An American Epiphany

Sometimes very important turning points in history have a knack for falling on important Feast Days on the Church’s calendar. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 comes to mind, with the subsequent declaration of war on the Empire of Japan on December 8th, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, which is the patronal feast of the United States. The Epiphany of the Lord, of course, is the manifestation of Christ to the nations. I would also argue that the Epiphany of the Lord, in the context of salvation history, is also a manifestation of nations to themselves. This is because every civilization can be largely interpreted and appraised by its approach to the most important philosophical questions of life. In particular, how peoples relate to the Christ child and his claims on humanity has great relevance. St. John Paul II was an expert at noticing this exchange between Christ and culture. Using the Gospel as a fulcrum, the great Pope was able to topple empires; whether it was the crowds chanting in Poland “we want God”, or his rebuke to the French in 1980 for not using the gifts given to them at their baptism, the Gospel has the power to unleash live-giving and restorative power to individuals and to nations. In contrast, error, heresy, lies and disinformation can lay low even our most stable societal institutions.

January 6, 2021 was an American Epiphany. The Congressional procedure to certify the votes of the electors is usually a pro forma and uneventful part of the American electoral process. On January 6th this year, it became a catalyst, much like Simeon prophesied about the infant Christ, “for the rise and fall of many…so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Luke 2:34,35). Let us begin with a dispassionate summary of the day’s events. Protestors throughout the nation, who represent at least some of the 74 million people who voted for the re-election of Donald J. Trump, gathered in the Capitol to object to what a not insignificant portion of conservatives believe was a corrupt election. It is a fact that voter fraud, especially with the widespread use of mail-in ballots, has happened in our Republic. However, none of the cases filed to substantiate that fact have been entertained, even by conservative judges, or conservative state legislatures. As usual, the truth is probably to be found between two extremes; that yes, there was fraud, but there was not enough evidence to survive scrutiny in court. Standards of evidence matter, especially if we claim to believe in the rule of law and love of the truth. If the fraud was as vast and conspiratorial as some say, I find it difficult to believe that so few officials came out to denounce it. The problem with conspiracies is that without clear evidence, they tend to be exercises in psychological projection. Conservatives have not yet been able to understand that despite the policy merits and achievements of the past four years of the Trump Administration, the fact remains that to a substantial portion of our nation, he was a loathsome personage. Many, and probably most people, wanted Trump out of office. The vote for Biden, just like the vote for Trump in 2016, was probably just as much a vote against the opposing candidate, and not for a candidate himself. But in this American Epiphany, the thoughts of conservatives are not the only thoughts that have been revealed.

The thoughts of leftists have also been made manifest in the events of January 6th. Any objective observer has to acknowledge the fact that if they want to call Trump’s comments over the past four years incendiary, racist, seditious, etc., then they must contend with the moral approbation they gave to social and political violence not only in the summer of 2020, but even before that. People tend to forget that the very day after Trump was inaugurated, people gathered on the National Mall to protest the election. They marched in New York City, holding signs such as “Rape Melania” and other morally odious sentiments. Madonna infamously declared she wanted to “blow up the White House” (despite what her allies in the media say she ‘really meant to say’). Outspoken Democratic Representative Maxine Waters told her supporters that they ought to physically harass Trump officials, and make clear “they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” That happened in 2018. And now somehow Trump, and his ‘deplorables’, have cornered the market on political violence? What a prescient statement Representative Waters made, because the idea that conservatives are not welcome in polite society is being made clear not just by the leftist establishment, but also by the Silicon Valley Techno-oligarchs, who no doubt are developing carpal tunnel syndrome in their digital excommunication marathon. Social media platforms lectured the free world for at least a decade about their impartiality and availability as a ‘neutral’ platform for human communication. As is typically found in the thought of liberals, their anthropological commitment to the fantasy of merely human perfectibility, when disappointed, inevitably degenerates into tyranny. Because most leftists do not view history as instructive, but rather as a power construct, they tend to dismiss the lessons on human nature which all forms of history, both sacred and secular, provide for us. All historians admittedly have a bias, because they are human. But it used to be a universally accepted principle among the truly liberally educated that critical thought created the virtuous middle way in navigating the waters of history, where we are able to filter out what is exaggeration or propaganda, and to discover the facts which underlie subjective perception.

For those of us who know history, we know that the damnatio memoriae is an ancient punishment, used in societies as diverse as Ancient Egypt and Rome. If a person or group of people are truly odious, truly hostes humani generis (enemies of the human race), then it is not enough merely to remove their physical presence: their memory and their ideas must be erased. Damnatio memoriae is to the ancient world what the ‘memory hole’ is in Orson Welles’ 1984. “He who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” More than ever, social media and the press control the stream of consciousness present. As one expert journalist once remarked, “The media does a poor job of telling the public what to think: they are experts at telling the public what to think about.” And that is power enough.

