these days—the spiritual urgency with which its proponents describe a universal inherited guilt they must seek out behind even its cleverest masks? Their very sense of themselves as good people, their confidence in their salvation from the original sin of American culture, requires all this.

In order to believe in white privilege, however—in order to feel the universal guilt of it—we must also believe in the necessary ground for the idea: a widespread American racism, however unrecognized, that is the current form of the same old social sins that gave us slavery and segregation. It “drives me nuts,” writes Sally Kohn, that “to avoid acknowledging racial bias in America, conservatives have taken to accusing those of us who point out racial bias as being racist.” Kohn’s example comes from the reaction to congresswoman Barbara Lee’s claim that a “thinly veiled” racism lurks behind descriptions of cultural problems in black neighborhoods. Lee was promptly attacked by several commentators who pointed out that she was exhibiting her own kind of racism, exempting blacks from the cultural analysis that would be directed at any other group.

The trouble is that those commentators seem right almost by definition: It surely is racist to single out a particular racial group for special treatment. Or, at least, Lee’s comments appear racist within a particular way of understanding racism as the reduction of social, political, and cultural issues to matters of race.

So why does someone like the liberal activist Sally Kohn complain that the conservative reply to Lee is an “insult” and an “Orwellian” abuse of language? Mostly because she too is right about racism. Or, at least, she is right if we accept her spiritualized way of understanding the idea. Even while she writes that she does not assign “blame or guilt or punishment,” Kohn sees race in America much as Kim Radersma and Robert Jensen do, with racism shaped into inherited sin: a moral blight in the American mind that “consciously or unconsciously” creates racial bias even in the absence of explicit racism. “Racial bias is like the proverbial water in the fish tank,” Kohn points out. “It’s there all around us, always, whether we realize it or not.”

We could call all this a clash of paradigms, except that mutual incomprehension rarely qualifies as a clash. Consider the opposing views on the Supreme Court. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 school-districting case. And this April, in her dissent to an affirmative-action decision, Justice Sonia Sotomayor replied: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” To think otherwise “works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.”

Within the paradigm Sotomayor dismisses as facile, it is contradictory to increase race consciousness in order to eradicate race consciousness. But in the 1988 academic essay to which the New Yorker recently traced the phrase “white privilege,” a key sign of such privilege is that, having mostly erased from themselves the race consciousness necessary for racial slavery and segregation, whites no longer have to notice race in the way that blacks and other racial minorities still must. “One of the privileges of being White is not having to see or deal with racism all the time,” as a 2012 manual for training the military’s equal opportunity officers put it. And thus the manual’s corrective command to military officers: “Assume racism is everywhere, everyday.”

Without that faith in universal and pervasive guilt, it would be perverse to require post-segregation Americans to re-create in themselves the race consciousness they were taught to congratulate the nation for leaving behind.

That conservative complaint, however, entirely misses the spiritual shape and religious logic of white privilege in the hands of people from Kim Radersma and Robert Jensen to Sally Kohn and the Princetonians who commanded young Tal Fortgang to “check his privilege.” The autodafé—the self-abnegation with which activists confess their own interior guilt—suggests that current use of the idea of white privilege has more to do with a religious impulse than it does with the realities of economic or social formation. The path to escaping racial consciousness really does run through increasing racial awareness—if the idea works the way the idea of original sin does.

“All have sinned,” writes St. Paul in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Christians in Rome, even those who have “not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression.” And so too are we all guilty of racism, even those who have never harbored an explicitly racist thought or said an explicitly racist word or performed an explicitly racist deed. “We have to get away from this idea that there is one sort of racism and it wears a Klan hood,” as Berkeley law professor Ian Haney-López explains. “Of course, that is an egregious form of racism, but there are many other forms of racism. There are racisms.” Racisms under which we all suffer.

Just as, for Paul in Romans, “the law entered, that the offence might abound,” so our awareness of our own racism massively increases when we realize that we are utterly formed as racists in America. And just as, for Paul, “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound,” so it is that only from this overwhelming awareness of racism can we hope to escape racism.

