The Game Is Hearts, Not Spades

Christian intellectuals must confront an uncomfortable truth in the age of Trump: we've been fighting the wrong battle all along

This is a guest post by Dr. John Seel.

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Hearts and Spades are both classic trick-taking card games that share several similarities but also have distinctive differences in objectives, gameplay, and strategies. In Hearts, there is no trump suit; however, players aim to avoid capturing hearts and the Queen of Spades due to their penalty points. In Spades, the spade suit is always the trump suit, outranking all other suits and adding a strategic element to gameplay. If you are playing a game of cards, it is imperative to know which game you are playing.

In the age of Trump, many Christian intellectuals have been playing spades, when the game is hearts.

In a long-form column following Trump's re-election, Christian historian John Fea wrote a provocative essay advising Christian intellectuals on how they should "think, write, and speak" in the re-emerging Age of Trump. There have been few harsher and more prolific critics of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement than John Fea, David Brooks, and Peter Wehner. Personal friends all. The 2024 election demonstrated that their writing was not publicly persuasive. Trump was framed as a civic cancer, a "threat to democracy," and their work as Christian intellectuals sought to be in the words of legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny, "moral chemotherapy." But as John Fea notes with alarm, "The disease lingers." The treatment failed.

Fea has the good sense historically, to take a step back and call for Christian intellectuals to "reassess how we do our work. What should we write and speak about in the Age of Trump? And how should we do it?"

He calls for a greater degree of understanding, and a better bedside manner than just prescribing the moral chemo pill. He continues, however, with the same condescending attitude toward "Trump supporting neighbors" as the progressives who use words like "deplorables" and "garbage." The movement is uniformly cast as being anti-intellectual and uneducated bumpkins, the very kind of people, the Christian historian reminds us, that the nation's founders Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson warned would destroy democracy. There is little here that will build bridges to those who see reality through the contrasting MAGA frame. This approach appears to me to be a rhetorical non-starter.

Consider the context of our body politics today. It is starkly divided, partisan to a fault, unwilling to give the benefit of the doubt to the other side, and bathed in a pervasive collapse of social trust. This is augmented by a rhetorical social media environment where intellectual silos are reinforced, and black and white thinking prevail. Nuance and compromise are viewed as toxic. And finally, we are in a negative world where faith-based or faith-oriented public assessments to civic problems will be viewed with decreasing plausibility. People's political frames are reinforced and hardened day by day.

A premise of this hardening by the MAGA populist movement is that certain sectors of American public life are not to be trusted: corporations, academics, entertainment, and media (collectively, "the elite"). In this public conversation, then, Christian intellectuals and academics—"elites" all—start with a rhetorically losing hand. Before they say a word, they are not trusted and their views discounted by their populist opponents. An appeal to academic bona fides, as Fea does in his essay, only serves to dig a deeper rhetorical hole: "don't abandon highbrow outlets." Condescension and hubris stop the debate instantly in this context.

This much is certain. What Christian intellectuals have been doing is not working. It is not having the desired public persuasion so desperately wanted and needed. It seems unlikely to date that the Democrats will learn anything about the public or their approach to the public from their election loss. Christian intellectuals or thought leaders might be in a better position to do so. I would suggest that we need is a deeper stand back than what Fea advocates if we are to find the common ground on which we can begin to gain rhetorical traction and positive outcomes.

There are lessons we can learn from Democratic strategist and Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff as well as from University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter.

Even deeper than culture war dynamics, we are living a world where our perceptions of reality are entrenched in two contrasting frames. In this world, there is no neutral third place outside this binary political framing. This is in part to blame on the fact that the media as well as most evangelical religious leaders see the public only through a political lens. It doesn't matter whether it is Fox or MSNBC, every single topic is reframed as being political. This political reductionism is both unfortunate and inaccurate. Discerning intellectuals know that culture is upstream from politics and religion upstream from culture. And yet, we tend to make our arguments narrowly within the limited and less consequential downstream political frame. We are locked into dealing with symptoms rather than causes, superficialities rather than substance.

