100 years ago, America was in the middle of the “roaring Twenties.” Flappers, gin, jazz. It’s easy to fall back on nostalgia, glamorizing periods like these, more from reading Hemingway than actual remembered history, perhaps.
It’s startling, but true: a revolt in the raging Twenties of America might just be a revolt against much of what goes by the name “Christian” — because it rejects the Crucified One.
Jerry Falwell, the architect of the Moral Majority in the Eighties, believed America lost its way just after these “roaring Twenties.”1 The nostalgia for the “good ole days” of the Prohibition era played well for conservatism.2 Falwell didn’t just mobilize conservative evangelicals as an electoral base for Reagan, he helped create the political machine that produced Trump. The machine is still running.3
America today is in the raging twenties. We live in the shadow of authoritarianism, violence, division, scandal, and wannabe dictators. I can’t be alone in observing that more than few New Year reflections on social media are burdened by the sense that optimistic sentimentality—even in the form of “resolutions”— is in poor taste.
While our day seems novel, it’s quite normal. We feel unsettled simply due to the fact that we happen to be living it. That’s why nostalgia for yesterday’s roaring Twenties, Fifties, or Eighties calls to us. But the roaring Twenties of the 20th century was raging too: it tends to forget the Tulsa Race Massacre. It has to in order for nostalgia to accomplish anything of value in the present.
But there’s not a single period in American (or human) history unmarred by violence, oppression, and tyranny. Not a single period worth preserving, idealizing, or returning to—at least not without sanitizing it, absolving its sins. But conservative moral panics tend to do just that.
The longing for some idyllic past—the ever present temptation of a conservatism playing with fascism—trends towards a mythic past. Just like the river of progressivism, with tributaries of effective altruism, longtermism, or technocratic futurism—trend towards a utopian future. All of this just leaves us in the present, with no way back, and seemingly no way ahead.
The way to face the raging Twenties is not optimistic sentimentality—mere fantasy—packaged up as “resolution”. Face the raging Twenties with revolt. It’s a revolt that first recognizes we do have reason to be angry.
The scandal of abuse in evangelical churches calls for ashes and sackcloth…in public. The growing shadow of authoritarianism calls for honest, public conversations, a reckoning not just of evangelical presence in politics, but a reckoning of the political machine’s evangelicals have constructed. Remembering that the Scripture still holds true: the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. But revolt holds onto a righteous anger that transcends partisan outrage and attempts to gaslight what memory cannot forget.
The revolt against the raging Twenties will also refuse to sanitize this past. It will reject wholesale the ludicrous idea that polarization is actually the frontline for a culture war upon which the fate of Christianity hangs. No, it’s just the fate of the West, and the fact that Christians in America are confused about this only highlights the extent of complicity and captivity.
It seems to me that, far from allowing despair and dread to define our year, we need something deeper, something that revolt seems to capture. This revolt, this Christian resistance, preserves the possibility that we need to, we must, hold out in our righteous anger, while reserving the right to find ourselves in the wrong when confronted with the Word.
This is a revolt which refuses the fuel of nostalgia, which rejects a return to the status quo. But all the same, it resists alternative futures proposed by the rich, by rogue actors or outrage entrepreneurs. It is a revolt in the present, against a sanitized past, recognizing fragmentary dimensions of God’s future in the here and now, it’s a future that confronts us in the faces of human beings, who many so-called “Christians” are too willing to hate in the name of Jesus.
It’s startling, but true: a revolt in the raging Twenties of America might just be a revolt against much of what goes by the name “Christian” — because it rejects the Crucified One.
See Frances Fitzgerald in her book The Evangelicals
He once called the separation of church and state a “shadowy phrase culled from a letter written by President Thomas Jefferson to a group of Baptists.” His language is clear: the disestablishment of religion is a conspiracy to keep evangelicals out of politics.
See Anne Nelson, Shadow Network (Don’t let the sensational title scare you. It’s not recounting a right-wing conspiracy, it’s just a material network analysis of the Council for National Policy, organized by Falwell, SBC titans Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson, and others)