Cross-Country Cross Musings

Hey, 

Greetings from the Colorado Welcome Center. 

I found a shady spot behind the main building, set up a camping chair, put leashes on the beasts, lit a cigar, and here we are. But what do I write about? 

A lot of people ask about the van and van life. But so far on this trip, I’ve basically just used it as a way to transport canines and alcohol westward at greater than normal expense. I’ll wait for some greater adventures in the days ahead before all that. 

I can report that I’ve seen very few Trump signs—and no Harris signs—on my travels. The Trump part is actually more interesting given that I drove through a lot of Trump country, particularly Pennsylvania, and I stayed off the interstate to boot. In 2016 and 2020, on similar routes, Trump signage—on barns, overpasses, hanging from abandoned buses in fields—was a feature of the landscape. I saw a handful of such things on this trip, mostly in Kansas and Missouri, but that’s about it. I did see one big sign about an hour ago in Western Kansas that said something like, “Thank You Mr. Trump for Trying to Save America.”

Speaking of saving, I saw an enormous amount of Christianity.  

I’ve driven cross country literally more times than I can count. But this stuff really made the omnipresence of explicit Christianity all the more noticeable. Billboards asking, “How Will You Spend Eternity?” or “What Does Jesus Say about Religion and Politics?” punctuate the interstate. One eyebrow-raiser declared, “Kill Relativism, Not Babies!”

One Kansan town—I forgot the name—has a series of small signs listing all of the churches you can find if you just take the next exit. There were about 10: Catholic, Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc. I’ve driven my fair share across parts of Europe, and I don’t recall ever seeing anything like it.

Admittedly, I was kind of primed to notice. I have been dipping in and out of Tom Holland’s book, Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade the World, since April. I decided I’d just listen to the audiobook from the start. (You may have picked up on the fact that I’m on a bit of a religion jag of late.) Just shy of 14 hours in and I’m barely into the Reformation. 

Still, I know Holland’s thesis well, partly because I’ve skipped around in the book, and partly because I’m addicted to the podcast he co-hosts with Dominic Sandbrook. Christianity reshaped the Western mind in such a way that even people who consciously despise Christianity, or religion generally, nonetheless are captives of its categories and imperatives. The secular humanist who insists on the primacy of human rights, the cosmopolitan globalist who adores the U.N., the Marxist who wants the workers of the world to unite, the radicals who want to remake the world anew, the scientists who believe that there are universal laws to the universe that are discoverable through reason, the conscientious objectors to this, the protestors of that, the feminist champions of sex workers, the billionaires who try to expiate their consciences with philanthropy, heck even the Muslims and Hindus who use our system of dating: They all—all—are standing on a foundation created by Christianity in ways large and small. Even the concepts of the “secular” and the “religious,” “theology” and “pagan,” are largely Christian inventions, or are at least suffused with Christian innovation. In a way, even the people trying to beat the house of Christianity, are nonetheless playing with its chips. 

This thesis is not exactly unique to Holland, but his explication and illumination of it is remarkable. 

Last year, there was a social media-fueled kerfuffle about how men—including yours truly—spend a shocking amount of time thinking about Ancient Rome. Ironically, I wrote about it while driving the Sprinter through Utah:

Whatever version of our Civilizational Operating System (C.O.S.) is up to, the Roman Empire (including the glorious days of the Republic) is very close to version 1.0. I mean, it’s not the first operating system—there was a lot of beta testing in biblical times and some important innovations in Ancient Greece. But Rome was a huge software upgrade, a near total reboot. And no matter how advanced you think we may be, a lot of that code remains in our C.O.S. 

I still think that’s true, for reasons I laid out. But I also think I gave short shrift to the ways in which Christian thought completely rewrote the programming on Roman hardware. Virtually everyone who earns the epithet or label un-Christian—fairly or unfairly—is arguing from a fundamentally Christian, or Judeo-Christian, framework. Critiques and condemnations of rape, slavery, murder, war, wealth, “toxic masculinity,” and excessive religiosity itself draw on Christian conceptions about human dignity.

In Ancient Rome, the idea that charity should extend beyond family or city, that the poor were a deserving class regardless of their deeds, that beggars were owed alms, was “airhead talk” in the words of the philosopher Porphyry of Tyre. The Jews had such notions, but the Jews were a weird cult in Roman eyes.

Obviously, a slave could not violate a Roman woman, but a Roman man could violate Roman women—if the opportunity arose. And slaves were playthings to be raped at will. Indeed, the concept of rape as we understand it today was largely alien: It wasn’t rape if you got away with it. Holland writes that the apostle Paul, relying on the Jewish morality he’d imbibed before his famous epiphany on the road to Damascus, had overturned the “sexual order rooted in the assumption that any man in a position of power had the right to exploit his inferiors, to use the orifices of a slave or a prostitute to relieve his needs much as he might use a urinal.”

Someone once offered me an explanation of why Gore Vidal disliked religion in general, and the Jews in particular. Having read very little of Vidal—something I am in no hurry to remedy—I don’t know how much of this was psychoanalysis and how much was based on a close reading of the text. But the basic idea was that Vidal, a man of Dionysian sexual appetites, resented the way the Jews invested moral status and dignity to women and to sex. Christianity took these precepts and universalized them in the West. In short, the theory went, Vidal disliked the Judeo-Christian tradition because it was a wet blanket on orgiastic flames. 

I’ve read too much Nietzsche not to let his views, rightly and wrongly, color my own views of St. Paul. It’s worth noting, though, that pretty much everyone else’s critiques of Pauline Christianity work within a Christian framework. Protest over  Paul’s emphasis on the need for women to submit to the authority of men—something I heard a lot about in all those women’s studies courses I took in college—was presaged by pious Christian women and men centuries before anyone conceived something called “women’s studies” or “feminism.” The argument that women have innate dignity and agency was a Christian argument long before secular arguments picked it up and turned it into an anti-Christian program.

I’m not going to get into the weeds on that, but I think it’s worth bringing up because it highlights how critics of Christianity often take immutably Christian arguments and try to pass them off as anti-Christian. That’s what Marx did, even as he promulgated his own millenarian and “scientific” argument for why the meek should inherit the earth and how the rich could not, should not, and would not find salvation at the end of history—unless, of course, they saw the light, unburdened themselves of their wealth, and joined the armies of the righteous. 

I find something reassuring about all of this. So much of our political and religious discourse and discord strikes me as a kind of tyranny of small differences. I don’t mean theologically; obviously, the differences between believers and unbelievers are hugely significant, and I have zero desire to downplay them or even debate them.  But the fact that even those eager to dismantle the moral cathedral of Christianity are using tools of Christian design to do it seems like a good hedge against the damage they can do. The moral frameworks with which many want to replace openly Christian ones are still very, very, Christian. Not all of them—I’m looking at you polyamorists—but most of them. And that’s good news, even if it’s not quite the good news.