Moral Formation in Country Music—Or, What’s Really Wrong With “Try That In a Small Town”

I must confess something here at the outset: I love Country Music. I love the twang, the history, the storytelling, and even the celebration of Americana. (I even love it when it comes from Canadians!) Of course, this wasn’t always the case. I used to hate Country like most people claim to do, but once you marry a girl from Texas, little bits of country just start to creep in all over your life. As my wife says, “You can take the girl out of Texas, but you can’t take the Texas out of the girl.” I say, “Bring it on.” Other times, I say “Y’all.” 

So, when I heard that there was controversy around a new country song, Jason Aldean’s “Try That In a Small Town,” I had to give it a listen—not as a hater of Country, but as someone who was mildly interested in both the kerfuffle and the genre. What I found, when I listened to the song, disturbed me. But it was not, as far as I can tell, what disturbed most people.

The song is standard enough—even sub-par, as far as Country songs go. Aldean croons about a variety of disquieting things that are happening in the world, shows footage of various “liberal” protests, and then returns to the refrain “try that in a small town.” The message is simple enough—liberal antics won’t work in middle America. A simplistic, even ham-fisted message; but then again, so is a lot of Country messaging, so we won’t hold that against it.

On the surface, the message of the song is a manifestation of an old and somewhat tired cliché: that the rural is superior to the urban. Cities are crowded, crime-infested, welfare driven places of wicked dehumanization, while the country is an idyllic, spacious, safe place bolstered by simple values, good people, and honest work. Half of my family comes from one of those small towns where everybody knows everybody, and Aunt Maudine keeps watch over the neighbourhood from the comfort of her rocking chair, sipping sweet tea and shucking corn while locusts screech in the background. Nothing gets past her. 

The chief controversy surrounding the song—and the reason the video has been “banned”—isn’t because of this clichéd message. It’s because, in one of the cuts of footage, the video features the Maury County Courthouse, in front of which 18-year-old Henry Choate was lynched in 1927. This is a terribly dark association. Here we are, singing about “trying those antics in a small town,” looking at an image of a courthouse famous for fostering exactly that kind of vigilante justice, in a county where some 20 black men were murdered on the basis of a very similar sentiment. If inclusion of the Maury County Courthouse footage is intentional, then the video is truly a thing of wickedness and should be condemned by all people of good heart and conscience. If it is unintentional… well, this is still a serious gaffe that should warrant, at the least, an apology, and at best should probably be re-edited. 

The lynching association is pretty horrific, but it’s not the concern I want to write about today. My concern has more to do with the moral formation for which the song appears to advocate. Allow me to explain what I mean. Songs can do lots of things for us. They can help us escape, or make sense of love, make us feel peppy, help us focus, or be an occasion for creating memories with our friends. Country Music is especially known for its focus on the value of hard work, love, loss, simple faith, and even a kind of warm patriotism. Some of the best of Country makes you want to love your wife more, work harder, hang out with your friends, go to church, and be grateful for your freedom. When we listen to songs about these ‘virtues’, we find that these virtues are being planted, reinforced, and encouraged within us. This is one of the ways that music facilitates moral formation.

Aldean’s song is right in the vein of this kind of formation—but I think it’s still critical to stop and ask, “What is the emotion being formed in me?” On my accounting there are a few. Aldean is, at the outset, sympathizing with the feelings of incredulity—and even outrage—at the way the world is going. In this, he has a sympathetic ear to many in America today. This sentiment is then contrasted with the pride that many Americans feel with regard to their home-town values (whether perceived or actual). These two emotions—outrage and pride—set the stage for the hook of the song. And what is critically important to know that the sung sentiment “Try that in a small town” is punctuated by images of “good” Americans carrying firearms. In other words, the takeaway message of the song is, “Try that here and we’ll shoot you.” Outrage, pride, violent justice. 

Pause and reflect more closely on this sentiment for a moment, because it’s actually very strange. The city is wicked, the countryside is virtuous. My nation should be protected. When the wickedness of the city creeps into the countryside, I should be prepared to defend it—violently, if necessary. In defense of American Values, I am prepared to do grievous bodily harm to others—even my fellow Americans. Perhaps you read those sentences and nothing stands out to you as strange about them. In your heart, there is only a straightforward, “Amen! We’ve got to stop the bad guys, no matter what!” Maybe there’s even a form of that statement that “The only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun!” But what I would like you to see is that a song like this fuels a fantasy of justified violence under the guise of patriotism. I will purchase a firearm, and carry it with me, so that if needed I can protect someone, save the day, even be a hero. It’s my duty as an American.  

In Country, more than any other genre of music, there is a profound overlap between America’s Patriotic and her Christian values. Standing for the flag and kneeling for the cross beats close to the heart of what Country Music (ostensibly) cares about. But here in Aldean’s song we are witnesses to, and participants in, a sentiment that is profoundly un-Christian. Christians should not fantasize about scenarios in which they might commit acts of violence. And I can go on to say, on the same theme, that Christians should not fantasize about scenarios in which they might commit acts of sexual intercourse, or theft, or deceit. And if a song is inviting me to fantasize about such thing, if a song lionizes activities which stand opposed to the tenets of my Christian faith, then I ought to put that song aside. 

