Anxious freedom and the gift of remembrance
America is an anxious place these days, as are many Christians I bump into. According to Gallup only 47% of the country is “very satisfied” with their personal lives. The reasons why seem to be frustratingly perplexing.
More and more people I interact with through my day job in the nonprofit sector have been wringing their hands about the economy for three long years, keeping their generosity scaled back as they remain convinced a massive recession is imminent. Meanwhile, the economy continues exceeding even positive expectations and they are spending and vacationing like they have no worries. Wars on the other side of the globe make some feel as if the world is more dangerous, but the institutions underpinning global security have so far prevented larger conflicts from igniting. There’s a tense election coming up later this year some people vaguely point to, yet they struggle to articulate the specific details on why it makes them anxious.
This all has bled into church life here in the American South, but there are internal dynamics driving much of the anxiety, too. In more fundamentalist-evangelical bubbles —which dominate my corner of the country— declining cultural power and people departing authoritarian churches has given way to defensive insularity and ressentiment. Folks who have fled evangelical cancel culture can easily see it elsewhere and feel no church is safe, failing to see that there are much healthier non-evangelical and even evangelical options. And some of my friends in non-evangelical traditions often come across as being more pessimistic or anxious about the future than hopeful.
Part of our anxiety stems from a fractured, negative information environment. The endless breaking news cycle makes the mundane an emergency and keeps actual emergencies hidden. Blow-by-blow coverage of both real news and the absurd does little more than instill a sense of powerlessness in viewers. Every day there’s a new story on social media of a pastor or other church leader abusing people. The old saying “if it bleeds, it leads” is in a new golden era.
I think there is something much deeper driving our malaise though. Pointing out that the economy is doing well despite some lingering issues doesn't change moods. Encouraging post-evangelical Christians to visit a more moderate or open-minded church can send their anxiety through the roof. I’m not immune to the bad vibes either. Earlier this month I felt a dark cloud hanging over my head for no apparent reason. When anxieties are met with a gentle and rational response, it doesn't change the way people feel. Sometimes it makes things worse.
It’s not just that people are anxious right now, it’s that they seem to be trapped in their anxiety. Something has snapped in the American psyche the past few years that has left many paralyzed, including some Christians. My goal here is twofold: to try to 1) articulate whatever this deeper issue is and 2) arrive at a few practical solutions that folks can latch onto. Let’s see where this goes.
Briefly surveying the historical roots of our relentless hum of anxiety
Our moodiness should probably not be a surprise. Too many of us Christians here in the South especially have been conditioned not to think beyond our immediate moment and place. This prevents us from leaning into history and outside perspective that can free us to see and think bigger.
Reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America years ago was especially eye-opening for me in this regard. As a Frenchman spending months traveling our country, Tocqueville saw 1830s America for more of who we were than most Americans at the time could. Many of his predictions came to pass, but it’s his observations of American culture and religion that feel especially pertinent today.
Here are a few excerpts from Chapter 13, titled “Why the Americans are So Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity.” Keep in mind these words were written nearly 200 years ago:
“In certain remote corners of the Old World you may still sometimes stumble upon a small district that seems to have been forgotten amid the general tumult, and to have remained stationary while everything around it was in motion. The inhabitants, for the most part, are extremely ignorant and poor; they take no part in the business of the country and are frequently oppressed by the government, yet their countenances are generally placid and their spirits light.
In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords, it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures.
The chief reason for this contrast is that the former do not think of the ills they endure, while the latter are forever brooding over advantages they do not possess. It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it…
At first sight there is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance. The spectacle itself, however, is as old as the world; the novelty is to see a whole people furnish an exemplification of it…
To these causes must be attributed that strange melancholy which often haunts the inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of their abundance, and that disgust at life which sometimes seizes upon them in the midst of calm and easy circumstances…The Americans do not put an end to their lives, however disquieted they may be, because their religion forbids it; and among them materialism may be said hardly to exist, notwithstanding the general passion for physical gratification. The will resists, but reason frequently gives way.”
Well, that’s…prophetic.
Photo: Alexis de Tocqueville rests his hand on a chair, as one does. (Théodore Chassériau, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
My generation was probably the last to grow up hearing the phrase American exceptionalism spoken in a positive light. Younger people especially sigh when older generations speak of the American dream. These are complex terms rooted in our civic religion that point to something not totally without merit: for decades the United States really was a place some people could build a new and good life. It was possible for some to become more economically stable with hard work, widening social safety nets, and American innovation.
