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The ambivalent wonders of cotton

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Eli Whitney’s cotton gin

Do they teach them about Eli Whitney in schools anymore? When I was young, Whitney’s story was told (briefly) because of his tremendous – and ambivalent – importance in American history.

Whitney’s cotton gin revitalized the economy of the American south. It made cotton a cheap and profitable bulk commodity. (Until then it had been exclusively luxury wear.) And – tragically – it revived human slavery as a business model in America, where it had been – everyone agreed – quietly dying out. All those self-righteous sermons about God ordaining slavery mostly got delivered after the plantation economy had been revived and prosperity once again depended on cheap field labor.

But there’s another side to the cotton story, less well known but equally significant. I read about it, I think, in Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern, and it astonished me.

I’ve written much about the rise of Pietism and how it contributed to literacy, social mobility, and a new social status for common people. But few are aware how much cotton fiber also contributed to that change.

As I understand it, John Wesley never actually said, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” But it does encapsulate some ideas he expressed. However (I think Paul Johnson made this point), it would have been impossible to say that before cotton became widely available.

Cotton is a wonderful fiber. It’s light and cool, great for summer wear. And you can boil the stuff. Throw it in a kettle and bubble the germs out of it. A poor man who owns cotton clothing can be as clean as the king of England or the president of the United States.

Wool is wonderful in its way (especially up here in the north), but you have to wash it in cool water. You can never sanitize it. That means that throughout history, when most of the poor wore wool, even next to the skin, those poor people stunk.

Cotton gave them a new dignity. I remember my mother reminiscing repeatedly about her childhood in the Great Depression. “Our clothes may have been old, and they may have been patched,” she said, “but my mother saw to it they were always clean.” That’s the pride of the honest poor, and a revolution in the world.

Since it’s supposed to be Pride Month, I’ll go with Cotton-Wearing Pride, thank you.

Reading, Religion

Black-suited Pietist

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Photo credit: Yunus Tug for Unsplash+. Unsplash license.

Today, after much soul-searching and delay, I made up my mind to go to a certain well-known men’s clothier and buy a suit. More than that, I allowed myself to be talked into ordering what’s known as a “bespoke” suit – cut to my size and tailored for my peculiar personal form. The waiting time will be more than a month.

You see, I’ve got a little money coming in, and I’ve frequently felt the incongruity of the fact that, for all my talk about men dressing decently, my own (only) suit is rather shabby. It’s a point of traditional wisdom that a “decent” suit is not an extravagance. A man ought to be prepared to present himself respectably when it’s called for.

My suit will be a rich, elegant black, so that I can wear it with my customary black Victorian vests.

Black is the traditional color associated with Pietism and Puritanism (though the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, generally depicted in illustrations in severe black suits, actually liked bright colors. And their hats were not tall and stiff, but soft).

I’ve been reading about my own Pietist roots, in Thomas E. Jacobson’s recent book, Pain In the Belly. It’s about the Norwegian pietist Haugean movement, especially its history in the United States. I’ll be reviewing it once I finish it, but one thing strikes me already:

Author Jacobson (who happens to be a friend of mine) likes to describe the conservatives, the party who wanted to follow the patterns of the old Norwegian state church, as “objective,” since they emphasized the efficacy of the sacraments, in which God does all the work and we are mere recipients of His grace.

My people, the pietist Haugeans, he describes as “subjective,” since we emphasized the necessity of a personal experience with Christ. We were suspicious of anyone who said their relationship with God was confined to receiving the sacraments. If faith is real, we argued, the individual will be transformed, and there will necessarily be an emotional component.

I’m not accustomed to thinking of us Haugeans as subjectivists. I’ve been a strong opponent of subjectivism in the church since college.

And yet the description is perfectly fair. I’m used to thinking of the subjective as just mushy emotionalism, but it doesn’t have to be. Real life is, in fact, a combination of the objective and the subjective, just as it involves the combination of the physical and the spiritual.

But this led to a further puzzling thought.

We Haugeans are often accused of Pharisaism, but Pharisaism is a defect of objective theology. The Pharisee makes a list of his duties, checks each item off the list, and considers himself square with God.

Haugeans are the opposite. We emphasize the passion of faith, total submission in all areas of life.

And yet, it’s not unfair to compare us to Pharisees. We do tend to get obsessed with lists of rules, as means of demonstrating our inner piety. I comment extensively on this characteristic in my novel, Troll Valley.

Perhaps the bottom line is that nothing human is entirely one thing or another.

Religion

Pensees

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Photo credit: Tabitha Turner. Unsplash license.

