The problem with identity politics and white nationalism is that they're flip sides of the same coin. When you reduce mainstream politics to the
attempt to establish and represent your identity, you invite racists/white nationalists into mainstream politics. The language of identity is as appropriate for
the alt-right as it is for oppressed minorities. They can snag a
victim-narrative, a label, and a t-shirt as much as anyone else. The white nationalists -- who've been ever so vocal in the most recent landscape of American politics -- want nothing that the #blacklivesmatter folks don't want. In fact, the alt-right folks are fond of describing their platform as "identity politics for white people".
Over the past 20 years, since I first encountered the insidious alt-right philosophy, I've noticed their trend to refute labels that end in describing them as "white supremacists". Instead, they're "nationalist" or "traditionalist" or, more recently, "identitarian". They want to bring about what their philosophers call "a white ethno-state", a place where the population is determined by heritability. In a willful and knowing inversion of the social justice tradition's vocabulary, they describe it as a "safe place for Europeans".
The fact that they're here, and they're here to stay -- apparently -- means it's time for Christians to develop a theological vocabulary that bases politics on our Christology, not on the universal framework from the Enlightenment. It would be a political version of the scandal of particularity that finds its home in the narratives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- but most importantly in Jesus.
The boldness of the biblical tradition has been to claim a universality in the place of identity politics -- or, more accurately, identity theologies.
The Jews and the early Christians inhabited a world in the midst of various, and usually hostile, cultures. Each worshiped their own particular god. Chemosh was the god of Moab, Milcom the god of the Ammonites, Qaus the god of the Edomites, and Yahweh was the God of the Israelites. The gods united their people into a nation and secured them in their identity. No one culture denied the existence of the others' god -- they simply saw them as warring powers.
But it was the Jewish insistence about Yahweh that ended up being earth-shattering: "I am the LORD; there is no other God" (Isaiah 45.5). That claim destroys all the localizing theologies and the politics which express them. Every nationalistic claim is relativized in the face of that simple claim. Every nationalistic claim.
Sure, the Jews were notorious backsliders, even by their own narratives, worshiping other gods from time to time, and finding themselves envying the theological constructs of the politics that embody those divinities (1 Samuel 8, anyone?), but that only meant the prophets would come along and drive home this point: Yahweh is the God of everyone. The rest are false gods, divine nobodies: "For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the LORD made the heavens" (Psalm 96).
But once you've made that theological claim, any claim to being "special" gets busted wide open. The vision of the One God, Father and Creator of all, implies a worldwide solidarity that overturns the nation-state, with its local, limited god. It is this legacy that the Christian Church claims to continue to embody. The goal of Christianity is to bring this glimmer of universality to its full brightness in the form of the Church -- a brotherhood and a body in which "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3.28).
I think identity politics is really nothing more than this repackaged polytheism -- with a belief in the modern nation-state as the fundamental faith. Nationalism is the new false god. And its embodiment is identity politics.
We are organized into "nations" in close proximity with other nations through our identities: The black nation, the rural nation, the "Christian nation", the transgender nation, the female nation, and so on. These identities verge on the mystical. They never take on earthly existence as actual communities of people. They never encompass reality -- there's always some poor, actual transgender person who isn't allowed into the identity politic, some person, as Judith Butler insists, who is never quite "woman".
Our "identities", then, remain within ideal spheres, where they secure us against the threat of other identities. They are gods, no doubt about it. This nationalism doesn't seem offensive because our new gods defend oppressed minorities. Every new nation is made up of a people involved in a struggle for emancipation. But there is no value-check on identity politics anymore than there were value-checks on the gods of the Mesopotamian basin. There is no reason why the insane, the evil, the greedy and the power-hungry cannot create a victim-narrative, establish an identity, design a flag, and demand a safe space.
It's been true at least since the arrival of modern nation-state politics in the Enlightenment. Which is why this isn't something new. We've seen this before, in countless places. Sure, most people most obviously remember Nazi Germany, but the Nazis didn't create it, nor did it end with them. Americans have been doing this kind of polytheism for a long, long time.
That's why the panic over identity politics here and now, in the post-2016 election era, is tragic, but it doesn't express something with which Christians -- at least those of us who follow Jesus -- have been uncomfortable for a long, long time. It's not new. We've done it before. And we're doing it again.
In the end, Jesus is the (only?) best defense against identity politics. The way to fight Nazism, lots of Germans realized, is with Jewish particularity. We need a theological politic that is able to claim all the polytheistic, tribal gods dead. Duds that have no power, precisely because they're so limited.
