This is not a teaching of popular religion now. It has become commonplace to see those who pose as moralists and as exemplary Christians exposed in some particularly squalid act or practice, and to see them driven back, not by conscience but by exposure, upon the mercy of Jesus, who, it would seem, died to neutralize the consequences of scurrilous behavior. So far as their coreligionists are concerned, they demonstrate the benefits of having been saved, which include using Christ as a strategy of concealment in the first place, with that great mercy always up their sleeves, in case things sometime get embarrassing. Edwards says this about a style of piety flourishing among us now:
As the love and joy of hypocrites, are all from the source of self-love; so it is with their other affections, their sorrow for sin, their humiliation and submission, their religious desires and zeal: everything is as it were paid for beforehand, in God’s highly gratifying their self-love, and their lusts, by making so much of them, and exalting them so highly, as things are in their imagination. ’Tis easy for nature, as corrupt as it is, under a notion of being already some of the highest favorites of heaven, and having a God who does so protect ’em and favor ’em in their sins, to love this imaginary God that suits ’em so well, and to extol him, and submit to him, and to be fierce and zealous for him.
Far better to have a lively fear of hypocrisy, granting that it is a subtle adversary, an endless temptation, as all those old divines agree, and given the fact that Jesus himself denounced it. From Wycliffe forward, the dignity of the individual was assumed to involve his or her being capable of responsibility for his or her thought and understanding, which meant a serious familiarity with the Bible, and the kind of self-awareness the powerful pious in his time and others so utterly lacked. Faith is as close to, and different from, presumption as virtue is close to, and different from, hypocrisy. These subtleties fascinated the New Englanders, who seem never to have doubted that they were an issue for any mind in any moment.
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It has been usual to treat the great school of writers who emerged from American Puritan culture in the nineteenth century as having put aside the constraints of the old faith and stepped into a larger conceptual world. But in fact the striking kinship among them suggests they found source and stimulus nearer home. Whatever else might be part of a Puritan worldview, the exalted mind is central for them as it is for all these writers. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, share a fascination with the commonest elements of life as they are mediated and entertained by perception and reflection. The Puritans spoke of their religion as experimental, that is, experiential. Sacredness is realized in the act of attention because reality is communicative and the mind is made, grace assisting exquisite effort, to experience its meaning. Dickinson and Melville propose minds brilliantly critical of their own perceptions, opening a vastness of suggestion in every shortfall, like a Puritan sermon. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman see through all convenient or dismissive categories to the actual, the vital and essential. In every case their protagonist is the perceiver. The beauty they achieve has the character of acuity rather than refinement. It equalizes. The absence of shrines and rituals and processions that interpreted the world and guided understanding of it in England and Europe reflected, as absence, a sense of immanence that gave theological meaning to anything in itself in the moment of perception—a buzzing fly, a blade of grass. The exalted mind could understand the ordinary as visionary, given discipline and desire.
The seventeenth-century English Puritan John Flavel wrote in A Treatise of the Soul of Man that “the soul of the poorest child is of equal dignity with the soul of Adam.” He said this about a human being: “It is a most astonishing mystery to see heaven and earth married together in one person; the dust of the ground, and an immortal spirit clasping each other with such dear embraces and tender love; such a noble and divine guest to take up its residence within the mean walls of flesh and blood. Alas, how little affinity, and yet what dear affection is found betwixt them” while breath “sweetly links” them. Whitman’s addresses to his soul might have had thoughts like this behind them. Whitman and any of his contemporaries might have read Flavel. He, or someone of similar mind, might well have come up in a sermon.
Perhaps we have given ourselves lives and expectations that are too small to sustain the customs and institutions the Puritans left to us. Or perhaps we will recover languages that can acknowledge the great mystery and dignity of humankind, which is essential to the best they left us. Here, at Harvard Divinity School, is the perfect place for such work to be done.
Slander
Trinity Cathedral, Little Rock, Arkansas: February 25, 2017
My mother lived to be ninety-two. She spent her last decades, her widowhood, in a condominium in a retirement community near my brother and his family in Charlottesville, Virginia. She had lived a very private, sheltered, small-town life, never employed, devoted to her flowers and her dogs. She was a sharp-minded woman, aware and proud of her intelligence to the end of her life. She was complicated, and my relationship with her was never easy, but it was interesting, which was probably better for me, all in all. With a little difficulty we finally reached an accommodation, an adult friendship. Then she started watching Fox News.
She had a circle of friends who watched Fox News, then gathered to share that peculiar salacious dread over coffee cake. My mother would call to ask me if I thought the world was coming to an end, which put me at something of a loss. I would tell her that, according to Jesus, we would not know the day or the hour, but she would always have just been updated by one of those commentators she and her circle called by their first names, as if they were trusted friends. The authority of Jesus was not quite robust in the light of breaking news. Sharia law! A war against Christmas! Who, she would say, would attack Christmas?! Just about nobody, of course, but the point of her question was not to doubt that the plot was afoot but to isolate these imagined malefactors from the human and American norm. These instances may sound absurd but they are real, and, like many things of their kind, they estranged and alienated a significant part of the population from those dark forces—I must include myself here—who would and could, for example, put a radical Kenyan Muslim in the White House.
