Our house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, but one back corner faces our neighborhood’s main drag. Our neighbors, in the cool of the day, walk their dogs along this drag. The cat and I have learned to ignore the dogs. Stretched out on the mulch, the cat no longer even flinches when the unit’s fan cuts on.

But what do the neighbors think? We’ve partially hidden the unit with tall, willowy Pampas grass, but it’s easy to see us between the tall tufts. To complete the picture, I’ve thought about returning the neighbors’ discreet glances with my field glasses stored somewhere.

Above: Cat-Cat among the Pampas. (Tyger! Tyger! burning bright)

The mulch is our cat’s idea. He had a rough upbringing, growing up with a hundred other strays in Nashville. When we got him in February, the shelter made us sign papers that we’d accompany him if we let him outside. The cat, for his part, wants our company constantly and won’t stray ten yards from our doors. He signals each morning when it’s mulch time.

Together, Cat-Cat and I are getting domesticated.

My world is contracting. I spend time in Birmingham and Nashville, but I spend most of my days in between, in the small town of Columbia. In my mulch. I feel like Jonah in that last chapter on the outskirts of Nineveh, that great city. It’s just him and his gourd and his God.

Things are still happening in Nashville. ICE continues to persecute its Coptic residents. After a recent Coptic Orthodox service, one of the parishioners explained to me—in my capacity as a podcaster? Or as a white American?—that he and his people just want to live in peace.

To the Orthodox Copts, I’m a member of a privileged class. Maybe Jonah, as a member of an oppressed people, doesn’t fit my predicament. I’m more like the aristocrat in A Gentleman in Moscow, a book I’m reading that my brother, also recently retired, recommended. In the novel’s first pages, the Bolsheviks sentence the Count to life in a Moscow hotel. The well-traveled Count spends several of the subsequent pages in the company of the hotel’s one-eyed cat.

My world’s contraction has recently expanded. You’ve heard that Katie Couric had a several-hour memory-loss episode last month? So did I. When asked who was president, she thought it was Joe Biden? So did I.1

My episode came two days before hers. My siblings call her a copy cat.

Like Couric, I was diagnosed with transient global amnesia.2 But because last month’s was my second episode, and because most TGA episodes are “one and done,” I’m seeing a specialist at Vanderbilt in September to (hopefully) rule out seizures.

Meanwhile, I’m not allowed to drive. Never mind that I drove fine during my first episode fifteen months before. Never mind that Couric, by all accounts, acquitted herself well as a panelist during her episode, though she doesn’t remember saying a word. She’s jet-setting all over the place, I’m sure, while I’m spending more time in the mulch. There’s only so many times I can bum rides from Victoria or my dog-walking neighbors.

First I was mulched. Now I’m also grounded.

What if I found those field glasses? I could become a kind of suburban flâneur. Would that satisfy my public itch?

The eighteenth-century flâneur, of course, didn’t hide behind tall grass but walked the streets. Flâneurs were jostled by the crowds, but their movements, unlike the crowds’ movements, weren’t hurried or purposeful. The flâneurs’ very aimlessness made “things reveal themselves in their secret meaning,” as Hannah Arendt describes the idea.3 Flânerie remains an urban epistemology,4 a kind of shell collecting cum conchology along the urban shore.

Walter Benjamin, though, for whose writings, according to Arendt, “the flâneur became the key figure,”5 references a fictional character stationed at home like me to describe the flâneur’s attitude. The protagonist “cousin” in an E. T. A. Hoffmann short story watches people at market day from his apartment window.6 Looking at them through his opera glasses makes him feel superior. He is the subject, and his neighbors are his objects.

But the difference between the cousin and the flâneur doesn’t end with the cousin’s opera glasses. The story’s mise-en-scène is all wrong, Benjamin says. The cousin’s not in Paris or London, where he wouldn’t have focused on particular people but on the masses and the peculiar world that frames them. And he’s looking from home, like me.7

Still, even on the city street, the nineteenth-century flâneur participates in the public sphere’s domestication. She feels at home, Benjamin suggests, because the streets feel like home. On the street, she recognizes various rooms at home that reflect her work and domestic life:

. . . he is as much at home among house façades as a citizen is within his four walls. To him, a shiny enameled shop sign is at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his living room. Buildings’ walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; newsstands are his libraries; and café terraces are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.8

Note the silence of Benjamin’s flâneur among his urban “rooms.” The flâneur sees and records, but he doesn’t speak. He represents what sociologist Richard Sennett finds dispositive in nineteenth-century public life: the gregarious, convention-following (and convention-transgressing) eighteenth-century public person has devolved into a silent spectator.9 As a result, “Observation and ‘turning things over in your mind’ take the place of discourse.”10

Our neighbors are friendly. One of my walking companions—someone with a vast capacity for friendship—has introduced me to any number of people. My walks with him are enjoyable social explorations. It’s a great neighborhood.

But when I walk in my neighborhood, have I really left home? Does my conviviality with my neighbors make me less silent?

All of the people I’ve interviewed for the Public Spaces podcast act locally. Many act to create communities in neighborhoods that have been ravaged by capitalism or racism or both. Other people denigrate some of these efforts, claiming that organized political action itself tends to encroach on the turf of family, neighborhood, and/or organized religion.11

Whether the localism in question feels more conservative or progressive, it may not go far enough in reviving the city. Sennett argues that, in the nineteenth century, localism was introduced to circumscribe people, particularly the working class, within ghettos. In Paris, “the intermixing of classes within districts was reduced by design”—often by physical walls and differences in prices for food and homes. During the same century, London created the same class-conscious localism but through distance between neighborhoods of different classes.

City planners who champion localism may be inadvertently reinforcing this breakup of the city, Sennett warns:

The celebration of localism and of the small-scale neighborhood on the part of well-meaning planners today is an unwitting reinforcement of a new form of domination, a deprivation of the city, imposed on workers in the [nineteenth] century.12

Sennett’s ideal city is a cosmopolis, a public space which people from many nations—and, by extension, many backgrounds—access and in which they associate. Compartmentalizing forms of localism deprive citizens of this city. Segmentation-as-localism stunts a vital aspect of citizenship necessary for the city’s flourishing, Sennett argues:

Now precisely what gets lost in this celebration [of the ghetto] is the idea that people grow only by processes of encountering the unknown. Things and persons which are strange may upset familiar ideas and received truth; unfamiliar terrain serves a positive function in the life of a human being. The function it serves is to accustom the human being to take risks. Love of the ghetto, especially the middle-class ghetto, denies the person a chance to enrich his perceptions, his experience, and learn that most valuable of all human lessons, the ability to call the established conditions of his life into question.13

As a volunteer at our town’s regional hospital, I try to learn something about people while escorting them to different parts of the campus. Around half of those I’ve escorted—and most of those I escort are older people—haven’t lived outside of southern Middle Tennessee.

People in both my white neighborhood and my Black church sometimes talk about how this local phenomenon narrows people’s experience and keeps people from questioning their locale’s pervasive ideologies and mindsets.

I often find a pervasive inability to identify privilege and systemic injustice particularly in “middle-class ghettos”—white, suburban neighborhoods. To discover the existence, much less the power, of invisible systems, those of us with privilege must take steps to transgress this and similar forms of localism.

People who transgress these local boundaries are Sennett’s cosmopolites. He defines the term in the context of a far more sociable public age than our own:

A cosmopolite, in the French usage recorded in 1738, is a man who moves comfortably in diversity; he is comfortable in situations which have no links or parallels to what is familiar to him.14

Surely this comfort level comes from making a habit of seeking out these unfamiliar situations. Or in being forced into such situations:

Without inherited wealth or inherited feudal obligation, the cosmopolitan, whatever his pleasure in worldly diversity, of necessity must make his way in it.15

People who find the need to code switch or to speak one language at home and another at school or work are often cosmopolites by necessity.

Maybe Jonah is my guy after all. God bids him to transgress national boundaries, and even when fleeing this God, Jonah transgresses them anyway. Robert Alter captures the cosmopolitan theme of Jonah’s journey:

Jonah engages with no Israelites in the story. First he has an exchange with the polytheistic mariners, then he addresses the Ninevites, and his closest connection is with two presumably insensate living things, a very large fish and a leafy plant. The God with whom he has such difficulties because of his Israelite nationalist mind-set is not chiefly the God of Israel but the God of the whole world, of all creatures large and small.16

Perhaps the balanced polity finds its spirit in the book of Psalms, a God faithful to Israel as well as a God concerned with the entire world.17 I might also suggest as a model Benjamin’s account of the storytellers he imagines in a medieval guild. The resident master craftsman and the traveling journeyman, who worked together, would share stories, one from long ago and the other from far away:

In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place.18

Benjamin’s vision of storytelling involves an openness to both a place’s tradition and the stranger’s new perspectives. Perhaps this cross-pollination grows a healthy cosmopolis, too.

YHWH is the God of tradition and of the stranger. He’s the God of the local and of the international. He’s the God of cattle in sackcloth19 and of Cat-Cat in mulch. But in the Christian Bible’s pages, he’s chiefly the God of the bride, the New Jerusalem of every nation and tongue, the cosmopolis coming to earth.20

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Above: Our view from the air-conditioning unit. Do you really consider this essay an elaborate excuse for posting cat pics?

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Diverse opinions build a common world. Each citizen’s opinion—in Hannah Arendt’s frequent phrase, each citizen’s “it-appears-to-me”—is a tacit acknowledgement that the citizenry shares a common world.1 Opinions come from particular points of view that animate a common world.

A community’s common sense builds over time as we express our opinions to one another and seek dialog with one another. This common sense makes empirical evidence possible. Common sense does so, Arendt says, by confirming that our sense perceptions “disclose reality” and aren’t merely “sensations of our bodies.”^⁠2 On the other hand,

A noticeable decrease in common sense in any given community and a noticeable increase in superstition and gullibility are . . . almost infallible signs of alienation from the world.3

By “world,” Arendt doesn’t mean the Earth but the common human world consisting of “everything between us.”4 Common sense—a fruit of political participation—confirms this common world.

Common sense has been America’s best defense against ideology, says philosopher Eric Voegelin, who calls ideology “a language of obsession designed to prevent the contact with reality.” Ideology excuses people from political participation and, as a consequence, from reality itself.^⁠5 As more of us accept this excuse, ideology is destroying our common world.

Ideologies work by weaponizing ideas. Historian Joyce Appleby finds in the term “ideology” a “kind of code word for ideas converted into social forces.”^⁠6 Ideologies, she says, “are capable of organizing the consciousness of the individual by fusing interests with beliefs and ideals.”^⁠7 Self-organizing replaces community organizing.

We don’t experience ideologies when we’re speaking or acting in public spaces. Ideologies allow us, in the comfort of our homes, to feel anger, pleasure, discouragement, and elation over political news without having to speak or to act with others.

Ideologies suggest, then, that we have no responsibility for our common world.

For Voegelin, ideologies in all of their forms, left and right, rebel against a form of consciousness. Voegelin doesn’t support what Appleby condemns—her concept of individual consciousness. For Voegelin, consciousness and politics are related:

. . . consciousness has a structural dimension by which it belongs, not to man in his bodily existence, but to the reality in which man, the other partners to the community of being, and the participatory relations among them occur.8

Consciousness is neither solely individual nor solely collective in nature. Instead, consciousness comes with self-discovery through participation among individuals, the collective, and the transcendent. In fact, Voegelin says, “the philosophy of consciousness is the centerpiece of a philosophy of politics.”^⁠9

Western politics has lost its transcendent aspect; as a result, ideologies rush in to create the transcendent on earth. Ideologies push to “immanentize the eschaton,” Voegelin says; that is, instead of faithfully moving in the power and weakness of new creation that Jesus’ and Paul’s communities modeled, ideologies propose to use force to bring about the final, heaven-like stage of history to the present world.^⁠10 They’ll end history by force if necessary.

For Voegelin, common sense isn’t as complete a political remedy as is repentance and turning toward the transcendent—“the ground of being”—but common sense amounts to unrealized spiritual progress toward that Being.^⁠11 One can imagine Voegelin, after listening to an American citizen dismissing the one-dimensional dictates of an ideology, saying to her, “Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”^⁠12

We want a just polity—whether we call it God’s kingdom on earth or the Beloved Community or something else—and we seek a political science that would teach us how to realize it. Voegelin believes, however, that a nation’s desire for an overarching principle of political science—for what columnist Walter Lippmann calls a public philosophy^⁠13—shows both a hunger and a need for “a differentiated noesis,” by which Voegelin means a turn to the ground of Being.^⁠14 When people ask for philosophy, Voegelin believes, what they really want are philosophers. But by “philosophers” Voegelin doesn’t mean intellectuals. Voegelin’s philosophers stand out more by their soul than by their intellect: philosophers are “men whose soul responds to eternal being.”

Voegelin’s “eternal being” is an encounter, not an object of study:

Eternal being is not an eternal object that could be discovered and studied ad libitum, but rather it is a compelling experience whenever it irrupts into time, thereby realizing itself in it. The place of this realization, as it occurs, is the soul of the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, who desires eternal being and, in love, opens his soul to its irruption.^⁠15

Most college faculties, of course, don’t include many of Voegelin’s kind of philosophers. But we need enough of them to leaven our politics with the age to come. Thomas Merton says much the same thing: “You cannot have social order without saints, mystics, and prophets.”16

II.

The most famous confrontation between medieval and modern mindsets occurs in 1608. King James I assembles all his judges to have them sign off on his plan: instead of the courts, he alone would decide certain kinds of judicial cases.^⁠17 The Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, whom James appointed to that office two years prior, objects.^⁠18

Edward Coke points out to King James that the king is not a judge. James responds that the law is based on reason, and that he (James) has as much reason as any judge.

Coke responds tactfully, distinguishing between two kinds of reason. He later summarizes his response:

. . . that true it was, that God has endowed his Majesty with excellent science, and great endowments of nature; but His Majesty was not learned in the laws of his realm of England, and causes which concern the life, or inheritance, or goods, or fortunes of his subjects, are not to be decided by natural reason but by artificial reason and judgment of law, which law is an [art] which requires long study and experience . . .

James responds by accusing Coke of treason, pointing out that if Coke’s position were true, then James himself “should be under the law.” Coke doesn’t disagree—at least about the king’s position with respect to the law—and he quotes the medieval jurist Bracton: “the king ought to be under no man, but under God and the law.”^⁠19 But unlike medieval kings, James aspires to become an absolute monarch.

Modern thought tends toward absolutism and immediate justice. Public opinion, expressed in polls and with no political institutions such as Jefferson’s “little republics” to mediate opinion and to benefit from it, tends to flatten out between two dominant and competing ideologies. Such unfiltered opinion comes across much like the peremptory queen in Alice in Wonderland, who frequently declares, apropos of nothing juridical, “Off with her head!”

Medieval thought, on the other hand, tends toward mediated, triadic justice. Instead of natural reason, it prefers “artificial reason,” by which Coke means informed and skillful reason. The Latin artifex means “skillful,” and both “artificial” and “artisan” are cognates of artifex.^⁠20 This skill Coke locates in lawyers’ familiarity with a conversation over time with “an infinited number of graue and learned men.”^⁠21

Law is “not logic alone,” as Professor James Stoner writes concerning Coke’s argument to James.^⁠22 The common law mediates between a litigant and justice, and its mediation stems from the legal profession’s community of interpretation that Coke believes extends back to time immemorial. That long conversation over time is found in reported case law.

But even with the availability of extensive reported case law, the common law itself remains unwritten. That’s because law, to Coke’s way of thinking, joins “reason and knowledge of particulars” and exists “not in books as a body of knowledge but in the minds of those who can use it.”^⁠23 Every new case activates the community, now rejoined in conversation.

When Bracton says that the king is under law, he is saying that the king is subject to that conversation like everyone else.^⁠24 This medieval concept of law—a community, trained in artificial reason, that mediates between a litigant and the greater community—is always threatened by the likes of King James.

III.

When Voegelin hears a public demand for a public philosophy, he understands the demand instead as a cry for philosophers. When Coke hears a public demand for justice, he understands it as a cry for lawyers. We want immediate answers, but immediate answers often lead to a cruel, immediate world. We need mediate answers instead, which means we need mediators and the communities of interpretation in which they flourish.

When we hear a public demand, what we might be hearing is demand for a public.

Discussion questions

1. At Bunker Hill, Col. William Prescott was reported to have ordered, “Don’t one of you fire until you see the white of their eye.” What if we held off on our ideological attacks on one another until we could “see the white of their eye,” meeting face to face in public space? What might happen to ideology?

2. Do you agree with Hannah Arendt that common sense confirms our common world? Do you agree with her about how common sense is formed? What do we mean when we say that someone has no common sense? Do we mean the same thing as Arendt does, or not?

3. Do you have a political ideology? Does this Substack have one? Are we doomed to follow ideologies, or can we participate in public life free of them?

4. Consider the package of positions on issues that make up a political party’s talking points. What do you know about the history of specific political parties—about how their packages of positions changed over time? Why did those changes happen?

5. Do you agree with Eric Voegelin that we need philosophers even more than philosophy? Do you agree with Edward Coke that we need lawyers even more than law? How might you restate their points?

6. What are the dangers or drawbacks of “natural reason”? What are the dangers or drawbacks of “artificial reason”? Do you stand with King James I or Edward Coke in their dispute?

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Divya: How did the Frist get the David Hockney show?2 Nashville’s kind of off Broadway.

Acton: The Frist gets big shows.

Phil: Here’s a clue. Hockney’s a painter, but these walls are covered with nothing but photo collages.

Acton: Hockney’s collages show what photography taught him about perspective.

Phil: Two years ago, friends dragged me to a Van Gogh exhibit in D.C. It turned out to be like 90% drawings.

Divya: I thought photography’s perspective was obvious—a single perspective taken in a split second.

Acton: Hockney thought so, too, and he didn’t like it.3 But one day a curator friend left his Polaroid at Hockney’s place with several dozen packs of film.4

Phil: I would’ve been really pissed if it hadn’t been free.

Divya: Yeah, film’s expensive. They had Polaroids back then?

Acton: Today’s Polaroids are retro. So’s this show. Hockney put on Drawing with a Camera in 1982 with collages like this just four months after he requisitioned the camera.5

Phil: He must’ve requisitioned his show’s title from Van Gogh’s curator.

Divya: This seems like an insider show for sure. Who else but other painters would care about a painter’s process involving cameras?

Phil: Yeah, there’s a reason juries are excluded from in camera hearings.

Divya: I’m pretty sure that’s a different camera.

Phil: Check out this guitar in a blue case. Still Life Blue Guitar.6 The guitar’s not blue, though. Why the misleading title?

Divya: The collage looks like hand-fired bathroom tile. A bunch of Polaroid prints, including the white borders, that add up to fruit, sheet music, and guitar.

Acton: I think the “Blue Guitar” title is a nod to Picasso. The sheet music, too. Picasso’s The Old Guitarist was all blue except the guitar itself.7

Phil: They’re more guitar squares than there should be.

Acton: “Hand-fired” works for me. The Polaroid’s flash in some of the photos focuses my eye on the photos’ centers. Its effect is like that of a Cubist painting of a face that’s somehow both head-on and a profile. Each aspect stands out.

Phil: Hockney’s not that distorted, but he’s working on it.

Divya: I love how half of the “Half and Half” is in one square and the other half of the “Half and Half” is in another square. Then there’s a third half in a third square?

Phil: Refresh my memory: what’s Picasso’s point? Or Hockney’s?

Acton: Hockney reads a Cubist painting as an invitation to explore how we see. When we look at a guitar, say, we’re not conscious of how our brain accumulates details over time. Time gives us different perspectives to put together, and we see a guitar.8

Phil: Artists’ shop talk. I come to a museum to see beauty.

Divya: Beauty is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder, Phil.

Acton: But Hockney found beauty in the beholder’s brain. The struggle we have between the woman’s frontal view and the woman’s profile makes us aware of what the brain does behind the scenes to help us see.9 Looking at a Cubist painting, we have to consciously and imaginatively make her beautiful.

Divya: This painting—I mean this collage—is playful, anyway.10 So why did Hockney hate cameras before his Polaroid obsession?

