Reviews of Reviews:
This is a thoughtful and insightful review of three books about our escalating culture war. The author of this review, Russell Johnson was a PhD Candidate studying “religious ethics and the philosophy of communication at U Chicago’s School of Divinity as late as November of 2018. Nothing newer turned up with a very simple DuckDuckGo search of his name. But maybe he got over being a candidate by now? Or maybe not. I know from personal experience that candidacy can be a long struggle. In any event the books reviewed here are
1. Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A strategy for Conservative Christians in a Post-Christian Nation; (New York: Sentinel, 2017).
2. Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
3. Philip Gorski’s American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 2017).
The review itself is well thought out and put into the framework of other scholarship in this area. One of the authors, Andrew Hartman, takes the time to respond specifically to Johnson’s essay with thoughts of his own that are illuminating and very much worth reading.
Of these three books, Dreher’s Conservative Catholic book is the least appealing to me. My impression is that it’s pretty much a replay of writers such as Ross Douthat, who is often interesting, or, God help us, the imagination-disabled writers from The Wanderer, who embrace Catholicism and Christianity as eternally static sets of meditative and hierarchical rules. Such books as this are generally “preaching to the choir” projects, and I see nothing in what Johnson writes to make this book seem any different. It’s not something I even momentarily thought it might be nice to read because I do not expect to find anything new or enlightening in it. But if I were inclined to read something like this, I’d certainly choose the more controversial recent bestseller, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (which Dreher himself writes a blurb for, calling it “one of the most important books of 2018). In reference to that work, meanwhile, after having read Robert Kuttner’s review of it in the NYRB, I wouldn’t bother reading it, either, on the grounds that its guiding assumptions are that traditional Christian values are the starting – and the ending – place for stable values.
As to Hartman’s work, I would kind of like to read it, if only I had more time and wanted to focus on this subject more deeply – which I don’t, except as an armchair academic and peruser of current events. But at a personal level I DO like Hartman, who describes himself in his response to Johnson’s review as a “Marxist of sorts.” That’s always a good start with me, since statements like that reassure me that I won’t be lambasted with eyeroll-deserving platitudes about how abortion and acceptance of ‘non-traditional’ sexual orientations are certain signals of approaching cultural and moral dissolution, if not outright armageddon. What was interesting to me in Hartman’s response, though, is that he pretty much agrees with Johnson’s primary critique of his book – which is that the “culture war is not over” – an idea that had already caught my eye in Johnson’s review.
To be fair, Hartman’s book was written in the pre-Trump Cult era, so he didn’t have the benefit of observing the ongoing devastating assault on our world and reality by the NeoReactionary Movement. And of course, given his confessed predisposition to Marxist-associated materialist philosophies, it’s entirely understandable that he resorted to the defeatist position of “capitalism won” on the grounds that there seems no hope of redeeming our world from corporate and economically elite control. He kind of gets around to saying “Well, maybe I was wrong, because it really IS getting worse.” But whatever …. he seems like a nice guy and good thinker, if a little hasty in making assumptions that it can’t go downhill from here (of course it can. Still).
Gorski’s book is also one I won’t read, because there’s so much social science research and political philosophizing about it that I feel like I have a handle on what he’s saying. But in a perfect world with more time for reading and less distraction from my other interests, I very well might, because as an anthropologist of sorts, and a cultural historian, of sorts, this book seems right up my alley in terms of it being essentially about tribal affiliations defined by subscription to varying religious and nationalistic mythologies.
Where Gorski does seem a little bit simplistic to me – in a way that I perhaps need to think of more than I have time for in this 2 hour project over a Saturday morning cup of coffee … anyway, where he does seem kind of simplistic is to define the two tribes he’s talking about as guided by opposing narratives of “tradition” and “social justice.” He notes that these are not impermeable Kuhnsian boxes, but rather that folks go back and forth between them in the various spheres of their lives.
Of course he’s right about this. As Hunter observes:
Now, it is worth mentioning that few people adhere exclusively to one of these two narratives. Even among the most fervent culture warriors on both sides, some things are getting better but others are getting worse. There are some timeless moral truths but there is some room for innovation and reinterpretation. It is perfectly reasonable to believe in both identity politics and family values. Individuals can thus reject the way events get framed, or find themselves telling different narratives for different issues.
So the problem is not that this concept is wrong, but that’s it’s rather anodyne. Or at least it’s presented that way in Hunter’s review. Perhaps in the book itself there’s more meat.
In any event, Gorski’s book appeals to me, Hartman’s book sounds quite interesting, and Dreher’s book appears to be a chicken little moral tale moral dissolution in the modern age … and as such, doesn’t attrack me in the least.
But the review itself is interesting, and important. Kudos to Hunter ….
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