But Arnade’s Dignity does something neither of the other books do: it features the role of faith, the Christian faith, within the cultures of his subjects. Faith, of course, is not incidental to the story of Donald Trump; even today, a year after he has left office, the ex-President would be nowhere without his loyal evangelical following.
What many still do not fully understand is how so many passionate evangelicals gave their hearts and souls to a man with his past, a man who today wanders Lear-like through life, speaking of nothing but what others call “the big lie.” It seems Arnade may have been interested in the same target, an investigation into what makes the subjects he decided to quiz, most of them “down and out” but ardent followers of a billionaire who knows nothing about the blues.
If that was his original goal, he soon enough wandered from his mission when he discovered that his subjects, quite clearly, didn’t want or need to go there. Their stories don’t really have time or patience for politics. They are too often working hard at just staying alive.
What I found most fascinating and blessed in Chris Arnade’s Dignity is the up-close attention he pays to faith in the lives of his subjects, not as an attribute of Trump’s cultic following but for purposes of describing the vital and even redemptive role the Christian faith plays in the lives of people from whom it is easy to look away—sex workers, drug addicts, petty criminals, people literally and figuratively “on the street.” Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America locates its central characters among those who sit in “the back row.” “Front row/ back row” is pervasive throughout. He’s describing a kind of church—front row folks, as you can imagine, are those who’ve been handed the keys to the kingdom, who know the rules, whose lives have been greatly improved by education. I am in the front row.
Arnade, like Vance, ambles along closer to personal memoir than does Osnos. He confesses himself to be the child of cradle Catholics who did not take their faith with particular seriousness. Whatever faith he had as a child fell away in college, he says, a victim of what he calls “science,” as if the two were opposites.
It’s difficult to find similar studies that analyze the effects of the Christian faith in people’s lives, but Arnade casts no doubt: he didn’t look for it, but what he discovered in all those interviews is how important the Christian faith is to the dignity we all deeply need and search for. One place he finds it is in church. The “back row” includes those who barely make it into church at all, men and women who do not play starring rules in our lives or anyone else’s— except perhaps in the headline-grabbing crimes they commit. They try—and most often fail—to get clean. They turn tricks. They wear black fishnet and ply themselves on street corners. The imbibe drugs, have for years, and occasionally turn to sales if they need cash.
If your seat is in the front row, you’ve got to turn all the way around and look away from what’s happening up front to realize that folks are even back there. But what he comes to learn is that the Christian faith sustains them. The church, their faith in God and the risen Christ, is a significant source of their dignity. It’s all there: The tragedy of the streets means few can delude themselves into thinking they have life under control. You cannot ignore death there. You cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is moral. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that “we don’t and never will have this under control.” It is far easier to see religion not just as useful but as true.
Dignity is not about Donald Trump, although the pathways it creates into our times inevitably lead us into the neighborhood of the ex-President’s following. Dignity is all about its title, how some of us, even the ones in the back row, seek to find it by way of the Christian faith.
“We need everyone—those in the back row, those in the front row—to listen to one another,” Arnade says, “and try to understand one another and understand what they value and try to be less judgmental.”
Chris Arnade is trying to understand where people who seemingly have very little, find their dignity. The unavoidable question I had when following the seamy lives Arnade explores is, “Is my religious sensibility big enough, wide enough, to admit even Arnade’s people, to love men and women who so easily make themselves unlovable?”
I was raised on the Beatitudes. I cut my teeth on the tale of the Good Samaritan. I wrote a book about grace. The most radical direction Arnade shows us is old-line biblical truth: “to love God above all and my neighbor as myself. On these two commandments…” well, you know.
Dignity isn’t primarily about our church, our congregation, our confession, or our immediate faith family. And yet it is. It’s about me, and maybe you too, about how I judge others, or condemn them, about who I consider to be children of God and who I may consider to be beyond the pale. And who the Creator of Heaven and Earth may not.
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This review appeared originally in the March 2022 issue of Pro Rege.
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