How Christianity Forgot Its Grammar, Part 2 — Contrapunctus V: Diagnostics
Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #11
What remains is the question Salin asked. The question about practices.
Not what do you believe about the formation this series has traced. What does your body do?
The road Salin’s question put me on — years of it — eventually produced a set of diagnostics I keep returning to. Not answers. Instruments. Ways of attending to what the formation is doing in your body before your mind has time to construct the trophy case.
I want to offer you these diagnostics. They aren’t arguments. They’re invitations to pay attention — to notice what your body knows before your mind has formed a thought. The formation that operates below consciousness gains its power from remaining unnamed. The moment you attend to it, you’ve opened a gap.
A small gap. But in that gap, you can choose.
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The first is for your community.
Every community tells itself a peoplehood story — who “we” are, where we came from, what we’re called to be. Is your community’s story ordered or disordered?1
An ordered story is generous: it includes, it welcomes, it receives the stranger as gift. A disordered story is anxious: it sorts, it excludes, it needs an enemy to know who it is.
Listen to the story your community tells about itself — in its sermons, its politics, its coffee-hour gossip about the neighborhood changing. Which grammar do you hear underneath?
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The second is for yourself.
When you hear “City upon a Hill” — which grammar activates? The covenantal grammar, where the city’s visibility means accountability, mutual obligation, judgment beginning at God’s household? Or the triumphalist grammar, where visibility means chosenness, superiority, a nation blessed above all others?2
You’ll know by what you feel, not by what you think.
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The third is for your body.
When you enter a room where you are the racial minority — what does your body do before your mind decides what to think?
I know what mine does. It explodes with data before I’ve formed a single conscious thought. Breathing changes. Posture adjusts. Something begins scanning, sorting, calculating social position before a word is exchanged.
The water fountain lessons running their program, decades after the fountains came down, hundreds of miles from the neighborhoods that installed them.
I’m ashamed to name this. But naming it is the point.
The formation that operates below consciousness gains its power from remaining unnamed. The moment you attend to what your body does — the moment you notice the scan, the sort, the tightening — you’ve opened a gap between the formation and yourself.
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When you encounter someone who has crossed a border — any border, literal or social — does your body contract or open? That’s the homo munitus diagnostic: whether the wall has formed you into a self that experiences otherness as threat.3 Wendy Brown argues that the proliferation of walls in an age of global capital reveals not sovereign strength but sovereign anxiety — the nation-state performing a power it no longer possesses, forming its citizens into walled selves in the process.
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When you meet someone without a degree, do you register it? Do you adjust — your vocabulary, your expectations, your estimate of their worth? That’s the meritocratic purity test operating below your conscious commitments.4 Case and Deaton found that the line dividing Americans who are thriving from Americans who are dying is not primarily race or region — it’s the bachelor’s degree. The credential has become a sorting mechanism as absolute in its way as the racial binary was in the Age of Control.
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When you suffer — when something goes wrong at work, when your body breaks down, when the world doesn’t deliver what you expected — do you bear it silently and count the bearing as proof of your worth?
That’s the endurance self.5
Hochschild named it in the bayou communities of southwest Louisiana — the deep story of people who have been standing in line patiently, playing by the rules, enduring without complaint, and watching others cut ahead. But its roots run deeper than Louisiana. It’s Christianized Stoicism: the ancient teaching that the sage masters suffering through self-sufficiency, baptized across centuries into a gospel where your worth comes from what you endure without complaint. I’ve traced this mutation across four essays — from the Stoic apatheia the early church tried to resignify, through Lipsius’s neo-Stoic revival that dressed self-mastery in Christian humility, through the Ramist-Federal convergence that transmitted it to the New World, to the theology I inherited from my father: bear the weight, don’t ask for help, and count the bearing as proof that you’re enough.6 Augustine diagnosed it as pride. Lipsius relabeled it as humble constancy. My family called it “Be the Gift.” The grammar hasn’t changed. The vocabulary has.
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And when your community gathers — in worship, in political assembly, in the spaces where belonging is performed — who is absent? Whose absence do you not notice?
That’s the deepest diagnostic of all.
Because the profane sacraments’ most successful formation is the formation that makes certain absences invisible. In Contrapunctus I, I described a vacuum — the absence of practices that could have inoculated the faith against dominative identity. That vacuum didn’t close. It went to work. Four centuries of profane sacraments later, the formation is so complete that its own evidence has become invisible. You don’t notice who isn’t in the room because the grammar has taught your eyes where not to look.7
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The formation that operates below consciousness gains its power from remaining unnamed. The moment you attend to what your body does — the moment you notice the scan, the sort, the tightening — you’ve opened a gap between the formation and yourself.
A small gap. But in that gap, you can choose. Not perfectly. Not permanently. But actually.
I’m not describing a completed transformation. I’m describing an ongoing conversion — the kind that never finishes, that has to be practiced again tomorrow, that looks less like a trophy and more like a workshop where the sawdust never settles.
Diagnosis isn’t destination.
Closing: The Outer Bracket Closes
But diagnosis matters. Because it reveals something the formation wants hidden: that it was made.
From the auction block to the water fountain to the redlined map to Heritage American — different signs, same formation. From Native dispossession to Chinese Exclusion to Japanese internment to “Build that wall” — different targets, same grammar.
