From Collective to Individual: Easter Thoughts on Constantine, Carrie Nation, and Changes in Christian Influence in Kansas (and Everywhere Else)

[A meandering and marginally holiday-appropriate extension upon my latest Insight Kansas column.]

Decades ago, the Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas—a man who has made his name articulating, in his voluminous writings, a radical, pacifist, vaguely-Anabaptist political theology, one which is suspicious of Christians understanding themselves as a force for justice or morality in the modern world, but instead sees Christianity as a call to form communities which reject and propose a complete alternative to our world of competitive economies and militarized states— wrote an essay in which he made an odd confession. In recounting he and his wife’s honeymoon in Ireland back in the late 1980s, he talks how they stopped to shop in a small village near Kerry named Sneem. It was a Thursday in mid-May, and to his surprise the shops all started to close around 11am. When he asked a shop owner what was going on, he was told that it was the Feast of the Ascension, and the traditional day for first communion in that part of Ireland. Leaving the closing shop, he watched as “little boys and girls appeared from everywhere fitted with white suits and white dresses,” marching to the local church for Mass, after which they would come out of the church, circle the fountain in the center of the village square, “while everyone in the town cheered and clapped.”

Unsurprisingly, given his theological views, Hauerwas acknowledges, in writing the essay years later, that he’s pretty suspicious of the Catholic doctrines he was seeing entwined with the social life of the town. But he also wrote “I could not suppress the thought: ‘If this is Constantinianism, I rather like it.’”

My personal take on Christianity is far more compatible with Hauerwas’s radical writings than it is the village of Sneem, at least as it existed in 1988. I didn’t grow up with any familiarity with the traditional calendar or liturgy of Christian history, and thus have no nostalgic connection to any of it; Mormonism was and remains, for all its internal structures, bureaucracies, and hierarchies, a decidedly low Christian church. Even though Melissa and I have informally brought many Christian traditions and holidays into our family life over the decades, and even though my own communitarian sensibilities have led me to be a lot more sympathetic to civil religion than most of my religious community, I still can’t say that I feel any sympathy whatsoever for Emperor Constantine, who wedded the Roman Empire and Christianity into one politico-theological whole, and thereby changed the movement began by Jesus forever. And yet, I can understand where Hauerwas was coming from nonetheless. Because here in Kansas, for all my liberal Christian (and liberal Mormon)—to say nothing of outright leftist bona fides, there is one vaguely Constantinian-ish figure I kind of like nonetheless.

Carrie Nation is a figure of folklore in Kansas, but a rather stunted one. Her work on behalf of the poor and prisoners, her marches in support of women’s rights, and much more from her remarkable life are not part of her cultural legacy, in the same way that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which supported so many vital progressive causes and social reforms, is mostly reduced in America’s national memory to one thing alone: the drive to prohibit liquor. In the case of Nation, that’s not entirely unreasonable; if someone engages in violent “hachetations,” destroying the property of saloon-owners and getting herself arrested on the regular, the fact that she’s doing it in part as a protest against predatory capitalism is likely to get a bit lost in the noise. Still, while I have no great desire to live in the strict Protestant Christian world that Nation imagined as normative, and haven’t ever been inclined to take a hatchet to those establishments and interests that I might be tempted to sign up in support of a new Prohibition against, I still respect where she was coming from. The prohibition against the sale of alcohol for consumption was the law in Kansas at the time (the Sunflower State actually held to Prohibition longer than any other state, only ending it in 1948, and Sunday liquor sales only became legal here in 2005), so wasn’t she really just expressing a legitimate small-d democratic frustration at business owners (and those who patronized those businesses) for rejecting a popular majority of Protestant Christians across the state had demanded through the ballot?

This is where this conversation becomes one that dives deep into the meaning of democracy, and specifically the power of democratic majorities in pluralistic environments. The fear of the tyranny of the majority is central to liberal democratic formulations, of which the American Constitution is at least nominally one such; it is for that reason, or at least partly for that reason, that contemporary liberals in America are quick to see any kind of moralistic majoritarian movement as, by definition, a threat to liberal rights. I don’t think they’re wrong to hold to that fear; the threat (and now the damage) which Trump has brought against our constitutional order has made me a lot more sensitive to the “bourgeois ends” that constitutional protections provide. But ultimately, I remain a participatory democrat (along with being a Christian socialist and left communitarian); I think that a false idolization of and an obsession with protecting individual sovereignty can, and does, get in the way of collective civil expressions that ought to be taken seriously when it comes to defining—and, perhaps, even improving—our shared common life. The fact that those collective expressions might be—as they were in Sneem, and as they were in the mind of Carrie Nation—rooted in broadly (if not universally) accepted religious principles doesn’t strike me as an obvious argument against them.

Which, at last, leads me around to some current news from Kansas.

Recently Senator Chris Blasi (my own state senator, elected—though not with my vote—from our district in west Wichita) proposed an amendment to an education bill in the Kansas state senate. The amendment would have changed the law to mandate that Kansas schools never schedule games or other activities on Sundays, or on five days around Christmas, or on the four days of Holy Week beginning with Maundy Thursday and continuing through Easter, or on the week around the 4th of July—or on Wednesdays. Since the Kansas State High School Activities Association, a private body that has been licensed by the state to coordinate policies across Kansas’s public school districts, already functionally does nearly all of the above, it is that last mandate which drew the most attention.

