The false hope of writing our own history

Easter itself is a reminder of how far events may stray from the story we want to believe we're living

A woman.

History resists a narrative while it's happening. It may rhyme, as they say, but the rhyme is often slant and anticipating it frequently proves a fool's errand.

Yet the habit of playing historian of our own moment can feel like an exercise in hope. I, for one, tend to mentally map out the coming weeks and months, to piece together a timeline of what could happen next — when the pandemic will peak, when we can stop social distancing, when we can rightly celebrate the family wedding we're now obliged to skip — and to interpret it, too, as all historians do. Just yesterday I read and wrote of how the novel coronavirus seems to have launched us into a new era, just as the 9/11 attacks did two decades ago. The impulse is strong to say, "This is how our lives will change," "This will reframe X," "This will shift politics and culture toward Y and Z."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.