Me and I Morality

The ‘I’ And The ‘We’
POSTED ON MONDAY, MAY 1, 2023 2:00AM BY MARTIN BUTLER


by Martin Butler 3 Quarks Daily

Bemoaning the ills of individualism is nothing new. Jonathan Sack’s bestseller, “Morality, Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times”(2020) provides us with one of the more comprehensive accounts of how we lost community and why we need it back. Justin Welby sums it up well in the foreword: “His message is simple enough: ours is an age in which there is too much ‘I’ and not enough ‘We’. Sacks himself puts the point succinctly when he says: “The revolutionary shift from “We” to “I” means that everything that once consecrated the moral bonds binding us to one another – faith, creed, culture, custom and convention – no longer does … leaving us vulnerable and alone.”

The book is divided into five parts, the first four giving a detailed account of how the shift from ‘We’ to ‘I’ took place and the fifth, entitled ’The Way Forward’, providing some suggestions as to how we might return to a more ‘We’-based society. The breadth and depth of knowledge Sacks displays is impressive, and he draws on a vast range of philosophers and numerous psychological and sociological studies to make his case, which is both detailed yet accessible to the general reader. Sacks divides society into three domains, the state, the economy and the moral system, and it is in this third domain that he claims an ‘unprecedented experiment’ has taken place in the western world, the long-term consequences of which – the divisive politics of recent years, populism, the epidemic of anxiety and depression, increasing inequality, “the assault on free speech taking place on university campuses in Britain and America” and more – we are now living with. He identifies three phases.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, he cites the liberal revolution of the 1960s in which he believes the ethics of self-fulfilment, autonomy and authenticity, which are essentially self-orientated, took priority over a more traditional morality in which duties to others were central. The harm principle – that you can act as you like providing you do not harm others – became the sole moral rule governing our relations with others, and this, he suggests, is insufficient. The second phase was the economic revolution of the 1980s, commonly known as Thatcherism or Reagonomics, in which market capitalism was given free reign. Although this phase appears to be exclusively concerned with the economy, Sacks attaches an important moral dimension to the changes that took place. The kind of self-interest inherent in any market economy was lauded as a moral virtue. The negative description of this change would be that ‘greed became good’. The more positive description would be that ambition and ‘wealth creation’ were given the value they deserved. The third and final phase is the technological revolution which accelerated in the 1990s and is ongoing. The development of the internet and social media are perhaps the most obvious and significant elements in this phase, and all of this leads, Sacks argues, to “social life as being about the presentation of one’s self to others, rather than of genuine social interaction”.

Sacks’s take on all this is certainly interesting and articulates what many feel, whether justified or not. Politically Sacks is keen to distance himself from both left and right, and in a sense there is something for everyone. Crucially, by locating the discussion within what he calls the moral system, he tries to avoid the idea that it is all about the political or economic policies a society adopts. To set the scene it is worth saying a bit about the I/We distinction itself. Sociologists commonly distinguish between so called collectivist(We) and individualist(I) cultures. Traditional cultures, usually based around a set of religious beliefs, are typically collectivist, whereas western culture is pre-eminently individualistic. This individualism, however, certainly predates the 1960s. In fact, the UK and US of the 1920s and 30s (and even before) were more individualistic than, say, many Middle Eastern countries of today. Surely the I/We contrast has to be understood as part of a continuum, rather than the simple binary distinction Sacks often seems to assume. Even if we accept that during the 60s western cultures moved towards individualism, there is still a debate to be had about how far the dial moved, and we should also remember that by world standards this change occurred within an already individualistic culture. It is not enough to argue, as Sacks does, that the UK and US simply turned from ‘We’ to ‘I’ moralities in the 60s; far more realistic to say they merely moved further along the I/We continuum until an important tipping point was reached. But what was that particular point and what was special about it? Unfortunately this book does not provide that kind of detail, and this reflects a wider problem with the book – the lack, despite the focus on the last 60 years, of a truly historical or global perspective. There is an almost myopic focus on the UK and US. Some comparisons, even with European countries, would have been useful, as their trajectory over this period has had important differences to the anglosphere.

But more important still is how we understand the relation between ‘I’ and ‘We’. Sacks says little about this. One kind of collectivist ethic is exemplified by the heroic warrior who lays down his life for the good of his country. Here the ‘We’ is unambiguously put before the ‘I’. But this is not the kind of relation between ‘I’ and ‘We’ that Sacks seems to have in mind, for most of his arguments and studies support the claim that a collectivist ethic is actually good for the individual. Ironically there’s a sense here in which collectivism actually supports individualism. This type of argument says the best way to achieve certain things is to aim for something else (happiness, for example, is not reached by trying to be happy). Sacks points to the fact that loneliness and mental health problems are likely to be higher in an ‘I’ culture where everyone is chasing their own ends with little regard for others – something like Durkheim’s anomie. This still places the primary value on the well-being of individuals. The ‘I’ and the ‘We’ are not competing entities between which we have to choose. Only such extreme ideologies as Fascism or Stalinism give the ‘We’ a value in-itself quite apart from the well-being of the individuals that comprise it (e.g., Hitler’s ‘Volk’). The Borg in the old Star Trek series, where the ‘We’ becomes a super-individual, is perhaps another example. We need to be clear that the central argument Sacks gives for moving back towards a ‘We’ and away from an ‘I’ culture is actually that it is good for the individual, that talk of ‘the common good’ still refers to the good of individuals but just by means of cooperation, pooled resources and sharing rather than by each pursuing their own end separately. Even for Sacks, it’s still the individual that matters.

This point reminds us that there are still good arguments in favour of individualism. Some of the best of these are to be found in the work of J. S. Mill (1859), a philosopher Sacks unsurprisingly says little about. Here are three from the third chapter of On Liberty.The adult individual is best placed to know what kind of life would be best suited to him/her: “…it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way. It is for him to find out what part of recorded experience is properly applicable to his own circumstances and character”.

Individuals are like plants; they grow in their own unique way; “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

“Unless individuality be allowed to successfully assert itself…” a culture will become ossified and stationary.

The message here is that individuals are different and that, once they have reached adulthood (a crucial proviso), they should have the freedom to live the kind of life that best suits them. It’s easy to forget that these arguments are moral. They are developments of Kantian insights about the autonomy and dignity of the individual, which in turn were only made possible because of the religious individualism brought on by the reformation. Charles Taylor gives a brilliant account of this in his Sources of the Self.