The doctrine of original sin is probably incoherent, and certainly gloomy, in the absence of its pairing with the concept of a divine savior—and so Paul concludes Romans 5 with a turn to the Redeemer and the possibility of hope: “As sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.” Think of it as a car’s engine or transmission scattered in pieces around a junkyard: The individual bits of Christian theology don’t actually work all that well when they’re broken apart from one another.

Which is why it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that an infinite sadness often haunts expressions of the white-privilege notion that we must become more aware of race in order to end the inherited sin of being aware of race. If we cannot escape it, then how can we escape it? When Prof. Jensen cries out in his chiliastic pain, “I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased,” he’s speaking in tones once reserved for the moral solution that only the Second Coming could provide. The strangeness of the isolated concept can be discerned in its unendingness, its never-satisfied ratchet. Discerned as well, I would suggest, in some of the disturbingly salvific terms with which President Obama’s campaign and election were first greeted.

Of course, however Christian the idea of white privilege may have been in origin, it emerged in contemporary America stripped of Christ and his church, making it available even for post- and non-Christians. For that matter, an explicit anti-Christianity is often heard alongside rejections of white privilege. At Radersma’s race conference, a fellow presenter named Paul Kivel defined white privilege as “the everyday pervasive, deep-seated and institutionalized dominance of Christian values, Christian institutions, leaders and Christians as a group, primarily for the benefit of Christian ruling elites.”

But that, too, is typical of much post-mainline moral discussion in America: the Church of Christ Without Christ, as Flannery O’Connor might have called it (to use a phrase from her 1952 novel Wise Blood). The mainline congregations may be gone as significant factors in the nation’s public life, but their collapse released a religious logic and set of spiritual anxieties that are still with us—still demanding that we see our nation and ourselves in the patterns cast by their old theological lights.

2. Close Your Eyes in Holy Dread

In May at Lincoln Center, in Avery Fisher Hall, the audience began to hiss—and more than hiss: actually boo—before the New York Philharmonic could even begin its rendition of Mahler’s Third Symphony. But the hisses and the boos proved not to be, in fact, a judgment of Mahler. They were a reaction to the recorded pre-concert voice that came over the hall’s loudspeakers, asking for cell phones to be turned off. The voice was that of actor Alec Baldwin.

National Review’s Jay Nordlinger was at the concert, and as he noted afterward, Baldwin would seem to have credentials appealing to that generally liberal audience of New Yorkers. He’s served on the board of the leftist People for the American Way, for example, and he’s been a strong supporter of PETA’s animal-rights activism. For that matter, a vocal Democrat, he’s been on the receiving end of pressure from the conservative side, forced to apologize in 1998 after making an ill-advised political joke about stoning congressman Henry Hyde to death and murdering the wives and children of Hyde’s Republican colleagues. Even more to the point, Baldwin has given the Philharmonic enormous sums of money, sat on its board, and hosted its radio series.

But none of that proved enough to overcome his use of an obscene antigay slur to chase off a paparazzi photographer outside his apartment in November 2013, as first reported on the gossip pages of the New York Post and then spread through thousands of Twitter and Facebook feeds. Despite his apologies, Baldwin quickly lost the liberal talk show he hosted on MSNBC and became a much-mocked figure. No narrative about media stars is ever tidy, and mixed into his firing from MSNBC were the usual elements of bad ratings and old resentments, together with the network’s perception that Baldwin was having a very public meltdown—as indeed he was. Still, this much is true: Alec Baldwin was once recognizable to New York’s symphonygoers as the voice of a generous supporter of the Philharmonic. And now he is recognized mostly as the voice of bigotry.

“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad,” G.K. Chesterton wrote back in 1908—virtues “isolated from each other and wandering alone.” And he meant the ways in which, to use one of his examples, the intellectual humility demanded in the Middle Ages reinvented itself as the kind of utter, self-immolating skepticism that his contemporary H.G. Wells proposed for their post-Enlightenment age.

It’s a clever thought, developed in Chesterton’s characteristically clever prose: paradox as the hammer and awl of common sense. But the description doesn’t seem quite right for our cultural experience in recent decades. These are the years in which the mainline Protestant churches, those Tocquevillian props of the later years of the American experiment, tumbled into irrelevance and inconsequentiality. And as the post-Protestant generations gradually rose up to claim the high places formerly occupied by their mainline grandparents, what they carried with them was the mood and structure of once-coherent ideas of Christian theology, rather than the personal behaviors of Christian morality. What escaped the dying mainline denominations was not so much the old virtues as the old concepts, isolated from each other and wandering alone.

