Everlasting mythologies: Anglo-Saxon identity

The following is a revised version of an essay originally published in January 2022.

Many years ago, late into Barack Obama’s presidential administration, maybe in 2015 or even early 2016, I had a long messaging conversation with an acquaintance about some of the right-wing movements and talking points that had become prevalent over the previous few years, specifically the fear-mongering over “they’re going to take our guns.” “They” being liberal people or, more specifically, Democrats. Guns being in America of course not just a tool or even a weapon but an enormous and lethal flashpoint of a longstanding culture war.

Why, I asked this acquaintance, did people keep believing and investing emotion in “They’re going to take our guns” when for the previous eight years it simply . . . hadn’t happened? How did people keep believing in this fear month after month, year after year?

In response, this acquaintance gave me the first good explanation I’d yet had about echo chambers and the dissolution of our information ecosystems—long predating the rise of social media, which further weaponized forces already in motion.

Over Facebook messages, she gave me a long, detailed history of her own upbringing in Rapture-oriented Baptist culture. In her childhood, she told me, no matter how many years went by, the Rapture was always just around the corner, God always just about to bathe the world in blood and flame, and spirit the righteous to heaven.

The key, she said, was that the adults in her world managed to keep the fear of impending doom fresh and alive, month after month, year after year, down to her entire school sobbing in terror one morning when they’d been told the Rapture was coming shortly after noon that day.

“During the formative years of many conservatives’ lives,” she wrote me, “this was the experience.” A constant drumbeat of being told that the end of days was just around the corner, and a nonstop fear of the future.

Whatever people were told was going to happen, she said, was always in the future, and the future was always to be feared.

It was one of the best and earliest explanations I’d read—aside from Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, as I wrote about a while back—that showed how deeply identity is involved in choices and decisions that from an outsider’s perspective make no sense.

Ever since then, I have intentionally looked for works and projects that either explain or engage with identity. Real identity, the way that our perception of ourselves, and of others in relation to ourselves, dictates how we’ll vote or even what we’ll believe.

It’s why this anthropology article about the blow to identity when steel mills in America’s midwest closed down being just as important as the blow to income sticks in my mind, as does this personal essay about growing up in a Christian homeschooling evangelical world that trained children to be warriors in American culture battles—and to win those battles in legislatures and courtrooms. It’s why this essay from Aeon about echo chambers and epistemic bubbles has ended up being the one I recommend to people more than almost any other.

I can’t think of many more entrenched identities in America and several other countries (I’m looking at you, Russia) than whiteness. Religion, wealth-based hierarchical structures, patriarchy, anti-Semitism, and human supremacy over the rest nature are the only identities I can think of that have deeper roots.

Kelly Brown Douglas’s 2015 book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God tries to get to the source of this identity and its staying power. Referring frequently to her own identity as a Black woman and mother, and position as an Episcopal priest, Douglas begins her book looking for the roots of “stand your ground” laws, which in many U.S. states allow someone to shoot another if they feel threatened; the book centers around the case of Trayvon Martin, a teenager in Florida who was killed while walking home by a man who used the “stand your ground” defense.

She pins those “stand your ground” laws to ideas of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, and traces them not back to 1776 or even 1619, but much further, back to the first century CE and the writings of Tacitus, a Roman general who wrote A Treatise on the Situation, Manners and Inhabitants of Germany, commonly known as Germania:

“In 98 CE Tacitus published Germania, which has been called ‘one of the most dangerous books ever written.’ Perhaps it is. The danger is not so much in what Tacitus said, but in how his words have been construed. In the brief space of thirty pages, he offered an ethnological perspective that would have tragic consequences for centuries to come. This perspective played a significant role in the Nazis’ monstrous program for ‘racial purity.’ It is the racial specter behind the stand-your-ground culture that robbed Trayvon of his life.

“In Germania Tacitus provides a meticulous portrait, based on others’ writings and observations, of the Germanic tribes who fended off Rome’s first-century empire-building agenda. . . . Perhaps what is most significant, at least in garnering the attention of political architects for centuries to come, is that Tacitus portrayed these ancient Germans as possessing a peculiar respect for individual rights and an almost ‘instinctive love for freedom.’ . . . According to many later interpreters, Tacitus was describing the perfect form of government.”

