How Christianity Forgot Its Grammar, Part 2 — Contrapunctus III: The Instruments of Order and Chaos

Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #11

The whip. The auction block. The coffle. The noose. The exclusion act.

For two centuries, the profane sacraments were performed on bodies and inscribed in law. The instruments were visible — designed to be witnessed, because the formation required an audience. The bystanders were formed as surely as the people in chains.

But after 1920, something shifted. The instruments didn’t disappear. They became invisible — built into the infrastructure of ordinary life, so that the people being formed by them couldn’t see what was forming them. Including me.

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The Age of Control (1920–1980): When the Sacraments Went Administrative

Then the violence went quiet.

I don’t mean it stopped. I mean it learned to whisper. The lynching tree came down. The auction block was 165 years gone. But the grammar found new instruments — instruments so bureaucratic, so procedural, so administrative that the people who operated them could go home at night believing they’d done nothing wrong. Because they’d only followed the guidelines.

“We’re just enforcing the law, ma’am.”

In the 1930s, the federal government drew maps of every American city. Block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, they assigned grades and colors. Green for the best investment risk. Blue for still desirable. Yellow for declining. Red for hazardous.¹ The red neighborhoods — the ones where the federal government would not insure mortgages — were invariably the ones where Black families lived.

But here’s the detail that should trouble anyone who thinks the unholy profane sacraments operated only along a Black-white line: lots of white neighborhoods got redlined too. Polish neighborhoods. Italian neighborhoods. Greek neighborhoods. If you were the wrong kind of white, the Ledger sorted you out.² But the racial dimension was absolute. If a neighborhood had one Black resident, it was certain to be redlined.³

The genius — and I use the word with full irony — was the framing. The FHA Underwriting Manual warned against “inharmonious racial groups” and instructed appraisers to watch for “infiltration” — language that made racial exclusion sound like pest control.⁴ And when challenged, the FHA described itself as “just a business organization” evaluating “the cold facts and elements of risk.”⁵

This wasn’t racial discrimination. This was risk assessment. The constitutional shield held because the government could claim it was merely measuring financial hazard, not performing racial exclusion.⁶ Same grammar. New vocabulary. And the vocabulary made the grammar invisible.⁷

The apparatus didn’t just reflect existing inequality. It manufactured the evidence for its own operation. FHA exclusion created the very conditions — neighborhood decline, overcrowding, deteriorating infrastructure — that it then cited as proof that Black neighborhoods were bad risks.⁸

A 1952 study in the Appraisal Journal demonstrated that property values actually increased in integrating neighborhoods. The finding was ignored for a decade.⁹

The profane sacrament produced the data that justified the profane sacrament. If the structure sounds familiar, it should — it’s the same logic General DeWitt would deploy to justify Japanese internment: the absence of evidence becomes evidence of threat.

The profane sacrament produced the data that justified the profane sacrament. The absence of evidence becomes evidence of threat.

The redlined map is the Ledger’s direct descendant — Gnostic accounting applied to neighborhoods instead of persons. The VA adopted FHA racial policies wholesale; by 1950, the FHA and VA together insured half of all new mortgages in the United States.¹⁰ And like every profane sacrament, the map generated its own aftermarket — exploiting the very inequalities it created, without requiring anyone in the next transaction to be explicitly racist.¹¹

The maps were drawn in the 1930s. They are still sorting neighborhoods today. Kurt Culbertson, a landscape architect who has spent decades studying spatial inequality, showed me what happens when you overlay the original HOLC maps on contemporary socioeconomic data in cities like Raleigh and Charlotte and Cleveland: the correlation persists in great measure.¹²

Ecologists call it patch persistence — once a habitat pattern is established, it reproduces itself indefinitely unless something actively disrupts it. The profane sacrament doesn’t need the mapmaker. It has become the landscape.^13,14

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Families locked out of federally insured mortgages had only one way to buy a home: contract sales. The seller retained the deed. The buyer made a down payment plus monthly installments with interest — not to a bank but directly to the seller.

And here’s the trap: miss one payment, even after fifteen years of faithful payments, and the seller could evict you and keep every dollar you’d paid.¹⁵ Then sell the house to someone else under the same terms. And do it again. In Chicago, eighty-five percent of Black property purchases were made on contract.¹⁶

In the 1920s, Dr. Ossian Sweet bought a house in Detroit through a contract sale. When a white mob surrounded the house, Sweet and his family defended themselves. The legal case became famous. But what most people don’t know is that Sweet didn’t own that house. The landlady did. He wouldn’t have owned it for twenty-five years.¹⁷

The instrument that promised homeownership was designed to prevent it — extracting wealth from Black families who had been deliberately excluded from the legitimate mortgage market, cycling the same house through contract after contract, each buyer’s accumulated payments forfeit at the first stumble.

And the contract sale formed everyone it touched — not just the families trapped in its mechanism. Rothstein traces the causal chain: FHA exclusion locked Black families out of legitimate mortgages; contract sales and blockbusting were the only alternatives; the exploitative terms guaranteed overcrowding and deterioration; white observers saw declining neighborhoods and concluded that Black residents caused the decline.¹⁸

The profane sacrament created the perception that justified the profane sacrament. White flight wasn’t a response to integration. It was a response to conditions the federal government had engineered.¹⁹

Levittown rose from Long Island potato fields in 1947 — mass-produced housing, VA loans requiring zero down payment, the federal government’s explicit guarantee that it would insure mortgages for these vast suburban tracts on the condition of all-white occupancy.²⁰ Restrictive covenants on every deed. The most important investment most Americans would ever make — their home — subsidized by the federal government for white families and denied to everyone else.

