I grew up during the period of the de-Christianization of American public spaces and the rapid decline of Mainline Protestantism. In early elementary school we still sang carols with theistic content and references. I sometimes find myself idly contrasting songs like O Come All Ye Faithful sung by my elementary school choir, or the ubiquity of Handel's Messiah in public spaces to the vapid, commercially factitious swill (the absolute nadir being Paul McCartney's execrable "Wonderful Christmastime", followed by "Winter Wonderland") that has become the inescapable soundtrack to the consumerist frenzy of the season. I worry that I am shortchanging my daughter by not exposing her to an experience of the homogeneous structure of feeling and belief whose residuum I briefly tasted in its waning years in the early 1980's.
Of course, I do not really know for sure whether my own memories of that more integrated place on the other side of the enormous event (the de-Christianizing of America) that I lived through and that barely registered with me is anything other than the memory of a child's first naive recollection of the only world he had until then known. I am always moved by the total sufficiency of the given to young children, the way they can be fully absorbed and delighted by plasticky junk from the dollar store or homemade YouTube videos of other children unboxing their toys. I will always well up a little recalling the way my daughter could barely contain her anticipatory joy as we drove home with a decorate-it-yourself gingerbread house; perhaps her own nostalgia will attach to the memory of that sugary confection as fully as my own nostalgia does to my brief exposure to a world of publicly avowed Christian ritual with its organically integrated ritual, pagentry, and song. Such is the relativism in which I am ensnared. It causes me to hesitate and hedge my statements, as I am doing here, before declaring that the world I remember that was not yet purged of the particularity that gave it substance and texture was in fact the more vivid and more meaningful place to inhabit than the one flattened by judicial fiat in the name of inclusivity.
It is of course not within my power as a deracinated individual (for that is what I am) to give her a collective experience that was dismantled by litigation campaigns spearheaded by the ACLU coupled with the changeover in elite consensus toward secularism as the baseline -- especially when I myself am a secular person bereft of either the will or capacity to believe. All I ever got from a still only very partially Christianized public sphere was a contact high generated off of the spiritual exertions of others within traditions that will always be fundamentally alien to me. I attended a Lutheran Church, brought there by the working class German immigrant family that lived next door to us, (the father owned and managed a diner in Bayonne, the mother was the lunch lady at our high school), went to Sunday school, studied to take Holy Communion, and made sporadic earnest attempts to whip myself into a state of belief in a triune God. But a few years later nothing remained of any religious faith.
My mother's father converted to Christianity in the 1920's under the influence of the American Methodist missionaries who represented the leading edge of modernity in that context, which in part accounts for the fact that I bear the name of the founder of that Protestant sect. But the horrors of the Korean War that blasted apart my mother's world inducted my grandmother into a deep and abiding Christian piety and my mother into a scarred and traumatized disbelief. It was hardly fertile soil for religious faith and moreover I was a young person living in a country sated by affluence subject to all the same relativizing and ironizing influences that would hollow out the entire structure of feeling that makes belief in the divine possible.
Year Zero is an ongoing inquiry into the ideological fever that overtook the governing and chattering classes of America during the Trump years. Free and paid subscriptions are available. The best way to support my work is by taking out a paid subscription.
Of course, the felt sense of the organic and timeless character of these rituals seldom bears up to historical scrutiny; everything you investigate always has a history, and always has a more recently manufactured history than you would think. The celebration of Christmas itself of course was a kind of opportunistic pagan syncretism, as the Puritan forbears of the Massachusetts Bay Colony well understood, absorbing and repurposing the forest spirit-worshiping animism of the northern Germanic tribes.
The de-Christianizing of American public spaces was one of many enormous mega-events that I lived through in my formative years that barely registered with me. Though the entry of women into the workplace en masse and by default was a change in social structure tantamount in its scope and scale to the Neolithic Revolution, it was scarcely remarked upon. Rapid demographic change from mass immigration was also ongoing. These events of course had determined opponents that opposed them with furious intensity. But the opponents were by default outside the scope of the institutional consensus; they were conservatives, who could compete for electoral office, and work to articulate and embed their ideas in jurisprudence, but who were outsiders to the functioning of the regulatory apparatus that determined the course of events.
I recall, of course, seeing the occasional news report about the Reagan Administration's attempts to restore school prayer, or merely a minute of silent reflection in which some could choose to pray. But I accepted by default the First Amendment jurisprudence that had been on the march since the 1970's, imposing a strict separation between Church and State, whose imposition had in turn politicized the evangelical churches, which would play a leading role in electing President Reagan, who would in the long run not do very much to stem the de-Christianizing of America. The conservative legal movement of course has worked tirelessly to roll back the still dominant but now weakened reading of the Establishment clause under the sign of “religious freedom” and will go further. But in doing so they will be shutting an empty barn door.
