Americans are often uninterested in exploring the languages and concepts used uncritically to explain and justify our actions. Michael Northcott’s book describes the consequences of such lack of interest, combining polemic and theology to argue that American public religion ‘rests upon a tragic deformation of true Christianity’ (12). His is criticism in the voice of practitioner rather than dispassionate observer, calling for ‘a new Exodus of Christians in America’ (12). As a writer about American religion and politics, and as an American who is (along with many millions of others) outraged over Bush Inc.’s anti-democratic thuggery, I find Northcott’s book to be bracing. To a lesser extent, the book is also flawed.
One recurring problem is Northcott’s tendency to conflate disparate phenomena. There is no denying that an apocalyptic tone has become ascendant in certain quarters of American Christianity, that this vision partly shapes public life, and that Bush’s presidency is a loathsome, at times imperial one. Indeed, dozens of books have made such claims. Northcott’s contribution is his suggestion that this current predicament is the natural culmination of long-standing historical processes. He generates a laundry list of villains, leaving an impression that every category, individual, committee, or corporation named here – and positioned on the ‘wrong’ side of the religio-political divide – partakes and participates in a singular force whose momentum can only be explained by the term ‘apocalyptic religion.’ Well, no.
We know that Bush flaunts his piety, and that religious conservatives have influenced his policies. Yet we know just as surely that the oft-discussed ‘neo-cons’ (11) – like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Rumsfeld – are, however dastardly, mostly uninterested in the actual beliefs of the Christian Right.1 Apocalyptic religion has a powerful role, but the myriad wrongdoings of the Bush administration – the No Child Left Behind act, ‘permanent’ tax cuts, or the suspension of habeas corpus – cannot be adduced to this influence alone. Perhaps Northcott makes such claims because he tends to see Southern and conservative Protestantism as monolithic (he often refers to Southern Baptists, ‘conservative churches,’ and ‘mega-churches’ as if they were coterminous and uniformly pro-Bush, pro-war). I live in a so-called red state in the American South, and this is simply not the case (thank God).
The point is not that Northcott is wholly wrong but that he sometimes overstates his case by trampling over important distinctions and complexities in American religion and politics. This culture is made up not just of fundaments but of fault lines, not just of zealots but of tortured consciences.
Consider another example among many: Northcott rails against the purported joint influence of unregulated market theory and dispensationalism on Bush’s politics (82). I do not disagree with Northcott that these influences are lamentable; yet while F.W. Hayek may mingle with John Nelson Darby in the very deepest pools of cultural influence, those espousing neoconservative economics are largely dismissive of dispensationalism (other than as expedient, which is not Northcott’s point). In other words, not all the pieces fit together so easily, not all dots connect inexorably; such perfect coherence cannot explain our American mess.
A related problem is Northcott’s occasional misrepresentation of American religion and politics. He gets more right than wrong yet he also indulges in overblown rhetoric and sloppy history, undercutting the force of his claims. Northcott finds it revealing that Bush uses language deriving from Puritan millennialists like John Winthrop. Yet such imagery is so ubiquitous in American public life, I can scarcely imagine any President failing to use it in the aftermath of 9/11.
Northcott’s history careens between Puritan commonwealths, nineteenth-century revivals, and the ‘War on Terror’ as if their similarities were self-evident.
Yet shared language alone does not make for much substantive connection between these different eras, and many of Northcott’s assertions obscure more than they illuminate. We are told further that Americans are now at war with ‘the Muslims,’ a conflict consistent with the ‘millenarian beliefs . . . [that are] a dominant feature of the modern American evangelical and fundamentalist imaginary.’ Such statements are off-base and overly general. Evangelicalism and fundamentalism are different, with – especially with the former – a good deal of variance on socio-political issues.
Such sloppiness is frustrating because Northcott does capture the interplay between a certain kind of patriotism, sacrificial themes, and apocalyptic imagery in American culture. Yet his insights are sullied by his zeal to force too many disparate phenomena into this framework. It may be, for example, that American culture is more replete with tropes of fear and destruction than others, but these claims are too often simply asserted and left without proper substantiation and development. Instead, Northcott seems frequently reviews content with potshots suggesting American apocalyptic believers are ‘like Osama bin Laden’ (10).
Of course it is true that the Bush administration is reckless and imperialist, but this kind of claim is beneath a writer of Northcott’s intelligence. Not all religious imaginings of violence are equivalent, and only someone unconcerned with the nuances of different religious traditions would make the inflammatory claim that American apocalyptic Christianity is ‘remarkably reminiscent’ to Wahabbist Islam and Al Qaeda. Comparisons between the two may be illuminating; but to indulge in such over-statement is, as we say in the U.S., bush league.
Thankfully, there is quite a good deal more than this.
Northcott deftly observes how American cultural pessimism parallels the shift between Jonathan Edwards’ optimistic millennialism and Darby’s doomsaying (88). He makes thoughtful observations suggesting that American understandings of freedom cannot resist imperialism since they hew too closely to negative rather than positive conceptions of liberty (109).
Northcott adeptly captures the way in which a certain kind of conservative self-imagining has no time for stubborn reality, using the canopy of sacred violence as motivation, consolation, and explanatory force alike. As social criticism, this is forceful stuff and tough to fault, for Northcott is surely right to call attention to the dangers lurking when consumerism, historical amnesia, and violent visions of divine redemption combine. Yet when making political and theological claims this bold – and worth supporting, as Northcott’s are – it is important to get the details right. This is true not only in an obvious sense, but also so that one might reasonably identify those areas in American culture where these claims might help stir resistance and alternate religiopolitical sensibilities. There are, after all, cracks in the hull of empire.
It’s difficult to argue for more nuance in a position like Northcott’s without simultaneously giving comfort to thugs. The reason I press these claims, however, is because in his occasionally broad-brush characterisations and in his tendency to homologise somewhat too quickly, Northcott may be directing our attention away from the very sources of religious progressivism he rightly seeks to counter the darkness of this moment.
With such an expanded vision, Northcott’s claims would only resonate more powerfully, and he might join with me and other Americans in echoing Thomas Jefferson’s 1798 letter to John Taylor: ‘A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore the government to its true principles.’ 1 See David Kuo’s Tempting Faith (Free Press, 2006). 2 See Frank Furedi’s Politics of Fear (Continuum, 2005) and my forthcoming The Religion of Fear (Oxford, 2008) on the former point.
Jason C. Bivins is Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA.
Reviewed: An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire by Michael Northcott, SCM Press (London), 2007, £12.99, 200 pp., ISBN:978033404116.