New York Diary

it's easy to be disenchanted at home, but i can't help wanting to defend my siblings while abroad

I've been doing lots lately.

1. Went to the Whitney with Zq.
2. Halloween Party! Lots of fun. Sadly, I subsequently found myself quite low because of how uncommunal, uninspiring, un-autumnal, and generally un-unusual Halloween is for the kids of this city. (I mean, what's the point, anyhow, if not to have a special day for dressing up, meeting one's neighbors, and carving large garden vegetables, the last two of which, at least, no Manhattan child does?)
3. Listened to The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4.

The Moral Maze is a program in which various smart people talk to various interested or well-informed parties about some issue, and try to tease out the moral implications thereof. This week's topic: is America a force for good in the world, or is it a force for bad?

The perspective that one gets hearing intelligent, well-informed foreigners analyzing one's country is shocking. I was extremely taken aback by the misrepresentations of my country that I was hearing on the radio. These were not born of malice, by any means; in fact, people were speaking from both sides of the debate (some suggesting that America has largely gotten things right and that our sense of American exceptionalism and strong moral and religious sentiments are admirable and noble, others suggesting that they are frightening and hubristic and that our actions in the world and even our motivations for actions are deeply immoral or at best are amoral). But despite, I think, a genuine interest in the question and real knowledge about the world (as well as a very commanding grasp of statistics about the US), these panellists seemed to me to miss something deeply essential about the relationships between religion, popular culture, and government in this country. Consider the following well-intioned, real, and to me ludicrous suggestions from the program:

1. Americans don't care about global warming because 59% of us believe that we are in the End Times, so why would we be worrying about anything of this world?
2. Songs like our national anthem and "America the Beautiful" are indicative of the deep and alarming faith of Americans, and just go to show how we constitutionally can't have patriotism without irrational religious fervor (that is, it's not in our constitution, not, it's not in our Constitution, if you see what I mean).
3. Evangelical Christianity directly and predictably drives foreign policy, and those who disagree with it are a strongly persecuted minority.

Here's what I have to say about all that.

1. We've argued that global warming is not real. We've argued that addressing it through state regulation is unlikely to be effective and may hurt businesses. We've argued that signing the Kyoto Protocol in some ways compromises our sovereignty. As a nation, we've argued a lot of ridiculous and not-so-ridiculous things about global warming, but never once in my life--about this or, indeed, about any issue--have I heard the argument that we can let the world go down the toilet because Armageddon is upon us. I don't doubt the statistic, and indeed I think it is reasonable to find it alarming. But surely, surely we don't think that Christianity in America is this crazy? Because, well, it isn't. Americans, Evangelical and not, care deeply about our country and our world. Indeed, it makes sense to argue that those who are religious believers care more about the world and doing good in it than those who do not, though I don't particularly know that that's so. I just think it's worth pointing out that one can come with a seemingly reasonable bias from either side of this equation.

2. What? Surely you jest. This from citizens of a country whose national anthem is "God save the Queen," and whose fellow countrymen sing "Jerusalem" at every sporting event ever conceived? A country with an established Church? Look, turn the mirror inward for a moment. If you're not crazy and frightening in your religion or nationalism, perhaps the existence of similarly anthemic patriotic songs in our part of the world, sung in similarly patriotic and not-so-patriotic contexts, is equally non-indicative of any scariness on our part. Yes, we're more religious than you. But again, we're not crazy. And more than that--and here's the fundamental disconnect, I think--these are patriotic songs for us. Do they mention God? Yes. Is that important to some of us? Absolutely. But singing them expresses primarily a certain patriotic fervor, and certainly cannot be taken as indicative as any sort of religious belief. People who don't believe in God sing them. Jews sing them, Christians sing them, Hindus sing them. It's okay, because what you're saying just doesn't have much religious significance for us. Not singing can be reasonably presumed to be a protest against government, not a call for further separation of church and state.

3. Finally, this is just clearly ridiculous--not in its soft form (Evangelical Christianity certainly does inform many people's judgments of our foreign policy), but rather ridiculous in the very strong form taken for granted by the panellists on this radio program. Did my Evangelical friends in school genuinely want to bring me to faith? Yes. Did they think less of me for my apostacy? Perhaps, but if so, it was a private thought. They were, genuinely, my friends. I don't think I was a social outcast, by any means, for my broad disbelief.

