Hope is an unsexy word, but it might be what we need.
The movement for change is getting mired in Internet Despair. Rebecca Solnit has a recipe for getting out of it.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The last several years have been, arguably, the most depressing years in recent record for those unsettled by extremist currents in American public and religious life, and, yes, it was especially painful for those of us with ties, however frayed, to the Evangelical church. We’d been betrayed, yet again, by those who claimed to speak for God. It’s an old story, but no less painful for being old.
Still, something about the way we’ve handled all of this has bothered me deeply. It’s a discomfort that I haven’t quite been able to name, a resistance to the the way our collective discourse has gone: the biting sarcasm, the streams of comments and retweeted toxicity, the doom and gloom and casting of blame. About halfway through 2020, I turned off Twitter, unable to deal with the collective indignation. It all seemed profoundly unhealthy in a way that I wasn’t quite able to parse out. We’ve been mishandling something.
Last week, I picked up Hope in the Dark and Rebecca Solnit helped me out. In her chapter about the American election of 2004, “When We Lost,” she writes:
Sometime before the election was over, I vowed to keep away from what I thought of as “the Conversation,” the tailspin of mutual wailing about how bad everything was, a recitation of the evidence against us—one exciting opportunity the left offers is of being your own prosecutor—that just buried any hope and imagination down into a dank little foxhole of curled-up despair. Now I watch people having it, wondering what it is we get from it. The certainty of despair—is that kind of certainty so worth pursuing?
There it is! This has been the era of the Conversation, of accusation and self-flagellation, of wallowing in the 24 news cycle of unceasingly dire news, of endless social reposts and mounting anger, of mourning things we knew and things we did not know, of the endless projection and refraction of anger until we stood in a house of mirrors, our anger infinitely morphing and reflecting and thwarting itself into new forms until finally settling into despair—unfocused, ruthless, self-destructive despair.
This has been the era of the Conversation, of accusation and self-flagellation, of wallowing in the 24 news cycle of unceasingly dire news, of endless social reposts and mounting anger.
Throughout all of this, we—yes, yes…I—forgot one thing which Solnit points out with laser-like specificity: None of us actually know what is going to happen next. That story has not been told. But by wallowing in the Conversation, I was robbing myself of the opportunity (and, frankly, energy) to help tell it.
Solnit is ardently anti-wallowing. She writes,
“[H]earing people have the Conversation is hearing them tell themselves a story they believe is being told to them. What other stories can be told? How do people recognize that they have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners?”
How, indeed?
The tricky part for those like me (that is, who grew up in fundamentalist-leaning faiths) is acknowledging that we’ve yet again succumbed to the temptation of certainty. For—as Solnit points out—however well ensconced in correct language and well-intentioned outrage, that’s what our collective fatalism ultimately is: A certainty that things will turn out badly.
And, as former Evangelicals know all too well, certainty how the world’s story ends leads directly to inaction, a paralysis so well-rationalized that it feels like righteousness.
Certainty how the world’s story ends leads directly to inaction, a paralysis so well-rationalized that it feels like righteousness.
So maybe we could take a page from Solnit and reframe all of this. Maybe this isn’t American culture’s long and inevitable slide into decay, but an upheaval which enables the rebuilding, the wrecking ball that makes way for something new. Maybe what we’re looking at is not a culture on the edge of the abyss, but a bunch of humans confronting a profound disruption of narrative, a sea-change of thought in American culture and a mass exodus from the old ways of perceiving and talking. Maybe. It could be.
The point: I don’t know and neither do you. But I don’t think it’s beyond us to leave the Conversation and, instead, tell a new story about faith and its place in the world.
To do that, though, we have to have a story, to be for something. We can’t simply reject the old narrative, be the “ex,” the against, the ones who say no. We can’t just rage against the inevitable on social media. We’d have to decide what we’re for, declare what kind of world we want to live in and live in that world as boldly as we can. We’d have to eke out the courage to, as Heaney puts it, “Believe that further shore / Is reachable from here.”
