I recently moved to a more rural area, but for most of my life lived in suburbia. Suburbia has many charms, but everyone knows that community almost never happens in such areas. Of my 40 years of suburban living, I surmise that I had only a semblance of a relationship with perhaps 6-7 families. I guess this is fairly typical.

I remember some years ago voicing an idea to my wife: What if on a corner house, someone was allowed to set up a small bar or cafe? Maybe even one for each street? My mind raced to the possibilities of front yards set up as family friendly areas with a few games and such. I thought that this could work, and communal bonds form. People generally want to get to know others, but nothing in the suburbs helps foster this in any way. In fact, everything more or less works against it.

Of course even if my idea would work in principle, it would fall afoul of zoning laws. As Jane Jacobs points out in her Dark Age Ahead, “purity” formed one of the key principles of zoning laws in the 20th century. Thou shalt not mix commercial and residential areas. One of Jacobs’ tasks in this, her final book, was to question this and other sacred cows.

In his A History of Needs (1978) Ivan Illich heavily criticized various aspects of the modern world on both the right and the left. Broadly speaking, we could group his attacks under the banner of his intolerance for what he termed “hygienic industrial ‘progess.'” Basically, whatever “made sense” in terms of measurement, neatness, and uniformity we counted as “good.” Illich thought most often the opposite would result.

Jacobs has a few main lines of attack, though she wished that readers would take Dark Age Ahead as a hopeful book in the end. I see her as essentially an heir of Illich, one who urges us to abandon our fixation with “purity” and stratification in order to achieve something more real.*

Zoning laws come under particular fire from Jacobs, though she is hardly a free-market libertarian. She writes,

Only in 1916 did zoning take appreciable hold in North American culture. The three ideas that shaped zoning were these:

1. High ground coverages are bad.
2. High densities are bad
3. The mingling of commercial or other work uses with residences is bad.

All three assumptions are rejections of cities and city life, devised by utopians and reformers who tried to overcome public health problems and “disorder” with these abstract, dysfunctional solutions.

Jacobs continues to argue that people object not to these particular things, but poor versions of their implementation. In theory at least, we should have the ability to legislate proper boundaries for all of the above. Jacobs hints at the real issue governments shy away from fruitful messiness–the lack of ability for them to effectively control outcomes. Organic “messiness” resists the neatness governments require, for governments these days govern mainly through data, which requires order to collect.

Jacobs sees that our “Dark Age” cometh because we rely on abstractions and theories, and refuse to properly observe. We might say that proper observation means noticing proper mixing. One of her touchstone examples involved the Chicago heat wave in the summer of 1995, where hundreds of elderly people died. One could easily observe the cascading effects, as overloaded power grids shut down, children opened hydrants, which meant no AC and no water for some poorer neighborhoods.

The CDC came in to study the problem, and Jacobs spares them not a whit. The study, conducted by nearly 100 intelligent people, found that people died because they remained in their rooms and faced heat stroke and dehydration. The study discovered what any 3rd rate medical examiner might–the medical cause of death. Congratulations.

Thankfully, another researcher named Eric Klinenberg came in and performed a far more useful task. He noticed that in some neighborhoods, the death rate was 10x that of other locales. The difference lay not in the temperature or even the direct access to AC and water, but in neighborhoods. In some boroughs, the at-risk elderly had people to check on them and give direct aid. This happened because different groups of people knew each other, and the elderly trusted those that came to check because they had seen them around. The CDC study pointed out that many who died did not follow the well publicized advice to leave apartments and go walk in the neighborhoods, go to a store with AC, etc. Klinenberg pointed out that neighborhoods with exorbitant fatalities had no place for people to walk to, no businesses to enjoy AC in, etc., because of zoning laws that do not mix the residential and commercial.

For Jacobs, such limited thinking by one of our top scientific institutions, combined with neighborhoods that do not allow for real life to take place, risks conjuring up a new Dark Age. The “high” of our institutions cannot properly assess the “low” of everyday life and appreciate what actually makes civilization possible.**

As Jane Jacobs wrote Dark Age Ahead (2005) we experienced the erosion of the situation in Iraq, and some might say, the end of American hegemony. In 2019 the Rand Corporation published a study entitled The Battle for Baghdad: Lessons Learned–and Still to be Learned. I feared that the book would have a know-it-all tone and paint everyone as idiots who should have known better. I found it fair and sympathetic to most everyone, while at the same time avoiding explaining everything away.

