When Rituals – and Candidates – Go Unquestioned
What Shirley Jackson’s lottery says about Georgia, and us
PLENTY OF ELECTED officials speak about their faith, but many fewer have studied theology, become ordained, or served as a minister in any religious tradition. Rev. Sen. Raphael Warnock, the winner of this week’s Senate runoff election in Georgia, was a rare candidate: a man of the cloth, pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. Unlike the Catholics, the Baptists have no ban on ministers serving in public office, and Warnock has no trouble linking his profession with politics. In his Tuesday night acceptance speech he said, “I believe that democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea. The notion that each of us has within us a spark of the divine…We all have value. And if we have value, we ought to have a voice.”
Georgia is one of America’s most devout states, where 2 in 3 adults characterize themselves as “deeply religious.” Given the candidates’ biographies – a Christian minister vs. a former football player – it wouldn’t be outrageous to expect a landslide victory for Rev. Warnock.
But we are living in a hyper-partisan era with “increasingly divergent versions of American Christianity,” wrote the New York Times. It seems many Georgia voters were willing to rationalize a cold political calculus. All told, Warnock received 1.8 million votes. And despite objective questions about his fitness for office, 1.7 million people voted for Walker.
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Shirley Jackson’s timeless story The Lottery, published in the New Yorker in 1948, is a brief and devastating tale. On a beautiful June afternoon townspeople gather in the square for their annual lottery. No one knows the genesis of this event, which pre-dates any of those present. We’re told much of the rite has been “forgotten or discarded,” the original paraphernalia long lost by preceding generations. If the big picture is missing, the small details are recalled and held onto.
“At one time, some people remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery, a perfunctory, tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each year; some people believed that the official of the lottery used to stand just so when he said or sang it, others believed that he was supposed to walk among the people, but years and years ago this part of the ritual had been allowed to lapse. There had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery had had to use in addressing each person who came up to draw from the box, but this also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the official to speak to each person approaching.”
The story’s rising action is the townspeople going about the lottery’s logistics – who will draw and in what order. Children, too, are invited in. They run around and speculate among themselves. No matter how small, they aren’t exempt from pulling the “winning” slip of black-dotted paper from the wooden box. The lottery is all they’ve known; to them, everything that is about to happen is totally, excruciatingly normal. These events are unfamiliar to us as readers but extremely familiar, even rote, to the characters.
The lottery is a ritual engrained in this culture that no one is questioning. As the narrator tells us: “The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions.”
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In an Axios focus group, several Georgia voters made their case for party over candidate. “I believe in redemption, and I wanted to vote for the Republican Party,” said one person. “I voted for the Republican Party through Walker,” said another. There was a time in the not-so distant past when party didn’t trump all. Elizabeth Kolbert lays out an excellent analysis of how we got this way in a New Yorker article earlier this year. But at this point, extreme partisanship is all many of us have known.
The irony in Georgia, of course, was that a party-line vote for Walker was a vote for a candidate whose flawed campaign included revelations that his commitment to anti-abortion policy – a cornerstone of his platform, and the driving force behind many of those 1.7 million votes – was more political than personal.
In the 1990s, I grew up in the pews of a decorous and studiously apolitical Lutheran church in Wichita. Outside its brick walls, the efforts of born-again Christianity to save the unborn while consolidating political power reached a fever pitch. In our mainline Protestantism, faith was private and zeal was not a virtue. I didn’t dream of asking anyone about their voting habits. We did not have yard signs or bumper stickers. It was all verboten.
It was a little strange, then, that I began a career in Washington. At 19, on a whim, I applied to intern on Capitol Hill. I showed up with few preconceptions, and that summer I slowly figured out how my belief system stacked up against the two parties.
Today I know many people whose parents wheeled them through political marches in strollers and talked politics at their dining room tables; I am certain I’m going to be that kind of parent. But I feel sort of weird about it. Everyone who has a team thinks theirs is the winner.
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The Lottery is a feat of dramatic irony. We go in expecting the lottery to be one thing and learn it’s quite another. From where we sit as readers, we can shout at the characters. Stop this madness! It doesn’t have to be this way! You’re worried about the wrong thing! But the characters themselves can’t see what’s happening or envision another way of life. The lottery is what it is. At the rumor of other towns having given up their lotteries, Old Man Warner, the town elder, snorts.
“Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly.
That’s classic fearmongering. More charitably, it’s also an understandable desire to keep things as they are. What does it say about us if we admit a need for change? How could we have let things go for so long if they were so wrong?
In this week’s On the Nightstand we asked Allison Crimmins, director of the National Climate Assessment at the White House, what she’s reading. This is what she said:
“This may be a bit cliche for a climate scientist, but I gravitate towards stories where a ragtag group of heroes team up to save the world against unbeatable odds. I like a good quest. In that vein, I'm currently finishing the last book of the Expanse series, Leviathan Falls. It is an epic space opera with exceptional characters to both love and hate, including the brilliant and brash Chrisjen Avasarala. I will forever aspire to her level of getting shit done. Despite my love for quests, I'm often disappointed by multi-book series as my interest in the individual books ebb and flow. This series is a surprising treat with each book as captivating and suspenseful as the previous, if not more.”