With a vision of God over all -- with a universal theological vision -- everything else is just a faint copy.
This would inaugurate the possibility of a nation of all, founded, not in their identities, but in principles and goods held in common. Because it has the staying power of something rather specific -- not something so vague as to be, well, vacuous.
Over the past 20 years, since I first encountered the insidious alt-right philosophy, I've noticed their trend to refute labels that end in describing them as "white supremacists". Instead, they're "nationalist" or "traditionalist" or, more recently, "identitarian". They want to bring about what their philosophers call "a white ethno-state", a place where the population is determined by heritability. In a willful and knowing inversion of the social justice tradition's vocabulary, they describe it as a "safe place for Europeans".
The fact that they're here, and they're here to stay -- apparently -- means it's time for Christians to develop a theological vocabulary that bases politics on our Christology, not on the universal framework from the Enlightenment. It would be a political version of the scandal of particularity that finds its home in the narratives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- but most importantly in Jesus.
The boldness of the biblical tradition has been to claim a universality in the place of identity politics -- or, more accurately, identity theologies.
The Jews and the early Christians inhabited a world in the midst of various, and usually hostile, cultures. Each worshiped their own particular god. Chemosh was the god of Moab, Milcom the god of the Ammonites, Qaus the god of the Edomites, and Yahweh was the God of the Israelites. The gods united their people into a nation and secured them in their identity. No one culture denied the existence of the others' god -- they simply saw them as warring powers.
But it was the Jewish insistence about Yahweh that ended up being earth-shattering: "I am the LORD; there is no other God" (Isaiah 45.5). That claim destroys all the localizing theologies and the politics which express them. Every nationalistic claim is relativized in the face of that simple claim. Every nationalistic claim.
Sure, the Jews were notorious backsliders, even by their own narratives, worshiping other gods from time to time, and finding themselves envying the theological constructs of the politics that embody those divinities (1 Samuel 8, anyone?), but that only meant the prophets would come along and drive home this point: Yahweh is the God of everyone. The rest are false gods, divine nobodies: "For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the LORD made the heavens" (Psalm 96).
But once you've made that theological claim, any claim to being "special" gets busted wide open. The vision of the One God, Father and Creator of all, implies a worldwide solidarity that overturns the nation-state, with its local, limited god. It is this legacy that the Christian Church claims to continue to embody. The goal of Christianity is to bring this glimmer of universality to its full brightness in the form of the Church -- a brotherhood and a body in which "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3.28).
I think identity politics is really nothing more than this repackaged polytheism -- with a belief in the modern nation-state as the fundamental faith. Nationalism is the new false god. And its embodiment is identity politics.
We are organized into "nations" in close proximity with other nations through our identities: The black nation, the rural nation, the "Christian nation", the transgender nation, the female nation, and so on. These identities verge on the mystical. They never take on earthly existence as actual communities of people. They never encompass reality -- there's always some poor, actual transgender person who isn't allowed into the identity politic, some person, as Judith Butler insists, who is never quite "woman".
Our "identities", then, remain within ideal spheres, where they secure us against the threat of other identities. They are gods, no doubt about it. This nationalism doesn't seem offensive because our new gods defend oppressed minorities. Every new nation is made up of a people involved in a struggle for emancipation. But there is no value-check on identity politics anymore than there were value-checks on the gods of the Mesopotamian basin. There is no reason why the insane, the evil, the greedy and the power-hungry cannot create a victim-narrative, establish an identity, design a flag, and demand a safe space.
It's been true at least since the arrival of modern nation-state politics in the Enlightenment. Which is why this isn't something new. We've seen this before, in countless places. Sure, most people most obviously remember Nazi Germany, but the Nazis didn't create it, nor did it end with them. Americans have been doing this kind of polytheism for a long, long time.
That's why the panic over identity politics here and now, in the post-2016 election era, is tragic, but it doesn't express something with which Christians -- at least those of us who follow Jesus -- have been uncomfortable for a long, long time. It's not new. We've done it before. And we're doing it again.
In the end, Jesus is the (only?) best defense against identity politics. The way to fight Nazism, lots of Germans realized, is with Jewish particularity. We need a theological politic that is able to claim all the polytheistic, tribal gods dead. Duds that have no power, precisely because they're so limited.
With a vision of God over all -- with a universal theological vision -- everything else is just a faint copy.
This would inaugurate the possibility of a nation of all, founded, not in their identities, but in principles and goods held in common. Because it has the staying power of something rather specific -- not something so vague as to be, well, vacuous.