More than enough blame exists between civilians and the military to go around. The authors point out that some things went right–food and water distribution went according to plan. Few Iraqi’s died of starvation, malnutrition, or improper medical care. Huzzah for us, but aside from that . . . well. . .

The long list of what went wrong begins with:

• The U.S. has a good record with humanitarian relief. It is one of our strengths. We spent tons of time and resources planning for such aid, but never had a chance to implement it effectively, because the war continued long past the conventional stage. We prepped for something that we never could implement.
• Conversely, time and money spend prepping for humanitarian aid was not spent on preparing for the political, cultural, and asymmetrical military mess we had after we took Baghdad.
• We expected that the Iraqi government would continue to function after top-level ministers and advisors (i.e. Saddam’s cronies) left office. Since Saddam’s regime depended on highly centralized decisions, we assumed that those ministries operated as effective state structures. If so, then the top leadership could be replaced without much fallout, and no large-scale reconstruction would be needed. Instead, we badly misread the nature of Saddam’s governance and Iraqi society.
• The military won a brilliantly clean conventional campaign. As for what came next, as one commentator put it, “The military wanted to put a civilian face on it, while the civilians [State Department] wanted to put an Iraqi face on it, and meanwhile we had 150,000 troops on the ground, and a UN order saying that what we were doing wasn’t what we thought we were doing, which was an occupation.”
• The question of looting confused many people on the ground at the time. One general talked of how he saw the looting as non-violent wealth redistribution. They expressed no hostility towards the army or each other. He saw the looting as a natural response to Saddam’s oppression, as a communally peaceful way to solve a problem, so why stop it? In hindsight of course, this “wealth redistribution” set the stage for lawlessness later.

We need to seek a path through such confusing events and attempt to find a central cause or problem.

I tentatively venture that the core problem involved just what Jacobs diagnosed stateside, a failure to embrace or even recognize beneficial messiness/appropriate mixing between agencies, peoples, and so forth. We can see this through a couple of different issues.

To start, a lack of cooperation between the Departments of Defense and State led to an elimination State’s meaningful role, for all intents and purposes. We always need unity of command, but not unity of perspective. This lack of cooperation hurt our available intellectual resources.

This lack of good internal mixing led to external problems. In a variety of instances, the authors cite the problems of our preference to tear down existing structures and build from scratch, rather than use what we found already in existence. This preference was surely easier on paper, but its application in a society with complex social dynamics proved most difficult.

Another example that fit this failure to mix pattern might be the “De-Ba’athification” of top level Ba’ath party officials close to Saddam. The authors acknowledge the deep complexity of the problem. Saddam governed Iraq as a mostly secular Sunni Moslem in a state where Shia’s and Kurds formed 80% of the population. Indeed, the removal of these generally corrupt party officials met with strong approval from this broad 80%. However, this move scarred and humiliated Sunni’s publicly. The authors strongly suggest that perhaps these officials needed removed, but not removed as a matter of public policy, which would bring public shame. Sunni insurgent groups very likely arose from this action. They felt threatened by the new order, and responded in kind.

The U.S. also usually sought to tear down existing structures of government and rebuild from scratch. Iraq had so much unexpected complexity, it made sense to seek more simplicity and clarity. However, this move also backfired. We failed to build an infrastructure for effective governance.

The theme I see often involves a strong avoidance of “mess.” Our democratic, Enlightenment inspired, science driven culture loves clarity, transparency, and simplicity. These values serve us well, up to a point. They fail us in situations akin to Iraq, where we need to ditch many of the qualities that form our society, and hence, our military as well. Among other things, our values lead us towards greater standardization and speed. These qualities will not promote the wisdom to recognize a good “mess” when we need to.

Jane Jacobs began her diagnosis of this problem with her groundbreaking The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The pristine clarity sought by developers, the separation of residential and commercial, would prevent real communities from developing like those that saved the lives of many of Chicago’s elderly in 1995. Jacobs thinks that “the people” often get betrayed, in.a sense, from on-high. Perhaps. I tend to think that democracies get the kind of culture they want, and thus, the kind they deserve. Our current cultural polarization, i.e., our failure to mix well, may not be the byproduct of the debacle in Iraq but its cause.

