Christmas Trees, Christendom and our Public Life
David Bisgrove recently retired after 25 years at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC, the last 14 as Lead Pastor of Redeemer West Side.
The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. It’s snowing, the boy said. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.
Cormac McCarthy, “The Road”
“Does the Center Hold?” This was the only question on one of my first seminary final exams. I remember the sensation of panic rising in me as I struggled to synthesize a semester worth of reading into a coherent answer. Today that same panic is rising in our country as we collectively struggle for civic coherence in an increasingly fractious culture. We seem trapped in Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus,” “filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither”.
This “condition” is in part due to the loss of a shared moral vocabulary that transcends our differences. For example Mark Lilla argues that we no longer have a common ‘catechism’ that envisions a common good. The founders understood that without this catechism democracies are subject to entropy resulting, in the words of John Adams, in a country that would be “the most miserable Habitation in the World.” Why?
“Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge….would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
A metaphor for this moment is an image I encounter each January on the cold sidewalks of Manhattan, one of discarded Christmas trees with broken ornaments hanging from brittle branches. Just weeks earlier those trees adorned apartments with twinkling lights and the aroma of pine. Yet the lights and ornaments masked that the trees were dying, cut off from their roots somewhere north of the border. For several generations America has masked its cultural entropy with the bright lights and shining ornaments of post-war economic growth fueled most recently by a stunning evolution of technology. But the public health, racial, and political crises of the last few years exposed a culture cut off from its roots, having burned the last fuel of Christendom’s values, leaving us with the toxic fumes of cynicism, nostalgia, and grievance.
I am not arguing in this essay that the antidote to our polarized public life requires conversion to Christianity, nor does it represent nostalgia for a past mythical iteration of our republic. But as a Pastor who has spent his adult life unpacking the cultural relevance of the biblical narrative for residents of Manhattan, I am convinced Scripture contains resources that can strengthen the cords of our Constitution. And what we are really cut off from, what we long for, is not the creeds of Christendom but what C.S. Lewis identified as Christianity’s unique contribution to world religions, grace.
Grace is loving kindness shown to someone who deserves the opposite. Grace is the bishop in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables giving Jean Valjean, who stole the bishop’s jewels and had been arrested, the rest of his silver. This act of grace assaulted Valjean’s conscience, leaving him in a state of speechless awe. The rest of Hugo’s novel is an outworking of how that moment of grace transformed Valjean’s life from an embittered thief to a compassionate citizen contributing to the common good. This is the power of grace. Christians have long believed that simple human existence is a grace given to us, as are the material things that support our lives. The Apostle Paul wrote that God causes the rain to fall on all people. Christians also know, of course, that this grace comes to us from a God who delights to give good things to the undeserving, who holds back nothing, giving even himself to us when we could not rescue ourselves.
The key to unleashing this power begins with an anthropology mirrored in Valjean’s antagonist Javert, brilliantly depicted by Hugo as a man riddled with pride, self-righteousness and insecurity. In other words, any cultural catechism rooted in the transformative power of grace must have as its starting point what Phillip Roth identifies as the human stain.
“(The human stain) is in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark…that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding.”
The Greeks understood the danger of the stain of hubris long before Hugo put pen to paper, arguing pride “destroys the cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom that buttressed the political order and made the good life possible.” Pride cuts us off from the taproot of grace because it blinds us to our finitude, frailty, and folly. Or as I would frequently tell my fellow New Yorkers from the pulpit, “Cheer up! You’re far worse than you think!” The good news of grace starts with admitting our inability to rid ourselves of our stain, just as the good news of AA begins with admitting powerlessness over alcohol. This posture of humility clears the way for grace to strengthen the cords of our democracy, in particular by enabling compromise, promoting justice, and infusing hope.
The genius of the separation of powers assumes a co-dependency borne of humility resulting in consensus and compromise. Congress’ current paralysis driven largely by ideological rigidity fuels cynicism and apathy in the very citizens the institution is designed to serve. But that rigidity is ubiquitous in our public life. Families and friendships have fractured as political disagreements are no longer viewed as differences in the marketplace of ideas, but evil utterances from a depraved soul.
This way of thinking locks us into panic rooms of ideological purity, enflaming our hubris (we are on the right side of history) while degrading courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom necessary for consensus. But grace in the form of humility allows us to receive wisdom from those with whom we might otherwise disagree opening the door to compromise and mutual understanding. Alan Jacobs writes: “There can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than among those who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity.” The fruit of this disposition of humble co-dependency would be less line drawing and more bridge building.
Secondly, grace leads to justice. Marilynne Robinson argues that cosmology can’t be reduced to neuroscience. There is an “anthropology of soul” such that statements like “God so loved the world…Love one another as I have loved you…are intelligible to us because we…participate in this (divine and given) attribute.” In other words, despite our vast personal, cultural, and political differences we not only share a human stain, but a given nature that includes a shared longing for justice. The cultural and political implications of this givenness is what the Founders described as the self-evident nature of individual dignity and unalienable rights of every human. Each person is endowed with sacred dignity and worth, and therefore our mutual obligation in light of this grace is to steward our collective lives such that everyone has the right to their own “vine and fig tree”, free of oppression and exploitation.
