America: From Christ into the Void

Response to a letter speculating on America’s drift from Christian faith

Dear … :

I agree with a lot of your analysis of why the culture has drifted from Christianity. At least in immediate terms. You mostly evoke a shift that’s occurred over the past couple generations--reaching, say, back to our generation. And it works. But my own framework is different. I don’t only look at this shift through the lens of the choices of younger Americans against older, recently dominant generations.

Yes, it sure looks like what we have in America is the mass of the population making a conscious, informed choice for freedom and self-determination against the religious strictures and judgmentalism of the 1950s. But I don’t think masses in general make really “conscious, informed choices.” I think rather they are molded by the Zeitgeist, which gives them justifications for the thinking they adopt. This is true in every culture, and it’s true for ours. It’s true for both educated and uneducated. Among the “educated” only a very small minority will ever challenge currently fashionable thinking.

So, we in America assume we are following our desires and that those desires are self-chosen, but the truth is we’ve absorbed most of those desires from others. In this respect consumer behavior (as in the burning desire for some new fashion or product) is a microcosm of human behavior in general. Even including our choice of “beliefs” or ideological positions. We are monkeys.

When the writers cited in that Substack post underline that the West has replaced Christianity with a Void, what they mean is that our culture has made the Desiring Self the origin of all values. “Woe to you if you offend my Desiring Self!” You point out correctly that everyone worships something, but the problem with the Desiring Self is that it can’t in itself be a sane object of worship--or rather, the circularity of such worship means that the culture is bowing down to a Void. Worshipping oneself is an illness, not a civilizational model.

We Americans believe we champion freedom, and we do, but what has happened beginning in the last century is that our concept of freedom has shifted radically. The Founders of the 18th century, and really all of the historical West, would look at our way of talking about freedom and immediately see a glaring problem.

Notice that we don’t use the word “liberty” so much anymore. We use “freedom” to mean the same thing. But what we actually mean is something different. The shift in terminology is a tell.

Most ancient philosophers and most thinkers up through yesterday would look at our contemporary, “supremely free” Americans and insist: “No, you are not free.”

Why not? Because almost all thinkers from the western past recognized that one can be enslaved in multiple ways. One particularly destructive kind of enslavement was to be slave to one’s own desires. Thus liberty, in the true formulation, includes freedom from being led around by the nose by one’s own urges and whims. An adult who self-defines by what he desires or what gives him kicks (whether money, or sexual behavior, or fame) is not free.

Yes, the mid-20th century largely invented “the teenage years,” or rather made a big thing of them. It then immediately proceeded to extended them. I’d say, more or less, that this invention of the teenager ended by extending adolescence first to age 22, then to age 26, and now indefinitely. Why not be a 30-something teenager? It’s called Sex and the City. Why not be a 60-something teenager? Who can criticize you for it? “I have my right to fulfill my desires. If you say otherwise, you are OPPRESSIVE. You are HARMING me.”

Our culture is therapeutic, much of it arising in the wake of Freud. We equate health with being liberated from the harmful “repression” that civilization imposed on us. Civilization is the problem we must be cured of. What nobody seems to notice is that this ultimately means that barbarism is identical to health. Although most people reject Freud on on most things, and don't anymore read him, we still live in the house he built. And since we can't avoid enculturation, i.e. civilization, the double bind is making our whole culture ill.

Of course our invention and then extension of the teenage years is a luxury, possible only because of our stellar economic and military success following WW II. But if you look back at my point about freedom vs. liberty, you will see the cost. There is everywhere a kind of enslavement. To what? Not to the Christian God, not to the Nation, not to the Family Clan, but to one’s own circular round of frantic desiring.

This is the Void they are writing about. And it is dangerous for us as individuals, but also dangerous for us as a civilization. Our cultural industries are happy to keep dangling ersatz fulfilments in front of this Void, whether in the form of lifestyle upgrades, sexual identities, political posturing, etc. From The New Yorker to pop music trends to vibes-based campaigns for the presidency, all of it has the same tedious character.

Some of it is sophisticated. Certainly many of the cultural producers in question have high levels of “education.” But to the extent they continue to believe in ever-expanding self-definition and freedom, they’re shallow. They’re not asking the meaning of human being, the meaning of our being here, but rather planning the Next Thing. Because they assume we are heading somewhere, toward greater self-autonomy and justice and “liberation.” It’s a hollow utopianism that is too frantically busy to question itself. A narcissist in a hall of mirrors will never be liberated.

These points might clarify what I meant at the beginning by my different framework. I’m not looking at a shift of generations so much as a wider historical decline. What I see is the unfolding of a certain perversion in western ideas of what our liberty is, or what it’s for.

Some argue that this perversion was already baked into the cake of our 18th century Enlightenment project, i.e. it’s already there in our Founding. I’m not so sure of that. I think most of the problem stems from a warping of what used to be the western left, and the rise of this new warped to the status of dominant faith. But these are all complicated questions.

You ask what Christianity has to offer young people facing these major shifts. I’d say what it offers is what it has always offered. I notice that you mostly seem to define Christianity in terms of those things in the sexual revolution to which it said No. This makes sense, but then again, you will understand that this only makes sense in the present, a present that lives under a different religious dispensation, the religion of the Desiring Self. Of course the thing we will first notice about Christianity is that it says No to some key part of this new religion.

“Christianity is obsessed with sex!” we say.

Imagine a tribe that lives by pig farming coming to a Jewish village. “These people—their religion is all about pork! They’re obsessed with it!”

That’s what the accusation looks like to me. A culture that worships the Desiring Self and generates constant new niche sexual identities, making these identities the center of individual meaning--this culture accuses Christians of being obsessed with sex?

I must admit, however, that my longer historical lens tells me that if Christianity is viewed this way by current generations, it isn’t only because of the new religion cultivated by younger generations. The particular kind of Protestantism that dominated mid-20th century America shares some of the blame. That Protestantism had jettisoned much in Christianity and ended up with an easy-peasy bourgeois version of the faith that managed to make sexual sins the only sins one should condemn. This was not all American Protestants, of course, but was a defining tendency of the national faith.

Perhaps there’s little surprise in this development. Though pride is the primal Christian sin, pride and greed were endemic to America during those years of expansion. In our capitalist culture, they were even touted as “virtues.”

That American Protestantism was only one iteration of Christianity. It was recognizably Christian, yes, but rather hypocritical, no? The tragedy is that because of the flaws and manias of that version, the whole has been rejected. Baby thrown out with bathwater.

I have much more I could write about, sure. But I hope this gets at some of how I see this new American religion vs. what came before. I don’t at all think we’re getting closer to the truth, nor do I think we’re flourishing as a culture. Quite the contrary. We are sick. We are lost and groping in a Void. Because the Desiring Self is not the meaning of the universe.

Best,

Eric