Back in 2005, columnist George Will used a Chestertonian account of mad virtues for comic effect, as then-president Lawrence Summers was being chased out of Harvard for noting the apparent difference in “standard deviation and variability” between male and female math scores. Interestingly, Summers was defended by the popular psychologist Steven Pinker with a traditional distinction between the institutions of reason and the institutions of faith: “Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor?” Pinker complained. “That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa.”

But the overwhelming reaction was one of horror that Summers had mentioned in public the statistics that dare not speak their name. MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, for example, told the Boston Globe that, listening to Summers, “I felt I was going to be sick. My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow.” If she had not fled the room, she said, “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up,” because “this kind of bias makes me physically ill.” Later, appearing on the Today show, she added that she didn’t know if she could bear even the thought of having a make-up lunch with a contrite Summers. And in his column, Will compared Hopkins’s reaction to outrage at violation of the old-fashioned virtue of innocence: “Is this the fruit of feminism? A woman at the peak of the academic pyramid becomes theatrically flurried by an unwelcome idea and, like a Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines until revived by smelling salts and the offending brute’s contrition?”

And yet, funny as all that was, Victorian innocence doesn’t quite capture, say, the annual festival of protested commencement speakers and honorary-degree recipients at American universities. The spring of 2014 alone saw Condoleezza Rice chased away from Rutgers, Christine Lagarde from Smith, Ayaan Hirsi Ali from Brandeis, and Robert Birgeneau from Haverford, all of them declared too conservative (or at least insufficiently radical) to be allowed to address the new and impressionable college graduates.

Plenty of the spiritualizing of American social politics occurs on the political right. In the libertarian elevation of the idea of individual freedom above all or in the tendency of Tea Party members “to be excessively confident in their righteousness” (according to conservative academic Jon A. Shields), one can sometimes discern dissociated Christian ideas. It’s in the air, and no one in public life entirely escapes breathing it.

But most of the recent cases of banned speakers and censored heresies seem to come from the radical side of things—unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the left’s dominant position in academia and the media, and its claim to possess now the moral authority once held by the mainline liberal consensus. Think of it in terms of the old Christian idea of shunning. Or, rather, think of it in terms of the shape and tone of the idea of shunning, set free from its constrained place in a general theological scheme. Think of shunning as it lives now, in the Church of Christ Without Christ that produces so much of our current social discourse.

Meidung, the Amish call the practice, meaning avoidance. Disfellowshipping is the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ term. There’s a parallel in the old Jewish juridical practice of herem, but the Christian form of shunning takes its cues primarily from Paul in his first letter to the Corinthian Christians: “I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolator, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner.” Indeed, we are “not even to eat” with such people. (Remember Nancy Hopkins’s hesitation about having lunch with her offender, Lawrence Summers?)

The key lies in the word “brother.” Shunning is not aimed at the unconverted; in undertaking the Great Commission of Matthew 28:16–20, Christians should be willing to sit with the publican and the tax collector and the fornicator, in hope of their conversion. Shunning is instead the means by which fellow Christians are disciplined for their public sins and the congregation is kept unsullied by the scandals of its members. It is excommunication, of course, but also something more than being barred from the sacraments—something particularly important in the non-sacramental forms of Protestantism: a removal from the church itself, the community of believers, until remorse and repentance have been demonstrated.

In 2014, an Internet campaign by gay activists successfully harried Brendan Eich into resigning from Mozilla, an Internet software company he had cofounded, for the sin of having donated $1,000 to the California campaign for heterosexual-only marriage in 2008. And while part of the purpose was clearly to punish him, it is hard to deny that part of the purpose was also to define as profane any opposition to same-sex marriage. Profane, here, in the root meaning of the word: pro fano, in front of—and thus outside, not admitted to—the temple.