Sacks casts the 60s values of authenticity and self-fulfilment, values central to Mill’s arguments, in a negative light because he regards them as destructive of the bonds community requires, but if we keep in mind the principle that ultimately it is individuals that matter, even for Sacks, these values can’t be dismissed. He’s right to argue that an overly individualistic society is not actually good for individuals, but a community which enforces a rigid set of beliefs and practices, especially when they benefit some sections within that community at the expense of others, as has often been the case, is equally bad and clearly not moral. I don’t think Sacks sufficiently acknowledges the real tension between these two poles. There’s a fine line between communities that are oppressive and those that are supportive. He also, as many do, fails to see the moral dimension within individualism, reducing it to an amoral selfishness. This comes over in the following:

What emerged in the liberalising measures of the 1960s was something that has never been managed successfully before, namely sustaining a society not held together by certain predominant ideas, not bound by a shared moral code, not committed to a substantive ethical ‘ideas held in common’. How can there be society in the absence of anything to bind its members in shared moral belief? p270

This is deeply misguided, not because he is wrong to claim that societies require ‘ideas held in common’ or because society does not need shared moral beliefs, but because of the implication that the 60s introduced a period of moral anarchy. Let’s remember that before key legislation was enacted in the 1960s and 70s (in the UK & US), homosexuality was illegal, openly racist and sexist employment policies were accepted, civil rights in the US for whole swathes of the population were severely limited. These and other legislative changes allowed many individuals to live better lives. In fact, one way to describe them is to say that they simply extended who is to be included in the ‘We’, and it’s surely undeniable that these key changes were part of ‘the liberalising measures’ Sacks refers to. The 60s no doubt produced lots of nonsense, but their enduring legacy is highly moral. Ask most people today if they think human beings should be respected as individuals, if they should be treated equally whatever their race or sexual orientation, if everyone should be given the best opportunities to thrive, if humans have an intrinsic value, if children should be given a stable and caring homelife, if we should care about our environment and so on – I’m pretty sure that well over 90% would say yes. Many of these beliefs actually gained strength in the 1960s.

Just as Sacks fails to say enough about the ‘I’, he’s rather vague when discussing the ‘We’. ‘Community’ is a fashionable word, but before making too many abstract generalisations it’s worth looking at some actual examples. Often, communities form strong bonds based on opposition or even conflict. A strong sense of ‘We’ can be the result of a divide with some other ‘We’. There was a strong sense of community in the working class Catholic or Protestant communities of Northern Ireland during the troubles, more so than in many working-class communities in other parts of the UK, but community based on opposition is hardly desirable. It’s always been true that communities grow stronger when there is an outside threat or some kind of hardship to overcome, as we saw to some extent during the COVID pandemic. Strong ties in many immigrant communities are based on a feeling of isolation or on a need to preserve a common set of religious beliefs not shared by the host population, and Sacks acknowledges that his own sense of the value of community comes from his experience of growing up in a tightly knit Jewish community. Communities may also come together to help those in need. It is impressive how money can be raised for children who need some kind of special and expensive medical treatment, or how a sense of community develops very quickly when an area gets flooded. Communities can also develop around the raising of children – sleepovers, babysitting and so on – or be built around a place of work: the old coal pit villages in the UK famously had a strong sense of community. And then there are myriad online and real-life communities built around some particular interest, activity or sport which encourage the virtues of cooperation and social support.

Sacks makes much of the decline in this ‘social capital’ which is documented in detail by Robert Putnam in the classic work “Bowling Alone”. Putnam documents the decline in voluntary organisations in the US, and uses the decline in bowling leagues as emblematic of a more general decline in participation in social organisations of all sorts. He gives one of the main reasons as the increase in technological entertainment which is often more individualised. But surely this is not necessarily indicative of a moral decline, and since Sacks’ theme is morality, this is surely of peripheral relevance. Should we not just accept that social capital has just changed its form as it always will? Is it so terrible that fashions change and there are fewer voluntary organisations? A bowling league would fill someone like me with horror, some people are just not joiners, and certainly there’s nothing to stop people from forming these kinds of societies if the demand is there. These sorts of voluntary associations will wax and wane and change their form but human beings, as Sacks constantly reminds us are social beings, so it’s really not something we need to worry about. Online communities have seen a massive increase, and in the UK in recent years there has been a boom in such things as amateur choirs, book groups, organisations centring around fitness, meditation, mindfulness and so on, and I know there is a thriving board game community.

These voluntary communities, however, lack the thick web of moral obligation and belief that is required for the kind of full-blown moral ‘We’ that is perhaps more what Sacks has in mind, exemplified by the kind of religious community you are born into, just like his own Jewish community, the kind that mark your identity for life. But surely he’s not seriously arguing that we all need to belong to such a community? Alternatively, he might have in mind the nation as a culturally united ‘We’ with a clear set of beliefs and practices, but then again questions arise over what is required for inclusion. I am a full-blown Englishman born and bred, but I am an atheist, have never been part of a close-knit community and have no time for the Royal family. That’s not at all unusual. Others see the bedrock of national identity completely differently. And what about the immigrant experience? What is the British national ‘We’? Sacks is vague. It would perhaps have been useful to delineate some minimal moral requirements for his idea of ‘We’. The notion of neighbourliness rather than community is perhaps useful here, and I certainly wouldn’t deny that more neighbourliness in many communities would not go amiss. This virtue is quite compatible with deep differences in religious and political affiliations, and with the positive aspects of individualism I have tried to highlight through the arguments of Mill. Neighbourliness is about cooperation at a basic level with those who live close to us. Recently I was shocked to learn from the postman that many people refuse to take in parcels for anyone they don’t personally know, and I also know someone who won’t take in mail for anyone who doesn’t vote as they do. This may sound like meagre fare in relation to the big moral change that Sacks seems to be after, but perhaps it is exactly these modest changes that are needed.

However, the main problems I have with Sacks’ book concern his discussion of economics. As I pointed out earlier he is at pains to distance his thesis from any commitment to either right- or left-wing policies. This is disingenuous, for though he’s unambiguous about the harms of ‘the liberalising measures of the 1960s’, when it comes to the economic individualism of the 1980s, he says:

One of the underlying factors of the change in corporate culture in Britain and America was doubtless the financial deregulation in the 1980s that came to be known as respectively Thatcherism and Reaganomics. I have no criticism of that policy, it was right for its time. The 1970s was a time of deep depression in both countries, economic, social, and psychological. Deregulation led to sustained economic growth from which most of us have benefited… p89

There are a number of odd things about this passage. Firstly, he admits that economic policy changes can lead to cultural changes, yet one of the basic assumptions of the book is that morality/culture are somehow to be treated quite separately from politics and economics. Secondly, he is quite wrong about the economics, and here I am focusing exclusively on the UK. Economic grow in the 80’s was no better than in the 70s. In fact the highest economic growth between 1970 and the present was in 1973. When he talks about ‘deep depression… economic, social, and psychological’, that is exactly what the Thatcherite policies of the 1980s visited upon numerous communities in the north of England and Scotland. We might accept that a move away from the heavy industries those communities depended upon was inevitable, but the government of the day showed little sense of the ‘We’ in the way these changes were managed, with the consequent array of societal ills that followed – increased drug use, family breakdown, increased mental illness, and so on. Many communities were just left to die. Thirdly, the question arises of what matters most, economic growth or a strong sense of ‘We’ within a country or community? You’d have thought Sacks would opt for the latter but this passage is clearly slanted towards the former. Unlike the ‘liberalising measures of the 1960s’, the negative effects of Thatcherism, which were undeniable, are downplayed. In fact the whole chapter ‘Markets without Morals’ is bizarre. Sacks lists the economic iniquities that have occurred since the 1980s, the corporate scandals such as the collapse of Enron, the ballooning pay levels of company directors as compared with ordinary workers, the appalling irresponsibility of bankers that led to the collapse of Leman brothers and the banking crisis, and so on. One would expect here another reference to ‘the change in corporate culture’ due to the deregulation of the 80s and the ‘greed is good’ culture. But no, we are back with the 60s again:

But that behaviour is the logical consequence of the individualism that has been our substitute for morality since the 1960s: the ‘I’ that takes precedence over the ‘We’.p100

Sacks might want to argue that the ‘greed is good’ culture came out of the 1960s but that is quite implausible to someone who has lived through both periods. 60s hippy slang gave us the term breadhead for someone who was overly concerned with money. The 80s gave us yuppies and, in Britain at least, the TV character Loadsamoney. The assumption here is that business leaders of the pre-60s world were more corporately upright. What about the South Sea Bubble of 1720 when corruption and the speculation mania of greedy investors led to the world’s first financial crash? What about the almost complete monopoly, achieved through all sorts of corrupt practices, of Standard Oil in the US at the beginning of the 20th century? The appalling exploitation of workers in the cotton industry in 19th century Manchester? Sacks just likes to blame everything on the 60s.

The fundamental problem with Sacks’s approach is that he wants to separate morality from the rest of society as a stand-alone domain evolving independently from socio-economic factors. Consequently he cannot allow that a government’s social and economic policies might actually have a positive effective on a societies morality or culture.

One of his more striking claims is that we have in recent years ‘outsourced’ morality to the state, that we expect social services, for example, to help when things get difficult rather than community. But surely in large complex industrial societies this kind of ‘outsourcing’ is inevitable and not necessarily bad. In fact it’s exactly what you’d expect in a ‘We’ society. Individuals, and even families or informal groups of individuals, are too limited to take on the major responsibilities of overseeing communal health, education, housing, poverty reduction, protection against pollution and the harms of the internet. Individual action cannot solve societal problems, although of course it can help, and expecting individuals to deal with it all is surely exactly what you would expect in an ‘I’ culture. It’s the exact opposite of what Sacks tells us. He may have legitimate concerns about an overbearing top-down bureaucracy, but that is not an argument for a minimal state. This is not an either/or issue. Unless we cast the state as somehow inevitably oppressive, as right-wing libertarians do, why can’t we see the state as representative of the ‘We’? Localism and individual involvement in decision making is crucial, and of course it doesn’t mean we have no moral responsibility. There are obvious dangers in state power and that’s why democratic accountability, checks and balances, and government transparency are crucial, but I see no alternative to the state playing a major role in supporting us through our lives. Why can’t the state encapsulate the common good, why can’t taxes be regarded as the pooling of our resources and sharing? A good example of the moral importance of the state relates to the third phase of the ‘experiment’ Sacks outlines – the technological revolution. In the UK, despite clear evidence of the harmful effects of social media on children, very little in the way of legislative controls have been put in place. That is surely due to the deregulation culture that has dominated since the 80s and that Sacks seems to endorse. There is an ‘Online Harms’ bill making tortuous progress through parliament at the moment but it is not yet law. But surely the state is the only body that can tilt the balance of power towards the common good and away from the private interests of the giant tech companies. The best kind of individualism is one in which the ‘We’ supports the ‘I’ in order to gain in autonomy and self-fulfilment. The two should not be in opposition, something with which Sacks would surely agree.

Because Sacks separates morality from political and economic policy, the last section of the book – The Way Forward – provides next to no actual suggestions for the way forward, just a vague hope that future generations are more moral than that dreaded 60s lot. No one denies that modern liberal democracies face enormous problems, but perhaps the next big ‘experiment’ should be to initiate economic and political policies that genuinely attempt to promote greater equality, more community, less poverty, less corporate greed and so one. Such policies are possible. It is at least worth a try.

 

How Christian Is Christian Nationalism?

How Christian Is Christian Nationalism?

Many Americans who advocate it have little interest in religion and an aversion to American culture as it currently exists. What really defines the movement?

By  Kelefa Sanneh The New  Yorker

Seven years ago, during the Republican Presidential primary, Donald Trump appeared onstage at Dordt University, a Christian institution in Iowa, and made a confession of faith. “I’m a true believer,” he said, and he conducted an impromptu poll. “Is everybody a true believer, in this room?” He was scarcely the first Presidential candidate to make a religious appeal, but he might have been the first one to address Christian voters so explicitly as a special interest. “You have the strongest lobby ever,” he said. “But I never hear about a ‘Christian lobby.’ ” He made his audience a promise. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power,” he said. “You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well.”

By the time Trump reluctantly left office, in 2021, his relationship with evangelical Christians was one of the most powerful alliances in American politics. (According to one survey, he won eighty-four per cent of the white evangelical vote in 2020.) On January 6th, when his supporters gathered in Washington to protest the election results, one person brought along a placard depicting Jesus wearing a maga hat; during the Capitol invasion, a shirtless protester delivered a prayer on the Senate floor. “Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you, and that love Christ,” he said.

The events of January 6th bolstered a growing belief that the alliance between Trump and his Christian supporters had become something more like a movement, a pro-Trump uprising with a distinctive ideology. This ideology is sometimes called “Christian nationalism,” a description that often functions as a diagnosis. On a recent episode of “revcovery,” a podcast about leaving Christian ministry, Justin Gentry, one of the hosts, suggested that the belief system was somewhat obscure even to its own adherents. “I think that, spitballing, seventy per cent of Christian nationalists don’t know that they’re Christian nationalists,” he said. “They’re just, like, ‘This is normal Christianity, from the time of Jesus.’ ”

In contemporary America, though, the practice of Christianity is starting to seem abnormal. Measures of religious observance in America have shown a steep decrease over the past quarter century. In 1999, Gallup found that seventy per cent of Americans belonged to a church, a synagogue, or a mosque. In 2020, the number was forty-seven per cent—for the first time in nearly a hundred years of polling, worshippers were the minority. This changing environment helps explain the militance that is one of the defining features of Christian nationalism. It is a minority movement, espousing a claim that might not have seemed terribly controversial a few decades ago: that America is, and should remain, a Christian nation.

There is no canonical manifesto of Christian nationalism, and no single definition of it. In search of rigor, a pair of sociologists, Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, examined data from various surveys and tracked the replies to six propositions:

The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.

The federal government should advocate Christian values.

The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.

The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces.

The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.

The federal government should allow prayer in public schools.