This is the profane sacrament of wealth-building: an outward and visible policy performing an inward and structural transfer of resources across racial lines, administered so quietly that white beneficiaries could experience their prosperity as earned rather than subsidized. The result: median white household wealth of $134,000; median Black household wealth of $11,000.

The income ratio between white and Black families is roughly sixty percent. The wealth ratio is less than ten.²¹ That gap is not the residue of slavery. It is the product of administrative profane sacraments operating within living memory — and, after the Supreme Court’s Shelley v. Kraemer decision in 1948 should have ended them, the FHA maintained its racial exclusion for fourteen more years.²²

I grew up inside that subsidy. The Baton Rouge neighborhoods where my family bought homes were green and blue on maps drawn before my parents were born. The neighborhoods where Marie lived, where Gary lived — the neighborhoods I described in the Water Fountain Walls essay — were red. The water fountain signs came down before I could read. The redlines never did.

Phil Moser’s concrete driveway with the basketball goal was in a neighborhood the federal government had decided was worth insuring. The neighborhood Gary went home to was one it had decided was not.

And sometimes the grammar didn’t need a covenant or a lending policy. It needed a tape measure. Robert Moses — who built Lincoln Center, consulted on the interstate highway system, and shaped more of New York’s infrastructure than any other individual — designed the bridges over the parkways leading to Long Island’s public beaches too low for buses to pass under.²³

Black residents, who depended on public transit, were excluded from Jones Beach by twelve feet of concrete clearance. No statute. No covenant. No racial language in any document. Just the built environment speaking the grammar fluently.

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The New Deal — the great expansion of the social safety net — wrote the grammar into the welfare state itself. Agricultural and domestic workers were deliberately excluded from Social Security, the Wagner Act’s labor protections, and the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage.

This was not an oversight. It was a political bargain with Southern Democrats who understood precisely which workers those categories described.²⁴ These were the two largest categories of Black employment.

Marie — who helped raise me, who came to work for my mother when I was a toddler — was a domestic worker. She was excluded.

The majority of the Black workforce, shut out of the nation’s foundational social insurance programs by a definitional maneuver that never mentioned race. And the mainline Protestant churches that blessed the New Deal as moral progress did not notice who it left out — because the people it left out were invisible to mainline Protestantism.

The social safety net was a white safety net. The administrative instrument that enforced the boundary was the occupational classification form. And the church that should have read the form theologically was too busy celebrating the welfare state to ask who it was forming.²⁵

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Meanwhile, the same administrative grammar had been building its case against Asian Americans for decades — and it was about to find its emergency.

The anti-Chinese logic from the Exclusion era hadn’t disappeared. It had been working its way through the courts. In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States that Japanese immigrants were ineligible for citizenship — not white enough, regardless of education, acculturation, or character.²⁶

Three months later, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Court ruled that Indian immigrants were also ineligible — even though they were scientifically “Caucasian,” they weren’t white in the “common understanding.”²⁷ Two cases, two different definitions of who counts, both reaching the same result: the supersessionist standard calibrated so that no Asian immigrant could pass. The 1924 Immigration Act completed the architecture, barring Japanese immigration entirely.

Then came December 7, 1941, and the grammar found its emergency.

General John DeWitt, commanding the Western Defense Command, stated the logic with a clarity that should have alarmed anyone paying attention: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”²⁸

Read that sentence again. The absence of evidence is the evidence. Loyalty is proof of concealed disloyalty. The purity test that compliance cannot satisfy — because compliance itself is suspicious. The supersessionist standard’s epistemological perfection: a test designed so that passing it proves you should have failed.

The grammar that Ozawa and Thind had encoded in law, Pearl Harbor activated as policy — rationalizing the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans.²⁹ Executive Order 9066 didn’t use the word “Japanese.” It authorized military commanders to designate “military areas” and exclude “any or all persons.” The vocabulary was race-neutral. The grammar was not.

Austin Anson, a grower-shipper from Salinas, said what the executive order wouldn’t: “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japanese for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do.”³⁰

I need to show you what happened to one family. The Matsudas were Methodist farmers on Vashon Island, Washington. When the FBI came, they searched the house and found one item of interest: a Japanese-language New Testament. “We are Methodists,” Yoneichi Matsuda told them.³¹

Before the soldiers arrived to take them, the family burned what they couldn’t carry. Mary Matsuda watched her father snap a phonograph record over his knee. “This one is ‘Sakura,’” he said — cherry blossoms, the folk song every Japanese child knows. She watched her mother’s dolls in kimonos fed to the fire. Everything that could mark them as Japanese — as anything other than American — had to be destroyed before the state arrived to classify them as not-American.

They were tagged. The Matsudas became Family 19788.³² Mary’s identification card was stamped “Non-Alien” — not citizen, not immigrant, not a person with a name, but a negation. Defined by what she was not.

I need you to hear that theologically. In baptism, you receive a name and enter a community. In the administrative profane sacrament, the movement runs in reverse.

