Last Memorial Day, channel-surfing past commercials for Botox
and Viagra, I came across a spokesman for a group offering its
own radical rejuvenation scheme: Christian Exodus seeks to relocate
"12,000 or more Christians" to a single state, secede from the
Union and establish "a Christian nation with government similar
to the early United States." ChristianExodus.org promises that
the new nation will offer "a small government based upon capitalist
free enterprise and Christian morality." The three states under
consideration -- Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina -- have
a relatively small population, a seaport, a "Christian conservative
citizenry" and (the band can play "Dixie" now) "a rich history
of standing up for its rights."
The folks at Christian Exodus seem to be just the sort of sectarian
fundamentalists who have historically been loathe to categorize
Roman Catholics as Christians. One wonders: would Catholics find
a place in their purified version of early America? The 1778 Constitution
of South Carolina proclaimed "the Christian Protestant religion"
to be "the established religion of this state," and Georgia's
1732 colonial charter proclaimed that "all persons, except papists,
shall have a free exercise of their religion." Lingering loyalties
to the old USA would be enough of a problem in this new Promised
Land; any degree of loyalty to a Roman pontiff would certainly
be too much.
As a Catholic native of South Carolina and a current resident
of Mississippi, I would have particular cause to be alarmed by
this neo-secessionist scheme if I thought it had any chance of
being realized. I don't. All the Southerners I know best -- Catholic,
Protestant, Hindu, agnostic or otherwise -- will laugh them out
of wherever they seek to go, whether from high-minded patriotic
motives like preserving the legacy of Washington and Jefferson,
pragmatic ones like maintaining the local economy, or flatly hedonistic
ones like preventing the repeal of liquor licenses and the probable
dissolution of the Southeastern Conference.
However, these Protestant secessionists do have me again contemplating
a favorite essay by Walker Percy, the Catholic writer, Mississippi
native and 1989 Laetare Medal winner, about how one can be American
despite being Southern and Catholic. Of course one can. But in
my own experience there is a healthy tension between defining
oneself as a Catholic and defining oneself as an American. And
that tension is strangely paralleled in my experience as an American
whose family has always lived in the South, that region which,
despite supplying the nation's first president and the author
of the Declaration of Independence, has historically been seen
as the great exception to national norms.
My own particular experience also grows in part out of my reading
of American literature. One of my students once commented after
an American literature course: "I always thought America was the
land of promise. But now I know that it's the land of racism,
sexism and greed." It profoundly bothered me that this was the
deepest insight he might take away from reading the likes of William
Faulkner and Edith Wharton and Ralph Ellison. He could have "learned"
as much watching CNN.
I had to say something in reply, and it came to me that my own
view was that held by a woman from Georgia whose work we had just
read. "The wisdom of a writer like Flannery O'Connor is not
that these are exclusively or especially 'American' vices," I
responded. "She would say our problem isn't that we're particularly
corrupt; our problem is that we tend to think we're innocent."
Flannery O'Connor was a thoughtful Christian writing in the
two decades following World War II -- a time when, she feared,
modern rationalism was on the verge of eradicating religious belief
altogether, at least among the "educated." She was also a Catholic
living in an overwhelmingly Protestant South that she alternately
admired and deplored. She believed that her seemingly peculiar
geographical circumstances somehow worked to her advantage as
a writer.
Reflecting on Percy's half-joking remark that the region had
produced so many good writers in the 20th century "because we
lost the War," she wrote: "He didn't mean by that simply that
a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that
we" -- Southerners -- "have had our Fall. We have gone into the
modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and
with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our
first state of innocence -- as it has not sufficiently developed
in the rest of the country."
The American conviction of innocence she speaks of here goes
back, paradoxically, to one group of British colonists who believed
profoundly in sin and another who believed not in sin but in error.
Neither liked Catholics much.
The Pilgrims and the Puritans
The most rabid anti-Catholics in the 13 colonies were those very
Pilgrims and Puritans we celebrate as our nation's spiritual founders.
They were Calvinists who came to the New World not only to escape
political persecution but also because they thought the Anglican
Church established by Henry VIII was still too Catholic. The Puritans
at Massachusetts Bay hoped their colony would serve as a model
that would ultimately inspire England to purify itself by removing
all traces of the popish past. The Pilgrims who reached Plymouth
a decade earlier had given up on the Old World altogether, deeming
themselves the new Chosen People and entering their "New Canaan"
wary of both the non-Christian natives they found there and the
"Babylonian" captors they had fled in Europe.
