Minding Laurie Johnson’s Gap

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

President Trump has been in office a month as of today, and the maelstrom of orders and actions which he has taken has elicited delight, horror, and/or confusion from many. In the midst of it all, I find myself still thinking about the Never Trumpers. I live in a mostly conservative state, and am a life-long member of a mostly conservative church; hence, the relatively small number of Republicans I know who still dissent from the faux-populist posturing, paranoid postliberal muttering, and borderline criminality that has overtaken most of what passes for politically “conservative” thought these days tend to really stand out. They’re honorable folk, these teachers and police officers, filmmakers and military veterans, farmers and parents and good friends, and the criticism they receive from their supposed ideological allies when they refuse to celebrate the latest mad (or Musk-influenced) order from Washington DC is painful to watch.

I don’t know if recommending Laurie Johnson’s fine book, The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View of Our Culture Wars, to them would provide them with much solace, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Johnson identifies herself at the start of the book as “an early ‘never Trumper,’” a registered Republican who broke from her party as she saw the conservative movement she’d long identified with turn into a “right-wing capitalist-friendly ethnically based populism” that idolized “an ill-equipped, seemingly unbalanced nationalist” (who also just happened to be a “narcissistic and unstable reality TV star”—p. 11). If you find such language describing the current occupant of the White House inaccurate or indefensible, then Johnson’s book probably isn’t for you. But that would be unfortunate, because the book—which was written and came out before the 2024 election—actually gives a pretty balanced assessment of Trump’s appeal to the sort of culturally conservative and rural voters whom Johnson (who, like me, lives in Kansas; she teaches at Kansas State University in Manhattan, while I teach at Friends University in Wichita) knows well.

Johnson’s book is sometimes meandering, but always thoughtful; as she writes at the outset, she thinks that the time for “narrow but safe and sure scholarship” (p. 12) is past, at least for her. Her overarching aim is to sketch out the long history of intellectual developments which have, in her view, turned inside out the positions she once held to, positions which most long assumed were deeply rooted in the cultural practices and perspectives common to our shared home in the Sunflower state. In turning to radical thinkers both right and left, Johnson's account of these developments turns primarily on, first, a process of “dislocation”—both material and moral—which has uprooted the cultural foundations for diverse, stable lives and sustainable living environments which were built up over generations, and second, a process of “strong-arming”—both ideological and religious—by which we submit to or participate in a collective attempt to paper over deep disagreements or deeply inhumane assumptions about the lives we live. I think her account is, ultimately, a wise one—but as someone who thinks Trump’s presidency was and will be appalling, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Johnson is a complicated thinker and a careful writer; those looking for facile diagnoses and easy prescriptions also won’t find this book to their liking. She interchangeably employs both political psychology and political philosophy in building her arguments, making use of everything from sociological examinations of cults to complex agricultural economic data to the history of Bible translations to reflections on television sitcoms along the way. But consistent throughout her analysis is the attention she pays to “domination,” and particularly the cultural and social effects of economic dominion.

Johnson does not frame that domination in terms of class; she’s no Marxist, though she thoughtfully explores what she thinks his philosophy both got right and got wrong. Rather, the domination that she feels far too many of her fellow citizens have chosen not to see or have failed to see clearly is primarily ideational. American individualism, she argues, has been led to its current alienating and disempowering state by the way market-oriented and technology-obsessed thinking has come to permeate even the most basic institutions and practices of ordinary life—in our schools, churches, families, and communities. The domination of the calculating liberal individualist model has not only pushed us away from one another; it has cramped our appreciation of the real-world diversity and richness which open cultural engagement and collective action ought to allow. The omnipresence of “free-market liberalism,” in Johnson’s view, has reached the point that it “shares some of the totalitarian aspects of more openly apocalyptic revolutionary regimes,” with its insistence that “marketplace thinking works equally well for all people in all times and places” (p. 33).