If anything, Christians should fantasize about peacemaking. What would it mean to wake up in the morning and prayerfully consider how you might end conflict, restore harmony between men and women, or even perform acts of radical forgiveness? Years ago, there was the faddish trend of “paying it forward,” where Christians committed to performing “radical acts of kindness,” usually by purchasing someone else’s coffee or MacDonald’s order. Personally, I thought that the fad was better at making you feel good than doing any actual good, but it was still better than starting your day by imagining shooting someone. Let me be explicit: carrying a firearm as a civilian in the anticipation that you might need to use it against other civilians in defense of various civic ideals is not anywhere part of Christian moral formation.

For now, Aldean will have his moment in the spotlight. In the power of the outrage machine, criticisms of the song—and its video—will fall on largely deaf ears. In time—hopefully a short one—this song will be forgotten while other, better, Country songs will come along and encourage people to be more faithful, hardworking, and attentive to life. What won’t go away so easily are those fantasies of violence—certainly not until we are forming properly Christian sentiments in their place. And while the Christian sentiments overlap so seamlessly with the Patriotic ones… let’s just say that the battle for true peace will be long and difficult. 

Secular Ethics? Think Again.

It often happens that my casual reading and my preaching schedule curiously overlap. Recently, an overlap happened between George Carlin’s irreverent, absurdist, and at times shockingly foul 2004 book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? and the sermon series in which I’ve been describing the characteristics of our secular age. Without further ado, here’s the relevant snippet from Carlin’s book: 

I’m in the Moral Minority

“I don’t think there’s really such a thing as morality. I think it’s a human construct designed to facilitate the control of people. Values, ethics, legal standards—all of these things are human-generated, and they’re lumped under some vague idea called morality. But suppose humans got it wrong? Suppose there’s no actual, objective morality? Suppose there’s just a natural, worldly, secular, common-sense standard of behavior whose purpose is what’s best for getting along and what’s best for survival? That would be a good system. Why should a system like that be overlaid with a sense of spooky, mystical, judgmental oversight?” (Carlin, George, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, 282) 

Carlin, George, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? p282

One has to be very careful in responding to anything that Carlin writes. A kind of modern, secularist Kierkegaard, he inhabits a series of characters in his prose that may or may not voice what he thinks. One of his characters voices the darkest kind of thoughts he can imagine. Another character spews out the foulest things he can think up. A third character even combines the two in an exposé of absurdism. Sometimes it’s merely shocking, at other times it’s quite funny. On rare occasions, it can be shockingly funny. 

But there is also a baseline voice—what I think comes closest to Carlin’s true voice—and this is when he angrily addresses what he perceives to be absurdity—in this particular book, the absurdities of language and religion. (Note: anger is the common thread through all of Carlin’s comedy.) In this respect, Carlin is never more contemptuous, dismissive, and derisive than when he speaks about religion, and about Christianity in particular. Given this disposition, it is reasonable to assume that the above quote comes about as close as we get to Carlin’s actual thoughts on something. 

Carlin claims that a secular morality is superior to a religious one, and I don’t think he’s alone in claiming this. So, how do we respond to his claim? Well, in one respect, Carlin is merely voicing a quite common attack on Christianity, namely, that the atheist does not need religion to be good. Carlin isn’t wrong, but what he (and many others) may not understand is that Christianity has long held that goodness is not the property of the redeemed alone. There are morally good atheists, and morally good Buddhists, and morally good Muslims. So far so good, but I should note that there is also a more cutting version of the above claim. Not infrequently, I encounter the atheist claim that they “don’t need a sky-daddy to be good.” The suggestion here is that Christian morality is based on fear of punishment, rather than any objective criteria of goodness. The secularist, then, in contrast to the Christian, styles himself or herself as good because he or she is good by intrinsic motivation, rather than any extrinsic factor. “I’m good because goodness is good; not because I’m afraid.” 

These are catchy and appealing claims, and they have rhetorical power inasmuch as they make oneself look good at the humorous expense of another. But the truth of the matter is that Christians have never believed that Christianity’s primary purpose was to make us good. Rather, Christianity saves us from sin and death. We do, however, believe that a consequence of that salvation ought to be moral and spiritual transformation. Where Christianity has been reduced to a project of behavioural modification, it has always done harm. 

But we can dig still deeper into Carlin’s claim that a secular morality would be superior. In this, it is important to recognize that his argument has traction precisely because it fits so nicely within the modern, secularist mindset. This is where my casual reading overlapped with my preaching, because one of the hallmarks of secularism is its conviction that the material world is all there is. Put in other terms, there is no supernatural reality sitting alongside or above our universe. Carl Sagan, in the opening to his science show Cosmos, states it elegantly: “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” In this respect, secularism carries with it an attitude not merely of myopic focus on the material, it also espouses an ethic of anti-transcendence. The idea that anything would be above or beyond the material is not only un-testable, it is abhorrent, and the idea that such a transcendent overlay ought to have formative impact on policies and decisions in the present world is laughable, if not evil. Modern secularism is thus an affirmation of the primacy of the material world, combined with a rejection of any authoritative transcendence. 