The ideas behind the proposal were grounded in serious arguments over the time demands piling up in the lives of students, and I take those ideas seriously. Long experience has taught me that I am hardly alone in being constantly frustrated by the expectations which both competition over students (and thus state and scholarship dollars) and our tragically internalized meritocratic obsessions have done to what are supposed to be curricular complements to in-class education: sports and debate and theater and music and the like. And yet, when looked at in terms of its practical implications, the facts were immediately obvious: the proposed amendment would primarily serve the interests of churches (again, primarily Protestant ones, even though one of the originators of the proposal was a Catholic priest) and parents that want their children and students attending religious activities on Wednesday nights.

I’m familiar with that want—one of my first teaching jobs was at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, AR, and I quickly learned there that keeping Wednesday evenings free for Bible study (including cutting back on mid-week homework assignments) was a local imperative. Perhaps not coincidentally, Jonesboro was also a dry community; alcoholic beverages were illegal throughout the city (as of 2019, they started to allow alcohol to be served in restaurants, but retail sales are still banned). Such—dare we call it…”Constantinian”?—social structuring around broadly shared religious principles obviously isn’t unknown in Kansas, given all I said about Carrie Nation above. But times have changed—mostly for the better, I think, but changed nonetheless. Hence my sympathy for state Senator Caryn Tyson, who commented “It’s a sad day that we have to legislate this….Years ago, it wasn’t even an issue. It was a standard and acceptable. But here we are.”

The movement of American society—or even just Kansas—towards a mostly more secular, and definitely less collective, way of thinking about religious influence in the context of democratic representation is, of course, not absolute. For example, here in Kansas, the Republican party has used its super-majorities in the state legislature to push harsh anti-transgender legislation, which have impacts on as ordinary functions of daily life as access to public bathrooms, high school sports, or using drivers licenses as a form of identification. This can absolutely be understood as a moralistic crusade that attacks individual rights. But completely aside from what I see as the serious flaws (indeed, arguably the evils) in the religious reasoning behind the justifications for these attacks is the methodological orientation of the attacks themselves.

In some ways, it is evidence of the way in which most religious majorities in my state and across the country—at least those associated with the politically conservative Christianity that has shaped so much of Republican politics over the past half-century—understand their democratic responsibilities. After all, the overall aim of these laws isn’t so much about transforming society through shared, legally mandated practices, but rather a clearing away from society (or from their preferred vision of it) those individuals whose personal actions of identification or participation or sanitation they see as a violation. Again, focusing solely on the how this thinking approaches the structures of social life, t would be as if Carrie Nation hadn’t attacked saloons, but instead had stood respectfully outside their door, and contented herself with chasing down individual drinkers after they left. Not much collectivity there.

So perhaps, given its incompatibility with how American Christians think about their place in civil society today, it wasn’t surprising how quickly the legislature abandoned this Wednesday restriction proposal. But then came another proposal, one even more revealing.

Overriding a veto by Governor Kelly, Republican majorities in the Kansas legislature guaranteed income tax breaks to those who join “health care sharing ministries.” These are private health care cost-sharing pools, ones usually organized by churches and not legally obliged to cover the conditions which publicly supported and regulated insurers must (this was the main reason for Kelly’s veto). They often restrict participation on the basis of one’s religious behavior as well.

In our late capitalist, neoliberal world, the idea that people will try to carve out for themselves, their families, their neighbors, and—yes—their churches a space wherein they can create their own alternative forms of mutual support is something I can only celebrate. All praise for decentralized, interstitial action, says I! And yet, the idea that such inter-personal associations ought to receive state support lands in my mind basically the same way other Kansas, GOP-led legislation has, such as their successful push to guarantee that students attending private religious schools and home schools will have the exact same access to publicly funded school resources that public school-attending children across the state. The goal, upon reflection, isn’t about working through shared institutions to find compromises that improve them (by their own moral and religious lights, obviously) for everyone. Rather, it seems mostly aiming to enable those living in accordance with what they understand their faith to require to escape the costs and complications of doing so in the religiously diverse America (and Kansas) of today.

So in the end, put it this way: once, Christians—which include up to 70% of all Kansans—would regularly argue and vote in ways that took seriously the shaping and the improving of the daily routines of our shared social life. But now, it’s more typical to argue and vote so as to make certain that believers can be included in all the benefits of that social life, while still maintaining some separateness from it. Call it a shift from collective aspiration to individual protection, perhaps. This is a shift which is entirely predictable, given the atomization and privatization of so much of American life. Why shouldn’t we accept that our political disputes over matters relevant to the living of a Christian life need to be—and, given the pluralism of American life, ought to be—expressed in terms of individualistic choices, rather than anything collective?

So yes, it’s a reasonable change. But still, this Easter, I’m not sure Carrie Nation would be entirely pleased.

On Superman, Sentimentality, and Citizenship (or, What Gunn's Superman Knows About America that J.D. Vance Apparently Can't Comprehend)

Daniel McCarthy expanded upon his New York Post editorial, the one I responded to previously, in the pages of his journal, Modern Age. His expansion—“Superman After Liberalism”—isn’t a rebuttal to my response, but he tagged me nonetheless, so I’m going to take the opportunity to respond once more…particularly since the way McCarthy is pursuing his case against James Gunn’s Superman provides me with an important contract to Vice President J.D. Vance, who recently, on the occasion of receiving an award from the Claremont Institute, gave a speech on citizenship which was about as antithetical to the deeply American moral sentiments of Superman as I can imagine.

