Let’s Put Our Heads Together And Start a New Country Up (or Not)

 

Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up
Our father’s father’s father tried, erased the parts he didn’t like

The River Runs Red

So begins one of the most political, and brilliant of songs – Cuyahoga –  by one of the most influential bands of the 80s and 90s, REM.  It’s from there seminal album, Life’s Rich Pageant.

Cuyahoga is about a river in Ohio. The focus on the song is that rivers in the US once ran red with the blood of Native Americans, as the settlers sought to start a new country up (hence the opening line of the song).

Here’s how the rest of the opening stanza goes, replete with some lyrics that seem just over the horizon of understanding, but which get to the point of the song:

Let’s try to fill it in, bank the quarry river, swim
We knee-skinned it you and me, we knee-skinned that river red

That new country start-up has had some serious problems, according to Michael Stipe, the lead singer of REM and the lyricist.  And astonishingly, the river ran red again and again, as chemical pollutants destroyed it. The only method of purging the river back at the start of the 20th century was to actually burn it. Occasionally it was so polluted it caught fire by itself, as this front cover of a Time magazine from the 1952 graphically shows:

The Cuyahoga River was so polluted it once spontaneously caught fire.

Rivers of Red and Blue

As I watch what is happening in the USA at the moment – left and right – and seeing its blowback here in Australia, I can’t help feeling that the utopian ideal that REM speak of – starting a new country up – is front and centre of the vision held up by both sides of politics.

The USA is nothing if not a chance to created a “New World” – which the earliest arrivals from the “Old World” believed without a blush. A fantastic exploration of this is found in the stunning book on the history of American Art, American Visions, but the late Australian critic, Robert Hughes.

What’s intriguing about many of the early paintings was the manner in which the landscape was painted in Edenic proportions. In fact, as Hughes points out, very little of the region being depicted by many artists actually looked like the works they rendered. It was that search for a new country to start up that misted their vision.

A review of American Visions when it first came out, in The New York Times by Australian writer, Alfred Knopf, states it categorically:

Along with this, because the New World really was new (at least to its European conquerors and settlers), goes a passionate belief in reinvention and in the American power to make things up as you go along. Both are strong urges, and they seem to grow out of a common root: the inextricably twined feelings of freedom and nostalgia which lie at the heart of the immigrant experience and are epitomized in America, to this day, as in no other country.

That passionate belief in reinvention is what makes America the place of the second act, the place where Tom Cruise can jump up and down on an Oprah TV studio sofa, declaring his undying love for his er- third wife – Katie Holmes, and increasing the second act of both the secular version of Christianity in the US (progressivism) and the more explicitly Christian version of conservatives  duking it out in the US at the moment.

Competing Visions

For the secular vision – the American Vision – of the future is that somehow we can do it again. We can start a new country up. Our father’s father’s father tried, and failed.

For the progressives the failure was sheeted home to the fact that because he was a father and not a cis-gendered male fully aware of his privileges, he failed to queer the country while starting it up. Hence we have the wokery that has wend its way, like a chemically-poisoned river through our institutions.

And for the conservatives it was because he didn’t go hard enough at maintaining the Christian boundaries that would have ensured that America would be that New World devoid of the stains of worldliness itself. The river has become a swamp that needs to be drained. New river banks are needed. River banks that maintain and uphold the virtues that made the country great in the first place.

Either way, the irony is that it appears to be a civil war between two increasingly bastardised versions of biblical Christianity. And it’s woefully non-eschatological. It requires what Americans appear to be good at – hard work, a history of invention, and a cast-iron belief in American exceptionalism. It does not require the return of Jesus. It requires the right man/woman/gender-fluid person in the White House.

From my own side of this, I see the increase in Christian Nationalism. Have a listen to NPR’s Extremely American podcast on the enfant terrible of the movement – Doug Wilson. Well, of course it’s NPR and they don’t realise their huge blindspots. Blindspots such as all of the handwringing directed towards the education system Wilson has established that is “indoctrinating” children.