In light of this secularist mindset, there are two ways I want to query Carlin’s “Moral Minority” quip. The first is to ask where he gets his idea of the good, and the second is to investigate his suggestion of a secular morality—what would it look like? 

First, then, where does he get his idea of good? In the subtext of Carlin’s claim is an idea that there is, indeed, goodness: that some people are good and some are not, and that, furthermore, a purely secular goodness is just as adequate as a ‘subjective’ moral goodness. But what makes one person good and another person not-good? By what standard is one person to be measured against another? 

In any judgment of value—this is the question of good, better, and best—the measurement of one person requires a standard against which to measure that person. Now, it may be easy to identify the good in distinction with, say, radical evil. Most of us would consider ourselves better than Jeffrey Dahmer precisely because we have not murdered, dismembered, and eaten other people. But I’m afraid it’s not so simple, because we need to ask why. Why am I better than Dahmer? Is it because eating people is wrong? Why? What, in the purely secular landscape, actually determines that murder and cannibalism are wrong? I think that the committed secularist will likely appeal to three things: survivability, sociality, and common sense. Cannibalism is wrong because it does not contribute to survivability, is anti-social, and goes against common sense. But a closer examination reveals, unfortunately, that all three considered on the purely secular model, are absurd. 

Survivability is absurd because the universe is winding down to a state of entropic chaos. The endgame of the universe is universal death, and since there is no transcendent (i.e., nothing above or beyond the universe), it follows that there is nothing to escape into in even the wildest dreams of science fiction. If the material universe communicates anything to us about life, it is that it is inexorably planning to wipe it out completely and viciously. If the secularist wants to elevate survival as a motivating factor for practical ethics, we must always ask, “Why?” We’re all going to die, anyway, and everything is ultimately meaningless. 

Sociality is similarly absurd because for as long as humans have existed we have killed one another. If human nature is on the same level of evidence as any other material for scientific study—i.e., as a data set to which we are prohibited from ascribing value—then we have no recourse to good/better/best in describing humanity’s violent tendencies. The best we can say is that sometimes society serves as a temporary holdout to our inner violence. However, on the historic, evidential scale, this holdout is not infrequently mobilized to guide an entire society to attempt the murder and eradication of another. In other words, one common characteristic of human societies is that while they don’t murder within the society, they are happy to murder those outside the society. Often in the name of ‘survivability.’ 

Lastly, common sense is absurd because, on the purely secular model, our thoughts themselves are a rather inconvenient accident of human existence. The universe existed for nearly 13 billion years without our thoughts to influence it, and our thinking is one of the most momentary, startling, and irrelevant features of that timeline. What has common sense, the thinking of minute and ephemeral beings planted on a tiny, obscure, and insignificant wing of the Milky Way, to do with anything? 

Image from the James Webb telescope, each point of light an entire Galaxy. In the words of Douglas Adams, “Space is Big. Really Big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

All this to say, the secular landscape is a landscape that is fundamentally without value—it cannot, by definition, communicate the values of what is right and what is wrong. This is, in fact, the most serious problem with any concept of “secular” goodness, because the concept of good/better/best is itself a fundamentally transcendent idea. To ascribe value to life, or people within life, requires a standard from above them, outside of them. Therefore, to determine whether or not a man or woman is good, simple comparison on the human timeline will always be inadequate—the driving question will be “Good with reference to what? Bad with reference to what?” Survivability, sociality, and common-sense cannot provide such a standard. The only hope for a moral standard that can be applied to all people and all times is an appeal to a transcendent moral standard.  

As I said, there are two lines of inquiry into Carlin’s claim about a secular ethic, and the second is to ask, “What does a purely secular moral ethic look like?” Carlin suggests in his writing that such an ethic would favour ‘survivability.’ I’ve just spent some time, of course, describing how this is an absurdity—the kind of claim the secularist cannot logically make—but for the sake of argument let’s give this one as a freebie. Let’s agree for the moment that surviving is a good, and work out the ethics that follow as a consequence. What happens? 

“Sanctuary!”

An ethic of survivability would need to make decisions about human conduct from the perspective of what maximizes human survivability—not individual human survivability, but the survivability of the race. This distinction is important, because we will be forced to make some very hard decisions that impact individuals, Knowing, however, that they will be done for the race as a whole will allay any outmoded moral hesitations about these decisions. One area where we will have to make these kinds of decisions will be regarding overpopulation. The ultimate survivability of the human race will require regulation of the birth rate. Since humans are terrible at self-regulation, the state will be required to enforce strict policies of birth control. For example, policies that limit how many children a family can have, and then commensurate policies that terminate all pregnancies that fall outside of those limits. 

Survivability will also require a reassessment of resource allocation. Humans that have a higher chance of facilitating the survival of our species ought to be given preferential treatment—they should perhaps be allowed to have more than the standard allotment of children. It follows almost naturally that any sub-optimal human (of below average intelligence, for example) ought to be prohibited from bearing children at all. From this, it follows almost naturally again that any crippled, handicapped, or mentally unstable humans ought to be terminated—ideally before, but occasionally and of necessity after, birth. Lastly, those people who do not contribute to the advancement (and survivability) of the human species will need to be, at minimum, ostracised, and in more serious cases, terminated. This of course includes the elderly, who occasion and outsized drain on resources that can better serve the strong, and also extends to the sexually deviant, those whose orientations by definition do not contribute to survivability. 