Acton: A photograph leads you to believe in single-point perspective. That misleading concept, in turn, leads us to believe in the neutral, objective observer.11

Phil: What, did Hockney believe in the Uncertainty Principle?

Acton: Actually, yes. He brought it up in a conversation about Cubism.

Divya: What’s that?

Phil: Cubism is this stuck-up, intellectual art movement . . .

Divya: Phil. Chill.

Acton: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says that, at the quantum level, you can’t know a particle’s velocity and location at the same moment. That’s the uncertainty.12

Divya: Does that work for bicycles? I don’t need to know my speed and location at the same time, but I never can measure my bike’s tire pressure without lowering it.

Phil: That’s the bigger point—for philosophers anyway. Heisenberg showed that the observer affects what she’s observing.13 There’s no such thing as good judgment.

Divya: I think there’s good judgment, just not objective judgment.

Phil: What’s the difference?

Divya: The uncertainty. Look at Jesus’ remarks about judging people. We try to remove a mote in someone’s eye, but we have a beam in our own eye.14

Phil: Like a two-by-four sticking out of my eye? That would affect what I was observing.

Acton: An eye surgeon’s bedside manner would be bad, too. Hey, doc, stop nodding your head!

Phil: I’m getting a pounding headache.

Divya: Some modern translations refer to a speck of sawdust versus a plank.15

Phil: So I guess my faults are worse than those of the person I judge.

Divya: Maybe, but I don’t think that’s Jesus’ point. I think he’s talking about perspective and judgment. We think we can see the other as a camera does—objectively. But something distorts our judgment.

Phil: Hume.

Acton: Beam. Hume beam? Human beings? Am I getting warmer?

Phil: Well, yes. David Hume. His Treatise on Human Nature.

Divya: Okay . . .

Phil: Hume said that we can’t learn about “the science of man”—about human nature—with scientific objectivity. If I put myself in an experiment about human nature, my “reflection and premeditation” would disturb my judgment and make the results unjust.16

Acton: I guess each “reflection and premeditation” would amount to a separate Polaroid. Hume’s concerned that any experiment would stitch together the pics and create an unjust collage of the Other.

Divya: I have a proposal. What if Jesus is channeling his inner David Hockney? What if his speck and plank are the same size?

Phil: Then why would Jesus call them a speck and a plank?

Acton: Perspective, maybe. If the speck is in the eye of the person judging someone else, it’ll distort their vision of the Other while remaining invisible to themselves.

Phil: Ah. The closer it is to your eye, the bigger the speck becomes.

Divya: And the more invisible. Our eyes aren’t macro lenses. We can’t see things on our lenses that distort our vision. So our faults stay invisible as we focus on the same faults in others.17

Acton: Jesus’ speck and plank don’t amount to a frozen image. Just like a Cubist painting’s frontal view and profile shouldn’t be viewed as a single, frozen image. They’re bizarre invitations to uncover how one-point perspective can fool us.

Phil: Montaigne can simplify all this. He said that every man likes the smell of his own shit.18

Acton: Well said.

Phil: Farts, too, if I may extend the analogy.

Acton: Montaigne also wrote as if our mistaken objectivity were our greatest foe.

Divya: Montaigne wanted us to smell our poo as others smell it?

Acton: I’d say so. He challenges our assumed objectivity with his loose-knit essays. Each essay is like a Hockney collage. It focuses on lots of fragments, and it somehow stitches the fragments together. My first impression after reading one is, hey, despite a lot of asides, he never really got off topic.

Divya: How does that strategy help us become conscious of how we judge?

Acton: Montaigne’s essays ask us to see many perspectives on an issue as parts of a conversation with the reader rather than as parts of an argument. That way, his essays make us less quick to judge.19 One sociologist points out that Montaigne’s essays are more dialogic than dialectic. In other words, they don’t argue. They don’t even seek common ground. Instead, they try to make people more conscious of how they think—how they see.20

Divya: “. . . and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”21

Acton: I guess that’s the hope. Where are you going?

Phil: The gift shop.

Divya: After seeing one artwork?

Acton: One snapshot, as it were?

Phil: I need Motrin. You guys gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.22

Divya: Will do.

Acton: I guess he’s not buying the catalog.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

As an older American, I often find myself singing jingles for brands or products that no longer exist. I’m a carrier with expired cargo. When I start singing, say, “Carrol’s / the home of / the unforgettable edibles”—you don’t remember it?—I feel like a piece of space junk. It’s not the chain’s hamburgers, which as a teen I found indistinguishable from McDonald’s, that turned out to be unforgettable.

My meaningless memory emissions help me relate just a little to Franz Kafka. Philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, a big fan of Kafka’s, says Kafka can be understood as jettisoning, in a way, all content just to keep the transport going. Kafka’s parables, short stories, and novels demonstrate transmissibility without truth, a kind of haggadic tradition with no discernible halachic content.

Benjamin shines his flashlight into Kafka’s literary shipping containers and finds them empty and swept clean:

But do we have the doctrine which Kafka’s parables interpret and which K.’s postures and the gestures of his animals clarify? It does not exist . . .1

Kafka’s work is . . . well, Kafkaesque in part because he provides the mediation, the transmissibility, but with no pretense of transmitted truth.2

A caveat, though. When I say, “Kafka can be understood as,” I don’t claim that Kafka can be understood, at least in the conventional sense. Kafka, Benjamin points out, “took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings.”3

But part of Kafka’s obscurity makes his point: in our age, truth and tradition have pretty much kicked each other to the curb. Truth has become fundamentalized—assented to but inhabiting no tradition. Or truth has become historicised—contextualized and objectified into irrelevance.

Kafka develops his world using our modern world as his negative. Or, better, Kafka presents his world as a mirror image of ours: he presents tradition devoid of truth as a lateral inversion of our world’s habit of proclaiming truth devoid of tradition. To help with this inversion, Kafka’s stories and characters make over-the-top but meaningless gestures, each of which “is an event—one might even say, a drama—in itself,” Benjamin points out.4 Each gesture acts like a tradition, but it doesn’t do tradition’s work. It doesn’t transmit meaning.

In The Trial, for instance, a priest speaks to the protagonist Josef K. alone from a pulpit, and he amplifies this gesture by insisting that K. come to the base of the pulpit and crane his neck to hear him. But no sermon—no content—ensues.5 Another gesture, this time in Kafka’s short story “A Fratricide,” involves a simple doorbell that inexplicably rings across town and up to heaven,6 where it finds me humming and circling the earth.

Abraham Lincoln seems to find himself in something like Kafka’s world. Throughout his public life, Lincoln understands his mission as entrusting the Founders’ truths, particularly the truth that “all men are created equal,” to the next generation. He understands his entire generation’s task, in fact, as transmitting the Founders’ “political edifice of liberty and equal rights . . . to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.”7

But the Founders’ truths are propositional, and in the contentious lead-up to the Civil War, they seem to lack an adequate tradition to transmit them to any future generation.

Lincoln, in his most famous line—the opening words of his Gettysburg Address—describes “all men are created equal” as a “proposition”—that is, as a truth outside of a tradition.8 Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence likewise describes the same truth as “self-evident,” a syllogistic starting point that everyone in theory is compelled to accept and from which anyone could build various deductive arguments.9

Jefferson and Lincoln therefore find political equality axiomatic. In an 1859 letter he writes in celebration of Jefferson’s birthday, Lincoln describes the Equality Clause and the Declaration’s other self-evident truths as “the definitions and axioms of free society.” He compares them, in fact, to Euclid’s core axioms, upon which Euclid built his framework of solid and plane geometry.

But what if the next generation denies Euclid’s axioms? Geometry would collapse. Likewise, if the next generation denies that all men are created equal, free society would collapse. Those who deny it would supplant the principles of free government, Lincoln says, with principles of “classification, caste, and legitimacy.”10

Euclid, perhaps, needs no tradition to carry his propositions forward. But the Equality Clause, despite its axiomatic status—or perhaps, in part, because of it—needs one.

What to do? Lincoln tries to save the republic much earlier with an appeal to reason. In 1838, passionate mobs “from New England to Louisiana” are making the news every day. In his speech that year at Springfield’s Young Men’s Lyceum, Lincoln asks the American public to fight “this mobocratic spirit” with a new “political religion” that he defines as reverence for law.

The American Revolution used such passion—”the basest principles of our nature”—to establish and maintain liberty. But without a common enemy, Lincoln says, Americans in 1838 must put passion away in favor of its opposite:

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.11

At Lyceum, Lincoln wants to lower the American political temperature. Reason must seem to Lincoln a reasonable approach: he was admitted to the Illinois state bar less than a year before this speech. At Lyceum, he seems to ask his fellow citizens to join him in his new profession—in spirit, anyway—by adopting something like its “cold, calculating” reason.12

No luck. By 1859, Lincoln has long since accepted that reason alone isn’t going to do the job. Outside of courtrooms and lecture halls—and particularly from one generation to the next within a polity—reason turns out to be a poor transmitter of truth.

In his Jefferson birthday letter, Lincoln recognizes that the American Revolution itself, despite its use of what he earlier calls ”the basest principles of our nature,” provides the tradition necessary to pass on the Equality Clause’s truth. He credits Jefferson with a certain genius—not for drafting the clause, but for inserting it into the American Revolution’s most revolutionary document:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.13

This paragraph, in Lincoln fashion, is constructed with antonyms: “concrete” versus “abstract,” “pressure” versus “coolness,” “a single people” versus “all men at all times.” In each pair of antonyms, the first is tangible and historical, the stuff of tradition. The second is theoretical and propositional. The first becomes the vehicle for the second.

Jefferson delivers the wheels. He demonstrates the capacity to provide not only the truth, Lincoln says, but also the truth’s tradition, its means of transport.

In doing so, Jefferson—a lawyer, of course, like Lincoln—uses a different kind of “coolness” than the “cold” reason that Lincoln champions in 1838. Jefferson’s action is certainly cool, calm and collected—he keeps his head while all about him are losing theirs—but his action isn’t precisely rational. It’s perceptive and shrewd. By 1859, after all, history bears Jefferson out: Americans only a year after independence begin annual celebrations of the Declaration’s signing. Lincoln seems to credit Jefferson with the “forecast” to insert the Equality Clause’s truth into this then-future tradition and into the country’s veneration of the Revolution that the tradition taps into.14

But notice how Lincoln in the letter’s “All honor to Jefferson” paragraph downplays the Declaration and, with it, our entire revolutionary tradition. The Declaration becomes “a merely revolutionary document”—merely the carrier of the proposition that all men are created equal. The concrete struggle for national independence becomes a truck—or a satellite—with cargo greater than the struggle itself or than even the “single people” involved in that struggle.

Lincoln therefore whittles his contrast between truth and transmission to a fine point with his stunning oxymoron, his compound adjective “merely revolutionary.” With “merely revolutionary,” Lincoln’s pairs of antonyms reach their ironic zenith.15

Like Kafka, Lincoln recognizes the need for truth’s transmission. Unlike Kafka, though, Lincoln doesn’t amplify empty gestures to suggest tradition’s ultimate necessity. Instead, Lincoln downplays America’s revolutionary gestures to emphasize, by explicit comparison, the revolutionary tradition’s precious cargo and the tradition’s potential for carrying that cargo to succeeding generations—generations that may face dangers similar to America’s just before the Civil War.

Generations like our own.

The priest’s sermon—or really, his parable—comes only after he climbs down from the pulpit and while he and K. are pacing together up and down a cathedral aisle. “Before the Law,” Kafka’s most famous parable, involves a man seeking the Law (in one sense, the Halacha) but meets a doorkeeper who, while not keeping him from entering the Law, refuses him permission to enter. For years, based on this refusal and the possibility of future permission, the man stands outside the Law and never ventures in, though it appears he could have. As the man is dying of old age, however, the doorkeeper finally closes the door to the Law against him.16

In the parable, legal procedure is both intimidating and vague, but the law’s content is absent. As he considers the parable, K. puzzles over a haggadic tradition with no discernible halachic content. What could it mean?

The priest and K. discuss the parable at length in talmudic fashion, as if the parable itself were the Law, but arrive at no conclusions. In his Kafka essay, Benjamin points out that this parable unfolds, but not to one specific meaning:

[The parable comes] at such a significant moment [in The Trial] that it looks as if the novel were nothing but the unfolding of the parable. The word “unfolding” has a double meaning. A bud unfolds into a blossom, but the boat which one teaches children to make by folding paper unfolds into a flat sheet of paper. This second kind of “unfolding” is really appropriate to the parable; it is the reader’s pleasure to smooth it out so that he has the meaning on the palm of his hand. Kafka’s parables, however, unfold in the first sense, the way a bud turns into a blossom. This is why their effect resembles poetry.17

We want parables that unfold into truth that we can hold onto, but Benjamin claims that Kafka offers poetry in place of clarity. The paper boat—truth’s erstwhile vessel—no longer unfolds into content. In Kafka’s work, parables, as traditions devoid of discernible truth, become poetry. As a vehicle, poetry may offer ambiguities, uncertainties and contradictions as a kaleidoscope offers new arrangements of broken glass.

And indeed, K.’s kaleidoscopic, talmudic discussion of the parable with the priest wearies K. Reflecting on the discussion, K. believes that “The simple story had become misshapen.”18 Still, Benjamin’s distinction between unfolding paper and unfolding blossoms suggests a promising approach to recovering tradition in a modern republic that seeks to practice democracy.19

Benjamin corresponds frequently about his Kafka essay with his close friend, Gershom Scholem, who is probably the greatest historian of Jewish mysticism. Scholem disagrees with Benjamin about why, for Kafka, the Law (or any propositional truth) is inaccessible to moderns. For Benjamin, tradition’s limitations begin with Adam and Eve’s exile. For Scholem, tradition’s limitations begin after Moses’ reception of the Law.20

Despite what Anson Rabinbach, a historian of twentieth-century European thought, calls this “inter-messianic dispute,”21 Scholem is impressed with Benjamin’s Kafka essay.22 Long after Benjamin’s death, Scholem writes a full essay about the relationship of truth and its transmission—the relationship of halachic content and haggadic tradition—in which he uses what seems to be Benjamin’s flexible metaphor of unfolding:

Tradition as a living force produces in its unfolding another problem. What had originally been believed to be consistent, unified and self-enclosed now becomes diversified, multifold, and full of contradictions. It is precisely the wealth of contradictions, of differing views, which is encompassed and unqualifiedly affirmed by tradition. There were many possibilities of interpreting the Torah, and tradition claimed to comprise them all.23

Scholem’s tradition that “becomes diversified, multifold, and full of contradictions” is much like Benjamin’s tradition in the form of Kafka’s parables. Isn’t, after all, diversity, complexity, and contradiction the stuff of poetry? The two friends differ over the Law’s availability, but they seem to understand in essentially the same way the nature of tradition that transmits the Law.

Where Benjamin and Scholem write about tradition in messianic terms, their essential agreement about tradition becomes even clearer. Scholem associates tradition’s flexibility and dynamism with the “Messianic condition”: any historical era’s unacceptable reading of Torah “anticipates a Messianic condition in which [that reading] will have its legitimate function.”24 In the Messianic era, the Law will reveal all of its manifold facets.

Scholem’s contrast of this Messianic era with “any given time within history” in which a rabbinic school’s understanding of Torah is rejected comports with Benjamin’s contrast of Messianic time with “homogenous, empty time,” including the events in a chronological account of history. Each generation has “been endowed with a weak Messianic power,” Benjamin says, and that power comes through a new insight into truth in the context of history—an insight preserved by tradition and called out by present danger:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.

Benjamin understands that an ostensibly objective view of history—typified for Benjamin here by historian Leopold von Ranke and typical, of course, of modern historicism—as “the way it really was” reinforces the victors’ views of history. Such views separate a truth from the tradition that would transmit a truth to people in that tradition as a memory—as bits and pieces from history—“in a moment of danger.”25

Benjamin’s philosophy of history, then, is dynamically traditional. His Theses on the Philosophy of History names only one tradition—“the tradition of the oppressed”26—because the victors themselves need no tradition to assert their truth. The victors wield historicism’s conformity and its underlying concept of “homogenous, empty time” to eliminate tradition. Hence our struggle—and Kafka’s lateral inversion of our struggle—to maintain tradition:

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

If the ruling classes succeed in replacing tradition with conformism, we could not “seize hold of a memory” because we would no longer see it “flash up” to us from history. Without tradition, Benjamin therefore says, “even the dead will not be safe.”27

One thinks of perhaps the Bible’s first haggadic tradition that interrupts halachic content: the Torah’s interruption of the Passover narrative to institute the tradition of Passover. Just before the Torah instructs us on how to celebrate the Passover and carry it to succeeding generations, Moses leaves Pharaoh with news of the final plague, the death of all the firstborn in Egypt. The angel of death has yet to pass over the Israelites’ dwellings, and the Israelites have yet to cross the Red Sea. The truth of YHWH’s deliverance, therefore, is transmitted by the first Haggadah in a moment of danger.28

The Passover Seder’s point is never to relate events “the way it really was,” whether or not one believes that the events in the Passover narrative actually happened. Instead, the Seder understands history through the lens of a tradition, and the tradition offers collective memories that “flash up” when the community needs them.

Lincoln’s curious wording at the end of his Jefferson birthday letter doesn’t end with “merely revolutionary.” Lincoln also says that Jefferson acts “to embalm” the Equality Clause in the Declaration. Is Lincoln suggesting that Jefferson’s clause, transported to the Declaration as in a political ambulance, is dead on arrival?

Not exactly. As far back as 1828, in the pages of Noah Webster’s first dictionary, “embalm” carried both a concrete and a more abstract definition. “Embalm” had our sense of a means for preserving a dead body, but it also denoted the act of preserving anything, “with care and affection, from loss or decay.”29

Still, the concrete resonance of “embalm” suggests that Jefferson is also, in a sense, preparing equality for burial, or at least for a long moribund state. The paragraph’s context, however, suggests that Jefferson is also anticipating equality’s episodic resurrection in Lincoln’s day “and in all coming days” in which people would find themselves endangered by “re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Lincoln’s notion, which he attributes to Jefferson, of history as buried truths made accessible to later generations facing political peril comports with Benjamin’s notion that the true historian must “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.”

Can our revolutionary tradition, including its contradictions—its injustices and its past appeals to “the basest principles of our nature”—still transmit our greatest truth? Is it still strong enough to contain and to call forth the Equality Clause again in our moment of danger?

Will we work to find out? As a nation, we praise transport while jettisoning its cargo. We pledge allegiance to the flag but not to the form of government—the republic—for which it stands. Our national celebrations, including those planned for this week’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration, likewise have become empty gestures—mere transmissions, empty of their erstwhile propositional payloads. We’re living in a Kafkaesque moment.

Generations of ancient Israel neglected the Law, but three times in the Bible’s pages rededication to the covenant began with Passover’s reinstitution.30 Lincoln in 1854 makes a similar call for us to reinstitute our revolutionary tradition, including the Declaration of Independence, and the truth it carries:

Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. . . . Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. . . . If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.31

Let’s weed out empty, nationalistic gestures. Let’s tend the Declaration of Independence until diversity, complexity and equality unfold again.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

What to the non-Jew is Pentecost? She isn’t there when the apostles pray in the upper room. She isn’t there when the Spirit falls. Instead, the Spirit falls on “devout Jews drawn from every nation under heaven.”1 It falls on the diaspora. The Gentile isn’t among them.

But the Spirit is getting close to the Gentiles. It has the disciples speak in the Gentiles’ languages on Pentecost. Their languages have been adopted by the diaspora living in Gentile nations. The Spirit does what the diaspora has previously done: it learns the Gentiles’ cultures and speaks in their languages.