We have to have a story, to be for something.
And there’s the rub: those of us who grew up righteous had a story and it let us down. For many of us, the dissolution of our old narrative was deeply traumatic. Our communities, self-worth, families, and identities hemorrhaged. And for those of us who walked away wounded, committing to a new story—with the fervor necessary to join in the telling—is a step of such bravery and vulnerability that it feels, frankly, impossible. Believing in something again would be an act of self-donation, profoundly religious. It is exposing our neck, once again, to the axe.
And, when we come right down to it, is it even possible to tell a story, collectively, without certainty? What do narratives about the future, faith, belief, and religion look like when you remove the platitudes, the systems of control, the neat sorting algorithms used to sort one another into cleanly edged groups marked In and Out? In the vacuum left by old orthodoxies, can we build a new orthopraxy strong enough to hold us together?
Again, I don’t know and neither do you. But since the Conversation no longer seems an option, I’m game for trying hope instead.
Orthodoxy won't save the world. But orthopraxy might.
To channel Bruce Wayne, it's what we do that defines us.
As with many other young evangelicals, I grew up under the auspices of orthodoxy, which is to say that what one believed is what mattered. To save people, you got them to "believe in Jesus" and declare as such. Believe with thy heart and confess with thy mouth. Any admonitions to read the Bible and do God's work were decidedly after the fact. What one did was important, too, but only in a hazy, ill-defined way I never understood. What was clear was that if you screwed up you could be forgiven as long as you believed in the appropriate doctrines. In other words, you can raise hell your entire life, be converted on your deathbed, and skid into heaven on a technicality.
This culture of right belief over right action—of orthodoxy over orthopraxy— was a large part of my early and ongoing grievance against my evangelical upbringings. The more I became disillusioned with evangelical leadership and action, the more the pontificating on belief and public skirmishes over belief-centered artifacts began to grate.
Before my final exit from the Christian fold—although "final exit" is perhaps a bit too strong for my slow drift away from the altar and out the church door—I was drawn to more ancient practices of Christianity, mostly because they were practices. Physical objects appeared and were handled. On high holy days one fasted, or prayed, or threw confetti at a church altar, or something. People did things. Sometimes the Lutherans opened hospitals and cared for the poor. It was nice.
By the time I got as far as Roman Catholicism, though, it was too late. The well was poisoned. The drift bore me relentlessly out the door.
The combination of the DJT presidency and the utter lunacy of my former spiritual leaders has turned me a bit religious, though, in the sense that I feel devoted to things; I want to save the whole damn world.
But not by thinking the right things, saying the magic words, or joining another Good Guy Club. In truth, I find the intellectual posturing and political correctness of the left nearly as exhausting as the rabid ideological insanity happening on the right. There are so many rituals and code phrases—things one must think, things one must absolutely never say, and questions one really shouldn't ask in public or out loud. It's as as steep a purity spiral and as rigid an orthodoxy as any I ever saw.
In the aftermath of Charlottesville car attack—remember that?—there was a push on social media to stand up and declare which side you were on. It all felt very religious: Think the right thing—and then be sure everyone knows you're one of the cowboys in white hats. But how much declaration is enough? How many words will it take to sort out this mess? How many rallies do I need to attend before everyone sees I'm on the right side? How loudly and how long do I have to declare the doctrine before I'm one of the so-called good guys?
How many rallies do I need to attend before everyone sees I'm on the right side? How loudly and how long do I have to declare the doctrine before I'm one of the so-called "good guys"?
In the midst of the mêlée, the quote I've turned to the most is from Wendell Berry, who humbly suggests that "[m]aybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly in it."
