1 Emergency Time?
Every authoritarian project is also a project about time. Aspirational strongmen strive not only to capture and control political institutions, independent media, academic and cultural institutions, organizations of civil society, and political opponents. Among their most strategic – if somewhat less conspicuous – targets are the clock and the calendar.
Authoritarian regimes institute new holidays to harness civil religion for the worship of power, discredit or purge the keepers of institutional memory, stall due processes and slow-walk everything they cannot control into attrition, deregulate shared rest days so that no common free time is available, rewrite history to sanction the redistributions of the current moment, pine nostalgically for a made-up past, and promise a future redemption that legitimizes current sacrifices. Not only do they coopt and colonize time, they also abolish it as they inflate the vocabulary of urgency to manufacture “unprecedented,” “historical” moments of grandeur as well as of crisis at a rate that creates a state of perpetual “now.”
This is the preferred tempo of every regime that wants its population too overwhelmed to resist and too frightened to imagine alternatives. The proverbial state of exception, then, is not only a legal category for abolishing checks and balances toward the unbridled exercise of power. It is also a temporal collapse into emergency singularity that abolishes the conditions for reflection and action, mourning and dreaming, building and organizing.
When I called my book an “Emergency Devotional,” I knew I was setting up a tension. An emergency is a state of urgency where everything depends on acting quickly in the face of an external threat. A devotional is a companion to a spiritual practice that sets up a slow and steady internal rhythm independent of daily affairs. The title acknowledged that the threat was real, the crisis pressing. But its juxtaposition simultaneously indicated that the demanded response required not stepping into, but out of emergency temporality.
As I mapped the current moment onto stories, figures, and wisdom from other historical moments – notably 20th century Europe, but also the deeper history of scripture – I aimed to simultaneously relativize and heighten the sense of crisis. “This is not the first end of the world. Many worlds have ended,” I briefly gestured in the introduction, zooming out to the broadest conceivable horizon of the rise and fall of empires, while in the individual lessons, I issued many direct imperatives to faithful action in concrete engagement at the smallest possible level of readers’ personal and professional lives. The point was not to resolve the tension, but to counteract both the temptation to get caught in the panic of the “now” and the temptation to withdraw into transcendence or false timelessness. Use dialectics to break out of emergency time; that was the intention, at least, refusing to let the regime set the beat, the rhythm, and the tempo at which we live and act and pray. Of course, everybody knows that dialectics solve nothing.
This is where Christman’s and Loftin’s books pick up what mine skipped. They slow the pace further as they provide robust historical, political, and theological analyses of the current crisis, and argumentation as to what a faithful Christian response requires – both things that the “emergency” register of my book did not take upon itself to make time for. And, as they center on mourning and organizing, respectively, they do so not only as calls to conversion and action, but also in contestation of and as alternatives to emergency temporality. One might even say that the three books themselves constitute three different machines for the production of counter-temporalities.
2 Three counter temporality machines
There are, for starters, the temporalities that attend even the different genres. Phil Christman has written an argument. Why Christians Should Be Leftists states its intentions concisely and sets out to achieve them. To argue is itself a temporal act; it presumes hope and an open future. There is still time for persuasion, still readers who might change their minds, still a tomorrow that might break off from a mere continuation of the present. And Christman’s argument operates in quite specific time periods, too: election cycles, union votes, legislative sessions, neighbors with concrete needs.
Mac Loftin has written something closer to an elegy. In the Twilight of the Christian West asks Christians to stop raging against the dying of Christendom’s light and to mourn it instead. Fascism, for Loftin, is a form of misdirected temporality, a grasping after something diminishing, an attempt to immunize it against change and loss, ever more violently as the effort to stave off its failure becomes futile. Mourning, as resistance to the fascist impulse in all of us, loosens the grip on past and present and so makes space for a future that is frightening in its difference. Mourning takes exactly the kind of time that emergency forbids; that is its resistance to emergency temporality.