Dave

*For the sake of clarity, purity is not a morally bad or good thing–it is a descriptive term of something that can sometimes be good, sometimes be bad, depending.

**One can see significant similarities between the CDC’s handling of this limited incident, and their handling of COVID 25 years later.

I am no fan of the “Woke” but a few years ago Ross Douthat wrote a piece entitled “A Crisis our Universities Deserve,” which showed me that at the core of this movement lay something admirable. At some point in the 20th century, college lost its emphasis on ennobling the soul, the great virtues, ideas, etc., and became a means to make more money in life. Certainly in the early 90’s, most of the encouragement from society to go to college came in this form. Students today rightly rebel from this, want more from their education than this, and more from life in general. Many “woke” students seek something moral, something transcendent. Douthat commends them for this, at least.

My public school education left me with the impression that the arc of American History bent towards the good, but of course we had x,y,z, and 1, 2,3, things wrong with us. The list of wrong things had grown since my dad’s day, but still stopped just short of overthrowing the basic arc. Subsequent generations have had the scales tipped. Manifest Destiny, the idea that History/God/Fate/Benign Providence wanted/needed America to span the continent, stood very near the core of our things wrong with us, and seemingly impossible to redeem in any way. After reading Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth I had the realization that the Woke and the various champions of Manifest Destiny have a great deal in common, including a highly idealistic goal and rebellion against the complacent stuffed shirts of status quo.

This comparison may surprise some, but makes at least temperamental sense to me. My first reaction to the Woke and Manifest Destiny comes from the gut: “Ick . . . it’s just too much work, too much angst and yearning, too much of everything. Enough, already.” I feel Jerry Seinfeld should have a bit on this–he would agree with me, I’m sure. But one needs more of a foundation to denigrate these two major epochs of our country’s past and present, and one has to admire the energy and drive in both movements.

Smith shows that Manifest Destiny had no direct racial motivations. When race entered into the discussion from some, it usually involved spreading “free labor” across the continent to help limit and eventually squeeze out slavery. Manifest Destiny’s sharpest critics in fact often came from pro-slavery camps, who poured cold water on all of the messianic expectations of free labor across the continent. I found it curious as well that the native Indians got little mention. It strikes me not that they were discounted, but rather not counted from the start. Maybe promoters of expansion automatically assumed that the natives would go along with it. More likely, thoughts of overland Asian trade routes, the fusion of independence, wealth, and power, the sweep of empires throughout time–left no room to see particular people such as the natives. Certainly one could critique the impact of the idea on native peoples, but harming them seems absent from the original intent.

At its core, then Manifest Destiny

• Believed firmly in America’s unique role in world history
• Allied with many of the progressive causes of the day–causes that today would certainly look progressive–grants of free government things (not $, but land), the belief that the hand of government should engineer certain social and political ends.
• Believed strongly in unity–national unity, but also a more expansive international unity, for which the United States could hold the standard. Walt Whitman wrote in his A Passage to India that

The people [are] to become brothers and sisters,

Their races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands welded together.

Whitman being Whitman, he waxes rhapsodically about how Man and Nature shall once again fuse together under the “true Son of God”–not sure whom this was supposed to be. We conclude, then, that Manifest Destiny involved not just our national greatness, but

• A grand union of all humanity, abolishing all national differences and dismantling the hierarchies of the old, worn out traditional world.

All of these are strongly progressive causes.

The progressive Woke have their virtues, but their virtues lean so far in one direction that they have to overcompensate, consciously or no, towards the other pole. So while they talk of abolishing all forms of difference in some grand human unity on the one hand, with the other they proclaim a certain kind of radical individuality. We see this in their insistence that anyone can do anything they like with their body, sexuality, etc. On the one hand, the Woke can be fiercely anti-authoritarian and anti-institutional, but on the other, as Patrick Deneen has pointed out, they need Government writ-large to protect them from local, more traditionally minded majorities. And, while the Woke encourage a general sort of mixing, they have a hard time mixing in a fruitful manner, i.e., with relationships, marriages, and families.

