 now, going through in our lives, a lot of uncertainty and learning how to live with that. Kate, thank you for joining us here at Soul of the Nation today.
I'm so grateful to be with you. I really am. I've been looking forward to meeting you for a long time. So this is a beautiful treat for me.
Well, here we are meeting in this new kind of way, right? But I've been aware of your insights for some time now and been very grateful for them. Let me just start with how's your spirit, Kate, in these days. How's your spirit?
Aw, what a thoughtful question. Right now I'm feeling a bit low to be honest. I think there was this the moment at the beginning of orienting to a new season and sort of trying to, I'm pretty good at setting horizons, cause I've gotten used to living between scans and so I was like, oh, I know how to do this, I know how to do this. But lately I've just lost more people that I know than I care to. So this week just feels heavier than usual.
I have a little notepad next to my computer here on the desk of those people, my own personal prayer vigil list and it grows and grows and grows. My sister and family went through this and they've gotten through it, but, you know, the kind of tweet beeps would happen all day long when I'm even doing podcasts. Something new had happened. I started my career as an antiwar organizer a long time ago. And during that time, I thought a lot about American culture and how it had contributed to a senseless war based on a lot of lies that really killed a lot of people. In a recent New York Times piece, you wrote something that I was struck by how that sort of, those sense of those falsehoods continues to contribute now to the mismanagement of COVID-19. You said everyone else in the world will suffer too, but I don't think they will suffer nearly the same cultural disillusionment because they don't have that account of exceptionalism. Unpack that a bit. What do you mean by that?
Well, I mean the story of American individualism, this founding myth of bootstrapping and righteous self-starters, which we've now morphed into a story about side gigs and hustle and #GoodVibesOnly, we've had a story told that is as much a story about people, individuals, we should do better as it is a story about the nation, that there is this deep American cultural script that tells us that there is supposed to be more than enoughness here. That we're supposed to live our lives with the assumption that we have all of the resources and the social structures and the provisions that will be required to live your best life now. And we know, of course, I hope by now that that is false. That we don't have the health structures we need. We don't have the economy we need and we certainly don't have the communal structures we need. And that structurally we're not actually in a position to be the bootstrappers we wish we were. And then we feel terrible when everything comes apart and we blame ourselves. And so, I'm just so concerned that the stories we tell ourselves are not serving us well, especially now.
So, your story really helps to show us some of that because, you know, I've often thought that in this country there's a history of religion leading to certainty or religion leading to reflection. In my view, it's the latter, but often it's felt to be the former in this country. And there was a certain kind of, there's a certainty to what's been called the prosperity gospel, and all of a sudden your life was interrupted by a whole lot of uncertainty with the cancer and a small child and you were flourishing in your career. Everybody was talking about how amazing you were. You were doing well.
Yeah, I was doing well for a minute there. No, I was almost a winner before I was suddenly a loser and that, that was a big and sudden fall. And yeah, I mean, I'm not even American. I'm Canadian. And yet somehow I've always wondered if I just, I felt so at home here because of its famous love of efficiency and bigger and better. And I just, you know, I was doing that thing where I'd worked really hard in graduate school. I had gotten a great job. I married a good person and like finally had the kid I'd always wanted and I just, as sophisticated as I think I am, I think I'd gotten confused there for a minute and thought that maybe I deserved the good things in my life. And, so when it all came crashing down, I really had to ask myself like, I'm sorry, did you think that you were like the exception to the rule that bad things happen to everybody and, like what stories were you telling yourself where you imagined that you were always pressing toward a better future? And I'm sure it's just part of the hubris of like being alive. We breathe and we assume we'll always keep breathing. But I was horrified and I think I was horrified because of my own little version of the prosperity gospel. And I think I was also horrified because almost immediately the cultural scripts that were being used to explain me like, oh, that I had to, what was the lesson I was going to learn and did I deserve this? I realized that all the frameworks around me had made it almost impossible for me to come to the right conclusion, which is that I had been lucky and then suddenly I wasn't.
As a scholar, an American scholar of history, you learned about this prosperity gospel and you wrote so eloquently about it. And then now I wonder from you, how does the prosperity gospel, how it's at such odds with living in our present uncertainty in this pandemic.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, man, and so like as a scholarly definition, right? The prosperity gospel is we look for health and wealth and happiness. We just try to figure out like who's winning in our culture? And if so, it's likely they imagine that it's their faith and their positive words and positive actions that have led them to be rewarded by God. And I mean one of the weirder parts of a moment like this is suddenly we realize that we are not actually constituted primarily by our thoughts and our attitudes. Like someone with a great attitude is still stuck at home in the pandemic. Someone with an amazing spirit and faith has still probably lost their dad and couldn't hold his hand. Like there will be no distinction between us because of our ability to be this super Christian. But the problem is that the prosperity gospel actually does really well in a time like this because it promises people like a return to certainty.   And like this being the human condition for which I'm guessing based on my experience, there is no cure. So it's hard. It does really well in poor times and it does really well in wealthy times. And there's a surrealness to that.
Why is American culture at large so resistant to uncertainty?
Oh man. I feel like we could talk about that forever. Yes. Well, and you and I share a love of, well, okay, so we love our certainties, right? Evangelicalism got hooked on the idea that they could prove their faith. There was always a Bible verse. Always a reason. Always approved text. Always a day on the Bible, man, ready to wage war against confusion. And that's one kind of certainty. The other is it's a country of plenty. And so it, it always felt like if we fell, we'd never fall all the way down. And so our faith and our lives were never really going to be disproven, not in this country. So I do think it's been, it's been hard because it's... and the other thing I'll just say is this is a faith that got hooked on metrics. Like I study megachurches and so the amount of times I've heard Christians explain why their church is better than others because it's, you know, a guy named Jeff and a 20,000 person multi-site model and like the numbers are always supposed to do the work. And we, we always just imagine that our faith is going to prove itself. And all of that has been a kind of endless reinforcement that, that we will always know that we are right. We will always know that we are good. And then all of a sudden when you're surrounded by all this disconfirming evidence, you're like, wait, are we not? Aren't Christians supposed to have more?
Yeah. All of us now could tell stories about our dinner tables are full of conversations about, with our kids, about uncertainty. We don't know what's going to happen or when and it's such a difficult time to live with uncertainty and live with suffering rather than trying to explain it away or fix it or deny it or say it's going to be over and different by this time.
Yeah. But I think we're scared though, honestly Jim, that if it doesn't mean something in the way that we need it to, that all this suffering is for nothing. And like, you know any woman who's been in labor knows that they are just like counting the seconds till the pain is over, but they're doing it knowing there's a baby at the end, right? Like every pain gets transformed into some great and beautiful gain. And like that's just how we're wired and that's, that's how our hope is directed. Like, okay, no problem. I'll deal with this horrible thing, but just tell me it's going to get better. But better is a word that no one can promise