Everyone interested in understanding the real scope of the challenge identity politics presents for the West should read American Awakening. Joshua Mitchell proposes that the many threads of this movement ought to be understood as a species of civic religion, carrying with it the echoes of mostly-forgotten theological longings felt by citizens yearning for liberation from the oppressive legacies of our past. Most readers will immediately appreciate his complex and powerful diagnosis of the trends in American life that got us here. The last third or so of the book steps back from looking to identity alone and offers something like a theology of history, one that portends a profoundly unsettling future.
While it seems unlikely that the nation’s Black Lives Matter protests would have erupted with so much force absent the pandemic, Mitchell explains the cultural tensions that gave birth to it in how we comprehend history itself:
The emergence of identity politics is the clockwork, predictable consequence of a civilization that has neither the courage nor the honesty to fully renounce its foundation and start over—or to fully return to that foundation for sustenance.
Mitchell proposes that while it might seem like the rise of the religiously-unaffiliated “nones” offers proof that faith is on the decline, it is more accurate to say that many Americans now practice their religion within the realm of politics. In place of a firm conception of original sin that chastens the community and forces them to attend to their transgressions, what Mitchell terms “the identity politics of innocence” offers up a shortcut: It rejects original sin but retains “original sinners,” and in doing so, identity politics, issuing in cathartic rage against white transgressors and any who would defend them in the name of the innocent oppressed.
This is what drives the adherents of identity politics to so often and so relentlessly use condemnatory language—“racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” and the like—where no evidence of wrongdoing is apparent. The goal is to “purge a group or humiliate its members into silence,” and this drive to identify the transgressions of the past and present with groups rather than individuals drains the very concept of transgression of all meaning, and eliminates any basis for an ethos of responsibility—to say nothing of the practices of self-government.
Read Full Article »