AT THE RISK OF GIVING HIM MORE AIR, I just haven’t been able to stop thinking about Corrie’s question: “Why is it so easy to read David Brooks?”
Part of the answer, as described last week, is “it feels right because it hurts.” But there’s more, and I think it matters for the Table.
I think a lot of us are socialized to mistake sweeping analytical banalities for wisdom, and that mistake prevents us from meaningful action.
“Sweeping” = generalized.
“Analytical” = explanatory and prescriptive.
“Banalities” = obvious, unoriginal ideas.
OK. Stick with me for a moment. Perhaps you know about My Lai, where—extremely brief content warning—American soldiers mass-murdered 350 - 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in 1968, in an objective moral outrage that sparked international opposition to the war. (It was extremely awful, and I won’t share further details here.) Only one soldier was ever penalized, with 3.5 years’ house arrest.
In a New York Times op-ed cautioning Americans to moderate their anger toward the army (yep!), Billy Graham reminded his readers that all of us are sinners: “We have all had our Mylais [sic] in one way or another, perhaps not with guns, but we have hurt others with a thoughtless word, an arrogant act or a selfish deed.”
This wasn’t unusual for Graham, who often echoed Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in an effort to convict run-of-the-mill sinners of major evil. At one evangelistic event, for example, he preached: “‘Thou shalt not murder’—so say you haven’t. Well, there are hundreds of husbands in this city who are killing their wives by neglect. There are boys and girls out there who are killing their mother and father with the wild life you are leading. You are guilty of murder!”
As Billy Graham knew, that rhetorical move is guaranteed to rake ’em in at the altar. As evangelical kids know, that rhetorical move can scare the shit out of a person. As a child, I believed I was already a supervillain, killing my mom every time I yelled “no,” committing a My Lai massacre every time I hurt my sister with a “thoughtless word.”
Suffice it to say that I’m very comfortable holding my hand to my forehead and moaning that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” or “everything’s so bad and can only be redressed by a massive moral-education movement.”
It’s been a tough mental habit to break. Early in my marriage, for example, I pulled this shit all the time: my husband would express frustration about some behavior of mine, and I’d respond with tears: “You’re right, I’m so sorry, I suck.” Finally a counselor gently pointed out: if “I suck” is my go-to, I never have to look squarely at specific behaviors, let alone own and change them. If we as a country just morally suck, then we as individuals and institutions are released from the burden of assessing (and increasing) the morality of our daily, weekly, and monthly routines. If all of us are abstractly guilty of My Lai massacres, then none of us are concretely guilty of THE My Lai massacre, and no one can be held accountable.
Big, sweeping statements can be true without being comprehensive or actionable. And hanging out in the realm of abstract truisms prevents us from making substantive change. In an essay that has helped me think about this (but, unforgivably, and I don’t care how accurately, implicates Amy Grant in the problem), Adam Kotsko writes that this habit is endemic to evangelical thinking. He calls out evangelical “contempt for moral striving,” the notion that since we’re all basically murderers whose salvation depends on God’s mercy, any trying to be good = trying to be God.
Trying to be good = trying to be God. I’m gut-wrenchingly familiar with that formulation. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s unique to evangelicalism. More generally, it looks like:
“Only [big sweeping thing] can make significant change, so all I can do is [mental action] and [generic, holy-sounding thing that does not require a weekly calendar entry or a monthly direct withdrawal from my bank account].”
Like, there's not a ton of daylight between
Only God can save us, so all I can do is pray
and
Only corporations can truly stop climate change, so all I can do is raise awareness and be a voter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Both, in their cultural contexts, sound fair and balanced. Resigned, but sensible. And both foreclose any action, any change.
So. We need the Table. A dining table, where we reject wise-sounding but ultimately unactionable banalities in favor of specific, human storytelling and strategizing. And a lab table, where we practice enacting hope through mundane action that genuinely does get shit done.
(It’s still August, which means it’s no time to start new habits. But one item on my autumn to-do list: figuring out whether contacting representatives is actually effective—and if so, how to do it well and habitually.)
I might finally be finished writing about Mr. Brooks. Love y’all.
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