January 6, Annuit Coeptis and the Disappearance of Moral Knowledge
An Exclusive Excerpt of The Spirit of Our Politics
Dear Friends,
I am happy to share with you the first significant excerpt of content from The Spirit of Our Politics. It comes from the second chapter of the book on what Dallas Willard referred to as the “disappearance of moral knowledge.”
As a subscriber, I wanted you to get the first look. I hope it whets your appetite for the full book, which comes out in just 17 days.
Yours,
Michael
An Excerpt from The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life
Chapter Two: The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge
On January 6, Jacob Chansley, known as Jake Angeli or the “QAnon Shaman,” called for prayer. Just days later, he would be charged for violent entry and disorderly conduct on the grounds of the US Capitol. In the days that followed, he would admit guilt and sign a statement of offense detailing his crimes.
In this moment, however, he was riding high. He felt like the Capitol building was his. He was part of a mob that physically assaulted law enforcement officials and terrorized public servants. Wearing a headdress with horns, he strode down the aisle of the Senate chamber, where others would rummage through Senate desks, hang from the walls, and otherwise seek to defile the meeting place of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” Another man shouted, “I invoke the name of Jesus Christ,” which gave Chansley an idea.
The New Yorker’s Luke Mogelson described the scene this way:
In the Senate chamber on January 6th, Jacob Chansley took off his horns and led a group prayer through a megaphone, from behind the Vice-President’s desk. The insurrectionists bowed their heads while Chansley thanked the “heavenly Father” for allowing them to enter the Capitol and “send a message” to the “tyrants, the communists, and the globalists.” Joshua Black, the Alabaman who had been shot in the face with a rubber bullet, said in his YouTube confession, “I praised the name of Jesus on the Senate floor. That was my goal. I think that was God’s goal.”
This raises the question: Was their goal actually God’s goal? Was God’s will done on January 6?
The Senate chamber itself speaks to this aspiration of aligning one’s actions with God’s will. I was reminded of this when I saw a photo of one of the insurrectionists hanging from the wall of the Senate chamber, half blocking an inscription of the Latin phrase annuit coeptis, or “God has favored our undertakings.” This, too, is a kind of prayer. It was inscribed there by people with no ability to see the future, only the desire for those who would work in that place to know they worked not just before men but before God. The inscription expresses a hope that those public servants who have the honor of working in the Senate would conduct themselves in light of that fact. Our politics is judged not by votes alone but by God.
The expectation that “God has favored our undertakings” hangs over our politics and our lives, even when we do not look up to see it. But let’s be clear—we look up quite a bit in our public life. One of the great misnomers of our time, repeated by Christians and non-Christians alike, is that we live in a “post-Christian” society. America is not post-Christian. Not demographically. Not culturally.
I am resistant to give a central focus to this idea that America is post-Christian because of what it implies about our past, present, and future. It suggests there was some point in the past when America was thoroughly or sufficiently Christian, which naturally raises the question, “When exactly was that?” When was America Christian such that we are now post-Christian? Was America Christian during Jim Crow but not after? During slavery but not after?
We should also reject the notion that America is post-Christian because of what it implies for our present. It is a political provocation, intended by one side to marginalize Christians and by another to mobilize Christians. It is used by those who wish to limit Christian influence to arbitrarily mark the present as definitionally precluding Christian influence, and it is used by those seeking to mobilize Christians as an explanation for everything that is wrong with America. Why isn’t America working? Christians don’t have influence like they once did.
The conversation about whether America is post-Christian or not is rarely an edifying one. We do not need America to be post-Christian to be inclusive. America can be a pluralistic nation, and not be post-Christian. What does it mean to say America is post-Christian when a majority of Americans, including a vast majority of US federally elected political leaders, identify as Christian? Yes, American society is changing, but to say we are post-Christian concedes too much. When applied to the present, it is too often used by Christians to shift blame or avoid responsibility. When applied to the present, it is too often used by those who seek to limit Christian influence to preempt a debate before it can even begin.
Finally, to say America is post-Christian suggests our future is written for us. The claim that America is post-Christian assumes our past, negates our present, and prejudges our future.
The truth is that Christianity is in the mix, as it always has been. Something has changed, certainly, and we’ll discuss that in this chapter, but the language of post-Christian has become counterproductive. Christianity was not as hegemonic in the past as some seem to think, and Christianity is not as irrelevant today as we are supposed to believe. This is a time of cultural contestation rather than cultural domination. It would be a mistake to equate a lack of Christian dominance with an absence of Christian influence. Every “God bless America” that ends a speech, every invocation of Scripture, every proclamation that one is on the “right side of history,” every declaration of one’s favored policy as right or just—these are all, to varying degrees, echoing a hope: that God has favored our undertakings, that he approves of our conduct. But now this is a hope for which many believe there is no accountability, no substance, no reliable knowledge. It is a precarious hope—a hope without basis.
The matter of whether Christians have anything to offer our politics is contested by both Christians and non-Christians. As religious disaffiliation has increased in this country, a greater number of Americans believe Christianity doesn’t have much to offer. In fact, Christianity, and religion generally, is increasingly viewed in America as part of the problem as opposed to part of the solution. Perhaps it is not surprising that the nonreligious would doubt the contributions religion has to make to our politics, but, of course, we must keep in mind how often the nonreligious seek to leverage historically religious ideas and resources when it seems desirable to do so.
Furthermore, a significant number of Christians do not think much of what Christianity has to offer the public. Some Christians wrongly, but not without merit, look at all the ways Christianity has been misused in our politics and conclude that the most reliably safe way to proceed is to enact a secular politics. Other Christians have a predominantly private conception of faith that is divorced from knowledge and cannot readily identify what, if any, implications their faith might have for politics. And so we end up with a sloganeering of Scripture or religious phrases during election season or in response to political news of the day, citations of 2 Chronicles 7:14 that serve as the foundation for worship events that pose as political rallies that pose as worship events.
While news of political malfeasance might earn a sighed response of “they need Jesus,” the words say less than the easy detachment that underlies them. These kinds of statements are a way of distancing oneself from the work of politics, not actually engaging in it. Whether it’s a Christian perspective that withdrawal and disengagement are the best we can do or a Christian sloganeering that is more about an expressive affiliation than it is about content or character, a crisis of confidence lies under it all.
This crisis of confidence, which affects Christians as well as American society at large, is tied to what Dallas Willard has called the “disappearance of moral knowledge.”