Snake Handling in the Streets
Patriotic meditations on the separation of church and state.
”Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to your music. They use your music to listen to their equipment”
There’s an image that I cannot get out of my mind when I think about Minneapolis, a city that for some time will not mean ‘Prince’ for the first time in my lifetime. That is the image of Renee Good happily honking her horn and turning her steering wheel back and forth. She is dancing in her front seat. She is telling the truth and shaming the devil. It resembles nothing less than the ecstatic performances I witnessed as a child at West Adams Foursquare Church where women danced in dizzy circles, speaking in tongues while the ministers yells “Satan, I rebuke you!”.
If you’ve ever witnessed this phenomenon then you know it is both profound and surreal. We called it ‘getting the Holy Ghost’, and its regular and predictable occurrence is one of the reasons that many black churches have a hierarchy of ushers. For there is a time and a place for ‘catching the spirit’ and it is bracketed by the discipline of the liturgy. The minister will orchestrate not only his own message but the tone and pace of the musicians and choir. He will turn the heat up until someone catches fire.
This is deeply ingrained the the tradition of the Pentecostal church. I believe that it is part of a millenarian spirit. If you are looking for wars and rumors of wars, if you believe you are living in the end times, if you see yourself in the middle of radical transformation and the coming of a new world order, then you cannot just sit still for that. You will sing a new song unto the Lord, may your words be sung from mountains high. You will speak in tongues, you will lay hands and cure the sick, and in some places, they handle snakes. This is not some passive rite, this is evangelical activism. You will jump and shout and you will be encouraged to do so from the pulpit, from the band, directed by the ushers, singing with the choir. I don’t know what Jung would call this kind of enthusiasm, I’m not an atheist. But I’m sure atheists have their terms. I’m not a political activist either, but I think that’s what I’m seeing in the streets.
Such a Christian tradition entails a deep investment. The investment begins with the association of ecstatic joy of unburdening yourself in the presence of your fellow churchgoers, ‘the community of saints’ because that is the church. Over the years you don’t go to church to worship and pray and dance in the aisles. You don’t go to church for the music. You go to church because it’s your church. The investment is sunk. The glory is about your glorious church and a class of goodness comes from the people and the pastor and the pastor’s family and all of the ministries. This inversion is never quite so clear as when there is a new member to be introduced. They are there for the altar call and know nothing else about the organization, the edifice, the policies and procedures, the ways and means of saints. They only want to be saved. The church is always there to save, but that’s not why the saved are there.
The Canonical and the Spiritual
As soon as one goes to Catholic church, the explicit rules behind the rites and rules are made clear. At least is was for me. There is a tight discipline in the messaging, in the liturgy, in the language, in the form and fashion. There is an explicit distinction between the laws of Man and the laws of God, and the imperfection of the World must compel your naive and sinful soul to understand the higher calling towards which you will be instructed by the clergy and the Sacraments.
The Catholic church polices behavior on a weekly basis, and even more when you are engaged in their parochial activities, whether that be attending school or living in the nunnery. People forget that priests and nuns live free in neighborhoods on Church property. One is called to be Christlike, to be Holy with the understanding that it is impossible because of Original Sin, and yet it is so simple to be lawful.
It is this coexistence, started by Christianity, that gives us something unique, by us, I mean that the very way that Christianity flowered under Roman rule reduced its set of governances to the spiritual rather than to everything. People might be confused by Islam’s directions for conquest and government, but for the Mohammedans as for the Hebrews, their religion contained all of the rules for living, not merely for the life of the mind, or the life of the spirit.
We contemporary Americans hear all of the time, that people want to be ‘spiritual’ but not belong to a church. Without statistical evidence, I would say that mostly means that people want to have their own spiritual discipline rather than adopt the discipline of an established religion. A church polices. A church directs. You belong to the church. That’s what people want. This is what Robin Hanson calls a ‘Thick Dependency’
We are parts of many social units. In those we see as “thick”, we are more okay being partisan and wanting other members to share many loyalties and cultural features with us. In “thin” units, we are instead more tolerant and tend to allow everyone who doesn’t violate basic norms. […] families, clubs, firms, professions, churches, neighborhoods, cities, nations, and world.