What is the Spirit teaching us here? In his commentary on Acts 2, Willie James Jennings discusses what it means to learn a language:

To learn a language requires submission to a people. Even if in the person of a single teacher, the learner must submit to that single voice, learning what the words mean as they are bound to events, songs, sayings, jokes, everyday practices, habits of mind and body, all within a land and the journey of a people.2

The Spirit on Pentecost, in a sense, submits to the Gentiles by learning their languages, even though the Gentiles are still far off. Like Jesus on the cross, the Spirit humbles herself. The Spirit on Pentecost also honors the diaspora, who have preceded the gospel to these foreign lands. The Spirit, of course, is also coming for the Gentiles themselves, but Peter hasn’t visited Cornelius’s house yet. As Paul says, the gospel comes “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”3

But as the narrative in Acts chapters 2 through 15 makes clear, the church takes much longer than the Spirit to include the Greek. Even after the church celebrates the Spirit’s confirmation of the Gentiles as fellow members in Acts 11, the church hears arguments in Acts 15 by one of its factions that the Gentiles should constitute what Paul elsewhere describes as second-class citizens.4

The journey to including the Gentiles takes up what Jennings calls “the ancient challenge”: “a God who is way ahead of us and is calling us to catch up.”5

What to the American slave is the Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass asks his white audience that question during a speech in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852. In it, he recites the history of American independence in glowing terms, but as David W. Blight points out, Douglass is careful to distance himself throughout his speech by using the second-person pronouns “you” and “your.”6 Here’s a sample, comparing Independence Day to Passover:

It is the birthday of your national independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance . . .7

Douglass speaks also of “your fathers,” “your” Fourth of July, “your Declaration of Independence.” Lincoln’s “electric cord”—the Equality Clause (“all men are created equal”) in the Declaration of Independence that Lincoln believes would “link the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together . . . throughout the world”8—has not reached the Blacks in America itself.

At the time of his Rochester speech, Douglass is a Garrisonian abolitionist, preaching the destruction of the Union and of the Constitution, the two things that Lincoln, by contrast, says must remain in place to protect the Declaration of Independence’s Equality Clause until its eventual fulfillment.9 In accepting Garrison’s view that the Union and the Constitution are essentially pro-slavery, Douglass acknowledges that, as a slave and then as an escaped slave, he would always be considered outside the American covenant by many of the whites inside it. Many of the whites inside the covenant see him as subhuman, as someone else’s property whom the Constitution rightfully requires the states to return to his owner.

But in two or three years, Douglass would convert to “political abolitionism,” which regards the Constitution as an essentially anti-slavery document and which focuses on using the Constitution’s main political process—the vote—to destroy slavery. In an 1855 speech, Douglass criticizes Garrison’s call to destroy the Constitution and to break up the Union. Douglass’s biographer summarizes the relevant portion of his 1855 speech in which “he left no doubt about his independence from Garrisonians. Their doctrines had become ‘plainly absurd’; they hated slavery sufficiently, but strict moral suasion and disunionism possessed ‘no intelligible principle of action.’”10

Which approach was correct, Douglass’s Garrisonian abolitionism or his later political abolitionism?

Two years after signaling his move to political abolitionism, Douglass’s choice to operate within political abolitionism and the American covenant seems to be sorely tested. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s Dred Scott Court holds that Blacks, slave and free, are an “inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Douglass meets the challenge a few months later by affirming the anti-slavery cast of the Constitution:

The Constitution, as well as the Declaration of Independence, and the sentiments of the founders of the republic, give us a platform broad enough, and strong enough, to support the most comprehensive plans for the freedom and elevation of all the people of this country, without regard to color, class, or clime.11

Similar questions about Blacks’ participation in the American covenant play out during the Civil Rights era. Malcolm X and Martin King famously take diverging tacks that resemble, respectively, Garrisonian abolitionism and political abolitionism. Even within a single expression of the Civil Rights movement, the influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis and Robert Moses work to integrate Blacks into the American political system, while Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and H. Rap Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) push for Blacks to develop political and economic power separate from white-dominated institutions.12

With Blacks’ place in the American covenant again under attack by the United States Supreme Court and many Southern state legislatures, I imagine this difference in approach to covenant will reappear in new forms in response to the attack. The ancient question, in this respect, is whether to act inside or outside of what Jason Frank calls “the relationship of the part with no part in relation to the whole.”13

Ten years after his July 5 speech in Rochester, in the middle of the Civil War, Douglass gives another July 4 speech. This time, he embraces the Equality Clause as his own. Douglass describes the Declaration of Independence as it is understood by Lincoln and the Republicans, and the Whigs before them, as “a full and comprehensive declaration of the equal and sacred rights of mankind.”14 He criticizes the South’s (and the Dred Scott Court’s) “heartless dogma, that the rights declared in that instrument did not apply to any but white men.”15

Douglass’s pronouns also change. Instead of referring to the American founders only as “your fathers,” for instance, as he had in 1852, he refers to them as “your fathers, and my fathers”:

We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers, and my fathers began eighty-six years ago.”16

It is the first time, historians say, that Douglass calls the American founders his fathers.17

The outpouring of the Spirit at Cornelius’s home in Acts 10 is the Gentiles’ “equivalent of Pentecost,” says Joseph A. Fitzmyer.18 When Peter follows the Gentiles to Cornelius’s home, the Gentiles begin to come into the promise of the Holy Spirit, the “Spirit of adoption, enabling us to cry ‘Abba! Father!’”19

We Gentiles are joined to Israel, and Jesus’ Father is now our Father, too.20 But such a summary can work to overshadow the narrative of how God’s covenant came to different peoples. Taken alone, it tends to collapse into a simple claim of “promise fulfilled” the church’s long struggle with accepting Gentiles into its covenant. Such a collapse of narrative would eliminate not only the memory of struggle but also the agency and lessons and tradition the struggle passes on to us.

Such a collapse of narrative also would camouflage the spaces where extremes meet, where the likes of Garrison and Taney tempt us to join them in setting fire to the covenant from which a ruling race or class has excluded us.

Such a collapse also would create a false universalism where Gentiles become Jews and Blacks become whites—a universalism that knows no tradition except the tradition approved by a covenant’s dominant nationality or race. Such a universalism tends to speak no language except that spoken by a covenant’s dominant nationality. We would no longer follow the Spirit’s example in submitting to oppressed peoples by learning from their cultures and learning of their political, economic and social struggles.

A belief that “all men are created equal,” if it remains aloof from the heroic and painful stories of the Equality Clause’s gradual expansion—as well as of its recent defeats—won’t lead to political action. Faith without works is dead, remaining aloof.

The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament contain not only covenants but also unflinching narratives about how the covenants were betrayed and renewed and betrayed again. We’d do well to follow these books’ examples by telling all the stories—everyone’s stories.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

When I started going to church here, I never dreamed of preaching or teaching. But you know how the Lord speaks? The Lord spoke to the pastor that I should preach. But I told her and the Lord no. Way too much bad historical precedent. People need their own spaces.1 She’d pause, taking in what I said, and respond, “No, the Lord told me . . .”

So here I am, preaching to my friends at a beautiful church.

Doing it fulfills, in a small and unexpected way, a longstanding dream. Why do almost all churches resist learning about and implementing at least some of the great political theology that has come out in the past almost hundred years? Are we still intent on ceding to oppressive governments the political callings that Jesus and his first disciples embraced?

But dangerous times can lead us in new directions. My talk two Sundays ago focused on Louisiana v. Callais, decided less than a month earlier. We went over the Supreme Court decision’s effects: the immediate gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the longer-term eradication of Black officeholding. My focus was on St. Paul’s approach to the same kind of covenantal backsliding among the Galatian churches.

In this video, I tie my recorded talk to the slideshow I was presenting then to demonstrate those parallels better. My talk distills my article on this subject and modifies it for the pulpit—and for an informed and practicing Christian audience.

In truth, I didn’t really preach much the other Sunday. I taught. As I wrapped up, I knew that the pastor would need to give the call to prayer, to faith, and to action in response to the Court’s wholesale attack on African-American voting rights, and the congregation would need to discuss it. And that’s what we did.

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Above: a photo from my time at the May 16 All Roads Lead to the South rally in Montgomery, Alabama.

Isaiah Berlin distinguishes between negative and positive liberty. (Negative liberty is individual freedom from coercion; positive liberty is self-mastery, often accompanied by an insistence that others follow suit.)1 Montesquieu distinguishes between philosophic and political liberty. (Philosophic liberty is the right to do as we please; political liberty is the right to participate in public affairs.)

Maybe Lady Liberty, while standing in New York Harbor or stretched out on a museum lawn, now champions both vertical and horizontal liberty.

Historian David Hackett Fischer presents another pair of opposing liberties. He distinguishes between what he simply calls “freedom” and “liberty,” terms most of us might normally use interchangeably.

According to Fischer, “the original meanings of freedom and liberty were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection.” One is liberated from bondage, but one is freed to a community.2

The etymological distinctions between the two words are worth examining.

“Liberty” comes from the Latin libertas and its adjective liber, which means “released from restraint.” The Greek word eleutheria carries a notion of liberty similar to the Latin liber: Eleutheria may be defined as “an independence by means of separation.”

But “freedom” is a cousin of the Norse fri, the German frei, and other Northern European variants. Their common root, the Indo-European priya or friya or riya, means “dear” or “beloved.” In fact, “freedom” has the same root as the word “friend.”3

The opposing etymology points to the history. Theologian Chaim Wirszubski points out that “ . . . the Romans conceived of libertas as an acquired civil right, not as an innate right of man.”4 Fischer says that, by contrast, “by the eleventh century, most men in Iceland were born free. This prior condition of freedom was a birthright that all freeman shared.”5

Paul seems to have developed this same Rome-versus-Iceland distinction in a conversation with a Roman. Paul was about to be flogged when he thought to assert his Roman citizenship. Then his conversation with his would-be torturer turned personal:

And the chief captain answered, With a great sum obtained I this freedom. And Paul said, But I was free born.6

This King James version of the interaction suggests Fischer’s distinction between earned liberty and innate freedom. But the KJV obscures what later English translations reveal: Paul and the official were comparing how each of them had obtained Roman citizenship.

But citizenship, at least in its earlier Greek form, puts the “friend” in “freedom.” Greek citizenship was all about the polis, the political community to which free people belonged. Grounded in political community, Fischer’s “freedom,” as opposed to his “liberty,” amounts to what we often call public freedom.

This clash of freedom and liberty, Fischer says, helps explain the different views on slavery that led to the American Civil War. The whites who settled the North generally had Germanic notions of freedom, the idea goes. They agreed with Jefferson—and Lincoln—that “all men are created equal.” But many of the whites who settled the South had Roman notions of liberty. They agreed with John C. Calhoun, dismissing “all men are created equal” as “dangerous error.” Instead, Calhoun said, liberty is earned: “. . . liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development.”7

How could Fischer’s opposing conceptions of freedom dominate in different regions—generally speaking, freedom in the North and liberty in the South? Different strata of English society—Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and Scots-Irish—brought their notions of freedom, Fischer says, to different regions in waves between 1629 and 1775. The Quakers advocated for a liberty of conscience, and their form of liberty made slavery anathema to them.8 The Scots-Irish believed in “natural liberty,” a form of freedom that championed individualism and made government suspect.9 New England exercised “collective liberty,” which amounted to the public freedom exercised in their town meetings.10 But Virginians considered liberty “as a hegemonic condition of dominion over others and—equally important—dominion over oneself,” ideal for the perpetuation of slavery.11

The American slaveholder’s hypocritical conception of liberty is certainly beyond the pale of Fischer’s liberty from. Fischer makes this clear by beginning his discussion of the Cavaliers’ liberty with the famous question Dr. Samuel Johnson posed in 1775: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”12 Of course, slavery had been legal in Great Britain as late as 1772, suggesting that the American colonists had inherited from England its justifications for slavery as well as its practice of it.

These versions of American liberty and freedom, in Fischer’s account, seem practically genetic in their transmission. Fischer believes in “Albion’s Seed”—the name of his most famous book, which chronicles the influence of English folkways, including liberty and freedom, on America. Concepts of liberty and freedom amount to English seed sown by its colonists in America’s rich soil.

These transatlantic folkways create what literary essayist George Steiner describes as almost a genetic version of the past:

[It] is not the literal past that rules us . . . It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility.13

Steiner’s “genetic information” insight comports with a nineteenth-century historical concept called ”germ theory” or “germ thesis.” In this theory, free institutions came like germs from Germany to Britain and from Britain to America.

Fischer himself applies what he calls a “modified ‘germ thesis’” of how a place’s cultural origins can affect it. He combines germ thesis with elements of the two prominent theories that replaced it in the twentieth century: the Turner thesis that the American environment explained more than first settlers’ folkways, and the still-later “migration model” based on the effects of ethnic pluralism.14

But what about First Nations, who don’t count as “seed” or as environment? Why didn’t their folkways stick like those of Medieval England, which according to historian Lewis Mumford gave New England its direct democracy in the form of townships and town meetings?15

Historian Charles C. Mann disagrees with Mumford. Mann argues that the freedom and equality that animated the Algonquians in New England influenced the development of the region’s townships, pulling them away from John Winthrop’s hierarchical “city on a hill” governmental model. Mann also thinks that the southern Native American nations, many of whom willingly captured and returned whites’ runaway slaves and sometimes even owned slaves, were still under the cultural sway of Cahokia (ca. 800-1300 C.E.), the last of probably many First Nations experiments in imperialism. Cahokia existed in what is now Louisiana.16

Mann isn’t alone in associating what Fischer calls liberty and freedom with pre-contact indigenous life on Turtle Island. Historian Pekka Hämäläinen explains the freedom of Northeastern Nations as a reaction to Cahokia:

North American Indians had experimented with ranked societies and all-powerful spiritual leaders and had found them deficient and dangerous. They had opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world . . .17

Hämäläinen’s lively histories of American First Nations focus on the nations’ power, based on their adaptability, covenanting, and diplomacy, as well as their practice of public freedom.18

Indigenous freedom, therefore, belies Fischer’s notion of America as merely freedom’s soil, lying fallow for centuries, waiting for European seed. Historians have argued persuasively that indigenous freedom influenced the Age of Enlightenment19 and, later, the creation of America’s balanced Constitution.20

But these arguments about causation, including Fischer’s, miss the bigger point: freedom isn’t just an idea that we can trace as intellectual history. Freedom is, at bottom, neither conception nor culture. Freedom doesn’t arrive only as cultural inheritance, which as the Greek historian Polybius first understood, freedom’s children tend to squander.21 Freedom is action and interaction.

A cause can be freedom’s causation. Using Fischer’s definitions, liberty from can engender freedom to. In Philadelphia from 1774 to 1781, Congress’s struggle for liberty from Great Britain engendered freedom to conduct the new nation’s business. Congress’s famous Declaration trumpets both independence from and interdependence with. It indicts King George, but it also records the signers’ mutual pledge of “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Liberty may bring the horns and strings, but bands of free people must pick them up and practice together.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Montgomery last Saturday was hot. Early in the program, a member of the Georgia state legislature, someone who had marched in the 1960s, apparently fainted, probably due to the heat. Deanna Reed, the rally’s emcee, stopped the program, called for the medics, and reminded us to visit the hydration stations.1

And of course we prayed. We lifted hands toward the stricken legislator. And while the medics were attending to her, someone in the audience started us on the Amen song. It’s like we became aware of ourselves as a congregation, a congress. We felt showered in the spirit. I thought of the praise that God prepares for himself, the Psalmist says, that stills the enemy and the avenger.2

And I wondered if the Alabama State Capitol grounds had ever experienced such godly warfare before, inadvertently brought on by a medical emergency.

The All Roads Lead to the South rally itself is a response to an emergency, and it was organized in a single week. It felt, though, as if the planning had gone on for months. Over 160 organizations came together to plan or support the rally. The hydration stations, of which I availed myself after the medical emergency, were all over the capitol grounds. The water bottles were free, and everyone also got a voucher for lunch good at any of the many food trucks. Lots of us waved “The March Is Not Over” fans. Security was tight, and the security attendants at the check points were friendly, all thanks to trained volunteers and the city police. In all respects, we were treated like fellow citizens.

The thirty-some kiosks, with their common black, white and red theme, seemed both differentiated and coordinated. I picked up one of the many available free signs, this one from ACLU Alabama: “Protect the South: No Jim Crow Maps.” My favorite sign, not reproduced for distribution, suggested the regional and national reach of the emergency: “The South Is Everywhere.”

The emergency the rally addressed stems from U. S. Supreme Court’s April 29 Louisiana v. Callais decision. In its aftermath, legislatures across the South are racing to eliminate Black state and federal districts, to turn Blacks out of office, and to dilute the Black vote. Many Southern states are redrawing districts to eliminate, in the aggregate, 15 to 20 African-American Congresspeople and probably over 190 African-American state legislative seats over the next six or eight years.

As a street marker in front of what was the rally’s stage indicates, the Alabama State Capitol building marks the end of the 54-mile-long Selma to Montgomery Historic Trail. It also now marks the end of what the marches commemorated by that trail led to: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Alabama has rushed to do its part. Almost as soon as the Supreme Court handed down Callais, the Alabama legislature changed the state’s congressional and state senate maps. They did so even though voting for primary elections under the earlier maps had already begun.

This emergency, in Alabama and across the South, leaves the Fifteenth Amendment without any enforcement power to defend the Black vote against white majorities’ actions to dilute it, and without any enforcement power to defend Black legislators against white legislatures’ actions to eliminate them.

How can we counter this? Before the medical emergency, Reed quoted a Bible verse about warfare: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”3

Until the Civil War, the principality Reed referred to held power on Southern cotton plantations and in Northern mercantile houses and financial institutions that benefitted from the cotton trade.4 Abolitionists and opponents of slavery’s expansion often referred to this principality and the moneyed interests and politicians allied to it collectively as the Slave Power. A more current term for the same or a similar principality and its human enablers is white supremacy. I’m sure that, by whatever name, the Slave Power is connected with patriarchalism and capitalism—certainly racism—dark forces that amount to high places themselves, but I’m more reticent than are many Southern legislatures about mapping out their domains.

By whatever name or names, this Slave Power is still at work in the United States.5 Labeling forces as “powers,” though, doesn’t mean there’s no way to counter them. That’s the point of Paul’s catalog of our weapons that follows the verse Reed quoted.

That’s also the point of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Galatians offers help in our emergency because it describes the nature and relationship of three covenants similar to the three that the Supreme Court mangles in Callais and other Fifteenth Amendment cases—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Constitution’s three Civil War Amendments. Getting the covenants’ relationships right brings freedom, Paul claims. Getting them wrong, as the Galatians were being taught to do in Paul’s absence, leads back to slavery. According to J. Louis Martyn in his Galatians Anchor Bible, Paul believed that this teaching placed the Galatians “in a life-and-death crisis.”6

The book of Galatians comes across as both drama and argument, Martyn claims.7 Galatians argues less than it performs. Galatians is “more revelatory and performative than horatory and persuasive,” he observes.8 The emergency Paul addresses is more elemental than what argument alone can reach. Galatians wasn’t written against the Law or against Judaism, as many mistakenly believe, but against an entire enslaving cosmos and the forces that perpetuate it. Revelation—Martyn prefers revelation’s synonym “apocalypse”—and performance are necessary to announce a new cosmos, a new world right down to its roots.

This apocalypse of Jesus the Messiah brought freedom that needs to be recognized, defended, and lived, Paul says: “The Anointed freed us for freedom; stand fast, then, and do not again be restrained by slavery’s yoke.”9 This freedom is similar to what Lincoln at Gettysburg anticipates as “a new birth of freedom,” the Civil War Amendments to the Constitution, something the nation was encouraged to work toward winning, drafting, and ratifying.

In celebrating their new covenants and their freedom, Lincoln and Paul had to deal carefully with what Rabbi Moshe Weinfeld calls treaty covenants—covenants that set out a community’s or an alliance’s rights and duties with respect to one another. In Lincoln’s case, the treaty covenant was the pre-Civil War Constitution. In Paul’s case, it was the Mosaic Law, or Mosaic covenant.10

These treaty covenants make silent allowances for human frailty. The Mosaic covenant, for instance, permitted divorce only “because of the hardness of your hearts,” Jesus said, but “from the beginning it was not so.” From the perspective of ancient Israel’s national covenant, the “beginning” wasn’t Eden, which Jesus cites, but God’s covenant with Abraham.

Paul in Galatians fleshes out Jesus’ impulse to go back in time before the treaty covenant. Paul says that the Mosaic Law, “promulgated through angels,” doesn’t void God’s earlier promise through his covenant with Abraham, the promise that through Abraham’s seed “all the gentiles will be blessed.”11

Lincoln also makes the same move. The Constitution permitted slavery because of the hardness of our hearts, but from the beginning it was not so. The United States’ covenantal beginning was the Declaration of Independence, and it contains the promise that “all men are created equal,” a promise that Lincoln cited at Gettysburg and that was to be fulfilled in America’s “new birth of freedom.”