McCarthy’s argument against Gunn’s vision of the Superman character isn’t changed by his expansion, but he does elaborate on his thesis in some interesting ways. He’s not wrong that “the problem of reconciling the exceptional with the egalitarian” has been a subtheme to telling super-heroes stories ever since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster essentially evented the genre (and if McCarthy had either the pop culture knowledge or inclination, he could have made the obvious point that recent comic, cinematic, and television incarnations of Superman—from Christopher Reeve in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie to Henry Cavill in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel to many, many others—have all taken different positions on how to address this narrative problem). Nor is he wrong—though he is, I think, incomplete—in suggesting that Siegel and Shuster’s original solution, and the one that supposedly served the character so well for decades, was to write Superman as motivated by a New Deal-era confidence in liberalism as a form of patriotism, the result of his, through his adopted parents, “assimilation into Kansas and America as the land of the free.” I don’t see how anyone remotely online—to say nothing of comic books fan over the past 85 years who have (likely unlike McCarthy) actually consumed Superman media—could be unaware of this aspect of Superman’s history, especially given how relevant it is to debates that McCarthy (and Vance) are deeply involved in today.

McCarthy sees the Superman of the James Gunn film as having abandoned this confidence, as American liberalism has also abandoned it (or maybe, depending on how much and what sort of postliberalism McCarthy embraces, it was fated to turn away from it, in favor of identity politics and government-managed pity). Instead, he sees the Superman played by David Corenswet as unexceptional, bland, and weak (McCarthy makes much of how Superman’s unwillingness to kill makes him reliant upon other heroes capable doing the necessary “dirty work”). And while he allows that there probably could have been, even within his framework, a way of telling the Superman story that asked the “right questions,” this one absolutely isn’t it; in Superman, he sees only a left-liberal film that is so frightened that “fascism has already taken over this country” that its titular character lacks “a place of his own,” leaving him to articulate only lame liberal sentiments with no moral strength of their own.

I’ve already talked about how wrong this argument is. The lame liberal sentiments that McCarthy sees in Superman’s wonderful final words to Lex Luthor—

I’m as human as anyone. I love, I get scared, I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human! And that’s my greatest strength.

—could, I suppose, be understood as validating a kind of moral individualism and even fatalism. That they lack much by way of realpolitik thinking, and thus arguably open the door to a hypocritical Machiavellianism, showing a face of kindness and sympathy to the crowd while justifying self-interested actions behind your back, is also perhaps true. (Superman didn’t seem too worried about the fate of his clone, for example.) But of course, it’s not like the downsides—the exclusionary classism, racism, sexism, and more—so frequently present in more rigorously particular moral systems are difficult to identify either.

More importantly, to fail to understand the moral strength—and, on an admittedly somewhat attenuated level, what I think can only be understood as an aspect of self-sacrificing Christian love—that is just as possible to be found within this kind of compassion-driven ethical universalism is a major mistake. It’s one that has been made by haters of Rousseau and every attempt within the context of modernity to follow the path toward moral legitimacy—a civil religion based on rights and consent and small-d democratic efforts to build communities of action and legislation—which he suggested for centuries now. I have no idea if James Gunn or David Corenswet have ever heard of Moral Therapeutic Deism, and I definitely reject the idea that what viewers of Superman saw on the screen is just another version of some self-centered, MTD, make-it-up-yourself-morality. But denying that there is any moral substance, any heroism, to someone who puts forward, first and foremost, kindness and concern and sentimentality and good deeds, absent any explicit patriotic attachment or sectarian confession or nationalist vision, is simply a complete misreading of the moral thinking at work in this long, centuries old, deeply important liberal Christian tradition. It’s a complete misreading of the religious sensibility that, as a resident of Kansas, I still see plenty of evidence of all around me, obtaining in communities and families that are interconnected and wired and far less self-sufficient that many who prattle on about “heartland values” insist on making them out to be, but which issue in friendliness and service and charity nonetheless. And finally, frankly, it is a complete misreading of American republicanism as well.

So now let’s turn to Vice President Vance’s partly thoughtful, but mostly pedantic speech, one that Superman would never be pretentious enough to give. In talking about citizenship, Vance starts by making a serious, complicated point:

Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we're doing [in the Trump administration] is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It's hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.

That social bonds and civic strength develop organically over time through the routines of ordinary life is an undeniable communitarian truth; the whole notion of “social capital” is built upon that understanding. And hence, it’s not unreasonable to see the challenges of ethnic, religious, racial, cultural, and (I think especially) linguistic diversity as genuine ones, ones which immigration restrictions might be an at least partial solution to. There is good research in support of this—but also evenmoregood research that challenges it, making the argument that the obstacles posed by diversity are actually, when one controls for technological distractions and economic barriers which prevent people from interacting as humans (anthropologically social creatures that we are) normally would, quite small, and in any case that such obstacles, absent political polarization, actually fall quite fast.* Robert Putnam, the scholar who developed the idea of social capital, essentially concluded in a later study that the difficulty Vance highlights is a short-term one, one that—in immigrant societies like the U.S.—is always being negotiated by the emergence of “cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.”

Presumably, Vance—or at least his speech-writers—are smart enough to know all this. Which means that in holding to this argument, he unintentionally (or, who knows—maybe intentionally!) reveals that his hope through serving in the Trump administration isn’t to fine-tune immigration policy, but rather to change America  away from being an immigrant society at all. And his case for this is plainly ideological—or even, I think, theologico-political, and not in a good way. In the most notorious passage in his speech, he claims:

If you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself. If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.

