God's Country?

I've just finished reading an essay called "God's Country", in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, by Walter Russel Mead. The full essay can be read for free, and is well worth the time. Mr. Mead has laid out a historical overview of American Protestantism, dividing it into fundamentalist, evangelical, and liberal camps, and he offers some observations on the directions that the United States is now taking.

He paints in broad strokes, and I will summarize his argument in even broader ones. In his view, it was Darwinism above all that basically divided early American Protestantism into three types. Fundamentalista and evangelicals place great importance on Biblical literalism and Christian doctrine than do liberals, for whom Christian ethics form the core of their faith. But while fundamentalists and evangelicals both read the Bible literally, the former are the main intellectual driving force behind creationism.

Fundamentalists are basically pessimistic about the capacity for human beings to create a better world while evangelicals and liberals share the basic American trait of optimism about that or any other goal. In contrast to the fundamentalist tendency to withdraw from the world into a pure Christianity, evangelical and liberal Protestants both believe in engaging the non-Christian world; both of the latter groups believe in missionary work in the sense of service, but liberals are less at ease with proseletyzing, which is of utmost importance to evangelicals.

Mr. Mead notes that evangelicals have grown the most as a percentage of the American population, while liberal Protestants have decreased significantly. This represents a marked change from the middle and late decades of the 20th century, when liberal Protestants may be said to have been in the ascendancy among our public officials and to have promoted values that are often defined as secular humanist as much as Christian.

I am much encouraged by any effort to make distinctions among Christians, since the general impression many people in the world have is that the United States is simply becoming fundamentalist, or simply becoming Christian, or merely theocratic. Properly speaking, the country seems to be taking a turn toward its evangelical roots, which is not the bad news that many think it is. I'm glad that Mr. Mead has described the concern of evangelicals with humanitarian and human rights issues, foremost among them the abolition of slavery, but also now, under the Bush administration, such things as increased aid to Africa to combat AIDS and to end Sudan's wars; human trafficking and the sexual enslavement of women and children has also come to the fore of their efforts.

In short, evangelicals belong no less than liberals in the ethical tradition that produced abolitionism and American optimism about moral progress in the world. The same might be said about the civil rights movement, which was in many ways inspired by both liberal Protestants like Reinhold Neibuhr (a major influence on the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.) and by evangelical faith among African-Americans.

The country is, then, not turning into a monster by becoming more "Christian," nor is it even turning away from the things of which it can be proudest. What is happening to America, at least as far as its Christianity, is not something radically new.

I do think that what is happening in a more general sense is worrisome. I mean that the United States is an empire and is behaving ever more like one. The political power that it wields in the world is what worries me, when it is wielded in such ways as to produce, for instance, the invasion of Iraq.

Of course, political power and religion do not exist separately, and there is every reason to question the relationship between the two. Religious faith, by giving us a sense that God is blessing the country and its actions, can produce over-confidence and diminish self-criticism and humility. But then, again, so can secular humanism and liberal Christian ethics. If Iraq is the great overconfident act of America during this new time when evangelical Christianity has been in the ascendent, certainly Vietnam is the counterpart for that time when American presidents were liberal Protestants who believed in moral progress.

For me it seems rather that Christian precepts, whether derived literally or liberally from the Bible and other Christian traditions, must constantly inform the country and guide it against error.

One specific worry I do have comes from something described in Mr. Mead's article: the evangelical belief that the modern state of Israel is Biblically prophesied. Mr. Mead notes that in the Bible, God promises to bless Abraham's descendants and to bless those who bless them; therefore, many evangelicals believe that God will literally bless the United States if the country blesses Israel.

