gods and histories at war in America
The monsters are surfacing, and we wait to see who will win
Because the fundamental character of human existence is jagged, nonlinear, and complex rather than simple, and every person is a mystery, most especially to themselves, finding a narrative that makes sense of the world is mostly a child’s game of playing pin the tail on the donkey while blindfolded—it’s arbitrary.
Sure, there are poets, prophets, singers, writers, preachers, comedians, and revolutionaries the dots are illuminated for, those who tell us a story about the world in which we can see ourselves, a story that make sense of things. But this still mostly only works in fiction, where a handful of dissonant characters find themselves converging on some unexpected road together, brought together for some cosmic purpose. Real life is not so easily plotted. We are not characters in Stephen King’s The Stand or a TV show like Lost.
The world is unfolding in a way that feels almost too tightly plotted to be real.
This is why attempts to find an easy sense of order and coherence largely elude and frustrate us. Until they don’t. And life happens in such a way as to blur the lines between whether we are acting or being acted upon, either by some guiding hand of providence or simply being carried along by some buried, unconscious force within ourselves.
It feels like such a moment now, where the world unfolds in a way that feels almost too tightly plotted to be real. Thus all the spiritual, existential questions are in play — is God furthering the story, or is it the devil or some meddlesome billionaire or corporation trying to alter the plot—or some combination of all of the above?
The news suddenly feels like Greek mythology: U.S. statues that have long napped in city centers are in the spotlight, causing us to question the gods in our pantheon. Images used by the Trump campaign on social media have been called into question because of their similarity to Nazi symbols.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I lived for three years, feels as mythic as Rome. Like most anyplace where human atrocity has occurred on an unfathomable scale, the Black Wall Street Massacre was largely not talked about among locals for years — certainly not in white culture, though Tulsa wears its history on its sleeve in its largely segregated present. One of the most depraved acts of racialized violence to Black Americans in the 20th century had never made the leap from Black culture to popular culture, until Damon Lindelof’s HBO series The Watchmen made the massacre the centerpiece of a fictional show that traffics in iconography and the psychology of American mythmaking.
So, Tulsa’s actual place in the story of race in the United States was restored to popular consciousness a few months before the Trump campaign decided to formally start its reelection campaign in the midst of heightened tension around police brutality. At the same time, statues of Confederate soldiers and Christopher Columbus are being torn down, and we are having heated public conversations about what such symbols mean in the public square. In the latter half of the 20th century, white liberalism didn’t take idols or idolatry seriously, much less the kind of “primitive” theology that would suggest that figures made of stone and wood might be animated by a spiritual or psychic power connected to an actual force of evil. We didn’t take evil seriously enough to tear down statues or to war with the spirituality that underwrites them. We were too sophisticated to talk seriously of our gods or our idols.
But now here we are, and all the monsters are coming up out of the sea, like the apocalyptic book of Daniel, and the monsters are coming out from under the beds, too. It’s not even a question of whether we believe in gods and monsters; it’s only a question of which ones will win. They’re facing each other down like Godzilla versus Rodan.
The devil is in the details, but zooming in too close can lose sight of the devil altogether.
People on all sides of everything correctly assume that the future is at stake in how we narrate and locate our history. So, along with the current debates about policing, white supremacy, and the language of white privilege, nearly everybody is a “historian” right now, contending a narrative of the past that can make sense of a present they choose to live in. From Candace Owens making an oddly overt public case for explicit white supremacist ideology — that white Europeans came along and “cured” Native Americans of cannibalistic ways—to a whole new rash of forgettable white evangelical preachers and right-wing media personalities making arguments that slavery “wasn’t that bad” and “the Founding Fathers did the best they could,” they rightly understand that they are contending for the mythic soul of America itself, however perversely they understand history itself. I would suggest that the frantic, manic nature of their cries, the almost audible wheezing gasp, is not the sound of a death, but of an exorcism.
They say the devil is in the details, but in zooming in too close on the details, we can lose sight of the devil altogether. It is easy to get swept into the particulars of the news of the day, and this is fine insofar that we are caught up in the particular details of how particular people live their lives in particular communities. But the trouble is that we are too likely to be swept up in the trivialities of particular players, in personalities more so than principalities. John Bolton will be a footnote in the history books, and Trump will likely remembered as a troubling cautionary tale of populism in the digital age and a symbolic obstacle to human freedom — Bull Connor with a little more jurisdiction. Only martyrs and saints truly endure. Breonna Taylor and Rev. Willam Barber’s names have a gravitas, a weight, a cosmic significance that Trump will never have.
I do not believe our lives are tightly ordered, and I’m not even sure that a planet plunging into catastrophic climate change will be renewed for as many more seasons as The Simpsons. I do not believe in a God who directly ordains everything that happens. I do not believe in a God who sits on a golden throne for eight minutes and forty-six seconds* listening to worship songs, watching George Floyd fade into a starless sleep on the concrete, as a plot device to move a story forward. I do, however, believe that the love that called all things into existence, the God of the Exodus, slowly and consistently bends the human story toward freedom. Ultimately, the human struggle of oppression, degradation, and slavery has always been one of race, economics, and power — and also a story about idolatry. A story of God among false gods, of lies told from supposed victors, and a truthful story carried forward by a minority report.
There have always been statues bound to histories of bloodlust and greed and demons that give these symbols animating energy. And there has always been a spirit — that rowdy, riotous Holy Spirit — that tugs at the human spirit, chafing against constraints, pulling us toward ultimate freedom. In the chaos, in the unrest, either you recognize her or you don’t.
“Free, free, we’ll all be free,” in the words of songwriter William Matthews. The prophet Isaiah told about the time that would come when the mountains would be made low and the valleys would be exalted. And from the mountains, the ground beneath us quakes, and the people on the mountaintops scream in terror, “This can’t be God!” But the people in the valleys feel the ground beneath them shift, too, for the lifting that is coming, and they hear in the rumble the sound of the Spirit— and they know in their very bones… that this is God.
This is no script; this is no novel. This is what God is doing now. Can’t you feel it?