Lakoff tells us in his important primer, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, that when the facts don't fit the frame, the facts bounce off and the frame stays. Such has been the experience of anti-Trump pundits. You cannot get people to change frames through reasoned argument—a failed assumption of Enlightenment rationalism. People change frames through the engagement of their imagination—by being captured by a new compelling story, a new visual horizon, and a provocative image. At this, Trump is a master ("Fight, fight, fight" photo, working at McDonald's, and driving a garbage truck) and against long-odds, a hostile press, and billions in negative advertising, he prevailed. Rather than getting sucked into responding to Trump's social media posts, which Lakoff warns Democrat and media critics places them within his chosen frame (a tactical advantage), they need instead a strategy of reframing the debate themselves, when necessary, by telling a new and more compelling story.

There are lessons here Christian thought leaders can learn. As Christian intellectuals living in a "cross-pressured" world, we need to learn rhetorically how to deal with contrasting and intractable competing frames. A direct assault will not and has not worked here any better than Lee's Pickett's Charge. We need rhetorical discernment not academic hubris.

Additionally, Trump is a symptom but not the cause. To attack the symptom is to avoid dealing with the cause. Here sociologist James Davison Hunter's insight is prescient. There has been extensive and thoughtful discussion of his latest book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis. (See Aaron Renn’s writeup about the book and interview with Hunter). But the more pressing and relevant piece is his Hedgehog Review essay, "Culture Wars: The Endgame." Here he makes two important claims. First, culture is more important than politics in understanding our civic ills and second, the seemingly binary division between progressive and conservative is an illusion. Both share a common culture of nihilism. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy in a culture war, Hunter writes, nihilism is. This culture of nihilism is not a field of play, by definition, where character or principle is held as a high value.

The implications of his analysis are even more foreboding, in that most of our attacks on the alternative framings whether Biden or Trump are only serving to deepen our shared nihilism. Our good intentions are making things potentially worse. Hunter concludes, "Our contemporary culture is a culture of nihilism without nihilists." This is a slightly softened version of Philip Rieff's critique of our "deathwork culture." This is not an argument that there is a moral equivalence between the nihilism on the left and right, only that there are such cultural forces at play both passive nihilism (the loss of meaning) and active nihilism (the will-to-power)—that we are "running with nihilism"—is beyond debate. The resentments of identity politics are evidence of this as are various forms of cancel culture and rhetorical demonization.

Hunter concludes:

Which is where, increasingly and tragically, we are headed, given how polarization underwrites our common nihilistic culture. Let me be clear: This is not an argument for the moral equivalence of left and right. Nihilism does not manifest itself in the same ways on the left and the right. Nor do the authoritarian tendencies find the same expressions on both ends of the spectrum. Rather, the point is that nearly all partisans share a common culture rooted in identitarian tribalism, fueled by ressentiment and guided not by differences over shared ideals but a fervid determination to annihilate the opposition—indeed, the evil enemy—in the never-ending contest over position and power. Until we take the measure of this challenge, we will fail to understand the depths of democracy's crisis.

There is a civic cancer but it not the one we have been addressing with our "moral chemotherapy." Moreover, our past treatments have only served to accelerate its spread. We've been playing political spades when the game is cultural hearts. We're dealing with a much deeper problem than we have wanted to admit. This is Hunter's thesis in Democracy and Solidarity. Cultural nihilism comes in many forms. Hunter mentions passive nihilism, which is the ubiquitous loss of meaning (quiet quitting and deaths of despair and the like) and active nihilism, which is the more well known Nietzschean will-to-power coupled with a hermeneutic of suspicion.

Artistically this was expressed at the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics. It was a commercially funded choreographed event that alternated from French transgressive decadence to American Hollywood spectacle. If the opening of the 2024 Olympic ceremony is taken as a symbolic event indicating the state of Western culture, then its central themes were proof of Hunter's analysis.

