David Dark’s The Possibility of America is as foreboding as it is worthwhile. Those who have the patience and imagination to dig into Dark’s prophetic and poetic words will be rewarded with a beautiful analysis of the Christian obligation to contend with the earthly powers that would establish themselves as competitors against the Kingdom of Heaven.
Opening the book for the first time, the reader is accosted by dense formatting that promises a dense read, and the balance of Dark’s text delivers on the promise. The author’s professorial passions and interests come through clearly on each page; it is as if the reader is auditing a class of a learned lecturer who has forgotten his notes. Dark, as this professor, delves into all of the topics that interest him most, from literature to current events, from science fiction to protest politics: the topics he can speak on at length with authoritative improvisation. He lectures from a deep well of practiced knowledge and a very heartfelt love of culture. And in giving voice to and analyzing the poets and prophets he most admires, Dark illuminates for his readers what it means to be a living, breathing, thinking Christian in a world fraught with insincerity, duplicity, and an utter disregard for godly priority.
It is impossible to speak or write on The Possibility of America for long without acknowledging Dark’s disdain for the Trump Administration (specifically for the man himself and his personification of an electoral will toward irresponsible, unchecked power). But all of us, on either side of the precipitous divide that has fractured America, must wrestle with the points illuminated in this text. Living as complex human beings, we readers are challenged by Dark to listen to an inner voice that tells us that worldly power and earthly victories will never deliver on a promise of deep inner fulfillment. The world is broken, and nothing will mend it in this age.
But that does not mean that nothing can help. Dark believes (as I do myself) that the Kingdom of God is not only a reality for some future, sanctified, and perfected ‘Heaven’, but that it is also (to an eternal extent) something that all Christians should be striving for in the here and now. Insomuch as we should be contributing towards God’s Kingdom presently, no collateral damage and no means-toward-ends will do. We must live and we must promote righteous activity and righteous liberty for the oppressed, for all those who Jesus so clearly expressed the desire to save. We cannot hide behind a conservative or a liberal impulse that would convince us that if we just bite the bullet now, we will see all of our desires fulfilled in the hereafter. No. Righteousness is righteousness. We must pursue godly goodness with each breath we take, never punting the issue with hope for better field position in the future.
Dark’s primary argument, laid out in the introduction, is that we must engage seriously in contrast to our culture of easy entertainment. Though this seriousness is messy, we can cut through the mess of serious conversation with honest action, which contradicts our culture of disingenuous propaganda (a culture that we have grown so accustomed to that we are at risk of not noticing it at all – think party politics and all that we take for granted). What this seriousness and honesty and genuine action produce is a community of people, a community of believers, who will not succumb to any earthly empire, regardless of how well such a principality might advance our narrow view of God’s will. The resulting community is what Dark refers to as ‘Blessed Community’, a catchall term for everything good and pure and honest and artistic and human and possible.
What Dark is arguing is that “an image, a brand name, or a nation state” cannot claim absolutely the blessing of God and/or Jesus (pg. 14). The Christian deity refuses to be co-opted. America may be blessed by God, but America is not synonymous with God. And based on the country’s immoral actions at present, we might do well to assume that we’re not even being blessed. We are likely holding desperately onto the coattails of our predecessors as we drag ourselves deeper and deeper into the temptations of empire.
Contrarily, as Dark sees it, Blessed Community would be a people that breaks with traditional boundaries and who abide by the category-defying testimony of the embodiment of the historical Jesus Christ. This is a people who:
are not apolitical. Their allegiance is to a different polity that is uniquely and radically for all people… In this sense, we might think of them as omnipartisan. They are not of this world’s way of doing things, but their hope is still scandalously this-worldly.
(pg. 22)
These people can genuinely support the good of their nation while also whole-heartedly seeking the benefit of the downtrodden, recognizing that:
There is no level of moral grandeur to which a nation can rise beyond which the critique of Jesus and the prophets will have nothing more to say. If it did, it would no longer be Bablyon; it would be the New Jerusalem, the reign of God on earth as it already is in the heavens.
(pg. 24)
“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). This includes principalities, nations, and empires: America is not the New Jerusalem, not by far by my sight and in the opinion of Mr. Dark. It may be true that he and I live in the best country on earth, but the earth’s best is still a far cry from heaven’s perfection. And the earth’s best has some ‘splainin’ to do these days.
—
With the liberalized inclination to point out the position of those in power and to favor the disadvantaged, Dark correctly demonizes the current Conservative position of executive prerogative; however, this reviewer feels that the author goes too far within this proclivity to elevate the position of the oppressed to something intrisically good. While it is clear that biblical references have a great interest in salving the wounds of the weak, it does not follow that, “the biblical collection ascribes a voice of moral authority to the refugee, viewing the disenfranchised of history as the custodians of human seriousness” (pg. 82). Moral authority and human seriousness belong only to he who embodied both within the weight of the divine.
