Floyd Summer and the Deformation of Guilt

A guest post by Brandon Van Dyck

Brandon Van Dyck directs the Beyond the Impasse project at Princeton University's Aquinas Institute. He can be reached by email at bvandyck@princetoncatholic.org.

The fifth anniversary of Floyd Summer recently passed with little notice. Anyone who was a teenager or adult at the time recalls the massive street protests that erupted in American cities after the infamous cellphone video went viral. Many observers marveled that the protests spread so quickly to dozens of other countries. But few paid attention to an important, if obvious, fact: in the vast majority of the world’s cities and towns, people did not take to the streets in May and June of 2020. The Floyd movement may have been international, but it was not global or universal. A closer look at where the action occurred, and where it didn’t, tells us something important about the Floyd phenomenon and ourselves.

The facts

If we define “large protests” as protests with over 100 participants, in the weeks after Floyd’s death there were roughly 1,200 large protests in the US and over 350 in the rest of the world. In total, more than 98 percent of the Floyd protests occurred in the Eurosphere—that is, in Europe or in white-majority countries outside Europe (e.g., the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). That alone is worth highlighting.

But the protests were not equally distributed across the Eurosphere, which consists of three broad cultural zones defined by language sub-family and religious heritage: (1) the Germanic Protestant zone, encompassing Northwestern Europe, the British Isles, North America, Australia, and New Zealand; (2) the Latin Catholic zone, comprising France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal; and (3) Central and Eastern Europe. These categories are of course imperfect. The “Germanic Protestant” zone includes two small Catholic-majority countries (Ireland and Belgium) and a few other countries with large Catholic (e.g., Germany, the Netherlands, Canada) or Romance-language-speaking (e.g., Belgium, Canada) minorities. Central and Eastern Europe are primarily Slavic and Orthodox Christian but include Catholic Poland, Czechia, and Croatia and various non-Slavic countries such as Romania, Hungary, and the Baltic states.

Still, the distinction is useful because the Floyd protests were not just a phenomenon of the Eurosphere; they were overwhelmingly a Germanic Protestant phenomenon. Only in one country outside the Germanic Protestant zone, Italy, did more than ten large protests occur. If we measure protest strength in per capita terms, the top twelve countries (excluding nations with under 2 million inhabitants) were in the Germanic Protestant zone: the US (3.53 large protests per million inhabitants), followed by the Netherlands (1.70), the UK (1.44), Canada (1.36), Ireland (1.20), New Zealand (1.18), Belgium (0.87), Australia (0.74), Denmark (0.69), Germany (0.59), Switzerland (0.58), and Norway (0.56). Italy (0.40) narrowly edged out Sweden (0.39) for the thirteenth spot.

The pattern holds subnationally, too. Of the ten large protests in Belgium, nine took place in Dutch-speaking Flanders, while only one occurred in French-speaking Wallonia, home to forty percent of the population. In Canada, there were fewer large protests per capita in Quebec (1.05) than in the English-speaking provinces (1.45). The trend is unmistakable.

Outside the Germanic Protestant zone, protest strength was next highest, albeit much lower, in Latin Catholic Europe, where scores ranged from 0.40 (Italy) to 0.09 (France). After that came Central and Eastern Europe, where scores were much lower still, ranging from 0.25 (Croatia) to zero in roughly half of the region’s countries (Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, and several others).

Outside the Eurosphere, the numbers dwindle to the point of insignificance. The populous, advanced democracies of East Asia saw just a smattering of large protests, with scores ranging from 0.05 (Japan) to 0.02 (South Korea). Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia saw even fewer: a small fraction of the countries in these regions scored between 0.03 and 0.01, while the vast majority scored zero. Outside of Israel (0.34), there was only one large protest in the entire Middle East/North Africa region, in Tunis. Not a single large protest took place in China, India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh.

In sum, viewed in low resolution, the Floyd protests were a phenomenon of the Eurosphere. Viewed in higher resolution, they were an overwhelmingly Germanic Protestant phenomenon in which Latin Catholic Europe played a very secondary role, Central and Eastern Europe played a smaller role still, and the rest of the world played virtually no role.

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The Floyd protests were a phenomenon of the Eurosphere. In higher resolution, they were an overwhelmingly Germanic Protestant phenomenon.

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These facts elude any sort of economic, political, or geopolitical explanation. The absence of protest in China, Russia, and the Middle East may be unsurprising, but Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are rich democracies and critical geopolitical allies of the US. Latin America is democratic, highly urbanized, and solidly middle-income, with strong linkages to the US. India is a vibrant democracy with a large English-speaking elite and friendly relations with the US. In a different vein, sub-Saharan Africa, especially West Africa, has ancestral and historical ties to the putative victims of anti-black racism on whom the Floyd protests centered.