With the heroes of expansion west, real or fictional, we see the same motifs. Civilization requires cooperation, but Cooper’s Leatherstocking, Whitman’s rhapsodies, and the real Daniel Boone can never settle and build. The unbounded horizon calls more strongly to them than any particular place. They decide things for themselves on the fly. Their freedom from the shackles of civilization gives them a newfound moral clarity and moral authority, for they are freed from all bigotry of place. They see with universal eyes. In his novel Old Hicks the then-famous Charles W. Webber (a product of Princeton), declares of the Texas Ranger that,

With them the primitive virtues of a heroic manhood are all-sufficient, and they care nothing for reverences, forms, and duties, as civilization has them, but respect each others rights and recognize the awful presence of a benign God in the grandeur of the mountain, forest, plain, valley, and river. . . . Such men do not look to society except with disgust . . .

Interestingly, as part of the plot, Webber has the head mountain man romantically pursue the wife of the villain, and marry her despite she actually being the wife of the evil Count. The “Laws of Nature” here easily become the Laws of God, which trumps the laws of man. Similar arguments today justify ditching traditional sexual ethics. For example, those that transition, or “come out,” are granted a carte blanche in their decisions regardless of its impact on those around them, for their very distance from society with these decisions grants them supposed insight and authority.

Webber wrote fictional characters, but life imitated art in some respects with the foremost advocates for the frontier. Francis Parkman, another ivy-league grad (Harvard) traveled west in the summer of 1842 following his sophomore year. In his journal Parkman showed disdain for most of the actual people he met, especially the livestock farmer, a foreshadowing of sorts of the frayed relationship between coastal elites and flyover country. After passing beyond civilization further into the forest, Smith notes that “[Parkman’s] tone changes completely.” The independent woodsman garners immense respect: “He is a remarkably intelligent fellow . . . resolute and independent as the wind.” Smith writes,

Parkman’s antithetical attitudes towards farmers and the hunters of the wilderness illustrate the fact that . . . two distinct “West’s” existed in the minds of many [advocates of the frontier from the east]. The agricultural west was tedious. Its inhabitants belonged to a despised social class. The Wild West was by contrast an exhilarating region of adventure in the open air. Its heroes . . . were in reality not members of society at all, but noble anarchs owning no master, free denizens of a limitless wilderness.

Advocates for Manifest Destiny could, like the Woke, see civilization in sweeping terms, and they could see the heroic individual. They both have a harder time with groups in between these categories, the basic societal building blocks of villages, farms, towns, etc.

A competing mythos, that of the west as paradisal garden, also informed America’s westward push. This motif had more to say for it, as it usually involved families, but still had its rose-colored glasses. Timothy Flint wrote against attitudes like Parkman’s, and gloried in farm life, writing in 1827:

Thousands of independent and happy yeoman reside [in the west], with their numerous, healthy, and happy families about them, with the ample abundance that fills their granaries, with their young orchards, whose branches must be propped to sustain the weight of their fruit, beside their beautiful rivers and beech woods, in which the squirrels skip, the deer browse, and the sweet red-bird sings, and with the prospect of settling their children on any of the dozens of farms that surround them.

James Lanman echoed such ideas in the 1830’s . . .

If, as has been remarked by distinguished statesman, cities are the sores of the political body where the bad matter of the state concentrates what healthful attitudes of mind and body are afforded by agricultural enterprise. The exhilarating atmosphere of rural life, the invigorating exercise afforded by its various occupations, the pure water, the necessities supplied for daily existence, leading to early and virtuous marriages, all point to this pursuit as best adapted to the comfort of the individual man.

I do not like to agree with the anti Free-soil crowd (often, though not always, secessionists and pro-slavery) on much of anything, but the “Messenger” was on to something in 1856, when it opined that

Farming is hardly a pleasant occupation, and the idea that it is comes from dreamers and poets. The actual, manual operations of farming are irksome and repulsive to the great mass of mankind.

Alas, reality set in for the devotees of the garden myth shortly after the Civil War. Smith writes,

The yawning gap between agrarian theory and post-war reality . . . comes out in the farmer’s crusades of the last 25 years of the 19th century. The western farmer had been told that he was not a peasant but a peer of the realm; that his contribution to society was basic, and all others peripheral or parasitic, in comparison cities were sores on the body politic. . . . He had been told that he was compensated for any austerity in his mode of life by receiving shelter from the temptations of luxury and vice, and against the ups and downs of the market. His outstanding characteristic was his independence of character and condition.

