Article

Culture

Politics

21 March 2024

6 min read

Re-enchanting councils - and glum councillors

Local government could be a place of humanity and beauty more than lifeless language and procedures.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A marbles staircase rises on four sides of a chamber.

Glasgow City Chambers' staircase.

Michael D Beckwith, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

At the local level in politics, I have found there is a stereotype that persists more than that of the corrupt politician. It is the glum councillor, the pothole poser, or sometimes the councillor looking glum while pointing at potholes. These are the photos that turn up on election leaflets, and in local news, and there are lots of them here in Devon because potholes are numerous and huge.

When I was a district councillor, I tried to push back against this image – I would smile, avoid photos with potholes, share the good stuff found in the community alongside working to improve what wasn’t working. But, looking around the council chamber, it was hard to deny. Sometimes the glumness would slip into sleep; I’ve seen councillors prodded awake ahead of important votes that impact tens of thousands of people. That is not just glum councillor, that is irresponsible, disengaged councillor.

And though the responsibility lies with them, this never surprised me. In my four-year term, I too felt a disillusionment creep in. And I am perennially hopeful; my default is to see possibility. But four years in a context of budget cut after budget cut, endless bureaucracy, lifeless language, and an aversion to trying things differently, even I started to slump in my seat. I never fell asleep, but sometimes my soul did.

Author-farmer Wendell Berry – who speaks with much affection and wisdom about the importance and strength of local community – said that

“unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom.”

I have seen that professional boredom in the language, in the sterile council chamber bare of life, where processes and procedures rule more than humanity; where passionate members of the public would attend meetings only to be told they couldn’t input because they hadn’t pre-registered; where a meeting that finished before the allocated time was seen as successful, regardless of content. I’m sure it should feel more hopeful, more vision-led, more life-giving to be involved in local decision-making – it should be about placemaking more than simply ticking boxes and balancing budgets.

There are, of course, councillors who care deeply, and there are councils where local decision-making is being reclaimed by to serve the local community, economy, identity – like the independent councillors elected onto the town council in Buckfastleigh in South Devon who made it more plain-speaking, more accessible and more engaged; and the Flatpack Democracy movement started in Frome Town Council that has sparked similar local ‘revolutions’. But I think there is something else needed, if local government is to replace lifelessness with hope and vision. Something more upstream of the how.

When the spirit of the age feels like cynicism more than delight, more than beauty, more than possibility, it impacts our relationships and the places that should thrive on good relationships like local government.

In his essay The Joys of Storytelling, Ben Okri says, “In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them...if we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.” I would often imagine a story of local government that makes space for enchantment. Former monk Thomas Moore speaks of reenchanting as a reawakening to the depth of soul that embraces us and the world. Councils, like lots of spaces, feel disenchanted. Perhaps much of our current disenchantment is symptomatic of our alienation from ourselves, from each other, and from our shared humanity – and from the belief that this shared state of being is strong enough to take the weight of our world, even as heavy as it feels now. When the spirit of the age feels like cynicism more than delight, more than beauty, more than possibility, it impacts our relationships and the places that should thrive on good relationships like local government. Everything dulls; we disconnect from our spirit-breathed humanity, we forget that we were pulled from the soil by a gardener God who made us to be with each other, surrounded by beauty and life.

In the book Faith, Hope and Carnage, the musician and writer Nick Cave says that the “luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”

Cave’s words echo Dostoevsky who wrote in The Idiot that ‘the world will be saved by beauty’, which in turn, echoes earlier sentiments from the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas who taught that God is truth, goodness and beauty. In the Bible, Jesus pointed again and again to these things too – in people, in creation, in God. They feel like good things to point the way now; more timeless and apolitical than any current ‘vision’ in government, more tangible than a distant government, more life-giving than purely balancing budgets as a goal. Of course, local government also needs better and more reliable funding, more efficient processes, passionate people, and lots more – but I think these things are more likely to come, in part, from a re-enchanted local government that draws on the “luminous and shocking beauty” of the everyday, and of local people and places. To start to make space for that re-enchantment, government could experiment with three things (which, more than funding, need people willing to try, to think beyond business-as-usual, to take existing resources and think about how they can be used even slightly differently).

It may not need to overcome death, but local government could embrace local people, their humanity, their aliveness.

First, it could move away from language that is detached from emotion and care and life. The word ‘enchant’ has its root in words – cantare means ‘to sing’ – Councils could aspire to make language beautiful more than bureaucratic, clear instead of obscure. It could invite local people into decision-making using life-giving and locally meaningful words and ideas, rather than excluding them with jargon and lifeless language. For this, we’d need the help of local storytellers, poets, writers, speakers – people who can wake us up with the power of words.