The alarm she expresses at the effects of the homogenizing success of the so-called “American way of life,” as she has come to understand it, is present in every chapter, whatever its specific focus. She sees our valorization of this image in “the imperative to be efficient in the making or acquiring of …goods and services” (p. 99) when writing about human anthropology and psychology; and she sees it in the “politicized Christian opinion leaders” that focus parishioners solely on “worldly ends” (p. 228) when writing about political theology. Near the book’s conclusion, she puts forward a lengthy jeremiad that perhaps comes closer than any other single passage in the book to being an overall thesis statement about how she sees this constrained notion of liberal freedom and economic success as having warped American life:

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are concerned about the current state of our culture because of its contentiousness, seemingly amoral nature, the way it breaks up families, our loss of community, and the every-swifter march of secularization, look no further for the cause than the economy that thoroughly dominates us. Our “freedom to choose” does not stop at our toothpaste brands, though it apparently increasingly does stop at being a small businessperson or a small farmer. We are also free to choose to stay married or not, depending on how we feel. As we have less real choice due to our mounting social stratification and precarity, our “freedom to choose” necessarily gets more and more intensely expressed in our personal moral choices and lifestyles, as well as our stylistic choices. If you don’t like the way the kid down the street dyes their hair purple and wears tattoos, remember that they’ve been taught that the pinnacle of American freedom is in accumulation and personal expression. In effect, we are all in a constant state of flux, and yet we are taught to fear the actual trans person, the one who has the courage to disregard the superficial freedoms most Americans “enjoy” every day because they feel in their interior person that they are not what their exterior says they are. Before we launch any more assaults on our trans neighbors, we need to consider the largely life-frittering ways in which the rest of us are inauthentically fluid, and change our own ways if we do not like what we see (pp. 274-275).

The language by which Johnson condemns the consequences of liberal capitalism--its competitive demands, its expectations of constant change, its condescending charity, its mentality of disposability, its victimizing of those who fall behind, and most of all (echoing Wendell Berry here) its stultifying assumption of “inevitability”--has many echoes, and she does a superb job integrating the many facets of this sort of non-Marxist (though clearly Marx-influenced) cultural critique together. While her analysis mostly bypasses recent integralist critiques, Johnson is clearly respectful of those Christian thinkers who have called for a collective retreat from our corporatized capitalist state. However, reading through her broad-ranging assessment of how the dominance of market values and personal choice has warped American life, and torn a “gap” in structures of community life—a gap which, in her view, Christian churches and those who populate them have overwhelmingly failed to sew back together—makes it pretty clear that she has no interest in fleeing towards some reactionary religious position. (Some of this is plainly personal; twice in her book she details ways in which church communities she was part of simply failed to address the needs of suffering parishioners or to even understand what those needs were, in ways that both involved and affected her directly.)

Johnson’s training as a political philosopher was grounded in the classical liberal tradition, and it’s one she holds to. As such, she blanches at the idea of “a return to some sort of benevolent aristocracy/oligarchy” (p. 231). For her, religious strong-arming and economic domination have mostly developed in tandem, in opposition to a proper articulation of the rights we can exercise in communities built through work and cooperation, free from the worship of political saviors or Silicon Valley “innovators.” That freedom—a small-scaled civic one—won’t be achieved through revolution; as much as she clearly appreciates Marx’s assessment of power under capitalism, she’s not looking for any new vanguard (much less new government programs) to lead us forward.

Rather, Johnson’s hopes—to the extent they exist; her writing is more realist than romantic, and she is better at providing information than inspiration—lay in a different sort of movement, one more focused on recovering habits of work and association than affirmations of identity or authority. Her concluding chapters look closely as distributism and the Catholic Worker movement; she has praise for both, but also gentle criticisms, partly because she is clear-eyed (in ways that more than a few of their advocates are not) about some of the bottom-line realities of exploring these alternatives to capitalism: that is, having less money, less resources, less “stuff” all around. But making due with less is one thing that Johnson can speak to as something more than an academic and critic.