But after the Civil War Republican policy obviously favored the city against the country, the merchant against the farmer. And the western farmer found that instead of being independent, he was at the mercy not only of the Chicago and New York and Liverpool grain pits, but also of the railways and steamships lines that he must rely on to get his crop to market

I have read most of the volumes of Toynbee’s unabridged A Study of History. I think him a great master and I owe him a great debt, but I found the central theme of Volume III, which describes the growth of civilizations after their infancies, so annoying I stopped reading about halfway through some years ago. I have yet to pick it up again. Toynbee rightly reacted against material measures of progress. A civilization surely must be able to advance in more ways that territory and GDP. Toynbee developed a different approach, which meant a good start. But he ended with what he called “etherealization.” The idea seems to run along the lines of

• A civilization develops an idea or technique that works for them, but that idea/process, has a limited growth potential because it is anchored to its locality
• The civilization then extracts the core of the idea, removing it from its trappings, thus making it more transferrable across space.
• This allows for more sharing of ideas, etc. which aids growth. The process is essentially cooperative and other oriented.

He takes, as an example, the alphabet as an etherealization of language, as opposed to ideograms. Alphabets transfer across cultures relatively easily, but China’s writing, among other things, will not allow for this, keeping them isolated.

Toynbee often nods via anecdote and analysis to “the old ways are best.” He wasn’t always consistent in his ideas, but this is not a fault. He usually explored possibilities as opposed to asserting things absolutely. But etherealization shows Toynbee’s weakness for too much generality, too much “Platonism” (but only in the worst sense of that word). Lifting something too far off the ground tends to make it dangerous and destabilizing to society, like a steroid. Supporters of Woke politics, and mid-19th century supporters of Manifest Destiny, have this same problem. What masks itself as “progress” in fact only abstracts what in embodied form might actually be good, though less dramatic, ideas.

American history mashes together so many competing concepts. Sometimes this results in great creative tension. We get into trouble when succumb to the lure of the unbounded everything America has always foolishly promised.

We should note that the Old Testament takes a dim view of cities. Cain builds the first one, from which evil and violence come, and then you have Sodom, the cities built by Hebrew slaves for Pharaoh, Babylon, Ninevah, and the like. But the end of the New Testament shows the final restoration taking place with a garden within a city–even cities get redeemed in God’s providence over history. So, the frontier, the farm, the city–every civilization that actually functions needs all three.

Dave

The Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon pointed out with some ridicule that in the Arian controversy, Christianity got into a kerfuffle over the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet — the iota.  At the Council of Nicea Arians wanted the word “homoiousios,” meaning “similar substance” inserted into the creed concerning the nature of Christ.  They were comfortable thinking of Jesus in divine terms, but not as an equal to the Father in His essence.  Led by Athanasius, the orthodox contingent objected, insisting on the word “homoousious,” meaning “same substance.”

For Gibbon and other Enlightenment oriented thinkers, this all seemed too much.  Such minutiae, such trifling, would upset things so unnecessarily.  Given that Gibbon liked nothing better than a well-oiled worldly machine, he saw the controversy as so many wrenches in the works.  Of course Gibbon missed the point entirely.  The difference between viewing Christ as fully God as opposed to merely “God-like” changes one’s conception of the entire universe, creation, and history itself.  When it comes to our theological understanding, what we worship will have dramatic consequences.

I’ve always believed that understanding religious belief formed the key to understanding any event in history, be it great or small.  Often this is more easily seen in the ancient world, where religion showed on the sleeves much more so than today. But men are men, and as a man thinks, so he is (Prov. 23:7).   Mark Noll  points out the religious roots and the religious mistakes of both North and South in his excellent The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.  Noll’s analysis gets to the heart of the real differences between North and South, and shows how these religious differences formed the roots of the political disagreements that led to war.  Both sides professed belief in the authority of the Bible, and both sides reached different conclusions.  That’s obvious to anyone, but Noll’s approach shows these different interpretations came from the same source American/Enlightenment source, and that makes this brief work a real treasure.

