Revolution in AmericaAn essentially theological problem requires a theological solution.
Colin Dueck
Jan 23, 2023
American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, Joshua Mitchell, Encounter Books, 312 pages.
It has been almost three years since a political-cultural revolution swept through the commanding heights of American life, including but not limited to institutions of higher education. Of course, this revolution, which some call “wokeness,” was a long time coming and is still playing out all around us. The most compelling book-length analysis of the phenomenon continues to be American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, by Professor Joshua Mitchell, a respected scholar of political theory at Georgetown University.
American Awakening was published in the midst of this upheaval, in 2020. Since Mitchell completed writing his manuscript in May of that year, he did not initially have a chance to reflect on the full extent of the ongoing revolution. In that respect his book resembled Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, even more convincing as prophecy than as contemporary assessment. Like Burke two hundred and thirty years earlier, Mitchell in the spring of 2020 hadn’t seen the worst of it yet. Thus, I was happy to see the book re-released in a fresh edition a few weeks ago with an extensive new preface updating its central argument in light of the last few years. Reading it, I was not disappointed.
Mitchell’s core thesis is that elite observers across the ideological spectrum usually misunderstand the profound appeal of left-wing identity politics, along with its grave dangers, because they have little feeling for religion and its substitutes. Christianity, especially in its 16th-century Reformed Protestant version, posited that all human beings are sinful without exception, but that the stain of this transgression can be removed through Christ. As Paul says in the Epistle to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
By contrast, Mitchell says that twenty-first century progressives believe in a kind of hierarchy of human sin and transgression based upon a series of group dichotomies: male versus female, white versus non-white, straight versus gay, Western versus non-Western, and so on. In each pairing, the latter group is the historical victim, and the former group the victimizer. Sin or guilt, like innocence, is therefore assigned by group. For oppressor groups, sin cannot be washed away, other than by apologetics that never end. For oppressed groups, there is no guilt or transgression in the first place, only the innocence of victimhood.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/revolution-in-america/