Second, local government could bring that “luminous beauty” into the space, rather than sealing conversations and processes away in characterless buildings. Meetings I’d go to were usually in bland rooms, with beige walls, nylon grey carpets, lukewarm coffee. Letting even some of the beauty of this world in – perhaps with colour, architecture, art; perhaps with stories and creativity and food; perhaps with some meetings outdoors in the beauty of the world – would, I think, breathe life into the space, and into relationships, and so into what becomes possible.

Lastly, re-enchanting local government must include re-humanising it, because humanity at its best is relationship and soul and care; it contains the same possibility that was present in Eden when all this was dreamed up. If, as Christians believe, humanity is made in God’s image, then God is endlessly creative; God is about the detail of our lives as well as world-shaking stories; God is about life – life that is so alive it overcomes death. It may not need to overcome death, but local government could embrace local people, their humanity, their aliveness; it could ask them to show up as themselves, with all their strengths and weaknesses, their ideas and hopes and fears, rather than shut them out because they cannot bend to inflexible meetings and procedures and language. It would not shy away from these things; it would use them to create new life and thriving places.

Re-enchanting local government could, I think, bring us closer to beauty, to the goodness of each other, to the truth of people and places. From there, I think it becomes possible to restore relationships, to imagine what government might be at its best, and to view it as a place-based way of knowing and actually serving people. I think it becomes easier from there to look downstream – to re-think processes, the voting system, and the rules of ‘business as usual’ – and perhaps even to fix potholes and the glumness that goes with them.

Essay

Creed

Politics

10 May 2024

7 min read

MAGA’s sorting of America

What would Bonhoeffer make of the rogue creed?

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A red baseball cap, with Make America Great Again written across it, sits on an open bible.

Natilyn Photography on Unsplash.

“Ten years is a long time in the life of every human being.” So begins Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay, After Ten Years. For him, the decade in question was 1933 to 1943. The place, Germany.

The original essay, penned to mark the new year of 1943, reflects on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s ascendancy to power through democratic machinery. The piece was sent to an inner circle of Bonhoeffer’s friends. “Are we still of any use?” asks Bonhoeffer. There’s a question I can relate to.

And so, I’ve returned to these modest words again and again these last few years. They’re prophetic, a jolt of honesty born of resilient hope. Not unlike Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, both could be modern epistles.

Their prophetic edge is clearer with eyes on our own situation. 2024 is not 1968 or 1933. As an American citizen, we have our own “decade” to reflect on in the United States. And that is the decade of MAGA, or “Make America Great Again.”

What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community.

Just 10 years ago, Trump wasn’t sitting in courtrooms. Back then, he stood on a stage to address the Conservative Political Action Conference. He wasn’t a candidate, but a businessman, reality TV star, and disrupter of status quo.

It was at that 2014 meeting Trump uttered that now ubiquitous slogan. Near the end of the speech, less rambling and sharper than his stream-of-consciousness rallies today, the line appears, “we need to make America great again.”

Trump wasn’t the first to use it, that was Reagan in 1980. Then, like now, it evoked a sense of nostalgia, of “good old days” that never were. But nostalgia is powerful, primal. It allows us to persist in the illusion that, for example, the social order of Jim Crow America was somehow more moral and upstanding than our present situation. As if lynchings, mob violence, and political inequality vanish in the mists of our longings. This is and can only be the imagination of white supremacy.

Trump didn’t invent the slogan, but perhaps he was the first to tap into its deepest lode in the bedrock. What began as a slogan became a cause which gave rise to a community. Now, “MAGA” is its own qualifier. We have “MAGA Republicans” and “MAGA Rallies” of the “MAGA faithful.”

Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this.

And where have churches been in these days? Hans Ulrich calls the church a “place of reversal” a place where rogue creeds and words ought to be emptied of their power, where a different public is constituted around the wine, bread, and water. But the lines of MAGA are drawn straight through our churches in America.

Caleb Campbell pastors in Phoenix, Arizona. I asked him recently his thoughts on the impending election, and how it would affect his church. Most churches have already been sorted, he told me. In 2020, churches fractured from within, torn from the pandemic, protests, and the Presidency. But now, there has been a sorting, and settling. The partisan lines, those borders the church is empowered to transgress, are sadly reinforced.