I only came to think about this history in recent years when, for the first time I found myself, right on schedule, entering the fifth decade of my life and finding myself on the other side of the regulatory apparatus for the first time ever — regarding the proposed transformations in our world as a traducing of everything I valued — and thus aware for the first time ever of what conservatives have felt for a long time. The massive social changes of the preceding decades were hugely political in their origins and their implications. But to a young person growing up amidst them and taking the forces pushing us toward them for granted, they were barely perceptible as changes and scarcely political at all. The politics was all on the side of those resisting, who in the very act of resisting gave sanction to the newly generated consensus and imbued it with the force of destiny.
I say all this to situate myself among the ranks of those hostile to the ideological succession. A relativist, an all-too self-conscious nostalgist, riven by ambivalence, not too sure of oneself. Fully inducted into the prior consensus that lead inexorably to the present one, but unable to embrace what seems both untethered from reason and reality and actively hostile to it — and yet uncomfortably conscious that today’s children barely perceive the changes that the apparatus presents to them by default as the world as it is. Thinking about what it mean to be less irresolute; not always able to surmount the ensuing paralysis; but increasingly possessed by the conviction that one can do no other.
First in a Series
“… finding myself on the other side of the regulatory apparatus for the first time ever — regarding the proposed transformations in our world as a traducing of everything I valued — and thus aware for the first time ever of what conservatives have felt for a long time.”
Boy, this is how I have increasingly felt over the past ten years. I don’t think I’ve heard it put so cogently before. Going from being as liberal as one could imagine to, in desperation for some cultural terra firma, devouring Roger Scruton’s galvanizing “Why I Became a Conservative,” has been one of the most flabbergasting developments in my life. I HATED catholic teachings a kid and the Moral Majority even more, also having been carried by the counterculture wave of the previous decades. I couldn’t wait to see it all shed from our lives. Make the 1960s last forever, baby!
Well….. I still am not a believer -and I still like The Doors- but am stunned to 40+ years on from those experiences find myself searching for any threads of these faded Christian American traditions to stay connected to that less irresolute, integrated time you write about. At Christmas time it’s nutcrackers, old Christmas programs, traditional songs, silly things… and the rest of the time it’s reading First Things and The New Criterion as a way to pull back close a cultural raft I spent my heedless youth callowly kicking out to sea.
It all seems reactionary, but what else can we do? Honestly? We cannot abandon what we know or forget what we saw.
Wesley's post resonated with me, as seems to be the case for many other commenters of a certain vintage. I am currently in my late 50s, and first had children at a late age (they are now 10 and 7). I was eager to re-live cherished Christmas rituals of my youth with my kids. One of those rituals was "Charlie Brown Christmas," which I had not seen in many years. I recalled that it delivered a heart-warming holiday message about goodwill toward man. However, when we sat down to watch it, I was frankly shocked; I had not remembered the extent and overtness of the Christian messaging. It was a perfect example of how thoroughly the times have changed, as it is difficult or perhaps impossible to imagine a children's cartoon of this type being shown on broadcast television to a wide audience today.
My upbringing did not involve any religion. Indeed, I recall discomfort when exposed to Christian ritual, such as when a friend's family said "grace" at dinner where I was a guest. And yet, with maturity I have come to appreciate that there are valuable lessons in religious teaching, even for those of us who are not believers. For example, Judeo-Christian principles (e.g., the Ten Commandments) provide a pretty decent framework for leading your life. As intelligent beings, we have the ability to pick and choose what we want to take from a set of religious teachings, from a political philosophy, etc. without adopting them in toto. It is not an all or nothing proposition. I realize now that is exactly what I did as a kid watching "Charlie Brown Christmas." I took away the message of the importance of compassion and goodwill toward my fellow man without adopting (or even remembering!) the expressed religious beliefs. As a parent, I trust that my kids can do the same, and thus we will watch "Charlie Brown Christmas" together and discuss the meaning of the messaging, its source (i.e., Christianity), and its importance to us, even as non-believers.
As other commenters have pointed out, the problem with the "de-Christianitizing" of America is that, while people are no longer exposed to as much Christian messaging, they are also not as exposed to the underlying principles, which, again, provide a useful framework for leading your life. Initially, no replacement was offered, leaving some people unmoored and adrift. The successor ideology has filled the void for some of those, leading to our current predicament. After all, the successor ideology does not exactly teach goodwill toward man.