The point is this: a commitment to a purely secular ethics that focuses on survivability inevitably descends into eugenics, where a self-selected and self-perpetuating group of human ‘elites’ craft and enforce policies that favour their preservation at the inevitable expense of the rest of the human race. If this sounds suspiciously like Nazism, you’re right to think so. Malcolm Muggeridge, in his essay “The Humane Holocaust,” traces the beginnings of Nazi extermination programmes to the ready experimentation with policies of survivability and eugenics. He writes that “the origins of the holocaust lay, not in Nazi terrorism and anti-semitism, but in pre-Nazi Weimar Germany’s acceptance of euthanasia and mercy-killing as humane and estimable.” What a relief that no such similar policies exist in modern countries today (!). 

Carlin’s thinking, motivated as it is in kneejerk criticism of Christianity, nevertheless voices something many people feel today—that Christian morality is passé, outmoded, and even an active hindrance to the progress of society. The formulation can even take on quite an alarming cast: “The Christian ideas are going to prevent our survival as a species!” But, as I hope is relatively clear from the above, people can only say this if they haven’t thought through the facts. What is more, secular ethics can give no value to human life; it can only be used by certain people to attempt the preservation and prolongation of their own lives—often at the expense of everyone else. 

Six Reflections on Western Support for Ukraine

I’ve been brewing some observations about the situation in Ukraine, and I wanted to share them. I’ll be blunt: I sometimes feel that comments like these are nothing more than opportunistic faff, riding the wave of a news cycle that everyone is watching. Hence, I’ve waited a few extra days to write this because I’d like to keep that from being the case. I hope the reflections that follow are sufficiently substantive to merit reading.

First, I think it’s worth saying outright that the situation in Ukraine has been nothing short of astonishing—whether the astonishment that Russia would actually invade, or the astonishing response of near global censure and support for the Ukrainian plight. What’s behind Russia’s motives, and what’s behind the largely unified Western response? 

In response to the first question, I can only offer a vast and brief oversimplification, and this by means of an insight from Mark Galeotti’s, “A Short History of Russia.” Galeotti asserts that Russia’s primary identity crisis stems from its vast geography—namely, whether it is a European or an Asiatic nation. This insight has come back to me in the recent weeks because Ukraine, in the Western part of the former Soviet Union, has made overtures to join the European Union. This would resolve, for its part, the age-old identity crisis of the Slavic mindset. The Russian Federation has objected, militaristically. 

If this assessment is correct, then it makes some sense of the trenchant response that Russia has offered to the declarations of Western help to Ukraine. For Putin (at least), and certainly for some Russians, what is at stake is something more like the soul of Russia as an entity independent of both Europe and Asia. 

That’s a very short reflection on the “why” of Russian motives, which are doubtless more complex. Where I am prepared to reflect more, however, is on the strength of the Western response. What’s motivating such a powerful, unified set of actions? I’ve got six thoughts on this. 

1. It is simply astonishing to witness war in Europe. It’s certainly unfair to Yemen, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan that we regard war as a normalized aspect of life in these regions, but it is nevertheless true that to witness war in Europe is a thing few expected to see again. Europe is close to home. Europe is supposed to be safe. The last time we saw tanks rolling across Europe like this there were Nazis operating them. This influences a global response both on account of the simple shock of the thing, and also on the basis of the memory of the Second World War. We’re invested because it’s close to home. 

2. It is heartwarming to witness the unity of Slavic Europe in defense of Ukraine. Ukrainian suffering is one thing to see, but it is another thing to watch Poland, The Czech Republic, Moldova, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary (among other nations), marshal their resources and open their arms wide to fleeing refugees. In its own way, it is such a startling contrast to the (perhaps anticipated) balkanized habits of these nation-states. Instead, a sense of Slavic unity in the face of Russian aggression has motivated a deep compassion, and their regional sense of unity is deeply heartwarming to the world. To put this in other words, their sense of trans-national compassion is infectious. We want to be part of it. 

3. There is a refreshing clarity about the situation. When we read stories about other conflicts—civil wars, freedom fighters, insurrections in other nations—the battle lines are often woefully murky. It is not clear who is good and who is bad. But in this story, there is a stark clarity. Russia has invaded, Ukraine has been invaded. Russia claims to be fighting Nazis, Ukraine has a Jewish president (!). And this subtext of Nazism hovers quite strongly in the memory of Eastern Europe, so that comparisons between the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the Nazi invasion of Poland don’t seem that far off. There is about this a whiff of the clarity that marked the Second World War, and I believe that Western support is responding to this clarity. 