A Reverend Fuji Usui — a minister — was, in his daughter’s words, “chained and numbered like an animal.”³³ His daughter attended St. Mary’s Church. The Uchida family hung tags from their coat lapels: “Family 13453.”³⁴ The Matsudas became 19788. A minister numbered. Families tagged. Citizens defined by negation.

The administrative profane sacrament is an anti-baptism — it strips the name, dissolves the community, and assigns a category that tells you what you are not.

At the ferry dock, someone spat on them.³² At the camp, searchlights swept the barracks at night. Mary Matsuda wrote: “Shaking in the darkness I realized that at seventeen, I am a prisoner of war in my own country.”³⁵

The searchlight seized her body the way the loyalty questionnaire would seize her identity — an instrument of surveillance so total that the person being watched internalizes the watching. The body learns: you are observed. You are suspect. You are not safe in the dark.

The Reverend Daisuke Kitagawa — an Episcopal priest, a clergyman of my own tradition — named what the camps destroyed: “The loss of the family table and the family kitchen was not simply a loss of opportunity to teach manners to growing children, but a forceful symbol of that human institution which transmits values from one generation to another.”³⁶

Kitagawa saw what I’ve been tracing throughout this essay: formation happens through practices — daily, embodied, repeated. The family table is a real sacrament. The mess hall that replaced it was a profane one. The administrative grammar didn’t just relocate bodies. It destroyed the domestic practices through which identity is formed across generations.

The economic devastation was specific and staggering. Frank Emi sold his $25,000 supermarket for $1,500 — six cents on the dollar.³⁷ In aggregate, Japanese Americans lost approximately $250 million in 1940s dollars — roughly $3 billion in 2013 terms — representing seventy-five percent of total assets.³⁸Scavenger trucks followed the military vehicles, picking over what the families couldn’t carry.³⁹

When the Matsudas returned after the war, they found that a man named Hopkins — a neighbor who had agreed to manage their farm — had been collecting rent from tenants and pocketing the payments. Yoneichi confronted him with the evidence of the theft. Then he handed Hopkins $2,000 from the family’s savings and told him: “It’s only money…. The important thing is we still have our farm.”⁴⁰

Then came the loyalty questionnaire — and here the profane sacrament achieved its administrative perfection. The state imprisoned you, then demanded you prove your loyalty to the state that imprisoned you. A twenty-eight-question form scoring “Americanness” against an implied white norm.⁴¹

Question 21 asked for “names and addresses of three white references” — the supersessionist standard in bureaucratic form, requiring Japanese Americans to produce white Americans willing to vouch for their humanity. Questions 27 and 28 asked them to forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan and swear unqualified allegiance to the United States.

For Issei — first-generation immigrants whom American law had prohibited from becoming citizens — answering “yes” meant renouncing their only citizenship and becoming stateless. For Nisei — American-born citizens — the question was an insult: they had no allegiance to forswear. And everyone answering was already behind barbed wire.⁴² The purity test was designed so that compliance meant self-destruction. The grammar hadn’t changed since limpieza de sangre. Only the instrument had.

And then the questionnaire generated its own logic of intensified control — the same circular logic I traced in redlining, where the instrument generates the evidence that makes the instrument seem necessary. Reeves documents Category (d): family members who chose to stay with relatives classified as “disloyal” were themselves reclassified as disloyal.⁴³ Family loyalty became evidence of state disloyalty.

The apparatus built by the incarceration produced the questionnaire that produced the classifications that justified further incarceration. Each step generated the evidence for the next.

The formation worked on everyone it touched. A bus driver named Sumie Barta had greeted Mary Matsuda by name every day — “Hi, Sumi!” — until the day the Executive Order made Sumi a category rather than a person. “Get that damn Jap girl off the bus.”⁴⁴ The grammar replaced a name with a racial slur. It formed the bus driver into someone for whom a person she knew could become a thing she expelled.

And the deepest formation was in those it silenced. Edison Uno, decades later: “We were like the victims of rape. We felt shamed. We could not bear to speak of the assault.”⁴⁵ The profane sacrament’s most devastating achievement: shame so total that it silences its own testimony for a generation.

When the shame has no face — when it arrives as a denied application, a neighborhood boundary, a loyalty questionnaire, a definitional exclusion — it seeps inward. It stops feeling like something done to you and starts feeling like something true about you. The most devastating profane sacraments are the ones you can’t see performing.

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The Age of Chaos (1980–Present): When the Constraints Came Off

And then the constraints came off.

I watched it happen in Louisiana. The oil bust of the mid-1980s emptied towns across the Gulf Coast almost overnight — men who had worked the rigs for twenty years came home to locked gates and severance checks that wouldn’t cover the mortgage. The refineries that had made Lake Charles and Port Arthur feel permanent turned out to be as mobile as the capital that built them.⁴⁶ The people left behind had done nothing wrong. They had done everything they were told to do. And the economy they had served simply left.

I need to be precise about what happened, because most accounts get this wrong. Capital — the speculative deployment of wealth in expectation of future return — didn’t suddenly “go mobile” in the 1980s. Capital is mobile by nature.

