The Sources of Forgiveness

I think that David Brooks is onto something in his most recent New York Times column:

We once had a unifying national story, celebrated each Thanksgiving. It was an Exodus story. Americans are the people who escaped oppression, crossed a wilderness and are building a promised land. The Puritans brought this story with them. Each wave of immigrants saw themselves in this story. The civil rights movement embraced this story.

But we have to admit that many today do not resonate with this story. This story was predicated on the unity of the American people. But if you are under 45, you were probably taught an American history that, realistically, emphasizes division — between the settlers and the natives, Founders and their slaves, bosses and the workers, whites and people of color. It’s harder for many today to believe this is a promised land. It seems promised for the privileged few but has led to marginalization for the many.

Let me pause right there. Preaching division is “realistic” if your aspirations are for your preferred group to achieve power. It’s simply destructive if your aspiration is “E Pluribus Unum”.

“E Pluribus Unum”, “out of many, one” was adopted as the motto of the new United States in 1776. There is nothing in it that limits it to a single race, stratum of society, gender, nation of origin, religion, or anything else other than aspiring to reconcile competing factions. The story of division that has prevailed for 50 years isn’t realistic. It’s nihilistic. It arises from the attempt to, in Voegelin’s phrase, immanentize the Eschaton which will always be frustrated. He continues:

The story of America, then, can be interpreted as a series of redemptions, of injury, suffering and healing fresh starts. Look at the mottos on our Great Seal: “A New Order for the Ages” and “Out of Many, One.” In the 18th century divisions between the colonists were partially healed. In the 19th century divisions between the free and enslaved were partially healed. In the 20th, America partially healed the divisions between democracy and totalitarianism. In the 21st, we have healing fresh starts still to come.

The great sermon of redemption and reconciliation is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

This is a speech of tremendous intellectual humility. None of us anticipated this conflict, or its magnitude. All of us “looked for an easier triumph.” None of us are fully in control. “Let us judge not that we be not judged.”

This is a speech of great moral humility. Slavery, Lincoln says, was not a Southern institution, it was an American institution, weaving through our common history for 250 years. The scourge of war, which purges this sin, falls on both sides. Lincoln fought any sense of self-righteous superiority the Northerners might harbor. He rejected any thought that God is a tribal God. He put us all into the same category of ambiguity and fallenness.

This needs to be considered in context. Lincoln grew up in the environment of non-orthodox Christianity. In the theology of non-orthodox Christianity not only is the individual “born again” but born again and again and again. That’s the reason that Arkansans voted Bill Clinton into office first as Lieutenant Governor and then twice as governor. It isn’t that they were unaware of his failings. It was that they forgave him. He transgressed; he said he was sorry; they believed him. That career would not have been possible outside of that context.

We do need either to revive our historic national “narrative” or to formulate a new one. However, I also think Mr. Brooks’s grasp of American history and Christian theology is too weak for him to understand the underpinnings of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural or why his hope for a new American secular religion based on forgiveness and redemption is doomed to disappointment. Repeated forgiveness is incompatible with the lex talionis of post-Christianity, something so evident in the campus demonstrations all over the country, BLM, and other contemporary groups.

Quite to the contrary, IMO never has “e pluribus unum” been so relevant but so hard to achieve. When the country of your birth is just a Skype call away and returning to it just a matter of hours after hopping on a plane, coming to the United States isn’t nearly the commitment it was a century ago. Today coming to the United States is more like commuting to work—no commitment required, least of all to forgiveness and redemption.

The rededication of the last paragraph of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

demands that you had that commitment to start out with. When I look around me I just don’t see that.