Thoughts from my devotional time:

Part 1: Building on a rock

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24-27, ESV)

Whenever I read the Sermon on the Mount, I’m struck by the surreal nature of the whole message. It’s as if someone told us, “Well, obviously the sky is green, and the quickest way to get from New York to San Francisco is by way of Hong Kong.” Look at the Beatitudes – “Lucky you if you’re spiritually poor! The Kingdom belongs to you! Lucky you if you’re mourning, because you’ll be comforted! Lucky you if people push you around, because you’ll inherit the whole shebang!”

These things are – very obviously – not factual, at least about life as we experience it. Jesus is turning our expectations upside down. The world doesn’t actually work the way you think it does, He’s saying. You need to zig when everybody else zags. You need to do take dangerous path instead of the safe one. Where there’s smoke, don’t expect fire. Don’t plan ahead. Don’t budget sensibly. Live like the birds of the air.

Live an impractical life.

And then, here at the end, He comes out with this metaphor of a rock. Which seems an obvious contradiction. He’s been telling us to build castles in the air, and now He’s saying, keep your feet on the ground, No, more than that – build your house on a rock. You need solid foundations.

The point, it seems to me, is this – Jesus is telling us not to believe our lying eyes. The world is not what we think it is. Everything that seems solid is in fact nebulous (a preview of modern Physics, perhaps?) while the really solid things are invisible and counterintuitive and have to be taken on faith.

Part 2: Emotion in faith

I’ve been thinking recently about the problem of emotion in our Christian faith.

I was raised, as I’ve told you, in the Pietist tradition. We believe in having what’s sometimes called an “Ah ha!” moment, when we receive Christ personally, often in a very passionate way. Much in our tradition is aimed at keeping that passion worked up. We’re warned against growing lukewarm, losing our first love.

The more high church tradition, against which my ancestors reacted, dismissed such thinking as “enthusiasm” (a negative term for them). They recognized – very sensibly – that it’s not only difficult, but ultimately self-defeating to try to live with our emotions perpetually amped up. It wears you down, emotionally and spiritually. (Remember how C. S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, describes abandoning his faith as a boy with great relief, after having worked very hard at keeping his fervor up?)

But the high church approach, to us Pietists, seems cold and lifeless.

It occurred to me that imagining the created universe as music, an idea I’ve been playing with recently, might help resolve this conundrum.

If you think of the Kingdom of God as a musical masterpiece, a symphony or an oratorio, then we believers are members of the orchestra, or the choir. If you don’t feel like playing or singing today, it doesn’t matter. You perform your part anyway. Just do the work. The music is the main thing.

And quite often, the music takes you by surprise and you get caught up in it spontaneously.

So when I pray or go to church or serve the in my vocation and “I’m not feeling it,” I do it all the same. Because the music is the main thing.

If my mind is on the music – the Kingdom of God – the religious ecstasy comes on its own timetable. “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

Religion

Pietists vs. Confessionalists

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Portrait discovered in Copenhagen,, believed to be Hans Nielsen Hauge.

I wrote a fairly long meditation on Pietist Christianity and legalist Christianity yesterday. And I think I failed to actually say one of the things I meant to say.

Which is ironic, because that was one of the very weaknesses I meant to criticize (gently) in my hero, the Norwegian lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge. Some years back I began work on translating his works, a project another linguist has since taken over. Mostly to my relief. Because Hauge is exceedingly hard to translate. I’ve heard of one scholar who started the same project years back and simply gave up in frustration. “He’s untranslatable!” that person said.

I think that’s an exaggeration, but I sympathize. Hauge is very hard to translate. The man was in no way a systematic thinker. He was an enthusiast. He poured his words out onto the page, it appears, just as they came to him. Sometimes he goes on for pages without a period or a paragraph break. I imagine Hauge as being very much like a certain pastor I once worked for. He hired me precisely for my writing skills. Because he found it almost impossible to actually get to the point. He communicated all right in person, because he could supplement his words with facial expressions and gestures. But when writing he just lost his way.

After many years, I think I finally figured out Hauge’s point. It’s a point he never states in so many words, but once you’ve figured it out, it illuminates all the rest of his verbiage. And it explains some of the puzzling – or even apparently unorthodox – things he seems to say.

That central point, I think – and I mentioned this part last night – was that he believed that a true believer – someone who was genuinely “awakened,” as he put it, would find the Christian life easy. They would be filled with the same joy and love he felt. We all know how love lightens burdens. When I was in love, long ago, I would have done many things far outside my comfort zone – and sometimes I actually did those things – just to please her. Just to be close to her. Love made hard tasks light.

This is a beautiful vision, and I believe it’s true in the Christian life to some extent.

But it’s not equally true for everybody. And it’s not always permanently true . I have good reason to believe that Hauge himself, during his ten-year imprisonment, when he was denied books and visits from his friends for long periods, eventually learned that the Way could be hard. He never lost his faith, but he learned that even true believers can struggle.