The specifically Germanic Protestant character of the protests also eludes such explanations. The entire Eurosphere is educated and urban. All three of its regions score comfortably above the global average in wealth and democratic strength, and their differences along these dimensions do not remotely suffice to explain the overwhelming concentration of protest activity in the Germanic Protestant zone.

In order to explain the geography of Floyd Summer, one must take culture, and therefore religion, seriously.

The role of guilt culture

As Eric Kaufmann has shown, the advanced West has, since the 1960s, increasingly come to see itself as guilty of racial oppression—and thus as morally obligated to elevate and emancipate the victims of this oppression. The worldview has national variants that reflect the histories and speak through the taboos of each country. The German people are still processing guilt over the Holocaust and have long prohibited Holocaust denial. America is haunted by historical white-on-black racism and has imbued the “n-word” with a talismanic significance hard to convey to cultural outsiders.

In the five to ten years before Floyd’s death, as younger Millennials entered the professions, a stark ideological variant of anti-racism seized ground in the Germanic Protestant, and especially Anglo-American, world. In the US, Google searches for “white privilege,” “institutional racism,” and “marginalized groups” shot up in the 2010s, as did usages of “racism,” “sexism,” “patriarchy,” “transphobia,” and “Islamophobia” in leading newspapers. Disinvitation attempts spiked on American campuses. Roughly a year before Floyd’s death, Matt Yglesias coined the perceptive term, “The Great Awokening,” to capture these shifts.

Then came Floyd’s death and the Awokening’s final, fervid chapter. Along with the Floyd protests, the US experienced the most destructive riots in its history. There was a spasm of cancelation and censorship in the academy, media, and cultural institutions, alarming older generations of left-liberals. Anti-racist organizational statements, pledges, donations, and initiatives came in a flood. The DEI industry rapidly spread into leading public and private institutions. Today, we are living through the backlash to those excesses.

But for our purposes, the key point is that white Americans—Euro-Americans, if you will, descended primarily from the Germanic Protestant zone—drove the Great Awokening. Without their leadership and mass support, wokeness would have been culturally and politically impotent. The Awokening was not primarily a movement of racial minorities making demands on whites; it was primarily a movement of white Americans making moral demands on themselves, at least outwardly. On issue after issue, white American liberals in the 2010s became more woke than the marginalized themselves: more racially progressive than blacks, more pro-diversity than nonwhites, more pro-immigration than non-white Democrats.

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The Awokening was not primarily a movement of racial minorities making demands on whites. It was primarily a movement of white Americans making moral demands on themselves, at least outwardly.

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Such a phenomenon is only possible in a guilt culture. Generations before wokeness, and decades before the Civil Rights Movement and Sexual Revolution, American anthropologist Ruth Benedict argued that the US was a guilt culture, in contrast to shame- or honor-based Japan. In a shame culture, people are guided by the approval or disapproval of others, whereas in a guilt culture, they are guided by an internal sense of right and wrong. Benedict noted that in a guilt culture, people can feel bad for actions that no one else knows about or suspects. One might add that people can gain status by appearing to feel guilty. Often, when people “virtue signal” in American society, they are signaling guilt.

Although some would argue that the advanced West has more racial oppression to atone for than the rest of the world, most understand that tribal, ethnic, and racial oppression (like patriarchy and heteronormativity) are universal and endemic in human history, including recent history. Much more peculiar is the Germanic Protestant propensity for intense guilt about these things. Germans have done far more to atone for their genocidal past than the Hutus, Turks, and Bosnian Serbs. The Brits led the world in abolishing slavery, and Americans shed more blood and treasure to abolish and compensate for slavery than any country in history. Yet, to this day, both countries evince more guilt about their past participation in slavery than the Arabs, Africans, Latin Americans, Chinese, or Indians.

Guilt is not a bad thing. Most of us would prefer to live among people guided by an internal sense of right and wrong, who would not harm us even if they could get away with it. From a social scientific perspective, guilt is a remarkable social technology, helping to foster cooperative behavior at scale without the need for costly external monitoring.

But guilt is not an unconditional or primary good. One can feel guilt when one should not, and one can feel too much guilt. Although it is noble to take responsibility for the suffering of others, and even to feel vicarious contrition for wrongs committed by others, it is a mistake to assume special or personal guilt for the sins of one’s ancestors and co-ethnics. One should not understate the sins of one’s society or ancestors, but one should not overstate them either. Germanic Protestant societies have lost sight of these truths to a potentially self-destructive degree—something seen clearly in China, a shame culture, by the netizens who coined the derisive term baizuo (white leftists) during the Awokening.