None of this was natural. It was crafted — through specific decisions, specific policies, specific economic arrangements, specific profane sacraments designed to sort bodies and assign worth. People built these systems. Legislatures funded them. Churches blessed them. Neighbors enforced them.
None of this was natural. It was crafted — through specific decisions, specific policies, specific economic arrangements, specific profane sacraments designed to sort bodies and assign worth. People built these systems. Legislatures funded them. Churches blessed them. Neighbors enforced them.
And the circularity completes itself one more time: how you use a person tells you what kind of person they are, and the kind of person they are justifies your use of them. The grammar hasn’t changed. The instruments have.
Which means different practices can replace them. Not a program — I’m suspicious of programs, because programs are trophy cases waiting to happen. But practices. Real sacraments. The kind that form people for communion rather than domination, that write a different grammar into the body over time.
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I keep coming back to the Prayer Breakfast.
Three thousand five hundred Christians standing. A seventy-five-minute speech that violated everything the Sermon on the Mount teaches about power, humility, and the treatment of enemies.
And a room full of people formed — by four centuries of profane sacraments, by a faith that arrived without the practices, by a grammar that learned to whisper so effectively that most of its speakers don’t know they’re speaking it — formed to hear that speech as strength rather than sacrilege.
Peter Wehner, watching from outside, asked the question the room couldn’t ask itself: “What does it mean for the Church to be the conscience of the state?”8
I’ve spent this essay tracing the formation that made the standing ovation possible. But Wehner’s question presses further: Can a church formed by the same profane sacraments it should be diagnosing become that conscience?
Can the people who stood — and the people like me who are confident we would never have stood — find practices strong enough to interrupt the grammar we’ve inherited?
I don’t know. I want to offer a confident yes, but confident answers are the trophy case’s specialty. What I can say is that the question itself — can the church be the conscience of the state when it shares the state’s formation? — is the question the profane sacraments were designed to prevent. Asking it means the formation hasn’t finished its work. Not asking it means it has.
What would my body have done in that room? I want to say I would have stayed seated. I want to believe the theological formation would have held me in my chair.
But I’ve learned enough about formation — about my own formation — to know that confident immunity is the last room in the trophy case.
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The girl at the dance was free. She looked me in the eye without fear or deference. Just friendship. Just the ordinary miracle of one person seeing another without the walls intervening.
Salin was free. He looked at my practices without being fooled by my credentials. He asked the question the formation didn’t want asked — and he asked it with the precision of someone who had spent his career reading the profane sacraments that form neighborhoods, housing markets, and the people who live in them.
What the girl at the dance offered — what Salin offered — was not endurance but encounter. Not managing the distance but closing it. Not the trophy case but the workshop.
The profane sacraments were crafted. Different sacraments can be practiced in their place.
But that requires a church that knows what it has inherited — and is willing to begin the long work of unlearning it.
When the formation you’ve inherited is being blessed in the name of the God you serve — will you speak?
I’m still being converted. Maybe you are too.
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This concludes Essay 11, published as five contrapuncti. The next essay in Jazz, Shame, and Being With will return to the regular biweekly format.
All five contrapuncti:
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
Notes
The ordered/disordered peoplehood distinction draws on the Church of England House of Bishops Theology Committee report, which provides a framework for evaluating communal identity narratives. An ordered peoplehood story locates identity in covenantal relationship — mutual obligation, hospitality to the stranger, accountability before God. A disordered story locates identity in contrast — defining “us” primarily through exclusion of “them.”
John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630). The sermon’s actual content emphasizes mutual obligation and divine judgment: the city’s visibility means the world is watching to see whether the covenant holds, not that the city is chosen above all others. Ronald Reagan’s famous 1989 use of “shining city on a hill” performed the grammar-conversion: the warning became a boast, the covenant became a credential.
Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). Brown argues that the global proliferation of walls reveals not sovereign power but sovereign anxiety. The walls produce what Brown calls homo munitus, the walled self — a subject who experiences porousness as threat and enclosure as safety.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). Case and Deaton document an unprecedented mortality crisis among white Americans without bachelor’s degrees. The education divide now predicts health, income, marriage, social trust, and political alignment more powerfully than race, region, or religion.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016), especially chapters 9 and 15. Hochschild’s “deep story” is about waiting in line: you’ve been patient, you’ve played by the rules, you’ve endured without complaint, and now others are being ushered to the front.
The endurance self’s theological genealogy spans four essays in this series: Essay 7 (“The Gift of Pride”) traces Augustine’s diagnosis of Stoic self-sufficiency as incurvatus in se; Essay 9 (“Pharaoh in Greek Dress”) traces the early church’s attempt to resignify Stoic apatheia; Essay 10 (“The Perfect Storm”) traces Lipsius’s neo-Stoic revival and the Ramist-Federal convergence that transmitted it to the New World.
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), especially chapters 1–3. The “five displacements” traced in Contrapunctus I draw on Jennings’s account. The absent-bodies diagnostic extends his insight: the formation that makes certain people invisible is the profane sacraments’ most complete achievement.
Peter Wehner, “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue,” The Atlantic, February 6, 2026. Wehner’s concluding question — “What does it mean for the Church to be the conscience of the state?” — frames this essay’s opening and closing.