Respondents who answered more often in the affirmative (or, in the case of the third proposition, the negative) were judged to be more supportive of Christian nationalism, and the scholars conducted interviews with fifty subjects, to get a better sense of who believed what. Near the end of Trump’s term, Whitehead and Perry published the results in a book called “Taking America Back for God,” in which they predicted a growing schism. “Christian nationalism gives divine sanction to ethnocentrism and nativism,” they wrote, noting that a number of respondents doubted that immigrants or non-English speakers could ever be “truly American.” Christian nationalism was, they argued, a divisive creed; its adherents were more likely than other groups to believe “that Muslims and Atheists hold morally inferior values.”

Perry expanded this argument last year in “The Flag and the Cross,” which he wrote with the sociologist Philip S. Gorski. For many people, Gorski and Perry argue, “Christian” refers less to theology than to heritage. Drawing on their own survey, they found that more than a fifth of respondents who wanted the government to declare the U.S. a “Christian nation” also described themselves as being “secular,” or an adherent of a non-Christian faith. Paradoxically, so did more than fifteen per cent of self-identified Christians. This last data point might be a sign that “Christian” is starting to become something more like “Jewish”: an ancestral identity that you can keep, even if you don’t keep the faith. There are, of course, plenty of nonwhite Christians in America, and even nonwhite Christian nationalists. (In the earlier book, Whitehead and Perry reported that Black Americans were in fact more likely than any other racial group to support Christian nationalism.) But Gorski and Perry argue that in American politics Christian nationalism has often served as a white-identity movement. They note, for instance, that white Americans who support Christian nationalism are likelier to evince disapproval of immigration and concern about anti-white discrimination. And they worry that “white Christian nationalism is working just beneath the surface” of American politics, ready to trigger an outburst, as it did on January 6th. “There will be another eruption—and soon,” they write.

Gorski and Perry warn that a second Trump Administration might lead to “Jim Crow 2.0,” with “non-white, undocumented immigrants” singled out for “mass deportations on an unprecedented scale.” But they also note that the white Christian nationalists in their survey expressed the most hostility not toward immigrants or toward Muslims but toward socialists. In this, the Christian nationalists are firmly within the historical mainstream of American conservatism. That may also be true even of those respondents who wish to “institutionalize Christian identity and values in the public square,” given all the ways in which America remains distinctively and sometimes officially Christian. (The federal government shuts down on Christmas, for instance, and on no other religious holiday; even in New York, there are special restrictions on the sale of alcohol on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath.) An allegedly insurgent demand is, in a way, a description of the status quo.

As a whole, the six Christian-nationalist propositions appear to be correlated with all sorts of other ideas and impulses. But, examined individually, most of them aren’t hard to defend. School prayer has been the subject of a series of fine-grained Supreme Court decisions; this past summer, the Court ruled, 6–3, in favor of a high-school football coach who liked to pray on the field after games. As for whether it is God’s plan that the United States succeed, even someone with nuanced views about Providence and predestination might nevertheless hope so. To a secular liberal, it might seem distasteful for a Christian to consider Muslim or atheistic values “morally inferior,” or to want the government to promote “Christian values.” But to claim any set of values as your own is to find them superior, in some meaningful sense, to the alternatives, and probably to hope that they will guide the decisions that your government makes on your behalf. In any case, it is impossible to separate the Christian history of America from the country we live in today. Both the secularization of the country and the counter-reaction to that secularization are reflections, in different ways, of a country founded on ideals of faith and freedom.

Anyone looking for a charter of American Christian nationalism might begin in 1630, the year John Winthrop, the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered his speech comparing the settlement to a “city upon a hill,” in “covenant” with God, serving as a beacon to “all people.” (The famous phrase came from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.”) In the eighteenth century, arguments for American independence were often cast in religious terms. Congregationalists, who structured their churches around ideals of self-governance and free conscience, were particularly influential: Jonathan Mayhew, a Congregational minister in Boston, published a sermon in 1750 in which he denounced the “tyranny and oppression” of Charles I, the former king. (One of Charles’s transgressions: “He authorized a book in favor of sports upon the Lord’s day”; on this front, anyway, America is indisputably less Christian than it used to be.) And in November, 1777, the Continental Congress issued a message of wartime commemoration and gratitude—it is sometimes considered the first Thanksgiving proclamation—which extolled “the Principles of true Liberty, Virtue, and Piety.” There is a certain tension, of course, between the principle of liberty and that of piety: in 1791, the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the “establishment of religion” by the new federal government, but Massachusetts did not officially break with the Congregational Church until 1833.

Then, as now, Christian identity in America was often tribal—which is to say, anti-tribal. In a fascinating book called “Heathen,” the religious historian Kathryn Gin Lum suggests that, in many times and places, the divide between Christian and “heathen” was the central divide in American life. The original British colonies were sometimes taken to be efforts to promote the “propagation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ amongst those poor heathen,” as a 1649 act of Parliament declared. The term could justify both exclusion and engagement: the scourge of heathenism was later adduced as a reason to oppose Chinese immigration to California, and to support the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands. But “heathen” is an unstable identity, because it denotes a condition that ought to be cured. A heathen is someone who has not yet been exposed to and converted to Christianity.

Africans and their descendants were sometimes held to be heathens of a peculiar sort, because they were considered to be both a Biblical people and a cursed one: descendants of Canaan, the son of Ham and grandson of Noah. In the Bible, Ham has an ambiguous encounter with a drunk and naked Noah, and is punished with a generational affliction: “Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” Frederick Douglass, in his autobiography, described this view of Africans as a perversion of the Bible. He wrote that he abhorred what he called “the religion of the South,” but also that he cherished “the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ.” He was making a version of an argument that appears throughout American history: that this country is not truly Christian enough.

Across the centuries, the political power of Christianity has waxed and waned, in tandem with waves of religious revival and retreat, and with the needs and aspirations of politicians. In 1899, a newly elected U.S. senator, Albert J. Beveridge, endorsed the conquest of the Philippines in starkly missionary terms, declaring, “It is ours to bear the torch of Christianity where midnight has reigned a thousand years.” Judging from church-membership figures, the nineteen-fifties may have been the most pious period in American history; it was the decade when the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance (1954), and when “In God we trust” was adopted as the country’s official motto (1956). By then, politicians were talking less about heathenism and more about a new adversary; many, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, believed that America was “engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic atheism and Christianity.” In America, Christianity works best as an organizing principle when there is a strong non-Christian force to organize against.

In “The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism,” Paul D. Miller, a political scientist at Georgetown, tries to make sense of this complicated history. He is, he writes, a Christian, and a patriot, “proudly pro-life” and “a zealot for religious liberty.” Yet he thinks there is a difference between leaders who humbly seek God’s guidance and those who insist, as Jerry Falwell once did, that “when a nation’s ways please the Lord, that nation is blessed with supernatural help.” Miller wants Christians to be more aware of “the undemocratic elements of the founding,” and more willing to consider the possibility that America’s history since then has been, in some ways, “a gradual story of progress.” In place of Christian nationalism, he advocates something more abstract: an acknowledgment that “Anglo-Protestant culture” has shaped America’s ideals, and a hope that those ideals will endure, even as culture changes.

