…at many colleges including Bowdoin, Vanderbilt, and the 23 campuses in the Cal State system, administrators are removing official recognition from Christian prayer and reading groups, mostly for these groups’ refusal to accept non-Christians in leadership positions. This might be taken as covered primarily by the idea of shunning, but it contains an element of prohibited opinions and banished books as well.
- The Return of Original Sin
Every day she must search her conscience. Every day she must confront her flaws—discern the dark that dwells within her, seek the grace to turn toward the light. Oh, she is a moral person, she believes: good willed and determined to do good deeds, instructing us all about the heart’s deep iniquity. But even she, Kim Radersma, a former schoolteacher now preaching our bondage to sin—even she still feels the fault inside her. Even she must struggle to be saved. And if someone like Kim Radersma has to fight the legacy of inner evil, think of all that you must do. Think how far you are from grace, when you do not even yet know that you are lost and blind.
In another age, Radersma might have been a revivalist out on the sawdust circuit, playing the old forthright hymns on a wheezy harmonium as the tent begins to fill. In a different time, she might have been a temperance lecturer, inveighing in her passion-raw voice against the evils of the Demon Rum. In days gone by, she might have been a missionary to heathen China, or an author of Bible Society tracts, or the Scripture-quoting scourge of civic indifference—railing to the city-council members that they are like the Laodiceans in Revelation 3:16, neither hot nor cold, and God will spew them from his mouth.
But all such old American Christian might-have-beens are unreal in the present world, for someone like Kim Radersma. Mockable, for that matter, and many of her fellow activists today identify Christianity with the history of all that they oppose. She wouldn’t know a theological doctrine or a biblical quotation if she ran into it headlong. And so Radersma now fights racism: the deep racism that lurks unnoticed in our thoughts and in our words and in our hearts.
The better to gird herself for the struggle, she gave up teaching high-school students to attend the Ph.D. program in Critical Whiteness Studies at Ontario’s Brock University. But even such total immersion is not enough to wash away the stain of inherited sin. “I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply embedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body,” she testified to a teachers’ conference on white privilege this spring. “I have to choose every day to do antiracist work and think in an antiracist way.”
Radersma is hardly alone in feeling this way (except perhaps for the peculiar bit about racist actions in her body). Discussions of the kind of racial privilege that she hates have been much in the news. A Prince-ton undergraduate named Tal Fortgang, for example, received considerable notice for a student newspaper column in which he recounted the Holocaust suffering and hard work of his family, all to explain why he rejected Ivy League demands that he identify himself as racially and economically privileged. Television host Bill O’Reilly mocked a “Checking Your Privilege” orientation program at Harvard, claiming to be exempt from white privilege himself because he had to find jobs while he was young. And the response from any number of commentators was that Fortgang and O’Reilly just didn’t get it. Just didn’t grasp the insidious way the shared guilt of racism appears in the form of white privilege. Just didn’t see their own sinfulness.
So profound is the sin, in fact, that not even its proponents escape. The more they are aware of white privilege, the more they see it everywhere, even in themselves. “There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased,” admitted University of Texas professor Robert Jensen in an essay assigned to Wisconsin high-school students in 2013. At the Daily Beast website, columnist Sally Kohn added that “racial bias is baked” into American history. “It’s just something we all learn to do.” She did note the nearly universal condemnation that met explicitly racist comments from the likes of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and California billionaire Donald Sterling this year. But all that, she insisted, actually distracts from awareness of the real racism that dwells in every white American heart.
Some of this, of course, derives from the perception of actual economic and social effects still lingering in the long aftermath of racial slavery and segregation. But taken just as a concept, considered purely in its moral shape, white privilege is something we’ve seen before—for the idea is structurally identical to the Christian idea of original sin. Indeed, the relation involves more than just a logical parallel, the natural contours of any idea about shared guilt and inherited fault. Historically and genealogically (as Nietzsche taught us to phrase such things), there is a clear path that leads from original sin, in which the most advanced Americans once commonly believed, to the idea of white privilege that they now assume.
In my book An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, I note that the Protestant churches in early America were widely divided on theological and ecclesial issues—and yet they somehow joined to form what Alexis de Tocqueville would call the nation’s “undivided current of manners and morals.” We can debate how long-lasting and all-encompassing that central Protestantism really was, but many of those churches would eventually coalesce into the denominations of the Protestant mainline, and the collapse in recent decades of the mainline churches (from around 50 percent of the nation in 1965 to under 10 percent today) remains one of the most astonishing cultural changes in American history.
And with that mainline collapse, a set of spiritual concerns, once contained and channeled by the churches, was set free to find new homes in our public conflicts. We live in a highly spiritualized age, I argue, when we believe that our ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken but actually evil. We live with religious anxiety when we expect our attitudes toward social questions to explain our goodness and our salvation. The anxiety appears today on too much of both the left and right, but it’s hard to imagine a clearer case of the theological origins of this spiritualizing of secular politics than the perceived guilt of white privilege.
