Chris Arnade is an American freelance writer and photographer. Over several years he has explored the underbelly of the United States, having quit his job as one of Wall Street's elite in response to his disquiet over the growing divide within his homeland. He has just had his collection of essays and photographs published as Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.
This divide is what prompted Arnade, who has a Ph.D in physics, to explore beyond his normal boundaries.Speaking of his former environment, he states: "Our isolation from the bulk of the
country left us with a narrow view of the world. We valued what we could measure, and that meant material wealth. Things that couldn’t be measured—community, dignity, faith, happiness—were largely ignored because they were hard to see, especially from so far away."
With the insights earned through his meeting the 'strangers' even in his own New York, Arnade reflects on his past. While he was at college, he worked in a painting gang with Preacher Man and they had a difference of view over the Bible: "His intolerance simply didn’t fit my intolerance. My intolerance was credential-based." Arnade continues:
"When I look back now at Preacher Man and the others praying, I see people striving for dignity in a harsh world. I see mothers working minimum-wage jobs, trying to raise three children alone. I see a teenager fingering a small cross and a young woman abused by an addict father. I see Preacher Man living across the tracks in a beat-up shotgun shack, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little. Their faith may not be true, I tell myself, but it is useful."
Arnade writes: "During my years on Wall Street, I argued for policies based on data. I thought we should focus on things that could be quantified—like higher profits and greater economic growth. I measured success by how high the stock market was or whether we had maximized profits and minimized expenses, not by whether we had done the right thing.
"I was not alone. Most of us in the front row had decided that it was impossible to identify absolutes, that moral certainties were suspect, and that all that we could know or value was what science revealed to be quantifiable. Religion was an old, irrational thing that limited and repressed people—and often outright oppressed them." Therefore:
"When I first went to the Bronx, I expected that the people there, those most affected by the coldness and ruthlessness of the world, would share my atheism. Instead, I found a strong belief in the supernatural, and a faith that manifested in many ways, mostly as a belief in the Bible.
"Everyone I met there who was living homeless or battling an addiction held a deep faith. Street walking is stunningly dangerous work, and everyone has stories of being cut, attacked, and threatened, or stories of others who were killed. Everyone has to deal with the danger. Few work without a mix of heroin, Xanax, or crack. None without faith. 'You know what kept me through all that? God. Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.'
"There are dirty Bibles in crack houses, Qur’ans in abandoned buildings. There is a picture of the Last Supper that moves with a couple living on the streets. Rosaries, crucifixes, and religious icons are worn for protection and good luck. Pages of the Bible are torn out, folded up, and kept in pockets, to be pulled out and fingered nervously, or read over in times of stress, or held during prayers."
Of note is this fact: "Mixed with faith in God is a strong belief in the reality of evil. Crossing the bridge into Hunts Point, Takeesha [a prostitute friend] looks out the window of my van. 'This place is so bad and evil. It’s, like, so simple to walk across the bridge, but it’s like you can’t go across, you understand? This place is evil. It’s possessed. It’s evil. I been here a long time. There are bad spirits here. I have seen good people, I have seen people that have family, jobs, and they come here and they get dug in, and two weeks later they living in a cardboard box.' "
Arnade comes to this conclusion: "When you’re up against evil, whether the mysterious efforts of demons or the all-too-explainable effects of drugs, the world of science, education, and smart arguments doesn’t do much for you[...]. All that the front row offers to those living shattered lives in broken buildings is sterile institutions that chew them up and then spit them out."
A further insight is this: "For many back row Americans, the only places that regularly treat them like humans are churches. The churches are everywhere, small churches that have come in and taken over a space and light it up on Sundays and Wednesdays. They walk inside the church, and immediately they meet people who get them."
Although there are rules: "They say, 'Enter as you are,' letting forgiveness wash away a past that many want gone. You are welcome as long as you try. The churches understand the streets, understand everyone is a sinner and everyone fails. The rest of the world [...] doesn’t understand that. That cold, secular world of the well-intentioned is a distant and judgmental thing.