Some of the reasoning here is obviously puerile. (“Must we admit all of them tomorrow?” So, you’re assuming that “hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence”—perhaps in part because their own French or Japanese or Canadian or British or Italian or Australian or Norwegian political cultures have long socialized them to accept similar principles of government by consent and natural rights—actually would all want to come to the United States in the first place?) And some of it worryingly strange. (As John Ganz pointed out, the Anti-Defamation League is hardly a “woke” entity these days, but somehow Vance nonetheless thinks it important to insist to castigate them, suggesting that he really does think that anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and others so-inclined should be given a pass, presumably because they had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.) But the parts of it which bother me the most are, I think, anti-republican in the most malicious way.

The republicanism of Thomas Jefferson has been endlessly analyzed, and no doubt will long continue to be. But broadly speaking, Jefferson’s republicanism was a fascinating—some would say incoherent—mixture of the aristocratic and the democratic, a mixture of Enlightenment confidence, agrarian sentiment, and noblesse oblige. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is not a crystalline distillation of all those ideas, but it does hit all the main points of it, especially as its ideas were later amplified and refined through centuries of American experience and practice. Jefferson’s vision was one of rational human beings exercising their natural right to collectively achieve independence, not solely or even primarily in order to remain virtuous farmers, or to instantiate through the power of a new social contract their own preferred res publica, but simply in order for their personal and communal development, as productive citizens, to be free from the interfering interests of powerful others in their civic spaces. Whatever the inconsistencies one might find in this theoretical framework, it is a substantive one, reflective not of unstated assumptions about some natural necessity regarding borders and identity, but rather of the explicitly stated assumption that a God-and-nature-given sensibility will show the rightness of a free people being able to work out their independence as part of civil order they choose for themselves, absent any distant hierarchy (whether spatially or temporally).

No one actually familiar with the philosophical and historical arguments here can deny that notions of sovereignty—of the right of a people to collectively define and govern their communities, including the borders thereof—were an important component of these republican visions that shaped America’s political culture. But Vance would have us believe that sovereignty needs to be the central concern of anyone concerned about citizenship and freedom:

What does it mean to be an American in 2025? For one, I think it has to mean sovereignty. More precisely, American citizenship must mean belonging to a nation that guards the sovereignty of its people, especially from a modern world that's hellbent on dissolving borders and differences in national character.

The Declaration is by no means a culturally placeless document; among the particulars that Jefferson levied against King George were claims that his actions were stirring up the continent’s native inhabitants to war and allowing the Catholic French to establish a dangerous foothold in Canada. Jefferson was not so idealistic as to ignore all concerns about security and identity. But the power of the document—and really, the power of this kind of liberal republicanism in general—is the way it connects with sentiments of liberty whose natural rightness were, in Jefferson’s view, becoming undeniable with the transformations which moved Western civilization away from the ancient and medieval worlds, and towards a more rights-based one. Jefferson’s embrace of the Enlightenment is hardly defensible in every particular, especially when it comes to race and religion. But the fact that America’s political culture became entwined with Jefferson’s hopes—his belief that, as he put it in one of the final letters he ever wrote, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God”—is inseparable from what this country has meant to the history of the world. To reduce that all to obsessions over sovereignty (and apparently not so much, in Vance’s mind, popular and democratic sovereignty, which is a crucial aspect of self-governance, but rather martial sovereignty, since he seems especially worked up about the fact that “so many young people…say that they would not die for their own country…[or] put on a uniform and sacrifice their lives for our common nation”) is a serious conceptual loss.

Fortunately, the history of America is filled with people who have understood this country’s civic self-conception more accurately than Vice President Vance does. President Abraham Lincoln, for one, who in perhaps his greatest and most influential speech, emphasized that the carnage of the Civil War, and the kind of community those who waged it were motivated by, was one characterized by a simple, singular “proposition”: “that all men are created equal.” But also, how about the political theorist, and refugee from the Holocaust, and naturalized U.S. citizen, Hannah Arendt? There’s isn’t a smidgen of flakey idealism to be found in her writing—and yet, her whole understanding of her adopted country began with her appreciation of the power of the demos to build civic spaces and secure liberty through revolutionary action, action which is not dependent upon some kind of prior security, but upon a spontaneity available to all. There is, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader, devout (however flawed) Christian, and democratic socialist, whose commitment to all three of those collections of moral principles formed the pillars of the “beloved community” that he believed all free people ought to and someday would be able partake of, with Jefferson’s words in the Declaration guiding him towards his refusal “to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” And what about Zohran Mamdani, the likely future Mayor of New York City? On July 4^th, he posted his sentiments: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home.” And Vance—kind of like McCarthy, come to think of it—found that bland statement of liberal patriotism simply horrifying. “There is no gratitude in those words, Vance ranted. “He dares on our 249th anniversary to congratulate [America] by paying homage to its incompleteness and to its, as he calls it, contradictions?....Who the hell does he think that he is?”

Well, for one thing, he appear to think—if only in terms of structure, not substance—pretty much the exact same way Vance himself thinks, if he were only honest or self-reflective enough to notice it, since our Vice President actually ends his own speech saying “we must get to work”—which I think must mean that even he agrees that the work of American citizenship is, well, “unfinished.” But that’s just more puerile rhetoric from angry man, or at least a man who knows his position in the Trump administration and the plaudits he receives from the MAGA base depends upon his performative anger.

A better answer, of course, is that Mamdani, like all good Americans this summer, may not think he’s Superman, but he’s surely been inspired by Malik Ali, the falafel vendor who believes in Superman, jumps into a crater to help him up during his first tangle with the Hammer of Barovia/Ultraman, and then is pointlessly murdered by Lex Luthor while the latter tries to get Superman to tell him the location of his home. Because Superman does have a home, a place—a place of homely, maybe even “bland” liberal republican and Christian virtues, all that not particularly sovereign stuff about doing good and feeling compassion and treating everyone equally and trying again and again, despite all his and our limitations and mistakes. It’s the sort of place that teaches a person to, when offered a falafel by a vendor after saving someone from being hit by a taxi, accept it gratefully.

