“Times were so horrible,” the young Evangelical Whig explained to his Nana

“Times were so horrible,” the young Evangelical Whig explained to his Nana. “We cannot go back to the pain.”

The Nana had lived through the horrible times when the times were not black and white photographs, but her life in living color and yet she stubbornly, even resolutely, refused to vote in her own interest. The young Evangelical could only hope he could mobilize his demographic to vote in the elections lest his Nana return to a time for which she was voting.

Meanwhile, the Nana shook her head. He had one view of history, she had a another: progress and decay, drift and direction.  She saw progress, glad for electric lights and the franchise, but also moral decay. She was glad her grandchildren, boys and girls, could go to college, but fairly sure they had smaller vocabularies at the end of the credentialing than she had received by the sixth grade when combined with the King James and old hymns.

To this youngling, the story of the past was one of darkness growing lighter as enlightenment spread across every demographic group.

Evangelical Whiggery is the notion that Christians should avoid reaction by making the opposite error. There was no Golden Age in the past, true enough, so the Whig finds the best of all possible worlds just now. Things might be bad, there are still reactionaries about, but if we dialog, read a bit, write a few memoirs (so our friends can read a bit), and find just the right community of like minded Whigs.

The Nana recalled hearing Whiggery before now and how it had worked.

She had seen much of her own generation embrace Soviet tyranny. Her generation was told they had seen the future in Stalin and it worked. Whatever else was true, the more moderate Whigs said, there was no going back again to the pain and ugliness of the past. Some on the right were so discouraged by the arc of history toward the Red Shirts, they advised turning to the Brown Shirts. What could be worse than Stalin?

After all, constitutionalism had justified slavery and other evils. Hadn’t the family had to send her sons to fight for Mr. Lincoln and end this evil? Hadn’t the work been left undone? The pains of the past were being healed in the palaces of culture that the Brown Shirts or Red Shirts were building. That was the choice: look at the young people. How could she relate to the youth if she refused to hear their pain and speak in the language of the powerful?

You might press Christianity into “all power to the Soviets” or folkish versions, after all. This was necessary, because the pain the young people felt, coming out of World War, plague, and a Great Depression was real. The old answers were an insult.

She had heard this, rejected it, and mere nostalgia. Nana kept looking for the move of God, made mistakes, but looked for the eternal City that she had seen in a vision as a young woman. This City, not made by hands, was the paradise she sought and if the young people could not understand, then she would have to wait until times changed.

They always do and what is up to date becomes dated. She had seen the back of her closet rummaged by grandchildren looking for now trendy clothes her kids had mocked.

Whiggery saw her pain and gloried in progress. She was sorry to see it, though reaction would have been no better.

She noted that the youngling could see pain, but lacked the experiences to see his loss.

Nana knew the pain of class limiting choices. She was glad to vote. Yet she also saw that community was weaker when more was being done by government. She had seen the benefits of the social safety net: nobody was forced to cut asbestos without a mask anymore, though too late to save the life of her husband. Nana had also seen strong people seduced by checks simply “go to bed” and stop working.

Both were real and true stories. The Whig wanted the stories of progress from pain, the reactionary of decline from Appalachian paradise. Both were nonsense, reality being a muddle of both . . .always. Meanwhile, there was life to be lived and that life required facing the goodness and the badness of our times.

When the grandson said we would have to change, she gladly agreed, just not to all the changes. She was too strong for Whiggery, the compromise with the spirit of our age that will only condemn the sins of the past. Nana was too strong for reactionary movements, they would only condemn the sins of the present. Nana saw good in the past and the present and stuck to condemning the sins of both.

Attend enough hospital visits like Nana and you learn a truth: the person sick often has less concern about the “problem of evil” than the younger people watching the illness. The sick man (often though not always!) has the grace, the youngling sees only the pain. The Whig looks at medicine and sees hope. The Nanas of the world agree, but also see over medication, prolonged dying, and fear of death.

Funerals have gone from warm family gatherings to sterile, hidden things. There was progress in fewer infant deaths, thank God and modern medicine, but a loss in how suddenly every death was a “tragedy.”

No.

The youngling, the Whig, can see the pain, and is right to fight pain, but lacks the experience to see that his victories came at a cost. Whiggery sees the hospitals’ Staff of Hermès raised up and only sees the progress, but misses that the masses may worship this Serpant raised up on a Pole as a false god and so miss paradise or even, merely, a peaceful, natural death.

Eventually the Whig, Even the Evangelical One’s, Grow Old and Learn We Can Go Back Again and the Past had more than Pain

The thing with times is they change. The old Whig is oft disappointed when we go back again on the bright promise of his Whiggery. The hippy becomes a parent so his son can vote for Reagan. The Reaganaut homeschools his child so he can bite his lip, share his pain, and vote for Obama. The Obama generation . . .

And so it goes, each generation of Whigs firmly convinced that the past was full of pain, but we have come to the sunset lands if only we do not vote for Nixon, Mondale, McCain . . . And so it goes. The Whig grows old and flips his Whiggery when he realizes that just as his Nana did not accept his view of the past, so his grandchildren do not appreciate all the Whig has done for them.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it might occur to the Whig that Whiggery was, is, and will be wrong. We are not in a state of constant decay, the Whig has that right, but we are not somehow, someway, getting better every day. Our multiplicity of pleasures might come at a spiritual cost.

Those of us who are old, or rapidly getting there, should pause and see if our picture of the past matches the experiences of those who were there. We need not be stupid about this: old age can lie or minimize, not all experiences are the same in a time. Still the Whig should pause when he rapidly judges his study of the experiences of his Nana’s time is of more value than her being there. The gap between his take on the awesome now and her more jaundiced view is vital. Nana saw her class decimated by influenza and loved street lights. She was not going back, but she knew there was loss as well as gain.

If people did not sit on the porch and talk, because they were watching television in their own individual rooms, there was good and loss. Isolation was not good, though the entertainment was better than it had ever been. Nana had no desire to go back again and junk her color television, but she thought that we could return to the porches.

After all, the nation of Georgia survived the mass murder of Georgia’s worst son, Stalin, and is rebuilding the monestaries and churches he closed down. You cannot go back to 1918, nobody should wish to do so, but you can recover some good things that were lost when 1919 went a bit mad. Keep the literacy, the hospitals, but lose the palaces of culture and the love of the all powerful state.

Whiggery is powerful, I have fought the Whigs all my life, mostly in myself. Just as reaction whispers to me that going back to the good old days would be pleasant, so Whiggery suggests the self-satisfaction of seeing so clearly “their” errors. Social justice must increase, so must individual holiness and this is a work that must begin in me.

Like the rock on which they built their houses, the Nanas stand defying our reduction of their lives to horror or heaven. They voted their own way while living and their prayers go Godward now they are dead. They stand in the Court of the God-King having refused to live anyplace but in the eternal now. They eschewed relating to their generation, no Red Shirts, Brown Shirts, and so they stand with the vast diversity of nations, times, and ages in the party dress of Paradise!

The Nana was mine, the Whiggery, thank God momentarily was mine, the temptation to reaction was mine, the victory is in Jesus, my savior forever.