This play was adapted from the book by Russell Moore newsletter. Subscribe here.
YesA few years ago, I spoke with someone who told me how difficult it was to maintain moral grounding in the sex-drinking atmosphere of his university. This is not unusual, but then he told me more about his university.
It turned out that this was not a party school, but a fundamentalist separatist Christian university, where holding hands with a date would get a student suspended and where dancing would for a student to return home. It’s the kind of place where the student conduct manual is longer than the federal nuclear reactor maintenance code.
I said, “So, despite all this rigor, the people there were savage? He said: “The people there were wild because with all rigor.
He then talked about getting in trouble for listening to a contemporary Christian music artist (the beat is too worldly), or for having his hair too long, or for violating some other regulation.
“After a while you start to lose track of what’s really bad and what’s not,” he said. “Your conscience is broken when you know you’re going to break the rules no matter what you do. Once that happens, it’s… well, it’s party time.
I thought of this man while reading Mark Edmundson’s book The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World. As in this conversation, my first thought upon seeing this book was: What age of guilt? It’s a time of immodesty. His argument, however, was different from what I expected, and it is an argument that those of us who are Christians should take seriously.
Policyby Michael Schaffer to summarize the fractured nature of current American life this way: conservative elites are afraid of their audiences, and liberal elites are afraid of their employees. Even beyond the political circus, we see some people, full of resentment and rage, breaking all previous norms and, with others, rates of anxiety and depression skyrocket. For what?
Like many others, Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, believes that much of the problem lies in our online lives. He builds his argument around Sigmund Freud’s concepts of the ego (what most of us think of first when we think of the word I), the id (the wild, “desirous” self of our unruly desires) and the superego (that aspect which judges other parts with moral evaluation). He does not necessarily accept Freud’s theories on their own terms, but suggests that, whatever their shortcomings, it is a mythology, with many problems, but one that tells a story that is at least partly true.
Edmondson simplifies Freud’s framework by saying that the moral code of the superego, left to its own devices, is “the code that a tyrannical father could inflict on a dependent child” and punish him relentlessly. On the other hand, our ego, he asserts, is made “of love, of being loved.” When this faculty of judgment in a person is relentless, “the ego becomes anxious and depressed; it loses confidence. Such a person is overwhelmed by guilt, anxiety and self-hatred, and therefore constantly fights a battle just to survive.
Sometimes a person “projects” this judgment onto another person or group, just to get some relief. Other people – like the fundamentalist student I spoke with – attempt to shut down the ability to “judge” altogether. Giving up, they surrender to the liberation of their identity – often in cruelty or chaos.
Edmundson argues that, like many other things, the Superego is a sort of “corrupted ghost” of something that was considered necessary in an earlier – more religious – time. Without some form of cultural or religious authority, we lose stability. “When legitimate forms of authority disappear, the way is open for rogue authority to assert itself,” he writes. “When there is nothing reliable outside of you to help organize your life, internal forces enter the empty space, and these forces can be anything but benevolent. In the outside world, the dictator arrives; the religious peddler arrives.
And within, there is often a kind of authority—a truly critical inner authority—that tends to “expand and expand and never be cultivated or displaced.” Sometimes this inner judgment, which no matter how many times it is projected always boomerangs, leads a person to try to stop it with alcohol or opioids.
In a culture like ours, Edmundson concludes, the Internet has become our collective superego. We then find ourselves with hatred, whether “hot” or “cold”. Both are often outward-directed self-hatred.
Often, Edmundson notes, the idea among online mobs is to join the collective superego with institutional power in order to fire, discipline, or humiliate anyone who is the target. If the boss or HR department doesn’t do it, he writes, the fury is directed at them. This does not quell anger; it just moves elsewhere.
By no means do I agree with all of Edmundson’s diagnoses or recommendations, but there is some truth to his superego metaphor. If we don’t pay attention to this as Christians, we have no way to bear witness to the gospel. What Edmundson means by the metaphor of the superego is a moralism without pity, a law without a gospel, a court without John 3:16.
This is significant because for so long many assumed that sin and guilt were outdated categories, fit for a medieval era but not this one. The prophets and apostles, however, told us that sin and guilt—like the search for meaning in life, the fear of death, and a response to shame—might be culturally amplified realities, but they are not culturally created.
Guilt and shame are fallen human conditions, not ancient, premodern, modern, or postmodern conditions. The question is not if the world is grappling with guilty consciences, but how.
We could also caricature the Old Testament Scriptures as the “superego” – the God of Sinai filled with intimidating judgments against and against the merciful God of Jesus – but we could only maintain this with willful ignorance of both Wills.
Even in the giving of the Law itself, with God on the mountain and Moses, there is a communication that the Law itself is not enough. The Sinai tablets were not all that God had given to the prophet. Most of the rest of Exodus includes the details of how God showed Moses the specifications for building a tent in which God would meet his people at the mercy seat (Exodus 25:22).
The people could see the priests as they went behind the veil to the Most Holy Place, to atone for their own sins and those of the people. They could then hear the word of forgiveness; they could do it again. The Book of Hebrews maintains that the plan of the tabernacle itself and the instructions for the sacrifices clearly indicate that this movable tent was temporary, emphasizing the sacrificial offering of the one High Priest who does not need to be replaced because he is human like us. But unlike the priests of Levi, the resurrected Jesus was not a sinner and he would not die.
The Israelites listened to the bells of their priests entering the mysterious place behind the veil, approaching the ark of the covenant before the face of a holy God, hoping that they would not be smitten to death, that their sacrifice would be accepted. They also knew that it could never completely cleanse their consciousness, because they would have to be here again, doing the same thing.
“We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. He enters into the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, entered for us,” the author of Hebrews tells us (6:19-20). The mixed metaphors here are mind-blowing if we really pay attention.
The imagery is that of a pioneer – a “precursor” – who precedes us where we will follow – and that is where we have never been able to approach before: behind this curtain. But the imagery is also that of an anchor. This “new and living way” (Heb. 10:20) to mercy, forgiveness and cleansing of conscience is stable and steadfast, unshakable and unshakable.
This is why we often do – when confronted with our own sin – exactly the opposite of what we should do. We are ashamed and withdraw from God. Prayer becomes more difficult. We assume that we must master our failures and then enter into the presence of God. We want to rely on the Superego to repair us until we are good enough to cope with the God who loves us.
However, God’s presence with us in Christ is not a reward for good performance; it is how we are transformed.
So we don’t give up. We do not wallow in self-loathing and project that disgust onto others. You might not feel well. You should not be All right. But behind the veil of what we can see, the anchor holds.
It frees us to pursue righteousness and holiness in the only way that can truly give them, not by obtaining it out of fear that God will reject us but by receiving it – because we know that no matter what our conscience tells us, there is a blood offering. There is a mercy seat. There is a God who actively moves toward us, not with condemnation but with mercy.
In a time when expectations are falling — and the witness of the Gospel is overshadowed — what would truly make the Church countercultural is if the people around us had a very different conversation. One might say, “They are morally upright people, even though they think God is merciful to them for their sin.” » And another might say: “Yes, but they say that their morality is not in spite of mercy; it’s because of it.
If this is in fact the “age of guilt,” if it is true that the collective superego and the collective id are destroying what it means for us to live as human beings, then surely there should be to have a people who remember what it is. to be amazed by grace.
Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief of Christianity today and directs its public theology project.