Its deepest structural impulse is what Jonathan Levy calls “liquidity preference”: the drive toward optionality, exit, the refusal to be bound to any particular place or people or purpose. Capital that can’t exit isn’t fully capital. It’s just property.⁴⁷

What changed wasn’t capital’s nature. What changed was that the sovereign constraints which had channeled that liquidity preference — the regulations, the labor protections, the social contracts, the democratic mechanisms that had forced capital to negotiate with the communities it operated in — were deliberately dismantled.⁴⁸

Wendy Brown diagnosed what happened next with a precision I haven’t found anywhere else. She calls it “double decontainment.”⁴⁹

Capital was freed from sovereign constraint — freed to flow across borders, to relocate production, to arbitrage between jurisdictions, to treat every community as a way station rather than a home.

But simultaneously, the demos — the democratic public — was freed from sovereign protection. The same political decisions that unchained capital also dismantled the institutions that had shielded ordinary people from capital’s liquidity preference: unions, pension systems, stable employment, the social safety net, the democratic mechanisms through which communities had negotiated the terms of capital’s presence.

Both happened at once. That’s the devastation. Capital was liberated. People were exposed. And the language used to describe both operations was the same: freedom.

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Here is where I need you to see something theologically.

Capital-as-process — operating without territory, without deliberation, without a face or a body, yet governing more of human life than any sovereign power — functions as what Brown calls a “deanthropomorphized God.”⁵⁰

Not a metaphor. A diagnosis.

Capital doesn’t deliberate. It doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t appear before a legislature or answer to an electorate. It operates through what Levy would recognize as pure liquidity preference — the restless, perpetual motion of wealth seeking return — and the communities in its path experience its decisions the way ancient peoples experienced weather: as fate.

Irresistible, impersonal, unchallengeable.

When the factory closes, no one decided to close it. The numbers decided. When the town dies, no one killed it. The market moved. The agency has been dissolved into process, and process has no address where you can lodge a complaint.

I’ve been calling this “counter-manna” — and I mean the term precisely. In the Ontological Foundations appendix to this series, I traced how the daily-bread economy of Exodus operates: provision is daily, dependence is the design, hoarding destroys the gift, and trust in tomorrow’s provision is the discipline that forms community.⁵¹

Capital’s liquidity preference is the structural inversion of every one of those principles. Provision becomes accumulation. Dependence becomes weakness. Hoarding becomes fiduciary responsibility. And trust in tomorrow is replaced by the perpetual optionality of exit — the refusal to be bound to any particular place or people or purpose.

Where manna binds people to place and community through shared dependence, capital’s liquidity corrodes every bond that might impede mobility.

The Age of Chaos is what happens when counter-manna wins — when the bonds are corroded, the communities dissolved, the stable employment that had provided not just income but identity stripped away.

And then the people who have lost everything except their ancestry are told that ancestry is enough.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, the wall.

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The border wall’s genealogy tells the story.

A chain-link fence in Calexico in 1911. The creation of the Border Patrol in 1924. Operation Wetback’s mass deportations in 1954. Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 — Clinton’s policy of funneling migrants into the Sonoran Desert, using the environment itself as a weapon.⁵²

Each iteration escalated the infrastructure while the underlying grammar stayed fixed: sovereignty means controlling who belongs, and controlling who belongs means identifying the threat.

David Bentley Hart has diagnosed the paradox at the heart of this escalation. Capital’s relentless drive toward borderless mobility generates the most intense demands for fixed borders, each nation-state sacralized as an area of absolute sovereignty, law, and coercive power.⁵³

The system that claims to liberate individuals actually requires the tribal identities it pretends to transcend.

Brown showed me what that paradox produces. The wall is this age’s characteristic profane sacrament — but not for the reason most people think.

The wall doesn’t work as a security measure. It fails at controlling migration. Its power is formational, not functional.

The wall forms what Brown calls homo munitus — the walled subject, contracting, defending, hunkering behind barriers both literal and psychic.⁵⁴

The wall controls what Americans think about the border, not what happens at it. It stages the fantasy that sovereignty still works, that containment is still possible, that the forces dissolving communities from within can be kept out by concrete and wire.

Where baptism says you belong to a community that transcends every border — a community with its own boundaries, to be sure, but boundaries defined by water and Spirit rather than by blood and soil — the wall says you belong only if the border holds. Where the Eucharist gathers a people whose unity is gift rather than achievement, the wall is a border without a table.

The profane sacrament of the Age of Chaos is not a practice performed on bodies — like the whipping machine — or a bureaucratic instrument applied to neighborhoods — like the redlined map. It is an architecture of imagination: a structure that forms subjects to experience the world as threat, other people as invasion, and containment as the only available salvation.

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And then the double erosion.

This is the insight I almost missed — and it’s the one that explains everything that follows.

The people most deeply formed by dominative identity — the people whose sense of worth depended on their position in the racial and economic hierarchy the profane sacraments had built — were eroded from two directions simultaneously.⁵⁵

From within: the very capital process they had served and defended — the system that had promised them prosperity in exchange for loyalty — dissolved the material conditions that made their identity feel secure.

The factory closed. The union disappeared. The pension evaporated. The town hollowed out. The stable employment that had provided not just income but dignity — the sense that you mattered, that your labor meant something, that your community had a future — was liquidated by the same liquidity preference these communities had been taught to celebrate as freedom.

Capital didn’t betray them. Capital did what capital does. It sought the highest return and moved on.⁵⁶

From without: progressive movements named the grammar. The civil rights movement, feminism, LGBTQ advocacy, immigration reform — each one challenged the hierarchy that had organized American common life for centuries.

Each one said: the sorting is wrong. The walls are unjust. The water fountain signs were evil.