The Christian roots of guilt culture

Guilt culture probably originates in Christianity. Pre-Christian European societies, from ancient Greece and Rome to the Germanic and Slavic tribes, were honor cultures. Christianity called on people to de-prioritize, if not abandon, the pursuit of earthly honor and glory. Turning the other cheek was the opposite of what honor demanded. The purpose of one’s time on Earth was to follow and model Christ, so that one too might conquer death. The faithful were asked to live by a new morality, regardless of others’ awareness or approval, and to confess and repent where they failed.

As Tom Holland argues in Dominion (echoing a more cynical Nietzsche), the most revolutionary aspect of this alternative, guilt-based morality may have been the insistence on compassion for the weak and lowly. It wasn’t just that the Spartans exposed weak infants and terrorized the helots; or that Greek armies sanctioned rape as a reward for bravery; or that Julius Caesar killed and enslaved millions in the conquest of Gaul; or that the Romans had sex slaves and made a public spectacle of human violence, suffering, and death. Christian societies have committed their share of atrocities, too. What made pagan Europe different was that no one seriously questioned the moral legitimacy of these behaviors. There was no sense, Holland writes, “that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value.”

Christianity proposed that all human beings were divine image-bearers and thus inviolable. No person following Christ could, in good conscience, discard or abuse human beings for pleasure, convenience, or gain. It didn’t matter whether society permitted it, or one could get away with it. Though Christianity did not prevent future generations of Europeans from committing atrocities, it strengthened internal resistance to inhuman practices, eventually leading to the elimination of infanticide, public torture, slavery, and the like.

Christianity is not inherently left-wing, any more than it is inherently right-wing. But Christianity may lend itself to left-wing interpretations more readily than other world religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism). In the Christian telling, God chose to incarnate Himself as an innocent victim forced to bear the worst imaginable suffering: humiliation, betrayal, and excruciating public torture and death. In his ministry, He befriended prostitutes and tax collectors, identified with “the least of these,” taught that the meek would inherit the Earth, and said it was extremely difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. One can isolate or accentuate these aspects of Christianity if so inclined. It is not a coincidence that Marxism, feminism, and anti-racist ideology—all of which make it their central mission to fight oppression, inequality, and hierarchy in this world—have emerged and found most purchase in societies of Christian heritage.

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Christianity is not inherently left-wing, any more than it is inherently right-wing. But Christianity probably lends itself to left-wing interpretations more readily than other world religions.

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But, as indicated by the geography of Floyd Summer, anti-racist ideology and white guilt are much more prominent in the Germanic Protestant zone than in the rest of the Christian Eurosphere. The Cold War is partly responsible for this. A half-century of communist dictatorship isolated Central and Eastern Europe from post-WWII cultural trends in the West and may have immunized their populations against leftist political ideologies. But this explanation would leave protest weakness in the Latin Catholic zone entirely unaccounted for, necessitating, at a minimum, an additional explanatory factor.

Protestantism and the deformation of guilt

Though not a necessary effect of Protestantism, the distorted racial guilt of the Germanic cultural zone cannot be understood apart from it.

Whatever one’s views of the Reformation, few would dispute that it loosened the interpretive guardrails imposed by the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church holds precious few ecumenical councils. Sole authority to interpret scripture and Tradition lies with the episcopacy, whose members are at least 35 years old, meet stringent educational and pastoral requirements, and, at least according to the Church, exemplify faith and virtue. In composing new doctrine, these bishops must engage intensively with the Church’s vast deposit of faith, developed over centuries, and build consensus across a wide range of present-day viewpoints and regional interests. Though imperfect, these processes help to ensure that doctrinal development is spaced out, deliberate, continuous and coherent with scripture and Tradition, and politically and regionally balanced. The Church is rarely, if ever, so porous that its doctrines map neatly onto existing political divides or incorporate the ideological jargon of the day.

By placing the interpretive burden on ordinary Christians across northwestern Europe, and by implicitly legitimating schism as a response to critique and disagreement, the Reformation gave rise to numerous, fragmenting variants of Christianity. It was inevitable that in the fullness of time, some Protestant sub-variants, compared to Catholicism, would reflect narrower ranges of viewpoints and regional concerns, be more porous to contemporaneous political and ideological forces, and rest on more selective readings of the Bible. The relevant example for our purposes is the progressive Calvinist interpretation of Christianity that prefigured modern anti-racist ideology.

