Off the Cuff: with Respect to Creed
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"
In 2016, the standard bearer of the Never Trump faction (outside of twitter) was Evan McMullin, who ran a quixotic presidential campaign as a non-affiliated candidate. Nationally, his 0.5% of the popular vote was unremarkable, paling in comparison to Perot’s (today, kinda mind boggling!) take of about 19%. Local results told a different story. McMullin is a Utahn and Mormon, and members of his tribe better saw his appeal — he took a monstrous fifth of the vote in Utah, denying the GOP a clean majority in that state.
It has been an interesting decade for Mormonism, politically and socially. Mitt Romney, another standout in the NT crowd, is probably America’s most famous Mormon. These examples reinforce a sense of Mormonism as a sort of latter-day WASPishness, which extends beyond politics. I was interested to read
’s piece on her experiences living among the saints in Utah published the other week, in which she affirms that Mormons really do seem to live the all-American life of entrepreneurial hard-work, indefatigable optimism, civic engagement, and wholesome morality:
It’s really quite a sight, when you grow up someplace where parents with just two kids who manage to go out in public are harried and bitching and sniping at each other non-stop. Then you come out here and go on a hike and pass a family where the dad has a kid strapped on his back, a toddler in each hand, and mom is managing her own three, and all of them have smiles on their faces and look happy as can be - precisely like the AI image at the top which looks just like multiple families I know.
When I was growing up, and Mitt Romney was the only Mormon I knew outside of South Park, Mormonism was still the cult of polygamy and magic underwear, to my mind. I recall vividly Romney telling the story of his personal reaction to his church’s evolving stance on race. I wondered why his religion never seemed to be a bigger deal. Since then, the civic example Mormons have set seems to have totally displaced these prejudices, leading to a widespread envy, if anything. Famously, even federal intelligence community recruiters seem to recognize the Mormons are doing something right (recall that Evan McMullin ran on his credibility as a former CIA agent)!
To many, this is kinda disconcerting. I can’t find the tweet now so I’ll edit it in later, but I remember someone online noting that the implication of all of this — if you are an atheist, or a Christian who regards LDS as, at best, heretical — is that civilizational success does not seem contingent on believing true things. Kryptogal’s piece reflects this ambivalence:
As to whether any of this can be achieved without thinking that one day you will rule over your own Celestial Kingdom and without the supernatural beliefs and secret temple ceremonies? Well, that part, I don’t know. Maybe not. But I don’t know, plenty of neighborhoods here are now LDS-minority, and they haven’t really changed at all. So why not at least try?
We’re in an era of dislocation, in which we are becoming very worried about our increasing atomization and the fragmentation of our values and beliefs. I think this ambivalent, fearful envy of Mormon success is one sign of the times.
Without getting too into it, another way in which this is reflected is in the post-liberal zeal for a sort of instrumental Christianity — zealous converts like Vice President Vance, aesthetic groyper Trads using Catholicism or Orthodoxy as a political signal, atheists like Peterson at great pains to try to rescue Christian ethics from his evident unbelief. It’s all a bit like “the French professors” derided by Sartre, who endeavored to “discover” an objective morality despite “God as an out-of-date hypothesis,” to avoid concluding that it is “extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven.”
How can we organize society outside of the church? The times seem entirely unprecedented; once Americans were Bowling Alone; now, we don’t even share a game in common. But few things are without precedent, and it’s not as if Americans haven’t been divided before.
I was thinking the other day about the culture war, and what makes it so incredibly enduring, and so wickedly suited to dissolving social ties between us. There’s been a lot of commentary on the right comparing everything from woke excesses to liberalism in any form to a religion. On the left, it’s common to speak of “losing” a relative or parent to Fox or QAnon. There is something near-civilizational about this dispute.
The word I keep coming back to to describe these beliefs — more than politics, more than culture; lifestyle-defining, but not quite religions — is dao or dō, translated as “Way.” If you’re a westerner, you’ve undoubtedly heard people claim that this or that “Eastern philosophy” isn’t “really a religion,” a claim which goes all the way back to the beginnings of modern East-West religious dialogue.
This is kinda funky, and it’s a pet peeve of mine how it sorta exotifies eastern religions; before Christianity, the west was very familiar with civic and social rites which were premised on very real metaphysical claims about the world but which allowed a wide variety of interpretations — that’s like, just Roman paganism, which we definitely call a religion. And I think we’re all familiar at this point with the fact that Buddhism and Taoism are not “just philosophies,” and for many — most? — these beliefs are bound up with real beliefs in the spiritual order of the world.
But there is something to this description in the way it gestures at the permeability of the category “religion,” which seems to be able to encompass everything from entirely internal or subjective mystical salvific experiences to basic shared civic morality and metaphor, and I like the word “Way” as an umbrella term for all these things, though I personally prefer the word “Creed.” Given western religious history, that term for me is loaded with meaning — it gets at the way what can appear as pedantic and irrelevant disagreement can actually be deeply meaningful, having implications for the whole of one’s beliefs and way of life. Credal disputes can persist for millennia, defining the course of civilizations!
It strikes me as the right category to describe our current conflict. I don’t think we’re facing an inevitable civil war or disunion, and I think it’s alarmist and irresponsible to pretend that’s the case. But, it’s irresponsible because we are in a moment of deeply fragile conflict, and it’s important not to fan those flames, given the stakes.