A parallel effort was attempted this June, in response to a George Will column that accused colleges and the Department of Education of mistaking “the ambiguities of the hookup culture” for an epidemic of sexual assault on American campuses. The condemnations were overwhelming, from the leftist website ThinkProgress, to the St. Louis newspaper that canceled Will’s syndication, to angry letters from members of Congress. His writing was “a hateful message” that “re-traumatizes victims,” thundered the National Organization for Women. “It is actively harmful for the victims of sexual assault when that kind of man writes a piece that says to assault victims, ‘it didn’t happen and if it did happen you deserve it.’ ”

To read the column that way requires something a little deliberate, a little willful; Will may have been less than precise, but his meaning was clear enough to a charitable reading—and it certainly wasn’t that rape is unreal or acceptable. Still, a moment of imprecision (and the separation of shunning from charity and all other old pieces of Christian moral theology) made vaguely plausible the attack on Will, and so it came.

Of course, if the effort was to shun Brendan Eich and George Will—to exclude them from contact with the congregation—there remains the question of what constitutes the congregation and its temple. We could do some history here, tracing the ways in which the public square itself, in an interesting transformation of the idea of Christendom, became a kind of temple of right opinion in the two centuries that followed the First Great Awakening in America and the Methodist Revival in England: Even as the Victorians grew less and less confident about the old, thick medieval view of the theological foundation of culture, they retained a Christian moralism about social and political life and a strong will to banish sinners from that moralized life. But the point is our current sense of the public square as a temple, inherited perhaps from the Victorians but focused now more on opinions than on actions and entirely separated from any coherent theological system. To shun these days is to take away from sinners any access to the forums of public life.

And the result, curiously, is to turn the effect of shunning in on the congregation: What once concerned primarily the disciplining of the erring brother, keeping him outside the temple until repentance, now seems to concern mostly the disciplining of the community itself by making sure no one dares join him in his sinful opinions. Examining the attacks on George Will for his column on sexual assault, the law professor Ann Althouse was similarly drawn to the idea of shunning. “The argument ‘George Will is toxic’ works even on people who think George Will makes a persuasive argument,” she noted on her blog, for people have “a psychological need to be accepted by others and not shunned”—and thus, even if you agreed with Will, you might reject him “out of a desire to be thought of as one of the good people.”

And so we expel the guilty and close our eyes in holy dread. But what then? With the idea of shunning now entirely free from its old theological context, we offer no clear path back for the shunned sinner. The words with which, for example, Alec Baldwin savaged his pursuer, like the scatological attack on Sarah Palin for which the leftist MSNBC commentator Martin Bashir lost his job in 2013 under pressure from conservatives, were so vile that these men may well deserve their public censure. But how shall they atone? And how shall they return from the symbolic place of sinfulness in which they have been set?

Our social and political life is awash in unconsciously held Christian ideas broken from the theology that gave them meaning, and it’s hungry for the identification of sinners—the better to prove the virtue of the accusers and, perhaps especially, to demonstrate the sociopolitical power of the accusers. Moreover, in our curious transformation from an honor culture into a full-fledged fame culture over the past century, we have only recently discovered that fame proves just as fragile as honor ever was, a discovery hurried along by the lightning speed of the Internet. Twitter and Facebook may or may not be able to make someone famous, but they can certainly make someone infamous in the blink of an eye. And because sinners’ apologies never receive the same publicity as their sins, the Internet both casts its targets from the temple and leaves them out there, lost among the profanities.

And yet, even this broad understanding of modern shunning needs at least one more expansion before it matches the full weirdness of public discourse in America today. If we are to discipline the community with shunned symbols of the sins of wrong expression, then we must also protect the community from exposure to the sins of wrong thought. And so, in addition to shunning, we require new forms of defining and excluding heresy.

I take as a kind of shunning the protests that aim to prohibit heterodox college commencement speakers. But how are we to understand, for example, the San Jose State University professors who in May 2013 thought it would be a good idea to distribute a picture of themselves burning books that express doubts about global warming? Or the young woman who in June 2014 had herself photographed burning a copy of Christina Hoff Sommers’s The War Against Boys, in protest against its perceived antifeminism?