By 1850 America experienced a deep political crisis, but astute observers of the day saw that the roots went deeper. A Protestant ethos merged nicely with Democratic principles in America quite easily.  The individual should be able to read, reason, and think for himself.  Both Protestantism and Democratic government rest on the idea that truth always has a “plain” and obvious character.  It could be argued that an agreed upon “atmosphere” of sorts existed between Protestant denominations despite their differences (Noll takes this for granted and does not argue the point).  But in 1844 both Methodist and Baptist churches (the largest in the U.S. at that time) experienced deep schisms.  A broken Church will lead to a broken nation, and leaders from the North and South predicted this. Henry Clay opined that, “this sundering of religious ties . . . I consider the greatest source of danger to our country. In 1850 John Calhoun of South Carolina warned that if the great Protestant denominations finally broke, “nothing would be left to hold the States together except force.”*  Noll writes,

If we keep in mind that it was never only a matter of interpreting individual biblical texts, but always a question of putting actively to use the authoritative Book on which the national culture of the United States had been built, then we are in a position to understand why in 1860 battles over the Bible were so important, why divergent views of providence cut so deeply, and . . . why the Civil War illuminated much about the general character of religion in America.

First, the South.

Southern arguments in defense of slavery had the advantage of simplicity and (the apparent) strict fidelity to the Biblical text.  They pointed out that . . .

• God allowed Israel to have slavery
• Abraham and other luminaries owned slaves
• Jesus never condemned the institution of slavery
• Nowhere in the epistles is slavery ever condemned.  In fact, slaves are repeatedly told to obey their masters.  Paul, after finding Onesimus, an escaped slave, has him return to Philemon.

Thus, to argue (as abolitionists often did) that anyone who practiced slavery could have nothing to do with Biblical Christianity flies in the face of the entire and obvious biblical teaching on slavery.  The case was open and shut.

Northern arguments also strove for stark clarity and simplicity.

The most common arguments usually had the following characteristics:

• Slavery had inextricable links to tyranny and moral abuses that the ethic of the Gospel strenuously opposed
• Slavery contradicted principles of justice, love, and mercy found throughout the Bible
• Slavery went against the general spirit of the “brotherhood of mankind” propounded by certain texts, like Galatians 3:28.

In other words, anti-slavery arguments inevitably used first principles but tended to avoid textual rigor and so failed to deal head-on with what pro-slavery advocates said.  Furthermore, many anti-slavery arguments wedded themselves to “natural reason,” “self-evident truths,” and “republican practices” and at times relied on these ideas more than Scripture itself.  Thus, as Noll comments, “The primary reason the biblical defense of slavery remained so strong was that biblical attacks on slavery were so weak.”  Again, Noll doesn’t dispute that slavery was wrong.  His point is one rarely made, that Northern arguments against slavery had some of the same flaws as pro-slavery arguments.  Thus, the two ships were likely to pass in the night.

Much better arguments against American slavery existed from some Protestants, and interestingly, some Catholics as well. Such arguments pointed out that . . .

• Using Israel as an example for American slavery made the mistake of conflating Israel with America, a mistake Americans had been making for generations.
• If the South could used ancient Israel for support, they should be informed by their practices.  For one, slaves had rights in Israel, and they did not in the South.  For another, Mosaic law prescribed years of Jubilee every 7th year and again at the 50th year in which all slaves were freed and all debts canceled.  The South never practiced this.  And again, slavery in Israel was not racial, perpetual, or hereditary. The South condemned themselves by asking to be judged by the law.
• Certain biblical principles of justice, mercy, and love certainly applied to arguments against slavery.  But these more careful Protestant and Catholic voices applied them differently than most abolitionists.  For starters, they kept such principles clear of democratic ideology — on which Scripture remains silent at least directly (and pro-slavery arguments pointed this out).  The goal for the Christian, according to these arguments, was not so much to live in light of specific texts, but in light of the flow of history itself.  If God’s Kingdom is not just coming but is already here in Christ, we have to live in light of the “now” reality of God’s Kingdom. In God’s Kingdom we will not/do not enslave one another.  Evidence exists for this not just in Scripture, but in the early history of the Church.  Christians worked to liberate slaves and medieval civilization stood as the first major civilization in history to essentially eliminate slavery.  It got reintroduced only in the Renaissance, when pagan, Roman concepts of property and ownership tragically got transported back into Europe’s bloodstream.
• The Roman example of slavery also condemned southerners, at least to an extent.   For one, Roman slavery lacked the racial character of Southern slavery.  In one of the best chapters in the book, Noll pulls from numerous sources that show that the real problem for the South was not slavery but race.

So whatever one might say about slavery in a general vacuum, no good arguments existed for slavery as practiced by the ante-bellum South.