Grace also catalyzes justice by reminding us that we have all benefited from the givenness of life far beyond what we have earned or deserve. Christians have long understood that the logic behind God’s call to his followers to care for the aliens and strangers among them (to do justice) is because they too were one time aliens and strangers, lost like Valjean. “The logic is clear'', wrote Tim Keller, “if a person has grasped the meaning of God’s grace in his heart, he will do justice.”
Finally, grace leads to hope, without which cynicism and indifference become the whale going through the net of our public life. Andrew Delbanco argues that “the heart of any culture is its hope…if we are to keep at bay the dim back-of-the-mind suspicion that we are adrift in an absurd world.” What role does grace play in overcoming this ‘back-of-the-mind’ suspicion? Simply this. There is no forgiveness without grace, and there is no hope (personal or societal) without forgiveness.
Hannah Arendt wrote: “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done (our past), our capacity to act would be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever (our future). If we continually deny people the opportunity to have an identity apart from their punish-identity - there’s no hope of reconciliation - their identity is their failure”. Nihilism is a view of the world that has lost hope in forgiveness leaving only bitterness, apathy and despair.
But grace applied in the form of forgiveness breaks the chain reaction of punishment and allows us to have a vision for reconciled relationships with those who have hurt us, or who we might otherwise ‘cancel.’ Grace allows us to see our neighbors as fellow pilgrims who, like ourselves, are a combination of dust and glory in search of the good life. Eugene Peterson reflecting on the saying that “love is blind” wrote: “It is hate that is blind. Love opens eyes. Love enables the eyes to see what has been there all along but was overlooked in haste or indifference.” This is why Jesus equated hatred with murder, for hatred is the first step to dehumanizing our neighbor, the ultimate fruit of which is murder.
So a cultivation of grace in our personal and public life can yield consensus (through humility), justice (through gratitude) and hope (through forgiveness). What might the application of grace look like? It is beyond the scope of this essay to offer detailed solutions, but let me offer two practical steps that degrade pride and elevate grace.
First, cultivate gratitude. When my daughters were toddlers I never had to teach them to say “Mine!”, but was forever reminding them to say “Thank you!” One example of cultivating gratitude comes from the Jewish celebration of Passover which begins with a Seder meal that includes the Dayenu, which means “it would have been enough”. For example, one recitation is that it would have been enough if God had rescued them from slavery and never brought them to the promised land. Gratitude turns “what we have” into enough and thereby opens our clenched fists and hearts in loving kindness to our neighbors.
Which leads to the second step. Love locally. National politics are important. But overly focusing on the national scene can leave us paralyzed with discouragement. Transitioning our energy to our local community is a practical way to do our part in keeping the cords of our shared life strong. Where I live I get a weekly email describing events and opportunities to serve our community, from food distribution to visiting the elderly. This kind of proximity humanizes us and our neighbor, and reminds us that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” So cultivate gratitude and love locally.
Let me conclude this way. In a biography of Jesus written by his friend and follower John, we find Jesus sharing a Passover meal with those who would become the founding citizens of his new society through which Jesus promised the good life. Jesus implores those sitting around the table to stay rooted in his teaching, describing himself as a vine and his followers as the branches. Otherwise they would become fruitless and brittle, like Christmas trees on the sidewalks of NYC in January. Jesus understood, like John Adams, that citizenship meant more than being able to recite our shared virtues, but living them. Not out of some puritanical impulse to be good, but as fellow citizens whose lives have been changed and now fueled by grace. Jesus put it this way: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Christians are to identify with Valjean, recipients of divine pardon by the ultimate Priest who paid a cost much more valuable than silver. Jesus identifies this grace as love and urges his followers to replicate it in their lives. This is what will hold the center of our public life. This is amazing grace.
1 Camus, Albert “A Quote from the Myth of Sisyphus.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9864429
2 Lilla argues that for two generations “America has been without a political vision of its destiny. There is no conservative one, there is no liberal one. There are just two tired individualistic ideologies intrinsically incapable of discerning the common good.” Lilla, Mark. 2018. The Once and Future Liberal : After Identity Politics. New York, Ny: Harper. 99
3 Adams, John. 2019. “Founders Online: From John Adams to Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798.” Archives.gov. 2019. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102.
4 Tom Holland argues that at a time of “seismic geopolitical realignment, when our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as some of us had assumed” it is important to understand that to “live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.” Holland, Tom. 2020. DOMINION: The Making of the Western Mind. S.L.: Abacus. 12-13
5 Roth, Philip. 2001. The Human Stain. New York, N.Y.: Harper Collins. Kindle Edition. 242
6 Dyson, Michael Eric. Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins (New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities) Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 14-15
7 Jacobs, Alan. 2017. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. New York: Currency, An Imprint Of The Crown Publishing Group, A Division Of Penguin Random House Llc. 69
8 Robinson, Marilynne. 2016. The Givenness of Things: Essays. London Virago. 80
9 “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid,
for the Lord Almighty has spoken.” Micah 4:4 NIV
10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 1 Peter 2:10 NIV
11 Keller, Timothy. 2016. Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Penguin Books. 93
12 Delbanco, Andrew. 1999. Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization; 1998). Harvard University Press. 2
13 Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. 237 (Emphasis mine)
14 Peterson, Eugene H. Where Your Treasure Is: Psalms that Summon You from Self to Community Kindle Edition.
15 Matthew 5:21-22 NIV
16 Stevenson, Bryan. 2019. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: One World. 15
17 I have come that (you) may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10 NIV
18 If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. John 15:6 NIV
