I saw these images for the first time yesterday. From the moment I saw them, I’ve been increasingly troubled by them, though I have not been entirely sure why.
I’ve continued to reflect on them, and I want to offer a reading of these images as a way of exploring why they are bothering me so. I’d appreciate any feedback you could offer.
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1. The primary meaning of these propoganda pieces is clear: Support the state so the state can continue to serve you. The subtext of these images is just as clear, I think. It is: Give the state ultimate loyalty, and we’ll allow you to say whatever you like and practice whatever religion you like. In other words, Be American first, then Christian or Jewish or whatever.
These images assume that “freedom” means the sacred (remember, this is the word Jefferson wanted!) right of and to one’s own opinions.
This, it seems to me, is decidedly unChristian. Certainly, I believe humans are possessed of “unalienable rights,” but I don’t believe that those rights are truely articulated in either the Declaration of Independence or the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Instead, as a Christian, I find those rights articulated in Jesus Christ and the good news about him.
As a Christian, I am constituted by Christ, and not by any other power. The Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaims:
Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
To this we must say No! Liberty consists in love for God and neighbor, in a life of service to and fellowship with one’s neighbors, in prayer to and worship of the Triune God as Creator and Judge and Redeemer. Far from being the license to do “everything which injures no one else” (how would one determine this, anyway), it is the humanizing responsiblity to do everything which moves anyone else toward that for which God intended them!
Also, the “natural rights of each man” do have limits – the limits of cruciformed love! And, most importantly, these limits are determined not by law, but by Christ. As I said already, Jesus is the Christian’s constitution. Jesus, not the conscience, is dictator.
2. Notice that the “worship” image includes symbols of diversity; black skin and white; a Catholic rosary and unadorned hands folded in Protestant prayer; also, believers and nonbelievers (notice the thinking man behind the Catholic; what is he, if not a symbolic agnostic or atheist whose reason revolts against the mysteries of faith?). The “speech” image, on the other hand, has little, if any, of this. I wonder if this is meant to emphasize the fact that being American is what unites us, while our religions makes us different from one another?
3. Notice that the figures in the “freedom of worship” picture are pale and drawn. Leather-jacket-man, by contrast, is tanned and virile and confident. He faces us, but they are all turned away from us. He is humanized; they are idealized. Again, this speaks to the Enlightenment assumption of the fundamental irrelevance of one’s religion.
4. Notice that the man in the leather jacket is drawing the attention of those around him, but he does not see them. His face is lifted and his eyes fixed on what must be the director of the town-hall meeting. However, it seems to me he is gazing at that-which-gives-him-meaning. If the Catholic woman is gazing adoringly at the crucifix; this man is gazing adoringly at his right to voice his opinion as he likes, when he likes.
5. The worshippers aren’t looking at each other! This, I believe, again speaks to the modern belief that religion is a private matter, a matter to be settled between oneself and one’s conscience (not even between oneself and God!). This goes against our Christian understanding of worship as necessarily always involving both love for God and love for neighbor; we are a people who turn to see one another, whose worship is carried out face to face.
6. Notice also that we do not see what it is the worshippers (or non-worshippers) are looking at. Why not? Because modern Western liberal democracies remain more concerned about the act of religious looking than the object of that vision. Religion is privitized, and so relativized. What matters, this picture reminds us, is that we look. What precisely we look at is beside the point. Of course, Christian conviction cannot allow this.
Every week I attend the rotary club and every week we sing “America the Beautiful”, say the pledge to allegiance, and then pray. This week during the prayer a gentleman said that the only reason we can sing about America being beautiful and live in a free country is because of God and His son Jesus. I’ve heard it done on several occasions at that meeting, but people equate Christianity with patriotism.