Obviously, America’s foremost experience with credal dispute is the Civil War. Pres. Lincoln’s second Inaugural frames this conflict in explicitly credal, sectarian terms:
Both [North and South] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
He leaves his audience with frankly an apocalyptic understanding of the stakes of the war, a register which rings through the history of American racial conflict:
[I]f God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty 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, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Today, we are a more secular nation — the woke are of course not often religious, and the counter-woke are increasingly defined by a religiosity-as-signal, their figurehead archetypical of the phenomenon of the non-practicing “cultural” Christian.
Were we still the Christian nation of Lincoln and Davis, would we frame our current dispute in any less eschatological terms? The extreme right’s embrace of the death cultish QAnon and the wokest left’s yearning to rewire human behavior to erase the inherited sins of our fathers make it hard not to reach for religious metaphor.
Woe! “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh,” thus sayeth the LORD. “[I]f thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.”1
Yea, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
The postliberal right has taken to defining their project as an explicit repudiation of the idea of America as a “credal nation.”
You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
The alternative, to the ardent liberal, seems to be blood and soil, and Vice Pres. Vance is not eager to avoid that association:
Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.
Now. Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.
I share Mr. Vance’s communitarianism, to the extent that I believe America is a nation, and I don’t really have time for claims to the contrary. But it is unambiguously an exceptional nation because it is founded on an idea, rather than a lineage. Its shared inheritance is “just a set of principles,” if that is what you call the frankly sacred trust that has been passed down to the nation’s children, “the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
You can see, I hope, why I think of this as a credal conflict. Mr. Vance and I are not just separated by conceptions of “the Good.” If we were, we could each pursue it, and leave the other to his folly. We’re separated by different conceptions of nationhood and righteousness, which is a bit of a trickier needle to thread.
Unique to American history is the fact that it was populated so early on by, basically, religious refugees. I won’t linger on the history because I’m writing this when I should be working and also it’d be tiresome, you all know about the Puritans and the Shakers and etc. America has always been a land of religious freaks and fanatics, from Anne Hutchison to the Oneida community, a cauldron of every creed the Old World could not abide. And, true to the fears of men like Mr. Vance, our history has not been peaceful.
But the long arc of history has shown that, as Arthur Morgan sagely said, “It’s a big country!” It is large, it contains multitudes; very well if it contradicts itself. The promise of the country, I think, has always been that, for all its bloodshed, it has escaped the doom of the Old World, all-consuming sectarian warfare. We are able, here, to live side by side, if not always together. It’s not always comfortable in the short term. But over the years, the compact has ultimately held.
And the LORD sayeth also:
Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.
But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.
And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.
I actually find Mormonism’s history deeply inspiring, not discomforting. One of the longer running standard bearers in the Republican Party of my lifetime was a Mormon Senator of Utah, a state which turned out large numbers for another Mormon running on a platform of basic civic virtue.
This is an astounding thing to say given the fact that the entire reason Mormons live in Utah is that America regarded them as so anathema to our basic values that we would not let them live anywhere else!
In Missouri and Illinois, they talk of Mormons wars. If America could be said to have manifestly failed to tolerate any creed, it is this one.
But the moral arc of the universe is long, and we have grown, first apart and then together, and they have come to represent to many the very best of what we have to offer, when the rest of us seem to have completely lost sight of it.
In A Canticle for Leibowitz, there’s a moving scene in which the abbot of a monastery meditates on a statue the reader has followed as it has passed through the ages:
Dom Paulo often marveled that the wooden Leibowitz had also proved resistant to several centuries of his predecessors — marveled because of the saint's most peculiar smile. That little grin will ruin you someday, he warned the image… Surely, the saints must laugh in Heaven; the Psalmist says that God Himself shall chortle, but Abbot Malmeddy must have disapproved — God rest his soul. That solemn ass. How did you get by him, I wonder? You're not sanctimonious enough for some. […] Someday, another grim dog will sit in this chair. Cave canem. To survive the Church's slow sifting of the arts, you have to have a surface that can please a righteous simpleton; and yet you need a depth beneath that surface to please a discerning sage. The sifting is slow, but it gets a turn of the sifter-handle now and then — when some new prelate inspects his episcopal chambers and mutters, "Some of this garbage has got to go." The sifter was usually full of dulcet pap. When the old pap was ground out, fresh pap was added. But what was not ground out was gold, and it lasted. If a church endured five centuries of priestly bad taste, occasional good taste had, by then, usually stripped away most of the transient tripe, had made it a place of majesty that overawed the would-be prettifiers.
America (and any collective history of human beings) is not just an idea, but a conversation, a discourse which is handed down through the ages, like pebbles turned in the sea. Despite everything, I still believe in the capacity we all have to bend the arc of the moral universe, to grind out the pap in hopes that history will discern the gold.
We’re in a moment of our culture war many are calling a “vibe shift,” which (IMHO) really has little to do with the soul of the nation and more to do with the intellectual fashions of the chattering class (of which I am now, officially, a member). I don’t mean that to be belittling — if I have come to believe one thing after living through 2016 - 2025, it is this: what those who think and speak publicly believe and say matters. All I mean to say is that, rather than some spiritual shift in the zeitgeist, what we’re experiencing is the way it feels to turn the sifter-handle, and strip away some of the pap. Kendi is out, we have agreed, in a rare moment of seeming good taste — alas, Yarvin is in.
The sea churns, the flour calls for another sifting.
So annoyed that you can’t rubricate on Substack