Johnson was instrumental in setting up the Maurin Academy, a multifaceted organization which includes both a farm and a school, one which seeks to provide both content online and food in-person, all in a way which challenges both profit-mindedness and state dependency. Inspired by the legacy of Peter Maurin (the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, along with Dorothy Day), the idea is to provide a place for the kind of “persistent, often unglamorous work” that she believes—and, I think, has argued persuasively for in her book—is “real and compelling” in the way that life defined by our corporate capitalist and governmental masters is not (p. 269). She recognizes that what they are doing could easily be categorized—especially in the absence of shifts in the state and federal money which keeps our exploitive food systems operating as they have for decades--as just more “quixotic attempts at economic and social experimentation,” but what else, she says in her conclusion, can we do? “We can smile and talk all we want about the benefits of localism, farmers markets, and mutual aid, but how many of us even remotely approach consistently adopting those practices?” (pp. 286-287)

Johnson’s book may not be the antidote to the Trump years which her (all too rare) sort of small-c conservative might need. But she is at least living out, in part, her own retreat from the corporatizing of disruption that seems to be the American lot, at least for the next four years. She is walking her talk, and as much as there are ideas and arguments her book that I admired and learned from (including a few I strongly disagreed with), I find the person she actually is even more admirable still.

Leslie's Love Story in Songs, and Ours Too.

Ian Leslie's John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is a terrific book. I say that as a major Beatles fan, though not, as I've confessed before, a fanatic. I may have collected and listened to everything Paul McCartney has ever officially released, but I haven't done the same with John Lennon (much less George Harrison or Ringo Starr), and that's a failure on my part. Particularly when it comes to John, I need to correct that someday. 

Why? Because as I think Leslie demonstrates very well in this book, constructing any history of the Lennon & McCartney musical partnership--both before and after the Beatles--which doesn't put their complicated, deeply loving, often deeply resentful, and always deeply confusing relationship at the center almost certainly misses something crucial. That's not to say Leslie does something here that has never been done before; any remotely attentive take on the lives of these two individuals--or at least their lives between 1957 and 1980, and the art they made during those years, both together and apart and with others--can't help but notice how much John and Paul, no matter what else is going on or who else is there, are looking at and to one another, seeking approval from the other, trying to one-up one another, listening to and trusting in each other. I took that away as perhaps the defining revelation of Peter Jackson's wonderful reconstruction of the Let It Be sessions, The Beatles: Get Back, and I know I'm not alone in thinking that way.

But Leslie provides the supporting evidence of the abiding artistic importance of all of John and Paul's looking, listening, seeking, competing, and trusting. Some of the songs he builds chapters around are, admittedly, a bit of stretch; he tells the story of these two artists chronologically, and finding the right song from the particular stretch of their lives he is chronicling (sometimes just a few weeks, sometimes several months) to match what he wants to say about respective artistic and personal as well as their relationship's evolution(s) doesn't always work. But there were so many times when the product of the Lennon & McCartney songwriting partnership reflected exactly what appears to have been going on in their hearts and heads that, more often than not, the songs Leslie chooses for each chapter work very well, sometimes perfectly. (I'll never think about "If I Fell" or "In My Life" or Lennon's "God" the same way again--and it's not a coincidence that these were all John songs: while Leslie's admiration for Paul is endless, he makes a strong case that the brilliant and damaged John was always the force that did more to captivate or infuriate or drive forward Paul as an artist, and the Beatles as a band, than was the case for any other single member.)

Anyway, this is a first-rate work of both popular biography and musical criticism; I have to set it alongside Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles as the best book I've ever read about that band, despite its limitations (he puts an official apology at the end of the book, expressing regret that, because of his thesis--as defensible and correct as I think it is--George Harrison and Ringo Starr get pushed aside). Check it out, if you're any kind of fan of the 1960s at all; you're learn something from it, and maybe be inspired by it too.

Justice Together: Praying, Planning, and Partly (but Not Yet Entirely) Pushed Aside in Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Before Christmas, I had some complimentary things to say about Wichita’s city council. Here at the end of the year, though, my thoughts are more critical—though this is really a story about an organization of citizens here in Wichita, one that has pushed and challenged the city council, with some (but not total) success.