4. Ukraine has better PR than Russia. Ukraine’s president, Zelenskyy, was previously a comedian and actor who had played a president on Ukrainian television. He was so well liked that the Ukrainian people elected him. Qualifications aside (and I believe we can all agree that he has shown himself quite competent in the past weeks), his sense of media-savvy is also quite developed. Putin’s Russia is operating a PR campaign that reads as absurdity to Western ears and eyes, but it is working with many people in Russia. Zelenskyy’s campaign is fundamentally more Western, and therefore better adapted for a sense of Western alignment with the Ukrainian cause. We are in support of Ukraine because Zelenskyy better speaks our (media) language. 

5. Defense of Ukraine taps into our frustrations about misinformation. For the past decade or so, there has been a rapidly deteriorating relationship of trust between news consumers and news producers. What was previously a matter of simple bias (e.g., 20 years ago, when CNN leans left, while FOX voices the right), has become a state of active misinformation. Today, news sources actively curate their production to maximize the outrage of their constituents, and even resist reporting that might alienate their fanbases. Why is this important? Because Putin’s Russia is engaged in a campaign of misinformation, while Zelenskyy’s Ukraine appears to be involved in simple reporting. I suspect that one of the reasons we feel drawn to the fight for Ukraine is simply because in it we see a cypher for our own frustrations with deceptive media. We’re mad at Putin because we’re mad at our own systems of misinformation. Ukraine’s fight feels like a fight for the truth itself. 

6. Good Nationalism. I’ve saved the most difficult observation for last. Several years ago I was at a conference where I heard eminent theologian Jürgen Moltmann condemn nationalism as perhaps the greatest danger to the world today. Certainly there are many people today who would agree with him—that Nationalism is a categorical evil. And yet his statement still gave me pause. Is there nothing good in a sense of national pride and identity? That may be too loaded a question for this short reflection, but however it gets answered, there is on display in Ukraine—and from its supporters the world over—a deep and resonant sense of Nationalism. Ukrainians declare their pride to be Ukrainian, are willing to die to defend their homeland, are trading all their wealth and stability to fight against Russia. There is immense pride in flying a Ukrainian flag. And with them, Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Hungarians, Finns, and many other Eastern Europeans are voicing their nationalistic support for Ukrainian sovereignty. I suspect that the West is responding to the Ukrainian situation in the way it does because something in the narrative of Ukrainian nationalism resonates with us. We also are willing to defend our homes and heritage from invaders. But sitting behind this there is a remaining point of criticism, because we cannot be both proud of Ukrainian nationalism and condemn all nationalism at the same time. 

Thanks for reading. Is there anything that you would add to my list? If so, tell me what it is, and don’t forget to give your reasoning in the comment. 

Why I Am Still Blogging: An Essay About Essays

With a mixture of astonishment and shame, I note that it has been seven months since my last blog post. Amazingly (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), it is not the case that I have simply run out of things to say. Instead, I have been Busy. Only this last year I’ve finished my PhD, a consuming piece of writing on its own. On top of that, my family has moved internationally not once but twice in the last six months. I’ve lately been settling in to the routines of a new job. On top of all this, I’m suffering from a new form of anxiety that I’d like to call “publication anxiety.” It works like this: now that I’ve had some pieces published in magazines and journals, every time I get an idea I think, “I should blog this.” Then I start to work on it and think, “Maybe I should shop this around to get it published somewhere else…” The result is an anxiety that has kept me from writing anything at all. Or, rather, I’ve written some things, but now I’m trying to get them published. 

At any rate, here I am. Writing once again. What is more, I’m writing about writing, and I suspect that the now is as good a moment as any—coming back to blogging after such a long hiatus—to ask what I’m doing here. Why am I still blogging? What do I hope to get out of it? To this question, I believe I’ve got two answers. Allow me to share them with you, today. 

First, I want to blog because I still believe in the essay. That may sound like crazy talk, especially if your primary experience of the essay was writing them for school. I remember those days well, being taught in my English classes to prepare “The Five Paragraph Essay.” An introduction should outline the subject and schematize your three primary points, followed by one paragraph for each of those points, and a concluding paragraph to round out the whole. We wrote countless numbers of these essays during my years in school—the process became rote, and ritualized, and largely lifeless. Structure was not the only instruction in this formative essay-writing season. I recall other stylistic tics that were drilled into us with the fervor of a medieval religious catechism: You shall not use the first person! You shall not use the passive voice! You shall not under any circumstances use the word ‘got’! Imagine my sense of rebellion when, writing an exam in Seminary, I dared to produce a four paragraph essay! Put yourself in my shoes, if you will, when I discovered the freedom of the first person—of saying exactly what I thought and why I thought it. Or imagine my feeling of relieved kinship when I encountered G. K. Chesterton’s assessment of Greek accents—and with it of stodgy grammarians as well—noting that because the accents had been added to the text by later authors, not using them rendered Chesterton “as ignorant as Plato and Thucydides.” So many fictional rules! And regarding the passive voice and various awkward elocutions? Those can be made use of whenever I damn well please. 