And they were right. But for those whose identity had been built on that hierarchy — whose sense of self depended on their position within it — the naming felt like annihilation. Not moral correction. Ontological threat.

The floor was being pulled out from both directions at once.⁵⁷

If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, you’ll recognize what was happening in the bodies of the people caught in this double erosion. Their window of tolerance — the nervous system’s capacity to stay present, to process complexity, to hold ambiguity without collapsing into fight or flight — was narrowing from both sides simultaneously.

The economic erosion triggered survival-level threat. The cultural naming triggered shame. And shame, as I traced in Essays 3 and 4, narrows the window faster than almost anything else — because it doesn’t just threaten what you have. It threatens what you are.⁵⁸

And here is what makes the Age of Chaos different from every age that preceded it: there was no communal space in which to process the loss.

Capital’s liquidity preference had already destroyed the stable communities — the unions, the civic associations, the churches with enough institutional thickness to hold people through crisis — that might have provided a vocabulary for grief and adaptation. The social had been hollowed out.⁵⁹

The people experiencing the double erosion were experiencing it alone — or in the thin simulations of community that talk radio and social media provided, where rage could be performed but grief could not be borne.

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Arlie Russell Hochschild spent five years in southwestern Louisiana listening to what the double erosion sounds like from inside. She found what she calls a “deep story” — the narrative through which her subjects made sense of their experience.⁶⁰

The deep story goes like this: You are standing in a long line, waiting patiently for the American Dream. You’ve worked hard, played by the rules, done everything right.

And then you see people cutting in line ahead of you — minorities, immigrants, women, people who haven’t earned their place. And the government is helping them cut. And the people who should be defending your place in line — the liberal elites, the media, the institutions — are telling you that your frustration makes you a bigot.

Hochschild is careful: the deep story is not an analysis. It’s an emotional truth — a felt narrative that organizes experience before reasoning begins.

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Angus Deaton and Anne Case showed me what the double erosion does to bodies.

Between 1999 and 2017, roughly 600,000 Americans died what Case and Deaton call “deaths of despair” — suicide, drug overdose, alcoholic liver disease.⁶¹

Not randomly distributed. Concentrated among white Americans without a bachelor’s degree — the population most fully formed by dominative identity and most exposed to its erosion. The geography of deaths of despair maps onto the geography of MAGA support with devastating precision.⁶²

And the American exceptionalism of the pattern — other wealthy nations experienced the same economic shifts without the same mortality spike — proves that this is formation, not economics. The dying is a design feature of a system that first built identity on hierarchy and then dissolved the hierarchy’s material supports.⁶³

Case and Deaton identified something else: the education divide has become the new caste line.

A bachelor’s degree now functions as a purity test — those with degrees live longer, earn more, marry more stably, report greater well-being. Those without degrees are sorted into a world of declining life expectancy, chronic pain, and what Case and Deaton diagnose as the systematic collapse of the structures that had once given life meaning: marriage, employment, community, faith.⁶⁴

The meritocratic system doesn’t just reward education. It humiliates those who lack it — and the humiliation is the formation.

What fills the vacuum when all other sources of worth have been eroded? That’s the question Heritage American answers — and I’ll get to it. But first, the daily instruments.

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But the Age of Chaos doesn’t need a wall to do its daily work. It has zip codes.

Here is what the profane sacraments produce when they have had generations to compound: in Baltimore, a fifteen-to-twenty-year difference in life expectancy within a matter of blocks.⁶⁵

Not across a city. Within neighborhoods that share a boundary.

Raj Chetty’s longitudinal data from the IRS — not surveys, not estimates, but tax records tracking actual lives over decades — confirmed what my brother-in-law Salin Geevarghese had been telling me from his years at HUD: where you grow up determines your life chances.⁶⁶

And the instruments adapt. Redlining denied credit to Black neighborhoods. When that was exposed, the financial industry discovered it could extend predatory credit to the same neighborhoods — subprime loans with exploding interest rates targeted at the communities the original redlining had made desperate for any path to homeownership.⁶⁷

Same geography. Same extraction. Opposite instrument. The 2008 crisis was not a market failure. It was the grammar working — finding a new vocabulary when the old one was taken away.⁶⁸

Salin told me that fair housing testing — sending matched pairs of applicants to the same realtors and landlords — still shows daily evidence that persons of color are steered away from high-opportunity neighborhoods into racially concentrated enclaves.⁶⁹ We are resegregating, he said.

And everywhere we signal it: the pawn shop where a bank should be, the convenience store where a grocery should stand, the park that gets mowed once a month in one neighborhood and every week in the one across the highway.⁷⁰ The “Whites Only” sign came down. The liturgy continues — through signals so embedded in the built environment that most of us drive past them without noticing. Which is exactly how the grammar prefers to operate now. Not through spectacle or statute but through the ordinary landscape of a Tuesday afternoon.⁷¹

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Brown named what I hadn’t been able to see: neoliberalism didn’t fail when it produced MAGA Christianism. It succeeded.⁷²

The Age of Commerce killed with whips. The Age of Capital killed with ropes. The Age of Control killed with exclusion from wealth-building and clean air. The Age of Chaos kills with your address — and with the dissolution of everything that once made an address feel like home.

The grammar hasn’t weakened. It has become so efficient it no longer needs visible instruments. And the faith that blesses it arrived without the practices that might have inoculated against it.

