Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

The Times has a fascinating article covering the debate in the Evangelical community on whether it’s appropriate for churches to sponsor Halo nights and tournaments despite the game’s direct contravention of “thou shalt not kill.”  The larger point, however, is that conservative institutions like Evangelical churches are the ones having this debate.  As Ezra Klein has argued, “[Evangelical churches] offer community, guidance, advice, charity, social capital, entertainment, and even the occasional shot at transcendence. And in return, their member’s trust their politics.”

Liberals have very few equivalent institutions.  Even while there are a large number of more liberal religious institutions (reform jews, liberal/mainline protestants) it’s hard to build a cohesive community around watered down transcendent principles.  Put simple, evangelical teens come for the Halo, but they stay for the salvation.  Liberals, because of their disavowal of transcendence and pursuance of essentially rational, veil of ignorance defined politics and ideas, do not have a coherent core to build any of these social capital maximizing institutions around.  Jonathan Haidt’s identification of liberals as those who value maximizing reciprocity and minimizing harm in their moral calculus — and do not consider purity, in group identification or hierarchy — gets at the core at why liberals are having difficulty building or maintaining any institutions comparable to the megachurch.  You can’t get a bunch of 15 year olds to play Halo, or adults to form relationships with strangers through their church, around abstract ideals like reciprocity or harm minimization.

It wasn’t always like this — when labor was a larger force in American society, there was a consideration of in group identification that was roughly on par with minimizing harm and maintaining reciprocity as well as the corresponding provision of social services around which to build cohesive bonds and solidarity.  Chris Hayes, social democrat extraordinaire, has been searching for a revival of this spirit in a resurgent labor movement, but as Andy Stern and his service workers are the most important union in the country, and since service workers are a more transitory and diverse workforce than the industrial workers of generations past, the labor movement will not be the locus of liberal community.   In Europe and parts of America, communism, which provided a near-religious eschatology as well as a distinct in-group to identify with, was able to build similar institutions — too bad they all had the hots for Stalin.

This state of affairs is ultimately quite unfortunate, but does it bring up an interesting question.  Are we liberals fated to play Halo alone?

PS – Henry Farrel outlines the fascinating cohesive, small communities in the Netherlands, Germany and Austria that were maintained and encouraged by social democratic governance. Also Reihan Salam on Christian Democracy and “soulcraft” in post-war Germany.