From the Puritans to the nineteenth century, the central current of American culture held a generally Calvinist view of original sin as injuring the whole of human nature. In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all, as the old New England Primer taught generations of schoolchildren. Corrupted with concupiscence and pride, expelled from the garden, we lost the ability to do the good with proper motives, even if weakened reason were able to discern what that good might be.
Early in the twentieth century, however, the main denominations of liberal American Protestantism gradually came to a new view of sin, understanding our innate failings as fundamentally social rather than personal. Crystallized by Walter Rauschenbusch’s influential Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), the Social Gospel movement saw such sins as militarism and bigotry as the forces that Christ revealed in his preaching—the social forces that crucified him and the social forces against which he was resurrected. Not that Christ mattered all that much in the Social Gospel’s construal. Theological critics from John Gresham Machen in the 1920s to Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1950s pointed out that the Social Gospel left little for the Redeemer to do: Living after his revelation, what further use do have we of him? Jesus may be the ladder by which we climbed to a higher ledge of morality, but once there, we no longer need the ladder.
Millions of believing Christians still populate the United States, of course: evangelicals and Catholics and the remaining members of the mainline churches. Demographically, America is still an overwhelmingly Christian country. But the Social Gospel’s loss of a strong sense of Christ facilitated the drift of congregants—particularly the elite and college-educated classes—out of the mainline that had once defined the country. Out of the churches and into a generally secularized milieu.
They did not leave empty-handed. Born in the Christian churches, the civil rights movement had focused on bigotry as the most pressing of social sins in the 1950s and 1960s, and when the mainline Protestants began to leave their denominations, they carried with them the Christian shape of social and moral ideas, however much they imagined they had rejected Christian content. How else can we understand the religious fervor with which white privilege is preached these days—the spiritual urgency with which its proponents describe a universal inherited guilt they must seek out behind even its cleverest masks? Their very sense of themselves as good people, their confidence in their salvation from the original sin of American culture, requires all this.
In order to believe in white privilege, however—in order to feel the universal guilt of it—we must also believe in the necessary ground for the idea: a widespread American racism, however unrecognized, that is the current form of the same old social sins that gave us slavery and segregation. It “drives me nuts,” writes Sally Kohn, that “to avoid acknowledging racial bias in America, conservatives have taken to accusing those of us who point out racial bias as being racist.” Kohn’s example comes from the reaction to congresswoman Barbara Lee’s claim that a “thinly veiled” racism lurks behind descriptions of cultural problems in black neighborhoods. Lee was promptly attacked by several commentators who pointed out that she was exhibiting her own kind of racism, exempting blacks from the cultural analysis that would be directed at any other group.
The trouble is that those commentators seem right almost by definition: It surely is racist to single out a particular racial group for special treatment. Or, at least, Lee’s comments appear racist within a particular way of understanding racism as the reduction of social, political, and cultural issues to matters of race.
So why does someone like the liberal activist Sally Kohn complain that the conservative reply to Lee is an “insult” and an “Orwellian” abuse of language? Mostly because she too is right about racism. Or, at least, she is right if we accept her spiritualized way of understanding the idea. Even while she writes that she does not assign “blame or guilt or punishment,” Kohn sees race in America much as Kim Radersma and Robert Jensen do, with racism shaped into inherited sin: a moral blight in the American mind that “consciously or unconsciously” creates racial bias even in the absence of explicit racism. “Racial bias is like the proverbial water in the fish tank,” Kohn points out. “It’s there all around us, always, whether we realize it or not.”
We could call all this a clash of paradigms, except that mutual incomprehension rarely qualifies as a clash. Consider the opposing views on the Supreme Court. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 school-districting case. And this April, in her dissent to an affirmative-action decision, Justice Sonia Sotomayor replied: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” To think otherwise “works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.”
Within the paradigm Sotomayor dismisses as facile, it is contradictory to increase race consciousness in order to eradicate race consciousness. But in the 1988 academic essay to which the New Yorker recently traced the phrase “white privilege,” a key sign of such privilege is that, having mostly erased from themselves the race consciousness necessary for racial slavery and segregation, whites no longer have to notice race in the way that blacks and other racial minorities still must. “One of the privileges of being White is not having to see or deal with racism all the time,” as a 2012 manual for training the military’s equal opportunity officers put it. And thus the manual’s corrective command to military officers: “Assume racism is everywhere, everyday.”
Without that faith in universal and pervasive guilt, it would be perverse to require post-segregation Americans to re-create in themselves the race consciousness they were taught to congratulate the nation for leaving behind.