In these antebellum days when New England was the Bible Belt,
its inhabitants lived in a state of conflict with both their neighbors
and their forebears. While they ardently professed the doctrine
of Original Sin, they also believed that God's Elect -- those
whose innocence had been restored -- dwelt only in their ranks.
They saw America as the land of the free insofar as it was free
of sin, the sin that its native inhabitants had been born into
and that "the Whore of Babylon" -- the Roman Catholic Church --
had championed in Europe. The Old World, these Reformation Christians
believed, was drenched in history and guilt. Only in the New World
could redeemed innocence flourish.
This New England vision continues to inform American culture,
often in admirable ways. John Winthrop's image of his Massachusetts
Bay colony as "a model of Christian charity," outlined in his
1630 sermon of the same name, would inspire abolitionists
over two centuries later. His famous portrayal
of America as a "City on a Hill" has been more recently echoed
by presidents Kennedy and Reagan.
But fortunately for Catholics, as for other non-Calvinists,
our political system came not directly from people like Winthrop
of Massachusetts but from people like Franklin of Pennsylvania
and Jefferson of Virginia, thinkers who stressed secular freedoms
rather than spiritual ones. For precisely this reason, Benjamin
Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were not anti-Catholic in the same
way the New Englanders were. But these two founders, who tended
to deify Reason as befitted their Enlightenment milieu, were Protestant
in spirit. They tended to deify The Individual. They wanted to
give each American freedom to think and to choose using his own
reason -- for which we all have good cause to be grateful.
Nonetheless, just about the last thing they thought reasonable
was Roman Catholicism. Franklin's Autobiography makes
it abundantly clear that he found it difficult to stomach traditional
religion and preferred to spend his Sundays pursuing "practical"
study. The quintessential self-made man devised a do-it-yourself
system of morality with only the vaguest of religious elements.
Jefferson thought Jesus was a great moralist but that He never
claimed to be divine, let alone to have instituted a divine Church.
In fact, the Virginian wrote what has become known as The
Jefferson Bible, a soothingly rational version of the Gospels
purified of distracting supernatural elements like the Resurrection.
Like Franklin, he believed not in sin but in error and in our
ability to overcome error using unaided human reason.
Radically different as Jefferson and Franklin were from their
Calvinist predecessors, all believed that the new circumstances
of the New World provided Americans the opportunity to start
over in the most radical sense -- as though the place were
a New Eden. They contributed to what observers of our culture
have deemed the notion of American Exceptionalism. As Americans,
we tend to believe that we are exempt from the historical forces
that have corrupted other nations. At most, we've been chosen
by Jehovah. At least, we are free of European history with all
its feudal baggage and self-defeating superstitions, free of past
mistakes, free to shape our own destiny. And we can trust not
only God but also our Selves to guide us in that endeavor.
There can be no question that, along with the new nation's policies
toward native tribes, the specific national sin which made the
notion of American Exceptionalism look downright delusional immediately
following the Revolution was slavery.
Living history
So far I've been talking primarily about books and ideas. To
many, these might seem like abstractions. To me, they are not.
They are grounded in concrete reality. I care about them in large
part because of family and because of place.
My parents live in a house in rural South Carolina that was
built immediately after the Civil War. It was built for my great-great-grandmother,
who came from a colonial family that had owned hundreds of slaves,
and my Tipperary-born great-great-grandfather, who had owned none
but still by 1861 had ended up in Charleston and then in the Confederate
Army (his brother in New York fought for the Union). The two of
them married after she, childless, had been widowed by the war.
Together they came to own not only the house but also a good deal
of farmland in the country surrounding. Along with their children
and grandchildren, they became deeply involved in the sharecropping
system that followed the war.
Sharecropping -- however pragmatically benevolent the system
might, at its best, have seemed at the time -- was built on a
fundamental injustice. It stemmed from a position where the white
landowners had been bequeathed undisputed economic advantage over
a race of people who had been brought to this country not by choice
but by violence and who, at the end of the 19th century, had two
centuries of enslavement behind them and seven decades of Jim
Crow ahead.
After World War II sharecropping began to disappear, as did
the railroad that ran in front of my great-great-grandparents'
house and as did most of whatever wealth the family had acquired.