“Error has no rights,” as Pope Pius IX is often quoting as saying in his 1864 Syllabus of Errors (although he didn’t, in fact). Or as Pius XII actually did put the thought in a 1953 address to Italian lawyers, “That which does not correspond to truth or to the norm of morality objectively has no right to exist, to be spread, or to be activated.” And similarly, in contemporary post-mainline America, we are beginning to build a new list of banned ideas and censored texts—a new Syllabus of Errors and a new Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

As the New York Times reported in June, at many colleges including Bowdoin, Vanderbilt, and the 23 campuses in the Cal State system, administrators are removing official recognition from Christian prayer and reading groups, mostly for these groups’ refusal to accept non-Christians in leadership positions. This might be taken as covered primarily by the idea of shunning, but it contains an element of prohibited opinions and banished books as well.

Or, to take yet another example in the news (from England, but too memorable not to mention), University College London barred a reading group from campus. The students’ Nietzsche Club wanted to meet and discuss books by philosophers who, according to the Union Council, have sometimes been appropriated by right-wing politicians. Which means that reading Nietzsche could possibly encourage fascism and thereby endanger the student body. So out they must go, say the fanatics—another term we derive from fanum, the Latin word for temple, the fanatics being the people who refuse ever to step outside the holy spaces, lest they be tainted and corrupted.

“Trigger warnings” were also in the news, when Oberlin College joined several others in announcing a policy that expected professors to warn students when an assigned reading might “recall a traumatic event to an individual.” Experiencing a trigger, the faculty handbook helpfully explained, will “almost always disrupt a student’s learning and may make some students feel unsafe in your classroom.”

What Chesterton derided as the great “Victorian Compromise” required a cleansing of texts, either at the printer or in the author’s own mind—a self-censorship that kept explicit mention of bodily functions off the page. The Victorian Compromise was already a decline from a richer Christian view of the body, visible in something like the bawdiness of Chaucer (and expurgated versions of The Canterbury Tales were legion in the nineteenth century). But even the faint connection to Christian theology in 19th-century bowdlerizing is lost in our own age’s mad self-censorship of almost everything heterodox. We know we aren’t those awful Victorians, we congratulate ourselves, because we’re so open about sex. But the least uncensored word about what we actually do hold sacred sends us into a tizzy that puts the Victorians to shame.

A banning or stigmatizing of words that might somewhere, somehow, offend someone in the temple of right opinion: This is what “Error has no rights” looks like when it is freed from its old theological foundation and wanders, isolated and alone. This is what the Index Librorum Prohibitorum looks like today.

3. The Late Great Planet Earth

There’s a usefulness to the idea of the apocalypse. A psychological comfort, for that matter, and a moral clarity. If the end really is nigh, then all our petty grievances, dreary compromises, and sad unfulfillments are revealed as simply that: petty, dreary, and sad; to be left behind unmourned as we enter the Valley of Armageddon. If the sea really is about to boil and a pale horseman rides the earth, then all the ordinary can be brushed aside. And our lives, in whatever brief time remains, possess a deep and satisfying meaning. An extraordinary moral structure and a profound ethical consequence: My Lord, what a morning, / when the stars begin to fall.

Of course, we have a name for the sum of those grievances and compromises, the sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time. The apocalypse stands outside all that, and perceiving the coming end of things means an escape from bothersome public order, irritating social manners, and annoying political concession. It is the last, the greatest, simplification. And who, at some level, doesn’t want that?

I met a man once over in Wyoming, when my car sputtered to a halt on a nearly deserted highway. Call him “Bob,” since he would hate publicity. Whether he’s typical or not of survivalists, I don’t know, but Bob was a fascinating combination of the most helpful, most capable person you’d ever want to meet when your fuel line is clogged, and a complete and utter nutball.

Oh, he had none of that white supremacist stuff with which those who prepare for the collapse of civilization are sometimes tarred. No militant militia ties, no membership in a church led by a prophet preaching an exact date for the Second Coming. Bob merely thinks that Western civilization is about to fall down, and a sane and competent man ought to prepare, ought to stockpile, unto the day—which Bob has done, I saw, when I visited his sprawling sagebrush ranch the next time I was through that section of the country. He’s got fuel tanks to run his four-by-fours, and horses, for when the gasoline runs out. He’s got wind-powered well pumps, a basement full of long-shelf-life food, a few years’ worth of gun supplies, and bows and arrows, for when the guns’ ammunition runs out.