"The churches are also the way out of addiction, a way to end the cycle. The few success stories told on the streets are of relatives, friends, or spouses who found God, got with the discipline and order of a church, and moved away."
For me, the next section is a powerful statement of what I believe will take the post-Christian society many years to discover, making Arnade's new book (see below) all the more insightful and therefore of high value. The section is given in full:
"When I walked into the Bronx I was an atheist. It was something I was sure about. After years of traveling America, I wasn’t so sure. To my educated lifelong friends, I might have said I was agnostic, or still an atheist, but one who appreciated religion.
"To the believers I met I would say, 'I appreciate the power of faith,' or 'I understand the power of the Bible.' To the more direct and blunt questions, 'Yes I read the Bible now and then, but I wouldn’t call myself religious,' or, 'I have not been saved, but I do read the Bible.'
"None of it was a lie, but the more direct truth was that even after I had come to see how useful religion was, I still attended services as an outsider trying to understand why faith drew so many people to it. Why it seemed to comfort those who needed it the most. In the language of the church, I wasn’t yet saved. In the language of my friends, I was a scientist trying to understand religion.
"I could no longer ignore the value of faith, not as a scientist, not as a person who claimed to want to learn from others. Yet I still saw it as a utility—something popular because it worked. Still, after attending hundreds of different services I was beginning to realize there was more to it than that. My biases were limiting a deeper understanding: that perhaps religion was right, or at least as right as anything could be. Getting there required a level of intellectual humility that I was not sure I had.
"Like most in the front row, I am used to thinking we have all the answers. On Wall Street, there were few problems we couldn’t solve with enough smarts, energy, audacity, or money. We even managed to push death into the distance; with enough research and enough resources—eating right, doing the right things, going to the correct medical specialist—the inevitable could be delayed, and mortality could feel distant.
"With a great job and a great apartment in a great neighborhood, it is easy to feel we have nothing for which we need to be absolved. The fundamental fallibility of humans seems outdated, distant. It’s not hard to imagine that you have everything under control.
"On the streets, few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. 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."
This piece is an edited version of an excerpt from Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade, published on June 4, 2019, by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House. Read the full excerpt at First Things.
This divide is what prompted Arnade, who has a Ph.D in physics, to explore beyond his normal boundaries.Speaking of his former environment, he states: "Our isolation from the bulk of the
 |
| Chris Arnade...surprised where faith flourished |
With the insights earned through his meeting the 'strangers' even in his own New York, Arnade reflects on his past. While he was at college, he worked in a painting gang with Preacher Man and they had a difference of view over the Bible: "His intolerance simply didn’t fit my intolerance. My intolerance was credential-based." Arnade continues:
"When I look back now at Preacher Man and the others praying, I see people striving for dignity in a harsh world. I see mothers working minimum-wage jobs, trying to raise three children alone. I see a teenager fingering a small cross and a young woman abused by an addict father. I see Preacher Man living across the tracks in a beat-up shotgun shack, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little. Their faith may not be true, I tell myself, but it is useful."
Arnade writes: "During my years on Wall Street, I argued for policies based on data. I thought we should focus on things that could be quantified—like higher profits and greater economic growth. I measured success by how high the stock market was or whether we had maximized profits and minimized expenses, not by whether we had done the right thing.
"I was not alone. Most of us in the front row had decided that it was impossible to identify absolutes, that moral certainties were suspect, and that all that we could know or value was what science revealed to be quantifiable. Religion was an old, irrational thing that limited and repressed people—and often outright oppressed them." Therefore:
"When I first went to the Bronx, I expected that the people there, those most affected by the coldness and ruthlessness of the world, would share my atheism. Instead, I found a strong belief in the supernatural, and a faith that manifested in many ways, mostly as a belief in the Bible.
"Everyone I met there who was living homeless or battling an addiction held a deep faith. Street walking is stunningly dangerous work, and everyone has stories of being cut, attacked, and threatened, or stories of others who were killed. Everyone has to deal with the danger. Few work without a mix of heroin, Xanax, or crack. None without faith. 'You know what kept me through all that? God. Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.'