And I, finally, wrote a devotional – the smallest of our three clocks in many ways, but one with a long-lasting battery. Devotions invite daily repetition, small acts at fixed hours, a timescale far below the political moment, disengaging from its dictates and, as it taps into the longer durée of liturgical time, establishing its own rhythm of attention and reflection. Barth once likened this posture to “the chanting of the hours by the Benedictines near Maria Laach, which goes on undoubtedly without break or interruption, pursuing the even tenor of its way even in the Third Reich.” It is not enough to profess that Jesus is Lord, even the “Lord of time”; one must live as if that were true. And one way to do this is to structure one’s time liturgically rather than by the demands of empire.
These are not three answers to the same question, so there is no need to contrast their relative merit. But I also find myself being pushed further by Loftin and Christman into questions I was not able to solve in my own book.
Fascism, Loftin diagnoses, “is not some external force threatening to corrupt Christianity from without.” Rather, fascism is what happens when Christianity recognizes its own boundedness toward loss and transience and, instead of embracing that fate in faithful mourning, responds with ever more “violent grasping after permanence and power”. Drawing on mystics from Hadewijch to Simone Weil, and theological critics from Bonhoeffer to de Certeau, Loftin traces a counter-tradition in which renunciation and loss go all the way down: creation itself is God’s self-subtraction, the eucharist makes absence felt rather than satisfying desire, and even resurrection is not reversal of death but the love that survives in a mourning community. Faithfulness, on this account, requires learning to mourn one’s own loss of power, transience, and death.
Loftin’s sharp critique and deep theological mining caution me against taking my own emergency rhetoric, dialectical intentions notwithstanding, too seriously. “Emergency” still sets the tone of watching for an imminent threat: act now, do not let it happen. Loftin insists that in many ways the moment is the opposite one: mourn rather than hold on. Let it go. The civilizational project he calls “the Christian West” is not so much under attack as passing, and has, not just historically but theologically, always been about passing. We are not watching a move from zenith to nadir; rather, we are called to inhabit the perennial twilight of an orientation that can never be about power and self-preservation in the first place. The rage to restore Christendom is the rage of those who cannot bear that God’s own primary move is a creative withdrawal that makes space for something other than Godself.
Christman pushes further into concretion, not just on a theological reading of crisis temporality, but what love requires within it. His answer is bracingly literal and material, as challenging as it is simple: Take the Sermon on the Mount not as pious sentiment but as social and political vision. What if the last are actually put first, debts actually forgiven, the hungry actually fed, not only in God’s regard, but also in concrete economic arrangements? No wonder the powerful of the world have always preferred to postulate (as in the famous quip often attributed to Otto von Bismarck) that it is impossible to base any sort of politics on the Sermon on the Mount. Christman instead insists that neither pious sentiments nor realpolitik are enough. The gospel entails specific policies, and these run unapologetically toward union organizing, worker co-ops, socialized wealth funds, and reparations reckoned at a global rather than merely national scale.
Starting with Christman’s own conversion account from conservative to left politics, much of the argument is funded by quite specific soteriological and eschatological temporalities. We may never be certain of our own righteousness, but the one thing we can be certain of is God’s love. Converting to such love requires not leaving anyone behind. It forbids subdividing the world into achievers and failures, elect and reprobate, friends and enemies, those who merit grace and those who do not. But this eschatological horizon is not transcendent. It gives time in which metanoia is possible, indeed required of the Christian. No escape to eternity, spiritually or politically, no withdrawal, no unpolitical stance. Against the leftist’s own perennial temptation to righteousness, Christman does not tire to caution that even holding the right opinions should only reveal how badly we all need grace, which is itself, he notes dryly, “not a bad starting point” for the universal solidarity his definition of leftism centers.
Both books, then, draw on different counter-temporalities to emergency time and thus open up further options for resistance than I had imagined. Both also unsettle my own inclinations in different ways. Loftin’s book challenges me on the nature of the crisis: is this an emergency, something coming that must be stopped, or is it a necessary loss that must be embraced and mourned? My devotional keeps leaning toward the first even as it draws the strength to do so from the second: it imbues the long twilight with theological significance and necessity, but then borrows grief as fuel and metabolizes it back into resilience and practice. Loftin will not let mourning serve anything beyond itself, on pain of relapsing into exactly the grasping he diagnoses as fascism’s core temptation.