Justice Together, an association of nearly 1500 volunteers from nearly 40 Wichita-area congregations, synagogues, and other religious bodies, made local history several months ago, when, at a major public assembly, they pressed and received commitments from various elected leaders that certain positive steps would be taken to assist the homeless population of Wichita. Their well-researched calls for 1) more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, for 2) more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, for 3) a sustainable budget plan for completing and operating the planned Multi-Agency Center (MAC) which aims to bring together resources for homeless individuals, and for 4) a free municipal ID program, all remain on the table. But two weeks ago a proposed set of changes to how the city deals with homelessness threatened to derail the compassionate efforts that Justice Together, along with many other municipal organizations (Wichita’s Coalition to End Homelessness deserves much credit here), had pushed for.

Fortunately, Wichita’s city council was convinced (or pressured) to bypass the worst feature of these proposed changes, and the role JT played in that effort (in over two hours of public comment before the city council on December 17, 21 of the 24 speakers opposed the proposed changes, and more than a third of those were associated with Justice Together) deserves praise. Still, the fact that the other changes which passed through the council on a 4 to 3 vote will increase the ability of law enforcement to treat homeless individuals from a criminal rather than a compassionate perspective is evidence of how much more, and perhaps how much further, the kind of activism JT represents has to go.

As was pointed out by multiple speakers (as well as a couple of members of the council from the bench), the proposed changes in Wichita’s policies were less rooted in local changes (though Wichita’s homeless population has increased, as it has in cities both large and small across the country, for dozens of often intertwined reasons) than they were in national decisions. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its majority decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson last summer, making it clear that criminalizing “public camping”—a euphemism that we all know is ridiculous (“camping” is a voluntary recreational activity, while sleeping or residing outside without shelter in public places is practically never either of those) but seem doomed to use anyway—would not be considered an unconstitutional punishment someone for their condition, but would instead be considered a nominally constitutional punishment of an action, the door to more aggressive enforcement of anti-homelessness policies was kicked wide open. Honestly, those of us Wichitans who recognize both the increased costs as well as the lack of compassion which the further criminalizing homelessness entails should probably be grateful that the city’s proposals didn’t go any further than they did.

As someone who has been associated with Justice Together since its beginning in early 2023, I received word of the prayer meeting being planned for the day of the city council meeting. Multiple faith leaders set the tone for the dozens who gathered for the meeting by emphasizing that pushing back, in whatever peaceful way we can, against adding burdens to the lives of those suffering from whatever mix of causes—poverty, trauma, mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, or all of the above—which had left them living without permanent shelter was a shared religious demand. As I’ve written before, JT is not a radical organization; rather, it is a serious, careful, realistic group of believers, who work in the tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1) researching and proposing responsible plans premised upon compassion and justice, and then 2) presenting their plans before elected leaders in ways that create tension, thereby hopefully forcing action and progress. That was the plan a few weeks ago, with a summary of the changes Wichita’s government was proposing and an action plan laying out a bullet-pointed list of Justice Together’s primary concerns handed out beforehand. (The individuals in the photo above, from the Justice Together prayer meeting before the city council chambers on the morning of December 17, are, from left to right: Pastor Chad Langdon of Christ Lutheran Church; Deacon Lory Mills of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church; Justice Together Co-President Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone of Ahavath Achim Congregation; and Rev. Dr. Karen Robu of Plymouth Congregational Church.)

Topping the list of those concerns was that the city, in the wake of Grants Pass, intended to “remove a requirement that a shelter bed be available for anyone displaced by an encampment removal”—in other words, to no longer oblige law enforcement to confirm that there are beds available at public shelters before enforcing anti-“camping” rules and forcing a homeless person to move from whatever location of rest they’d found for themselves. This central issue was highlighted by Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, the co-president of Justice Together, when he stood to speak before the city council (two other speakers, Revs. Travis Smith McKee of the Disciples of Christ and Jacob L. Poindexter of the United Church of Christ, later underscored Rabbi Pepperstone’s demand): the “removal of bed space verification” from those tasked with the often ugly task of disrupting the attempt of the homeless to find a secure corner or underpass somewhere in public space has, in his words, “no compassionate rationale that I can conceive of.” He challenged the city council to strip that policy change from the proposal, which resulted in some city leaders playing hot potato, suggesting that this odious proposal was really just a matter of police protocol. But thankfully, whomever ultimately owns this obligation, the result was a positive one. The policy changes voted on ended up preserving this restriction, thus making it at least still slightly difficult for those experiencing homelessness to be forced to move and to abandon many of their possessions like herd animals and not human beings.