Douglas’s arguments track through the conflation of idealized Anglo-Saxon society with Christianity in England, and how early English immigrants brought that attitude to North America intact because they thought that even the reformed English church wasn’t Anglo-Saxon enough:

“The English considered themselves the descendants of the Germanic tribes identified by Tacitus. They believed that these tribes were their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. . . . Notwithstanding the fact that some of Tacitus’s ancient tribes were probably of Norse heritage, these reformers generally agreed that corruptions entered into English church and society with the Norman conquest in 1066. Popular belief held that the Normans adulterated the very English laws and institutions that served to protect individual liberties. . . .

“The Pilgrims and Puritans fled from the Church of England to build a religious institution more befitting Anglo-Saxon virtue and freedom. They considered themselves the Anglo-Saxon remnant that was continuing a divine mission. They traced this mission beyond the woods of Germany to the Bible. Thus, they saw themselves ‘as the Israelites in God’s master plan.’”

This faith, Douglas reiterates later in the book, is crucial to understanding the lasting power of American exceptionalism:

“Not only did the early American Anglo-Saxons believe their mission to be one of erecting God’s ‘city on a hill’ but they also came to believe that they essentially had divinity running through their veins. The Protestant evangelicals in particular believed themselves to be as close a human manifestation of God on earth as one can get. In general, however, the religious legitimation of America’s exceptionalist narrative suggests that to be against Anglo-Saxon America is to be against God.”

The crux of Douglas’s arguments lie in the development of whiteness as treasured property—property created through the myth of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism (which she calls the “wizard behind the curtain of white supremacy”), mixed with belief in preordained Christian dominionism:

“Whiteness in this respect is not simply cherished property, but it is also sacred property. . . . Within the religious narrative of America’s exceptionalism, anything that cannot pass the test of whiteness cannot get to God.”

I’ve thought a lot about humans as property—women most universally, and slavery worldwide, reaching back thousands of years and continuing through the present day; the philosopher Aristotle described an enslaved person as a property with a soul back in the 4th century BCE—but until I read Stand Your Ground (and later, thanks to a recommendation by Sherri Spelic, Cheryl Harris’s 1993 paper “Whiteness as Property”), I hadn’t thought much about how the creation of a class of people as property to be treasured and protected easily turns everyone else into something to be controlled, something—not someone—that becomes a threat when it invades the space or entitlements of the treasured, protected class.

A key component of property rights, Douglas reminds us, is the right to exclude, which “ultimately ushers in the stand-your-ground culture.”

“This right to exclude inexorably gives way to other fundamental rights—the right to claim land and the right to stake out space. These rights, Harris [Cheryl Harris, in “Whiteness as Property”] points out, were actually ‘ratified’ at America’s beginnings with ‘the conquest, removal, and extermination of Native American life and culture.’ From then on, she says, ‘Possession and occupation of land was validated and therefore privileged’ as a white property right. . . . These rights of exclusion, land, and space are the defining characteristics of whiteness as treasured property.”

Stand Your Ground lacks direct reference to the Doctrine of Discovery, the 15th-century papal decree that, as I’ve written about several times before, forms the continuing legal basis for much of America’s outright theft of land from Native American nations. I wish Douglas would have examined the intersection of the Doctrine with mythological Anglo-Saxon supremacy because they became deeply intertwined, but in general her points still hold.

According to Douglas, it’s in the ancient idea of the Anglo-Saxons as some sort of mythically perfect society and people that we find the roots of much of America’s founding ideals—the ideals of freedom and individual liberty specifically—mixed wholesale with the belief that specific white Northern Europeans were the only people who could understand and embody those ideals. Eastern and Southern Europeans, as well as Irish, Scottish, and Swedish people, initially weren’t included—in a 1751 essay, Benjamin Franklin also threw out the French and most non-Saxon Germans as not white enough.

Even before America’s founding, the country inherited the unalloyed belief of culture as synonymous with bloodline, and therefore race:

“Building on Tacitus’s admiration for the way these Germanic tribes ruled their communities, the myth stressed the unique superiority of Anglo-Saxon religious and political institutions. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, the myth shifted its focus to Anglo-Saxon blood. In doing so, it seized upon Tacitus’s characterization of the ancient Germans as ‘free from taint,’ and suggested that the superiority of their institutions was a result of their blood.”