In the face of all this disapproval, a few intellectuals have decided to claim the term for themselves. In “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” Stephen Wolfe, a political philosopher and faithful Presbyterian, advances a series of syllogisms designed to convince believers that they must help America become more Christian, and more of a nation. But the country he wants to bring about seems less a realistic future for America than a thought experiment—occasionally a sinister one. (Wolfe’s Protestant vision sometimes evokes the Catholic “integralists,” who dream of building an unapologetically Catholic state.) He has firm opinions on whether non-Christians are “entitled to political equality” (no), whether “political atheism” should be excluded from the bounds of “acceptable opinion” (yes), and whether “arch-heretics” can justifiably be put to death (yes). In Wolfe’s view, Christians are too quick to dismiss the virtue of tribalism—the notion that people are drawn to others who share their “ethnicity,” a word he uses to gesture at a wide range of traits. (Ethnicity, as he defines it, is not just “blood ties” but also “language, manners, customs, stories, taboos, rituals, calendars, social expectations, duties, loves, and religion.”) At one point, Wolfe disparages “ethnic identity politics,” but elsewhere he suggests that “in some cases amicable ethnic separation along political lines” might be beneficial for everyone.

Wolfe’s book avoids explicit claims about race, but after its publication, in November, a shadow was cast over it by an investigation that Alastair Roberts, an English theologian, conducted into the public writing of one of Wolfe’s close friends and collaborators, Thomas Achord. (Achord hosted a podcast with Wolfe.) Roberts assembled evidence that Achord, under a pseudonym, had been posting online in support of what he called “robust race realist white nationalism.” Roberts pointed to a Twitter account that had responded to a post from the American Jewish Committee by writing, “OK jew,” and referred to Representative Cori Bush, of Missouri, as a “Ngress.” In response to a discussion of white supremacy by Jemar Tisby, a prominent Black historian of Christianity, the account posted, “Please leave soon. —Sincerely, All White Peoples.”

Achord parted ways with a Christian school in Louisiana where he had been headmaster, and said that the posts, most of them from 2020 or 2021, reflected “a spiritually dark time marked by pessimism and anger and strained relationships.” While he eventually admitted that the Twitter account in question was his, he said he had “trouble recollecting” posts connected to it. (Achord could not be reached for comment.) Wolfe, who had defended Achord and had pledged some of his book royalties to him, wrote a Twitter thread “repudiating” the old tweets, and asking that his book be judged on its own merits. But the Achord affair made it clear that even a sympathetic reader of Wolfe’s book could be confused about how, exactly, an ideology of “amicable ethnic separation” might differ from white nationalism.

The scandal was a big deal in the small world of intellectual Christian nationalism. One difference between Wolfe and someone like Jerry Falwell, who believed many of the same things, is that Falwell could plausibly claim to be leading what he called a “moral majority,” whereas many of today’s Christian nationalists are keenly aware of their minority status—and perhaps, as a consequence, less likely to worry about transgressing dominant social norms. In today’s America, anyone eager to denounce “sodomy” is marking himself as a dissident: not a defender of American culture as it currently exists but, rather, an enemy of it. “Christian nationalist,” as sociologists and pundits use the term, refers to a broad array of conservatives, concerned—as conservatives always are—about the way their country is changing. But those who embrace the term are a much smaller, self-selected group: in this climate, calling yourself a Christian nationalist is a much more radical act than merely being one.

The Presidency of George W. Bush was a high-water mark for Christian politics. Bush launched initiatives to support “faith-based organizations,” and brought a missionary’s fervor to the promotion of democracy in the Middle East and, much more successfully, aids treatment in Africa. By contrast, Trump was perhaps the least Christian President in modern times; although he kept his promise to anti-abortion Christian voters by appointing three Supreme Court Justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, he seemed to view this not as a moral triumph but as a favor for a special interest. (During a recent interview, Trump said, “They won—Roe v. Wade, they won!” In this formulation, “they” meant the Christian lobby, and Trump expressed disappointment that “they” hadn’t done more to support his preferred candidates during the 2022 midterms.) And, though some of Trump’s supporters put Christian identity front and center, others are harder to categorize. The January 6th protester who prayed in the Senate, for instance, was Jake Angeli, known as the QAnon Shaman, who had previously referred to himself as part of a “light occultic force.” During his prayer, Angeli thanked God for the “divine, omnipresent white light of love and protection, peace and harmony”: this is the language of “lightworkers” and of other contemporary spiritualists. Perhaps a shaman is the perfect figurehead for a movement defined by Christian heritage, not Christian faith. America may now be following the trajectory of Europe, where Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, talks about the importance of “Christian roots,” even though fewer than twenty per cent of Hungarians attend church regularly. If the rise of Christian nationalism in America reflects the decline of Christianity, that is bittersweet news for secular liberals, because it means that they might expect to see more and more of it as the country grows less pious.

How did this decline happen? No one seems to know. Sociologists such as Gorski and Perry can tell us that Christian-nationalist beliefs reflect a tribal or partisan identity, but they can’t tell us why so many self-identified Christians seem uninterested in the religion itself. Miller, for his part, seems confident that the Christian values he cherishes can endure and thrive, even in an increasingly post-Christian country, but it’s not clear why. The question is even more urgent for someone like Wolfe, who portrays America as a formerly Christian polity undermined by immigration and relativism. If America was once better than it is now, why did our Christian forebears allow it to get worse? In answering this question, Wolfe sometimes sounds more like a critic of the faith than a defender of it. Christian majorities, he contends, too often refuse to wield government power when they have it, insisting on official neutrality in ways that Muslim majorities, for instance, typically don’t. “Western Christians gaze at the ravishment of their Western heritage,” he writes, “either blaming themselves or, even worse, reveling in their humiliation.” He could almost be quoting Nietzsche, who excoriated Christianity for its ethic of mercy and self-sacrifice, for siding with “the weak, the low, the botched.” Wolfe thinks that there is something “weird” about the way in which the U.S. and other Western nations reject ethnic chauvinism—officially, anyway—in favor of an “ideology of universality.” But this weird universality is part of what sets Christianity apart from most other creeds. Tellingly, one of the scholars who blurbed Wolfe’s book was the Israeli political scientist Yoram Hazony, who has suggested that American nationalists should draw inspiration from the example of Israel, which conceives of itself as “the national state of a particular people.”

The strangest thing about the debate over Christian nationalism is the assumption shared by many of the participants. The sociologists see a fearful tribe, resentful of a country that won’t stop changing. Exponents see a small but indomitable movement, standing strong against a tide of secularism. Miller sees an opportunity for Christians to play a constructive role in a changing country, preaching what their compatriots may no longer practice. But the underlying idea is that recent trends will continue: that churches will keep emptying out, and that Christianity will become an ever more tribal identity. The secular country that emerges might be increasingly free, anxious, and unpredictable—less prayer in schools, more shamans in the Capitol. Why should we assume, though, that these trends are irreversible, and that most of today’s Americans are beyond the reach of a message that has reached so many for so long? Earlier periods of secularization in America have given way to periods of Christian renewal. Is the next Christian revival just around the corner? It seems hard to believe—but, surely, not impossible. ♦

Inside Mexico’s Largest Detention Center:

Inside Mexico’s Largest Detention Center: 

A Q&A with Belén Fernández

“There may not be human rights in Siglo XXI,” the name of the Tapachula immigration detention center where the author and journalist was imprisoned, “but there’s lots of humanity.”