Justice Together also opposed, along with other groups, expanding the number of city workers who could wield that kind of police power against the homeless, another proposed change which the city council was convinced to drop. Unfortunately, though, the other priority of JT—opposing “a change to shorten the notice to vacate period before an encampment is removed, from 72 hours to 48 hours, and in some cases, allow removal without notice”—went through. Perhaps that’s unsurprising; the city staff made it clear in their presentation to the council that there was, functionally speaking, only two elements of the proposed changes which they considered truly substantive: getting rid of the bed requirement, and allowing for the more immediate removal of homeless persons and the clean-up of their sleeping locations. Despite complaints that went far beyond the religiously motivated—there were speakers who challenged the proposed ordinances from libertarian perspectives on human rights, and conservative speakers who pointed out all the additional costs which ramping up enforcement requires—Wichita will, beginning probably in mid-January, join the host of American cities that are responding to the increase of the homeless population with even more criminalization, even if conjoining that with some additional compassion.

That additional compassion is obviously vital. Justice Together’s slogan for their (in retrospect, only partly successful) action was “Invest in a Fully Funded MAC, not Criminalization of Homelessness,” and there was much discussion of how to move forward with finding the funds necessary to keeping the plans for the MAC on track, and many supportive words from city council members for doing so. (There was an update on plans for the free municipal ID as well, which still seems to me likely the most important single non-structural action Wichita could take to assist the city’s homeless.) Ultimately, though, those who have dedicated so much time and effort to Justice Together must now consider their next steps.

Do they accept this defeat and continue to focus on pushing our elected leaders on the social justice issues which they have not foreclosed? That seems most likely; what JT’s volunteers are best at is speaking practically about policy options and researching how other cities have funded programs or dealt with changes in the legal landscape is the kind of action that appeals to their skill set best. But there is also the possibility of reconsidering what kind of, and how much, tension they can productively generate—perhaps while looking towards this year’s municipal elections, with the aim of changing one of those 4 yes votes. Becoming an interest group which actively promotes or opposes candidates would give Justice Together a very different and much more contentious vibe, yet political challenges are part of the toolkit of any successful advocacy organization, whether they’re used or not. (Sometimes, simply the knowledge that an organization could organize their forces—in this case, many hundreds of mostly middle or upper-middle class Wichitans in dozens of well-established religious congregations, the great majority of which are likely voters—can be persuasive enough.)

Justice Together has worked with and through the religious faith of thousands of Wichitans over the past 2 years to advance the conversation about social justice in our city. As a supporter, I am curious to see how its leadership will continue to try to advance our shared ideals, even as the opposition to some of what has been labored over pushes back. As in so many other ways, 2025 will be a very telling year.

The 10 Best Books I Read in 2024

Ian Angus, The War against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism (2023) and Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (2022).

I put these two books together in my head not because they are similar, because they are not—the former is a succinct, straightforward, deeply earnest but also very dry Marxist history of the enclosure movement in Great Britain, the latter is a rambling, profoundly personal and discursive and sometime repetitive set of reflections by the author on the legacy of slavery, the devastation of the farming economy, and how American exceptionalism and predatory capitalism ties them both together. I put them together because, as I elaborated here, the excellent analysis of the former helped me find the best, most profound insights of the latter.

Fred Dallmayr, Truth and Politics: Toward a Post-Secular Community (2022)

Fred Dallmayr, a long-time professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Notre Dame who passed away this year, was never one of my teachers—directly, that is. Indirectly, he was an inspiration and, in a very small way, a friend, and on the occasion of his passing I went back and read deeper from his massive corpus. What I found, among many other wise and challenging observations, was a different way to talk about the post-liberal moment, a way that America will almost certainly not be able to make use of, to our great loss.