But the house remains. My parents moved into it a decade ago,
and when I go there now I am surrounded by not only the written
history within but also the living history without, the descendants
of those sharecroppers and others like them who inherited a three-century
old legacy of legally enforced deprivation.
When I walk on the farmland that has been in our name since
the 19th century, I am reminded of something else: This land was
initially acquired when those who had lived on it for untold centuries
were swindled or forcibly driven out of it by people who had better
weapons.
My family is Irish Catholic, so there is at least one obvious
irony in this history, an irony highlighted by the fact that the
farm's legal name has always been that of my great-great-grandfather's
hometown: Clonmel. There, the native Irish had for centuries received
much the same treatment from colonial invaders that non-Europeans
received in the New World. At the same time that the American
colonies were being settled, English Protestants were either driving
Irish Catholics into the far west of their native country or working
them as tenants on land the invaders now claimed as their own.
When the Great Famine finally forced my ancestors into the New
World, my great-great-grandfather ended up not in the increasingly
urban Northeast, where the efficient removal of native cultures
had made room for the quintessentially modern nexus of
capitalism, democracy and industrialism, but in a strange simulation
of the social order he had just left. The American dream was supposedly
to escape history. What he accomplished was, in large part, repeating
history. This time he was on top.
This is the obvious irony. But the deeper one is this: If he
had not acquired that house and land and those that followed had
not held onto it as they did, I would not see or feel any of this.
It -- and maybe history itself -- would only be something in a
book, something on TV. Not something real.
And something real not only to me. My father's brother, who
spent most of his life as a successful businessman in New York
City, sensed it too. When he came back home for his mother's funeral
he saw on my desk a copy of The Burden of Southern History
-- Yale historian C. Vann Woodward's classic argument that
the Southern experience of defeat, poverty and guilt provides
a valuable counterpoint to the larger American myths of success,
opulence and innocence. My uncle eyed the cover for a long time.
"That's a good title," he said. "The burden of Southern
history." He must have been reminded of that burden every time
he came back to his hometown, though to him -- who had left the
agrarian past behind for success in the American city -- the burden
was probably not so much guilt as economic lassitude. For he saw
himself in the light not of Jefferson but of Franklin.
The Franklin model
Northerners and neo-conservative Southerners alike, I think,
prefer to claim the Franklin model of the self-made man. But because
of Jefferson, all Americans are partly Southern. Like the classically
proportioned, white-domed house our genius third president named
Monticello, the rhetorically beautiful Declaration of Independence
and Bill of Rights that he designed are the work of a mind whose
leisurely intellectual freedom was made possible by black bodies
that did the dirty work: tending the fields, cleaning the stables,
cooking the food. Jefferson obviously participated in a gross
moral error when he wrote that "all men are created equal" but
continued to own slaves himself. That error was so glaring that
it moved even his relentlessly logical mind to a sense of something
beyond rational ken. In his Notes on the State of
Virginia, he uncharacteristically reflected on a God
who might "by supernatural interference" punish Americans for
slavery: "Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that
God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever."
These words were later echoed by another American president
who also was generally more given to Enlightenment-style rationalism
than to religious prophecy. In his 1865 Second Inaugural Address,
Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln powerfully affirmed that God "gives
to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those
by whom the offence" of slavery came -- a woe that might justly
afflict both sides "until all the wealth piled by the bondman's
250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop
of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with
the sword."
Lincoln concludes by shifting his focus from a vengeful Old
Testament God to more characteristically New Testament imperatives
that Americans learn to practice "charity for all." In the address
as a whole he, like Jefferson before him, seems to me somehow
Catholic. He does so not so much in his sense of an interventionist
God (whom the Puritans were quite familiar with) as in his sense
that Americans are not merely individuals set free to pursue spiritual
or economic self-advancement but are ultimately bound together
in a communal history -- somehow responsible for one another,
for one another's interests and for one another's sins. And"one
another" includes the dead as well as the living. This is not
exclusively Catholic, but it is certainly a view of reality that
is much closer to the Catholic view than to the Pilgrim-cum-Enlightenment
strategy of perpetually separating oneself from sinful others
and the sinful past.
