“‘There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ [O’Brien] said. ‘Repeat it, if you please.’ ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’ repeated Winston obediently. ‘Who controls the present controls the past,’ said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. ‘Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has any real existence?’” George Orwell, 1984(1949; 2023 edition, page 248)

DISAPPEARING THE PAST

Orwell’s 1984 is as much about the past as about the future—about the intrusive, often uncomfortable, not-the-way-you-would-like-it-to-be, real existence of the past. And about the way that authoritarian governments try to extinguish the past. As the Party slogan has it, the future depends on the past, and the past depends on the present. All authoritarian governments know this. All authoritarian governments practice this: they attempt to control the past so that they can control the future.

Seventy-five years after Orwell’s book appeared (1949), MAGA (Make America Great Again) wants to control the past, and by controlling the past to control the future. The key word in MAGA is “again.” Tucked into “again” is a view of the past—of the “good old days”—that includes and excludes. It includes pickup trucks; it excludes electric vehicles, even those made by Elon Musk. It includes petroleum; it excludes solar and wind power. It includes evangelical Christians; it excludes Muslims and liberal Christians, although the definitions are wide here. “Evangelical” doesn’t mean you actually go to church or that you follow the man from Nazareth. “Muslim” includes not only Muslims but people who look like they might be Muslim. It includes Republicans (though not all); it excludes Democrats (all of them). I need not go on. We all know the outline of the MAGA view of the past in which real men drove pickup trucks, lived in all white neighborhoods, worked in factories and made cars. They told sexist jokes, and women laughed. Gay people stayed in the closet. Women stayed at home. And people of color knew their place. 

A parody, perhaps, but not far from the truth. But what if the past was not like this? What if the past, even in the Fifties, was not so white or male or straight as the MAGA tribe remembers. History is an inconvenient thing. It never quite tells us the story the way we want the story to be told. And so history must be, in the opinion of authoritarians, well, managed. 

In the MAGA view, the wrong people have been telling the wrong story. The story of the US has been told by university professors who are liberals or, worse, socialists. They hate America. They hate people who don’t have a university education. We need history to be told by the right kind of people, and so the president leans on the universities with the considerable power of the federal government to root out anything that in his opinion looks “woke.” And the universities, under financial pressure, bend to his demands.

This steps in the direction of the Party in Orwell’s 1984. For the Party, the past is whatever the Party declares it to be. At the beginning of the novel, Oceania (a mega-state that includes what had been the UK and all of the Americas) is at war with Eurasia (Europe and what had been the Soviet Union). Has always been at war with Eurasia. Historical documents, whatever they might have originally said, have long since been adjusted to reflect this core “truth”: Eurasia is the enemy; Eastasia (China and the Pacific Rim) is a friend. 

In the middle of Hate Week, when the populace of Oceania is required to “hate on” Eurasia, just as a stemwinding orator is in the middle of pumping up the crowd by decribing the atrocities of the Eurasian army, the war suddenly shifts. Oceania is no longer at war with Eurasia but now with Eastasia. A note is slipped to the unfortunate orator, who without pausing, without interrupting the syntax of his sentence, substitutes “Eastasia” for “Eurasia,” and goes on in full voice. Hearing the change, the crowd rushes to tear down the anti-Eurasia banners posted all around, and the event goes merrily on. 

For Winston, who works for the Ministry of Truth, the ministry in charge of adjusting documents to fit the requirements of Party doctrine, the shift from Eurasia to Eastasia means work. Every document that bears on war must be altered to reflect the new reality—every newspaper story, every radio broadcast, every memory. Winston and his fellows in the Ministry of Truth work long hours to alter the documents. Once the documents have been changed the old past in effect disappears. But this is nothing new for Winston and the Truth crew. Over time, the documents have been changed so often that no one any longer knows what they originally said, and with that there is no longer any way to retrieve what happened. The past effectively is whatever the Party says it is.

Or so the Party thinks. Orwell’s book is a testament to the facticity of the past. And a warning. As we read the book, we read the truth about the very past the Party means to deny. In Orwell’s fictional universe, we know that Party ultimately failed because we are holding the book. In the measure we as readers enter his universe, we give the lie to pretensions of the Party. 

Orwell seems to believe that the past cannot entirely be buried. As Faulkner put it in a different context, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It’s this that MAGA seems not to believe. In the MAGA mythology and in presidential directives, the past is whatever the president wants it to be. We now have our own ministries of truth.

In this MAGA and some left wing thinking meet. Both make the same arguments: that the past is a matter of who tells the story (different stories for different folks) and that the story is malleable (my truth is different from your truth). For a short time a few decades ago this point of view was called “postmodern,” and it was stridently attacked by intellectuals on the right. But, ironically, “postmodern” thinking has come to dominate MAGA-land. The past is not factual; it’s a point of view.

Let me briefly say what needs to be said here as a sort of disclaimer: the fine print, as it were. We know and acknowledge, you and I, that our point of view on the past matters. We bend the past to our purposes. And of course we realize, all of us who are adults in the room, that historical facts can be remarkably slippery. The story we tell is never final. We need multiple histories. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) tells the story of the US quite differently from, say, Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans (3 volumes, 1958, 1965, and 1973), but both are important. But, for all that, we hold to the idea that facts matter, and that within limits, facts can be established. History is messy but not impossible. 

It’s a bit like the first lesson in a freshman philosophy course, about solipsism. Having been introduced to the concept, our freshman self spends a few delicious days thinking that just maybe I am the only one who exists and everyone else is a figment of my imagination. And then, we move on. Life has to be lived, after all, and those figments of our imagination often prove remarkably resistant to our wishes.