This is the age of epistemic chaos — the same kind of chaos the printing press unleashed in Essay 10’s story of the medieval church. The digital revolution has done to shared reality what the Reformation did to shared liturgy: fragmented it into a million competing narratives, each with its own facts, its own authorities, its own account of who the enemy is.

And in the chaos, the Heritage American story offers what it has always offered: certainty about who belongs.

The profane sacraments no longer need chains or redlined maps or relocation notices. They need algorithms, zip codes, and a peoplehood story that sorts the world into us and them before the data arrives.

MAGA Christianism is not an aberration. It is the predictable response of a formation that has been practicing the friend-enemy grammar for four centuries — now offered a megaphone in an age when every other source of worth has been systematically dismantled.

The grammar is old. The instruments are new. And the faith that blesses it arrived without the practices that might have inoculated against it.

But describing the profane sacraments doesn’t explain how they persist. The Whipping Machine is gone. The Auction Block is gone. The coastwise ships no longer carry human cargo alongside the mail. The opera house in Livermore is just a building. The Santa Fe Bridge doesn’t spray Zyklon B.

So why did my body know what it knew at the dance?

Four ages. Four sets of instruments. And underneath them all, a grammar that precedes and outlasts every one.

I’ve been tracing that grammar at a scholarly distance — naming it in Jennings and Carter and Baptist and Brown, mapping its economic phases, identifying its instruments. That distance felt like analysis. I’m beginning to suspect it was also a kind of protection.

Because underneath the four ages, there’s a grammar older than any of them. And I’ve been speaking it my whole life without knowing.

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Next in this essay: Contrapunctus IV: The Grammar and the Trophy Case

All five contrapuncti:

• How Christianity Forgot Its Grammar, Part 2—Contrapunctus I: The Vacuum

• Contrapunctus II: The Instruments of Flesh and Exclusion

• Contrapunctus III: The Instruments of Order and Chaos

• Contrapunctus IV: The Grammar and the Trophy Case

• Contrapunctus V: Diagnostics

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Notes

1. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), Kindle Locs. 730–760. Beginning in the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew color-coded maps of American neighborhoods — green for “best,” red for “hazardous” — formalizing racial assessment into federal lending policy.

2. Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). Polish, Italian, and Greek neighborhoods were also redlined — the grammar sorted “wrong kind of white” as well as Black, though the racial dimension was absolute.

3. Boyle, Arc of Justice. A single Black resident in a neighborhood guaranteed redlining — the racial line was absolute even when the ethnic sorting was more nuanced.

4. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 800–830. The FHA Underwriting Manual warned against “inharmonious racial groups” and instructed appraisers to watch for “infiltration” — the language of pest control applied to human beings.

5. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 850–870. The FHA described itself as “just a business organization” evaluating “the cold facts and elements of risk” — the constitutional shield that made racial exclusion look like financial prudence.

6. Boyle, Arc of Justice. The “risk assessment” framing allowed the government to claim it was measuring financial hazard rather than performing racial exclusion — the vocabulary made the grammar invisible.

7. Salin Geevarghese, in conversation with Craig Geevarghese-Uffman, Race on the Rocks podcast. On how profane sacraments adapt their vocabulary while preserving their grammar — the move from explicit racial language to technical risk assessment.

8. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 900–930. FHA exclusion created the very conditions — neighborhood decline, overcrowding, deteriorating infrastructure — that were then cited as proof that Black neighborhoods were bad risks. The profane sacrament manufactured the evidence for its own operation.

9. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 960–980. A 1952 study in the Appraisal Journal demonstrated that property values actually increased in integrating neighborhoods. The finding was ignored for a decade.

10. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1000–1020. The VA adopted FHA racial policies wholesale. By 1950, the FHA and VA together insured half of all new mortgages in the United States.

11. Craig’s concept, informed by Jonathan Tran’s analysis of how racial capitalism generates secondary markets. The “aftermarket” describes how profane sacraments create inequalities that subsequent actors can exploit without being explicitly racist — each transaction building on the previous one’s distortions. See Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

12. Kurt Culbertson, in conversation with Craig Geevarghese-Uffman, Race on the Rocks, Episode 21, c. 2021, ~15:00–20:00. When you overlay original HOLC maps on contemporary socioeconomic data in Raleigh, Charlotte, and Cleveland, the correlation persists in great measure. Ecologists call it patch persistence.

13. Culbertson, Race on the Rocks, Episode 21, ~20:00–25:00. The ecological vocabulary — patch persistence, habitat pattern, succession of instruments — naming how spatial inequality reproduces itself indefinitely unless actively disrupted.

14. Culbertson, Race on the Rocks, Episode 21, ~25:00–30:00. On the succession of instruments — redlining maps to highway routing to zoning codes to school district boundaries — each new instrument inheriting and reproducing the pattern the previous one established.

15. Boyle, Arc of Justice; see also Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 950–970, and Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). Contract sales gave buyers none of the protections of a mortgage — miss one payment and lose the house and every dollar paid.

16. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 950–970. In Chicago, eighty-five percent of Black property purchases were made on contract.

17. Boyle, Arc of Justice. Dr. Ossian Sweet’s famous legal case — what most people don’t know is that Sweet didn’t own the house. The landlady did. He wouldn’t have owned it for twenty-five years. The instrument that promised homeownership was designed to prevent it.

18. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1050–1080. The causal chain: FHA exclusion → contract sales and blockbusting → overcrowding and deterioration → white observers concluding Black residents caused the decline. The profane sacrament created the perception that justified itself.

19. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1080–1100. White flight wasn’t a response to integration. It was a response to conditions the federal government had engineered.

20. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1100–1130. Levittown: VA loans requiring zero down payment, federal mortgage insurance conditional on all-white occupancy, restrictive covenants on every deed.

21. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1100–1120. Median white household wealth: approximately $134,000. Median Black household wealth: approximately $11,000. The income ratio between white and Black families is roughly sixty percent. The wealth ratio is less than ten.

22. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1150–1180. After the Supreme Court’s Shelley v. Kraemer decision in 1948 should have ended racial covenants, the FHA maintained its racial exclusion for fourteen more years.

23. Culbertson, Race on the Rocks, Episode 21, ~30:00–33:00. Robert Moses designed the bridges over Long Island parkways too low for buses to pass under — excluding Black residents dependent on public transit from Jones Beach by twelve feet of concrete clearance. No statute, no covenant, no racial language. Just infrastructure speaking the grammar. See also Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974).

24. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Rothstein, Color of Law. The Social Security Act of 1935, the Wagner Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act all excluded agricultural and domestic workers — the two largest categories of Black employment — as the price Southern Democrats extracted for their votes.

25. Craig’s observation. The mainline Protestant churches that celebrated the New Deal as social progress — Reinhold Niebuhr was advising the Roosevelt administration — did not notice or challenge the occupational exclusions that left the majority of the Black workforce outside the safety net. The silence is itself a profane sacrament: the church blessed the structure without reading who it formed.

26. Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922). The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant who had lived in the United States for twenty years, graduated from Berkeley, and educated his children in American schools, was ineligible for citizenship because Japanese persons were not “Caucasian” and therefore not “free white persons” under the Naturalization Act.

27. United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923). Three months after Ozawa, the Court reversed its own reasoning: Thind was scientifically Caucasian, but not white in the “common understanding.” The ruling stripped citizenship from approximately fifty Indian Americans who had already been naturalized. Together with Ozawa, the paired decisions ensured that no Asian immigrant could satisfy the supersessionist standard — one case excluded those who weren’t Caucasian, the other excluded those who were.

28. Richard Reeves, Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II (New York: Henry Holt, 2015), ch. 2, p. 51. General John L. DeWitt: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”

29. Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015). The anti-Chinese logic from the Exclusion era resurfaced to rationalize the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans.

30. Reeves, Infamy, ch. 2. Austin Anson, grower-shipper from Salinas: “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japanese for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do.”

31. Reeves, Infamy, ch. 3, pp. 85–90. The Matsudas were Methodist farmers on Vashon Island. Before the soldiers arrived, the family burned what they couldn’t carry — the phonograph record of “Sakura,” the mother’s dolls in kimonos. Everything that could mark them as Japanese destroyed before the state arrived to classify them as not-American.

32. Reeves, Infamy, ch. 3, pp. 90–95. The Matsudas became Family 19788. Mary’s identification card stamped “Non-Alien.” At the ferry dock, someone spat on them.

33. Reeves, Infamy. Reverend Fuji Usui — a minister — was, in his daughter’s words, “chained and numbered like an animal.” His daughter attended St. Mary’s Church.

34. Reeves, Infamy. The Uchida family hung tags from their coat lapels: “Family 13453.”

35. Reeves, Infamy, ch. 3, pp. 90–91; see also Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 2005). “Shaking in the darkness I realized that at seventeen, I am a prisoner of war in my own country.”

36. Reeves, Infamy. The Reverend Daisuke Kitagawa, an Episcopal priest: “The loss of the family table and the family kitchen was not simply a loss of opportunity to teach manners to growing children, but a forceful symbol of that human institution which transmits values from one generation to another.”

37. Reeves, Infamy. Frank Emi sold his $25,000 supermarket for $1,500 — six cents on the dollar.

38. Reeves, Infamy. Japanese Americans lost approximately $250 million in 1940s dollars — roughly $3 billion in 2013 terms — representing seventy-five percent of total assets.

39. Reeves, Infamy. Scavenger trucks followed the military vehicles, picking over what the families couldn’t carry.

40. Reeves, Infamy. When the Matsudas returned, they found Hopkins had been collecting rent and pocketing payments. Yoneichi confronted him, then handed him $2,000: “It’s only money…. The important thing is we still have our farm.”

41. Reeves, Infamy. A twenty-eight-question form scoring “Americanness” against an implied white norm. The state imprisoned you, then demanded you prove your loyalty to the state that imprisoned you.

42. Michi Nishiura Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (New York: William Morrow, 1976; updated ed., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). War Relocation Authority, Form WRA-126 Rev. (1943), Questions 27 and 28. Question 21 asked for “names and addresses of three white references.” For Issei, answering “yes” meant renouncing their only citizenship and becoming stateless. For Nisei, the question was an insult.

43. Reeves, Infamy. Category (d): family members who chose to stay with relatives classified as “disloyal” were themselves reclassified as disloyal. Family loyalty became evidence of state disloyalty.

44. Reeves, Infamy. Sumie Barta had greeted Mary Matsuda by name every day — “Hi, Sumi!” — until the Executive Order made her a category: “Get that damn Jap girl off the bus.”