Where I find myself wanting more is guidance on how to inhabit that stance concretely, and tools for how to distinguish between different impulses toward self-preservation. Is the opening of borders demanded in relation to the climate refugee from Honduras also demanded in relation to the corporate data center or the fracking effort on native land? Are the impulses to self-preservation of trans rights’ activists indistinguishable from those of the defenders of “the traditional family” or “the Christian West,” I found myself wondering, primarily because in my own book I felt I had not been able to solve the problem of discernment.
In Loftin’s case, everything depends, of course, on his book’s particular audience. Insofar as the book is directed at the white muscular Christian in many of us and calls us to conversion away from our own temptation towards fascism, I find it extremely compelling and theologically challenging in just the right ways. But as I am finding myself called back to my own need to disidentify the Christian faith from the historical-political projects (including the Christian West) that it has wedded itself to, I am also asking myself when an exclusive focus on disidentification and mourning one’s death risks abdicating the concrete and messy responsibilities that attend survival. Perhaps this is the moment, for both of us, to look past the Bonhoeffers and the Weils and become apprentices to those who have already developed practices for living after the end of a world, not least those whose worlds Christendom itself has ended and who have often insisted to keep “praying and doing justice,” anyways, such as indigenous peoples, the Black church, and queer and disabled counter-communities.
Christman’s intervention offers some of that concretion. He is the one among the three of us who most explicitly draws on just these type of sources – even as his book is also the one most invested in continuing to address “conservative” Christians (the questioning Republican, fundamentalist, white Christian he himself once was and now is intent on persuading). Christman builds that bridge by retaining the apologetical and testimonial style, including the temporality of the conversion narrative with subsequent sanctification, now as a roadmap not for individual achievement but collective political change. His analysis and argument are not about the past and the present as much as about the future, and here he does not shy away from political specifics in a way that challenges my own project from a different direction. A devotional invests in formation, it invites the reader into discernment and reflection toward individual and communal transformation. But formation can become a substitute for organization, a way of treating politics as a spiritual condition, to be addressed by becoming the right kind of person rather than by building the right kind of power. Even with all my exhortations to action, I take from Christman the reminder not to let the call to reflection curdle into an alibi, and not to let the call to discernment deflect from making concrete commitments. Christman will not let interiority stand in for organization, even as he also makes his own journey much more transparent for the reader as a path to follow.
His example raises questions for me: How much of my discomfort with offering such a prescriptive roadmap is really anti-authoritarian pedagogy (as I’ve told myself), if I am also using the rigid formational structure of a devotional? Where does my attempt of stepping out of emergency time into both longer and shorter rhythms neglect the political cycles that are the given avenues for organizing? Where is my pitching discernment empowering, and where does it avoid stating my own commitments with more concretion?
3 What time is it, then?
There is no algorithm for discernment. No book – not Loftin’s erudite elegy, not Christman’s compelling conversion, not my own elongated emergency – can answer: When is it time to draw a line, and when is it time to build coalitions; when is it time to mourn the loss of power and space, and when is it time to be a spoke in the wheel of fascist transformation; when is it time to pray and when is it time to do justice? What our books might do, hopefully, is train you to live in more than one time at once: to grieve and organize and keep the small daily offices, in the company of people watching the signs of the times with you. Discernment is not a faculty you either have or lack. It is a rehearsal that the whole community practices in ordinary time, so that the community is prepared to draw the necessary lines and build the necessary bridges in extraordinary time, as every moment can become the one through which the messiah enters.
In the context I study, the people who were most confident they could read God’s hour off the face of history were the German Christians. They knew exactly what time it was: the nation’s hour, the Führer’s moment, history itself as providential decree. Maybe confidence about what time it is is itself part of the strongman’s reach for power, part of the fascist impulse Loftin diagnoses in all of us, part of the all-too-human wish to answer helplessness with decisiveness.
My grandmother (having survived the Nazis) used to say, “I don’t have time to hurry.” That struck me as a child. Hurrying is exactly how we misjudge, misstep, drop what we’re carrying. When there isn’t time to try again, we can’t afford to rush the telling of it. Even so, it has always been those in positions of relative privilege who advise for caution and care, while those on the margins, long struck across the mouth, eventually say, “we can no longer wait.” If we are honest, the “moment of truth” has always had to be produced from the margins.