We also see glimpses of it in Trump's cabinet nominations—a tactical combination of political pragmatic destroyers and technologically innovative utopians, scorched-earth political partisans all. The contours and feel of the Trump and Biden administrations are vastly different. Yet the underlying cultural assumptions about why and how we do civic life remain the same. We face a serious civic problem in a social media context that makes facing the culture of nihilism enormously difficult in that we are predetermined to avoid listening to each other without a hermeneutic of suspicion. I assume the same to the reception of this essay.

As Christian intellectuals in the Age of Trump, we're going to have to reframe our analysis, rethink our approaches, and revive fresh answers. As Christian thought leaders we have work to do. Without assuming this is the definitive word on the subject or that I have any business making suggestions to Christian thought leaders, here are some implications from combining Lakoff and Hunter's assessment of our cultural moment.

First, we need to start addressing civic problems at their headwaters. We must stop addressing political problems without first acknowledging their cultural sources. We need to stop addressing cultural sources without also addressing their religious and metaphysical foundations. We need to focus our analysis upstream, adopt a headwater strategy.

Second, we need the courage to move beyond mere social description to social prescription. To the degree that we only speak about what is, limiting our analysis to a scientific methodology that can only address what is, then we abandon any consideration of what ought to be. The erasure of cultural ought’s is the playground of nihilism. Hunter explains, "All cultures up until our own have been, in their origins and evolution, an address to some ultimate authority." This is what has been abandoned—any sense of civic transcendent ought’s. This is unprecedented in human history and consciousness. To write books of social analysis that are merely descriptive without strong statements about what ought to be, which rules them out of most academic publications, is to further concede the ground to nihilism. This is a common academic malpractice—analysis without solutions.

Third, we need to reengage our civic imagination. If the crisis is one of meaning, then using reason as the antidote to meaninglessness is to miss the mark. C.S. Lewis defines imagination as the organ of meaning, and reason the organ of truth. Michael Ward adds, "Once the imagination has determined that the thing at hand is meaningful, we can then begin to judge whether its meaning is true or false. Before something can be either true or false, it must mean." Christian thought leaders are prone to left-hemisphere rationalism, disinclined to address the antecedent crisis of meaning with the imagination. Reason and the imagination are not opposed to each other, but imagination necessarily needs to proceed reason. Ward explains, "We should think of reason as being like a tree and imagination as being like the ground in which it grows. Reason rests upon, indeed relies upon, imagination, as a tree roots itself in the ground.... Reason can't survive without imagination."

We cannot address the challenge of nihilism without a robust engagement with the imagination. The solution to meaninglessness is not more data, facts, and arguments, but a new story and/or an encounter with beauty.

The culture of nihilism has two sides the "why" side (meaning) and the "how" side (will-to-power). On the "how" side, if we demonize our opponents, resort to victimhood and grievance, play the game as high-octane culture warriors, we are acting as "functional Nietzscheans" and serving the culture of nihilism however well intended we might be in advocating for our beliefs.

As Christian thought leaders it appears that we have been playing the wrong game in the wrong way. The result has not simply been that we have been ineffective, rather we are making things worse, being unwitting allies in the culture of nihilism.

The task before us is more difficult work than we may have realized. In part because the seeds of our challenge begin not in the voting booth but in the church pew, not among the unwashed deplorables, but among the elite—academic, commercial, and cultural. Hunter warns that our focus has been on the wrong things.

Much of the scholarship in establishment sociology is committed to denying or trivializing its [the deathwork culture's] existence by focusing attention exactly where the conflict is weakest—the attitudes and opinions of ordinary people. It ignores or avoids the areas of social life where the conflict is strongest: the culture-forming institutions of contemporary society [corporations, academy, entertainment, and media], the elites who lead them, the competing sources of moral authority that animate them, and the symbolic discourse through which much of this conflict takes place.

Christian thought leaders need to stand back at this moment of inflection as we enter the Age of Trump 2.0 and take an honest look in the mirror. We have work to do. It begins with us.

Cover image credit: Cornischong at Luxembourgish/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 1.0