There was a strangely admirable and clean simplicity to it all—a comfortableness that Bob has found, even though every time he sees a contrail in the sky, he wonders if it’s a Chinese bomber in flight for the final battle. The thing is, it just doesn’t bother him all that much. He’s made his peace with the failure of America. “The Founding Fathers had a vision,” he told me with a great and equable acceptance. “The churches, the citizens: After the Revolution, there was this picture of what could be. But we’ve run through all that and come to the end of it.” Economically, politically—morally, for that matter—it was bound to happen. 

And maybe Bob is right that the collapse is barreling down upon us. Who can say that it isn’t? But we have to admit that we’ve seen all this before—if not the specific content, then at least the shape of the idea. The fall of Rome, and thus the fragility of civilization, has been a small but persistent ghost in the American imagination since the Founders themselves. And even more, there has been a sense in the American imagination, straight out of the Book of Revelation, that maybe we deserve this. That maybe we need the fire to come and scour the land of all its filth and iniquity, all its dithers and vacillations, all its failures to see and act on what matters.

So much of our social discourse—so much of the spirit-ual shape of our political ideas—is an inheritance from the consensus of the Protestant churches. And the notion of a looming apocalypse is no exception to the rule that, even without much explicit Christianity, the public square is filled with once-Christian ideas. As it happens, the search for immediate application of the Book of Revelation—the fretful reading of the signs of the times—was found more often in the Bible churches of the radical Reformation than in the magisterial Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican denominations that would form the nation’s Protestant mainline. And perhaps that’s why, even in its secularized, post-mainline form, the apocalypse has tended to remain on the fringes of national politics. 

Still, the quick impatience of the apocalyptic mood, the exasperation, the demand that we step outside the ordinary and act now on what matters: You can see some of it in the online writings of Bob’s fellow survivalists, who respond with individual preparation. And you can see it as well in the even larger set of modern millenarians: the radical environmentalists, insisting on immediate public action. They are, in their way, Bob’s mirror image. As the extreme survivalists are out on the edges of the right, so the extreme environmentalists are out on the edges of the left.

We must “set the world on a fundamentally new course,” Bill McKibben wrote in the June 5 issue of Rolling Stone, for the cataclysm is upon us. The future will not wait, the hard rain will not be put off, and we have no time for the ordinary luxuries of cultural indecision, social debate, and political compromise. If a dictatorship of activist scientism is what it takes to halt 300 years of the Industrial Revolution’s destruction of nature, then so be it.

A number of activists reject such attempts to sell the apocalypse, however worried they are about climate change. “If you were looking for ways to increase public skepticism about global warming,” the environmentalists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger warned this April in the New York Times, “you could hardly do better” than to rage about the end of the world. Such doom-saying, Nordhaus and Shellenberger insist, actually lessens public confidence in the honesty of the kind of serious and effective climate policy they think we need.

Nevertheless, the literature of those screaming for repentance seems endless. Human beings are a cancer on the Earth, they tell us. The rising tide will flood our cities, and the rising heat will burn our farms. As Wen Stephenson wrote for the Nation’s website on Earth Day 2014, “Stop pretending that the crisis can be ‘solved,’ that the planet can be ‘saved,’ that business more-or-less as usual—what progressives and environmentalists have been doing for forty-odd years and more—is morally or intellectually tenable.” Stephenson’s piece might be taken as the archetype of all the apocalyptic emotion of recent times. “Let go of the pretense,” he shouts, “that ‘environmentalism’ as we know it .  .  . comes anywhere near the radical response our situation requires.”

And maybe Stephenson is right that the collapse is barreling down upon us. Who can say that it isn’t? But I always find myself doubtful, always suspect the disingenuous, when people who clearly desire a particular outcome insist that a contemporary situation somehow uniquely mandates the changes they would have wanted anyway. It’s a species of what statisticians call confirmation bias. If you despise the busy industry and messy artificiality of modern times—if you hunger for a return to a Rousseauian state of benign nature and the innocence before the Fall—then you’re probably deceiving even yourself when you claim that somehow, this time, people who think the way you do must be put in charge of everything.

Besides, we really have seen all this before, in both its Christian shape and in the pressing anxiety that takes every event in the world as somehow encapsulating the dread augury. To read the pages of the Communists’ Daily Worker—from the 1950s all the way back to the 1919 “Emergency National Convention” at which the newspaper began—is to see the Comintern’s urgent sense that every passing political moment was fraught with significance for the coming revolution, and every small turn of industrial policy was a violent threat to the existence of the working class.

