Renewing the Covenant

Good news, fellow Americans: It’s civil war time!

The violence, praise the Lord, unfurls exclusively on the silver screen, where the tortured protagonists of Alex Garland’s new blockbuster—unimprovably named Civil War—watch America being torn apart in a hail of bullets.

Who’s doing the shooting? Not who you’d expect. Wary of losing at least half of the audience if the film’s politics too neatly mirror our own, Garland gives us the Western Forces, an improbable confederacy of California and Texas. Sweetgreen salads and salsa, Teslas and pick-up trucks, Gavin Newsom and Ted Cruz. The point, the movie insists with every plosive line, isn’t who is doing the fighting; it’s that it could happen here.

The ideological agnosticism is the film’s greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness. If you are able to suspend disbelief for 109 minutes and imagine a world in which journalists working for mainstream publications are still intellectually discerning, emotionally stable, and morally upright, you’ll be treated to a series of tableaus featuring our great republic in various stages of disunion and decomposition. Such scenes are a pleasure, I suppose, for some, particularly those who spend their days clutching their armrests as MSNBC croaks on and on about the dawn of American fascism. But look closely, and Civil War’s absurd politics and meandering plot deliver a larger, more luminous, and wildly hopeful point: Civil war is already upon us, just not in the way Garland and his talented cast would have us believe.

On screen, the movie ends (spoiler alert) with the assassination of the tyrannical president, who bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain real estate mogul with a penchant for fast food and loose lips. In real life, the conflict we’re seeing is much subtler and more meaningful. To understand it, we need to go back to basics, to the very essence of our great and godly nation.

What, pray tell, is America about? Civil wars are fought when two sides offer radically different answers to this question.

The language of the Bible, as so often happens, offers us a surprising but terrific clue. In Hebrew, the United States of America is called Artzot HaBrit, or the States of the Covenant. It’s a stark and necessary reminder that our union isn’t merely a marriage of political convenience. It’s not another iteration of the Enlightenment’s favorite idea, the social contract, in which a host of particles, stripped of roots and loyalties, band together and sacrifice their prerogatives in the state of nature to guarantee their mutual safety and well-being. A covenant is a very different and more consequential arrangement. Just ask Abraham.

Our great forefather was a perfectly ordinary man. The Torah tells us that Noah, on the other hand, was a singularly righteous man, which is why he was chosen to build the ark and preserve all life on earth. Moses was the Prince of Egypt. But Abe? Just a regular man from Ur of the Chaldees trying to get by, when the Almighty shows up and starts making demands.

God selects Abraham not because of who he is, but because of who he is capable of becoming. A covenant, as Rabbi Ari Lamm wisely observes, is the opposite of a contract. A contract stipulates every imaginable condition and covers every loophole because it has no theory of change; it wants to guarantee a very specific outcome. The shipment is delivered; the house is sold. A covenant, on the other hand, is all about change—you enter into it in order to grow and become the best version of yourself. It’s a big and joyous leap of faith. Abraham is tapped by the Lord; he is sent to a strange land, receives commandments, and is tested. At the end of it all, he emerges as the moral giant God had always known he could be.

Following in his footsteps, his descendants, the Jews, sought to remain true to the covenant. They quickly realized that the strange, terrifying, and marvelous thing about covenants is that they must be renewed. No renewal looks the same. Each comes with its own set of hurdles and opportunities. Each demands that we, like faithful Abe, ask ourselves what it is that we believe and what it is that God is calling us to do.

Which brings us back to America.

As the Hebrew name for America beautifully suggests, we are a covenantal nation. A shining city on a hill (John Winthrop got that right), we fought a war in 1775 and cast off tyranny’s yoke so that freedom might ring throughout the land. We renewed the covenant in 1861, when we took up arms against those who argued that freedom for some requires shackles for others. We did it again a century later, when the Civil Rights Movement sought to make us adhere to the principles upon which this great nation was founded. Look at the dates. These renewals of the covenant occur every one hundred years or so. We are heading toward another.

What would covenantal renewal look like in the twenty-first century? In a real sense, it will mean a civil war of sorts. Not, God forbid, one involving the bloody chaos Garland depicts so vividly on-screen. But it will be one involving a contest between two very different visions of America.

On one side are those who believe in covenantal America. Following in Abraham’s footsteps, they—we—believe in rising to the occasion. Just as our ancient patriarch dared to haggle with God himself in an effort to spare the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah, we see a decadent culture that has grown idolatrous, and we seek to cure it not with the rage of destruction but with a love that seeks renewal. We are builders—of families, of churches and synagogues, of new institutions and new communities dedicated to old, noble, and lasting ideals. We’re not nostalgic. We understand that the America we’re called to renew will not look like the one that came before. Covenants aren’t for sentimentalists. Every renewal strikes out on a new path. Yet the values that inspire them are eternal.

The folks on the other side take a different approach. They block bridges and occupy public spaces while chanting “Death to America,” or they boast about using American power as an instrument to serve the interests of other nations, because, according to them, America is a grimy, hopeless place, a supersized hippodrome in which classes, races, and sects must stab at each other until only one remains standing and wins the power and the glory. As pagans so often do, they delight in feeding believers to the lions.

Abraham was no stranger to such foes; nor was Abraham Lincoln. Both understood the power of walking with God. “I now leave,” the sixteenth president said as he bid farewell to Springfield in 1861, “not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.”

Honest Abe wasn’t just grandstanding. He understood the power of covenants. They are great engines, tremendous sources of renewable spiritual and political energy. If you believe that you have a responsibility to uphold worthy traditions and preserve what is good and just in our national inheritance, you can meet every challenge. If, on the other hand, you are animated by a sense of entitlement and resentment or you welcome wrath unchecked by law or love or loyalty, then you are just a burning match in search of something to burn to a crisp.

That contrast—the ambition to renew versus anger that destroys—defines our civil war. Unlike Hollywood’s flashy fantasy, it is not being fought by mirthless men in fatigues or steely fighter jets but by forces much mightier—ideas. One side makes a coherent case, rooted in truth, in Scripture, in centuries of American history, in observable biological reality, in essential human psychology. The other, like Abraham’s godless adversaries, bows to flimsy idols, feeds its lust for domination, and believes that everything is permitted. For short and terrible periods of time an abandonment of reason can feel thrilling: Men can become women! Social justice means looting the Prada store! Let’s throw soup at a work of art to show our love for Mother Earth! But the orgiastic energy, like all death-bound forces, loses steam quickly, producing nothing but broken cities and broken hearts.

It’s terrifying to watch the madness of our present moment unfurl, just as it was terrifying to watch Civil War’s depiction of shelled-out cars strewn across a deserted I-95. But we must not lose heart. While covenant renewals are often rocky, they’re never ultimately grim for those who keep the faith. Those who reject the godly calling will perish—just ask the Jebusites, the Hittites, and the other muscular pagan nations who shuffled off this mortal coil. And as they have in every turn, those true to the covenant will find new ways to carry on their mission. Let’s find our inner Abrahams, and, like him, say Hinnenu—here we are, full of faith and ready for the challenge of remaking America again and again and again. It’s hard to imagine a war more worth fighting. 

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine and the cohost of its popular podcast, Unorthodox. 

Image by William Pei Yuan, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.