The Brooklyn Rail

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”— Søren Kierkegaard

“The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.”— Alexis de Tocqueville

“The conflict between art and politics … cannot and must not be solved.”— Hannah Arendt

As our internal conflicts are escalating at home, with the left and the right bending their own twigs on endless frictions, and pushing their ideologies as if to see how far they can go before the twig breaks and or bends and springs back, whipping their own faces, wars and violence continue to intensify abroad. While the US provides aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia, we also contribute unconditionally to Israel’s devastation of Gaza. This homemade political dysfunction creates greater volatility in our global role. As we’re currently experiencing a potentially divisive 2024 vote and the possible return of former US President Donald J. Trump, whose authoritarian ambition and disdain for traditional allies have given broader permission for other aspiring dictators to exploit in their autocratic rules—Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Bashar al-Assad, Viktor Orbán, and Kim Jong-Un, among others—the fragility of our world is more perilous than ever.

All these concerns may seem remote from the city of Venice—long called La Serenissima—but they are right at the core of the 60th Venice Biennale, which I recently visited. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, with the theme Foreigners Everywhere, the Biennale’s current spectacle aims to explore issues of polarity that lie in between the intimacy and tenderness of community, love and sex, and the violence of colonial histories, migration, homophobia, racism, and war. Among the 331 participant artists and collectives, who present works in a wide range of mediums, many are tied to their identities as refugees or displaced persons, or as queer, indigenous, self-taught, or outsider artists. It seemed to me that about half of the artists presented works that evoke direct translations of their intended messages, and hence lack pictorial subtleties. The other half explore their material mediations with sensual depth and poetry. The same can be said of the collateral projects, as well as the countless exhibits curated in different locations around the city. Taken as a whole, this large panoply of works reminds us once again that having a free mind means turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical comforts, and spoon-fed ideologies or social engineering; that we must find ways to stay true to the issues of our vulnerability, our sense of mystery, and the perplexities of reality, for they are our best chances of remaining fully human. In the same way that the city of Venice itself excels in the contrast between the bright extravagance displayed by the exterior white stones of its magnificent buildings and the dark enigma of their interiors, so it’s the water below the surface that brings art and commerce between them, as do the colors from the sky above.

Being in Venice also focused for me some thoughts about what is happening back home. As we all have noticed in recent months, Trump’s rallies, unlike the ones in the past, which were improvisational and even at times volatile, are now more organized and synergistic. They also now include religious rituals, as they often end with evangelical altar calls. How can we forget that on June 1, 2020, amid the George Floyd protests in Washington, DC, as law enforcement officers used tear gas to clear peaceful protestors from Lafayette Square so Trump and his staff could walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church—who could forget that Trump stood in front of the church and held up a Bible and as he posed for a photo op? Now Trump has gone a step further and has aggressively mobilized his faith-based campaign tactics to harness White evangelical voters. And Trump being Trump, he is also now selling “God Bless the USA” Bibles for $59.99 each. Although such immoderate antics might seem to undermine religion’s role in government, it nonetheless is good to remember that genuine religious belief serves a public good, and that a free government could not be maintained in the absence of religion. For democracy to survive, it needs a moral underpinning, which is most often provided by religion, which provides checks and balances for human character in the spiritual realm of both secular and political life. This is especially important in light of the advancement of science and technology during the last decades, along with the way social media fronts have been rapidly advancing. These changes have created a real challenge to the balance between freely practiced religion and political freedom. The emergence of religious fundamentalism’s claims about a number of critical issues, such as job losses, loneliness, and general anxieties amplified by a growing sense of purposelessness, has fueled a revival of the old Protestant Fundamentalists’ sometimes hypocritical strictures against all sorts of non-conforming behavior. (One thinks here of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter).

It’s true that as democracy democratizes itself so it can become ever more democratic, the danger of it falling into the pit of constant doubt and suspicion of authority remains present. In other words, without moral authority the party of liberty would be undermined and degraded. On one hand, democracy tends to succumb to an excessive appetite for materialism, which can allow strong leaders to exploit those they consider as weak and hence manipulable. On the other hand, those who cannot overcome their ongoing conditions of doubt, suspicion, and anxiety will likely subscribe to any form of dogma that offers to set their minds at ease. America, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, is a democratic nation that can thrive on this experimentation only when there exists a productive and healthy relationship between the party of liberty and the party of religion. Whenever the lack of balance between the two is too disproportionate, any form of religious fundamentalism will claim to represent the moral high ground. The application of a strict literal interpretation to scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies, along with us-against-them psychology, can be used to appeal to a concept of “purity” as the justification to advocate racism, sexism, hate-mongering, and xenophobia, and to deny a number of science-based realities such as climate change, or denounce liberal issues such as birth control and gay marriage. It’s equally true that since the end of the Cold War more Americans are associating themselves with the Republican party, which means that some Republican politicians are well-positioned to weaponize religion for their own gain. Here we should be reminded that while liberal democracy gives us greater liberty than ever before, and while the process of secularization provides us great comfort through the advancements of science and technology, democracy by itself cannot fill the void that was once occupied by religion. It’s our moral duty to fight for the balance between liberty and religion, and to remind ourselves that although we are not born cultural, we become cultural.

In solidarity with love, courage, and cosmic optimism to us all,

Phong H. Bui

P.S. This issue is dedicated to the remarkable lives and works of Patti Astor (1950–2024), Dinh Q. Lê (1968–2024), and Faith Ringgold (1930–2024). For Astor, her contribution to the artistic bohemia of the East Village in the 1970s and 1980s, from underground films, art scene to early hip hop was of significant to the downtown experimental culture; Le, whose invention of photo-weaving technique that how past history, pop culture, and media can be explored with personal memory was as inventive to photography as what he had nurtured the art community in Ho Chi Minh City; For Ringgold, it would be impossible to separate the radical and large vision of her vast artistic production, including painting, mixed media sculpture, performance from the essential intersectional activism. All of us at the Rail would like to send our deep condolences to their immediate families, friends and admirers in the US and across our world.