I’ve described many reasons why I should by all accounts hate the essay, but I don’t, and school, although it tried persistently so to do, was never quite successful in killing off the essay for me. Why is it, then, that I still love the essay? I suppose I should offer the historic answer first: I love the essay because it was through writing the essay that I developed the skill of articulation, of clarity. More than any other academic discipline, writing has forced me to reason my way from A, to B, to C, and to examine the linkages between those steps. The past twelve years of writing has had a wonderfully honing effect on my thinking

I have also grown to love the sense in which an essay is always a journey. The word “essay” has its roots in the Latin word exigere—meaning to test, ascertain, or weigh. In a lovely sense, it comes to be linked with a kind of wild anticipation: knights from a medieval keep may “essay forth,” anticipating an adventure in the forest of Broceliande, a place where they will attempt great things, be weighed against the code of chivalry, and ultimately return with stories of adventure to retell. The essay banks on your willingness to ‘go with’ an author on whatever journey he or she wishes to lead you, to whatever humorous, insightful, or surprising anecdotes that emerge from the fabric of that venture. All essays are travelogues—whether they document a journey of ideas or a holiday to the shore. In this respect, they’re a lot of fun. 

But I have other, more subversive reasons for loving the essay. If the writing of essays demands clarity, the reading of essays demands attention. With alarm I have watched minds—my own included—suffer a seizure in their capacity to attend to any long argument. The tweet, the hot take, blazes across our news feeds and slowly, inevitably, our brains have lost the capacity to pay attention to anything longer than an image macro. Sometimes I fear that the essay is the only thing standing between the inane tweet and the utter degradation of the human mind in the digital age. Baron Friedrich von Hügel once advised his niece, Gwendolyn Green, to “Beware of the first clarity; press on to the second clarity.” In a world that has reduced almost all information intake to a rapid-fire succession of first clarities, how on earth are we to find that second clarity? The answer will be by learning once again to read, and in the systolic and diastolic pulses of clear articulation and careful reading lie the heartbeat of a crucial kind of educational formation: if we will not attend, we will be stupid. 

Lastly, writing essays—extended studies of a subject, journeys through ideas, clear reflections upon or articulation of a concept—stands me in what I regard to be a noble tradition of journalism. I don’t mean journalism as pure reporting, but I mean the latent, and often forgotten, power of the journal: that is, a collection of writings that forms a community of readers. Writers are convicted of the need to speak the truth, and they articulate those truths for a growing community of readers who feel a “Yes.” “Yes. This articulates what I have felt. These words, in some small way, resonate with the ambitions and desires of my heart.” Consider for a moment the pedigree of this tradition and I think you’ll see what I mean: without publication and community, there would have been no Reformation, no Gandhi, no Martin Luther King, Jr., and no Inklings. Communities are not formed around tweets; they gather around ideas, clearly articulated, written words that speak to the condition of our states, our souls, and our ambitions. If there is any hope for bringing our world out of the morass of inept thinking and contemptuous hot-takes, then that hope lies in the recovery of the essay as a way of intellectual formation.

That’s why I still love the essay—because despite the crushing conformity of a school system, I’ve found a joy in clarity that the essay is unparalleled in promoting, a clarity I believe we desperately require if we are to stem a tide of stupidity, and a clarity and attention that might just provide a bright glimmer of hope for gathering together a community around something good, beautiful, and true. 

I said at the outset that there were two reasons why I still blog, and the second is this: I continue to blog because I have a sense of responsibility. I have been a pastor now since 2007, and have been blogging since 2010. Writing for me has always been first and foremost an activity of obedience—I felt quite strongly that the Lord told me to write in 2010. I have been trying to obey that command ever since. But as I watched my communities, and took stock of the information they were receiving online, I realized early on that if I didn’t speak some clarity into the sea of information, confusion would uncontestedly win the day. To speak has since become an act of pastoral responsibility. I must do all in my power to model clarity of thought and reflection for the sake of my people, my communities of faith. In the interim, and over the years, many people have subsequently asked me to write about various subjects. I now have a responsibility to them, as well. 

So, I try, and hold up my flickering candle of analog essays against the megawatt digital flash of the modern information highway. Like Dylan Thomas, I shall refuse to “go gentle into that good night,” instead I will “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Doubtless, I’m far too insignificant to make any real difference—and you can comfortably detect and dismiss me on the grounds of my obvious delusions of journalistic grandeur. But perhaps—and to mix my metaphors with glee—my tiny and obedient candle, faithfully lit, may act as a mustard seed for light, truth, and faith among a few. 

A Long Erosion in the Same Direction: Trump, Evangelicals, and the Poison of Conspiracy Theories

Throughout the past five years I have regularly criticized Donald Trump, and while it remains true that I personally dislike him, that personal dislike has been neither the substance nor source of my criticisms. Instead, my attention has focused on what his presidency and actions have meant for, and within, the community of Christians of which I am a member. I am an Evangelical, and these past years—under the explicit influence and impact of Trump—have revealed many things about Evangelicals that reflect poorly on the Gospel we claim to advocate.

I think we’ve made a bad deal.

I have found, speaking as a Christian to Christians, something deeply troubling in the easy alliance between our tribe and this president. This president has been a Bad Moral Example—he speaks and acts in ways in which we would not allow for our children. The ready defense of his many indiscretions makes a mockery of our public witness—we who claim to uphold the importance of integrity in our public officers have, strangely, given this man a pass. In the end, we look like people who are more hungry for power than for justice. We are the inevitable losers in this exchange.