Todd Miller Border Cornicles

In 2012, former Customs and Border Protection official Alan Bersin proclaimed that “our southern border” is now with Guatemala.

In her great new book, titled Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Detention Center, author and journalist Belén Fernández writes about this underdiscussed part of the U.S. border from the on-the-ground perspective of the Tapachula immigration prison, where she was detained. In the book, and in the below interview, Belén describes how she ended up behind bars and what she witnessed and experienced, including the friendships and solidarity she had with other detainees. As she writes, “There may not be human rights in Siglo XXI, but there’s lots of humanity.” Belén has this unique ability to write in a personal, detailed, and heart-wrenching way that is often also bitingly hilarious. She also has a penchant for coupling deep geopolitical analysis of state power, particularly that of the United States, with its absurdity, often in the same sentence.

This is Belén’s fourth book. Her others include The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011); Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019)—a travelogue like no other about how Belén has successfully traveled and written about the world without setting foot in her home country, the United States, for 17 years (here’s a review I wrote about it in 2020); and Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), about what it was like be stranded in a Oaxacan beach town during the pandemic, where she ended up living right across the street from a Covid checkpoint. Needless to say, I strongly recommend checking out all her work. She is an original. And we are proud to feature her here in The Border Chronicle.

Can you explain how Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Detention Center came to be? What were you doing? How did you end up arrested and incarcerated by Mexican immigration authorities?

In July 2021, I traveled to the southern Mexican border city of Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas, to write an article about migrants for Al Jazeera. I had been residing in the coastal town of Zipolite, in the neighboring state of Oaxaca, since March 2020, when the pandemic put a halt to my previous modus operandi of manic itinerance. This itinerance had entailed 17 years of darting between countries with the help of my U.S. passport—even as I avoided the homeland at all cost, finding it irremediably creepy.

During the pandemic, I overstayed my Mexican tourist visa, and rather than rectify the situation legally, I opted to simply DHL my passport to some dude in Mexico City whose visa falsification services came highly recommended by other lazy white foreigners in Zipolite. As it turned out, these services worked just fine for exiting the country, but it was another matter altogether in the Tapachula airport—where, while attempting to board my domestic flight home after spending a couple of days writing about migrants, I was carted off to Mexico’s largest immigration jail, charmingly branded Siglo XXI (Twenty-First Century).

So it was that I unwittingly finagled myself an exclusive view of the innards of Siglo XXI—where journalists are banned from entering (oops)—and of the U.S.-imposed migrant detention regime in Mexico. As a friend in Tapachula put it, I was “gringa collateral damage” of U.S. policy, and as such was able to witness firsthand the torment to which my country subjects asylum seekers and other migrants—many of whom are fleeing U.S.-inflicted political and economic catastrophe in the first place.

My own torment was of course exceedingly brief, and I was released from Siglo XXI after only 24 hours, thanks entirely to the efforts of a Mexican journalist acquaintance of mine. Not a finger was lifted by the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, whose staff hung up on my panicking mother after inquiring whether she was sure I was a bona fide U.S. citizen and not just some naturalized María Belén Fernández.

Can you describe the Siglo XXI detention center? How many people were in there, and where were they from? What sorts of memories do you have of the prison? Were there people who stood out to you? Was there solidarity?

I can only speak for the women’s section of the prison, although there is a unanimous consensus that the conditions in the men’s part are even more atrocious. When you enter Siglo XXI, you are first relieved of your shoelaces and most of your other possessions—which in my case included the 40-plus bracelets to which I had developed a rather pathological attachment over the years and whose removal required the intervention of two policewomen.

Once you’ve been effectively stripped of personhood, you are admitted to the bowels of the 21st century, which consist of a large room with concrete tables and a corridor to the left, where there are smaller rooms containing toilets with no doors (for our own “security,” as one immigration official assured me). I am bad when it comes to estimating numbers of human beings, but Siglo XXI is notorious for its overcrowding, and there were definitely many hundreds of women in there—such that every last bit of table and floor space was occupied by bodies at night. Since there was literally no space for my floor mat, a Cuban girl named Daniely insisted that I share hers—and furthermore insisted that I use her spare clothes as a pillow: “Here we share everything.”

In addition to many Cuban detainees—whose country was of course going on six decades of the asphyxiating U.S. embargo and attendant scarcities that fuel migration—there was a range of other nationalities: Haitians, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans. There was a lone Bangladeshi woman, who had traveled for nine months in the hopes of reaching the U.S. only to end up behind 21st-century bars—where she had been taken under the wing of a group of Haitian detainees. A pair of Cubans had undertaken to teach Spanish to the lone Chinese inmate, who could not communicate with anyone—much less the jailers—but who by all accounts had been in Siglo XXI a long, long time.

As for me and my position of extreme privilege, I hardly merited the compassion and solidarity I received from the other women. It was not just Daniely; there was Kimberly, a young Honduran girl whose two sisters had been murdered in Honduras and who with her affectionate presence brought me back from various psychological precipices. Another young Honduran held up her towel for me in lieu of a shower curtain. A Salvadoran gave me her remaining toilet paper. Whenever I was alone for a fraction of a second, some or other group of women would invite me to sit with them. There may not be human rights in Siglo XXI, but there’s lots of humanity.

I’m curious to know if you have any revelations that you can share with us from this experience? I ask this as a journalist, knowing that many of us who cover immigration or borders have never been behind bars in an immigration prison.

I can certainly say that I now understand why they confiscate shoelaces.

It is impossible to downplay the physical and mental anguish that Siglo XXI signifies for so many people—many of whom have already suffered sufficiently in their home countries or during their respective migrant trajectories. The waiting game can be the worst part of it all; I met women who had been imprisoned for a month and still had no idea whether they would be deported or granted asylum in Mexico—or when they might expect an answer to this existential question. The indefinite limbo constitutes psychological torture in itself, and on more than one occasion during my 24-hour stay, I heard a detainee declare, “I’m going to leave this place traumatized.”

Again, I myself barely experienced a fraction of what everyone else had to go through, and I basically felt like a preposterous asshole the whole time—for manifold reasons: for the superior value that my U.S. passport automatically conferred on my life; for my deathly fear of being deported to the U.S., the country most of my fellow inmates were risking their lives to reach; for my psychological fragility and physical unkemptness when I had spent not even a week trekking through the corpse-ridden Darién Gap, as many of the women had.