Grant Hardy, ed., The Annotated Book of Mormon (2023)

Grant Hardy’s decades of work on the Book of Mormon—the central holy scripture of my religious tradition—has resulted in multiple previous works of devotion and scholarship that I’ve learned much from. Last year, he finally was able to achieve something of a magnum opus: a complete critical edition of the text of the Book of Mormon itself. My appreciation of it, as both a believer and a doubter (and how much do those two go together!), is massive, to say the least.

Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (1989)

In 2023, one of the best books I read was by Stanley Hauerwas, a radical Christian thinker whose essays and ideas I’d long thought about, but whom I’d never really studied before. This year I continued with that new direction by giving Hauerwas’s probably most famous book a read, and I wasn’t disappointed. Co-written with William Willimon, when both of them were young scholars and pastors, this book lays down the fundamentals of Hauerwas’s radically Barthian, church-over-culture, Christianity-over-society, perspective, the one which later came to be called “neo-Anabaptist.” Reading this book at the same time as the 2024 elections, its constant reminders of the uselessness of trying to make Christianity “relevant” to a world of violence, competition, and exploitation, was a deeply persuasive experience, to say the least.

Charles Marohn, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis (2024)

Chuck Marohn hasn’t yet written a book that I haven’t found bursting with concepts and conclusions worth wrestling with, and his latest is probably the bursting-est yet. This is the first time Marohn has written with a co-author, and perhaps that was necessary; the Strong Towns approach to America’s housing crisis obliges him to weigh in on a huge number of historical, financial, political, and sociological issues, far beyond his earlier works which focused on the comparatively more straight-forward questions of community sustainability and transportation management. I’ve found myself in multiple arguments over this book, and it’s advice is definitely not the final word on figuring out how to both build ourselves out of, and better arrange our financing of, America’s housing problems. But his words are worth listening to all the same.

Eva Piirimäe, Herder and Enlightenment Politics (2023)

When I was in graduate school in the 1990s, I discovered the communitarian-liberalism debates of the 1980s, which in turn led me to Charles Taylor, which in turn led me to German romanticism, and in particular the philosophy and criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder, a late 18^th-century German educator, translator, and Lutheran pastor, one of the truly great—and often frustratingly changeable—intellects of the Enlightenment era. I wrote my dissertation on him, but the days when I thought I would be a true Herder scholar and intellectual historian are long past. Still, every once in a while the blessings of academia allow me to dive once more back into this area of scholarship—and for the first time in a decade, 2024 allowed me that, with the opportunity to review new book that is, in some ways, genuinely path-breaking, at least insofar as English-language scholarship on Herder is concerned. It reminded me of, and perhaps opened up, some old paths for me, and for that I’m grateful for.

George Scialabba, What Are Intellectuals Good For? (2009) and Only a Voice: Essays (2023)

Scialabba is a near-legendary critic and pundit, at least among that small group of writers, publishers, and thinkers that make up America’s tiny-but-not-quite-extinct-yet population of “public intellectuals.” A man who made his name writing sharp, both open-minded but also deeply opinionated essays on important intellectual figures of both the past and present, I’d read several of the pieces in this first collection years ago. Fortunately, the opportunity to write an essay on Scialabba gave me a chance to both re-read them, and peruse this latest collection. Everything in them is brilliant, even if you find his consistently contrary (and, I would argue, in important ways “conservative”) leftism not to your taste.

Paul B. Thompson, The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics (2010)

Returning once again to last year, one of the best books I read in 2023 was the wonderfully dense yet still student-friendly introduction to “sustainability” as a general topic, Sustainability: What Everyone Needs to Know, which Thompson wrote with a co-author, Patricia Norris. This year I finally worked through a book of his published articles and essays--published over a period of 20 years from the late 1980s to the late 2000s--that I’ve had on my shelf for years, and I wasn’t disappointed. While much of what is included here has long since become familiar within the field, he still often surprised me with creative insights (his essay focusing on a reading of The Grapes of Wrath and the John Ford film adaptation of it particularly stands out). Overall, this book is an excellent, thoughtful review of the difficulties and opportunities which thinking seriously about agrarianism, environmentalism, and the differences between them presents.