In the traditional Christian account, injustice is an ineradicable product of the Fall, and poverty and inequality are necessary evils. The weak, lowly, and aggrieved are made in God’s image, making it a sin to treat them with indignity or violate their basic rights. They even have a potential spiritual advantage over the wealthy and powerful because they are less likely to make false idols of earthly success and pleasure. In this account, the primary reason to give away one’s power or wealth, per Christ’s instructions in Matthew 19:21, would be to purify one’s soul in preparation for the afterlife, not to improve the earthly lot of the poor or powerless (though this could be a secondary purpose or effect). The poor and marginalized have no automatic pass to heaven. They, too, must purify their souls by guarding against envy, resentment, lust, and other temptations. More than most, they may be required to turn the other cheek in the face of cruelty or hostility.

A distinct account, based on an unorthodox, postmillennialist interpretation of Revelation 20, emerged among Anglo-American Calvinists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Postmillennialists held that Christ would not return until Christians had perfected conditions on Earth, which gave them a non-purificatory religious motive to root out social evil and sacrifice on behalf of the downtrodden. As various historians have shown, this doctrine gained primacy among progressive American Protestants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and laid the theological foundation for the Protestant social reform movements of the Second and Third Great Awakenings, including abolitionism and the Social Gospel.

Since that time, Americans’ religious restlessness to root out social evil has not dissipated. But it has become steadily unmoored from biblical Christianity. Paul Gottfried and others argue that recent generations of American elites have retained their forebears’ perfectionist zeal, even as they have abandoned Christian belief, and that in a context of American cultural hegemony and unprecedented global interconnectedness, their ethos has spread to culturally receptive countries in the white Anglosphere and broader Germanic Protestant world. From this point of view, anti-racist ideology and white guilt, like other aspects of wokeness, are a secularized vestige of progressive Protestantism.

It is fitting that mainline Protestant churches, as they empty, have come to resemble progressive activist organizations in much of their rhetoric and iconography. Catholic and Orthodox churches are more likely to offer parishioners a refuge from politics—and a higher outlook on it.

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Anti-racist ideology and white guilt, like other aspects of wokeness, are a secularized vestige of progressive Protestantism.

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A Trump coda

In March of 2010, Mitt Romney published a book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, in advance of his presidential run. The pitch was not convincing to the people who later became Trump’s base. In 2015, Trump didn’t have to say he wasn’t sorry; it was obvious. His 2015 presidential announcement speech was so shocking, and apparently disqualifying, to the mainstream media because he did not seem to feel any racial guilt, or any need to signal it. A normal Republican candidate would have raised immigration concerns much more delicately. Five years after Trump came down the golden escalator, Romney marched with BLM protesters as Trump sat in the office that Romney coveted and tried to deploy federal troops to quash the riots.

Although Trump has helped to advance key aspects of the conservative Christian agenda, he is much more pagan than Christian. He committed adultery with a porn actress. His favorite sporting events are UFC fights—orgies of female sensuality and tattooed male aggression. Trump’s critics often say, with reason, that he is shameless. But Trump’s supporters love him despite his shamelessness, not because of it. They love him because of his guiltlessness.

Trump could not appear guilt-ridden if he tried, just as he could not appear elitist. If a reporter asked him, “Do you feel guilty about America’s past?”, or, “Do you think you have white privilege?”, Trump would dismiss the question and insult the asker, not because he has read Fanon and Bell and found their arguments unpersuasive, but because deep in his bones, he just isn’t sorry. He may be shameless, but he doesn’t live in a shame culture. He is guiltless, living in a deformed guilt culture. He is a walking repudiation of white guilt in a country plagued by it. His guiltlessness is the essence of his populism.

But like white guilt, Trump’s guiltlessness is disordered. In recent years, Trump has peddled Birtherism and spread unsubstantiated claims of mass voter fraud, leading to the death of one of his supporters at the Capitol. He revels in the submission and sycophancy of aides, allies, and reporters. He attacks people who criticize him and lauds people who compliment him, regardless of their character or the truth of their words. He is entertaining, but no one would call him virtuous or wise. He is a moral and spiritual vacuum.

America is ill-served by the choice between white guilt, a strange remnant of postmillennialist Protestantism, and Trump, an implicit rejection of Christian morality. One hopes for a different kind of leader in Trump’s wake—one who rejects race-based guilt and refuses to magnify the sins of his nation and ancestors, but who has not shed healthy, Christian guilt or lost his soul.