Lincoln defended the Constitution as the Declaration’s picture frame because it preserved the Declaration’s Equality Clause (“all men are created equal”) for a day when it would be accessible to all people.12 Likewise, in Galatians Paul defended the Mosaic Law as a “schoolmaster” because it preserved the earlier, Abrahamic covenant’s blessing (“in you shall all the peoples of the earth be blessed”) for a day when it would be expanded to all peoples.13

So both the United States and ancient Israel, “all” and “all,” began with what Weinfeld calls “grant” covenants that promised to one day include everyone—Blacks and Gentiles, respectively.

Lincoln painted a vivid picture of how the nations of the world in the form of emigrants to America had come to be grafted in because of the Declaration’s Equality Clause. Though the emigrants have no blood relation with the founders, he said, they can look

. . . through that old Declaration of Independence [and] find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” . . . they feel that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as thought they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.14

This grafting in, this finding by outsiders that they are, because of the promise in the founding grant covenant, the “blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh” of the founding generation, is this not Paul’s Good News to the Galatians? As Gentiles, they are no longer excluded from covenant but are, in some mystical but real sense, “Abraham’s seed, heirs according to a promise.”15

Of course, Paul argues to the Galatians that Israel’s third national covenant, in which Gentiles and Jews are equals, is a second grant covenant—one between God the Father and his Son Jesus. Jesus fulfills the first covenant as “Abraham’s seed” through which all the peoples of the world are blessed.

Similarly, America’s third national covenant, the one that fulfills the promise of the first covenant’s “all men are created equal,” is the Civil War Amendments. Through these amendments, Blacks are freed from slavery, including the “badges and incidents” of slavery, and given the right to vote. Historian Eric Foner calls the Civil War Amendments America’s “Second Founding.” Carl Schurz, tasked by President Andrew Johnson in 1865 to research and report on the condition of the defeated South, later called the Amendments a “constitutional revolution” that

found the rights of the individual at the mercy of the states . . . and placed them under the shield of national protection. It made the liberty and rights of every citizen in every state a matter of national concern.16

Of course, this “constitutional revolution” would last for only a dozen years before its betrayal at the end of Reconstruction.

Above: diagram suggesting the similar ways in which the national grant and treaty covenants entered into by ancient Israel and the United States interrelate

In Galatians, Paul’s emergency stems from the Galatians’ betrayal of Jesus and his grant covenant. The Galatians were “bewitched,” he says, returning to forces that had, before their baptism, enslaved them. By converting to a practice of observing the Mosaic law, Paul says, the Galatians were returning to their original state of slavery as Gentiles to “elemental spirits of the cosmos.”17 This seems to us an odd argument. In Jewish tradition, these elemental spirits were associated not with law but with pairs of opposites—air versus earth, fire versus water—that the Gentiles were believed to worship. But Paul, mixing performance and argument, associates these elemental spirits with religious opposites, as Martyn points out:

Specifically, the cosmos that was crucified on the cross is the cosmos that was founded on the distinction between Jew and Gentile, between sacred and profane, between the Law and the Not-Law.18

The Gentiles would not become free, Paul argues, by simply switching polarities—that is, by moving from Not-Law to Law, from profane to sacred, from Gentile to Jew. If they merely switched polarities, they’d be stuck in the same cosmos and its polarities that they renounced at baptism, Martyn points out:

Citing an early Christian baptismal tradition, Paul emphatically says that the cosmos, founded as it was on religious pairs of opposites, does not any longer exist:

“For when all of you were baptized into Christ, you put on Christ as though he were your clothing.
There is neither Jew nor Greek;
There is neither slave nor free;
There is no ‘male and female’;
For all of you are One in Christ Jesus (3:27-28)”19

Paul bid the Galatians remember their association at baptism with Jesus’ crucifixion, by which, in Paul’s words, “the cosmos has been crucified to me and I to the cosmos.”20

Of course, the Galatians’ dangerous teachers wouldn’t have made this connection between Gentiles keeping Law and Gentiles returning to elemental spirits. Instead, the teachers gave lip service to the new covenant in Jesus but insisted that Gentiles, brought into Israel’s covenant with God through Jesus, had the privilege of following, and the responsibility to follow, Moses’ law to the letter.

The Supreme Court wants to do something similar. It gives lip service to the Civil War Amendments, in this case the Fifteenth Amendment concerning voting rights, but insists that Black votes blend in with white votes so that as many whites as possible hold public offices, much as they did under the pre-Civil War Constitution.

To accomplish this, the Court wants Blacks, and with them the entire country, not to speak in public spaces of slavery or even of race. In this respect, public discourse would mirror that earlier Constitution, which never mentions race or slavery while many of its provisions work to perpetuate slavery.21 The Court requires that any remedy for racial inequality on a political level must not be based on race or even mention race. For the Court, the actual problem—racial discrimination—isn’t the problem. Instead, the statement of the problem is the problem.

But treating all groups the same without regard to their historical relations keeps the formerly excluded group functionally excluded. In Acts, Peter was instrumental in bringing the first Gentiles, slave and free, into the Jesus fold, but later he refused to eat with the Gentile Jesus people at Antioch. Paul tells the Galatians that, in confronting Peter about his snub, he traced Peter’s behavior to his desire to erase differences through conformity: “. . . how is it you require the gentiles to become Judaean?”22 Paul warns the Galatians about why the teachers would have them keep the Mosaic law: “. . . they want to shut you out . . .”23

At the Jerusalem conference recorded in Acts, Peter advocated for the position that the Gentiles need not keep Moses’ law. Peter wanted to erase ethnic differences as an outcome, to break down, in Paul’s words, “the barrier of the dividing wall” between Jew and Gentile.24 Eliminating ethnic inequities in the public life of the congregation would be outcome-oriented and would follow Paul’s elimination of Jews and Gentiles as polarities in the broken cosmos. But at Antioch, while shutting out the Gentiles at table, Peter passively used conformity to erase ethnic differences not as an outcome but as categories: Gentiles must live like Jews.

For the Supreme Court, too, it’s all about the categories. It’s racist to speak of race. In its 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court struck down a race-conscious remedial program irrespective of its effect in chipping away at a badge and incident of slavery. It struck the program down because it was race-conscious in the first place.25

Remedies for racism therefore face the same higher scrutiny as does a state’s or a municipality’s expressly acknowledged racial discrimination. What flies under the Court’s ahistorical radar, though, is racial discrimination itself, which as the framers of the Civil War Amendments well knew, even at the outset of Reconstruction, is almost never couched in racist language or categories. For the Court, any conceivable remedy, because it must use the r-word, is worse than the disease of racial discrimination. But this equality under the pre-Civil-War-Amendment Constitution—as opposed to the equity under the Second Founding—works like equality for Gentiles under the Mosaic Law: “. . . they want to shut you out . . .”

The Supreme Court’s imposed silence about race, then, leads to conformity and to political invisibility. In that respect, America’s future public sphere under the Supreme Court resembles antebellum America’s public sphere, as Foner describes it: “Slavery rendered blacks all but invisible to those imagining the American community.”26

One can hear this silence and see this invisibility at work in Callais, which found that Louisiana’s voting map requiring a second Black congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Under Callais’s reasoning, the creation of any Black district under the Voting Rights Act is discriminatory because the creation will always be explicitly based on race. The court claims to protect any valid remedy to an instance of racial discrimination, but it finds that it must strike down any remedy that claims to address an instance of racial discrimination. The demanded silence makes all remedies unenforceable.

The result is invisibility. A minority community may now be cracked—that is, they may be split up among majority white communities—“so that it loses all its electoral influence,” as Justice Kagan points out in her dissenting opinion:

Members of the racial minority can still go to the polls and cast a ballot. But given the State’s racially polarized voting, they cannot hope—in the way the State’s White citizens can—to elect a person whom they think will well represent their interests. Their votes matter less than others’ do; they translate into less political voice.

A different kind of silence—an historical silence—pervades the Supreme Court’s other recent Voting Rights Act case. In its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Court declared unconstitutional the Voting Rights Act’s formula for judging whether a state or locality could be subject to the act’s remedial precondition requirement, making the jurisdictions gain federal approval before implementing changes to their election laws and procedures. The Shelby County decision requires Congress to pass a new formula, not based on history but on present values, to accompany what even the Court acknowledges as Congress’s ample present findings of voter suppression. But while a present-formula requirement seems reasonable, it silences any acknowledgement of the past that the Voting Rights Act and the subsequent acts extending it find active in the present.

In support of its decision, the Shelby County Court conjures the displaced federalism of the pre-Civil War Constitution. Under it, states must be treated equally, and the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance regime would be highly suspect. But as Foner points out, the Civil War Amendments constitute a new federalism:

Federalism endured, but a deeply modified federalism, which recognized the primacy of national citizenship and saw the states, not the national government, as most likely to infringe on Americans’ fundamental rights. This point can be appreciated simply by comparing the first words of the Bill of Rights (“Congress shall make no law”) with the beginning of the final sentence of each Reconstruction amendment (“Congress shall have the power”). The first constrains the federal government; the second . . . authorizes it to combat “the abuses of state power.”27

Applying pre-Civil War federalism to legislation authorized by the same Civil War Amendments that deeply modified that federalism begs the question. It also, in effect, partially and effectively repeals these Amendments that make up the nation’s second founding.28

A community can expressly break covenants. It can also ignore covenants until they are forgotten, which the Supreme Court’s decisions encourage us to do. But covenants themselves are acts of memory. The opposite of covenant isn’t anarchy but amnesia. “The past is never dead,” the lawyer Gavin Stevens says in Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” Covenants acknowledge this. But in Callais and Shelby County, the Supreme Court acts as if forgetting our nation’s past will make the past, with its badges and incidents, go away.

Paul concludes his letter to the Galatians with a call to remember, to renew their baptismal vows based on the apocalypse that is still leading to a new cosmos:

May I, however, boast in nothing except the cross of our Lord Jesus the Anointed, through whom the cosmos has been crucified to me and I to the cosmos. For neither circumcision nor having a foreskin means anything, but rather a new creation. And as many as proceed in line with this rule, peace and mercy upon them, and upon the Israel of God.29

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is, of course, also a covenant renewal speech, also as much performative as persuasive. Lincoln begins with the nation’s founding grant covenant, quoting its Equality Clause. He ends with the nation’s anticipated second founding. And he reminds us how the promise of the first calls for our participation in the second:

. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom . . .

The nation’s highest court of law should be, above all, a court of covenant. In Galatians, Paul offers guidance that would allow the Supreme Court, in Voting Rights Act and other Fifteenth Amendment cases, to begin again.

Along these lines:

“Yes, but can it preach?” adapts the content of “Galatians and the Voting Rights Act” for another genre and audience: a sermon in a southern, Black church.

“How to renew America’s covenants” sets out more fully and theoretically the relationships among the grant and treaty covenants entered into by ancient Israel and by the United States.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

In 1763, Britain began to assert sovereignty over its American colonies. In response, the colonists began, historian Bernard Bailyn says, “to state in the language of constitutional theory, the truth of the world they knew.”

This week’s Revolution 250 essay examines what that language got right, what it got wrong, and how we might form a more perfect Revolution.

In the violent seventeenth century, home of the English Civil War and the overthrow of three English governments, history wasn’t turning out well. In response, political theorists sought a way to ground government in something non-historical.1

Two of these theorists, the great proto-liberal thinkers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, describe states of nature to explain the fundamental relationships among individuals, societies, and governments. These states of nature aren’t historical or even prehistorical accounts. In fact, as a later political theorist, John Dunn, points out, they’re deliberately and “crudely anti-historicist.” These states of nature don’t add up to anthropology or myth, either.2 Instead, they are simple means of getting across the age’s social-contract theory.

These states of nature remind one of the Bible’s Garden of Eden, but they don’t have Genesis’s narrative character. In fact, by the time Locke sets out his state of nature in his famous Second Treatise of Government, he has, in his less famous First Treatise of Government, dismissed an earlier attempt to ground government in the Garden of Eden. In his First Treatise, Locke attacks the Patriarchalism of Robert Filmer, who traces the Divine Right of Kings back to Adam.

Locke’s state of nature is peaceful and rational, but it’s also insecure. Consequently, governments are formed to secure individuals’ rights. By contrast, Hobbes’s state of nature amounts to a state of war. Without an absolute ruler, Hobbes reasons, individuals would destroy one another.

Hobbes and Locke describe different worst-case scenarios depending on the outcomes they want, as Professor Ruth Grant points out:

By identifying the state of nature as the worst case, Hobbes teachers obedience to civil government. By identifying the state of war as the worst case, Locke justifies resistance.3

One key phrase in Locke’s justification for resistance to government is “appeal to heaven.” During the Revolutionary War, George Washington had the phrase placed on his cruisers’ ensigns. We can see how Locke constructs his state of nature and his social-contract theory by observing how we Americans applied it in our revolution.

In a letter to Congress dated October 20, 1775, Washington suggested a modification for the ensign that several new American cruisers would fly. The ensign is a green pine tree—a stylized version of New England’s Liberty Tree—on a white field. Washington wanted “An Appeal to Heaven” on the ensign, and he got his way. The next year, the ensign also became the Massachusetts Navy’s ensign, and Massachusetts kept “An Appeal to Heaven” on its naval ensign until 1971, long after the state’s Navy itself was destroyed by the British.4

Most Americans, I imagine, have seen the flag. The flag’s “appeal to heaven” is a prayer, as many today assume, but it’s principally a declaration of American independence based on Locke’s theory of resistance.

Locke’s “appeal to heaven” is part of his effort not only to supplant Filmer’s Patriarchalism but also to justify the 1688 English Revolution. The American patriots frequently cited the 1688 revolution in support of their own revolution. Locke’s Second Treatise, which revolutionary America consulted as a central text on political theory, uses “appeal to heaven” several times as a term of art.

Here’s how the phrase “appeal to heaven” fits into Locke’s account of the state of nature. Suppose two people or two towns or two countries become aware of each other.5 If they coexist “according to reason,” they share a “state of nature.” If they are individuals, this state of nature includes “a title to perfect freedom, and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature.” But if one person or town or country uses “force, or the declared design of force” on the other, the state of nature becomes a state of war.

Individuals may create a “political society” to avoid this state of war. Those societies allow the majority to have its way on any given question.6 However, those political societies may create governments such as democracies, oligarchies, and monarchies, all with legislative power chiefly for “the preservation of the society.” By creating political societies and governments, however, individuals surrender their power to settle and punish infractions of their natural rights to “life, liberty, and estate.” Instead, “the community comes to be umpire” of these infractions, and individuals appeal to their political societies for redress.7

But even in political societies created by these social contracts, a state of war can occur between a people and its government if the rulers exercise “a power the people never put into their hands.” Because there is no “common superior” to both a people and their rulers to appeal to in such a state of war, the people as an aggrieved party may appeal to heaven. That is, the people may resist their rulers based on an unwritten, God-given law superior to the rulers’ law, Locke says:

. . . where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of their power without right, and have no appeal on earth, there they have a liberty to appeal to heaven whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have by the constitution of that society an superior power to determine and give effective sentence in the case, yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves, which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven.8

Such an appeal would be ineffective if heaven were bound by the rulers’ laws, Locke here suggests. Instead, heaven judges the people’s case “by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men”—that is, by natural law.

The distinction between natural law and humankind’s positive law (law “posited” by human lawmakers) reinforces the governmental distinction between God and man. If a ruler’s decrees cannot be checked by any higher authority, then he or she becomes as arbitrary as God could be if he hadn’t limited his own rule by covenant.9

Locke isn’t the first philosopher in the Western Christian tradition to find that in proper cases, natural law justifies not only civil disobedience but also a ruler’s overthrow. The thirteenth century philosopher Thomas Aquinas writes that

A tyrannical government is not just because it is directed not to the common good but to the private good of the ruler, as the philosopher [Aristotle] states. Consequently there is no sedition in disturbing a government of this kind . . . indeed it is the tyrant rather that is guilty of sedition, since he encourages discord and sedition among his subjects.10

Aquinas here summarizes what later became known as the right of revolution, the foundation of all other rights.

So two of our nation’s first navies sailed under a flag that asserted a right of revolution against the British. Specifically, it asserted the stage in which America found itself in John Locke’s political appeals process. The Americans had petitioned the British king to no avail. It was time to appeal to heaven. In other words, it was time for revolution.

But I’m not sure how revolutionary Locke’s right of revolution really is. After all, the right of revolution assumes the need for rulers. People may assert their right of revolution, Locke says, only if the ruler is bad enough and only if the revolution works to secure a new ruler:

Such revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty will be born by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, ‘tis not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected . . .11

Despite his attack on Filmer’s Patriarchalism, and even at the end of his theoretically successful revolutions, Locke still props up patriarchs who can promulgate and enforce “many wrong and inconvenient laws” which should be “born by the people without mutiny or murmur.”

I’m also not sure how different Hobbes’s and Locke’s states of nature are at bottom. Even though Hobbes’s state of nature teaches obedience to rulers and Locke’s state of nature justifies resistance, their theories share the right of revolution’s central assumption: we need rulers.

Hannah Arendt sniffs this out. She highlights Locke’s predisposition to sovereignty as she explores a contradiction in Locke’s account of the state of nature. Locke’s account, Arendt says, is really a combination of two mutually exclusive social contracts. Here’s a summary of Arendt’s explanation of how the two social contracts, one creating society and the other creating government, differ in terms of power, political involvement, and principles:12

Arendt’s analysis of Locke’s mutually contradictory contracts pits “the republican principle” of the first contract against the “principle of absolute rulership” of the second. It pits the “federal principle” and its balance of powers, associated with the first contract, against the “the principle of the nation-state” undergirding the second contract.

Are we not, as a country, currently moving from the first contract’s principles to the second contract’s principles? From republicanism and federalism to absolutism and nationalism?

The tendency of our nation’s founders to express our nation’s founding in Locke’s contradictory terms suggests that our revolution, at its current stage, is both promising and flawed. Our revolution is incomplete, and our work in this hour is to complete it.

What would that work be like? Arendt doesn’t argue for a liberal notion of progress under which more and more categories of people would receive the franchise to vote for their rulers, as important as the franchise is under a Constitution that makes elections—that is, the regular surrender of power to rulers—the hallmark of its civic life.13

Instead, Arendt argues that America should return to its greatest contribution to political history: its rediscovery of power generated among people through mutual promises and the living out of those promises in local and federal assemblies.

American colonists practiced this power for 150 years. Locke may have taught the American founders his second social contract, Arendt admits, but she posits that, by their experiences, the American colonists taught Locke his first. Locke constructed the first part of his social compact account, Arendt suspects, based on what he had heard and read about the colonists’ experiences from the Mayflower Compact forward. Long before Locke wrote his Second Treatise, Americans were entering into covenants.14 As soon as the American colonists got to what would become their settlements—even beforehand, during their voyage to America, in the Mayflower’s case—they entered into covenants to create the power they would need to survive and prosper. They learned that action “can be accomplished only by some joint effort” and not in individual isolation.15 Arendt summarizes their experience:

The unique and all-decisive distinction between the settlements of North America and all other colonial enterprises was that only the British emigrants had insisted, from the very beginning, that they constitute themselves into “civil bodies politic.” These bodies, moreover, were not conceived as governments, strictly speaking; they did not imply rule and the division of the people into rulers and ruled. . . . These new bodies politic really were “political societies”. . .16

Arendt terms the Americans’ exercise of their newfound power in these assemblies a rediscovery because of “the Puritans’ reliance on the Old Testament, and especially their rediscovery of the concept of the covenant of Israel . . .”17 Ancient Israel, and not seventeenth-century political theorists, taught the first American colonists about covenants.

As we all know, however, the “republican principle” isn’t alone in adopting the logic of monotheism. The principle of absolute rulership, Arendt points out, often makes a kind of appeal to heaven: its “absolute monopoly of power . . . is liable to be construed in the image of divine power, since only God is omnipotent . . .”18 One can see also in Locke’s appeal process this easy association of kings with God. To gain redress for the violation of their rights, the people first appeal to the king. Only when this fails do they appeal to heaven—that is, they appeal to a greater king.