America’s original sin, Douglas articulates, lies in the belief that white Americans are both the genetic and spiritual descendants of Anglo-Saxons; Anglo-Saxons in the white imagination represent not just the purest form of humanity, but the purest form of society.

The conflation of skin color with race and therefore culture was fully integrated into the dominant American psyche by the 1920s, by which time Franklin’s objectionable French, German, and Swedish people, as well as Eastern and Southern Europeans, previously excluded, were considered white. The project of whiteness, wrote Douglas, by that time overlapped almost completely with the project of Manifest Destiny.

It’s here where a foray into the Doctrine of Discovery would have been most helpful, because the book dives into a core tension of privatization versus the commons (without naming it as such), which is the question of who has a right to land and, therefore, to life. Douglas quotes an 1846 speech by Senator Thomas Hart Benton in which he makes the case that the “white race” is the only one that has obeyed the “divine command” to “subdue and replenish the earth.” All other peoples, he claimed, were subsumed before this civilizing project:

“Benton’s remarks make clear the other defining feature of Manifest Destiny. It was not just about land and race. It was also about life. . . . Those who had the right to land were also those who had a right to live. Manifest Destiny was about more than who was destined to occupy a certain land, it was also about who was destined to live. If the manifest vision was the expansion of Anglo-Saxonism from east to west, then those who did not capitulate to Anglo-Saxon ways were destined to become extinct. Benton was clear: it was whites who had the right to land and life; others were eligible for extinction.”

Protecting the treasured property of whiteness, in other words, is an overwhelming and centuries-long iteration of a war on life itself, and on the right to live.

Given this historical context, one of America’s recent manufactured culture wars—over the nonexistent teaching of critical race theory in K-12 public schools—makes a little more sense. As haphazard and frankly weird as that particular contrived moral panic is, in the realm of identity, the “threat” that’s being responded to is perceived as real, as is the threat inherent in the dismantling of a powerful creation myth underlying that identity.

Not just the myth of American exceptionalism, but the older myth, that England and then white America were inheritors of a somehow pure and noble people, strong and intelligent and just (they were also red-haired, according to Tacitus). That somewhere way back two thousand years ago existed a perfect culture of perfect people who knew their position and their purpose and ran their societies along the purest of principles along with the purest of blood, and if we could just find our way back to it everything would be all right.

This hankering for a previous idealized society can be seen in critiques of social justice movements as well as of critical race theory, critiques that seem to rest on the notion that studying the bases of America’s laws, politics, and culture through an understanding of whiteness’s influence—as well as the influences of gender, culture, and wealth—is somehow anti-Enlightenment and anti-intellectual—in a sense, anti-Anglo-Saxon.

Which is in itself odd: trying to erase knowledge of real events in favor of a blander narrative for the sake of cohesion is an anti-Enlightenment endeavor. If someone can’t quote Thomas Jefferson’s high ideals about democracy and freedom without feeling that they have to bury his active efforts to trick Indigenous people out of land, and his position as a slaveowner, then that person is not doing a very good job of crafting a society based on any kind of shared reality.

The American settler story, to give another example of a history many people find threatening to crack open, is often framed as one of intrepid yeomen farmers-to-be making the hopeful but uncertain journey to an unknown land to prove their worth in building an independent and productive life, providing the basis for society based on democratic principles and without a monarch.

What’s left out almost completely is the reality of many of those lives: if those settlers weren’t rapacious land speculators with a bit (or a lot) of cash backing back home, most were landless due to centuries of feudalism, many escaping serfdom or barely out of it, many refugees from famine or evictions from land, unable to sustain their families from the commons due to enclosure and privatization of activities like hunting and fishing.

They were also at the mercy of nobles, landlords, and rulers with a seemingly endless appetite for war. So. Much. War. As much as I love Montana, and I love it down to my smallest bones, I’d probably leave too, given the chance, if all I or my ancestors or my children had known or would ever know were the kinds of war-packed centuries that Europe saw in the 1400-1600s and beyond.