Some is obviously the key word here. The problem is that opportunity was never afforded to everyone. At our best, the lives of Black Americans, indigenous peoples, and some immigrant communities were looked past. Our growing industrial and military might on the world stage, as well as the spread of “our” democratic ideals in the post-war era, was over-glorified to the point of becoming myth. Myth that we took for absolute, unchanging truth. White Christians not only bought into this hook, line, and sinker, but also led the charge in treating the myth as something akin to biblical truth.
Tocqueville saw and articulated the parallel track of anxiety caused by these beliefs long before they took on the forms we are more familiar with today. To varying degrees, this anxiety has always been with us. It has become more obvious in times of social change, when the myth has been challenged. The Civil Rights movement spoke truth that the American dream was neither open to all nor our country as exceptional as it could be. Vietnam and other moral failures during the Cold War showed American power had dark proclivities and limits. This did little to usurp the militarism that could be found in many Christian spaces, but it has caused bouts of intense anxiety in them as reality crashed into the American myth.
Still, through it all we managed to convince ourselves every generation was going to be a little better off than the last. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the “end of history” could not be too far off.
Then the planes slammed into the Twin Towers. America fell headlong into a “war on terror” that we are still fighting and cannot win. The global economy almost collapsed as my generation was entering the workforce, and most of us still haven’t fully recovered from it. Nearly four decades of trickle-down economics arrived more fully at its logical conclusion with the emergence of the absurdly wealthy. This gave way to extreme partisanship and the reemergence of a more vocal white identity politics…which led to Donald Trump. Similar patterns can be seen rising elsewhere in the world. Ever since, more Americans are being forced to reckon with the myth our country has preached to itself across generations, without always realizing that’s what we are doing. And we’re certainly still “brooding over advantages” we “do not possess,” with little ability to recognize that there are far more dangerous places with less opportunities to live than the United States.
Many of us Christians who had some of our naivety sloughed off during the Trump years hoped that he represented the last gasps of an ugly American underbelly, one with deep roots in our churches, but that we thought was destined to die with an older generation. In doing so, we were merely repackaging the same old myth for our moment.
Then the pandemic hit.
The year from hell, now all but forgotten
Whatever the pandemic broke in the American psyche has proven to be a double-edged sword, like many things in life are.
On one hand, COVID-19 itself was truly horrifying. The disease killed more than one million of our fellow citizens, hospitalized millions more, and forced all of us into varying degrees of isolation and need. The country veered from anxious to grief-stricken to angry at such a dizzying pace as the incompetence of the Trump administration compounded the damage. If 9/11 knocked America off balance, then the pandemic dragged us to our knees.
On the other hand, 2020 was also an inflection point, at least for those who could choose for it to be. Many who moved to working from home made the decision to prioritize spending more time with family moving forward. When the weight of American racism manifested in a cop suffocating one of our black citizens, more people who may not have noticed in the past not only did, but also raised their voice in calls for change. Just enough people of all ages and backgrounds stepped forward in a tense election to prevent another four years of danger and global embarrassment. As bad as January 6 and associated efforts were, that attempt to overthrow American democracy failed.
Churches were often home to the worst divisiveness of 2020 and January 6. Regular readers of this site will tell you they’ve left a church because of the ugliness they witnessed. I will, too. Trumpism and the pandemic exposed the rot in churches that had always been there. Fundamentalism was not co-opting evangelicalism in real-time; rather, we learned fundamentalist and authoritarian behavior had always been there behind closed doors. A lot of Christians were given good reason to stop believing in the story their church told about themselves.
We all lived through a difficult year regardless of our politics and beliefs. And we’ve been trying to move on as if none of it happened.
A country and church not in decline, but set adrift by the “dizziness of freedom”
I understand the inclination to just move on. We all have lives and responsibilities we have to keep up with. No one wants to stay mired in the past, and we shouldn’t. But moving on and moving forward are not necessarily the same thing.
Several years ago, an Indian pastor who immigrated to the United States remarked to me “Christians in America don’t know how to grieve and it’s your Achilles' heel.” We have a tendency to just move on without truly processing what we’ve been through. As such, moving forward and making real progress is a frustratingly slow burn; like, generationally slow. The reasons are as historic as they are immediate. It’s not difficult to see today what Tocqueville observed so many years ago. It’s also easy to think back to more recent history, such as the pandemic or having to leave a church, and feel anxiety, sadness, and lingering anger that never seems to go away.