But if the people learn how to covenant and live out those covenants effectively, Arendt points out, then the covenant members do their political work without sovereignty or rule: “. . . the notion of covenant presupposes no-sovereignty and no-rulership. . .”19 In fact, in America’s case, these colonial covenants were “made without any reference to king or prince,” Arendt says. Subsequent English royal charters merely “sanctioned and confirmed an already existing system of government.” Therefore, “the Revolution liberated the power of covenant and constitution-making as it had shown itself in the earliest days of colonization.”20

Aided as they were by this colonial heritage of self-governing assemblies, why did the American founders frame the revolution partly in Lockean terms, including “an appeal to heaven”? The founders’ reasoning “both in style and content was formed by the Age of Enlightenment,” Arendt says. As a result,

. . . Jefferson could speak of the consent by the people from which governments ‘derive their just powers’ in the same Declaration which he closes on the principle of mutual pledges, and neither he nor anybody else became aware of the simple and elementary difference between ‘consent’ and mutual promise, or between the two types of social-contract theory.21

But the Enlightenment framing that conflated consent and mutual promise had no grounding in the American heritage of townships and similar popular institutions.22

Beyond their blinders borrowed from the Age of Enlightenment, why were revolutionary-era Americans attracted to Locke’s self-contradictory state of nature? It may be because Colonial America had lived both sides of Locke’s contradiction. For the most part, from the last years of the seventeenth century until the French and Indian War, the king and Parliament were content to let the colonists govern themselves, and the colonists mostly did so pursuant to the covenants they had entered to create distinct polities.23 Matters handled by the British legislature touched “only the outer fringes of colonial life,” historian Bernard Bailyn points out.24

During this period, the English didn’t tax the colonists. Instead, the colonists taxed themselves, and they did so with English encouragement. But by the end of the French and Indian War, which moved Britain to tax her colonies, the colonies began to live a contradiction, maintaining local and colony-wide power structures inside “an empire presumably ruled by a single, absolute, undivided sovereign,” Bailyn says.25 The living contradiction Bailyn identifies mirrors the contradiction Arendt identifies in Locke’s state of nature.

When the British began to assert their rule against the colonies in 1763, the colonists found their settled forms of government challenged. They began to advance arguments, Bailyn says, “to state in the language of constitutional theory, the truth of the world they knew.”26 One such theory, Locke’s social contract examined by Arendt, gives theoretical voice to both sides of the colonists’ contradictory experience with government.

Locke’s state of nature describes today’s contradictory governmental expectations, too. We want government to defend our rights to life, liberty, and property, but we also want government to leave us alone. We want good government, but we don’t want to spend time governing together. We’d rather not attend to public life ourselves. We prefer rulers.

So we appeal to heaven for a better ruler, a better patriarch. We long for what the Ukrainian essayist and psychoanalyst Jurko Prochasko terms a psychologically immature revolution. Reflecting after the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution on his country’s 2004-2005 Orange Revolution, Prochasko realizes that the earlier revolution, considered a success in its immediate aftermath, had merely swapped one ruler for another:

We concluded the revolution in three weeks, delegated everything to [Viktor Yushchenko], and went away. In that sense Yushchenko’s betrayal was a very, very valuable experience. . . . At the time we thought there was a bad father, and we had to replace the bad father with a good father. And now we no longer believe in a father at all.27

In our dark hour, we must ask ourselves which half of Locke’s self-contradictory compact theory we want from the American Revolution. Do we merely want a better ruler? Or do we want to live “the republican principle, according to which power resides in the people, and where a ‘mutual subjection’ makes of rulership an absurdity”?

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This essay is the second in the series The Spirit of Revolution, which commemorates our nation’s sestercentennial. An explanation of the series serves as the preface to the series’s first essay.

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

This invisibility is disempowering and deliberate. Competing and flattening narratives from liberals and conservatives and even many U.S. Coptic Orthodox clergy members tend to discourage Nashville’s working-class Copts from organizing and from participating in mutual aid.

Above: Lydia Yousief (left) and Keria Nashed

Enter Elmahaba Center, an independent Coptic community organization founded in 2019 by Lydia Yousief. It serves all of Nashville’s Arabic-speaking immigrants, refugees, and their children—and anyone else in town who asks for help. Elmahaba offers mutual aid, tutoring, college prep classes, art classes, civic engagement, case management, livestream informational sessions for new immigrants, Arabic and English classes, and an oral history project. Elmahaba Center also creates and sponsors art and cultural events around Nashville. (Because they’re Middle Tennessee’s only Arabic community organization, the’ll create and sponsor other programs as needs arise.)

Elmahaba Center is unique because of its focus on an unserved community—the Arabic-speaking working class. Learn how Elmahaba Center navigates deficient and sometimes false narratives to support Coptic and Muslim working-class solidarity, often against the wishes of the workers’ religious clerics. Learn how Elmahaba’s leadership does so by living out a vibrant Coptic Orthodox faith.

Above: the Elmahaba Center van, chock full of diapers.

You’ll hear from Lydia, from two volunteers (well, three, counting me), and from Anthropology Professor Candace Lukasik, who has written about Elmahaba’s work in her recent book Martyrs and Migrants. You’ll hear parishoners singing in a Nashville Coptic Orthodox Church and volunteers talking about their work as they hand out diapers to Nashville’s young Arabic-speaking families.

My thanks to Keria Nashed and Lydia for meeting with me and to Lydia for being my guide to the liturgy during my visit to Nashville’s St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.

Above: part of the narthex entryway of St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.

Above: doors from the narthex to the nave in St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.

The title of this series of occasional essays, The Spirit of Revolution, takes Arendt’s term. The essays will focus on what her book calls “the problem of beginning,” a concern she shares with Benjamin in the context of revolution. As a potential solution, Arendt’s concept of natality more than resembles Benjamin’s concept of “a weak Messianic power.” The interplay of these concepts fuels these essays.

Apropos of a sestercentennial, this first series essay concerns calendars.

Winter, Spring

At the other end of a telescope, if the Big Bang’s distant past were to peer back at us, New Year’s Day might seem to it an arbitrary holiday. Why January First? Any day could start a revolution. Why not July Fourth?

To associate the two holidays, of course, is to conflate two senses of the word “revolution.” The first English use of “revolution,” as historian Garry Wills points out, referred to the stars’ paths across the night sky and the planets’ paths around the sun.2 The English started using the word in this sense early in the seventeenth century, when Johannes Kepler fixed the planets’ revolutions.

Later in the same century, English politics appropriated the scientific term, describing two big changes to their government—the royalist victory when Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660 and Parliament’s victory when William and Mary ascended the throne in 1688—as revolutions.3 (The latter revolution is the “Glorious Revolution” and is usually what is meant by references to the “English Revolution.”)

Proponents of these two opposed political upheavals called them revolutions because, in their view, something long missing was restored to English government, just as the earth is restored each year to some arbitrary place in its revolution around the sun. For these proponents, ancient liberties had been restored and history, like the planets, had come full circle.

Even a century later, England’s founder of conservatism supported revolutions. To Edmund Burke’s way of thinking, a revolution is the necessary exception that makes continuity in government possible. As a conservative, Burke reasoned that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”4

For Burke, flexibility means strength. On the ground, so to speak, revolution is the wobble, or maybe the detour, that permits the state to continue its course, which in England’s case includes the hereditary succession of monarchs. Burke saw each succession as a revolution:

[Hereditary succession] is the spirit of our constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions. Whoever came in, or however he came in, whether he obtained the crown by law or by force, the hereditary succession was either continued or adopted.5

Some English kings usurped the throne, Burke admitted, but England, imbued with its constitutional spirit of hereditary succession, resumed its governmental circuit after each usurpation. Revolution is the exception that makes the rule of succession.

Burke understood the French Revolution differently, though. He saw it not as a change that permitted a return to France’s “settled course” but as a change that would start France on a new and dangerous course. The word “revolution” would lose its meaning in such a context, Burke thought. Proponents of the French Revolution, he believed, “take the deviation from the principle for the principle.”6 The revolution’s English proponents, whom Burke warned his readers against in his famous book Reflections on the Revolution in France, wished to bring France’s perverted notion of revolution to England. They wished to substitute France’s deviation for England’s settled course by eliminating hereditary succession as well as other institutions that kept England in its fixed political orbit.

Burke’s understanding of revolution, then, is circular and sempiternal. However, the new understanding of revolution brought by the French Revolution—the understanding we’re now more familiar with—is rectilinear, grounding government not in a return to longstanding institutions but in a new conformity to the rights of man or to the people’s “general will” or both.7

Was the American Revolution a revolution in the English or in the French sense? Was it a circular return to ancient liberties or a rectilinear experiment based in large part on John Locke’s natural rights theory, which also influenced the French Revolution? Burke argued in 1775 that the Americans based their claims against English policy on a desire to restore to themselves the liberties of the English Constitution. The Americans are, he claimed, “not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles.”8

In asserting independence a year later, of course, the erstwhile American colonies could no longer base their position on the English Constitution. But even the Americans’ reliance on abstract theory—on John Locke’s doctrines of natural right and revolution—was indirectly grounded in English constitutional law, according to John R. Stoner, Jr.:

. . . at least as much as Locke ever intended, into [his] theory were integrated doctrines and practices of English common lawyers and their notion of an ancient constitution—an unwritten constitution subject to development as well as decay but ultimately aimed at protecting English liberties.9

Just as the American revolution, from a temporal standpoint, came between the English and French revolutions, so also the American Revolution seemed to adopt both the continuity Burke saw in the English Revolution and the new start that the French revolutionaries set out to make in 1789. As Hannah Arendt summarizes it, speaking of the American revolutionaries,

What they had thought was a restoration, the retrieving of their ancient liberties, turned into a revolution, and their thoughts and theories about the British constitution, the rights of Englishmen, and the forms of colonial government ended with a declaration of independence.10

Above: Map of Heavens and Earth. From the New York Public Library. Public domain.

Summer, Fall

So far we’ve enjoyed a kind of springtime, dear reader, finding symmetry in the American Revolution reminiscent of a French garden. Guided by the English etymology of “revolution,” we’ve discovered that the American Revolution is both English and French, both cyclical and rectilinear.

It would’ve made a good essay, too, I’ll venture, if I’d venture no further. But our assay of the American Revolution’s mettle hasn’t completed its circuit. True, we’ve walked through the sources of American liberation. Now that I’ve brought up Hannah Arendt, though, we must look at the American Revolution also for its late-season bloom, the political flowering that often needs the heat of our fights for liberation. We must look for public freedom.

Arendt’s 1963 book titled, appropriately enough, On Revolution, focuses mostly on the American Revolution and its aftermath. The book casts the French Revolution as the American Revolution’s wayward, younger sister. When Arendt looks at both revolutions’ first years—and she focuses more on the American Revolution’s beginnings than on its sister’s—she’s more interested in the process of independence than in its products. Regarding the former revolution, Arendt is more interested specifically in the experiences and interactions of the delegates to the Second Continental Congress than in the Declaration of Independence that resulted from them.

As the delegates labored in Philadelphia for liberation, she says, they stumbled upon the delights of something different from liberation. While they were founding a nation, they found public freedom. Compared to this freedom, liberation from “taxation without representation” seems . . . well, banal:

Whatever the merits of the opening claim of the American Revolution—no taxation without representation—it certainly could not appeal by virtue of its charms. It was altogether different with the speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing which proved necessary to drive this claim to its logical conclusion: independent government and the foundation of a new body politic. It was through these experiences that those who, in the words of John Adams, had been “called without expectation and compelled without previous inclination” discovered that “it is action, not rest, that constitutes our pleasure.”11

Few eighteenth-century revolutionaries sought this public happiness, though, because few knew of its existence before they began to act together for liberation:

The men of the eighteenth-century revolutions had a perfect right to this lack of clarity [between liberation and freedom]; it was in the very nature of their enterprise that they discovered their own capacity and desire for the “charms of liberty,” as John Jay once called them, only in the very act of liberation.12

Genuine revolution, Arendt says, must involve both a new beginning and this public freedom. Consequently, every coup d’état or civil war, ancient or modern, doesn’t amount to a revolution.13 Political freedom and beginning something new, she says,

are at the root of the enormous pathos which we find in both the American and the French Revolutions, this ever-repeated insistence that nothing comparable in grandeur and significance had ever happened in the whole recorded history of mankind, and which, if we had to account for it in terms of successful reclamation of civil rights [i.e., liberation], would sound entirely out of place.

Only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution.14

In a real revolution, before liberty bells ring, public freedom must ring inside the citizens’ assemblies, as it did in the Second Continental Congress.

But does that mean we’ve left revolution’s orbit? That is, has revolution in modern times become only rectilinear, concerned as it is with novelty “connected with the idea of freedom”?

Arendt’s entire book may be considered a search for modern revolution’s orbit, a search for the American Revolution’s missing institution that would serve as a kind of temple for the return of revolution’s spirit. After the American Revolution ended, Arendt laments, “the spirit of revolution—a new spirit and the spirit of beginning something new—failed to find its appropriate institution.”15

The new revolution’s revolution would cycle differently than would the restorations claimed by the supporters of Charles II or William and Mary. These early modern revolutions claimed the restoration of only civil liberties. In Arendt’s orbit toward restoration, civil liberties wouldn’t be restored, or at least not at first. Instead, citizens themselves would be restored, and restored to public life.

A modern revolution, Arendt suggests, would not be out of bounds if it promulgated a new calendar to aid in public life’s restoration. The French Revolution’s calendar, which made 1789 its Year One, attests to a country’s new political start, Arendt says, but also to something greater. It signaled “an entirely new era” that discovered in revolution something beyond the sempiternal cycles of governments among the one, the few, and the many typical of ancient and even early-modern revolutions.16 Theoretically, citizens living in this newly mapped time would imbibe revolution’s spirit as they practiced public freedom.

A new calendar certainly gives witness to a new beginning. In an American calendar, July Fourth could become January First. But does a new calendar suggest, in each year’s revolution of witness, the kind of institution that would keep the spirit of revolution among us?

Arendt’s good friend Walter Benjamin thinks so. Benjamin points to the same revolutionary calendar as evidence that ordinary time can be interrupted by remembrance just as it can, on Day One, be interrupted by revolution itself:

The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance.17

A time-lapse camera confounds ordinary time and links the past with the present. As we view its film, our July 4, 2026 would not just remind us of July 4, 1776. Instead, our first July 4 would be present among us, disguised as our present July 4. A calendar—frankly, even our present calendar, and this year’s sestercentennial to boot—could serve as an archetype of the revolutionary spirit’s temple. But as an archetype, it only draws something of the true temple’s contours.

Woodrow Wilson came closer than a calendar to Benjamin’s kind of living historical consciousness. Wilson observed that the U.S. Supreme Court is “a kind of Constitutional Assembly in continuous session.”18 America’s momentous 1787 Constitutional Convention and all of its ratifying conventions appear in the guise of nine robed justices each time they deliberate on a Constitutional question.

The Supreme Court serves—or at least was designed by the Founders to serve—as the institution for the spirit of America’s 1787 Constitution. But what would serve as the institution for the spirit of America’s 1776 revolution?

Arendt points to another president’s conception of bringing the past into a living present. Thomas Jefferson traced his love of public freedom to his past as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress.19 After his presidency, he wrote at least eight letters advocating for Virginia (and by extension, for other states) to make his and his fellow delegates’ experiences in Congress available to all citizens. His plan was this: divide Virginia’s counties into wards, each with around a hundred citizens. Jefferson wanted direct democracy at the local level. In each ward-republic, all citizens would govern the local areas where they lived and, in the process, would develop and maintain face-to-face, public relationships.20

American citizens’ practice of daily, local public freedom, Jefferson believed, would keep America from falling into the hands of an autocrat:

Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs . . . when there shall not be a man in the state who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his powers wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.21

The inverse is also true: if Americans don’t practice public freedom, they’ll lose even the liberation they won during their revolution.22

Public freedom can be practiced in limitless ways, including updated versions of Jefferson’s local assemblies, direct action, community organizing, mutual aid, public lamentation, street liturgy, hospitality to strangers, indigenous public traditions, community art centers, carnivals, intentional communities, and anticipatory democracy.

Arendt calls the American Revolution a “simple fact.” But even simple facts can be forgotten:

. . . facts are stubborn; they do not disappear when historians or sociologists refuse to learn from them, though they may when everybody has forgotten them. In our case, such oblivion would not be academic; it would quite literally spell the end of the American Republic.23

Arendt isn’t concerned that we will forget that the American Revolution happened. She is concerned that we have no institution that would restore the living presence of the revolution to us. She describes an oblivion that begins without presence and ends without liberty. In that case, the spirit of revolution would find no purchase. It would hover over America’s dark, oligarchic waters indefinitely.

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Above: “Gloster B. Current, Ruby Dee, and Malcolm X at radio station WMCA.” From the New York Public Library. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

I felt responsible for our three neighbors. But most of my angst involved turnout: I was expecting maybe a dozen people at our city hall meetup, and who knows how many counter-protesters. But around 400 of us showed up, and we saw maybe only six counter-protesters.

Above: “No Kings rally in Mineola, New York, 28 March 2026,” photograph by terryballard. Used by permission.

We lined the sidewalks downtown and waved our signs at the passing cars and pickups. Many vehicles honked back approvingly. Overall, too, the silent majority of drivers seemed to take our presence with grace.

Just as in Nashville, some guy with a megaphone paced along the sidewalks, leading us in chants. But one old favorite—“Whose streets?” “Our streets!”—was quite out of place. We crossed only at crosswalks and only when we had the green light. And after we had left—as in Nashville—there was no longer any sign that the streets, or the sidewalks, had ever been ours in any sense.

Above: at our town’s March 28 No Kings rally.

Many signs (and tee shirts) were thoughtful and clever. As would befit a small-town protest, no signs involved profanity. If they did, I didn’t see them. Still, I don’t think our signs were as effective with our ostensible, motoring audience as the nearby service station signs advertising fresh, sky-high gas prices.

I really don’t go to these rallies because I’m convinced they’ll make a difference. I’m not. The rallies may or may not help to rein in the president’s desire to reign. Now involving 2% of the population, the rallies may or may not eventually lead to approximately 3.5% of Americans protesting, the percentage associated with regime change in Erica Chenoweth’s frequently cited study of nonviolent movements from 1900 to 2006.

And even if it does, 3.5% involvement really doesn’t signal big, positive change anymore. Since 2006, mass movements approximating that size or larger haven’t fared nearly as well as those earlier ones Chenoweth cites. Our protests may look like our forebears’ protests, but as Zeynep Tufekci points out, pre-digital-age movements were forced to develop organizational capacity alongside their direct action. By contrast, today’s social-media-driven movements “lack both the culture and the infrastructure for making collective decisions.” Modern mass movements, therefore, generally don’t pivot well.1 Many of them never remove the training wheels of, say, infrequent afternoon protests.

Revolution—and even the reassertion of a revolution begun 250 years ago in the case of the United States—is complicated. Vincent Bevins studied the mass protests during the 2010s in ten countries and found that “seven of these countries experienced something worse than failure. Things went backward.” Bevins attributes these bad results in part to mass man’s belief in masses:

Too often, it seemed that the approach employed in the 2010s could be summed up, fittingly, in a tweet:

1. Protests and crackdowns lead to favorable media (social and traditional) coverage

2. Media coverage leads more people to protest

3. Repeat, until almost everyone is protesting

4. ????

5. A better society2

Even Chenoweth, in a later report, points out that, using her own framework and accounting, the success rate of nonviolent protests dipped from 65% during the 1990s to 34% in the 2010s.

So the No Kings protests alone may not bring what most people might consider to be success.

But the keys to balancing this reality check may be the words “alone” and “success.” If we add other means of direct action and community organization to protests and look at success from the standpoint of process and not just product, maybe we see a brighter picture. Activist Tim Hjersted summarizes what protests may lead to:

Protests rarely achieve their maximalist demands on their own. But they do things nothing else can: they shift public discourse (Occupy didn’t break up the banks, but the language of the “99%” permanently changed how Americans talk about inequality), they energize waves of downstream organizing (the Women’s March fed directly into the candidate recruitment and voter mobilization that flipped the House in 2018), they build relationships between people and groups who might never have connected otherwise, and they make visible the scale of opposition in a way that no online petition or social media post ever will.