That conservative complaint, however, entirely misses the spiritual shape and religious logic of white privilege in the hands of people from Kim Radersma and Robert Jensen to Sally Kohn and the Princetonians who commanded young Tal Fortgang to “check his privilege.” The autodafé—the self-abnegation with which activists confess their own interior guilt—suggests that current use of the idea of white privilege has more to do with a religious impulse than it does with the realities of economic or social formation. The path to escaping racial consciousness really does run through increasing racial awareness—if the idea works the way the idea of original sin does.
“All have sinned,” writes St. Paul in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Christians in Rome, even those who have “not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression.” And so too are we all guilty of racism, even those who have never harbored an explicitly racist thought or said an explicitly racist word or performed an explicitly racist deed. “We have to get away from this idea that there is one sort of racism and it wears a Klan hood,” as Berkeley law professor Ian Haney-López explains. “Of course, that is an egregious form of racism, but there are many other forms of racism. There are racisms.” Racisms under which we all suffer.
Just as, for Paul in Romans, “the law entered, that the offence might abound,” so our awareness of our own racism massively increases when we realize that we are utterly formed as racists in America. And just as, for Paul, “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound,” so it is that only from this overwhelming awareness of racism can we hope to escape racism.
The doctrine of original sin is probably incoherent, and certainly gloomy, in the absence of its pairing with the concept of a divine savior—and so Paul concludes Romans 5 with a turn to the Redeemer and the possibility of hope: “As sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.” Think of it as a car’s engine or transmission scattered in pieces around a junkyard: The individual bits of Christian theology don’t actually work all that well when they’re broken apart from one another.
Which is why it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that an infinite sadness often haunts expressions of the white-privilege notion that we must become more aware of race in order to end the inherited sin of being aware of race. If we cannot escape it, then how can we escape it? When Prof. Jensen cries out in his chiliastic pain, “I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased,” he’s speaking in tones once reserved for the moral solution that only the Second Coming could provide. The strangeness of the isolated concept can be discerned in its unendingness, its never-satisfied ratchet. Discerned as well, I would suggest, in some of the disturbingly salvific terms with which President Obama’s campaign and election were first greeted.
Of course, however Christian the idea of white privilege may have been in origin, it emerged in contemporary America stripped of Christ and his church, making it available even for post- and non-Christians. For that matter, an explicit anti-Christianity is often heard alongside rejections of white privilege. At Radersma’s race conference, a fellow presenter named Paul Kivel defined white privilege as “the everyday pervasive, deep-seated and institutionalized dominance of Christian values, Christian institutions, leaders and Christians as a group, primarily for the benefit of Christian ruling elites.”
But that, too, is typical of much post-mainline moral discussion in America: the Church of Christ Without Christ, as Flannery O’Connor might have called it (to use a phrase from her 1952 novel Wise Blood). The mainline congregations may be gone as significant factors in the nation’s public life, but their collapse released a religious logic and set of spiritual anxieties that are still with us—still demanding that we see our nation and ourselves in the patterns cast by their old theological lights.
- Close Your Eyes in Holy Dread
In May at Lincoln Center, in Avery Fisher Hall, the audience began to hiss—and more than hiss: actually boo—before the New York Philharmonic could even begin its rendition of Mahler’s Third Symphony. But the hisses and the boos proved not to be, in fact, a judgment of Mahler. They were a reaction to the recorded pre-concert voice that came over the hall’s loudspeakers, asking for cell phones to be turned off. The voice was that of actor Alec Baldwin.
National Review’s Jay Nordlinger was at the concert, and as he noted afterward, Baldwin would seem to have credentials appealing to that generally liberal audience of New Yorkers. He’s served on the board of the leftist People for the American Way, for example, and he’s been a strong supporter of PETA’s animal-rights activism. For that matter, a vocal Democrat, he’s been on the receiving end of pressure from the conservative side, forced to apologize in 1998 after making an ill-advised political joke about stoning congressman Henry Hyde to death and murdering the wives and children of Hyde’s Republican colleagues. Even more to the point, Baldwin has given the Philharmonic enormous sums of money, sat on its board, and hosted its radio series.
But none of that proved enough to overcome his use of an obscene antigay slur to chase off a paparazzi photographer outside his apartment in November 2013, as first reported on the gossip pages of the New York Post and then spread through thousands of Twitter and Facebook feeds. Despite his apologies, Baldwin quickly lost the liberal talk show he hosted on MSNBC and became a much-mocked figure. No narrative about media stars is ever tidy, and mixed into his firing from MSNBC were the usual elements of bad ratings and old resentments, together with the network’s perception that Baldwin was having a very public meltdown—as indeed he was. Still, this much is true: Alec Baldwin was once recognizable to New York’s symphonygoers as the voice of a generous supporter of the Philharmonic. And now he is recognized mostly as the voice of bigotry.