Of course, the Communist party was often described by its detractors in those days as a sort of mongrel religion: a re-creation in Soviet Russia of a fantasy of what the medieval church would have been like if it had possessed absolute rule. We had the scholasticism of Marxist texts and the party theoreticians as its theologians. We had the cardinals in the Kremlin and the return of the Inquisition in the secret police and Moscow show trials.

So, for that matter, is environmentalism often derided by skeptics of global warming as an ersatz religion. It has a clerisy of well-connected advocates, the mockers note. A willingness to treat even the least deviation as a sign of heresy. Choirs of true believers who will sing Amen! at the end of every sermon. A raging avowal of the wrongness of doubt.

I wonder, though, whether these global-warming critics have seen all the way to the bottom of their analogy—for much of radical environmentalism has, in fact, the shape of a Christian worldview. Or, at least, what a Christian worldview would be if it lacked any role for the gospel. This is a supernaturally charged history: We have an Eden, a paradise of nature—until the Fall, with the emergence of sentient human beings as polluters. We then have a long history of the gradually increasing immorality of smog and litter, all aiming toward the apocalypse of the final injuring of the Earth beyond repair. Strong environmentalism is, in essence, an unknowing recapitulation of St. Augustine. Or, at least, the dark half of the theologian: what Augustinianism would look like if you stripped away the idea that there might be salvation. What Augustinianism would look like if you had just the human stain, without human redemption. Environmentalism often comes to us these days as a political idea with a particular spiritual shape. It comes to us as Christianity without Christ.

Interestingly, as a political idea, the more apocalyptic forms of environmentalism often verge on the brutal. On the Powerline website in recent months, the conservative commentator Steven Hayward has been collecting examples of rhetorical extremism from climate alarmists. Dozens and dozens of them. He notes, for example, that Lawrence Torcello, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is only one of many who have demanded legal prosecution of those who oppose the climate change agenda. “My argument probably raises an understandable, if misguided, concern regarding free speech,” Torcello admitted this March, but nonetheless, “the charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers.” Following Torcello’s lead, Adam Weinstein made it explicit on the Gawker website: “The purulent pundits, paid sponsors, and corporate grifters” must be stopped. “They should face jail. They should face fines. They should face lawsuits.”

And Torcello and Weinstein are right enough, aren’t they? Right, at least, within the circle cast by their apoca-lyptic lights. An impending disaster really would justify imprisoning our opponents, running roughshod over democracy, and making things actually happen for a change—because .  .  . well, because it’s just so damn important. Literally damn important. And because an apocalyptic age stands outside culture, society, and ordinary life. “These are crimes. They are crimes against the Earth, and they are crimes against humanity,” as Wen Stephenson writes in his jeremiad, and “our global crisis—not merely environmental but moral and spiritual—is fundamental: it strikes to the root of who we are. It’s a radical situation, requiring a radical response. Not merely radical in the sense of ideology, but a kind of radical necessity.”

Perhaps it’s unfair to subject Stephenson to this kind of close reading when he doesn’t seem to have given his column all that close a writing, but his Earth Day essay is so quotable, so fulfilling of its millenarian kind. Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late, as Bob Dylan sang back in 1967, in one of his most apocalyptic songs. “Stop lying to yourselves, and to your children,” Wen Stephenson’s version runs. “Any discussion of the situation must begin by acknowledging the science and the sheer lateness of the hour.” Indeed, he writes, as though he were St. John on the Isle of Patmos, “I am engaged in a struggle—a struggle—for the fate of humanity and of life on Earth.”

But then, it’s always the fate of humanity that is at stake when the prophet calls us to repentance, and an apocalypse always provides to its diviners and their listeners a sharp and wonderful clarity. In this, at least—in the shape of their shared idea—the radical environmentalists are brother to the radical survivalists: co-congregants, co-believers in the Christian apocalypse, albeit without much Christianity. Armageddon comes to us these days as an idea, a powerful moral intuition, that has finally broken free from its old theological constraints to wander, isolated and alone. It is the last, the greatest, simplification of all the messiness of life. And who, at some level, doesn’t want that?

Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.