Surely you didn’t miss the text in the “religion” image: “Each according to the dictates of his own conscience.” It speaks most directly to your point about privatization of faith and an emphasis on personal conscience over communal acts of service oriented relationship with God and other. I think you’ve demonstrated very clearly our modern obsession with over-emphasizing a “personal relationship” with God, where we advocate private, personal prayer, study, and devotional life as the “keys to victorius Christian living” at the expense of communal worship, among other things. So. I’ll say less about that and more about what I might add that interests me.
You are certainly right to point out that the “freedom” advertised by modernity is largely about an escape from the restraints of communal living. The general shift from a rural, agrarian lifestyle to an urban, industrial one (largely the story of the modern era) only exacerbated this phenomenon. Ironically, as physical proximity increased with urbanization, so too did feelings of alienation, fragmentation, and isolation-the three biggest keywords for describing “the modern condition.” In the last hundred years, this shift is most clearly seen, perhaps, in neighborhood planning. Whither the large front porches and centralized public parks of older neighborhoods? We used to park our cars in back and relax in the evening on our front porch so we might be more visible and accessible to our neigbors. As time has gone by, the street-facing facades of our houses are marked by garages and closed doors. The privacy of the back yard is favored over the front for recreational use, if we ever even venture outdoors at all. We leave our locked houses in locked cars for a job in a private cubicle to interact with a machine, or at best, people mediated through a machine, only to return home to watch people we don’t know on the screen of a machine until we do it all again the next day. This is an oversimplification to be sure, but the point stands.
The compartmentalizing of our lives, or what Habermas and others have called “the structural transformation of the public sphere” is also a result of modern life. Just the other day Elizabeth was talking about inviting an old friend of hers from law school to our church’s small group’s fellowship night but said she hesitates to ask him because he’s mentioned before his distaste for “mixing worlds.” He’d prefer to keep his school friends separate from his church friends, from his familial ties, from his work relationships, etc., etc. I can’t say I don’t fight the same feeling. This cordoning off of our lives into separate spheres is another hallmark of modern life, and that it takes a toll on our obedience to love God and neighbor is inevitably true. How often do we hear people complain that the Sunday worship experience never translates tangibly into their weekday living as effectively as they know it should. How sad then, is it, as you’ve pointed out, that our solution has largely been to more aggressively supplement the worship experience with private devotional time rather than Christianly interaction involving fellowship with and service to others. It’s hard to love your neighbor alone in your prayer closet.
On another note, one more thing I think is worth mentioning is the connection between what Etienne Balibar and others haved called “full attachment” concerning nationalism and the intent of these posters. Balibar points out how it is easy to see how the pathos of nationalism is used rhetorically to legitimize violence (in this case, to sell war bonds); but, perhaps more interstingly, he points out how the emotional experience of violence actually catalyzes nationalism. We are always at our most patriotic at war time. It’s interesting to think, then, how not only do these posters which extoll the virtues of “freedom” galvanize support for the war effort itself, they also re-inscribe us within that very rhetoric of modern “freedom” with a renewed passion for (and thus easy aquiescence to) the status quo of modern life. This is made possible directly by the very violence of war and its accompanying emotional drive towards patriotism. In other words, it’s not only that our attachment to those “freedoms” impassions us with a noble desire to fight for them, but that the very act of fighting for them makes us care more deeply about the nation state and the rhetoric of freedom which props it up. We likely become most “fully attached,” to the nation-state and its ideology through the defense of that ideology through violence, not through our attachment to the ideology itself. Just something else to think about.
Mark
I’ve not read Balibar, but Stanley Hauerwas makes the same point, perhaps derivatively. Regardless, I do think he’s exactly right to say that violence catalyzes nationalism. That is, violence both against “us” and by “us.” This is perhaps the clearest indication to us as Christians that we are citizens of another kingdom!