This sanguine summary comes from Hjersted’s piece “How To View Protests Like an Organizer.” But how about viewing the No Kings protests like a denizen of what Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven?

The No Kings protests may not lead to what I long for—functioning models of God’s just and participatory community. They don’t, for instance, live out what they desire, as did the early church’s modeling of God’s messianic kingdom. (Using Dan Swain’s term, they don’t involve themselves in “ends-effacing prefiguration,” in which the group’s desired future changes as they learn from seeking to live it out.3)

The No Kings protests also have no plans to organize in small groups and take responsibility for their localities, as the Israelites did under the Torah’s constitution. This Jewish vision of the messianic era, as Daniel J. Elazar describes it, involves “a restoration of Israel’s tribal system.”4 Jefferson’s plan for village-states approximates this approach. It must be said, however, that the proliferation of No Kings events—now up to 3,300 in rural, suburban, and small-town locations as well as urban ones—suggests to the imagination something like Jefferson’s wish to divide the country’s counties into small wards for the purpose of spreading republican government to the country’s citizens.

So at these No Kings rallies, I kind of channel the old people present when the foundation of Jerusalem’s second temple was completed. The young focused on the limited freedom that the temple represented and shouted for joy. But the old remembered the fuller freedom that the pre-exilic, original temple represented and “wept and wailed aloud.”5

But from a messianic standpoint, there’s also reason to cheer. The No Kings protests perform three vital, foundational tasks toward the re-establishment of public life. Remarkably, these three tasks seem to coalesce around the thought of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has instructed the church on messianic time.

Why “remarkably”? I think any confluence of political task and philosophy is remarkable. Agamben, true to a philosopher’s form when addressing politics, resists being pinned down to application, to a particular political program. But Agamben does offer one application in his 1990 book The Coming Community—the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Those protests exemplify the three tasks he identifies and that I find also in the No Kings protests.

The first task is to challenge state sovereignty. As the phrase “no kings” suggests, the No Kings rallies organize themselves around the idea of rejecting sovereignty and supporting the U.S. Constitution’s balance of powers. The Bible organizes itself around the same concept: God alone is king. When God raises Jesus from the dead, he declares his judgment against all forms of earthy sovereignty and the dark spiritual forces that support them. I can get behind the “no kings” of No Kings.

Agamben finds the same overall assertion of political freedom against sovereignty in the then-recent Tiananmen protests:

What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict . . .6

Many participants of both No Kings and Tiananmen advocate for specific policies that a state would implement, but the overall thrust (democracy, “no kings”) suggests something more foundational: a way of doing politics without the state. Pointing to Tiananmen, Agamben gestures toward this deeper conflict between the now and the desired future:

The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever sovereignty and the State organization.7

This “whatever” as in Agamben’s notion of “whatever singularity”—the key concept in The Coming Community—isn’t an indifference to the things that we might use to organize ourselves into communities (Agamben at every turn exemplifies this tendency with examples such as “being red, being French, being Muslim”). Agamben’s “whatever” doesn’t reject the universal for the specific or the specific for the universal. Instead, it describes a way of actively loving the world as a lover loves their beloved (a particular universal), including their particular traits, but not based on their particular traits.8 This love, expressed as community, is what Agamben says the state cannot abide:

What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging . . .9

Our intolerance for separation as a means of belonging, one that finds no need for the nation-state’s binding, brings me to the second task of the No Kings protests: to demonstrate this undifferentiated belonging. The No Kings protests attract people from many actual or would-be “identity groups.” The protests involve all ages, races, and sexual orientations, for instance. Protesters come from many walks of life and categorize themselves by different social and political labels.

Above: also at our town’s March 28 No Kings rally.

Agamben doesn’t reject these and other categories. He finds, in fact, that contemporary politics wrongfully “unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities.”10 But he argues that to use such categories as the basis for a political movement—and eventually as the basis for a new or a revised state—would attempt to oppose the state with the state’s own logic. If we adopted this nation-state strategy—if we grounded the political community in the notion of a particular identity or of a coalition of identities—any success in that endeavor would eventually replicate the state’s failure.

What’s left without categories? Agamben doesn’t counter communities that make particular categories of identity a condition of belonging with notions of a “negative community,” which he defines as a community mediated by “the simple absence of conditions.” The coming political community, instead of being based on conditions or on an absence of conditions, will be based on unconditional “belonging itself.”11

This political belonging is located in our faces, Agamben says:

My face is my outside . . . In the face, I exist with all of my properties (my being brown, tall, pale, proud, emotional . . .), but this happens without any of these properties essentially identifying me or belonging to me.12

This understanding of political community processes Tiananmen as a threshold, or what Agamben calls “the event of an outside.”13 When he counsels us to “Be only your face. Go to the threshold,” he insists that we reclaim our political life from the mere spectacle that politicians and media establishments (now including social media) present to reduce public life.14

A spectacle is a single visage. Spectacle fools us into thinking that the true substance is the unseen person behind the visage. Spectacle teaches us that the face is a simulacrum, something that hides the truth.

But true politics isn’t spectacle. Politics is located not in the visage but in the face, “the simultaneity [the simultas] of the visages, that is, the restless power that keeps them together and constitutes their being in common.” Politics teaches us that when we come together face to face, we encounter together something like the face of God, a face that Agamben describes as “the simultas of human faces” and that Dante describes as “our effigy.”15

This is No Kings’ third task. The protests get us over our thresholds and into public life, even if just to show our faces to one another.

Showing our faces means more than just showing our signs. Politics can’t be reduced to merely communicating messages. Real politics communicates ourselves as communicators,16 and at this early stage of our recovery from spectacle, I thought I’d point the way to this distinction with some meta-protest.

Above: Yours truly, at our town’s March 28 No Kings rally.

Admittedly, my “We are the signs” sign signals that my signage hasn’t advanced much since my “I don’t have time for this” sign that I waved in 2010 at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” Those on the left who criticized the 2010 rally, I think, missed the rally’s implicit invitation to public life and its foundational message about public freedom. They missed the comedians’ reflection on what Shakespeare calls man’s “glassy essence,” something Ann E. Berthoff picks up on:

Man is a Sign. Salvation lies in agapism . . . The agapastic process moves beyond individual man and out of our circle of society, that “loosely compacted person,” into futurity . . .17

Here, in semiotic terms, Berthoff echos Agamben’s idea of love in public life, the notion of a lover moving beyond both the universal (“individual man”) and the specific (“our circle of society”) and into the coming community.

And here, Agamben says, is where the State sends in the tanks.18

Rejecting sovereignty, coming together in diversity, and showing our faces to one another in public spaces might not seem like much. It’s not a political program. But these tasks amount to the ontological foundations of any healthy political program. More importantly, they also point to the coming community.

Agamben identifies these tasks, finds them happening in the Tiananmen protests, and asks for nothing more. His foundational approach helps me celebrate No Kings for what it is while acknowledging, at this early stage of crossing our thresholds, what it isn’t. As the prophet asks those rebuilding the temple, “Does anyone scorn a day of small beginnings?”19

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Above: my other No Kings meta-sign. Cat-Cat himself protests by twitching his tail and offering us his butt. Agamben explains why the cat doesn’t need my sign: “Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it. That is why they are not interested in mirrors, in the image as image.” Agamben, Means without End, 93. My meta-sign is my perfect mirror, my claim to my own exposition.

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in my earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Acton: This used to be the school chapel.

Phil: Walking in, I thought it was a cathedral.2

Divya: Making a chapel a theatre isn’t such a big transformation. Take out the communion rail, put up a raised stage.

Acton: No raised stage here, though, unless we want a traditional proscenium. We can also make a theater in the round like last spring. We use movable seating risers to design different spaces and involve the audience more.

Phil: Woah, Transformers’ alt-mode! But it’s all the same, right? No matter how you manipulate it, the stage is the stage, and the audience remains spectators.

Above: Detail of The Laughing Audience (1733) by William Hogarth.

Acton: You’re saying the fourth wall stands.

Phil: Sure, the fourth wall. Sounds untouchable, like the third rail.

Acton: Pretty much. Diderot came up with it. Aren’t you a philosophy major?

Phil: I read a dialogue Diderot wrote about the theater, but it didn’t mention any wall.3 Are you going back to the house anytime soon?

Acton: I’ll probably be here all night. Remember last fall’s show?

Divya: What’s the fourth wall?

Phil: I thought The Stranger was a novel.

Acton and Divya: It is.

Divya: But Acton’s troupe is transforming it into a play. So what’s the fourth wall?

Acton: Diderot says actors should imagine a wall between them and the audience. Eliminating audience distraction would allow players to concentrate on acting well.4

Phil: Acting well is also the point of Diderot’s dialogue. Two guys argue over whether actors should get emotional or whether they should be calculating—whether they should think through every inflection and gesture and do it the same effective way each performance.

Divya: Who wins the argument?

Phil: Diderot wins. The Enlightenment philosopher writes the dialogue, right? So guess what. Forget sensibility. Be rational, even on the stage giving an emotionally charged performance. Diderot calls it the paradox of acting. That’s what he named his dialogue, too.

Divya: Was his fourth wall descriptive or prescriptive?

Phil: The stranger was convicted for smoking at his mother’s funeral, right?

Acton: Not exactly. [Turning to Divya] Phil doesn’t know what “prescriptive” means. Long before Diderot, Shakespeare had a fourth wall if you don’t count the asides and soliloquies. Or the groundlings shouting at the actors. So maybe descriptive.

Phil: Okay, ready for this? Prescriptive, too. It was like Diderot’s encyclopedia, which he said was meant to change how people think.5 The 18th-century theater had loads of audience interaction. In Paris and London, patrons walked around on stage with the actors and waved to their pals up in the boxes. Audience members would scream and wail during death scenes, too. Diderot wanted to change that.

Above: Detail of Portrait of Denis Diderot (1767) by Louis Michael van Loo.

Divya: How did the patrons get away with it?

Phil: Actors had the social rank of servants. At home, people undressed in front of their servants because the servants didn’t count. At the theater, people would act up because actors didn’t count.6

Divya: How could the actors possibly act?

Phil: Diderot’s point exactly.

Divya: It also sounds like we can trace our actor worship back to Diderot.

Acton: Probably. Before him, people focused on the lines. Theatre-goers knew what was coming—what was coming on stage, anyway. Few plays opened in Diderot’s day. People would see the same shows over and over and would respond to them each time in similar ways. But the similar ways weren’t exactly the same each time.7

Divya: Sounds like liturgy.

Phil: Liturgy’s a good analogy. Until Diderot, a play was seen as one way of getting across text. The actors were considered rhetoricians, and so were priests. The priests in church were the best rhetoricians because they had the best text.8

Divya: “Liturgy” means the work of the people, and the people sure seem to have done more “work” in the 18th-century theater than in more modern ones.

Phil: One sociologist thinks Diderot’s debate between actors’ sentiment and their artifice broke the connection between acting out the text and the authority of the text.9 People stop judging a sermon, say, by the compunction it causes. Instead, people start judging it by its oratory.10

Acton: I was going to say pre-Diderot theater is like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. My grandfather saw it all through college. The movie bombed after like the first week, so the theaters started showing the movie only at midnight. But people came again and again at midnight wearing wild but predictable costumes and throwing the same props in response to the same lines. When a particular character proposes a toast, as he seems to do each viewing, people throw dry toast.11 Rocky Horror became the longest running movie ever.12

Phil: Yeah, Rocky Horror’s the revenge of the 18th century. The audience was making the movie genre into a joke. Or I guess the joke wasn’t the movie. The joke was the idea of sitting silently in public watching a movie.

Acton: The joke was the fourth wall. The fourth wall makes us go out in public only to watch actors develop their characters’ inner lives.13 Some public encounter.

Above: Victoria (right) and her friend Lyneve in costume for a Boy George and Culture Club concert in April 1984 in Nashville.

Divya: That’s why the stranger was executed.

Phil: For throwing shit during a theatrical production?

Divya: Not exactly, Phil. Meursault—the stranger and first-person narrator—has no inner life for the jury to hear about. He smokes during the vigil in front of his mother’s casket. He sleeps with a new girl the day after the funeral. The murder, of course, has nothing to do with any of this. But the prosecution wants to show that Meursault doesn’t follow social conventions. Based on the facts, the jury should convict him of something like second-degree murder. Instead they sentence him to death.

Phil: He doesn’t follow social conventions, so he must’ve planned the murder.

Acton: Right. The court and the prosecutor pry into his private life. They want interior theater, like our fourth-wall moviegoers. And Meursault won’t oblige them.

Phil: So the court reenacts Robespierre’s hunt for hypocrisy. Camus was French, right?

Acton: Yeah, but . . .

Phil: Words and deeds are the stuff of public appearance, Hannah Arendt famously claimed. But the motives behind words and deeds are cloaked in the heart’s darkness and should remain there. All motives become suspicious in public daylight.14 Are you guys doing The Stranger straight up or art nouveau?

Divya: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

Phil: Jesus?

Divya: Jeremiah.15

Acton: Toss in that jeremiad when you defend your M.Div. thesis, Div. [To Phil] Art nouveau, Phil, if you will. If you must.

Phil: Robespierre made patriotism a heart matter, so he shined the public light on the hearts of his enemies and allies alike. Dark hearts lead to rolling heads.16

Divya: And to Meursault’s execution, I guess. Though his heart wasn’t exactly dark. It was just illegible. “Who can know it?”

Acton: Maybe Robespierre was channeling Jesus. Didn’t Jesus rail against hypocrisy?

Divya: Not as we understand “hypocrisy”—or as the members of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety understood it. The Greek word we transliterate into “hypocrisy” didn’t begin to refer to the inconsistency between private behavior and public presentation until the second century A.D.17

Phil: What did “hypocrisy” mean before then? I’ve heard Jesus was essentially calling the Pharisees actors—as people playing public roles.18

Divya: Right. But “actors” wasn’t the word’s primary meaning.19 Back in Attic Greece, hupocritēs meant someone who recited or declaimed Greek poetry or drama. In Jesus’ day and for centuries leading up to it, it also meant someone who interpreted text, including an actor. Hupocritēs derives from the Greek verb krinein, which is concerned with interpretation. Krinein gives us English words like “critic,” “criterion” and “discern,” all having to do with interpretation. The association of hupocritēs with acting was derived from an actor’s role in interpreting.20

Phil: So Jesus wasn’t calling the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites?

Divya: He was calling them hupocritēs, which is better translated as hypercritical, not hypocritical, interpreters.21 Matthew’s Anchor Bible translates the “woe” lines in chapter 23 as “Away with you, you pettifogging Pharisee lawyers!”22

Phil: “Pettifogging”? Was Jesus British?

Divya: Pettifogging. Quibble about petty stuff. A fog machine belching out pettiness.

Phil: Will your art nouveau production use fog machines? Hey, stage noir . . .

Acton: No. But we’re making the audience the mourners at the funeral and the jury at the trial. They did this ten years ago in a German production.23

Phil: Rocky Horror!

Divya: Liturgy!

Acton: So what was Jesus’ deal with the Pharisee lawyers?

Divya: They were interpreting the Mosaic covenant narrowly and oppressively. One of his seven woe’s captures this best: they tithed even their herbs but they neglected—Jesus charged—justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

Phil: Wasn’t that hypocrisy as we understand it?

Divya: Not really. When Jesus points to a discrepancy, it’s between the scribes’ and Pharisees’ public personae, like their long public prayers, and their systemic public injustice, such as forcing poor widows to pay so much in tithes and taxes that they lose their homes. But you could say that their interpretations were private in one sense: their interpretations of scripture were outside of the great tradition advocated by the Hebrew prophets and later by Jesus.

Acton: So the Greek word for hypocrisy has mutated like modern theater. Both started out having to do with the text’s interpretation. Then both had to do with an actor’s inner state, whether that state is emotional or calculating.

Phil: Performance mirrors philology.

Divya: Something like that. And the transitions in both cases have to do with the fourth wall. Jesus wants everyone participating in public life. His first “Away with you” addresses this directly: the Pharisee lawyers have shut the door to God’s kingdom in people’s faces.

Phil: If the kingdom is no longer about text, speech and action,24 then it’s solely about the human heart. And the public light on the human heart brings a pandemic of suspicion. Hunts for hypocrisy in the modern sense keep people out of public life, too.

Divya: Jesus addressed the human heart, of course. But he wasn’t making the Mosaic law more private. He was diagnosing why public life keeps going wrong: contempt, greed, lust for honor.

Phil: How will you guys deal with Meursault’s suspicious and unknowable human heart?

Acton: The director in the 2016 German production made Meursault into a community. Three actors played him. We’re doing the same.

Above: Photograph of Albert Camus.

Phil: Each actor gets his own night?

Acton: No, all actors play Meursault every night. They’re passing around his lines based on which part of Meursault is best suited to land them—or, because it’s Meursault, to fail to land them. The dialogue among the Meursaults becomes a functioning Greek chorus of sorts, a voice of the community of Meursault.

Divya: How will that challenge the community’s Robespierre-like hypocrite hunt? What will it say about the jury’s sentencing of Meursault based on his suspicious interior life?

Acton: If a court defendant’s thoughts are portrayed as three people, an “interior” public life isn’t possible. Meaning isn’t within but among. Spaces of interpretation open up among the Meursaults. The chorus, as always, serves as a public mirror, but here the public—the healthy, meaning-making public—is itself on trial. Meursault’s death sentence suggests the death of public life.

Divya: The inversion of Jesus’ death, which inaugurates God’s reign.

Acton: I suppose so.

Phil: I’m going to bed.

Acton: Wait. Grab me some pizza. Get some for Meursault, too.

Phil: I’m not feeding a chorus.

Divya: I’ll go in on it. We’ll be back in a minute.

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Above: The Laughing Audience (1733), here in its glorious entirety, by William Hogarth.

Political Devotions news

I don’t use artificial intelligence to write, revise or edit anything. But I’ve been using Bing Image Creator for many of my posts’ illustrations, the ones in the style of illuminated manuscripts. I’m also now using Claude to help me research. It’s fun! Claude’s a boon companion, though he needs to be challenged often. To err is human, I guess. And when Claude is shown to be wrong, he’s forthcoming and contrite.

I’m also had ElevenLabs generate the audio version of this dialogue. Claude helped me through using ElevenLabs for this purpose: making a dialogue into an audio file with three distinct voices isn’t something that comes easily to ElevenLabs. Claude even helped me pick out suitable voices on ElevenLabs based on how I described our three characters. I hope you like the audio, though I can’t say the voice acting is too good.

But the biggest news of all: Political Devotions has new office space! Substack wants us all to put mailing addresses out there, and it seems beneath the dignity of my own Substack to use our home address. So I went to the nearest town and snapped up P. O. Box 29.

In Northern Virginia where I’m from, renting a P. O. Box with a number as low as four digits is an accomplishment. My new, two-digit address makes me feel like a big shot around these parts, like a former mayor or an absentee landowner or something. (The town—Mount Pleasant—has lots of three-digit P. O. boxes to support my illusion of instant entrenchment.)

All to say that my writerly self now lives out its corporeal existence in this venerable, fusty box:

So do it the hard way. Drop me a line at:

Bryce Tolpen
P. O. Box 29
Mount Pleasant TN 38474-0029

Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness.1

There’s so much delicious irony in this long, periodic sentence, and irony is the vernacular of biblical justice. As with all periodic sentences, nothing really happens until the sentence’s subject and verb finally show up: “the word of God came.” God chooses the time. All of the authority and actions of Tiberius Caesar and Caiaphas and the rest are reduced here, syntactically speaking, to subordinate phrases and clauses. The empire and its client rulers add up to nothing but backdrop.

The sentence’s syntax, then, reinforces its semantics: the word of God doesn’t come to this world’s rulers but to John, a man eating locusts and wild honey and clothed with camel’s hair.2 God chooses the space: we hear of Galilee, Itruaea, Trachonitis, and Abilene, but John shows up outside of the Roman Empire’s way of organizing space. God’s word comes to him “in the wilderness.” John is off the grid.