Did the Kents introduce Superman to falafels while he was growing up? Probably not—probably he came to like them because he’s just another struggling modern person, appreciating the good food and other good works human beings can achieve. There is a substance to this very American, very liberal, very “bland” struggle. It’s a substance I’m happy to admit is in some ways parasitic upon, and therefore must necessarily connect to, all sorts of deeper traditions and values and visions; there’s a reason why I call myself a communitarian and a civic republican and a Christian, after all. But to allow the fact that the Christianity and republicanism and community attachments of modern Americans (like, I think, James Gunn’s Superman) tend to be rather liberal to become a reason to reject their sources entirely is the worst sort of cutting off your nose to spit in your own face. Of course, when you’re talking about a political movement that’s all about reacting against the America that actually exists, not to reform or improve or correct it but rather to just reject its reality, then maybe that kind of cutting and spitting is what passes for respectable thought. It wins awards from the Claremont Institute, apparently.

Seven Theses on Kansas, "Popularism," and Value Them Both

Well, my predictions from yesterday were wrong (mostly; I was still right about Kris Kobach getting the Republican Attorney General nomination). And while the image I used yesterday to reflect the diversity of the No campaign here in Wichita didn't unintentionally predict the final state-wide vote totals (59% voted No, not 75%), the fact is it was a lot closer than I or any other serious political observer here in Kansas that I'm aware of actually believed was possible. So what more is there to say.

Well, a few things, anyway:

1) Let me repeat what I just wrote: nobody I am aware of who as at all seriously engaged in following these campaigns--and I've talked to people at the Kansas Reflector, at Vox, at Newsweek, at ABC News and KAKE News locally, and many more places about all this--was predicting that in an August primary election, in a strongly Republican state, would result in a win for abortion rights by 10 points, much less nearly 20 points. As the very first election to take place anywhere in America after the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the ending of a national constitutional guarantee of at least limited access to abortion services, the size of the Value Them Both amendment's defeat is bound to create a lot of political noise.

2) Political noise...but maybe not immediate political changes. Political parties are mighty beasts, and different factions or interest groups that have put in years of work and money and organizational strategy in shaping their platforms, and thereby socializing and contributing to the further self-sorting of voters who look at those parties and platforms, aren't going to want to see them make an about-face after just one election. Here in Kansas, I would expect that Governor Kelly will express gratitude for the results, and then proceed to run her re-election campaign in with the same wonky focus on Medicaid expansion and other nuts-and-bolts issues that she's always preferred; similarly, I bet that Derek Schmidt will prefer to say as little as possible about the failed amendment, and run the same "Governor Kelly serves the radical left in Washington DC" ads that he's team has no doubt long since prepped, only with references to abortion very much cut back.

3) Why? Because Schmidt will know, as will leaders of the GOP's current super-majority in Topeka, that there is simply no honest way to parse these numbers without acknowledging that there were a good number of Republicans--including at least a small-but-nonetheless-meaningful slice of Kobach-supporting, low-propensity, normally-November-voting-only, self-identifying conservative Republicans!--who voted against the amendment. The majority of the Republicans in Topeka come from safe enough seats not to worry about alienating those Republicans who wandered off the anti-abortion reservation this particular election...but there are at least a few who will worry about them, and Schmidt, who needs to hold on to votes in the same urban counties which Kelly won in 2018, will worry about them as well.

4) So I suspect that the short-term consequences of this vote won't be especially visible. It's the medium-term consequences, the post-November 2022 consequences, which could potentially put some real force behind all the chatter which Value Them Both's defeat is generating. I could be wrong, of course; my track record suggests I probably will be. Maybe the Kansas GOP will immediately throw all their efforts behind voting to unseat state supreme court justices in November, and immediately start talking about taking another shot at amending the constitution, this time grudgingly including language about how the Kansas constitution does guarantee that there cannot be a total, no-exceptions-for-rape-or-incest-or-medical-emergency abortion ban. But I doubt it; rather, I think they're going to want to wait to see how this vote is reflected in other votes nationally, and how the overall abortion discourse continues to evolve.

5) After all, in the meantime there is probably going to be a small, perhaps invisible, but almost certainly nonetheless viscous, fracture within the Kansas GOP to deal with, all while the gubernatorial election is going on. Because there will be Republicans--the small-government, business-oriented, libertarian-inclined, individualistic Republicans from rural Kansas, the pragmatic folks that, before Brownback and Trump would have been considered the backbone of the party--that will have serious questions for why their party essentially out-sourced themselves to Kansas Catholic archdioceses for this election, and why they ended up (by driving all the cultural conservatives to the August voting booth) saddling themselves with a three-time loser like Kris Kobach as their attorney general candidate. That fracture doesn't exist in isolation, of course; the divide between the numerous micro-factions that make up the much-declined (but not extinct) moderate bloc of Republican voters and the even more numerous micro-factions that make up the dominant (but not completely unobstructed) conservative, Trumpist bloc of Republicans, has been a feature of Kansas politics for decades, and this internal fight will be folded into it. Will it push the party towards a new balance? Dion Lefler, who has watched Kansas politics as closely as anyone I know, thinks it might; we need to wait and see.