45. Reeves, Infamy. Edison Uno, decades later: “We were like the victims of rape. We felt shamed. We could not bear to speak of the assault.”

46. Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Random House, 2021), chs. 16–17. The oil bust of the mid-1980s devastated Gulf Coast communities, demonstrating capital’s liquidity preference in real time: the industry that had built towns could abandon them without deliberation, because capital that cannot exit is not fully capital.

47. Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Random House, 2021), Introduction and throughout. Levy defines capital not as a physical asset but as a process — “the never-ending conflict between the short-term propensity to hoard and the long-term ability and inducement to invest.” Its deepest structural impulse is the drive toward optionality and exit.

48. Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), chs. 1–2. Beginning in the late 1970s, a series of political decisions unleashed capital’s inherent liquidity preference from the sovereign containers that had held it accountable to democratic publics.

49. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, chs. 1–2. “Double decontainment”: capital freed from sovereign constraint while simultaneously the demos freed from sovereign protection.

50. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism; see also Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). Capital-as-process functions as a “deanthropomorphized God” — operating without territory, deliberation, or accountability.

51. Craig’s term, building on Levy, Ages of American Capitalism. Capital’s liquidity preference as “counter-manna” — the structural opposite of the daily-bread economy where receiving and trust form the basis of community. Developed in the Ontological Foundations appendix to this series.

52. Carrie Gibson, El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019). The border wall’s genealogy: a chain-link fence in Calexico in 1911, the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924, Operation Wetback in 1954, Operation Gatekeeper in 1994.

53. David Bentley Hart, “Notes Toward a Polyphonic Politics — Part the Second.” Capital’s relentless drive toward borderless mobility generates the most intense demands for fixed borders. Developed in Essay 8 Appendix (“Ontological Foundations”), Section 6.

54. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), chs. 4–5. The wall forms homo munitus — the walled subject, contracting, defending, hunkering behind barriers both literal and psychic.

55. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, ch. 5. The people most deeply formed by dominative identity were eroded from two directions simultaneously — from within by capital’s dissolution of material conditions, and from without by progressive movements that named the grammar.

56. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, ch. 5. The very capital process they had served dissolved the material conditions that made their identity feel secure. Capital didn’t betray them. Capital did what capital does.

57. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, ch. 5. For those whose identity had been built on the hierarchy, progressive movements naming the grammar felt like annihilation. Not moral correction. Ontological threat.

58. Craig’s synthesis, drawing on the neurobiological framework developed in Essays 3–4 (Porges, Siegel, Schore). The double erosion — economic threat from within, shame-based naming from without — narrows the window of tolerance from both sides simultaneously. Economic insecurity triggers survival-level physiological responses. Cultural naming triggers shame, which narrows the window faster than almost any other affect because it threatens identity rather than circumstance.

59. Brown, Undoing the Demos, chs. 1–3; and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, ch. 1. Neoliberalism converted every domain of human life into market logic, destroying the social as a sphere of shared meaning — the communities that might have provided vocabulary for grief and adaptation.

60. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016), ch. 9, “The Deep Story,” 135ff. The “deep story” is not an analysis but an emotional truth — a felt narrative that organizes experience before reasoning begins.

61. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), chs. 1–3. Between 1999 and 2017, roughly 600,000 Americans died what Case and Deaton call “deaths of despair” — suicide, drug overdose, alcoholic liver disease.

62. Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair, chs. 13–16. The geography of deaths of despair maps onto the geography of MAGA support with devastating precision. Concentrated among white Americans without a bachelor’s degree.

63. Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair, chs. 1–3. Other wealthy nations experienced the same economic shifts without the same mortality spike — proving this is formation, not economics.

64. Case and Deaton, Deaths of Despair, chs. 10–12; see also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death,” Annual Review of Economics 14 (2022): 1–21. A bachelor’s degree now functions as a purity test — those with degrees live longer, earn more, marry more stably.

65. Salin Geevarghese, in conversation with Craig Geevarghese-Uffman, Race on the Rocks, Episode 20, c. 2021, ~41:30–42:30. A fifteen-to-twenty-year difference in life expectancy within a matter of blocks in Baltimore.

66. Geevarghese, Race on the Rocks, Episode 19, ~28:00–33:00. Geevarghese cites Raj Chetty et al., “Where Is the Land of Opportunity?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 4 (2014): 1553–1623.

67. Rothstein, Color of Law, Kindle Locs. 1736–1770. The 2008 financial crisis as redlining’s mutation: from denial of credit to predatory extension of credit.

68. Geevarghese, Race on the Rocks, Episode 20, ~12:30–13:00. The 2008 crisis as the grammar working — finding new vocabulary when the old one was taken away.

69. Geevarghese, Race on the Rocks, Episode 19, ~22:00–23:00. Fair housing testing still shows daily evidence that persons of color are steered away from high-opportunity neighborhoods.

70. Geevarghese, Race on the Rocks, Episode 20, ~27:30–28:00. The pawn shop where a bank should be, the convenience store where a grocery should stand, the park mowed once a month in one neighborhood and every week in the one across the highway.

71. Geevarghese, Race on the Rocks. On how the grammar operates through the ordinary landscape — not through spectacle or statute but through signals so embedded in the built environment that most of us drive past them without noticing.

72. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism; see also Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” Critical Times 1, no. 1 (2018): 60–79. Neoliberalism didn’t fail when it produced MAGA Christianism. It succeeded.