Of course, it is not false that religion pervades much of the public sphere in America--indeed, far more than I would like--but you can't quote a statistic that says that more than 80% of Americans are actively religious and then say that our shared religion drives our foreign and domestic policy. Surely if that were true, 80% of the population would be voting in the same way in most elections. Guess what? It isn't. The missing link is a fact that we take for granted on this side of the Atlantic: the religious lobby is clearly an interest group here in America, and it represents many but not nearly all people of faith. Whether we agree with the Moral Majority or not, we know that an affiliation with it is a political one, very like an affiliation with the ACLU or National Right to Life or any of a million other interest groups. The role of religion in our government is extremely complicated, and, I think, is not engrained in our national psyche in the way that The Moral Maze presumes.

Perhaps this is the main point I want to make, actually. Religion is deeply engrained in the personal and communal lives of many Americans, but as a people I do not think we are religious to nearly the extent that the panellists in this radio program took for granted. That is to say, Americans do not share explicitly religious ideals as national values, and indeed we all value freedom of religion. You can be a full and good American without being Christian, but it's harder, at least, to say that you're a full American if you don't believe in liberty and democracy. It's nowhere near a legitimate talking point for Bush to say we're going into Iraq because God told us to. We'll tolerate the statement happily, it's true, but nobody would accept it as justification.

We do share strong national ideals here, though. Liberty may well be the most fundamental of them all, in fact; if you suggest that we should be going into Iraq because we have an obligation to spread freedom and democracy, you certainly will get people thinking. That seems at plausible, even if we're given pause by other issues ("but Iraq is a democracy!" and "are we more right to go in to better the lives of Iraqis (pretending for a moment that we might have been remotely successful) or staying out to allow a certain amount of national self-determination?" and "but isn't this moralistic stuff just a ruse when it's really about oil?"). Freedom and democracy are elements of some shared national character, and whether you're a unilateralist (a Bush "liberating" Iraq) or a multilateralist (a Wilson trying to build self-determinitive nations), a protectionist (Washington fostering his new democracy) or an interventionist (George H. W. Bush overthrowing the military junta in Panama), these tropes inform your decisions and rouse the masses. That is not, of course, to say that all American foreign and domestic policy holds true to these ideals--after all, one can believe lying is wrong and still lie occasionally (and that does not make one's belief wrong, either), just as one can espouse the virtues of democracy while sometimes propping up undemocratic regimes. But it is to say that maybe it's a little more compelling to think that our national fervors are born of a real and, indeed, moralistic belief in certain secular ideals than in religious absolutism. To be sure, some of us may think these ideals are grounded in religion--but this is a bit circular; after all, our religion is predicated upon our sense of our (God-given? smirk. circularity.) religious freedom. And we tell that story--the story of America, the land of freedom where the pilgrims could come practice their religion without the hand of the government upon them--much more often than we tell the story of America, the land of institutionalized Christianity.

I don't mean any of this as a judgment on any of these perspectives. We have legitimate (and not-so-legitimate) arguments in this country about the role of religion among our Founding Fathers, the appropriate place of religion in civil society, and moral questions which necessarily touch on religious belief. All I mean, here, is to suggest that these are real points of debate in our public sphere, rather than internalized and agreed-upon parts of our national psyche. It bothers me that the program made someone with my own perspective, doubts, and centricism seem as if I was on the political fringe in this country. Frankly, I just don't think that's true--and moreover, I don't think others make me feel that way, either. I have big problems with prayer in schools and religious opposition to stem cell research, among other things. But this doesn't mean my fellow Americans who are religious think of me as a lesser American or a crazy liberal or something; I mean, these are the difficult issues of our day, and everybody grants that the country is in debate about them, with mainstream, respectable, and competitive political parties coming out on opposite sides of these issues.

I don't know how one goes about making one's culture transparent to the rest of the world, but I do wish we could be more successful about it. I mean, the British share our language and our news sources; we vacation in each others' backyards; we share a basis for Common Law and are clear political allies with close historical ties that go back at least to the Magna Carta. If they seem to have such a skewed sense of the role that religion plays in our society--an important role, to be sure, but completely unlike the role they seem to suggest--then what of the rest of the world?

And, as Zq pointed out to me over the phone, the excercise should suggest to me that we must be missing an enormous amount about everywhere else. Cultural tropes are impossibly hard for foreigners to pick up on. But we must try, if only because I feel right now that my own country is so gravely misunderstood, and that it would serve the world better were it not so.

posted by Skay @ 11:23 AM