6) As we wait for the medium- and long-term consequences of a strongly Republican state voting in a way that actually reflects the existing polling data here in the state, as opposed to being led by party allegiance to support the much more extreme positions adopted by minority anti-abortion factions in their parties, to play themselves out, one note about "popularism." While there are many ways to make use of this wonky idea which has emerged among Democratic activists over the past couple of years, the basic idea is that Democrats hurt themselves when they allow their party to become associated with liberal or progressive or radical or socialist ideas that don't poll well, even if their purported consequences are ones voters clamor for. The question, as my old friend Damon Linker posed months ago, is whether the insights of popularism--that is, building campaigns around those ideas which poll well with ordinary voters, keeping the question of whether or not they are truly empowering or "populist" insofar as the interests of ordinary people are concerned as a secondary concern ("normie politics," as Freddie deBoer put it)--apply to Republicans as well. Noting the extreme abortion bans popping up through legislative action throughout the country in the wake of Roe's overturning, Damon wondered if Republicans are "governed by the principle that there are and can be no negative electoral consequences from moving too far to the antiliberal right on cultural issues." If so, then the defeat of Value Them Both might be seen as sign that some Republicans had had enough, or at least were content with what they had (abortion is already quite heavily regulated in Kansas), and didn't want to see the status quo disrupted, even if that meant challenging their own party's priorities in this primary election.

7) Finally, if nothing else, let's enjoy a couple of news cycles where people wonder how on earth an anti-abortion referendum could have lost in Kansas. The context is totally different, but I can’t help, as I look at the incredulity around me, but remember an exchange during the debate over the non-discrimination ordinance adopted here in Wichita by the city council last year. City ordinances to explicitly list and defend the rights of LGBTQ citizens had been pushed by many groups throughout Kansas for years, and Mayor Brandon Whipple made supporting such a priority. It passed by a 6-1 vote, but not before much argument on the council, some of it contentious, and two marathon open city council meetings that went on for hours, with dozens of people showing up to elaborate about how an NDO was an attack on religious freedom. At one of those meetings, a woman showed up and looked at the council (which ultimately, after many delays, voted for the ordinance by 6-1), shook her head, and said, in essence, “this isn’t the Kansas way, this isn’t the Wichita way, I don’t know who you people think you’re representing.” When she saw Mayor Whipple roll his eyes, she zeroed in on him, observing that her grandchildren deserved to grow up in a Christian world, "not Brandon Whipple’s world." I’ve never heard the conviction held by that shrinking-but-still powerful segment of Kansas voters that true “Kansas values” can’t possibly include abortion rights, LGBTQ protections, etc., expressed so pithily. Until today, that is.

Why I have a Pro-Choice Sign in my Front Yard (Even Though I Don't Call Myself That)

[The publication Current asked me to write up my thoughts about abortion; I ended up writing nearly 3000 words. A much, much shortened version of the essay below is available on their website this morning, but if you want to read the full thing, go for it. Cross-posted to By Common Consent.]

That sign is in our front yard, signalling our support for defeating the "Value Them Both" amendment on the ballot here in Kansas this August. If the amendment referendum succeeds, it would overturn a state supreme court decision which determined that the Kansas state constitution guarantees at least minimal abortion rights to Kansas women, thus allowing Kansans opposed to abortion rights to follow our neighboring states of Oklahoma and Missouri and push for a total abortion ban. The sign thus betokens a "pro-choice" position, even though I've never called myself that and think the language of individual "choice" when it comes to abortion is part of the whole problem. So why am I, some who was raised in a politically conservative (but not, as I later came to see, particularly ideological) Mormon home and thoroughly absorbed the repugnance of abortion which was communicated to me, taking this position all these years later? Well, that's a story, mostly having to do with what my wife and four daughters have taught me along the way.

When I say "repugnance," I really mean it. While my parents were never activists and anti-abortion literature didn't litter our home, the moral and even visual revulsion to the practice of abortion was invoked anytime the topic came up (which, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the death-rattle years of the Equal Rights Amendment--my church having played a major role in sealing its fate--was not infrequently). I can still call up in my memory a feverish image that somehow made its way into my brain when I was still a child: that of an abortion doctor plunging a huge butcher knife into a woman’s vagina, murdering the child in her womb. (I should note that the fact that some zealous opponents of abortion rights might point to procedures used in incredibly rare late-term abortions to insist upon the basic accuracy of that nightmarish image from decades ago has no effect on my thinking today; what I find most repugnant in 2022 is very different than it once was.)

Was it all just moral revulsion and distaste? No, there was some actual doctrine taught as well (emphasis on "some"). Mormon leaders over the decades have made multiple, if not numerous, statements regarding abortion, with some stipulating that “life begins when two germ cells unite to become one cell, bringing together twenty-three chromosomes from both the father and from the mother”--which would seem to suggest that Mormon doctrine teaches that life begins at the creation of human zygote--and others stipulating that a woman’s “right to choose what will or will not happen to her body” is fundamentally limited if “she behaves in such a way that a human fetus is conceived”--which would seem to suggest, in light of the previous declaration, that any sexual activity which results in the creation of a cell-multiplying zygote entails a mother’s complete responsibility to preserve that cell-multiplying life. In practice, however, none of these teachings were ever politically deployed throughout Mormonism in a theologically rigorous or ecclesiastically consistent way (which is not to say there haven’t been attempts to do so). In general though, the unarticulated presumption seems to have been (and still seems to be) that stating officially that “elective abortion for personal or social convenience is contrary to the will and the commandments of God” is sufficient, with no further elaboration or explanation regarding public matters being necessary. Repugnance at the idea of extinguishing “a cherished newborn baby,” complete with “beautiful eyes” and “little fingers” was perhaps assumed to do the rest.

