Once Again, Evil Geniuses: A Reprise (Evil Geniuses Series)
Photo by Brad Dodson on Unsplash
This is the final post in a series of posts where Dr. Brueggemann reflects on the book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen. Read the previous posts here.
In a series of recent expositions I have been engaged in response to the remarkable, important book of Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (2020). In the book, Andersen traces the long-range planning of a political party to take over the movement, a plan that has well nigh succeeded! Near the end of his book (pp. 368-370) Andersen lists eight elements of the playbook of this group that have evoked support and guided action:
Government is bad.
Belief in our perfect mythical yesteryear.
Establishment experts are wrong, science is suspect.
Entitled to our own facts.
Short-term profits are everything.
Liberty equals selfishness.
Inequality’s not so bad.
Universal health care is tyranny.
In my responsive expositions, I have engaged each of these claims and have sought to show how and why, and in what way gospel faith, rooted in the Bible, refuses these claims and takes them to be false. I have entitled my eight responses in this way:
The Possibility of Good Government.
The Discomforting Gift of Newness.
Do not let the Doctor Leave You.
Public Truth and Private Rumors.
The Prophet on Profit.
A Sufficiency Other Than Our Own.
Bread Shared by All the Eaters.
Healing…without Money, without Price
In these discussions I have proposed exact counters to the misguided and distorted expression of the way forward. I suggest that this sketch of an alternative way of thinking about our public life in sum refuses and contradicts these claims.
l. Good government is possible. All that is required are brave, publicly oriented citizens who care enough about the common good to restrain any greedy extortion for personal gain or advantage. It is ludicrous to propose that our public institutions, grounded in the constitution and rooted in democratic political theory, cannot provide us with such leadership. The case for the public good is at the heart of biblical faith, most notably when the Book of Deuteronomy, with its offer of separated powers of government, can be taken as an early radical model of constitutional government, a model, moreover, championed by Israel’s prophetic tradition. See S. Dean McBride, “Polity of the Covenant People: The Book of Deuteronomy,” Interpretation 41 (1987), 229-244.
2. Biblical faith in sum compellingly resists and refuses nostalgia for any “good old days”
(see Isaiah 43:18-19). It affirms, characteristically, that our eye should be on an emerging public future, on the work of the God of the gospel, exactly the creation of new life—new wine to be contained in new wine skins! To linger with a wish for the return of the good old days is then a refusal of this future-generating God and the future that God intends. Our current nostalgia, moreover, is specifically for a return to the good old days of white male control and privilege. It turns out that is what the current phrase, “great again” intends. It is a futile hope to contradict the promissory energy of the God of the gospel, and the emergence of a new, viable neighborly public future.
3. The dismissal of science is a dismissal of the God-given human capacity and human responsibility to live knowingly in God’s world. We have long since understood that responsible faith and responsible science have no need for contradiction. Our best knowing is an act of faith and trust in the ordered world willed by the creator. The wisdom tradition of Israel embraces both the continuing mystery of God’s world and the human capacity to do the work of understanding and interpretation. It is not an either/or:
It is the glory of God to conceal things,
but the glory of kings to search things out (Proverbs 25:2).
It is the proper business of the church to support good scientific work as a way to receive and exult in both the wondrous gift of life and the wondrous vocation of human agency for the maintenance and enhancement of God-given life.
4. We may take as paradigmatic for the claim of truth the dramatic moment when the Roman governor who stood in wonderment before Jesus asked, “What is truth? (John 18:38) Of this confrontation, Paul Lehmann, The Transfiguration of Politics: The Presence and Power of Jesus of Nazareth in and over Human Affairs (1975) 55, can write:
The question of the establishment is up; the question whose world is this, and by or whose authority…Pilate’s honest perplexity about truth was revealed in his puzzlement that power should require truth if it sought to command authority. Pilate was a realist whose chain-of-command conception of power made it impossible for him to understand the lifestyle of Jesus. Confronted by the lifestyle of Jesus, however, the worldly realism of Pilate is exposed as pseudo-realism… Jesus, on the other hand, affirms, both by conviction and by role, that the only authority power has is the authority of truth.
In his bewilderment the Roman governor discovered that his grasp on power and authority is illusionary, because he is unable to outflank or outwit the reliable governance of the creator God who stands before him in human embodiment. The governor discovers that power is not given over to clever management or cunning ideology, but is woven into the fabric of a life of self-giving vulnerable generosity. No amount of political posturing or epistemological flim-flam will alter that governance that we have most unambiguously witnessed in Jesus of Nazareth.
5. It is clear that economic practice that is solely committed to private gain and individual advancement is an enterprise that can only result in a deathly jungle of greed, fear, and violence. It is impossible to pursue profit in a selfish way without disrupting and damaging the political and social infrastructure upon which the life of all of us depends. Such a pursuit of personal profit is an unsustainable illusion because it imagines that it can succeed without reliance on the gifts of the social, economic, political order. It is an illusion because our lives depend upon attention to, investment in, and commitment to the common good. The Bible is unflinching and unaccommodating in its insistence upon the priority of the community upon which the life of the individual depends. It is for that reason that the great mantras of prophetic faith endlessly insist upon justice, righteousness, compassion, steadfast love, and faithfulness. No amount of private gain or private property will substitute for that, nor will it provide, of itself, the requirements of a sustainable political economy.
