A couple of items recently — coming from very different starting points — have led me to revisit Glenn Tinder’s disastrously timed 1989 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Can We Be Good Without God?” (I wrote about that essay here: “With or Without You.”)
Tinder’s subhed was “On the political meaning of Christianity,” which was why this essay was assigned as a reading when I was a seminary student studying that very topic in the early 1990s. It took me a while to notice the extremely unfortunate publication date on the thing. The essay was from the December 1989 issue of the Atlantic — meaning it was written and edited earlier in the year, with final galleys and proofs tidied up and locked in place well before, say, November 17, 1989 so that it could arrive in subscribers’ mailboxes and on newsstands by the first of December.
I don’t know the precise drop dates in the Atlantic’s publication schedule, but I’m not picking out November 17, 1989 as some arbitrary date. That’s right around when the printers would have been churning out copies of this issue of the magazine, but that wasn’t the only thing happening that day:
On 17 November 1989 (International Students’ Day), riot police suppressed a student demonstration in Prague. It marked the 50th Anniversary of a violently suppressed demonstration against Nazi occupation. The 17 Nov. 1989 event sparked a series of demonstrations from 19 November to late December. By 20 November, the number of protesters assembled in Prague grew from 200,000 the previous day to an estimated 500,000. A two-hour general strike involving all citizens of Czechoslovakia was held on 27 November. On 24 November, the entire top leadership of the Communist Party, including General Secretary Miloš Jakeš, resigned.
In response to the collapse of other Warsaw Pact governments and the increasing street protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced on 28 November that it would relinquish power and dismantle the one-party state. Two days later, the legislature formally deleted the sections of the Constitution giving the Communists a monopoly of power. Barbed wire and other obstructions were removed from the border with West Germany and Austria in early December. On 10 December, President Gustáv Husák appointed the first largely non-communist government in Czechoslovakia since 1948, and resigned. Alexander Dubček was elected speaker of the federal parliament on 28 December and Václav Havel the President of Czechoslovakia on 29 December 1989.
November and December of 1989 were an age of revolution. History was being written and rewritten right before our eyes. The world was changing — dramatically, drastically, and almost daily. The small cracks that had begun earlier in the year in Poland and Hungary were widening and spreading throughout the Soviet bloc. Millions of people were in the streets with flags and candles. Governments were teetering and toppling in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania, and shortly thereafter in the USSR and South Africa.
And just exactly at that glorious moment — watching the world wake up from history — poor Glenn Tinder’s essay was arriving in The Atlantic, arguing that “the universal disaster of revolution” was an iron-clad law of the universe.
Even the Chicago Daily’s infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline can’t compete with that. It was an epic, historic instance of history itself disproving a historical thesis in real time.
That’s why I couldn’t help but think back to poor Tinder’s claim about “the universal disaster of revolution” when reading Lily Geismer’s review essay: “Conservatives and Counterrevolutionaries: Corey Robin’s ‘The Reactionary Mind.'”
As his title suggests, Robin sees conservatism less as an autonomous intellectual tradition than as a series of reactions to the progressive left. He defines conservatism as “a meditation on — and theoretical rendition of — the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” The sequence begins with Burke’s outrage at the French Revolution, which Robin argues was due less to the revolution’s violence and more to the ways in which it called for inverting the obligations of deference and command.
Robin rejects those who define conservatism as a commitment to limited government and liberty; these ideas, he allows, are perhaps “byproducts of conservatism,” but they are not its “animating purpose.” In one of his most provocative formulations, he contends that the fundamental difference between the left and the right is not that one values equality and the other freedom, but rather that “the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders.” Moreover, it’s no accident that the conservative tradition begins with Burke’s appalled response to the French Revolution. Conservative ideas, Robin contends, are not merely reactionary but counterrevolutionary: the right has always made violence (both abstract and real) a central part of their efforts to constrain the emancipatory politics of the left in order to preserve their power. While not all counterrevolutionaries are conservative, he posits, “all conservatives are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary.”
I found that essay thanks to a link from John Fea’s blog. It has, in turn, has colored the way I’ve received Fea’s occasional reliance on Tinder in a series of fascinating and thoughtful recent posts trying to make sense of the Trump-worship of those Fea has given the devastatingly apt moniker of “court evangelicals.” (Tinder, to his credit, offers a much more coherent and Trump-resistant formulation of Christian political thinking.)
The influence and popularity of those court evangelicals — 80 percent! — suggests that we might be better served, at this moment, with essays exploring if it is still possible “To Be Good With God.” Such essays, I think, would need to consider the political meaning of our present forms of Christianity, and why they seem so dramatically opposed to what we might call the universal necessity of revolution.
This is all a bit heady, and that’s not where I want to leave you here, with talk of abstract, academic essays from the likes of The Atlantic or The Los Angeles Review of Books, or with abstract, academic musings on the political meaning of Christianity.
I want to leave you, instead, with a reminder of a very different, still very recent, moment in history — a time when hope and change were in the air and when they were undeniably and effectively alive on the ground.
I want you to remember that this happened. People did this, not long ago. Ordinary people lit candles and sang songs and redrew the map of the world.
So let’s finish here with a little bit of Jesus Jones to help us remember that this happened and that it can happen again.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In