It certainly did for me, for many years. The change in my opinions didn’t come at once, my movement away from being “pro-life” (a phrase I don’t remember particularly liking even in my most ardent phases) was a long process. Well into my 30s and 40s, articulating a set of reasons that could make sense of my youthful revulsion--even as I grew into a fuller understanding of the deep complexities of human sexuality, science, and sociality—remained hugely important to me, thus leading me blog about abortion and related topics repeatedly, in perhaps some increasingly strained ways.

During these years, for reasons that are probably similar to those of nearly every person who comes to think differently about the faith of their youth as they grow older, I became more and more doubtful that the statements of Mormon leaders, when not explicitly grounded in the scriptural canon, were necessarily the word of God and thus normative. For related reasons over the same time span, I came to recognize the scriptures as exceptionally complicated and thus not well-served by the proof-texts, just-so-stories, and tidy logical conclusions so unfortunately common in Mormondom (and pretty much every other Christian domination as well, to be fair), especially in regards to complicated claims regarding the pre-natal beginnings of meaningful life. And finally, officially non-Mormon (though unofficially, many conservative Mormon leaders and thinkers had been borrowing them for years) anti-abortion arguments, such as those dependent upon a religious invocation of natural law, became increasingly implausible to me; for example, I found the teleological demand to view a human zygote which may or may not implant itself in a woman’s uterine wall as equal in every way to a newborn baby simply unpersuasive, philosophically speaking. So what coherent articulation of anti-abortion belief did that leave me with, if I wasn’t to simply dismiss my original revulsions and intuitions as bankrupt, but neither found them well served by the simplistic affirmations of my leaders or many other anti-abortion thinkers? Well, one grounded in my long-standing contempt for philosophical individualism and capitalist commodification. Abortion, I came to believe, was a moral evil not primarily because of its harm to human lives (since 99% of abortions in the United States take place months before the life of the fetus in question stops being a matter of mere scientific principle and instead becomes an actionable reality), but rather because it was rooted in a socially harmful, choice-centric sense of disposability: a disconnect from both the anthropological fact and the civic ideal that our social relationships form a connection (as Edmund Burke said) between the living and the dead and the not yet born. Stanley Hauerwas’s essay “Abortion, Theologically Understood,” though I do not agree with all of it, made this point better than I ever could:

If you want to know who is destroying the babies of this country through abortion, look at privatization, which is learned in the economic arena. Under the veil of American privatization, we are encouraging people to believe in the same way that Andrew Carnegie believed. He thought that he had a right to his steel mills. In the same sense, people think that they have a right to their bodies. The body is then a piece of property in a capitalist sense. Unfortunately, that is antithetical to the way we Christians think that we have to share as members of the same body of Christ. So, you cannot separate these issues. If you think that you can be very concerned about abortion and not concerned about the privatization of American life generally, you are making a mistake.

I look today at the 15-year-old essay where I quoted Hauerwas, and I think the perspective it articulated (a perspective I tend to call “left conservative”) remains mostly sound. And yet I want to take much of it back nonetheless, because the animating force behind it—the admittedly simplistic yet still meaningful repugnance I felt when I first learned what abortion meant—has become deeply entwined other, more complicated and, I think, more mature intuitions. I’m particularly bothered by the way, in 2007, when our oldest daughter wasn’t yet 10 years old, I could write that those who defend abortion rights as necessary to the sexual freedom essential to individual personhood, who think it a matter of right to “enjoy sex without their futures or thoughts or relationships being messed up by any communitarian crap in any way, clearly have only ever had sex on the starship Enterprise's Holodeck.” I see the point I was trying to make in those passages, but still, that’s a sentence that could have only been written by a man woefully uninformed about the complications of sexual identity and expression, especially as experienced by women, one of whom he was married to and four of whom he was raising to adulthood. I hope I’ve repented of that presumption.

To be very plain: I now realize that to accept, even just implicitly, the notion that insofar as abortion is concerned there are only two types of pregnancies--those which result from violence, in which case abortion ought to be guaranteed to the violated woman, and those which didn’t result from violence, in which case abortion ought to be treated a perilous choice that needs to be weighed against principles of social responsibility and connection and regulated by the state accordingly--is really stupid, even if a coherent point can be found within it. Why is it really stupid? Because it’s a binary, and binaries practically always fail. Maybe that 16-year-old teen-ager’s, or that divorced woman’s, or that 42-year-old mother’s, sexual decisions were made entirely without violence. But were they made entirely without social pressure? Without religious expectations? Without bad information? Without forced compromises? Without conflicting socio-economic and cultural demands? As I’ve grown older, and watched my daughters grow and move into adulthood, and watched as my wife and I have moved into middle-age, the pressing and often painful complexities of marriage, sex, love, risk, desire, and children, the confusions and justifications and fears which attend all of them (as well as, of course, the many joys and surprises they bring), have simply become enormous to me. Add to that concerns about money, concerns about extended family, concerns about health (both mental and physical), and maybe most importantly, concerns about all the innumerable little assumptions and (mis)understandings amidst the ones we love which we navigate day after day after day. The result of all this is a heaviness—the same sort of heaviness I can remember feeling when I held our firstborn daughter, and felt the enormity which my wife and I had taken responsibility for.

Does that responsibility carry any kind of moral obligation to it? Of course it does! But that obligation cannot be extricated from all the other obligations that come with the complex existences we are all heirs to. Eventually, there came a point when I realized that the repugnance I feel at abortion is more than matched by my repugnance at the prospect that someone with the power of the state (and here I remember Elizabeth Bruenig’s sharp observation from several years ago: “penalty seems to be the only way those operating under the ‘pro-life’ banner feel comfortable expressing their commitment to life”) could approach any woman who has come to a moment of heavy decision-making regarding abortion in the midst of all of the above, looked her in the eye, and say: sorry, but we’ve decided that this choice should not be available to you.