I don’t know where trauma begins and ends, but it feels like a lot of us have some from 2020 and even further back that remains undealt with. The pandemic was unprecedented in so many ways. Mundane tasks like going to a store became potentially dangerous. There was loss of community and the challenge of trying to comprehend why so many of our brothers and sisters in Christ were saying truly awful things. Even those who fared better than others had moments of feeling completely overwhelmed. If there was a moment to hit the reset button on how we deal with hardship and loss, this was clearly it.
Instead, we just moved on. The obvious question is why?
The reasons are myriad. Some folks are just trying to keep up with the busyness of life. Others keep locking onto the latest crisis and can’t break free from the cycle. As I mentioned at the outset, fear of trying something new to help move forward such as visiting a new church, even one in a different tradition, is a very real feeling, even if the reasons aren’t totally rational. We could add to this list, but you get the point.
The longer-term effects of this are bearing out now and they are not good. In a recent article for The Atlantic, clinical psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman write this:
“Traumatic memories are notable for how they alter the ways people recall the past and consider the future. A recent brain-imaging study showed that when people with a history of trauma were prompted to return to those horrific events, a part of the brain was activated that is normally employed when one thinks about oneself in the present. In other words, the study suggests that the traumatic memory, when retrieved, came forth as if it were being relived during the study. Traumatic memory doesn’t feel like a historical event, but returns in an eternal present, disconnected from its origin, leaving its bearer searching for an explanation. And right on cue, everyday life offers plenty of unpleasant things to blame for those feelings—errant friends, the price of groceries, or the leadership of the country.”
If that doesn’t describe our current milieu, then I don’t know what does.
Thinking back to some of our history, another reason we seem to be trying to move on instead of forward is that we have the freedom to. There are good things that expressive individualism has brought us; however, we Americans have taken it so far to the extreme that we’ve plunged ourselves into a loneliness epidemic, one that creates pressure to perform moving forward instead of actually doing it. Being in healthy community with others has many benefits, one of them being that you have less freedom to avoid facing real problems. When you’re without a robust support network, responsibility and anxiety weigh much more heavily.
This is not a new insight. 19th century Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” It rises up when we become aware of our own freedom and responsibilities, especially when the going gets rough. For example, when one is leaving a church because of abuse and toxicity, they are also confronting the uncertainty (what comes next) and potential consequences (losing friends and even their livelihood) of that choice. This can induce a disorientation akin to looking into an abyss. The anxiety of a past decision like that and the fallout can come roaring back months, even years later.
It’s not difficult to find anxious declarations of an America in decline today. This, too, is reflected in many churches thinking about our secularizing society. But it seems to me that we are adrift more than anything else. The ongoing collapse of a certain kind of Christendom —one that I would argue needs to reform or die— has not yet given way to what comes next. It’s entirely possible that, 30 years from now, we’re all in a much better place because we dealt with our anxieties and trauma today.
Our excessive, expressive individualism has unmoored us from our past and each other as we’ve veered from one crisis into the next. We are caught up in the “dizziness of freedom.” The choices before us are so many that we don’t even want to consider what all of them are. What we do want is certainty and we are narrowing our vision to try to create it. Black and white. Right and left. Conservative and liberal. Republican and Democrat. Christian and not. Evangelicals vs. everyone. Our anxiety is driving us away from our imaginations and each other.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Kierkegaard correctly points out that anxiety can push us to confront the fundamental questions of existence, morality, and meaning we are facing. It is an essential aspect of human existence that can lead to deeper self-awareness and growth, not just a negative emotion that needs to be overcome. But only if we can remember the reasons why we are anxious to begin with and do so in a healthy way.
The need for remembrance
My day job with a Sudan-focused nonprofit used to take me to Washington D.C. on occasion. Most of my time was spent meeting with Congressional staffers on Capitol Hill or with donors in coffee shops, so I never had much time to see the city. I always made it a point to visit the Holocaust Museum though. It’s an impressive place from an educational perspective, but how the institution handles remembrance is truly remarkable.
The pinnacle of the museum, in my opinion, is the Hall of Remembrance, where you can light a candle and pray or meditate along one of the hexagonal room’s walls. At the front of the hall is an eternal flame sitting atop a chest of soil gathered from the concentration and death camps, Jewish ghettos, and cemeteries where American soldiers who fought and died to defeat Nazi Germany are buried. An inscription of Deuteronomy 4:9 reads “Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children, and to your children's children.”