I am Roman Catholic, and I have always been most comfortable, by far, with liberal Protestantism, which may be the reason that I am more comfortable with the kind of support-and-criticism that the United States once gave to Israel under administrations like Truman, JFK's, and even one so recent as the elder Bush's, rather than with the pure support that seems to exist now. And I am troubled by what Mr. Mead points out, that evangelicals are unmoved by criticism of Israel, since they just see criticism as further sign that Israel is favored by God. Even if evangelical attitudes toward Israel can be said to be more sophisticated than this, it seems what we have here is the danger of issuing a blank check to a worldly government and not letting fair criticism come through. There is a Christian tradition of just war, and it would seem to me that whatever form of Christianity is dominant needs to embrace it more -- and continue to develop it.

An article well worth reading.

Biography of Anne Frank

I have recently become very ambivalent about sharing my thoughts on blogs, but I do want to say something about a book I read over the weekend, Anne Frank: The Biography, by Melissa Muller.

I am a slow reader, but this one (like a book I read last month, Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts) took me less than two days to read. The style is simple and selfless, entirely in service of the subject. The book is gripping simply due to the content, which varies greatly. I felt as if I read three books, in fact. The first of these consists of the years before the Franks went into hiding. Ms. Muller tells us vividly about what was going on in Germany in the eyes of ordinary people like Anne's father, Otto. It is gripping to read, with tragic hindsight, about people's decisions in those days to leave or not to leave Germany. Their growing fear is palpable, and if you've only read the diary, it may be especially interesting for you to read about the impact on the Franks of Hitler's occupation of Holland, which took place two years before Anne began writing in her diary.

Perhaps because World War II has been a lifelong interest of mine, I flew through the first half of the book in a single brief seating. Then came the years in hiding, which is a very different part of the biography -- the second of three "books" or distinct experiences that I had. The prelude to the hiding consists of a portrait of the "external" world, in which Anne herself appears as an extroverted child, one with a personality more difficult than I had imagined, and one who was not yet aware of the larger history taking place around her; I dare say she can be the least interesting element of the first part of the biography. But once we come to the years in hiding, Anne is forced to become more introspective, and her inner life, open to us, commands your attention fully.

This part of the biography actually becomes something of a meditation on family life and human intimacy. My reading slowed down, but to my own surprise the content was actually more interesting than the large-scale historical portrait. This was really more than I had expected from a biography of one girl -- it turned into a very sympathetic account of Anne's whole family and its individual members. The discussion of a formerly unpublished diary entry concerning the Franks' marriage, which delves as well into the issue of censorship, is, I think, the highlight of the book. It is obvious that Ms. Muller is both sympathetic to the protaganists and committed to the truth, which makes the subsequent routine turn to other well-trod subjects, like Anne's own love life, appear like an anticlimax.

Still, the story does not flag, and we arrive finally at the "third" section of the biography, the account of the betrayal and the concentration camps. To say that this material is gripping is to say nothing. Yet I was sincerely disturbed by the details here. From a historical point of view, what Ms. Muller has highlighted to great effect is how everything the Nazis did was intended not just to destroy, but also to humiliate. This had already been clear in Ms. Muller's chronicling of the sequence of restrictions placed upon the lives of Dutch Jews, which are rightly described as "malevolent." Here at the close of the book we see it repeatedly, as when Ms. Muller describes the disorientation that Jewish prisoners must have felt upon disembarking from trains at Auschwitz and being greeted with high floodlights and whippings. This is large-scale history from the personal vantage point. Too often what the Nazis did, because it is analyzed in an attempt to understand how it came about and how it functioned, is remembered in the abstract, so that, for instance, the restrictions on Dutch Jews can seem merely like the necessary steps to genocide rather than the malevolent expressions of hatred that they also were.

In the end the biography, though impossible to put down, becomes very hard to read. The only negative thing I can say about the last part of the book is that it is so horrifying, it overwhelms a reader's reception of the gifts in the earlier sections; those have to be taken in again under a second reading.

There is nothing new about finding Anne Frank's story to be compelling. Millions of people have shared the same experience. What is new here is that the myth has been soaked in history. It has been set in historical detail, which makes the story stronger. Rather than destroyed, the myth, stripped of sentimentality, innacuries and other illusions, appears more attractive than ever, as historical truth.