To pour salt on these wounds, in recent years Christians have increasingly turned upon one another when they criticize Trump. Certain members of the Evangelical world are all too ready to question the credentials and faithfulness of anyone who dares to publicly criticize this particular president. The rhetoric of divisiveness (us/them, conservatives/the libs), the sloganeering and name calling (snowflake, libtard, MAGA), and the all-or-nothing thinking (“Trump’s presidency is the last hope for America!”), have combined in such a way that the Good Guys and Bad Guys are now determined not by their faithfulness or clear thinking but by—ironically enough—a form of political correctness. These factors bear a strange fruit indeed when an upright figure like John Piper becomes an enemy of Evangelicalism for daring to criticize Trump.

Nietzsche once ironically wrote of a “long obedience in the same direction.” His words were ironic because, despiser of Christian rules and regulations as he was, he recognized in them a consistent source of beauty and goodness in the world. But now I fear that we Evangelicals stand together at the end of a long erosion in the same direction—that we Christians, who for so long have warned of the dangers of the slippery slope, have become the victims of one; that, having cozied up to a form of power, we have allowed that power to corrupt our witness.

This corruption has reached a peak in the last weeks. Despite all of the alarming characteristics within Evangelicalism that have been exposed by the Trump presidency, none has been more dangerous—or more toxic to our faith and witness—than those that have emerged in the conclusion of his presidency. I speak specifically with regard to the claims of widespread conspiracy and election fraud. These claims, and our belief in these claims, present perhaps the gravest threat of all to our Christian witness. Allow me to explain why.

I should begin by noting that I grew up near Chicago, and Illinois basically wrote the book on election fraud. It is, indeed, a Thing. It happens, and when corruption reaches a certain stage in civic operations, it becomes difficult to accomplish anything without corruption. But I also know that the resources required to commit a fraud at the level required to hoodwink an entire national election beggars belief—organization, secrecy, money, they simply aren’t there. I’ll tell you why I think this way. When I was young and driving at night—especially late at night—I used to listen to a syndicated radio program called Coast to Coast AM. The program was great fun. They regularly interviewed alien abductees, discussed the Kennedy assassination, and talked endlessly about the mysteries of Area 51. The content was absurd, but at night, driving alone in your car, the voice through the radio worked its comforting magic and became strangely believable. One night, the host was interviewing a former CIA agent. The host was asking questions about government conspiracies, about cover-ups and secrets, and in two short sentences the former agent put a pin to the balloon that is basis of many U.S. Government Conspiracy theories. He said, “The people who run the CIA are basically like the Post Office. Do you think they’re organized enough to keep a thing like this secret?” With that, the absurdity of a nationwide, massive coverup became clear as day. It’s impossible. Nobody knows how to keep quiet about these things. Nobody is organized enough. And therefore it is far more likely that the conspiracy theory is just that—an interesting but ultimately flimsy theory.

Here, with the 2020 election, we face a similar set of incredulous claims—and they are in-credulous in that they defy credulity. And yet we are challenged by many prominent Christian figures to believe that there are widespread conspiracies of election fraud. Eric Metaxas is a prominent example of this, and in articulating his convictions he has quite clearly linked support for Trump to support for the Christian faith. About a month ago, participating in an event called “Global Prayer for US Election Integrity,” Metaxas offered the following comments, drawing first on the distinction between the natural and supernatural,

If we’re going through a time of darkness where in the natural we’re not getting the evidence—or whatever—we need, there is no doubt that we must stand firm. It’s like somebody saying, ‘Oh, you don’t have enough evidence to believe in Jesus.’ We have enough evidence in our hearts. We know him and the enemy is trying harder than anything we have seen in our lives to get us to roll over, to forget about it. (video timestamp 11:52)

This is an astonishing train of thought, because in it something of the very structure of Christian belief has been coopted for political purposes. Metaxas is arguing that belief in election fraud is of a kind with belief in the resurrection of Jesus; that faith might mean knowing a thing is true first and then finding the evidence later; that the nature of faith is belief in the absence of evidence; and with all these there is the suggestion that the nature of belief is a kind of inner fervor. This, to my thinking, is the most troubling development of all, the most dangerous yet to our Evangelical witness.

There are many things to address here. In the first place, Christian faith is not a feeling, it is not a fervor, nor is it a kind of conviction in the absence of evidence. One of the most mis-read verses among Christians is Hebrews 11:1, which states “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” In my experience, Christian readers undergo a kind of hypnosis when reading these words—they read, “Now faith,” then gloss the middle of the sentence, and hear, “is unseen.” Faith is invisible, it is like the “leap of faith” in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where he doesn’t see the invisible bridge, but must step on it anyway. See? Faith is unseen. But that isn’t what the author of Hebrews says—he says that faith is the assurance, the substance, the material reality of things hoped for. If we look closely we will see that it is, in fact, hope that is unseen. Faith is most definitely seen.