Unfortunately such arguments never made it into the mainstream of American cultural life.  As to why, we might assume something along the lines of a “short attention span,” but this fits modern times more readily.  In fact, audiences flocked to hear discourses and debates of all kinds in the mid 19th century. Lincoln and Douglas in 1858 spoke for many hours at a time to packed audiences.  One debate on slavery lasted for multiple hours over multiple days to an audience of several hundred.  Rather, the reason lies in the common roots shared by mainstream arguments about slavery on both sides.

The mainstream arguments for and against slavery before the Civil War had the following characteristics:

• They involve no more than a 1-2 step reasoning process
• They insist on the “plain” character of truth.  Neither side could be described as anti-intellectual, but arguers for both sides seemed to show an exasperation with the need to develop arguments at all.  The truth was so obvious!
• Anti-slavery arguments relied on “simple” principle, pro-slavery arguments on isolated small texts.  Both arguments only functioned along one track, one line of thought.

Whichever side won the argument (i.e., the war), the future for having the Church influence culture looked bleak.  The Enlightenment had done its dirty work.

Subconsciously perhaps, we reject oversimplifications because reality and our experience have more complexity and mystery than the Enlightenment can fathom.  Rejecting this truth condemned us to search aimlessly for generations hence to fill the void with politics, “The American Dream,” sex, and the like.**  Obviously western theologians could and did make nuanced and complex arguments, but western culture as a whole failed to notice or heed them.

As a buttress to his observations about slavery arguments, Noll includes a section on the idea of God’s providence as debated before and after the war.  True to form, both sides found obvious answers to the results of the conflict.  For the Southerners, even their defeat showed the rightness of their cause, for “God disciplines those He loves” — i.e. — “We are experiencing discipline, showing God’s love for us, showing the rightness of our cause.  For it is often true that the godly rarely prosper in this world.”  For the North, their arguments had a simpler character, though no doubt the South would have made them had they won the war.  “We won.  God was and is on our side.   Therefore we were/are right.”  Lincoln understood better, and pushed back on this simple approach.  We may always know that God has events in His hand, he agreed, but the particular application of His providence often remains a mystery to us.  Not even someone of Lincoln’s stature could get others to embrace this more nuanced view.

Noll’s work has great value for his illumination of the state of religion in 19th century America.  What makes it even more intriguing is how he reveals what may be the central problem of American political and educational life.  Our problem really resides not in short attention spans, not in one political party or the other, not the sexual revolution, or other such movement. Rather, Americans need to grapple with how our democratic ideology meshes with the nature of truth itself.

Dave

*Noll includes some interesting statistics showing the decline of religion and growth of government.  This should not surprise us, as Calhoun (not someone I’d like to agree with very often) foretold.

• In 1860 about 4.7 million people voted in the presidential election, but in that same year between 3-4 times that many regularly attended church  on Sundays.  In 2004, about 115 million went to the polls, which equaled the number of regular church attendees in 1860 (Noll should take into account, however, the fact that women and many minorities did not vote in 1860).
• In 1860 the number of Methodist clergy alone equaled the number of postal workers.  Today the ratio of postal workers to Methodist clergy approximates 9-1.
• Before mobilization in 1860 the number of active duty military was about 1/2 the number of clergy in the country.  In the early 21st century, before mobilization for the war in Iraq, the ratio of military to clergy was about 3-1.
• In 1860 the total income of the churches and religious organizations nearly equaled the federal budget.  Today the ratio of federal income to annual religion-related giving is about 25-1.
• In 1860 about 400 institutions of higher-learning existed, with nearly all of them run by religious groups.
• In 1860 there were 35 churches for each bank.  Today there are four churches for each bank.

**In an interesting digression, Noll points out that warfare and dramatic social change have often produced great works of lasting theological depth.  One thinks immediately of Augustine’s The City of God, but numerous other examples exist (St. Bernard during the Crusades, and St. Francis experienced a dramatic shift after fighting in a small war.  In the modern era, Bonhoeffer comes most clearly to mind).  By that model, the Civil War should have, but failed, to produce any significant theological insight, and this reveals a thin theology throughout North and South at that time.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the great storytellers of the 20th century, MacDonald, Lewis, Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy — all came from liturgical and historical traditions.  Lewis and Tolkien both fought in W.W. I, and O’Connor and Percy both suffered from lifelong illnesses.