Oh the irony! If you haven’t watched, seen or read anything about the US classroom scene recently, then you might be unpleasantly surprised at how often words such as “suck”, “penetrate”, “pleasure”, “orgasm” et al, make it into the school curricula at an earlier and earlier age. Or as we might put it, as how insidious progressivism progresses.

But of course, in the progressive mind all that is happening is that we are starting a new country up. As with all utopian idealists,  they never see their own issues. Never see how they are totalising their viewpoint. Never see that it’s not bad people that we should truly be afraid of, but “good” people, with “good” motives, who in the end will stop at nothing in order to achieve “the public good”.

And all of this is in competition with the Christian Nationalist vision of a new country being started up, which has its own version of good, some of which I share. I sure hope we continue to raise up public theologians and practitioners who buffer us against the excesses of zealous progressive sins.

But zealous conservative sins have blindspots too. And they are just as willing to rack up a body count as far as I can see.

So try as I might I could not finish The Case For Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe. Not because I was simply opposed to everything in it, but because I wanted to see the process by which this vision – this American Vision – could be enacted. And as it turns out, it is simply based on the same utopian – and non-eschatological – ideals of the progressives he clearly despises.

God’s Vision of a New Country

Yet as a friend pointed out to me this morning – here in Australia – he can’t see how any reading of Hebrews 11 gives a Christian Nationalist much grounds for trying to create a boundaried country. At least not one that he – and it will inevitably be a “he” can patrol, without running a few rivers red in the process.

How does Hebrews 11 go?

People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own.  If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

You can’t have it both ways. You can prepare a city that you think God wants you to have. Or you can – by faith – wait for the city that he prepares for you. If you can only envisage the former and refuse to countenance the latter, you will inevitably rack up a body count. You will run a river red somewhere.

You can long for a heavenly country and shape your framework and practices according to that longing  )and park your anxieties and frustrations there as well). Or you can continue in the long – and frustrating – attempt to start a new country up.

I clearly think that progressives are doing this when I see the de-personing of the unborn and the casual commitment to end-of-life processes creeping into more and more areas of life.

But I see it too when I read – and hear – how, if and when, Christians get the levers of power, then the only way to ensure it remains that way is to patrol the boundaries harder and harder.  Think of it like a local cult – only nationalised.

The other common feature between the progressive and conservative American Vision is its breezy optimism, acknowledged as such by REM about their song Cuyahoga. And I just don’t see that in the Scriptures when it comes to the human condition or its ability to create any lasting city on earth. In fact quite the opposite.

A bit like the dog chasing the car, what would happen if the dog finally catches it? What then? What if the Dems won every state? What if the Republicans did? What if the Christian Nationalists won a county?

What then for anyone who dissented> The New Dissenters, so to speak? Is there a Mayflower spaceship available to take the neo-pilgrims to another New World now that all parts of this globe (and it IS a globe?) have been explored and found wanting? Hardly. All we have is a non-eschatological telos – a hope for this world from this world and utterly mired in the problems of this world.

Let’s conclude with another song from that amazing album, Life’s Rich Pageant, called Fall on Me, replete with these – once again – arcane but meaning-filled lyrics about the sky above us:

Buy the sky and sell the sky and tell the sky and tell the sky

Don’t fall on me

When the sky’s the only thing above us (and this was originally an environmental protest song about acid rain which morphed into a whole lot of other meanings), then our hopes are reduced to the immanent frame. And so are our solutions.

Progressive and conservative alike have no idea how to bring dissenters to heel. Or how to dispose of them without running a river red again. They fail to see their own devilish goodness for what it truly is – a desire to be like gods.

The tension for the Christian navigating this age is that we cannot start a new country up, per se, but we can be an outpost of a new city that will come to us one day, when the sky is rent asunder and heaven comes to earth. Bad things come from those who seek to create heaven on earth.