I know I risk raising doubts about my mother’s soundness of mind when I say that she was deeply persuaded of the truth of what she heard from Sean and Megan and Bill. But she was at least as acute as any of the millions who watched with her and learned to share the same view of the world, and, crucially, of the country.
Toward the end of her life, my mother began to be tormented by anxieties and regrets. I, her daughter, a self-professed liberal, was one of those who had ruined America. I would go to hell for it, too, a fact she considered both regrettable and just. She did shoulder some blame. She should have been far stricter than she was all those years ago when my character was still forming. A mother less Fox-saturated might have taken satisfaction from degrees and prizes, but to her they were proof that I was in league with the sinister Other; they were enhancements of a prominence I could only misuse. My mother lived out the end of her fortunate life in a state of bitterness and panic, never having had the slightest brush with any experience that would confirm her in these emotions, except, of course, Fox News. She went to her rest before she would have had to deal with the ignominy of my conversation with the president. I saw a clip of some Fox blondie saying that our conversation proved that Obama hated Christianity. Those who have read my books might think me an odd choice of interlocutor if that were the case, but having struggled in the tangled web of my mother’s reasoning, I know that the impassioned little commentator might actually have found a way to believe what she said. If not, the polarization she was at that moment exploiting and making worse meant there was precious little chance her listeners would pick up a copy of The New York Review of Books to read the conversation for themselves.
* * *
One mother, one life to live by which she would judge th
e fruitfulness of her own life, one twilight in which human mortality becomes at the same time mythic and real. I wish it could have ended better for both of us. What a weird intrusion, these loud voices shouting down memory and reflection and assurance, nullifying the most intimate kinship. My mother loved this country and was deeply persuaded that it was in peril, first of all in having tempted the wrath of God with all its liberalism. Again, this was not dementia. She and her friends were actually or virtually housebound. If they had kept their eyesight and their driver’s licenses, I have no doubt that some of them would have been out shopping for guns, as so many of the young and strong were doing at the same time for the same reasons.
This is, of course, the age of the weird intrusion. We have voices in our heads that can neutralize experience and displace the world we observe with a much more urgent and dramatic reality, a reality with a plotline and strongly identified characters, with villains bent on enormity and all that is sacred in desperate need of rescue. For my mother and her friends, this was excitement, a big dose of adrenaline, and its appeal in their circumstances is understandable, at least by comparison with its attraction for people who are healthy and mobile and who still enjoy some exposure to the world and some control over their lives. I remember when I was a child, walking out of a movie theater and finding the world outside utterly bland and dull. Now we can all impose Technicolor fantasies on that world, if we are so inclined. Infotainment they call it.
* * *
The text for today is from the Epistle of James 3:5–10:
How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed, and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.
This is very strong language indeed, cautioning against a sin we seldom hear mentioned and perhaps have no ready name for. James is not speaking of the lies we tell, although they would certainly fall within his condemnation, since to speak the truth is certainly to tame the tongue in some respects, depending on circumstances. He represents speech as literally inflammatory, as it can be even when what is said is possibly or arguably true or in fact true. Think of the role of informants and spies who have shaped history in often grievous ways by saying something true. Judas kissed Jesus in Gethsemane. The gesture is false because it is not an expression of love or respect, and it is true because it singles out the man Judas has promised to betray to the authorities. We all know people who speak damaging truth, often by violating confidences or by acting on an indifference to tact or kindness. James was clearly concerned with more than lying, more even than slander. He is categorical in his denunciation. The tongue is a world of iniquity, a restless evil, full of deadly poison. He offers no rule for the control of it, except that we remember that other human beings are made in the likeness of God and are owed the kind of respect he is owed.
John Flavel, a seventeenth-century English Puritan, considers the thought that we might all be judged twice, once when we die and again when the full consequences of our lives have played themselves out. I find myself turning to this idea often. He says this will not have occurred until no living mind remembers any slander, any injurious word that we have spoken. He was writing in the early days of mass literacy and print, so he would have meant the memory and effect of spoken words. No need for a pulpit or a soapbox now. Any one of us can bully and slander at will. So, in light of history, perhaps we should consider his suggestion very carefully. James says the power of the tongue is utterly disproportionate to the human person, like a bit to a horse or a rudder to a ship. This is truer in an infinite degree now that we have the means to multiply and perpetuate whatever proceeds from it endlessly.