This point of argumentative weakness is where Dark’s position loses its luster and leaves a glaring point of contention at which his conservative detractors will undoubtedly exploit his prejudices. He builds up the value and worth of a ‘non-white’ perspective as contrasted against a ‘white’ perspective. These arguments against ‘whiteness’ are strong. As he points out, relating to the historical and real person of Jesus of Nazareth in modern America essentially requires a non-white, non-dominant perspective. However, the arguments for the POC-perspective are very fragile.
The weakness becomes more apparent when considered alongside The Possibility of America’s strengths, for these two components are one and the same. In a work that combats the highly politicized world of modern American thought, we should not be surprised that the argument for one side is the very argument the other side uses against the first.
In this case, the majority of Dark’s text emphasizes the importance of cultural artifacts, specifically and generally those found within literature, music, poetry, story, film, personal perspectives of modern politics, and the protest politics that are positioned against conservative power. The ambiguity and subtlety of these arts are proposed as antidotes to the absolutism held dear by the Republican establishment. But ambiguities and subtleties, whether embodied in art or the divine, will not be so easily reined in by any one political body. Using Bob Dylan as a basis of argument is a non-starter. No one knows what he, his actions, or his lyrics really mean. While we can read into the real meaning of these arts, ultimately they are a very bad place to argue via logic. History itself, as Dark observes, can be bent and twisted to fit ones’ own argument, and in this case, the ‘white’ perspective will not lend one inch of ground to the truth-broadening perspective of the ‘lesser’.
Dark has an excellent point: the subtleties of art are one of the best means by which humans have opportunity to break through the very hard shell of personal opinion and to encounter something truly human and humanizing. This is unquestionably true. But such personal experiences cannot be collected, packaged, and delivered to those who need a shot in the arm. And even if we could deliver such an experience to our foes in political debate, they need not draw the same conclusions from the same raw data (as is clearly shown in various political hot-topics, e.g. global warming). Music, literature, art, rap, and the disruptive witness of protest politics might lead us to stark realizations of our humanness and our own evil actions, but this is not a full-proof method.
What Dark takes for granted is that by bumping his reader against these truths expressed in the canon of American culture he might be able to convince her that obvious evil is obviously evil. What Dark overestimates is the canon’s ability to do so in one particular direction. What Dark underestimates is man’s ability to justify his own actions.
As a wise man, an academic, and a bit of a pessimist (perhaps), Dark recognizes the limits of his argument, but as a wise man, an academic, and an optimistic protestor at heart, he refuses to believe that these limits will have the final word. He argues against the limitations that he knows are there, but in the end, they are still there.
Now, for me as a baseline conservative (read ‘conservative’, not ‘Republican’), for me with a penchant for liberal ethics (especially concerning religious themes), for me as an appreciator of the arts (a thorough lover of the humanities), Dark’s arguments are cogent and persuasive. But what Dark assumes is true and enduring art, what he assumes is pure and apolitical, the reader recognizes is always tinged with sin. All human endeavors are the same in this.
However, after recognizing such imperfect subjectivities, we must still discard and disdain Trumpian what-about-ism. Sin is sin: full stop. God is good: full stop. Sliding scales do not factor into this discussion. We must also reject the notion of some universal, disembodied Christ figure. Jesus Christ was a particularly brown Jew who lived in a particularly turbulent empire. Though his sacrifice works forward and backward in time and across all latitudes and longitudes of this disparate earth, he was and is still a lived embodiment of righteousness. This is a righteousness that we do not have the liberty of generalizing or hypothesizing about. We have a witness and an example of holiness. Let us strive to embody the same character to the extent our mortality will allow.
—
Considering all of the canonized wisdom Dark highlights for us:
Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank Him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.
(pg. 57 – Nathaniel Hawthorne in a letter to Herman Melville)
Let us not take any steps backward into the darkness that we once knew, but let us always walk forward into the marvelous light of God’s goodness. And if we, liberal or conservative, feel that we have reason to celebrate ourselves, compare ourselves to others, or rest on some earthly laurels, let us remember:
We must not congratulate ourselves prematurely when there’s so much further to go.
(pg. 143)
Inevitably there will be many who will read The Possibility of America (God willing) or who will encounter similar arguments and will not be struck by the profound meaning lingering beneath the surface, behind artful expressions and purposeful allusions. We might blame this on the ‘whiteness’ or ‘illiteracy’ of the reader. Perhaps arguments based on art will only ever be cogent and convincing for those already ‘in the know’. Or perhaps the divide between liberal and conservative is more fundamental than Dark supposes.
Regardless of what may be the case in these particulars, I for one will stand alongside the faithful witness of David Dark and proclaim that we all need a dose of the humility that engulfs one when she is overwhelmed by the personal presence of a very good God. Reverence for God and the imago dei in the least of these is the only thing that will begin to heal the hurts that we impose on each other and ourselves.
God have mercy on this God-blessed, God-forsaken land.