Rulers like grids. Grids are a part of the orderliness and sameness that modern rulers prefer in their domains. Political theorist Benjamin Constant discovered this preference from observing Napoleon:

The conquerors of our days, peoples or princes, want their empire to possess a unified surface over which the superb eye of power can wander without encountering any inequality which hurts or limits its view. The same code of law, the same measures, the same rules, and if we could gradually get there, the same language . . . The great slogan of the day is uniformity.3

To govern cities more efficiently, kingdoms and empires often build or reconstitute cities using lines that intersect at right angles, creating grids. A city’s grid structure is most evident not to a city’s pedestrians but to the principalities and powers that govern the city from above the city’s communities. This bird’s-eye grid pattern presents a tradeoff in favor of the city’s rulers and against its inhabitants, as James C. Scott points out:

Although certain state services may be more easily provided and distant addresses more easily located [through a grid street layout], these apparent advantages may be negated by such perceived disadvantages as the absence of a dense street life, the intrusion of hostile authorities, the loss of spacial irregularities that foster coziness, gathering places for informal recreation, and neighborhood feeling.

Scott concludes that while the grid may work “for municipal and state authorities in administering the city,” the grid’s assistance in administrating a city “is no guarantee that it works for citizens.”4 Communities need “spatial irregularities,” he says, and their citizens need those irregularities’ gathering places.

Grids privilege buildings over spaces between buildings. The sameness of a city block’s rectangle sets an architect’s building design off to best advantage. But many city planners, doing what they can with the reticulation of streets they’ve inherited, fight with architects to factor in “figural space” when designing their buildings, their “figural objects.” Here’s how city planner and architect Jeff Speck defines figural space:

[Traditional urbanism] believes that the shape of the spaces between buildings is what matters, because this is the public realm—the place where civic life plays out.5

It’s not as if architects don’t understand figural space. A similar concept, “solid-void theory,” shows up as “Thing #5” in Matthew Frederick’s book 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School:

Solid-void theory . . . holds that the volumetric spaces shaped or implied by the placement of solid objects are as important as, or more important than, the objects themselves.6

Good architects, of course, apply solid-void theory inside their buildings to create interesting spaces. But good, civic-minded architects apply it also, if they can, to their buildings’ exteriors, taking advantage of their buildings’ contexts of streets and other buildings to create interesting spatial irregularities as potential nests for public life.

Grids are also an example of what theologian John Milbank terms “simple space.” Simple space is “suspended between the mass of atomic individuals” below and a centralized government above.7 Simple space helps eliminate horizontal spaces that make for free associations among citizens. Simple spaces do this even when a central government seems tamed by a social construct to which citizens impliedly consent. One can see the effect of a simple-spaces mindset even in the American Revolution’s slogan, “No taxation without representation.” The slogan, purely vertical in its orientation without a hint of free association, is a pre-war surrender of sorts, ceding liberty to a future simple space between atomized individuals and a centralized representative government.

By contrast, Milbank’s concept of “gothic space” is horizontal and complex in nature. Its complexity honors “the irreplacability of individual vantage-points for the making of judgments.”8 Instead of merely mediating between part (individual) and whole (sovereign), the associations that congregate in gothic space tend to become signs that are themselves mediated, fostering a community of interpretation. Using Milbank’s less semiotic phrasing, the associations “become themselves a new sort of context, a never ‘completed’ and complexly ramifying ‘network’, involving ‘confused’, overlapping jurisdictions, which disperses and dissolves political sovereignty.”9

Gothic space, then, threatens the sovereignty that thrives above the grid’s simple space. Gothic space adjusts “to the innovations made by free subjects, without thereby surrendering the quest of harmonic coherence.”10 Gothic space’s coherence isn’t that of brutalizing sovereignty: “. . . not only does the whole exceed the sum of the parts, also the parts escape the totalizing grasp of the whole.”11

Gothic cathedrals mirror these ideals found in the complex relationships of gothic towns and medieval life. The “upwardly aspiring building, representing hierarchy and the sacred,” is at the same time “subordinated to the function of sheltering the many altars, many depictions, many procedures, enacted within its frame.”12 One recalls the psalmist’s description of the unforeseen mixed use in Jerusalem’s temple:

The bird also has found a house, And the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, Even Your altars, O LORD of hosts, My King and my God.13

The swallow’s usage of the altars’ figural space suggests how, in God’s presence, “parts are in turn wholes.”

But figural space isn’t merely a way to picture these ideals. Architecture can be an invitation to public practice: as Milbank says, “Variegated space has to have literal embodiment.”14

In simple space, citizens have little agency since God’s public presence is reduced to the theoretical source of the government’s authority. Likewise, God’s economic presence is reduced to becoming the mover, if not the creator, of the market’s invisible hand.15 But in gothic space, agency and diversity are privileged over statism and capitalism: “every act of association, every act of economic exchange, involves a mutual judgement about what is right, true and beautiful, about the order we are to have in common.”16 Because this order comes from an “irreducible diversity” (much as the Trinity is, as Walter Brueggemann describes God, “irreducibly, inscrutably relational”),17 and because this order is mediated by the parties to the association and exchange, it “tends to be imbued with a ‘sacred’ character.”18

Medieval streets match medieval cathedrals in their “irreducible diversity.” An aerial view of medieval cities would have had “the look of disorder,” according to Scott:

Streets, lanes, and passages intersect at varying angles with a density that resembles the intricate complexity of some organic processes. . . . The cityscape of Bruges in 1500 could be said to privilege local knowledge over outside knowledge, including that of external political authorities. It functioned spatially in much the same way a difficult or unintelligible dialect would function linguistically. . . . Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside cities. . . . Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.19

Other “rural analogues” to medieval streets include the paths created by America’s First Nations and many of the animals they lived among, paths that were largely illegible to colonizers.20

John the Baptist’s wilderness, coming at the end of Luke’s long, periodic sentence, provides a biblical “rural analogue” to medieval streets. The wilderness made John’s power illegible to the civil and religious authorities that framed his life and message.

But in the United States, the grid works against spaces like John’s wilderness as much as it works against civic life. Soon after the Revolutionary War, Congress adopted Thomas Jefferson’s plan to divide the American wilderness west of the Ohio River into rectangular lots and townships. The resulting regularity, Jefferson argued, would create “legibility for the taxing authority” (Scott’s words), and it also would create “a convenient and cheap way to package land and market it in homogeneous units.”21 Jefferson’s grid system covered what is now two-thirds of the United States.22

Due in large part to Jefferson’s grid overlay, “a way of thinking about space took shape in America that was primarily concerned not about actual space, but its possible price,” according to Willie Jennings.23 For our new nation and other nations that adopted our approach,24 the grid system organized land the way race organized bodies reoriented from their lands, Jennings points out:

Like the formation of racial vision organized around white bodies, the grid system operated without regard to any specific geographic features. And like the conceptual turnings of whiteness in which tribes and peoples, their stories, their ways of life were charted through the visual logic of their phenotypes and racial classifications, the grid system drew lines through mountains, valleys, rivers, burial sites, and so on.25

Jefferson’s grid system facilitated our domination and reconstitution of what we considered to be wilderness. These imaginative grids chopped through the land’s topographical features and through the indigenous communities that inhabited the land.

A grid, like greed, reduces reality to mere potential. Due to Jefferson’s grid, white Americans settling west of the Ohio bought “space, rather than land,” John B. Jackson points out, and this space “was so easy to buy, so easy to sell, that commitment to a specific plan for the future must have been difficult for many.” Grids of streets in western settlements emptied out sometimes more quickly than they were constructed, Jackson says.26 But that abandonment was according to plan. Jefferson’s grid system, Jackson says, was “never meant to produce close-knit communities.”27

The future is a creature of covenant. Most American settlers moved away from a real future—a future together in covenant—even as they moved west to seek a new economic future as individuals. Luke’s account of John’s advent suggests that any incursion by God’s kingdom to establish community will start against the grid.

Discussion questions

1. What do you think the significance of the wilderness setting was to John and to those he baptized?

2. What changes to government, aesthetics, community, or other factors might have contributed to the move from the aerial-view chaos of medieval cities to the aerial-view orderliness of many modern cities?

3. What came first (if either came at all)—the American settlers’ individualism or their commodification of land? Is one the cause of the other?

4. What examples of simple or complex space do you find in America? What parts of America favor figural objects? What parts of America favor figural space? What is each part’s community life like? In any of these parts of America, is there any correlation between space and community life?

5. “Luke’s account of John’s advent suggests that any incursion by God’s kingdom to establish community will start against the grid.” Discuss.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.2

Theologians gravitate also to the same language in Matthew 16, which applies to Peter instead of to Jesus’ entire community.3

Outside of these two verses, the meaning of binding and loosing in the New Testament is not particularly abstract or debatable. In the 41 other uses of “bind” (δέω, or deō) and the 40 other uses of “loose” (λύω, or lyō), the context leaves little doubt about what the words mean. The meanings for each word, though, differ depending on how they’re employed. The semantic range of “bind” (deō) stretches from the binding of prisoners and of Satan to the binding in covenant.4 The semantic range of “loose” (lyō) stretches from forgiving debt to delivering from bondage to destroying something.5

These different meanings give us a lot to work with when we return to Matthew 18:18, the catalyst of this devotion. The meanings suggest that one or more of them might fit each of our verse’s more open-ended “whatever you bind” and “whatever you loose” categories. But which, and what to make of the results?

The various meanings cause theologians to draw various conclusions about the verse as a whole. Do “whatever you bind” and “whatever you loose” refer to the apostles’ power to excommunicate? Do they echo the disciples’ authority, found in John’s Gospel, to forgive or retain sins? Do they refer to the binding of demons and the freeing of people possessed by them? Do they institute the Roman Catholic Church?6

Or whether you believe or don’t believe they do any or all of the above, could “bind” and “loose” also reconstitute what we call political theology? Despite the crowds of theologians surrounding Matthew 18:18, this possibility is worth expending some theopolitical imagination.

And more importantly—and for those of us with only a small stake in the interdisciplinary field known as political theology—could “bind” and “loose” help us restore the public realm?

I think so, with help from rabbinic teaching, from Matthew 18:18’s context, and from Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt.

Let’s start with the most prevalent current view of “whatever you bind” and “whatever you loose”: Jesus, consistent with (arguably) contemporary rabbinic teaching, is referring to his disciples’ “halakhic authority”—that is, to their authority to decide how, if at all, a given mitzvah (command) applies to a given situation:

In this practice of halakhic binding and loosing, rabbis uphold the law as eternal and universal but recognize that new contexts require new decisions about how to bind or loose particular behaviors.7

This kind of binding and loosing is necessary. Of course, it can also get pretty punctilious. KindaLee Pfremmer DeLong provides an example:

. . . certain rabbis allow a hot bath on Sabbath but “bind” washing and “loose” sweating. In other words, if a person soaks in a warm bath on Sabbath, scrubbing is considered work—a violation of the divine command to honor the Sabbath—but sweating is not.8

Jesus, of course, isn’t exactly known for engaging in punctilio, and it’s not likely that his enigmatic statement pertains merely to authorizing his disciples’ engagement in it. But Jesus is, on perhaps a deeper level, asking his disciples to work out communal norms, which is a form of binding and an aspect of covenant. In the New Testament, after all, binding in covenant is a frequent meaning of deō.

Another source of finding how “bind” and “loose” work in Matthew 18:18 is the verse’s fuller, political context.9 Though the verse makes “bind” and “loose” into abstractions, Jesus places his abstracting remark itself in a concrete communal context.

Jesus’ binding and loosing remark comes just before and after he speaks about covenanting and forgiving in community life. Right before the remark, he speaks about the number of witnesses necessary for the assembly to hear and adjudicate about someone’s sins. Implicit in this context is both covenant, present in the assembly’s formation, and forgiveness, which the assembly is ready and willing to offer.10 Then, right after the binding and loosing remark, Jesus speaks of two or three that “agree on earth”—that covenant, or that act under their preexisting covenant—will have their request granted “from my Father in the heavens.”11

Then Jesus returns to forgiveness. Jesus answers Peter’s question about how many times he must forgive his brother.12 This conversation about forgiveness leads DeLong and others to conclude that “loosing” in verse 18 also includes forgiveness.13 In the conversation, Peter seems to be asking for, and receiving, clarification about loosing, part of what two chapters earlier in Matthew were seemingly his exclusive rights as the person holding “the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”14 But here in chapter 18, Jesus implies that we all have the keys of the kingdom—the authority to bind and loose, to covenant and to forgive.

Jesus’ “whatever you bind” refers to covenanting. Jesus’ “whatever you loose” refers to forgiveness. These phrases surely refer to other things as well. The verse invites us to explore layers of meaning.

But could Jesus be presenting covenant and forgiveness to humankind as keys to a public realm he calls the kingdom of God?

If so, may we accept these keys? May we, in the first place, engage our theopolitical imaginations when reading the Bible? And may we, in this particular act of imagination, read the Bible to find guidance on and inspiration for political and community life? Arendt bemoans how Jesus’ sayings, many of which “sprang from experiences in the small and closely knit community of his followers” and constitute challenges to his community’s political authorities, “have been neglected because of their allegedly exclusively religious nature.”15 Consistent with Arendt’s observation, our modern understanding of religion as separate from politics makes many of us relegate the stretch of Matthew 18 in question here, including our enigmatic verse 18, entirely to theology and its subset ecclesiology—to “church life” and “church government.”

But as Arendt seems to have intuited, Jesus’ assemblies—the one he started and the ones later started by the likes of Peter, James, and Paul—are at once political and religious communities. They offer public freedom and an alternative to the larger political and religious community known as the Roman Empire.

After the Roman Empire collapsed, some political thinkers came close to returning to this fuller understanding of Jesus’ ancient communities. In late medieval and modern times, political theorists and movements have accessed both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to explore new means of conducting civic life together. The early-modern republicans, for instance, studied the Bible for over a century and discovered a model republic there. Both Walter Brueggemann and Nicholas Wolterstorff use the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to flesh out political concepts involving covenant, justice, and mercy.16

Carl Schmitt, the Nazi political theorist credited with inspiring our new interdisciplinary field of political theology, is only one of the recent influential thinkers to at least partially ground their political theory in the Bible’s pages.

Arendt, who escaped the Nazis’ grasp twice, is another. She suggests that Abraham discovers the power inherent in covenant. With her tongue perhaps only partially lodged in her cheek, Arendt offers this summary of Abraham’s wanderings:

. . . [Abraham’s] whole story, as the Bible tells it, shows such a passionate drive toward making covenants that it is as though he departed from his country for no other reason than to try out the power of mutual promise in the wilderness of the world, until eventually God himself agreed to make a Covenant with him.17

Likewise, Arendt credits Jesus with discovering “the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs.”18 She points out that Jesus’ miracle of healing a paralyzed man was proof that “the Son of man hath power upon earth to forgive sins.”19 This power to forgive is “upon earth,” Arendt emphasizes, and “must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also.”20

Just as Jesus links binding and loosing to covenanting and forgiving, so also Arendt links covenanting and forgiving to each other. To be clear, Arendt, as far as I know, never references Jesus’ remarks about binding and loosing. But her insights into Abraham and Jesus as fellow political thinkers serve as lenses we might use to understand Jesus’ remarks about binding and loosing in this more theopolitical light.

Arendt views both covenanting and forgiving from the standpoint of action, the “sharing of words and deeds.” Action is vital to Arendt’s concept of public spaces: action “not only has the most intimate relationship to the public part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it.”21 For Arendt, covenanting and forgiving aren’t merely instances of the Bible teaching us about elements of healthy political life together. For her, on these two faculties—covenanting and forgiving—hang all that is necessary to protect us from the potential harmful consequences of our public action:

The two faculties [of covenant and forgiveness] belong together in so far as one of them, forgiveness, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose “sins” hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men.22

Unpredictability and irreversibility, Arendt argues, are the strengths but also the burdens of action.23 Enter covenants and forgiveness. Covenants counter unpredictability, and forgiveness counters irreversibility.

For Arendt, forgiveness doesn’t erase the past so much as it redeems it: the community learns from its mistakes and moves into the present together. Likewise, covenant doesn’t fear the future but stabilizes it through a chosen public kinship. Redeeming the past and covenanting the future allow the seeds of public speech and action to germinate in the present.

Arendt claims that action has ontological roots, and her claim reinforces the ontological earth-and-heaven language that Jesus employs in Matthew 18. By describing action as “ontologically rooted,” Arendt means that our very being—and our being together—ground our public freedom:

The miracle that saves the world . . . is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope . . . It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”24

In this public world of speech and action, she says, the relevant aspects of morality must arise from this ontology. Only two forms of morality do this, Arendt says: covenanting and forgiving:

[Public morality needs] no more to support itself than the good will to counter the enormous risks of action by readiness to forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them.25

Arendt insists that Jesus preaches not behavior, strictly speaking, but action.26 In this regard, Jesus’ binding and loosing set out a morality of action that allows his communities to create a future and redeem the past in order to make his community’s political and religious action possible in the present.

Compare this Abraham/Jesus/Arendt ontology with that of Schmitt, known as the founder of political theology.27 Schmitt famously defines the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.”28 With Schmitt, the possibility of an exception—an emergency decree—becomes “a general concept in the theory of the state,” setting aside covenant even before an emergency arises. Schmitt argues that the exception is analogous to a biblical miracle, presumably because a miracle constitutes an exception to the general course of nature. This “miracle” of the exception makes the sovereign analogous to the omnipotent God. Compare Schmitt’s association of miracles with tyranny to Jesus’ association of miracles with forgiveness, or compare it to Arendt’s association of miracles with natality. Arendt’s natality gives humankind its ontological standing to overturn the kind of oppressive structures that Schmitt’s theory champions.

In Jesus’ terms, Schmitt sets aside binding in covenant and absolutizes loosing—not the loosing of forgiveness but the loosing of destruction. Time under Schmitt’s political theology isn’t hopeful and redemptive, as it is with Jesus’s binding and loosing, but becomes a pathological form of an earthly eternity, without past or future.

Jesus’ binding and loosing, when cross-pollenated with Arendt’s twin faculties of covenant and forgiveness, offers an ontological foundation for political theology and public life that would set aside Schmitt’s theoretical, if not historical, claim to the same.

The first action Jesus preaches is to repent and believe the gospel of God’s realm.29 Surely part of that repentance is to re-adopt the good will “to forgive and to be forgiven, to make promises and to keep them,”30 and to find ourselves in political communities small enough to make forgiveness and covenant lived encounters with other people.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

How do Coptic migrants navigate between these narratives of exemplary martyrs and undesirable migrants? I interview anthropologist Candace Lukasik, who writes about these issues in her new book published by NYU Press, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire.

Above: View from a monastery in Upper Egypt, fall 2009. Photo by Candace Lukasik. Used by permission.

I met Dr. Lukasik last fall at the Political Theology Network’s biannual conference in Nashville. She co-facilitated our section “Up/Rootedness” about place and migration, themes dear to my heart. After choosing the section, I found that I had migrated to a land of anthropologists, and I got a three-day practicum there on ways that anthropology can inform political theology (and vice versa).

At first, our section seemed a bit like an Indiana Jones convention, full of professors who early in their respective movies seemed to trade in their tweed jackets and classrooms for fedoras and foreign fieldwork. Presenters discussed their extensive and often dangerous work in places such as Kashmir, the Columbian Amazon, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Egypt.

I discuss some of that anthropological adventure notion with Dr. Lukasik, who has a different perspective. For her, anthropology is both an intellectual and a spiritual practice, and it backgrounds any distance and difference between her work at the university and in the field. While reading her book and interviewing her, I found that anthropology also has led her to remarkable friendships, a subtler and more gracious view of the world, and a conversion to the Coptic Orthodox faith.

The video interview is lavishly punctuated with several of Dr. Lukasik’s striking photos from her fieldwork (see Photos & timestamps below).

I hope the interview inspires your own desire to cross borders and to learn from and support those you find on the other side.

Topics & timestamps

00:30 — Setting the scene of Martyrs and Migrants: the Copts as a Christian minority in Egypt and as an Egyptian minority in the United States; the Copts in the U.S. being understood as persecuted Christians and Middle-Eastern Other

01:35 — Lukasik’s book summary: What has migration to the West done for and to the Copts? What light does the Copts’ struggle shed on geopolitical issues? What issues about the practice of Christianity today do the Copts’ experiences raise?