You’re right, of course, about the Sunday worship experience too seldomly impacting our “everyday lives.” Some might say – someone did say this to Stephen just a day or so ago – that that means we should do away with a weekly communal worship gathering. As you might imagine, I strongly disagree. I think that’s all the more reason for us to articulate more clearly and passionately that the Christ who is present to us in the Bread and Wine and with us as we worship and pray together, is for the world as its rightful ruler and that he someday shall put it all right. It is a failure of nerve and imagination, of faith and hope, both on the part of the hearers and speakers, that we don’t see how what we do on Sunday matters to our lives in the “real world.”
For wha it’s worth, I didn’t miss the text. Though I didn’t comment on it directly, I did offer the comment that “Jesus, not one’s conscience, is dictator.”
The two paintings are part of a set of four painted by Norman Rockwell to illustrate the four freedoms he heard enumerated by FDR in one of his speeches. Those four freedoms were Freedom of Speech, Freedom from Fear, Freedom of Religion and Freedom from Want. They were originally published in the Saturday Evening Post along with an essay about each freedom. Later they were commissioned for use to help sell war bonds.
I copied the following from a Norman Rockwell website:
“Rockwell said that this painting was the hardest to finish of all the Four Freedoms paintings. This was the last of the Four Freedoms to be finished.
His first idea for this painting was a cheerful scene in a barbershop. In it would be different races and creeds, all getting along splendidly. The characters planned and partially painted included a white Protestant barber, a Jewish customer, an Afro-American customer, a Catholic priest and a white Anglo customer.
It wasn’t long before people who saw the rough painting were complaining about Rockwell painting the characters as stereotypes. The Catholic priest looked too rough. the Afro-American should have lighter skin. Or darker skin. The Jewish man didn’t look like the Jewish viewers wanted him to look. Norman Rockwell started all over from the beginning.
His second and third ideas didn’t go much better.
The Post editors started pressuring him to finish.
Then Rockwell pulled the final idea for Freedom to Worship out of his head. This rendering of the idea was wildly successful.
The painting shows eight people, four women and four men. They are all praying. Each is praying in his or her own way. Some are praying with eyes open, some with eyes closed.
They are illuminated by a soft, golden light emanating from off the left side of the canvas.
Some have their heads bowed, one is looking upward. One holds rosary beads, one holds scripture.
Catholic, Protestant and Jew are all represented in the painting. Black and white are both represented. Freedom of religion is all encompassing.
At the top of the painting, Norman Rockwell has inscribed “EACH ACCORDING TO THE DICTATES OF HIS OWN CONSCIENCE.” Rockwell said that he remembered reading it somewhere, but he didn’t remember exactly where.
Norman Rockwell’s illustration of the right of people to worship as they choose without governmental interference was the most moving of the Four Freedoms series.”
Back to my words:
Growing up just a few years after WWII, I have a sentimental attachment to these paintings. They were in most of my classrooms as a child, and since my teachers had all experienced at least some of the horror and fear of the war, they spoke reverentially of them, so it is probably impossible for me to look at them as analytically as you do.
I will give you, however, that we fought to make these freedoms available to people in Europe while at the same denying them to African Americans here. But the use of symbols is a powerful method of motivating and comforting a populace. They are used in the political arena and in church spheres everday. There is always a great possibility of misuse and abuse when stirring visceral responses from crowds.
Randy,
Thanks for the background info. I didn’t know about the other images, or what purpose they were to serve. I’ve no doubt that your personal experience of them differs profoundly from my own.
Randy,
My comment was published prematurely. So back to what I was saying…
It’s the reverence you mentioned that bothers me! Talk about “America” or Americana in hushed tones troubles my Christian sensibility deeply. I don’t think it’s as simple as a possible misuse of these images; I believe these pictures symbolize a fundamental problem for those of us trying to live as Christians in the United States.
Let me quickly add: I’m not at all clear on what exactly we are to do about this. And I’m not even sure how big a problem nationalism is, after all. But I do stand convinced that being Christian and being American are in tension with one another, not because Christ does not allow us penultimate loyalties, but because the nation-state insists on being ultimate. Christ can sanction patriotism, but the nation will not submit itself to Christ.