At the turn of the millennium, naïve technophiles coined this time in history the “Information Age”. Democratization of information, it was thought, would create a Golden Age in the exchange of ideas. Just like Fukuyama’s ridiculous notion of the “End of History”, where democracy would march onward and upward, as we beat our swords into credit cards and our spears into entitlement programs, a similar anthropological fallacy is at work. This is not the Information Age, but the Disinformation Age. It is a manifestation not only of the problem of technology divorced from personal and social responsibility, but also of the appalling collapse in education in the Western World. When children are no longer being educated, but indoctrinated, in our premier universities, and barely achieve literacy in our primary and secondary schools, the ground is fertile for a civilization which lacks the intellectual and moral capacity to desire and to find the truth. The thoughts of many hearts have been revealed, and what is perhaps most disturbing, is not that the thoughts are corrupt, but there is little to no thought at all. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Is that not a perfect summation of the current situation?

This American Epiphany has already begun to manifest what I believe is the most troubling development of the past few days: the move toward making all conservatives and devoutly religious people a gens lucifuga, like the Ancient Romans used to say of Christians in their persecutions. They are a people that must “flee the light” of the public forum. When Nero burned Rome, he needed an easy target to blame. This is a more perverse situation. For months, if not years, liberal mobs routinely burned our cities, destroyed our monuments, and intimidated regular men and women. These were labeled “peaceful protests”, and no one dared to call them “super spreader events”. Numerous BLM protests, some of which occupied entire city blocks, were not condemned, but the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in 2018 drew weeks of official condemnation in the news cycle. As Noam Chomsky said, the media clearly has economic and ideological motives for declaring “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, typically in accord with the hermeneutic of Marxist and Alinskyite class and racial warfare. Chomsky at least was an honest liberal on this score, and rightly saw the modern press as the primary interpreters and shapers of modern events. They are not impartial actors. Their thoughts too have been revealed.

I want to be as fair as I can to companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Some claim they carry water for terrorists and tyrants. That is only partially true. They routinely have to delete everything from pornography to murder on their platforms, a job which can be as traumatic as it is thankless. When ISIS was in its ascendency, they often had to take down videos which showed men, women and children burned alive, beheaded, and otherwise brutally murdered. But they do allow content from political actors and leaders that most of the world considers unsavory. This is mostly in the form of speech, however, because even if the Ayatollah Khamenei wants to tweet “Death to Israel” on their platforms, a true liberal (i.e., not a crypto-communist) will, as Voltaire proclaimed, fight for even the wrong opinion to be expressed. But how is Trump’s pugnacious language considered an incitement to insurrection, and leftist rhetoric is not? (See Jeff Shapiro’s article on the WSJ for a good commentary on that front) Quite frankly, there is blame on both sides for the escalation. Yet no progress will be made in lowering the temperature of the public discussion if there is not basic honesty and humility about one’s own faults: and humility is that angelic virtue which alone demons cannot imitate.

Which brings me to another aspect of this American Epiphany: given the ubiquity of virtual media, what is the next shoe to drop on “deplorables”? The social media platform Parler has already been effectively annihilated by the actions of Apple, Amazon and Google. Who is to say, for instance, that an important service like PayPal or Venmo cannot then move to refuse financial transactions for persons and groups whom are deemed deplorable? These are, after all, private companies, as our libertarian friends constantly remind us. They can, in theory, do as they like. Yet once again, the postmodern conception of freedom, divorced from rights discovered in nature and in nature’s God, devolves into a contest of the will, as the prejudices and grievances of people become the measure of law, rather than principles based on God-given human dignity.

We Christians must in the current environment avoid social and political triangulation, ghettoization, and encirclement. That is to say, all orthodox Christians who profess the Lordship of Christ must stand very clearly against godlessness and lawlessness on both the right and the left. What seems to be occurring now is that we are being wedged between the two sides, and forced to choose which type of tyranny we wish to inhabit. That cannot be our choice. We must refuse to be classified by facile and ludicrous simplifications: most Christians I know are not crazy about President Trump’s personal morals or his Twitter commentary. His temperament is not outstanding, but I believe that most Americans prefer his obvious exaggerations to the practiced, studied lies of career politicians. What is most important is the arena of policy, and there is little doubt that his administration has been the most Pro-Life, and the most favorable to a true religious liberty in decades. Are there neo-Nazis and white supremist people among the right? Yes. Are there Bolsheviks, anarchists and race baiters in the left? Yes. Do any of these positions represent who we are? No. Cynics will say that Trump has taken Christians and other religious people for a ride, that he has exploited our feelings of endangerment in regard to our civil and religious liberties, in order to obtain our votes. Is that true? I don’t know. But does that mean that these threats to our liberties do somehow not exist? Absolutely not. Perhaps now they have never been more obvious.

Personally, although I am saddened like so many by violence in our nation’s capitol, I am grateful for the National Epiphany which has dawned upon us all: the knives are coming out, and the lines are being made clear. It is a moment of stunning clarity, in midst of so many lies. As believers in the mutually supporting nature of faith and reason, we must avoid both the lure of conspiracy theory and lazy intellectual oversimplifications. Trump is not blameless in regard to the state of public discourse, but neither is he its vanguard. To paraphrase Augustine, the times we experience are the people we are. Like the Magi on the Epiphany, our January 6, 2021, is an invitation for us to leave the experience, and to set forth on new path. We have chosen whom we will adore. We have paid the infant king homage with our hearts and minds. Now we must evade the tyranny of our postmodern Herods, who will stop at nothing to extinguish the light in our life and in society, that “life [which is] the light of men” (John 1:4).