6. Self-sufficiency is of course an illusion. There are no self-made or self-sufficient persons. Thus the church can innocently sing:
Now thank we all our God with heart and hands and voices,
who wondrous things hath done, in whom this world rejoices;
who, from our mothers’ arms hath blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.
(“Now Thank We All Our God,” Glory to God: Hymns, Psalms & Spiritual Songs, 643).
The stanza of the hymn nicely affirms both the life-giving reality of our mothers, and the abiding sustenance of God. Both are required for a viable life. As innocent as these lines in the hymn are, they nonetheless convey the truth of our lives. From our births—even before our births!—we have each been blessed; the blessing of God, moreover, has unfailingly taken human form; a host of persons in their constant attentiveness have surely “blessed us on our way.” We, every one of us, are on the receiving end of life long before we become agents or guarantors of our own life or of the wellbeing of our community. The great fear of capitalist ideology is the notion that we may be on the receiving end of the processes of life. That is why capitalism, at its most unrestrained, seeks to abolish Sabbath rest, because Sabbath is an acknowledgement that what we have and what we are constitutes a gift that sustains our lives. Such a false notion as self-sufficiency contradicts the facts of our lives. The plain truth is that our lives are a gift, and we are dependent upon a host of givers. The only appropriate response to this recognition is gratitude that makes for generosity. That is why we are endlessly haunted by the question of the apostle:
What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift? (I Cor. 4:7)
The answer to the first question of course is “nothing.” I have nothing that I did not receive!
7. It may be that some measure of inequality is inescapable in a complex economy. It is, however, quite another matter to advocate that inequality is a social practice that is to be valued, endorsed, and sought after. The Bible is preoccupied—long before Karl Marx—with the problematic of haves and have-nots, of the legitimate claims of the have-nots, and the dangers of the haves who possess in excess. While some inequality is not only inescapable, but bearable, the extremes of inequality featuring greed in policy and in practice are irresponsible and cannot end well for our society. The apostle has written that “greed is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). That is, unbridled self-serving is the actual practice of an alien god. In the Old Testament the name of that greedy, endlessly consuming god is Baal. But the name does not matter. In the end greed is a practice that can only lead to a false life, and to the failure and defeat of truthfulness, justice, and social wellbeing. The God of the gospel issues an endless summons to us to live in a generous, generative mode that has all kinds of important implications for policy as well as for practice. The Torah and the prophets are filled with summons for “justice,” for the creation and maintenance of dignity, security, and wellbeing for every member of the community. In the coming Kingdom of God there are no throw-away persons. There are only neighbors who have yet to be admitted to the table of abundance.
8. I have laid out a case for universal health care. Healing is not a private property. It is a practice that participates in the generous promises of the creator as human agents work for a common wellbeing. To imagine that support for those life resources should be doled out according to money is a ludicrous mockery of the way of the creator. Indeed, the wisdom tradition has well seen that the dismissal of care for a needy neighbor is an affront to the realty of God:
Those who mock the poor insult their Maker;
those who are glad at calamity will not go unpunished (Proverbs 17:4).
Our shared failure concerning health care in our society is indeed a blasphemy against the God who will not be mocked, and who eventually will not abide the mockery of any of God’s own well-beloved creatures.
While I have dwelt on these eight points and made specific responses to these eight claims as articulated by Andersen, I take the import of my responses to be cumulative. That is, my eight responses are not distinct matters. They are, rather, all a piece of a single claim concerning the will of the creator for the wellbeing of creation. I intend that the cumulative effect of these pieces may be grounding for the awareness of the quite distinctive claim the gospel makes upon our common life.
There is little to be gained in making arguments against these perversions of the common good. It is far better, in my judgment, to use our energy to see that the sum of these points provide grounding for an alternative witness and an alternative practice by the church. Because of our long-running cultural accommodation of the church, many in the church do not fully realize how radically alternative are the claims of the gospel. In our current circumstance of rising fascism and the jeopardy of our democratic institutions, it is time for the church to be awakened for its articulation and practice of alternative. Thus I hope that these expositions may provide ground for the church and its pastors to be about the business of alternative identity and witness in the world. We are deeply at odds with the distortions named here, in a struggle with uncritical nationalism, with a new wave of white racism, and anti-Semitism. These distorted claims provide an opportunity for such work in which the church can make a difference in the maintenance of our democratic institutions and our democratic ways of life that honors every member of our political community. The maintenance of that common life relies upon faithful, bold, and courageous leadership, not least among pastors.
Walter Brueggemann
August 13, 2022
