Fear and Trembling in America:
An Essay Response to Studying Kierkegaard During the January 6th Insurrection.
by Stephanie Ann Devito
Reading Søren Kierkegaard was a hell of a task, let me tell you. One I did struggle with because of the weighty language.
Oh, and also because I was reading it as the cornerstone of American democracy were literally being shit on.
This personal essay acts as both a diary entry and a book review. It was my way of processing what I read as I saw the unfolding consequences of our Kierkegaardian faith in America’s institutions.
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Do you have faith in America? Several minutes and a few ideas shrunk off into the distance as I rode this train of thought off a cliff. Writing it down, asking it of you, my hypothetical reader means asking myself. Do I have faith in America?
The date is January 10th, 2021, 4 days after an armed mob of white nationalists stormed the US Capitol.
So I’m gunna go with – no.
I’ve been reading Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, muscling through the disharmony I felt attempting business as usual during a televised insurrection. Admittedly, I could have been struggling because Fear and Trembling is simply not an enjoyable read. Dense with analogy and written as a direct conversation about Christianity between Kierkegaard and his contemporaries, it’s not what I would consider accessible to modern readers.
To ironically borrow his own words, it’s challenging to “talk about [Fear and Trembling] humanly as though it happened yesterday.” Unfortunately, that’s the only way you should read Kierkegaard; unburdened by your preconceptions. He asks the reader to forget what motivates the authors of history and answer the question simply. What does it mean to have faith?
Fear and Trembling is Kierkegaard’s painstaking response to his own question, defining faith as irrational and absurd. And just to be clear, he means that in the best way possible.
“Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off … His faith was not that he should be happy sometime in the hereafter, but that he should find blessed happiness here in this world.”
Believing that, as Alastair Hannay explains, “projects on which one sets one’s heart are possible even when they prove humanly impossibly to carry through”.
To his readers, Kierkegaard made it clear that calling yourself faithful, truly faithful in the Christian ideology, means your faith in God can’t be rationally explained. It was a very unpopular opinion.
Søren argued this point using multiple readings of the story of Abraham. Resigned to sacrifice what he holds most dear, Abraham has faith that God can take Isaac as a sacrifice and return his son to his destiny in this life. If you, the reader could not embrace the absurdity of these opposing realities existing at once and surrender to the void of ethics and rationality that a father requires to murder his son, then you do not recognize true faith.
You see, Kierkegaard wasn’t trying to discount the monstrosity of filicide by outweighing it with the virtue of duty to God in the way other readings of the parable do. If your faith regards this murder as rational or a conscious step in a larger plan, then he wouldn’t consider you faithful, just pragmatic.
“Faith itself cannot be meditated into the universal, for in that case it would be canceled. Faith is this paradox, and the single individual is quite unable to make himself intelligible to anyone.”
While navigating this dialectic, the news updated constantly but it reported the same exact headline: “This is not America”.
Spewing out of every media orifice like sick, politicians, pundits, and social media posts felt worthy of the very critique Kierkegaard levied against Hegelians of his day. Denying this armed insurrection of white nationalists as not part of America meant dismissing the difficult questions you’re required to answer if you’re going to commit to your faith in the American gospels.
Consider “this is not America” a modern near rhyme with the 19th-century rejections of Kierkegaard’s paradox of faith. Those who profess to have belief in the essence of America, who believe that America was created with inherent goodness and equality, are being tested. The only way to pass is to acknowledge that faith in America is absurd but you believe anyway.
Every citizen and public official that saw the insurrection and has since continued to argue against changing the fundamental structure of American democracy is relying on divinity alone. On January 6th the golden son of America had a knife put to its throat by an authoritarian force ready to bleed democracy dry.
The question is, will we simply have faith that America will endure anyway, or are we going to fucking do something about it?
Equality and democracy are supposed to be the seeds from which American greatness grows. Doesn’t it sound absurd to have faith that they will flourish even as we’re letting them be ripped out of the earth?
Yes, yes it fucking does. America is not a divine experience and we need to start governing it that way.