Someone must have been the first to say that Jews poison wells and cause plague. Certain strata of Christendom saw advantage in focusing hostility on the Jews, which became catastrophic when these libels spread. The tongue made women into witches, dissenters into heretics, and for centuries horror swept the world. The tongue called for lynchings. We know that Christians suffered under the same mass aversion in the early days of the faith, that they were stigmatized with rumors of atheism and cannibalism and were persecuted on these grounds. But James is clearly speaking more generally. These conflagrations are not isolated phenomena. They are a pervasive consequence of the misuse of the human power of language. They are not the fault of others who defame the Christian community but potentially and actually their fault, our fault, whenever we speak without respect for the image of God, which is the only form in which a human being can ever present herself to us.
* * *
I keep returning in my mind to Flavel’s proposal, that we might face two judgments. Let us say that God is atemporal and omniscient. Let us say he is attentive to the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts. Then he can only be aware of the human context of a thought, the future history of a word. If some resentment or rage is building in a population, any of us might well share in it, justifying it to ourselves on the basis of the very consensus that will make it destructive, even lethal. That the same malice can simmer in a hundred thousand minds might lead us to believe that it must surely be based in something rational, that it is not simply another instance of the potential of ungoverned thought and language to breed firestorms. Surely we are beyond witch hunts and Jew-baiting and their like. Surely.
People enjoy sharing in consensus, especially when it allows us to indulge a guilty pleasure—to be among the despisers rather than the despised, to feel we have permission to express, if only to ourselves, hostilities we might otherwise find shameful. Catharsis can feel so good, and so can the strong sense of identity that comes with knowing who is with you and who is against you—whether this is true or not. The drama depends on your believing you have antagonists, even if a bit of invention is required to make them in any way sinister. But if our words and meditations are present to God’s sight, as we so often say they are, and if for him a thousand years are like a day, he might see in any of our thoughts and utterances the impulse that in a year, a decade, or a century will disrupt peace and destroy life. From his perspective, it could be a word spoken by anyone, an acquiescence in some ordinary meanness, that tips a nation toward offense, disgrace, brutality. In other words, we might, at any moment, at every moment, stand before God as in that second judgment, guilty for our part in crimes we do not quite intend and will not live to see.
I am increasingly persuaded that we Christians need to expand our moral universe and to find a way of thinking and speaking that allows us to acknowledge the complexity of a morality deserving the name. I hear people talk of “accepting Christ as their personal savior.” This is the threshold of salvation, by their lights, the narrow gate. But who is Christ? According to the Gospel of John, he was present at the Creation and central to it. Without him nothing was made that was made. I keep Greek images of Christ Pantocrator, the great figure of triumph and power, to correct for what seems to me a diminished sense of Jesus in Western religion. A diminished Christ is not Christ, just as a diminished God is not God. To put another object of worship in their place is idolatry.
Lately I have heard more frequently persons who consider themselves religious conservatives saying that those who are redeemed need not take their sins, or the sins of the redeemed in general, or their allies, too seriously. So great was the suffering of Christ, so precious his blood, so loving his nature, so profound his humbling that they can be up to things he specifically condemns, things that expose his name on earth to ridicule and contempt. And it will not matter at all from their point of view—which is to say, insofa
r as their personal salvation is concerned.
I would propose that this view of things turns on a faulty definition of sin. In the great majority of cases, a sin is injury done to another person, other people, whom, we must assume, God loves at least as much as he loves us. The loving-kindness Jesus models for us is very largely a matter of feeding and healing those in need of such care. The sins denounced by the prophets, or, if you prefer, by God through the prophets, are sins that create poverty and exploit and abuse the poor. Thou shalt not kill, steal, bear false witness. John Calvin says it is theft to fail to show anyone the honor due him, always implying James’s standard, the honor due the image of God. This standard was of great interest to the fourteenth century, and again to the Reformation, but I haven’t seen much attention paid to it in the last few centuries. A great lapse, a great loss. In any case, Jesus makes it clear that he is one among the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the imprisoned, which is very much to the same point. In the grandeur of his triumph he is also judge of the quick and the dead. We are never given to believe that he will overlook the scorn and injury done to the vulnerable. After all, in order to identify himself with them, he parted the heavens and became a slave obedient unto death.
Those who feel they have crossed a line into assured salvation look back on the rest of us as essentially deficient in the things the Lord requires—not lacking in justice and mercy, perhaps, but lacking in that special assurance that makes justice and mercy optional and humility a possible sign of weak faith. It is necessary, by the lights of this theology, that one believe in his or her redeemed condition, whether it follows from a conversion experience of some kind or is maintained through the doctrines and sacraments of a church. By extension, they must also believe that those who have the same theory and narrative of redemption are also saved. So they become in effect a faction whose loyalty is to itself, without ethical conditions, putting aside or radically devaluing the standards of Christian life, which can be seen by them as distracting from the free and sufficient act of God’s salvation. And so we have scandals in the church, and we have the collapse of standards in regard to public figures and organizations who are seen to advance the interests of this faction. Therefore the great gift of their Christianism to the country is the disruption and loss of a moral orientation that for cultural and historical reasons has always been Christian.