So my intuitive sense of the wrongness of abortion hasn’t changed; that repugnance is still there, and it still guides my thinking. But it is no longer a solitary or supreme guide; there are too many other potential harms, manifest in too many other ways, for me to accept any longer that a pregnancy, insofar as the responsibility to the potential life which it may result in is concerned, is always of only two possible sorts. Between violent rape at one end, and mere (though is it ever actually “mere”?) convenience at the other, there is an immense amount of very murky road. Do my critical views about that individualistic, privatized, choice-centric mentality which treat all the connections in our lives as disposable still matter? Absolutely they do. But mostly today, they lead to me focus ever more on the response that millions of women have screamed, and continue to scream, at anti-abortion politicians who insist upon inserting their concerns into an enormously difficult and private decision, but whose concerns lead them to do exactly nothing in terms of compassionately responding to the enormous weight that women as human beings who can become pregnant and give birth experience every single day of their lives. What about supporting those connections? What about health care? What about maternal leave? What about reproductive assistance generally? What about educational and social and care-giving support? (Carolyn Homer’s list of what the “pro-life” label ought to include is an excellent rundown.) Again, while I do not agree with every implication of her language, the Catholic writer Leah Libresco Sargeant’s comments in The New York Times last week speak truthfully, I think:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg….made the case that abortion is really the price of admission to society we demand of women. And I think she's factually right. That's what we ask of women. We don't support women when they're pregnant, even with wanted pregnancies. We don't support parents nationwide. We place heavy burdens on parents who are most vulnerable. TANF, which is support for needy families, has been hollowed out. The child allowance didn't make it to parents who were the poorest. So it's true, you can look around and say, our culture has no room for the vulnerable. It doesn't have room for babies who are vulnerable, and it doesn't have room for women who are vulnerable. So abortion is a crutch that lets us navigate that hatred of dependence that's pervasive in our culture.

And now, millions of people who have worked very hard for decades on behalf of a simplistic defense of the unborn have kicked away that crutch. Bad decision, I say; very bad, all the way down.

Which is why, here at the end (for now, anyway) of this ongoing argument I've been with myself (and others) for years, we have the aforementioned sign in our front yard. The argument over abortion in the U.S., thanks to Roe v. Wade, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, and other Supreme Court cases, has for a half-century been utterly entwined with—and often served as a proxy for—debates over judicial power and the meaning of democracy. I have strong opinions about both of those debates, both nationally and in the context of our state constitution, and given that I have a profound distaste for undemocratically allowing unelected judges to make policy for the people, one might wonder why, all arguments over abortion aside, I don’t see Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health as a good decision, or Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt (which articulated a very broad—much too broad, I think, especially given how many Republican politicians hypocritically misused it to justify opposition to vaccination policies during the pandemic—right to “bodily integrity” and thus abortion here in Kansas) as a bad one. The answer, of course, in line with everything I’ve written thus far, is that nothing happens without a surrounding context which weighs upon one’s choices.

I’ll freely admit that if Dobbs really does turn out, in the years to come, to have been just the first step in the expression of the Supreme Court’s determination to no longer involve itself in not just abortion legislation, but voter rights legislation, gerrymandering legislation, health care legislation, gun control legislation, etc., the time may come when I'll eat crow and call this a good decision, at least constitutionally speaking, because the ending of undemocratic judicial rule over the people's elected representatives will turn out to have been a very, very good thing. However, given that the Supreme Court involved itself in New York's century-old and widely supported gun laws literally just the day before Dobbs was handed down, I see no reason to believe the Court is suddenly turning away from screwing with democratically determined legislation. Rather, I conclude—as I think any remotely well-informed observer also must—that the Republican majority on the Court has, with Dobbs, achieved a long-standing and carefully developed (and financially well-supported) political aim, nothing more. That is an aim that will hurt women whose lives I want to make easier; preserving Hodes here in Kansas is, I think, not nearly as much a perhaps unavoidable concession to the individualistic, choice-centric assumptions of our current social order as it is an embrace of showing mutualist support to women who, in the absence of a radical change in the direction of solidarity and equality our economy and culture, are now facing potentially grave harms in their navigation of the heavy choices of family and health and life. (Also, please note that, despite claims to the contrary, Hodes has not “radically changed and expanded the landscape of abortion in Kansas,” unless you think that “landscape” is defined entirely by the ability to the state to be able to ban one particular rare second-trimester abortion procedure or impose prohibitively burdensome abortion clinic requirements; moreover, keep in mind that does the “Value Them Both” amendment really doesn’t appear to do anything of specific value for women’s choices at all anyway). Thus I say, to any Kansan who reads this: vote on no on August 2, please!

Abortion is, I believe, often (if not always and in every way) an evil. I also believe there are lots of evils in this world, some actual and some potential. Telling a pregnant person who might have to tragically confront--in all their diverse physical and economic and familial and occupational and religious and mental situations--a hideously difficult route through all these diverse evils (both real and potential) that they no longer have, and never should have had, a political or legal promise that one particular route will be available to them, no matter what their circumstances or what the science of what’s going on (or not yet going on, or no longer going on) inside their bodies at any point along their pregnancy, is simply repugnant to me. So yes, I changed my mind since I was a boy. If I was able to do so regarding same-sex marriage, I can do it regarding the necessity of abortion rights too.