The lasting power of “Make America Great Again” over the last decade is significant. Among practicing Christians, the story we tell about America in our churches has theological consequences. And every church tells this story, implicitly or explicitly, in speech or in silence. And rather than emptying the rogue creed “Make America Great Again” it would seem that in and among many churches across America, it has been given an ample charge of theological authority.

MAGA trades in all the elements of a seemingly eradicated virus called fascism. A mythic past, demographic anxiety, authoritarian rule, all elements converging and colliding in American life. And curiously, the one thing that gives fascism its strength is a failure to remember.

And perhaps this is why Bonhoeffer’s letter, read on the rising tide of anti-democratic platforms, speaks so directly to us. It holds space for a necessary exercise of remembering.

“Who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer asks in the wake of Hitler’s ascendancy. Even the Confessing Church, organized to resist the Nazification of the German evangelical church, soon folded. Pastors either took the oath of loyalty, or enlisted. Time had proved how most attempts to stand firm in the Third Reich had collapsed in on themselves. Such failures mark our day, too.

Bonhoeffer answers his own question in a way that is instructive for us. He surveys all the failed responses to Hitler’s rise. For example, there’s the “reasonable ones” who simply think better answers and clearer communication win the day. Today, we ought to learn that we are simply not tweeting or posting our way out of this. Even more stalwart, institutional efforts fail here. In the torrent of raw information sewage flowing with conspiracies, algorithms, and slogans, reason isn’t enough.

Private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

There’s the ethical fanatic, who tries to “meet the power of evil with purity of principle.” Many in days like ours are earnest in their convictions, but white-knuckling principles is satisfied not with responsibility but with keeping to some arbitrary vision of integrity that prizes its artificiality, confusing the arbitrary refusal to cede principles with responsible action. There’s those of conscience who, Bonhoeffer notes, can never know the difference between a bad conscience (which can be strong) or a deceived conscience.

The path of duty seems attractive, until we recognize that “just following orders” is the justification of every functionary in Trump’s MAGA machine. And of course, freedom, which can side with the wrong to prevent the worst and so lose its own solid footing. When all else fails, Bonhoeffer holds out private virtue as that last course of action. Not to be confused with monastic retreat, private virtue “closes its eyes to injustice” and scrolls its own virtue signaling posts with smug self-satisfaction.

If all these routes are taken off the table, we find ourselves in position to recognize a bitter truth: we’ve made resisting Trump a good business. Good for convincing stakeholders to fund new ventures, good for justifying ourselves as a moral opposition. After 10 years of MAGA, it’s true that we have assumed much about democracy that can only be realized by vigilance.

Our democracy is a spectacle, not a process. It is an oligarchy of represented interests, not a democracy of representatives. And Trump? The ethos of greatness has always been tied to the former, not the latter. And it is in this situation, not uncommon throughout history, but novel for us who face it, that we can receive the question, “who stands firm?” Bonhoeffer’s question resounds.

If the resistance of reason, principles, duty, or virtue fail, then what? Bonhoeffer’s insistence is that responsible action is “nothing but an answer to God’s question and call.”

Does this mean only Christians can save the world? That Christians are inherently “better” or “righteous” in politics? No. But ten years of MAGA would seem to suggest that this belief continues to animate the evangelical political machine. This is not Christendom; living “in answer to God’s question” means that Christians, simply by virtue of the story we confess and participate in, point to the One who saves.

The singular answer Christians give, of a witness to God’s call, is a window into the story in which the world may find its salvation and hope. Logics of inclusion and exclusion are shattered in the event of reconciliation. There’s a politics in these wider horizons that can heal the bitter contempt that marks our present situation. And sure, Bonhoeffer’s conclusion may strike some as trite sentimentality, of veiled Christian piety that belongs anywhere but politics or the public square. But that’s precisely it.

The Christian story creates a public with its own politics. And this doesn’t mean the church is a counter-society, set up against the world, rather, it is precisely in our participating with fellow citizens in the mess of political process where such a witness can be given and made. There is a free responsibility to this presence. This is not Christian dominance, Christendom 2.0, or MAGA visions of authoritarian power dressed up in Christian rhetoric. This is something more modest, and yet deeply radical.

A decade of MAGA ought to have taught many of us much more than we currently know. And such learning can only happen once we stop incentivizing and normalizing assaults on democratic machinery that come to us as a spectacle for our consumptive entertainment. There remains a way to stand firm, a way that resists necessities and immediacies, primarily because it has the audacity to confess the truth that the world is already reconciled, it just doesn’t know it yet. And nowhere is this ignorance more concentrated than in the retributive, ascendant vision contained in the phrase, “Make America Great Again.”