For those of us accustomed to moving through the world with relative ease, it is difficult to convey the sensation of being stripped of one’s free will, however briefly. In Siglo XXI, I at least caught a glimpse of the system of criminalized oppression that defines migration in the 21st-century.

How much of an influence do you think the United States has on Mexico’s southern border enforcement and detention? Is this a part of the U.S. border system that people need to know more about?

Absolutely. The U.S. has long forced the Mexican government to do its anti-migrant dirty work, not only on Mexico’s northern border but also on the southern one. It’s no coincidence that, two days after the inauguration of Siglo XXI in 2006, then Mexican president Vicente Fox met with U.S. war on terror chief George W. Bush at a Cancún hotel, where the latter tripped over himself in praise of Fox’s “work to enforce Mexico’s southern border.”

As you yourself write in Empire of Borders—recounting an episode from 2014—U.S. officials had already described the Mexican-Guatemalan border near Tapachula as “where … the United States border really began.” And current Mexican president AMLO has only proved too eager to kiss the gringos’ ass on the migrant front, even while purporting to pursue a more humane approach to migration and uphold Mexican sovereignty. In 2019, for example, he reduced the U.S.-bound trans-Mexico migrant flow by no less than 75 percent in three months after Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexican imports—a statistic that the supposed no-shit-taking AMLO has curiously chosen to boast about in his own book A la mitad del camino.

Under pressure from the imperial neighbor to the north, AMLO has also overseen the unprecedented militarization of migration policy—hardly reassuring in light of the Mexican military’s track record of human rights violations and other crimes. In 2021, the White House press secretary announced that, thanks to bilateral discussions with the Joe Biden regime, the AMLO administration had decided “to maintain 10,000 troops at its southern border, resulting in twice as many daily migrant interdictions.”

That same year, Mexico experimented with a ludicrous “air bridge” project that involved flying migrants from northern to southern Mexico and then expelling them into the Guatemalan jungle.

What is the most important point of your book? What do you want people to take away from it?

That structural inhumanity has somehow yet to crush the human spirit. As I suggest in the conclusion, in a 21st century governed by sadistic U.S. imperial policy and shitty capitalism, there is often more magnanimity behind bars than beyond them.

Man Convicted in Terror Attack That Killed 8 on a Manhattan Bike Path

Man Convicted in Terror Attack That Killed 8 on a Manhattan Bike Path

Benjamin Weiser and Lola Fadulu NY Times

 

Sayfullo Saipov could face the death penalty in the federal case. He said he was inspired to carry out the attack by Islamic State videos.

The jury in the case made its decision during its first full day of deliberations after weeks of testimony.

A man who raced a truck down a Hudson River bike path in 2017, killing eight people in what the authorities have called the deadliest terrorist attack in New York City since 9/11, was convicted of murder charges on Thursday by a federal jury and could now face the death penalty.

The man, Sayfullo Saipov, 34-year-old Uzbek native, said after his arrest that he was inspired to carry out the attack by Islamic State videos that he watched on his phone and that he chose a truck to inflict maximum damage against civilians. Mr. Saipov is the first defendant to face a federal death penalty trial during the administration of President Biden, who had campaigned against capital punishment.

The Manhattan jury delivered its verdict during its first full day of deliberations, after hearing wrenching testimony from survivors and relatives of people killed in the attack. The truck had plowed into bicyclists, sending riders flying into the air, crushing others on the ground and leaving broken truck parts, mangled bicycles and bodies scattered behind.

The eight fatalities included six tourists, one from Belgium and five from Argentina. The other victims were a 23-year-old software engineer from Manhattan and a 32-year-old financial worker from New Jersey.

Having convicted Mr. Saipov, the jury will now be asked to decide whether he should be imprisoned for life or face the death penalty, which would require a unanimous vote of the 12 jurors.

The government’s decision to seek capital punishment against Mr. Saipov was originally made during the administration of President Donald J. Trump, who tweeted after the attack “SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!”

Later, the attorney general at the time directed federal prosecutors to seek Mr. Saipov’s execution if he was convicted.

Last year, Mr. Saipov’s lawyers asked the Justice Department under Mr. Biden to withdraw the death penalty request. But in September, writing to the judge, Vernon S. Broderick, prosecutors said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland had decided that the government would continue to pursue capital punishment.

The government had argued that Mr. Saipov carried out the truck attack in order to become a member of the Islamic State, a terrorist group that once held authority over large areas in Iraq and Syria and had pledged to create a new Muslim caliphate

“He turned a bike path into his battlefield,” Jason A. Richman, a federal prosecutor, said during his closing argument on Tuesday. “He was happy about the terrorist attack he unleashed.”

Mr. Richman noted that Mr. Saipov had asked to hang an ISIS flag in his hospital room at Bellevue Hospital Center, where he was interviewed by the F.B.I. after being shot in the abdomen by a New York police officer, ending his rampage.

“He told the F.B.I.: ‘I committed this attack to do my part, my part for Allah, my part for my version of Islam, and my part for the caliphate, my part for ISIS,’” Mr. Richman said.

The government has said that a cellphone found in Mr. Saipov’s truck contained roughly 90 videos, many ISIS-related, depicting, for example, the shooting or beheading of prisoners and instructions for making an improvised explosive device. The phone also contained about 3,800 images, including many of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then ISIS’s leader.

Mr. Saipov’s lead lawyer did not deny that his client had intentionally driven the truck that caused the deaths and injuries. “His actions were senseless, horrific, and there’s no justification for them,” David E. Patton, the city’s federal public defender, said in his summation.

“Nobody forced him to do this, and he’s guilty of murder and assault among many other crimes — plain and simple,” Mr. Patton said.

But Mr. Patton disputed the government’s claim that Mr. Saipov carried out the attack in order to become an ISIS member — which Mr. Patton indicated was a critical distinction. Some of the charges say Mr. Saipov committed the murders “for the purpose of gaining entrance to ISIS.”

Mr. Patton argued that his client had merely been “steeped in ISIS propaganda,” which encouraged followers to carry out martyrdom attacks around the world.

“He bought into all these notions of the caliphate and that it was a religious obligation for him to become a martyr and ascend to paradise,” Mr. Patton said.

Mr. Patton appeared to be setting the stage for arguments during the death penalty phase of the trial that his client, in orchestrating the attack, was not trying to become an ISIS member but rather had been manipulated by ISIS propaganda.

The trial, coming more than five years after the attack, had been long delayed, largely because of the pandemic. Mr. Saipov did not testify. But the words of the victims and witnesses, often delivered through interpreters, were riveting as they recalled that sunny afternoon on the tree-lined path.

The first fatality was Ann-Laure Decadt, 31, the Belgian tourist, who had come to New York with her mother and two sisters.

One sister, Friedel, took the witness stand, carrying a bottle of water in one hand and a package of tissues in the other. Mr. Saipov, sitting at the defense table in a mask, stared at her.

As she began to describe their visit to the city, she wiped tears from her face and occasionally looked up at the ceiling. Mr. Saipov looked down into his lap.