Both Jefferson and Lincoln finally denied American innocence
and articulated something quite like the "sense of mystery" O'Connor
spoke of. They also anticipated Faulkner's famous statement that
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
Faulkner, who offers a more historically grounded version of
O'Connor's ultimately otherworldly vision, joins the Georgia writer
and the two presidents in marking the subcurrent in American thought
that I most deeply admire. For all in one way or another posit
that to be an American is not to be innocent but rather to participate
in a story much like Faulkner's multivolume narrative of the intricately
interwoven white, black and native families who inhabit the countryside
around the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi. To be an
American is to stand in the place of Isaac McCaslin in the novel
Go Down, Moses: to inherit a legacy that we must learn to
recognize as tainted yet worthy -- a legacy we must not shun but
continually seek to participate in redeeming.
My great-great-grandparents were not innocent.
From our early 20th century vantage point it is easy to see that
and to judge them -- to judge how they participated in the socioeconomic
injustices of their time and place, injustices built on racist
foundations. Those injustices are now, to us, clear and odious.
But no individual is fit to fully judge a family's history, let
alone the nation's. Especially knowing that we, too, will be judged
by our descendants -- for wasting our riches and destroying the
Earth that God has given us, or for permitting unregulated consumerism
and lust for power to trump our necessary respect for the sanctity
of all human life, or for flaunting our military might in a manner
that invites the world's distrust. Or for other acts or failures
to act that we are not even aware of yet.
American Exceptionalism
Honest human reflection and informed Catholic insight alike should
teach us that American Exceptionalism is a dangerous idea. No
nation is innocent, and none is so exceptional as to be elected
above the common fate of humanity. But Catholic habits of thought
can also help us to become better Americans by giving us a clearer
perspective on our nation than we might get from narrower sources.
Catholicism should compel us to be countercultural in such a way
that we ultimately benefit the larger culture.
The orthodox line held by Pope John Paul II and
dissenting voices within the American Church alike have this in
common: They inevitably call for U.S. Catholics to counter our
country's ongoing tendency toward moral smugness on the international
stage; its growing tendency to idolize individual choice and downplay
communal responsibilities in domestic matters; and, above all,
its obvious materialism. This last is bound up with our American
inclination to worship free enterprise, which, despite our usual
political labels, is the least conservative force imaginable.
It is a force that levels tradition. It will close down old Main
Street to build a Wal-Mart; it, in and of itself, would support
cloning and child pornography if that's what the market demanded.
How can Christian Exodus claim to represent true Christianity
on one hand and idolize Adam Smith on the other, as though Jesus
came to tell us to be hard-working capitalists?
My particular concerns in this regard come in part from spending
my childhood in a rural South where people ideally sought to stay
put on the land and in the traditions their families handed to
them rather than going wherever the best-paying new job was and
assuming the identity that job demanded. But that South was also
provincial and often jingoistic. Worst of all, it tended to equate
Christianity with Americanness.
A few of my Protestant classmates reminded me of this, giving
me comic books about the Apocalypse in which the Antichrist wore
a papal miter and ran the United Nations, telling me I worshipped
Mary and the pope, and inviting me on mountain retreats where
I dutifully sang hymns and participated in Bible study and was
finally asked to come clean and accept Jesus Christ as my personal
Lord and Savior. (Hadn't He already accepted me, I thought, and
the problem was not accepting Him in one magic moment but instead
trying day by day to live as He would have me do?)
But I took pride in being in the minority -- South Carolina
was less than 5 percent Catholic. It was a pride that, paradoxically,
came from being humbled in the way the Gospel deems appropriate
for Christians, and faith in the institutional Church perhaps
came easier in the South precisely because our outnumbered leaders
were not capable of the kind of hubris that seems to have characterized
some U.S. bishops during the recent pedophile scandals.
So it simply was not possible for me to feel smothered by Catholicism
as some of my Notre Dame classmates felt smothered by it in Chicago
or New York: Catholicism in South Carolina necessarily felt
countercultural. And if my pride in it was in
part simple clannishness, something that separated my family from
our immediate neighbors, Catholicism also manifested itself as
something that bound me to an international community. When in
ninth grade the time came for me to settle on a foreign language
class, I sought the advice of my father, who remembered the pre-Vatican
II Mass he had heard daily as a student at Belmont Abbey College,
a Benedictine institution outside Charlotte. Eyeing me fixedly,
he dismissed German, Spanish and French. "Latin," he counseled,
pronouncing the name with relish and with an authority that seemed
at once sober and visionary.
"It wouldn't do me any good. It's a dead language."
"Yes, but you can go anywhere and talk to a priest."
I envisioned myself 10 years older, grizzled and worldly, perhaps
in the merchant marine. Pulling into Shanghai with a duffel bag
on my back, walking cat-ridden streets and alleys, knocking at
a door and greeting a saffron-skinned man in a Roman collar: Vale,
pater.