04:30 — What drew Lukasik to her work with the Copts in Egypt and in the U.S.? Her background, her trip as a teen for an Arabic language program and her discovery of Coptic Christianity and its “in-between-ness” within Christianity.

06:30 — Her trips to Egypt and slow discovery of migration’s effects on the Coptic tradition

07:10 — Her growing relations with Coptic friends and families; her description of her fieldwork, particularly during the violence of 2017

09:00 — The effect of the martyrdom of the twenty Egyptian Christians and one Ghanaian in Libya in 2015 and subsequent violence in Egypt had on her ongoing work

12:00 — The effect of images of this violence on the Coptic diaspora and on transnational relations among Copts

13:10 — How fieldwork affects her teaching; how she presents anthropology to perspective students; how she has come to understand the interplay of classroom and fieldwork (versus Bryce’s “Indiana Jones” theory of the professor with the adventurous side students hear about but don’t experience); anthropology as attending to the messiness of the world

19:10 — The blend of her spiritual and intellectual journey involving her classroom, her research, and her fieldwork, including her conversion to Coptic Orthodoxy

20:45 — How the situations of Coptic Christians and Palestinian Christians compare with respect to the powerful Christian persecution narrative and the applicability of Lukasik’s concept of an “economy of blood.” The nature of narratives that make a people visible to empire.

24:50 — The “economy” of the “economy of blood” and the “blood” of the “economy of blood”; the “economy of blood” through theological and political lenses

29:20 — How asylum law as practiced with Coptic petitioners often differs from other, less legible Middle Eastern Christian petitioners because of the economy of blood

32:00 — The tension between the Christian persecution narrative and the need for specific harm in Coptic asylum application hearings to create legibility before the law

35:12 — Copts work in law enforcement often to create visibility within the police forces for Copts in the community and to help the forces differentiate between Copts and Egyptian Muslims. Copts work in law enforcement often in an attempt to keep Copts from being seen as the Other.

39:10 — Copts in law enforcement are somewhat like Irish emigres working for law enforcement to become legible as part of their new American community. A group’s distinction from Dangerous Others is part of becoming American.

40:42 — How the Coptic Orthodox Church serves as the governments’ point of contact with its Coptic population in both Egypt and in places like Nashville, Tennessee. The causes and downsides of such relationships: the church wants to play to the role that the broader geography expects of it, but that role is challenged by the needs and perspectives of poor and working-class Copts.

44:12 — The innovative work of Lydia Yousief and the Elmahaba Center in Nashville in community organizing and community support, work that makes up for the inattention to new Coptic migrants by the Coptic Church in Nashville

46:12 — The first Coptic migrants came to Nashville to build the next phase of Opryland

46:52 — How Tyson Foods covered up the exposure of Coptic workers to COVID; how the church discouraged the Tyson workers from unionizing and from forming coalitions with other migrant workers

47:22 — Elmahaba Center interrupts the neoliberal emphasis on who are—and who are not—members of the Body of Christ by emphasizing community needs and the need for different perspectives that a community carries

Photos & timestamps

00:31 — Cover of Martyrs and Migrants

05:44 — Candace Lukasik in 2009, visiting around 40 monasteries over four days with a Coptic Orthodox youth group in Cairo

09:36 — Coptic martyr blood behind glass at the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo

16:34 — An image on martyrdom in a Coptic church that Dr. Lukasik used in her class the day before the video. The image is from the bombing near Saint Mark’s Orthodox Coptic Cathedral in Cairo in December 2016.

17:56 — An image on martyrdom in a Coptic church that Dr. Lukasik used in her class the day before the video. The image is from a commemoration room at the Cathedral for the 21 martyrs of Libya.

19:31 — Bahjūra from a rooftop

26:43 — Image from a church in Upper Egypt. It might be seen as a metaphor for thinking about the economy as part of inclusion in the Body and reflection of the outside

27:44 — U.S. and Egyptian flags in a Staten Island home

29:07 — A Coptic Church in Jersey City

30:37 — One of the computers Copts use in Upper Egypt to enter in Green Card Lottery information

31:06 — A white board where Coptic migrants take their photos to apply to the Green Card Lottery in Upper Egypt

37:28 — “Honeywell Security / Proud to be a Coptic American”: issues of security and inclusion

43:47 — An image of St. Mina in a Nashville gas station where Copts work

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In Rome there were no persons such as there were in ancient China who could be acclaimed . . . as members of an “untitled nobility.” Wealth and “honors” were made to converge. The one could not be achieved or maintained without the other. For this reason, when approaching wealth in the later empire (as in most other periods of Roman history) we must make a fundamental transition “from a [modern] mental cosmos in which power depends largely on money to one where money depends . . . largely on power.”1

In modern times, power depends on money, but in Rome, money depends on power. Here, as with any effective chiasmus, a contrast in syntax mirrors and strengthens a contrast in semantics: power < money ^ money < power.

Admittedly, President Kennedy achieved a stronger rhetorical effect in his famous chiasmus, “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” But I now think Brown’s chiasmus is more profound.

I didn’t see the chiasmus’s larger importance at first. But as I was thinking through Brown’s suggested reorientation, I realized that I needed to go through a similar reorientation to understand how money and power work not in Ancient Rome but in America’s federal government since the 2024 election.

Up until recently, money made power. Now power makes—or breaks—money.

Power and money have switched polarities.

Above: detail from page 1 of the April 29, 2019 edition of The Washington Post.

Up until the election, if you couldn’t otherwise explain why bad politics persisted, you wouldn’t be far off if you repeated the old adage, “Follow the money.”

Why don’t we have affordable health care as do other developed nations? Follow the money.

Why don’t we ban assault weapons, despite their use in mass killings? Follow the money.

And so on.

Before the reverse polarity, the current was generally running one way: money was making power. Large corporations would back candidates and hire lobbyists to control legislation. They’d get naming rights on major stadiums and arenas. They’d control the research agenda at universities. And so on.

We’re still largely an oligarchy, as Jimmy Carter observed after Citizens United, because the rich still buy power and influence. But this reverse polarity between power and money since the 2024 election shows that we’re becoming something else—an authoritarian regime.

These days, to spot the big, regime-altering moves, don’t bother following the money. Instead, follow the servility. And start with the billionaires and CEOs who got to come in from the cold to witness and celebrate the president’s inaugural.

Witness, for instance, yesterday’s effective shuttering of the Washington Post by its owner, Jeff Bezos, along with the paper’s previously severed relationships with several reporters and writers who weren’t permitted to publish pieces critical of the administration.

Or witness the administration’s use of power to extract large settlement sums from legacy media and to have television shows the president dislikes canceled. Or the administration’s use of power to threaten federal research funding cuts to universities. Or its orders punishing law firms for advocating on behalf of people or causes the president disfavors.

Or witness areas where the administration, to this point anyway, hasn’t met with servility: the administration’s cuts to federal grants to four blue states or the administration’s plans to cut federal funding to sanctuary cities and states.

The administration’s use of power to affect the pocketbooks, and thereby the decisions, of perceived enemies doesn’t stop at the country’s borders. It has used tariffs and the threat of tariffs to influence the internal political decisions of certain countries.

Admittedly, it’s hard for the poor and the middle class to stand on the shore of a great ocean of money and power and discern which way the current is flowing. But once we feel the strong undertow of moneyed obedience, we know that the political current is shifting as surely as global warming is causing ocean currents to shift and in some cases to reverse themselves.

In the case of both politics and oceans, it’s also hard to know exactly what the results will be, but the results likely will be dire. Our new power-makes-money polarity could lead us to ancient Rome, or at least to something like it.

Brown points out that, during the Roman Empire, “most people lived miserable lives,” and their “very bodies remained at the mercy of the Roman state.” Another recent book on Roman history, this one by J. E. Lendon, describes its empire’s “crude application of force (or its insidious threat), reliance on the willing compliance of the subject to authority he acknowledged as legitimate, and the subtle workings of patronage.” There’s also the Roman army, Lendon points out, which not only expanded and defended the empire but also acted against its civilian population.2

You knew all that without my citing these history books. And it’s impossible to know if any of these specifics will come to pass in an American version of authoritarianism. But Rome wasn’t good, and this won’t be good.

Actually, Brown is quoting Lendon’s book, Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World, when he mentions the “mental cosmos in which power depends largely on money to one where money depends . . . largely on power.” I like what Lendon says right after his chiasmus, though, to exemplify this reorientation of money and power: “. . . from New York to the Mafia’s Sicily.” All of Rome’s centuries-long “honor,” Lendon suggests, comes down to violence and extortion.3

Classical republicanism, still in vogue 250 years ago when the founders signed the Declaration of Independence, advocated a simple manner of life, one that avoided luxury and excess wealth. Republicans (small “r”) knew that private riches would divert us from active public life. And Jefferson advocated for the daily practice of public life in small communities precisely so we wouldn’t fall for “a Caesar or a Bonaparte.”4

The Bible makes a similar warning about riches, starting with what the King James expresses in its own chiasmus:

. . . supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself. But godliness with contentment is great gain.5

Classical republicans similarly understand contentment as gain, as a boon to our public life together.

The writer of 1 Timothy then fleshes out how the love of money hurts us:

. . . for the love of money is a root of all evils, and reaching out for which some have wandered from the Faith and pierced themselves about with many pains.6

Have we not seen over the past several months how quickly the rich have pierced themselves, how easily they have been manipulated by power?

Are they free?

I don’t think the relationship between public freedom and money can be expressed any better than how Janis Joplin has sung it: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”7

A lot of the smart money had a lot to lose, and still does. A lot of it has surrendered to power’s newly minted willingness to extort.

And like the rich, soon we also may have to choose: our money or our public life.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Come and see four inner-city neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama. Or hear them, rather, in this 18-minute podcast episode.

Gerrel Jones has discovered Jesus as an effective community organizer, and his Renew Birmingham and its extraordinary team of staff members and volunteers are putting Jesus’s community-building principles to work in the four poorest neighborhoods in Birmingham. Renew’s story, its approach and its outcomes will challenge you to help communities in new ways—and perhaps to understand Jesus and his mission in new ways, too.

Above: Gerrel Jones, Renew Birmingham Founder and Executive Director

Resources:

Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America by Nathan McCall

Gerrel’s plug for Makes Me Wanna Holler:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Gerrel’s plug for Man’s Search for Meaning:

Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine by Richard A. Horsley

Jesus and the Politics provides an excellent theological and historical framework for understanding Jesus’s work as a community organizer.

From the publisher: “Learning from anthropological studies of the more subtle forms of peasant politics, Horsley discerns from these sources how Jesus, as a Moses- and Elijah-like prophet, generated a movement of renewal in Israel that was focused on village communities.”

Renew Birmingham’s website

Gerrel Jones’s talk before a group of Birmingham church leaders on what church should look like

Connective Tissue’s great interview of Gerrel Jones

Above: Jason Williams, Renew Birmingham Youth Program Director

Music: “Wild Wild Wet” by Pecan Pie. Used by permission.

Citations to quotes:

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second edition (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 318.

Richard A. Horsley, You Shall Not Bow down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul (Cascade Books, 2021), 71.

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While a nation-state doesn’t constitute what Arendt describes as a political place, a properly functioning nation-state may contain such places.

ICE’s recent killings of two citizens in Minneapolis, the circumstances of which the federal government is attempting to distort,2 threaten the United States’ political structure as a nation-state. The killings represent the clearest evidence to date that the federal government intends to encourage ICE’s violence against United States citizens and operate ICE as a police force answerable to no court.

Arendt died in 1975, long before ICE was established and long before the present administration encouraged ICE’s agents to act without appropriate restraint in its community sweeps and in its on-the-street patrols. But she scrutinized and critiqued uncannily similar European police forces working to deport stateless people3 during the Interwar Period. She concluded that these police forces undermined the nation-states in which they operated, first by compromising the nation-states’ rule of law.

Above: Konstantin Yuon, The Symphony of Action (1922). Public domain.

According to Arendt in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, police deporting stateless people from European nations before World War II helped to undermine the rule of law in those nations in four ways:

1. The police charged with arresting and deporting immigrants began to rule directly over the populations:

This was the first time the police in Western Europe had received authority to act on its own, to rule directly over people; in one sphere of public life it was no longer an instrument to carry out and enforce the law, but had become a ruling authority independent of government and ministries.4

Over the past year, the United States has seen ICE transform into a law-enforcement agency with little effective government oversight.5 It has broadened its scope by arresting and detaining over 170 U.S. citizens.6

2. The stateless people were put in internment camps, where they had far fewer rights than if they were incarcerated in a normal jail or penitentiary:

The same man who was in jail yesterday because of his mere presence in this world, who had no rights whatever and lived under threat of deportation, or who was dispatched without sentence and without trial to some kind of internment because he had tried to work and make a living, may become almost a full-fledged citizen because of a little theft. Even if he is penniless he can now get a lawyer, complain about his jailers, and he will be listened to respectfully. He is no longer the scum of the earth but important enough to be informed of all the details of the law under which he will be tried. He has become a respectable person.7

America has established such camps. Many people detained in these camps were arrested by ICE agents while pursuing a change in immigration status in courts. Despite a federal statute requiring immigration jails to allow members of Congress access to the facilities unannounced, the administration currently refuses to permit such visits. Previous visits by members of Congress and testimony by people incarcerated in these jails suggest widespread overcrowding, malnourishment, and physical abuse in several of these jails.8

3. The police in these countries became used to cooperating with their counterparts in Nazi Germany, so when the Nazis conquered their countries, the countries’ police were willing accomplices to Nazi rule there:

That the Nazis eventually met with so disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries they occupied, and that they were able to organize terror as much as they did with the assistance of these local police forces, was due at least in part to the powerful position which the police had achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination of stateless and refugees.9

4. Because the police in Eastern European countries effectively weren’t answerable to courts on deportation matters, those countries’ populations grew accustomed to a state not bound by the rule of law. As a result, the countries gave in more to the temptation of police rule over its citizens:

The clearer the proof of their [the states’] inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.10

Making legal distinctions among classes of people, Arendt suggests, is a nation-state’s kryptonite. When the nation-state turns to nationalism and takes away the rights of minorities and stateless people, the state built around that nation can no longer effectively exercise its core mission of providing equality before the law. When this happens, the nation swallows the state, and the country is no longer, strictly speaking, a nation-state:

Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states.11

In America, such a “mass of over- and underprivileged individuals” seems have started by terrorizing the aliens in our midst and incarcerating many of them, some in prisons outside the United States and outside the aliens’ countries of origin. But it hasn’t stopped there. The administration recently announced that federal funding will end this month for sanctuary cities and states, even though city and state policies of non-cooperation with ICE are legal.12

We Christians are exiles, a political status we hold for the healing of the nations. If we deny our political calling and, as citizens of a nation-state, countenance the persecution of our fellow exiles, we’ll lose the country we think we serve.

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Above: Konstantin Yuon, The New Planet (1921). Public domain. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

What am I able to say? I was helping a group in Memphis distribute fresh fruit, bread, and canned food. I was taking pictures only of the community organizer, whom I was permitted to photograph as part of a future podcast episode. But how could the people be sure that I wasn’t taking pictures of them?

After I left, some people contacted the organizer with their concerns about me. Their community had been affected badly by ICE’s actions, and they didn’t want photos ending up in the wrong hands.

What else can I say? I changed the location and the nature of what we gave the people in this account because, as I say, the people must stay invisible.

Poorer communities have long been invisible. Most immigrants, for instance, were invisible long before our country began taking some of them from their homes here and sending them back to their countries of origin or to prisons in third countries.

Above: this picture is intentionally left invisible.

Impoverishment and invisibility work together to further marginalize historically targeted minorities. Thus, a book on Americans’ misconceptions about First Nations places the biggest misconception in the title: “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans. A recent book about systemic racism is entitled, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness.

Invisibility, then, is a big problem. For sure, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament care a lot about the poor’s need for food, shelter and clothing. But both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are concerned even more with the poor’s invisibility. Witness Jesus: he begins his Sermon on the Plain by equating poverty with political place in the coming age of God’s earthly rule:

“How blissful the destitute, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”1

In the early models of that rule—the first two centuries of life among the Jesus assemblies—Jesus’s followers are known around the empire for their care of and respect for the poor.2

But this care and respect aren’t always the case. And in the New Testament’s epistles, when assemblies mistreat the poor, we read about shame as much as we read about hunger. The apostles Paul and James address how the poor are shamed and, through shame, made invisible. Here’s Paul:

Therefore when you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper, for in your eating each one takes his own supper first; and one is hungry and another is drunk. What! Do you not have houses in which to eat and drink? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing?3

The Corinthian church, Paul says, shames the poor. Shaming happens in public; it’s actually a shutdown that excludes people from public life. Paul’s emphasis here is not on feeding the poor—though Paul frequently refers to his efforts to help the assemblies do just that4—but on honoring and therefore benefitting from the poor.

James makes the same point when the churches to whom he writes refuse the poor chairs, when they make the poor stand or sit on the floor at the rich people’s feet:

Listen, my dear friends: has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to possess the kingdom he has promised to those who love him? And yet you have humiliated the poor man.5

Future political stature promised again. Present shame and humiliation experienced again. The wicked distinctions we make—who eats and who doesn’t, who sits in chairs and who stands—make people visible or invisible. We end up shutting down those who are rich in faith, those with much to give.

John Adams, like Paul and James, notices poor people at church—and at other places, too. Adams also emphasizes the poor person’s shame and invisibility:

The poor man’s conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed . . . He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market . . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable.6

Quoting Adams’s remarks, Hannah Arendt observes that Adams’s “. . . conviction that darkness rather than want is the curse of poverty, is extremely rare in the literature of the modern age . . .”7 The rarity of Adams’s conviction may be explained by the modern age’s insouciance toward public life. A sufficiently engaged public wouldn’t stand for poverty because it needs the opinions and contributions of everyone, and poverty silences people.

Aristotle agrees with Adams, though Aristotle emphasizes that poverty silences people not through shame but through necessarily long hours of work. The poor have little or no leisure time. Consequently, Aristotle thought that the best democracies pay their poor. That way, the poor would have the leisure to participate in civic life.8

The Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes agrees with Adams, too. It suggests that when we deny public life to the poor, we risk destroying ourselves. The Solomon figure makes this point in a parable:

There was a little city, with few men in it; and to it came a great king, who invested it and built mighty siege works against it. Present in the city was a poor wise man who might have saved it with his wisdom, but nobody thought of that poor man. So I observed: Wisdom is better than valor, but

/ A poor man’s wisdom is scorned, / And his words are not heeded.9

Like this little city, we shame the poor and fail to listen to them. bell hooks explains our failure to hear or even to see the poor in terms of who gets to hold the public megaphone:

We live in a society where the poor have no public voice. No wonder it has taken so long for many citizens to recognize class—to become class conscious.10

A point well taken. But I think there’s a broader reason why we understand the plight of the poor solely in terms of want and not also in terms of invisibility: we’re almost invisible ourselves. Society at large has given over its own megaphone to political and economic rulers. We don’t cultivate public spaces where we can speak and act and see and hear one another speak and act.

As a society, we put little value on what Arendt calls “the space of appearance.” The space of appearance, where we as equals appear to one another in words and deeds, doesn’t exist in every age, Arendt says. And without the space of appearance, we are “deprived of reality”:

. . . reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; “for what appears to all, this we call Being” . . .11

Without a space of appearance—without a public world not dominated by consumerism, racism, and rulers—we lose our sense of reality. We begin to wall ourselves off from those whose wisdom and life experience could give us broader perspectives.

We begin to experience, even before death, the great gulf separating the rich man and Lazarus, who begged outside the rich man’s gate in Jesus’s parable.12 Because we don’t appear with the poor and experience what James C. Scott calls “the infrapolitics of subordinate groups,”13 we may do some insensitive things. Even when we may try to address the poor’s physical needs, we may end up taking pictures like tourists.

Of course, when we take deliberate steps to make the poor even more invisible, such as threatening to arrest them and deport them, we harm our own public life. When we start disappearing our neighbors, our public life has long since disappeared.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.