Friedel said the family had visited Fifth Avenue, Central Park and Wall Street, had taken the ferry to Staten Island and had gone to the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan.

On Oct. 31, they were pedaling side by side on the bike path, she testified, when she heard a loud rattling noise — the sound of a rapidly approaching vehicle.

As she tried to turn to look, the truck must have passed her, she said, adding, “As of that point, I have only flashes of memory of what I saw.”

She said she remembered seeing Ann-Laure lying on the ground ahead of her. Her first thought was that the truck “might have driven over her head,” she testified. “I went over to my sister, and I just started screaming.”

Ann-Laure had a lifeless gaze, staring into the air with blood gushing from her mouth, she recalled.

Another sister, Justine, and their mother, Lieve, said that the trip was to be a celebration of the sisters’ birthdays and Lieve’s recovery from two bouts of breast cancer.

“It was supposed to be a fun trip, a girls’ trip,” Justine said.

The jury also heard from another Belgian family that was on the bike path that day.

Aristide Melissas, his wife, Marion Van Reeth, their son Daryl and their nephew Timothy Buytaert, had stopped at a traffic light near Pier 40 to take a photograph.

Marion Van Reeth was struck and gravely injured as she took a photograph.

The light turned green. “I remember perfectly well what I said to the boys,” Mr. Melissas testified. “I said the last who reaches the One World tower, we will offer the ice cream.”

He heard “slippery tires” and a sound like “metal crushing” behind him as he was thrown into the air, he said.

Marion testified that she woke up in a hospital, where she learned that she had suffered a spinal cord injury, broken ribs and head wounds and had to have both legs amputated.

The five Argentine victims of the attack had been part of a group of 10 friends from high school, who had come to New York to celebrate the three decades since they had graduated.

One, Juan Pablo Trevisan, testified that the group was biking in pairs, one couple behind the next. They were heading south to visit the 9/11 Memorial and then planned to bike across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Mr. Trevisan recalled that he was talking with the bicyclist to his immediate left, Hernan Ferruchi, when he heard a strange sound, which he tried to imitate for the jury — “too-toom, too-toom, something like that,” Mr. Trevisan said.

“It sounded like a very loud engine,” Mr. Trevisan testified. “It was as if a train were passing by.”

Mr. Trevisan said he asked Mr. Ferruchi, on the left, if he had heard the sound. “He made a gesture as if he didn’t know,” Mr. Trevisan testified.

It was then that the truck plowed through the group, striking and killing every rider on the left side of the column.

Benjamin Weiser is a reporter covering the Manhattan federal courts. He has long covered criminal justice, both as a beat and investigative reporter. Before joining The Times in 1997, he worked at The Washington Post. @BenWeiserNYT

Lola Fadulu is a general assignment reporter on the Metro desk. @lfadulu

How to Help Girls Enduring the Unendurable

How to Help Girls Enduring the Unendurable

By Nicholas Kristof NY TIMES

NAIROBI, Kenya — She is impossibly young to have endured what she did, and what still haunts her is the job of the man responsible: a police officer.

“He said that if I tell, he will kill me,” whispered the 11-year-old girl, whom I’ll call Nancy (the names of the girls in this column have been changed). “I have dreams that he is coming to kill me.”

Nancy was walking home last year when the policeman chased her. She might have been able to outrun him on her own, but her mom had entrusted her to walk her 5-year-old brother home. They ran together but the boy was slow, and she was too responsible to let go of his hand — so the officer caught her and then, she said, raped her.

Afterward, she delivered her brother home but was bleeding so badly she soon lost consciousness. Her family rushed her to the hospital.

The authorities are still searching for the police officer, but because she is a prospective witness, the family fears for her safety. So now she is rebuilding her life in a safe house on the edge of Nairobi run by a nonprofit called Kara Olmurani.

Two dozen girls spill out of the seven-bedroom safe house, telling stories that sear the heart. They underscore that sexual violence is a global scourge that we haven’t done enough to fight.

One unpublished survey found that a majority of women in the Kibera slum here in Nairobi had their first sexual experience through rape or sexual assault. The World Health Organization estimates that almost one-third of women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual violence, with rates particularly high in developing countries. A 2013 United Nations survey found that almost a quarter of men in six Asian countries acknowledged that they had raped someone.

This is part of the unfinished business of #MeToo, and it could use more American leadership. For many years, the bipartisan International Violence Against Women Act has languished in Congress; it would make permanent an office in the State Department for women’s issues and elevate issues of gender violence.

How much difference would this make in practice? I don’t know, but a similar approach to human trafficking has been fairly effective at applying American pressure on foreign countries to end impunity for traffickers.

Sexual violence persists because it’s hard to talk about. It thrives in silence, leaving children nowhere to turn.

“I could not tell anyone,” Muriel, 14, told me. “My mum would not have understood.”

Muriel says that her stepfather abused her beginning when she was 8. “I started asking myself questions,” she said. “‘God, why did you allow this to happen? What did I do to you, God, to allow this? Did I bring this about? Who’s to blame, me or my dad?’”

Eventually Muriel did tell her mother, but it didn’t help. “My mum was blaming me, scolding me, warning me not to tell anyone else,” she said.

Things changed only after Muriel was raped while at school at age 13 by a young man who entered the school grounds and drugged her. She became pregnant from that rape, and hospital authorities informed the police. The perpetrator has not been found, and there was never an attempt to prosecute the stepfather.

The impunity is typical. The Kara Olmurani shelter has 24 girls, and in only one case has there been a prosecution. That case involved a man who was regularly raping his 9-year-old stepdaughter.

“I told my mum, and she wouldn’t believe it,” the girl told me.

The abuse in that case ended only when some men smoking marijuana in a field saw the stepfather raping the girl and intervened, leading to arrest and prosecution.

“People are not willing to talk about the sexual abuse of children,” said the Rev. Terry Gobanga, who founded Kara Olmurani. “They’re not willing to confront it.”

Gobanga speaks from experience. On the morning of her planned wedding in 2004, she was on a street in Nairobi when several men shoved her into a car and then gang-raped her, stabbed her and threw her from the moving car.

The wedding party gathered at the church without her, unaware of what had happened: When she was supposed to be celebrating her marriage, she was fighting for her life in a hospital.

Seven months later, after she had recovered, she and her fiancé married. She regularly counseled sexual assault survivors and was frustrated that abused children often had no safe place to go, so she started Kara Olmurani and runs it on a shoestring. It takes in girls 14 and under but can’t begin to meet the need. If Gobanga can raise the money, she would like to expand the safe house and open a similar home for abused boys.

These are hard stories to hear, I understand. But change will come only when we talk about these difficult topics — and prosecute perpetrators.

One girl in the safe house told me that after a pastor raped her at the age of 12 she tearfully told her father: “He did something to me. I don’t know what it was.”

We know what it is, though: an enormous global human rights issue. We won’t eliminate it, but passing the International Violence Against Women Act would help to end the impunity, reducing the number of children traumatized by something that they don’t even understand.