Those who grew up with the same kind of evangelicalism I did will recognize this concept as pretty much fundamentally opposed to evangelical orthodoxy. Because everything in evangelicalism is about saving the world. Not the actual world you and I live in, mind you, but the theoretical, futurey-wuturey world that will be labeled as Saved when all the people in it (who are future people—not us) believe and say the right thing about God. It's an unreachable utopian ideal, as is so much of evangelical theology.
What I like about Berry's idea is that it's rooted in the real, the concrete. The word "living" is in the present perfect progressive tense. It must be done here—in the muddy and half-baked Now—and it will continue into the future with no specific expectation of an end. Living savingly has no finite goal and no real measure of success. It's a concept grounded in messy and unending reality—in the humans, relationships, and physical objects which surround us and which we have the power to affect.
What does living savingly look like? I've been trying to figure that out. I have an ache to figure that out. My own attempt at living savingly has looked largely like a series of adjustments: staying in conversations from which I'd otherwise excuse myself, a sputtering project to gather people in my home every week, carrying around a coffee carafe, changing where I shop, changing my writing goals.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The adjustments don't feel like much in the grand scheme of things. They are slight reorientations. Sometimes they are too slight.
So, in the end, I have no great revelation, but I have come to two conclusions. The first: No other human can tell you how to live savingly—or give you the conviction necessary to do it. Likewise, no one has the right to extract a confession of belief or demand that you flash a "good guy card." There are no lawful initiations to this game we're all born into, squalling. You must do the best you can by your neighbor. You must—to risk quoting an old nemesis—"work out your own salvation."
No other human can tell you how to live savingly—or give you the conviction necessary to do it.
The second: releasing oneself from the obligation to save the entire world—to "think of the small as large" as the Tao Te Ching puts it—is one sure step away from despair. The dismissal of Everything is what allows us to start on the road to our Something—whatever that might be. Of course, our Something will never be enough. But I don't think it's supposed to be. The cosmos of good appears to operate by a math I don't understand.
In his 2014 article Burn Your Indecision to the Ground, David Sessions outlined a plan of resistance:
"[S]tart living different ways, a little at a time. Start committing to people, places, things. Say yes to your friend’s party Saturday night, and go anyway even when something better comes up. Join an organization that fights for an issue you care about, and keep going even when the meetings are long, boring, and seem pointless. Fight for someone . . . . immigrants, minorities, the homeless, the incarcerated, whoever; you’ll realize you had more in common with them than you thought. Commit to a person or people; stay in the same city with them, live with them, marry them. Join a union, especially if you’re the only member under 50; if there isn’t one where you work, start one. If you can find one that hasn’t retreated into spiritual apoliticism or reactionary traditionalism, I don’t even care if you take up a religion. The point is to build human ties, add little by little to your network of solidarity, make it thicker and stronger. It won’t be enough, but it’ll be a start."
Sessions wrote this well before Trumpist hell broke loose, so the resistance he described was not against Trump or his cronies but against the very ideological current that later was to bear them up. His advice was even more sound for its prescience. After all, the year really makes no difference: be it in 2014 or 2017 or 2025, we deal not so much with the power of people as with the power of ideas, of too-simple narratives, of ego-stroking propaganda. We wrestle now not with fellow citizens, but with an old American demon—an ideology we have fought with since the beginning.
We wrestle now not with fellow citizens, but with an old American demon—an ideology we have fought with since the beginning. If it is to be defeated, it will not be by repeated declarations of horror on Twitter or by heroic acts in flames of glory.
If this ideology is to be defeated, it will not be by repeated declarations of horror on Twitter or by heroic acts in flames of glory, but by the stalwart obedience of a multitude of ordinary people able "to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways," as David Foster Wallace put it. In other words, a communal system of action, an orthopraxy of everyday justice, of bull-headed devotion to good work, and of deliberate attention to those things and people termed inconsequential by a for-profit culture.
Again, it's not enough. But for those of us orphaned from our faith communities and haunted by old gods, it is something: A rubric of sanity and a way to approach our days.
(This article was written in 2017 and updated slightly.)