As I said near the end of my November 4 column, “Over the next few columns I will be exploring this essential work of unbundling and re-bundling that is our common vocation.” Rather than choosing terms like “devastating” and “decay” to describe the world’s (or our nation’s or your own) life situation, I have chosen “unbundling”—pulling apart a coherent group of assumptions and commitments that has now become impossible to hold together.
A historical example (in 105 words!) would be the Protestant Reformation, when, about 500 years ago, enough people decided that they could no longer hold together their assumptions and commitments to the Catholic Church. So they unbundled them. Some they discarded altogether, like Popes, encyclicals and indulgences; and some they kept, e.g., doctrines of creation and sin and forgiveness; and rebundled them into Lutherans or Puritans or Dutch Anabaptists. For over half a century, Christian churches world wide have been undergoing a second such unbundling, but that’s a subject for another day.
In addition, our assumptions and commitments about the natural environment are also being unbundled. We are faced with a constant barrage of natural disasters out west: massive wildfires along with a decade’s long drought; COVID-19 continues to menace us, and both global temperatures and sea levels are rising. Then there are the social upheavals: the turn to authoritarian regimes around the world, the almost daily mass shootings and the proliferation of domestic terrorist groups.
There used to be a consensus about many things, both natural and social, that are up for grabs today. The world most of us inhabit has tilted toward uncertainty, disarray and sometimes violence. Unbundling is disconcerting, even frightening.
Here is an analogy “unbundling” is based on: instead of buying an album that may include some songs you really don’t like; people now make their own playlists. The album stands for a collection of assumptions and commitments I once depended on. I might not like all of them, but I could live with the package as a whole.
But now, many of us have discovered that that “album,” that set of assumptions and commitments, can be “unbundled” and the tracks separated, leaving me to choose only the ones I like. I can in fact create my own playlist, my own unique “album” of assumptions and commitments I can rely on to live my life. It will be composed of several tracks from this album, several tracks from other albums, and maybe several tracks of my own composition.
Unbundling, however, is like playing with fire, like opening Pandora’s Box. It can be disastrous. Once loose, those newly liberated tracks fly where they wish and land where they will, to form new “albums.” Today, I mention only one of those. It is named Liberty.
This new album and the people who sing its tracks harken back to early American history and carry flags that warn Don’t Tread on Me and flags that display the Liberty Tree, the one that “must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants” (channeling Thomas Jefferson). They take liberty to mean “I can do whatever I want to do (and you can’t stop me)!” Such were the vigilantes who planned and executed the attempted coup d’etat on January 6, 2021.
Such were the ones who followed them and egged them on via social media. For whatever good or bad reasons, they have lost faith in the assumptions and commitments of American democracy. They have unbundled that album and made their own playlist. Mix in a heavy dose of evangelical Christianity, and well, if you believe an angry, vengeful God is on your side, there is nothing you won’t do. Remember what happened to all those inhabitants of Jericho?
Their version of the Liberty album is dangerous. It has nothing to do with the desire of the American colonists to rid themselves of the rule of George III. Those colonists did not vote on members of Parliament or have any part in making the English laws that governed them. But we, American citizens today, have Congress and state legislatures, elected by citizens; and laws those elected representatives have made. In addition, those insurrectionists demonstrated by their actions that they believe in force more than they believe in the rule of law; and that decisions are to be made by those who are the strongest and have the loudest voices. That’s not American democracy. It’s an album I pray will not go gold.
Dick Conville is a retired university professor and long-time resident of Hattiesburg. He can be reached at rlconville@yahoo.com.