My father's linguistic fantasies aside, the Church had opened
the door to a larger world for him in a number of ways. His Benedictine
teachers, themselves educated partly in Europe, found freedom
from local prejudices inside their monastery walls. It was they
who, in the late 1950s, organized a gathering with students from
a local black college. When my father told them he didn't socialize
with colored people, they told him that today he would.
As for myself, I still remember the surprise I first felt at
seeing a brown-skinned husband and a white wife attending the
small parish church in my father's hometown. This surely seems
no big deal nowadays, but in rural South Carolina in the 1970s
it was something to remember.
The Catholic Church in America
This is what the Church in America, at its best, can be: not
only a sign of universal humanity that cuts across divides of
race and class, but also a place where Catholic teaching frees
us from what we wrongly deem to be freedom -- as with my father's
submission to the monks who told him blacks were his equal. From
a perspective geographically and historically broader than any
narrowly "American" one, the Church constantly reminds us that
what we think of as liberty might well be slavery. We are called
to embrace standards of community, responsibility and self-discipline,
standards that run counter to what our immediate culture often
teaches. Our clerical leaders are sworn to poverty, chastity and
obedience -- what could be more un-American? If God's an American,
then why's the pope Polish? Or German? Or (one day) Venezuelan
or Nigerian? And what's he doing in Italy?
I've found that Catholicism can not only give me a critical
perspective on America but also can help me to make better sense
of what I love about it. The whole notion of loving America as
an idea or ideal, noble as it sounds, seems to me both more dangerous
and less honest than loving it as a reality. As a Catholic whose
faith is grounded in the sacraments, I know that what I love in
the real sense of the word must be concrete: that which I can
taste, touch, see, hear.
When I think about what I really love about America, it's stuff
I can feel in my gut. I'd miss the look and feel of the land,
the way I used to miss damp blue-green pine horizons when I lived
in the asphalt and dry open hills of southern California. Given
time and money, there's not much I'd rather do than get in my
car and start driving west until the grass ends in desert and
rock, then high up north along the grand blue Pacific, east over
high peaks and long prairies, all the way through wooded New England
to the rocky Atlantic and south toward home again. If I don't
watch myself I can start sounding like that crazed quasi-Catholic
Jack Kerouac, too in love with America to sit still, perpetually
longing to be on the road.
America at its best stands for two things we rightly treasure:
a recognition that all cultures hold something of value, and --
most profoundly -- an insistent recognition of the value of the
individual. Yet neither of these ideas is exclusively American.
Both are recognized by the Church as well, the first perhaps increasingly
so in an era when Catholicism seems to be more alive outside of
Europe than within it. The second, contrary to popular belief,
was not invented by the USA: Modern Western individualism is deeply
rooted in older Christian thought. Yet the Church reminds us that
we are not only individuals, and that we are incapable
of achieving the good of the world -- or even our own good as
individuals -- on our own.
The primary reason I love the country, of course, has to do
with the people around me. The better I know them the clearer
it is that their individual identities have only a limited amount
to do with the big ideas of America I've been talking about. At
the same time, my own family history tells me the reality of America
is imperfect. And I guess the best I can feel about the USA is
the best I can feel about my family: I have a great family, wouldn't
trade it. But it's not perfect, and it seems absurd to go around
chanting "We're the greatest family in the world!" It's not my
duty to cheerlead about it. It's my duty to love it.
This much, perhaps, reason alone could tell me. But, in addition,
Catholicism teaches me humility not only as an individual but
also as an American. What's the point of shouting that we live
in "the greatest country in the world?" Isn't there something
deeply worldly about wanting to make such a claim in the first
place -- "worldly" in the sense condemned in the Gospel of John,
which tells us we must not live by the standards of this world?
Finally, Catholicism tells me I'm bound up with and responsible
for all those around me, both in my nation and beyond it. I can't
take individualism to its absurd extreme and seek to become a
nation or a church or a world unto myself. I must recognize all
those squabbling individuals around me as somehow united not only
by our common history but also, most deeply, as souls called to
live in the body of Christ, who died for all and who calls us
to serve those around us, wherever we may be and in whatever necessarily
sin-ridden history we may find ourselves.
Farrell O'Gorman teaches English at Mississippi State University
and is the author of Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor,
Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction.
(October 2005)