Some of us aren’t like Hauge. Our experience with God may be lower-key, less emotional. We have a smaller tank of emotional fuel to burn (those of us who are introverts feel this especially). We’re more like John Haugvaldstad, who needed rules and lists to keep himself on the straight path. I believe he took it to an extreme, but for some people this pattern seems prudent. Books like Jordan Petersen’s 12 Rules for Life fill a need for them (us).

Among us Lutherans there’s an old tension – sometimes fiery verbal warfare – between the Pietists and the “Confessionals.” The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod is the largest and best-known Confessional church body in the US. Going back to the days of immigration, the Pietists and the Confessionalists anathematized one another. The Pietists (like Georg Sverdrup, subject of the journal I edit) condemned the Missouri Synod as cold, formalistic, Catholic-adjacent, and spiritually dead. Confessionalism, Sverdrup wrote, provided a “sleeping pillow” on which members of dead congregations could slumber while their pastors tried futilely to do all the work of the church on their own.

The doctrine-centered Missourians, on the other hand, condemned the Haugean Pietists as unstable, emotional enthusiasts. If synods and pastors didn’t keep a close eye on the laity, checking their every statement for orthodoxy and basically barring them from any kind of spiritual ministry, then everybody would just go crazy. Subjectivism would take over. You’d have churches abandoning traditional sexual morality, and syncretizing with other religions, and reciting something like, oh, “the Sparkle Creed.”

Which, sadly, is just what happened. Missouri Synod theologians rarely hesitate in making the charge that all the aberrations we see today in The Very Big Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless (as I call it) spring from the subjectivism inherent in Pietism.

I have to admit their prophecies came true.

But I still think Hauge and Sverdrup had a point.

The heart of my own theology, for many years, has been the Incarnation. The Word became Flesh. Somehow, through the power of God, body and mind came into harmony. Justice and Mercy kissed. The absolute and the subjective cooperated perfectly in the one perfect Man.

That’s what I want to see reflected in the church, and in myself.

Religion

Adjusting to the world

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Thinking about history, philosophy, and theology.

I have enough thoughts for a lecture (if anybody wanted a lecture), but I’ll lay some of them out very briefly here.

The Church adjusts to the world. It isn’t determined by the world – or shouldn’t be – but we have to relate to people as they live, and we have to live in the world as it is. So we adjust our message to the tenor of the times. We have to. It’s not necessarily bad.

But it can be bad when it goes off the rails.

The modern world, I think, began with Isaac Newton. Newton occupied the role of prophet in European civilization, sparking what we call the Enlightenment. “God said let Newton be, and all was light,” as Alexander Pope wrote. The Enlightenment achieved the level of religion – and that religion was Deism, where God was sublimated into a cosmic Watchmaker. Intellectuals believed they now understood the laws of Nature, and soon all questions would be answered.

The Church followed the Enlightenment to an extent. Great emphasis was now placed on correct doctrine. Cold reason was elevated, in some quarters, to a theological virtue.

But the Enlightenment didn’t last long.

In practice, it was inadequate to actual human life. Enlightenment thought was like trying to feed people with vitamin pills only. Technically all the necessary nutrients might be there, but people need more than that. They need flavor and texture and scent. They need the whole human experience. The Enlightenment didn’t feed the soul.

So the Enlightenment was replaced. It was replaced by two movements (you could call it one of them a sub-movement, but I like the sub-movement too much to subordinate it).

The secular reaction was Romanticism. Romanticism reacted against cold formalism and logical reductionism. Romanticism centered on passion. Life was to be lived with intensity. Love and freedom were what made life worthwhile.

But there was a theological corollary to Romanticism (some, as I mentioned, would probably call it a sub-movement). This was Pietism (the forerunner of contemporary Evangelicalism). To the rationality of Enlightenment Christianity, the Pietists replied, “That’s not enough! Jesus’ greatest commandment was not to understand God, but to love Him!” They emphasized a personal experience with Christ and a life of growing sanctification, learning to love Him more.

Now an argument can be made that Pietism led directly to the Liberalism of today’s mainline churches. It’s argued among Lutherans, in some quarters, that Pietism’s emphasis on personal experience led people to set their subjective feelings at the center of their faith – which is what Christian postmodernism is all about.

And there’s probably a measure truth in that.

But I would relate it, once again, to the Church’s habit of imitating the world. Christian postmodernism (I maintain) is mostly the fault of secular postmodernism. The nihilism and despair that followed the World Wars led secular thinkers to existentialism and moral relativism. The mainline churches followed suit, rejecting all authority, including that of the Bible and orthodox doctrine. (Leaving both the Pietists and the orthodox out in the cold.)

It wasn’t the Pietists’ fault, in my view. But they did get sucked in.

The one unifying principle of all these theological fashions, it seems to me, is following the world. We have to adjust to the world, but we must not let it set our agenda.

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12;2, ESV)