There is a reason we regard Kierkegaard (lolz rhymes) as the Father of Existentialism despite his unshakeable devotion. His work stripped faith of its default practicality and morality by arguing that belief is only belief when it doesn’t make human sense.
One cannot wade into faith, you have to leap into it.
But Fear and Trembling’s theme invites readers to stay grounded and reject an irrational God. Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other existentialists responded to his work with a resounding – ah, Nah not for me bro.
They acknowledged being incapable of inhabiting the paradox of theistic faith. God spares Isaac, sure, but Jephthah still murdered his joyous daughter after she danced at his homecoming. Does a God who doesn’t also provide a ram for the sake of Jephthah’s vow deserve our obedience? Is the sporadic denial of human sacrifice enough to prove God exists? Or that they’re worthy of a covenant?
If the answer is no, what then for humanity? If America’s sporadic strides towards equality does not make a democratic country, what then for America?
For that, Kierkegaard’s observation still stands. We “find blessed happiness here in this world.” In the absence of divinity and essence, the purpose of life, not being imbued in existence itself, is capable of being created.”
And that’s Existentialism baby.
Watching white nationalists desecrate the people’s house with little resistance from Capitol Police should shake everyone’s sleepy faith at a magnitude of 11. Anguished, as Abraham was, we watched as the peaceful transfer of power, that fruitful seed of American democracy, was nearly mutilated and burned to ashes.
Now we must ask ourselves if we have faith, despite the information of all rationality, ethics, and sense, that America’s very essence is one of equality and justice. Are we resigned to believe that faith, not human action, wills this to be true?
Many Americans have committed to faith and in doing so cut down human dignity, democracy, and equality to build their sacrificial pyre. They’re wholly committed to the belief that “on the strength of the absurd,” we will “get exactly the same finitude back again.”
But those who fate cast as America’s Isaac, do not have faith that America is a merciful God who will stay their father’s hand in time. The American Gods have taken children as sacrifices before, and they will continue to watch our genocides idly as victims plead for their mothers.
We should not will ourselves to the absurd for the sake of America. We must believe that America’s existence precedes its essence and admit that America’s dictum, “all men are created equal”, is not imbued in our mere existence, but it is a purpose that actions alone make true.
Now, we could try and understand this by deferring to the French and German corpses of Existentialist thinkers or even engage the arguments of a depressed 19th-century rich boy. But it’s in The Atlantic article Denial Is the Heartbeat of America: When Have Americans Been Willing to Admit Who We Are? where Ibram X. Kendi offers a deeper understanding of what “creating purpose” means in the context of America.
Ibram X. Kendi lays out a Kierkegaardian critique of Americans who “remember and accept the enfranchising of citizens and peaceful transfers of power and their history while forgetting and denying the coup plots, the attempted coups, and successful coups. White terror is as American as the Stars and Stripes. But when this is denied, it is no wonder that the events at the Capitol are read as shocking and unamerican.”
Kendi’s article illustrates that continuing your faith in America requires you to accept the immoral, unethical absurdity of white supremacy as Abraham had to accept the violence and tragedy of murdering his long-awaited son. All the while maintaining your conviction that, regardless of the impossibility depicted in history, America’s divinity will bring about equality.
Unlike Kierkegaard, but much like the Existentialists, Ibram X. Kendi does not find faith necessary. America is not a subject one can regard theistically. No American divinity will save us from our worst natures; there is only the interjection of human action in the form of structural change and psychological awakenings.
The hand that stops the murdering must be our own.
So no, I do not have faith in America. I side with Kendi’s words that:
“in the end, what will make America true is the willingness of the American people to stare at their national face for the first time and see themselves for themselves – all the political viciousness, all the political beauty – and finally right the wrongs or spend the rest of the life of America trying.”
The American Idols of whiteness, capitalism, and denial readily accept human sacrifice. If this is a test of faith then we should respond to it in the way of Ibram X. Kendi and the Existentialists by declaring the American Gods dead.
Only then can we move on to create that promised land of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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