In the same way, the past proves resistant to what we want it to be. The facts keep intruding awkwardly on the story we want to tell. Our romantic vision of the first Thanksgiving in 17^th century Plymouth gives way to contrary images. Our notion of America exceptionalism runs up against a slave ship in 1619 making its way to colonial Virginia. Our conviction that Americans always the good guys comes face-to-face with My Lai and Abu Ghraib. In dealing with the past, we are forced to adjust our view of the present and our plans for the future. The past anchors our view of present and future.

RESURRECTING THE PAST

These insights into the importance of the past are, for Christians, anchored in resurrection. Resurrection is not just about the future; it’s about the past. Jesus rises with his wounds. His rising says of the crucifixion: See, this happened. Here are the nail prints in his hands and the gash in his side. The past cannot be denied. Jesus, the whole of his life and ministry, cannot be “vaporized”—the term of choice for the enemies of the Party in Orwell’s 1984—even by the power of the Roman state. Resurrection proves the stickiness of reality.

Christians often confuse resurrection with resuscitation, but they are not the same thing. Resuscitation is a continuation of life. After resuscitation, life goes on. The resuscitated person gets older, adds to their store of experiences, and at last dies. The Lazarus story in John 11 is not resurrection; it’s resuscitation. When Lazarus emerges from the tomb, it is to his old life that he returns. His story is not yet complete. He has more to do before the final summing up of his life (what the Bible calls “judgment”). 

Resurrection requires finality, an ending. When Jesus says, “It is finished” (John 19:30), the life of Jesus of Nazareth is finished. The Jesus who rises is no longer temporal in the same sense as before. He does not get older. He is not now 2025 years old. The life that is raised is not Jesus at age 33 (if that was the age at which he was crucified) or Jesus at some other age. What is resurrected is the whole life of Jesus, his days from birth to death. In a way beyond understanding, this life of Jesus has been retrieved from death and lives through the Spirit in relationship to the Father and to us.

There is more to be said here, much more, but I will leave it at this, except to draw out two implications of the Christian view of resurrection that bear on what I said above about the importance of the past. The first is that in scripture the resurrection of Jesus is an embodiment of the resurrection of the human race. It is an answer to the legitimate despair over the human prospect.

In scripture (see on this Paul in Romans 5), there are two ways to tell the story of the human race. Both are valid. Both are necessary. The first is to tell the story from the beginning. This way of telling the story is cumulative. Begin with Adam or whatever you wish to call the first human beings. “Adam,” after all, is just Hebrew for “humanity.” Humanity, then, emerging into a new kind of self-consciousness, comes into history with such consider powers and  such promise as has not been before seen on earth. But this creature, this species, has proven, as the ancients long predicted, more menace than magic. In the Adam telling of the story, we have despoiled the earth, slaughtered our fellow creatures, and imperiled life itself. The future of the human experiment seems grim.

Along with that first telling of the human story, the scriptures tell another story, a story of resurrection. This telling of the story begins as the end. It’s not creation so much as retrieval, what the scriptures call “redemption,” “buying back” what has gotten lost. Or, better, “resurrection,” Greek ʾanastasis, “standing up.” In this telling of the story, God first calls back, retrieves, stand up the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But the retrieval of the life of Jesus is only the first such retrieval. In the biblical account, God intends to retrieve all that is human, to call it back into a new relationship with the Father—to tell the story fresh and that way redeem human existence.

Again, there is much more to be said, but allow me to add one last piece. In this promise of redemption—the retrieval of the human past in order to tell a new story—the promise is that nothing is lost. Human history is a tissue of losses: people who once lived with scarcely anyone noticing, and now lost; events once important, and now lost; loves once transcendent, and now lost. In the scriptural promise of resurrection is the promise that nothing will be finally lost. Resurrection is God’s work of retrieval.

And if all that is true—or even if it is just an idea worth considering—then part of our work as humans, as Christians, is to join in this work of retrieval. Against the forces of authoritarian governments, it’s important that we work to retrieve what has gotten lost. In doing so, we are doing divine work. Telling the stories of the forgotten, getting the story right about our country and our cities and our own ancestors is work worth doing.

Orwell’s 1984 ends on a disquieting note. Winston seems finally defeated. We close the book with a sigh. But Orwell, canny author that he is, knows what he is doing. As I mentioned above, we hold the book in our hands, a testimony to the very history the Party wishes to deny. Having read the book, we are Winston’s witnesses—all the Winstons of the world. We are those who testify to the defeat of the Party. They cannot triumph so long as books like 1984 and readers of such books exist.

In making this argument, Orwell is only repeating an earlier argument of the same kind. The book of Mark, arguably the first gospel, ends (in the most reliable manuscripts) on the little word gar. Gar in the Greek of the New Testament is a weak conjunction. It never comes first in a clause but second or even third or fourth. In the ending of Mark, it comes after the verb for being afraid: “They [the two Marys and Salome] left the tomb [of Jesus] in full flight, seized with trembling and amazement, and they told no one at all, for [gar] they were afraid.” In the Greek syntax, the gar, the “for,” hangs on the end of the clause. It is a stunning ending for a gospel that begins with the confident claim it is “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” 

But, of course, it’s not the ending. We, the readers, are holding the gospel of Mark in our hands precisely because the women who visited the tomb did not stay silent. It is their testimony and that of the apostles that form the basis of the book we hold. Jesus of Nazareth has not perished into a dim past.

Nor will our story perish, yours and mine and that of all humanity together. It’s on the basis of that promise that we move boldly into the future. Holding on, all the while, to the past.

Clay