The Government Commons
People also want to belong to their political parties. What is the purpose of government? I would say that as well as I understand and defend Western Civilization that this purpose is to administer justice, law and order for the purposes of defending rights, security and property. In doing so, it secures the general welfare. That it doesn’t overreach is its measure of liberty. That its policing is not prejudicial is its measure of authoritarianism. It must keep these in balance. Most importantly, that it respects the traditions of religion is something that is critical. I would say that most of the challenges of governments in the world today is the extent to which their secular laws don’t infringe on religious canonical laws. Allow me to elaborate.
Contemporary Western Civ takes a great deal of its common law and traditions from Christendom, that is the time in which Church and State were a singular continuum of authority, rarely in competition for the attention of the people. For arbitrary sake let’s say Martin Luther broke that unity and then Henry VIII broke it further. On the other hand Marx, Lenin & Mao unified it by stomping out religion and created in the overarching state, a secular religion. What else could a cultural revolution be, but the supremacy of the secular law whose clerics were the political leaders, and whose church was modern media?
In my life, I parroted ‘godless commies’ almost instinctively, and I have had the interesting combination of life experiences that allowed me to see (among many influences) Black Nationalism, Catholic discipline, Pentecostal spiritualism and Progressive politics lead different aspects of my education. But I find it particularly significant that in terms of principle, Americans have had a surfeit of choices from which to choose. One could be ‘spiritual’ without religious discipline. One could be ‘moral’ without legal sanction. One could be ‘righteous’ without political legitimacy. One could be ‘patriotic’ without official duty. Or as Timothy Leary exhorted, one could be none of the above and simply drop out of society with some measure of intellectual integrity.
Yet in the end, all individualism fails because without some communal defense of liberty, anyone can get cancelled and hung out to dry. This is the lesson people like Renee Good learned the hardest way. Individuals are not sovereign. What goes on inside your head, whatever it is that makes you dance and shout does not matter unless you are covered by some institution of the people. “You and what army?” is always a relevant question, or as I say here “Who’s your Leviathan?” As I have mentioned before, people may break the law and that may be heroic, but which organization of lawbreakers outlive the state?
The USA is not a feudal kingdom, it is a great sovereign power. It is our ultimate Leviathan. What ails us is this: As citizens, we have forgotten our patriotic obligations. We are not clear in what we owe each other through state vs non-state organizations.
If we do not fight in coordination with each other to defend legal sanction, religious discipline, intellectual integrity and political legitimacy, we will all be brittle, vulnerable and balkanized. These are our patriotic obligations to our nation.
Altar Call
I am calling out the atheists, for no particular grudge of mine, but because of where we are in the history of Western Civilization. Where we are in history is that we have not evolved government and governance to handle matters of the spirit. Without having read the book, I’d wager that Samuel Huntington would argue that we Americans would necessarily have to respect our culture, religion, history and language to preserve our civilization.
So where would people who have no place for religion expect a particular sort of social patriotic obligation to arise and be maintained? I don’t know, so I’m jumping to the conclusion that without any god on the Leviathan side of the equation they only would expect their patriotism to defend legal sanction, intellectual integrity and political legitimacy. So their spirit is not maintained or policed by anything approaching religious discipline. This is not to say atheists don’t have spirits to maintain or that culture has no effect on their spirits, but it suggests to me that they would overweigh those other aspects. In other words, overweigh the legal, intellectual and political and dismiss the weight of the soul. Such a person would negate everything about someone they could legally, intellectually or politically overcome.
Nor am I trying to say that atheists are the only sorts of persons who would contribute to an imbalance of patriotic obligations or even some discounting of them. But ultimately we have to consider the nature of all of our obligations in defense of our civilization and recognize that it’s going to be hundreds of years, if ever, before we isolated the strengths of cultural & spiritual edification and ingest them into some fourth branch of government at the express expense of religious freedom. I for one will fight against any ideas in support of The Department of Soul or as Orwell named it, the Ministry of Truth.
Moreover there is a warning that has been adequately provided by the examples of ‘godless commies’ and their cultural revolutions that necessarily come at the cost of liberty. Not just individual liberty, but the way justice is dispensed in society and the close policing of social behavior.
