In confronting his readers with the strange wisdom of the cross, Kierkegaard reminds us that any Christian rendition of theology begins and ends with the full scope of Jesus’s incarnation, born into humble circumstances and fated to die in humiliating and ignominious circumstances. Christendom was a target of so much of Kierkegaard’s fury because it recoiled from this difficult message, preferring a theology of triumph to the desolation and absurdity of the cross, aligning itself with the rich and powerful instead of the poor and destitute, preferring Easter over Good Friday. In its glaring discomfort with suffering and death, with human finitude and frailty, Christendom retreated from these realities the way the priest and Levite cringed at the wounded man on the way to Jericho.
The American Self
North America, of course, established its own variety of Christendom, complete with many of the same characteristics identified by Kierkegaard. If we recall, for example, that the early Massachusetts Bay emigrants were largely members of the entrepreneurial and professional middle classes (tradesmen, merchants, lawyers, artisans, and clerics), we can understand Carl Degler’s comment that capitalism came to America in the first ships and Max Weber’s argument that the capitalist spirit arrived before the capitalist order.56 It’s difficult to dispute the powerful conjunction between Puritanism and capitalism in the American experiment; it was the wind behind the Mayflower’s sails. Supported by the divine right of possession and buttressed by the biblical stories of exodus and conquest, this experiment soon achieved combustible, explosive success in the domains of industry and free enterprise. It was not long before this new Israel was designated by John Winthrop “the city on the hill,” a light of free enterprise and unlimited material and spiritual progress.57
By the nineteenth century the powerful union of Protestantism and capitalism had picked up steam, as many preachers turned the pulpit, in the words of Sacvan Bercovitch, “into a platform for the American Way. The great crusades of Lyman Beecher and Charles Grandson Finney brought ‘Gospel tidings’—rugged individualism in business enterprise, laissez-faire in economic theory, and constitutional democracy in political thought.”58 The religious revivalists of the period were fusing Protestantism and American patriotism, Christian morality and capitalist economics, all in the interest of consecrating the Christendom of the New World. With piety and prosperity welded together in this way, every instance of visible success, moral or material, confirmed God’s providential designs for America.
For Kierkegaard, as for the classic Protestant reformers, this amounted to a pagan or secular morality, nothing remotely close to the dark wisdom of the cross, where God appeared incognito in the distressed face of the beggar and vagabond.59 As a betrayal of Christianity’s difficult message, Christendom seemed to insist on the opposite: God’s presence in the gilded facades of worldly success. In this scenario, the poor and powerless were abject instances of moral bankruptcy and spiritual failure. In fact, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the poor and unemployed, vagabonds and prostitutes, orphans and delinquents were depicted in such terms, examples of failed values and failed lives. But more ominously, as Michel Foucault has argued, these groups—especially those of a darker shade of brown—were turned into pathological subjects and in many cases criminalized.60
Because of new legislation directed at poor, vagabond, and colonized subjects in both Europe and North America, in the nineteenth century a whole new class of illegalities was created, and prison populations began to swell as a result.61 This repressive climate, in Foucault’s reading, “increased the occasions of offenses, and threw to the other side of the law many individuals who, in other conditions, would not have gone over to specialized criminality.”62 Whether through travel restrictions, greater demands for productivity in the workplace, discrimination in the judicial system, or vicious practices of displacement, exclusion, and incarceration, many new laws and regulations gave free rein to practices of ruthless injustice, the hand of naked power held out in gestures of benevolence.63 An example is the benign-sounding California Act of 1850 (An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians), which permitted officials to arrest and sell to the highest bidder Indians who were found intoxicated or vagrant or were accused of crimes. The act even gave whites the power to purchase Indian children by making available certificates for the custody of these children. (Over the next approximately thirteen years, an estimated twenty thousand American Indian children were held in bondage.)64
Bourgeois ideals of freedom, in short, coexisted with violent measures that denied liberty to many. Republican ideals were plainly mocked by the existence of chattel slavery, wage slavery, and other methods of punishment and abuse. It was culture well practiced in the sophistry of freedom, but with a sanctimonious eloquence that rang hollow for many Americans. For those who lived in the underground of American society, such as blacks, American Indians, and Mexicans, life remained confining and restricted, as if, to invoke Foucault once again, they were “the lepers of old.”65
For the reader curious about the relevance of this discussion to the sublime matter of the soul, I recall the devil’s offer of world dominion to Jesus: “All this I will give to you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me. Jesus said to him, away from me, Satan” (Matt. 4:8–10). In the Christian mind, the matter of worldly dominion has everything to do with the well-being of the soul. When power and wealth become the ruling principle of one’s life, the soul is dethroned and replaced by something unworthy of its name, something that dons a crown of self-aggrandizing vanity instead of a crown of thorns. By considering the shadowy opposite of the soul, its rival and alter ego, we hope to deepen our understanding of the terms and implications involved in this regime change.
The shifting connotations of pride are further evidence of this altered state of affairs in the modern world. In Andrew Delbanco’s reading, the American self—self-made, calculating, overweening—became increasingly heedless of traditional warnings of pride until it became a god in its own right (the promise of the serpent in Genesis). “Pride of self, once the mark of the devil,” writes Delbanco, “was now not just a legitimate emotion but America’s uncontested god. And since everyone had his own self, everyone had his own god.”66 Just as avarice, once a mark of sin, became a legitimate and vital force in modern economics, pride of self was cleansed of the devil’s shadow and made into a staple of American individualism. The American self thus came into its own in the nineteenth century. By fiercely asserting itself against all odds, dangers, and aboriginal rights, pride of self grew to monstrous proportions and validated the expansionist urges of land-grabbers, settlers, businessmen, whalers, and forty-niners. As S. C. Gwynne puts it in his powerful narrative of the westward push of Americans, the main players in North America, in contrast to the presidio soldiers and missionaries of the Spanish New World, were rugged and obdurate pioneers; the “vanguard was not federal troops and federal forts, but simple farmers imbued with a fierce Calvinist work ethic, steely optimism, and a cold-eyed aggressiveness that made them refuse to yield even in the face of extreme danger. . . . They habitually declined to honor government treaties with Native Americans, believing in their hearts that the land belonged to them. They hated Indians with a particular passion, considering them something less than fully human, and thus blessed with inalienable rights to absolutely nothing.”67 Needless to say, the compulsive belief in manifest destiny, reinforced by the American civil religion of exceptionalism and triumphalism, led to numerous calamities, if not outright genocide, for American Indians.68
In a Christian assessment, these attitudes smack of idolatry: an anthropomorphic god fashioned out of the material of the human ego, and driven by an insatiable appetite for the world’s goods. Those in previous ages had names for this behavior—blasphemy, sin, idolatry—but Americans gave a new spin to this approach, labeling it enterprising, pioneering, and dauntless. This was a conceit so brazen that not only would this expansionist behavior annex Texas, swallow parts of Mexico, seize American Indian lands, and enslave Africans, but even the heavens seemed vulnerable to its oversized willfulness. Captain Ahab in Moby Dick sized up the attitude perfectly: “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man. I’d strike the sun if it insulted