History isn’t some smooth narrative of simple stories that can only ever make a nation or a people proud. It lurches around the needs and ambitions of people who did not agree on much of anything, not who should be king or whom land belonged to or who had a right to the basic necessities of life nor what form of religion to follow. The war in Europe between Catholics and Protestants that started in 1619 lasted thirty years and resulted in an estimated eight million dead, from famine and disease as well as battle. England’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 came after those in power imposed a poll tax and legally prohibited higher wages even though labor was in high demand after massive population loss due to the plague. It ended only after the East Anglian rebels were crushed and King Richard agreed to the peasants’ demands, a promise he then reneged on, perpetuating more centuries of inequality, injustice, and subsequent revolt.

People don’t fight racism and misogyny and wealth inequality and crushing hierarchies—much less the narratives that underlie them—because they have a sense of shared reality with the people perpetuating and profiting from those systems. They fight them because the reality in front of them is destructive, deeply unjust, and makes no rational sense.

The Anglo-Saxon myth holds just as much sway over American identity—even if it’s less understood or known—as the idealized (and very pale-skinned) nuclear family life of the 1950s does. There is very little daylight between the mythologies born out of Tacitus’s Germania and modern white nationalist calls for pride in culture and people—what culture and people is never specified, only that it be pale-skinned and preferably Christian.

Truly facing this history and its consequences could not only slow the devastation wrought by centuries of injustices, it could even have unforeseen beneficial outcomes, like seeing if the Anglo-Saxons that Tacitus wrote about so enthusiastically might have healthier societal models to emulate.

The Anglo-Saxon peoples evidently had no hankering for gold or silver, for example: “The possession of them is not coveted by these people as it is by us.” Their sacred places were “woods and groves” rather than temples, and many, such as the Varini, Avions, and Angli, worshiped the goddess Hertha, or “Mother Earth.” They also valued the counsel of women, assuming “somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and therefore neither despise their counsels, nor disregard their responses.”

And undercutting his own claim of a people whose bloodlines were “free of taint,” Tacitus described the lives of peoples, countries, and clans like the Gauls, Langobardia, Hermunduri, Narisci, and Varini—I counted 35 before losing track—and their wide differences in law, worship, dress, governance, battle, and hairstyles. In other words, Germany as he depicted it nearly 2,000 years ago was a mixed and multicultural land whose inter-people relations we know little about.

We could, if we wanted, aim for some of those other ideals and skip the idolization of blue eyes and “russet” hair along with Tacitus’s later delight at sixty thousand Germans dying in battle without help of the Romans on either side but “as it were for our pleasure and entertainment.”

Truly a stand-up guy, Tacitus.

Returning to Trayvon Martin and too many others who could only be victims of stand-your-ground thinking and never the beneficiaries of it, Douglas writes that:

“The Anglo-Saxon myth, which emerged from Tacitus’s Germania, has shaped and continues to shape America’s sense of self. This myth is the unspoken, but pervasive, narrative that determines who is and who is not entitled to the rights of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ . . .

“The deaths of these young black people are about more than a Stand Your Ground law. They are about a culture that is bound and determined to protect the Anglo-Saxon ‘white country’ that both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin imagined and worked to build.”

As my acquaintance taught me some years ago about Rapture culture, adherence to identity has tremendous power. And threats to identity are painful, so much so that many will engage in violence before questioning their adherence to a particular identity, much less before walking away from it. But until our societies learn to face some of our more destructive identities, and our beliefs about them, they will continue to harm vast numbers of people as well as our communities and the commons, the generous gifts of this planet, that we all depend on for survival.

Douglas’s hard work unpacking the myths of Anglo-Saxon society and Tacitus’s admiration of it and its peoples gives us the knowledge to know what we’re facing—and to give the Anglo-Saxons a rightful place in history without insisting that the world they created for themselves is one we need to carbon copy for the present day. Like all other peoples, the Anglo-Saxons lived, they loved, they quarrelled, they cultivated, they died, and they changed.

As we all must, hopefully for the better.

On the Commons has no paywall. To support this work digging for the entangled roots of injustice, inequality, and environmental degradation, please consider a paid subscription.