"There are dirty Bibles in crack houses, Qur’ans in abandoned buildings. There is a picture of the Last Supper that moves with a couple living on the streets. Rosaries, crucifixes, and religious icons are worn for protection and good luck. Pages of the Bible are torn out, folded up, and kept in pockets, to be pulled out and fingered nervously, or read over in times of stress, or held during prayers."
Of note is this fact: "Mixed with faith in God is a strong belief in the reality of evil. Crossing the bridge into Hunts Point, Takeesha [a prostitute friend] looks out the window of my van. 'This place is so bad and evil. It’s, like, so simple to walk across the bridge, but it’s like you can’t go across, you understand? This place is evil. It’s possessed. It’s evil. I been here a long time. There are bad spirits here. I have seen good people, I have seen people that have family, jobs, and they come here and they get dug in, and two weeks later they living in a cardboard box.' "
Arnade comes to this conclusion: "When you’re up against evil, whether the mysterious efforts of demons or the all-too-explainable effects of drugs, the world of science, education, and smart arguments doesn’t do much for you[...]. All that the front row offers to those living shattered lives in broken buildings is sterile institutions that chew them up and then spit them out."
A further insight is this: "For many back row Americans, the only places that regularly treat them like humans are churches. The churches are everywhere, small churches that have come in and taken over a space and light it up on Sundays and Wednesdays. They walk inside the church, and immediately they meet people who get them."
Although there are rules: "They say, 'Enter as you are,' letting forgiveness wash away a past that many want gone. You are welcome as long as you try. The churches understand the streets, understand everyone is a sinner and everyone fails. The rest of the world [...] doesn’t understand that. That cold, secular world of the well-intentioned is a distant and judgmental thing.
"The churches are also the way out of addiction, a way to end the cycle. The few success stories told on the streets are of relatives, friends, or spouses who found God, got with the discipline and order of a church, and moved away."
For me, the next section is a powerful statement of what I believe will take the post-Christian society many years to discover, making Arnade's new book (see below) all the more insightful and therefore of high value. The section is given in full:
"When I walked into the Bronx I was an atheist. It was something I was sure about. After years of traveling America, I wasn’t so sure. To my educated lifelong friends, I might have said I was agnostic, or still an atheist, but one who appreciated religion.
"To the believers I met I would say, 'I appreciate the power of faith,' or 'I understand the power of the Bible.' To the more direct and blunt questions, 'Yes I read the Bible now and then, but I wouldn’t call myself religious,' or, 'I have not been saved, but I do read the Bible.'
"None of it was a lie, but the more direct truth was that even after I had come to see how useful religion was, I still attended services as an outsider trying to understand why faith drew so many people to it. Why it seemed to comfort those who needed it the most. In the language of the church, I wasn’t yet saved. In the language of my friends, I was a scientist trying to understand religion.
"I could no longer ignore the value of faith, not as a scientist, not as a person who claimed to want to learn from others. Yet I still saw it as a utility—something popular because it worked. Still, after attending hundreds of different services I was beginning to realize there was more to it than that. My biases were limiting a deeper understanding: that perhaps religion was right, or at least as right as anything could be. Getting there required a level of intellectual humility that I was not sure I had.
"Like most in the front row, I am used to thinking we have all the answers. On Wall Street, there were few problems we couldn’t solve with enough smarts, energy, audacity, or money. We even managed to push death into the distance; with enough research and enough resources—eating right, doing the right things, going to the correct medical specialist—the inevitable could be delayed, and mortality could feel distant.
"With a great job and a great apartment in a great neighborhood, it is easy to feel we have nothing for which we need to be absolved. The fundamental fallibility of humans seems outdated, distant. It’s not hard to imagine that you have everything under control.
"On the streets, few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. 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."
This piece is an edited version of an excerpt from Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade, published on June 4, 2019, by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House. Read the full excerpt at First Things.
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