In the meantime, why not just dance at church?
Sanctuary or Sacrilege?
So we ask ourselves, as we must, how is it that Americans of a particular sort are engaging politics with an ecstatic fervor that puts them onto the streets in performative or kinetic conflict with agents of the state? Well, I’m making the case that it is a lack of spiritual nourishment coming from their normal cultural routine.
It is the unfortunate fact of life that when people of any sort decide to engage against the secular law enforcement, it is wholly different from simply not going to church or declaring oneself as ‘spiritual but not religious’. We are indeed free to protest. We are free to carry arms. We aren’t at liberty to cross law enforcement, but we are free to try.
Which brings up a very interesting question. What if Renee Good were actually singing a gospel song in her horn honking ecstasy? What if it was her minister that encouraged her to fight agents of Satan posing as government law enforcement? What if one is convinced that some government actors are sinful? There is a certain amount of our culture which is essentially myopic in this regard because so little of what we Americans protest and cancel each other for is rooted in tractable religious conscientious objection. Not that I would leave atheists out, nor do I believe that the law does or must, but clearly there has been a lot of spontaneous protest mixed in with organizationally backed countercultural activism. Here we are into a foggy realm of evangelical action which is neither doctrinally sound or philosophically consistent. Everybody has their placard. The swiftness through which citizens have infiltrated and ratted out domestic cells of kinetic activists is one testimony. The other is how such spontaneous groups have got up the nerve to invade and interrupt church services.
Consider the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center. It’s a funding magnet resting on laurels established during the Civil Rights era. Like any other non-profit, it exists in free space established by the First Amendment. But is it as consistent as a religion? Could it offer sanctuary? How indeed might an elected official or government bureaucrat who has some fidelity to such an organization act in harmony with its precepts and recuse themselves from certain government actions or responsibilities? Indeed what happens when what SPLC wants to rebuke is an entire federal agency?
Surely once upon a time there were organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that legitimately represented actual religious leaders and their congregations. Today, any billionaire can pick a passion and fund a non-profit or NGO and direct something which is only legitimated by our convention of believing these entities are not subversive of our society. So what are we offering? Are we merely marketing creeds as if they were the political equivalent of Coachella, offering a parade of nihilist counterculture masquerading as free expression? Where is the truth? Where is the beauty? What of the commons? There is no general welfare in that aim. There is only special pleading.
What Politics Can’t Do
What politics can do is shape policy. That’s the point. Policy cannot be shaped and snapped into place like the response of a search engine, or the corrections of a spell checker. As a society, we have entertained cultures of fast fashion and impermanent fads, and of families that dissipate within two generations like Brad & Angelina. In fact, famous couples desperately try to keep their kids anonymous to hide nepotism. We create multi-phasic alternating currents. Everything seems to be detached not only from reality, but from the search for understanding reality. Instead young people are taught to find something extreme that never existed before and live for that. This is why Facebook renamed itself to Meta.
What politics cannot do is exist for the sole purpose of becoming the only avenue to civilizing our society with respect to its history and future. Politics is an ideologically driven struggle for power which always generates excluded middle grounds for which there are inadequately disciplined institutions to take up the slack. I may sound hopeless for industry, the arts, the sciences and academia but I don’t mean to be. It’s just that they have been polluted more by political strategies and tactics than politics and government have been enlightened by the saving graces of those institutions, especially as regards the search for truth and beauty and the purposes of human flourishing.
With that caveat, I understand why people are reluctant to participate in politics, as I am myself, but that reluctance should never diminish our patriotism and our civic responsibilities to ourselves. Our civilization, government and society deserve our better contributions. They deserve our patriotism. We have an obligation to that as citizens. So we find ourselves on a battlefield in which citizenship literally does not matter - we have people committed to the oppositionalism of the moment rather than the continuity of our best commitments.
Rethink
We need to make America the instrument of fidelity to the principles that will make the excellence of Wester Civilization shine brightly. We need to clear the signal path of extraneous noise. It starts with responsible citizenship, and the proper defense of rights, security and property. Only when we do it right will we see that patriots use all voices to listen the high fidelity of our system.
