As I watched Jesse Jackson weeping in Grant Park, I decided to forget the Reverend’s own campaign nastiness and thought instead of Psalm 30:5—“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” And then I thought about “Chocolate City,” the 1975 Parliament ode to my hometown—“They still call it the White House, but that’s a temporary condition too.” Bafflingly, improbably, Starchild got it right.
And, as with almost everyone who reads this, joy came in the evening too: those darkest hours just before the dawn were filled with tears of joy. Each of us now has our story, a recount of our own investment, participation, and memories, locked in as tightly as a framed newspaper front page. But after that surpassing, glorious night, I woke to find that four students at my university had spray-painted racist graffiti in our “free expression tunnel.” It is, sadly, no surprise that such sentiments continue to circulate (nor that hundreds immediately rallied to protest it).
So taking these sentiments together—the collective joy felt by millions, and terror at the prospect of “Chocolate City” felt by the few—how now might we look at religious politics in America? First of all, there are several threads from the election cycle itself to note before considering paths forward.
America seemed to make unexpectedly little of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, perhaps ranking his fiscal priorities and positions on key “hot button” issues higher than his religiosity. While neither Romney nor the polished Mike Huckabee (who can deliver red meat to the base as smoothly as he plays his bass) attracted the languages of alarm, such sentiments defined this campaign as they have political religions more broadly in recent decades.
Here in North Carolina, Liddy Dole painted Kay Hagan—an elder in the Presbyterian Church and Sunday school teacher—as a defiler, an atheist. And nationally, the panic button was mashed hourly, by different constituencies and in the name of different notions of American civic legitimacy. Sarah Palin became a consorter of witch doctors, a Cold War valkyrie swooping in from the north, an advocate of holy-rolling end-times fervor, and the embodiment of derision aimed at everything not “common,” “regular,” or part of “real America.” Amidst denunciations of her divisiveness, her shrillness, and her ignorance, other alarms were sounded, this time about black radicalism (Reverend Wright’s damning America), the socialism nested in Obama’s approach to progressive taxation, “pallin’ around” with terrorists, or the covert Islam his detractors saw peeking through his past and endangering our collective future (notably that horror-strewn 2012 cooked up in James Dobson’s fervid imagination). Americans seemed less compelled by the languages of optimism, though these too were there: in the promise of a maverick orientation to government, of keeping country first, and of change we need.
On the broadest level of this hyperreal national campaign, this plurality of notions reminded us continually that we cannot simply “sum up” political religions in America. We know that recent decades, particularly the period since 2000, have been dominated by discourses of fear, accusation and recrimination, violent imagery, and triumphalism. These discourses, and those deployed so flamboyantly during the election, have a specific lineage which I and others have interpreted. But are there sources of joy we might look for after this period of fear? If the various renderings of political religion just limned represent in some ways the untethering of reason and the eclipse of historical knowledge, then what might we expect in the future, either in dread or excitement?
The Smart Guy Won
Just as we all have our own stories of the elections, we are all busying ourselves with predictions. Richard Rorty once wrote that what’s interesting about the sun’s distance from the earth is not that it can be measured at 93 million miles but the fact that we want to measure the distance at all. Whatever legislation is forthcoming, whatever the makeup of Obama’s cabinet or his choice of Supreme Court justices, this quadrennial event offers an opportunity for reflection on signs and signifiers, those we flash to the world and to ourselves. What’s interesting about our overjoyed and prolific measuring in these days since Obama’s victory is perhaps what it reveals about us, not only in the magnitude of our hopes or the intensity of our projections onto the president-elect, but also in our longing and our crushing sense of powerlessness.
As a Republican colleague of mine said, “I never thought it would happen: the smart guy won.” As much as we want to think about the triumph and fulfillment of America’s democratic promise represented by electing an African American, there are some intellectual goods to consider too—not least that our first post-Abu Ghraib president is a Constitutional law professor. And yet America is far from being “post-racial,” and farther from thinking and talking our way out of the climate of unreason that has grown exponentially in recent decades. Obama’s smartness and blackness worked against him, much as we might wish to deny this truth, much as we wish these very qualities will shape the future.
Tags: evangelicals, jason c. bivins, obama, optimism, plurality, politics as usual, stereotypes, symbolism
Comments closed
The comments for this story have been closed. Thank you to everyone who participated.