Not Enough Glue

Crumbling Common Ground

We are familiar with the expression, Too big to fail.  It usually refers to a company or business enterprise which is so significant and so influential that many, if not all, are dependant upon it in one way or another.  Usually "too big to fail" morphs into an expectation, then demand, that the State must bail out said failing company. 

When nations reach the point where they risk breaking up into constituent geographical components, "too big to fail" is not usually an issue.   We can readily contemplate Scotland or Northern Island breaking off from the United Kingdom and the subsequent countries surviving, and, in the case of England, probably thriving.  The current issue of Catalan voting to secede from Spain would fall into this category.  At such occasions it is probably better in the long run to accede to the breakup and maintain the most harmonious relationships possible--provided a genuine and strong majority wish it so.

But in order for nations to co-exist in comity there has to be a widely shared world-view.  If there is none, all bets are off.
  The bigger the nation, the more likely dislocation becomes.  The slogan "too big to fail" in such cases becomes a cruel irony.  Too big to succeed or continue becomes the more likely case.

We wonder whether the United States of America is approaching that watershed.  What really holds Michelle Obama--with her strident identity politics--and Ted Cruz--with his Christian worldview--together?  Is there a centre that can hold?  Is the United States too big to fail, or does failure (breakup) become inevitable.

Rod Dreher reckons that Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw this two hundred years ago.  De Tocqueville discerned that the United States could not survive as a unified nation without an underlying unity of belief in Jesus Christ.  Remove Jesus Christ from the hearts and souls of the majority of the population and the Republic would splinter apart.  It would be too big and, therefore, too diverse to succeed.

Alexis de Tocqueville was convinced that democracy could not survive the loss of Christian faith.  Self-government required shared convictions about moral truths.  Christian faith drew men outside themselves and taught them that laws must be firmly rooted in a moral order revealed and guaranteed by God.

If a democratic nation loses religion, he wrote, then it falls prey to inordinate individualism, materialism, and democratic despotism and inevitably "prepares its citizens for servitude."  Therefore, said Tocqueville, "one must maintain Christianity within the new democracies at all cost."  [Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, (New York: Sentinel, 2017),  p. 89.]

Without the glue of the Christian faith, countries like the United States, rather than being too big to fail, become inevitable failures precisely because they are so big and ideologically diverse.  Similar observations could be made about the European "Union".  It is far too diverse to achieve genuine political union: the glue of the Christian faith does not exist in that continent.