Religion and Emersonian Decadence in American Politics

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.

Political talk is increasingly incendiary. Threats of violence against lawmakers in both parties are on the rise; political epithets like “fascist” and “criminal” fly free. American politics has always been entangled with religion. The breakdowns in American political discourse we’re seeing in the runup to November’s presidential election are entangled with religion, too, just not the religion we assume is usually in play.

Ronald Reagan’s courtship of the so-called Moral Majority in the 1980s established evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics as emblematic of American Religion’s political involvement. “Religion,” under this guise, is invariably Christian, and usually conservative and white. That assumption was troubled by Donald Trump, however, when white, conservative Christians voted for Trump in record numbers in 2016. Why, flummoxed pundits and politicos wondered, would these Christians so support a candidate who flaunts most of the cultural values their faith communities have customarily espoused, even enshrined?

The consensus answer seems to be: An emphasis on religious pluralism under the Obama Administration, coupled with liberal victories like the Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage, led many Christians to shelve their traditional values and hitch their wagon to Trump’s star. On this interpretation, Christian nationalism’s recent rise coincides with conservatives’ anxieties over religious diversity and the diminishing access to power it portends.

While this interpretation seems plausible on its face, my research focuses on an alternative explanation as to the character of religion’s hand in contemporary American politics. I’m interested, specifically, in the role of an alternative tradition of religious reasoning, one that historically has been in tension with conservative Christianity but perhaps better accounts for the rift in public discourse that characterizes our current political moment.

The alternative tradition to which I’m referring is Emersonianism. I’m far from the first to note its outsized role in American politics. The late literary critic Harold Bloom did so most famously. In renowned works like Nature and his Divinity School Address, the nineteenth-century Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bloom says, articulated a profoundly influential vision of American religiosity that prioritized intuitive knowledge over institutionally sanctioned forms of belief, solitude over community, freedom over constraint.

Emerson’s emphasis on freedom is key. “The American finds God in herself or himself,” Bloom explains, “only after finding the freedom to know God by experiencing a total inward solitude.” Humanity’s “being is without bound,” according to Emerson. The divine’s voice might be heard by anyone who has ears to hear, if only they listen for the way it sounds inside themselves. “Why should not we enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Emerson famously inquired. Neither tradition nor institutions nor practical habit need intervene on that most revered of American religious values: the self’s unmediated confrontation with the divine.

The emphasis Emersonianism places on individual conscience and experimentality makes it well-suited to democratic politics. An aversion to custom and political conformity is indispensable to the pursuit of social justice, for instance. Yet my research this year at the CSWR

examines the distinctly negative valence of Emersonianism’s political emphases, which create problems for democratic polity. This is evident in the politics of environmentalists, say, who, on the strength of their intuitive connection to nature, claim authority to speak to how nature really is, to what nature really wants.

Emersonianism inspires similar problems in the current breakdown of American political discourse. Take Donald Trump’s habit of attributing the authority for his claims to vague sources of knowledge. “A lot of people are saying…” he often begins his assertions when he addresses followers at his rallies. “A lot of people tell me…” and “What I’ve heard is…” are species of the same. Just what “people” is he referencing? And where, and to whom, are they speaking?

More than merely a verbal tic, Trump’s rhetoric betrays the problematic side of the Emersonian religious heritage. While an aversion to custom such as what Emersonianism prescribes encourages the expression of individual genius, if that genius is not somehow held in check, not somehow chastened, by standing communal norms, then the individual’s own blind spots, biases, even bigotries will masquerade as truth. Trump’s practice to ground his intuitions in the sayings and doings of anonymous others—the “people” purported to authorize his assertions—shields his claims from the processes of contestation under which all assertions are (or should be) subject in a healthy democracy.

Any religious tradition can affect decadent forms of practice. We must remain vigilant of the ways religion’s excesses negatively impact our pursuit of political unity amid our diverse cultural contexts and identities. For all political claims are subject to challenge by public calls for justification. Such calls are democracy’s lifeblood. With November’s presidential election approaching, our commitment to mending the rifts in our political discourse so to hold each other accountable is of the highest order.