This is, of course, not a new problem. American Christian teaching on faith and the nature of faith in has for too long relied on a misplaced understanding of faith—our theology has been formed more by Stephen Spielberg than by the Bible—and we have allowed ourselves to believe that faith means clinging to things without evidence. This kind of belief—faith as fervor, faith as belief without evidence—characterizes not Christianity, but Mormonism. The book of Mormon documents rivers, cities, and events that don’t’ exist and never happened. No external evidence corroborates the events of the Book of Mormon, and therefore faith for Mormons very much means believing in things without evidence. When Christians ask us to believe in election fraud, even when there is no evidence, then the structure of their ‘faith’ looks more Mormon than Christian.

And yet evidence is at the heart and soul of the Christian faith. On this, 1 John 1:1-3 is explicit, and I will attempt to make it even more explicit by highlighting the words of evidence in bold:  

What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life— and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us—what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.

The New Testament contains the writings of people who were eyewitnesses to the Christ event. They met him, touched him, heard him, sat with him, watched him die, and met him after he rose from the dead. The whole business of Christianity hangs precipitously on whether or not Jesus rose bodily from the dead, and even the early Christians knew the stakes. Paul himself, writing in 1 Corinthians 15:16-19, makes this explicit,

For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.

Do you see that? If it didn’t happen, we’re the stupidest people on the planet. Everything—and I mean everything—for Christians hangs on the testimony of these eyewitnesses.

This means that, extending from our belief in the evidence of the resurrection, we are a people who care a great deal about evidence, and along with evidence we care about truth. Our commitment is, in fact, uncompromising. Josef Pieper, in his book Happiness and Contemplation, puts it succinctly: “We want to know the truth at any cost, even if the truth should be frightful.” I want to know God, not my idea of God. I want to know the real Jesus, not my idea of Jesus. And if it were indisputably proved tomorrow that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead—if they produced without doubt the desiccated bones of Jesus Christ—then the nature of our faith is such that everything we Christians believe would be over. It would be a frightful truth, but it would be true; and we who have committed to the truth could do no other.

This is the quite the opposite, of course, to the tone set by many public Christians of late—who appear to be measuring the value of a news source based on its agreement with what I already believe. Upset with Fox News for reporting, well, the news—the news that Trump had lost and that no fraud was forthcoming—many conservatives have turned on Fox! The new measure of a news source’s worthiness is whether or not it agrees with me, and apparently masses of conservative Christians have migrated from Fox News to Newsmax, from Facebook to Parler. It begins to look as if agreement means more than information. We have truly entered into strange waters when a media figure like Metaxas wields more authority among Christians than a seasoned pastor like Piper.

But a further reason why claims like Metaxas’s are so damaging is precisely because as Christians we ask other people to believe things. We are in the business of faith, of belief—that’s arguably our main business in the world. What we do is ask people to believe—things like our testimony, our witness to the resurrection of Jesus, the trustworthiness of our tradition, and our commitment to goodness, and truth, and virtue.

But all this is at risk, because what we ask people to believe are real things. Thing that really happened. The basis of the Christian faith is the belief that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, bodily, on the third day after his crucifixion. We believe this because eleven men and three women saw him that day, and then most of them died violently never abandoning their conviction that Christ was alive. They handed their testimony on to others, who met and experienced the risen Jesus, so that today—two thousand years after the event—we believe in the resurrection of Jesus in the same kind of way that we believe Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on the 15^th of April, 1865. It happened. People saw it, and told us about it, passing it on.

Christian faith is not a conspiracy theory. The conspiracy depends upon secrets, deception, hidden evidence, and suggestive connections between events. Christian faith depends on openness, clarity, sound reasoning, and an unbroken line of eyewitness testimony. Consider the words of Chuck Colson, one of Nixon’s advisors, and the only one of his associates who was tried and convicted for the events related to the Watergate scandal. Reflecting on these events years later, he wrote the following in his autobiography, Born Again:

I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world—and they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.

Colson has nicely outlined the difference between conspiracy-faith, and Christian-faith—the conspiracy cannot sustain itself, it will break, and under pressure the truth will out; Christian faith is ongoing, it doesn’t break, and under pressure its original adherents refused to break. Their testimony was proved true. So should it be with us who claim Christ.

Therefore when we—whose entire eternity is wagered on the belief in the trustworthiness of these events—when we abuse our belief by associating it with baseless conspiracy theories, when we allow our cultural fears to override overwhelming evidence, then this promises immeasurable damage. What is at stake is more than an election, more than our rights, more than America; what is at stake is our ability to ask people to trust us when we tell them that a man rose bodily from the dead and that belief in him is the means of salvation for humans.

In the end, the more incredible the beliefs we demand of people, the more incredulously they will regard our actual beliefs. It was bad enough when society began to associate the term ‘Evangelical’ with Trump; now, because of our tarnishing of belief, they will associate our disposition of faith with Trump’s fraudulent election claims. Inasmuch as Trump will inevitably fail to execute this particular lie, our faith will be tarnished alongside him. That’s why our evangelical association with conspiracy theories is so very dangerous: because if you are ever again going to ask someone to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a condition for their salvation, you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror about what other things you have linked to that belief.