Momma Tried

I recently started reading Rodney Clapp’s latest book, Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction. It promises to be, in turns, exilarating and exasperating.

Clapp is pointing out the contradictions of the whole American set-up, as embodied in Johnny Cash himself, and so I think I will begin by noting the contradiction that is going to drive me through this book, cheering and yelling alternatively.

If the early pages are any indication, Clapp is a social critic who understands America very, very well. He does not fall into the trap of demonizing America, or lionizing her. The whole gnarly thing is put out there — good, bad, and indifferent. Acknowledging that America is “noble and brave,” he also sees that the American Experiment is “threatening as well as inspiring, frustrating as well as fascinating” and that we have a “series of contradictions” at the heart.

“America assumes the dirty-handed, death-dealing burdens of empire but still imagines itself a nation of exceptional innocence” (p. ix).

I would only modify this by saying that we are a nation of exceptional innocence, and that we are exceptionally violent and deadly. That’s a contradiction with real tension, and the way Clapp phrased it here sounded more like straight up hypocrisy, and I don’t think it is that simple. And since I think Clapp is driving toward contradiction, not hypocrisy, I am modifying his point, not refuting it. He names the contradictions better in another place:

“These are America’s simultaneous embrace of holiness and hedonism, its pining love of tradition as it carries on a headlong romantic affair with progress, its extreme individualism coursing beside a gigantic, gaping yearning for community, and its insistence on innocence at the same time it revels in violence” (pp. xii-xiii).

Clapp sees that, for all intents and purposes, the South, defeated militarily in 1865, nevertheless won the long war. Southern culture has largely become American culture. Flip around Gramsci’s long march through the institutions, and you might be surprised at what is actually going on. The popularity of NASCAR (America’s most popular sport) doesn’t really register at National Proletariat Radio. The proletariat are out racing cars, or watching people race them, and not listening to their station.

And check this out:

“Country must is in fact the most widely popular radio format in the nation, with 2,028 stations devoted to the genre. (The nearest competitor is talk radio, with 1,318 stations; the closest musical challenger is that of ‘oldies,’ at 793 stations. Top 40, urban, and rock music formats, despite their higher profiles, all lag far behind.) So country music reflects not only the southern values of significant concern in this book, but those perspectives and attitudes aired through the nation, and demographically more pervasive in city settings than rural” (p. xiii).

And country music faithfully reflects all this turmoil, all these contradictions. Clapp quotes one gentleman who points out that it is these conflicting tensions that make country music durable and lasting, and not its “alleged simplicity.” As Rosanne Cash once put it, “God, love, murder.”

And so I am really looking forward to what Clapp as social critic has to say here. He starts out strong. But unfortunately, somebody left some old theology lying around and Clapp trips over it. First, the set up:

“The United States, which has never been an officially Christian nation, is now closer to that status than at any time in its history” (p. x).

I actually think this is true, and not in the panicked sense that European secularists fear. There are great opportunities for the Church ahead of us. But the people who make America a Christian nation again will be Texas Baptists, charismatics who go to Bible theme parks, and the stalwart members of Tishbite Presbytery. They will not be Christian academics and social critics. Which leads to the next quote:

“In these pages, then, I want to wrestle with what it means to be a Christian and an American, in the truest and best sense of both words. While I emphatically do not believe America is or should be a Christian nation, I affirm that America’s history and the current composition of its citizenry (Christian of one stripe or another by a large majority) mean that Christianity (and other religions, especially Judaism) cannot be simply ignored in the public square” (p. xi).

No, we must not be ignored. We insist that somebody pat us on the head.

So here we are in that naked public square again, trying to figure out what to do with the damned thing. Again. Now this is a simple argument, and I am not tired of making it. We need to make it, again and again. And every time we make it, we need to stop for a minute and listen to the sound of crickets and frogs in the quiet evening that surrounds us. Silence. No counter-arguments. No answers. This is because, given Christian premises, there are no answers to the stumpers that get posed whenever this issue comes up.

The way Christians are to behave in the public square has to be in submission to the Lord Jesus. And if Jesus gets to tell us how to behave in the public square, He must be the Lord over it. If this is not the case, then we have no obligation to listen to what anybody else says, and so we can make America a Christian nation whether Jesus wants us to or not. I know, go ahead and read that again. Think about it.

When Clapp says that America should not be a Christian nation, what is his authority for saying this? If Jesus agrees with him, then this really is a theocracy, but we are all commanded not to let on. If Jesus differs with this (hint: disciple all the nations), then we should go with what Jesus said. If Jesus doesn’t care, then I am going to go for a Christian America anyway — I’d rather have that than than Sharia law.

Clapp holds that America should not be a Christian nation, but that it should have lots of Christians in it. Doing what? Oh, I don’t know. Creating tensions in country music maybe? One impulse is what lands me in the jail house, and the other is why momma tried.

If Christ is not the source of law for the public square, then what is? And the central point, for Christians at any rate, is why does that source of law, if it rejects the authority of the king of kings, and lord or lords, have anything authority to bind our conscience, or to bind it whenever I go out in public?

There are different kinds of contradictions. One is the kind that I think this book will do an outstanding job of highlighting — the contradictions and tensions in a forgiven sinner, who knows that Christ is Lord of all, and yet struggles to realize that in every aspect of life. Johnny Cash said somewhere that he was a Christian — “a C minus one, but I am one.” That is the kind of contradiction that tells the kind of story that Cash was so good at telling.

But the other kind of contradiction is what theologians come up with when, to avoid dualism, they have to say that Jesus is the Lord of all, and then, because they cannot actually afford to give up their dualism, say that Jesus is actually not the Lord of the public square. It has all the tension involved in squaring the circle — “bow to your partner!”This would not even make a very interesting song.

The first thing I remember knowin’ was a metaphysic blowin’,
And a freshman’s dream of th’ transcendental slide,
On a Kantian proof leavin’ town, not knowin’ where I’m bound.
And no one could change my mind but Momma Tried.