The impulsive reformer, eager to set the world right
Plus: CT listicles, a farewell to Joe Biden, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.
A take I haven’t written elsewhere
The impulsive reformer, eager to set the world right
Last month I read Dorothy Sayers’ The Devil to Pay: A Faustian Drama, a brief retelling of the famous soul-selling story that came in the same volume as He That Should Come, a one-act Nativity play. The Christmas scene was why I bought the book, and I prefer it of the two, but this was also well worth the read.
Here I won’t much discuss the play itself but rather a brief section from Sayers’ introductory comments explaining how she reframed the old tale for a modern audience. “Modern” in this case means an original publication date of 1939, right on the cusp of World War II (though, going by the feel of it, I’d label this an interwar period work rather than a product of the war years1).
Sayers’ chief tweak to the Faust legend concerns his motive:
All other considerations apart, I do not feel that the present generation of English people needs to be warned against the passionate pursuit of knowledge for its own sake: That is not our besetting sin.
Looking with the eyes of today upon that legendary figure of man who bartered away his soul, I see in him the type of the impulsive reformer, over-sensitive to suffering, impatient of the facts, eager to set the world right by a sudden overthrow, in his own strength and regardless of the ineluctable nature of things. When he finds it is not to be done, he falls into despair (or, to use the current term, into “defeatism”) and takes flight into phantasy.
His escape takes a form very common in these times: It is the nostalgia of childhood, of the primitive, of the unconscious; the rejection of adult responsibility and the denial of all value to growth and time.
I could almost stop here and simply let you meditate on that. It’s very good. (But then, everything from Sayers is very good!) Nevertheless, I will be so bold as to add a few words of my own.
It’s a devastatingly current sketch. The most obvious specimens are on the left of the late 2010s and early 2020s, pitching police-free cities in a fallen world, announcing an endless stream of lingual diktats in the apparent conviction that “of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh” also works tidily in reverse. The most embarrassing version of the retreat to the juvenile might be the Harry Potter politics of c. 2017—in which full-grown adults publicly referred to Donald Trump as “he who must not be named”—as well as whatever has succeeded it since Harry Potter fell out of vogue with that whole crowd due to the normie 90s liberalism of his author.
But it’s on the right as well, I think, particularly among the swath often too carelessly labeled “Christian nationalist.” There is a very similar impatience and immaturity here, especially among the incessant posters who amuse themselves by imagining a dystopic future in which they alone steer American politics, having deported or disenfranchised everyone else.
This crowd might protest the charge of shirking adult responsibility—they want to get married early, you know, and have oodles of children. To which I suppose I say, as someone who got married younger than most of them and actually has three children and does more in my life than work and post: Get back to me after 10 or 20 years, all of which should include serious involvement in a local church and dramatically less social media use. Get back to me after understanding that women are human and racism is a sin. Get back to me after taking the advice with which Sayers concludes this bit:
Against the exhortation to take refuge in infantilism we may set the saying of Augustine of Hippo concerning Christ: “Cibus sum grandium; cresce et manducabis Me”—“I am the food of the full-grown; become adult, and thou shalt feed on Me.”
Until then, this mostly looks like a too-online pastoral phantasy.2
The Sayers diagnosis strikes me as particularly timely as the second Trump administration is about to begin. Though reactions to his victory have been more muted this time around, his omnipresence in our news cycles tends to have a consistent escalatory effect. It will tend to increase the reformer’s impulse and, when that impulse is inevitable thwarted, at least in part, will offer new material for the denial that anything ever has or possibly could change for the better.
For those of us outside this type, then, I have three purposes. One, simply to recognize the type.
Two, to recognize that though this desire to reform may well be juvenile and unrealistic or possibly dangerous, it is typically sincere and well-intended even if simultaneously self-serving.3 (After his demonic dealing, in his very first attempt to save his city, Sayers’ Faust manages to occasion three murders. But he really wants to help! Or, at least, he does at this early stage of entanglement.) If that is implausible to us, it suggests a deficient political theory of mind, which is a useful asset that can be deliberately cultivated.
And three, to recognize that we likely are not so wholly outside the type as we suppose. The Faust legend is durable because the soul-selling temptation is universal, albeit usually on a smaller and apparently more harmless scale. We all need to be warned that visions of ourselves as swift and benevolent saviors are not as they seem.
Intake
Selected Stories, by P.G. Wodehouse
Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible, by Stanley Hauerwas
Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, by Jonathan Rauch
And I haven’t started it yet, but I found The Scourging Angel: The Black Death in the British Isles, by Benedict Gummer, in the little free library on our block and am really hoping to be able to get into it this week
I was finally making new progress on the quilt project I’ve mentioned, and then my sewing machine needed a new belt. The internet supplies, but too slowly 🥲
Output
New work:
Forgot to share, but I put together two of Christianity Today’s end-of-year listicles:
For many writers, putting hundreds or thousands of words on the page is not the most difficult part of writing. It is rather the ideation phase, the task of coming up with what we call the pitch, the angle, or the take and then determining whether the idea we’ve gotten is worth anything: if it holds together, if it tells the truth, if it might possibly edify the church.
On some blessed occasions, the idea may simply appear, like Gabriel to Mary, an unlooked-for mental gift. Perhaps more often, ideation can be a slog. It recalls less the first chapter of Luke than that of Ecclesiastes: “Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’?” (v. 10)
Readership, of course, is only one measure of an article’s import, success, and value. If you browse our other end-of-year listicles, you’ll find we’re also curating stories by […] other criteria. But readership is telling, too, particularly when the readers in question are those of Christianity Today: Our most-trafficked articles each year offer a snapshot of the interests, hopes, and fears of evangelicals in America and around the world.
Newly relevant work:
On the occasion of President Biden’s retirement:
Biden’s foreign policy is adrift | Reason, February 2023
Biden can’t have it both ways on drone strikes | Reason, October 2022
Why aren’t we out of Yemen yet? | Reason, June 2022
Biden duplicitously continues Trump’s war on the press | The Week, June 2021
Biden’s next step as example-in-chief is ditching his mask | The Week, May 2021
Biden makes big government feel inevitable | The Week, April 2021
Biden’s natsec team is conventional in style—and, unfortunately, policy | Reason, December 2020
The alluring fantasy of Biden ending the imperial presidency | The Week, November 2020
Biden can’t heal the country | The Week, October 2020
Joe Biden, own your age | The Week, April 2019
I’m possibly unduly influenced by overconsumption of Sayers’ earlier detective fiction, which is squarely (and relevantly) interwar in its setting, but also, I have a pet theory of resonance between the interwar period and our post-end of history, post-9/11, post-COVID time.
Cf. the “raw milkmaid dress,” which is honestly a public health hazard—no, not like that, it’s just that my eyes might roll out of my head.
Granted, exceptions to this “typically” are more likely to be found in the halls of power.
Hi, and happy Wednesday. Lord, search us continually. In Your presence are the eyes a flame of fire. May our desire to "reform" see that You, alone, make all things new. I am dealing with one hanging issue related to a divorce, my second. Too much to tell my story but receiving justice is a business where my heart is exposed. Yet with mercy, grace, and truth comes restoration of our (and mine) souls as we seek the adulthood which is Christ. At the same time I am growing into childhood maintaining awe and wonder as I enter His kingdom through trouble. Appreciating your fellowship and CT. What did you think of Mike Pence interview with Russell Moore? I already understood his relationship with President Trump. No matter his performance as President, may Donald Trump encounter Jesus. The King does not mix with politics. He never did and never will. Amazing that Jimmy Carter's funeral is juxtaposed with an inauguration.