You can feel the weight of history here. The point of this space is not to move on, but to remember and never stop remembering. It’s to root an atrocity in the past where it belongs, honor those who were lost, and to help us do better as we move forward. It’s a reminder that the world has been in much worse shape than it is now. It’s where anxiety and doubt are confronted head on. I always felt better about my job, which tends to have more dark days than bright ones, walking away from that sacred ground.
Working with some of the most persecuted people in the world has opened my eyes to the importance of remembrance. Trauma-informed counseling is rarely accessible in war-torn Sudan, but many Sudanese have found a way to weave their hardships and trauma into a broader narrative, rooted in truth, that helps them move forward anyways. When traumatic events are recalled they are often in the context of the past with an eye toward the future. People have found a way to use their experiences to make real progress. This is not to say that anxiety and fear don’t exist in Sudan; they very much do, especially right now. But it has never ceased to amaze me how easy it is to find joy and hope in one of the last places on earth there should be any of either.
This paradox should not surprise Christians. In Luke 22 during the institution of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus is recorded as saying:
When the hour came, he took his place at the table, and the apostles with him. He said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he said, “Take this and divide it among yourselves, for I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
It’s interesting that Jesus begins the process of remembrance before the extreme trauma that is to come. It’s like he knows that the disciples need to remember who he is and their time together before the terror of the next few days. Jesus is not preparing them to move on, he is trying to prepare them to move forward. There’s a reason this became one of the sacraments: for us to remember and move forward, too.
If we are to imitate Jesus well then we need to learn how to remember the past in its appropriate context. This is difficult here in the American South especially, where a specific view on the truth of Christ is emphasized far more heavily than the way of Christ. But try we must. I think there are three places we can start.
1. Giving thanks. Jesus expresses gratitude for the bread he is breaking, which he uses as a metaphor for his soon to be broken and traumatized body. This is a radical act: being thankful for their time together and for what lies ahead.
We need to find a way to remember the hard and ugly of the pandemic, yes, but there are good things worth remembering, too. Maybe it was a new friend made or more time spent with family. Heck, it’s a good thing to have escaped toxic places, even if that experience was difficult. Instead of “brooding over advantages they do not possess” —as Tocqueville wrote– we would do well to express gratitude for those real blessings and advantages we have today.
2. Choosing to be less free. This is anecdotal, but most Christians I’ve run into the past few years who are are anxious and struggling to remember the past in a healthier way are lacking strong community around them. Not to beat a dead horse, but being in healthy community with others has the benefit of being less free to avoid facing real problems. We’re not meant to do life alone (Hebrews 10:19-25). Voluntarily taking on a little less freedom may be considered un-American, but it is certainly Christlike. We should choose the latter.
If you’ve been forced to leave a church the past few years and haven’t made a serious effort to find a new church home, I encourage you to do so now. If the thought of going to a church in the same style of the one you left gives you anxiety, then visit some that are not in that tradition and see if one of them is a good fit. New perspective can be enlightening and help you internalize the truth that your past is neither the majority of the historic Christian faith nor your future.
3. Seeking professional help. If you feel like your anxiety and trauma are beyond your means to handle in community with others, seek out professional help in the form a licensed therapist. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing that you can’t do this alone. We’re blessed to live in a country where trauma-informed counseling exists. Take advantage of it.
Closing Thoughts
The darkness of social anxiety doesn’t descend all at once. The process of moving forward takes time. It must begin with a recognition that much has been lost and needs to be remembered in a way that connects healthily to the past.
Some of us lost loved ones. Others a church community. Some are realizing the last remnants of an American myth have been replaced with uncertainty as we try to tell a more honest story about who we are and where we are going. There’s a lot that needs to be remembered and found out. Trying to move on hasn't gotten the job done and it never will.
Renowned Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann once said “Churches should be the most honest place in town, not the happiest place in town.” I think about that a lot in the context of anxiety. Pursuing happiness is an exercise in just trying to move on. Honesty can help replace the warped blur of 2020 with memories that are more truthful and helpful. It puts us on the road to remembrance.
Remembrance is a gift. Remembrance is Christlike. Remembrance is how we move forward.
I explore faith and church culture in the American South from Memphis, TN. Never miss an article by signing up for my newsletter and subscribing to the podcast. You can also become a member or leave a tip to help keep this site free and open to all.
