In 2007 a Minneapolis bridge fell into the Mississippi River killing thirteen people and injuring 145. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the bridge’s metal gusset plates were too thin to support the weight of the span.
Last month a pedestrian overpass fell on Route 295 in Washington D.C., injuring several people. It was in poor condition.
On June 24, a 12-story condominium in Surfside, Florida collapsed. Rescue workers are still trying to find 100 missing bodies. Engineers suspect that concrete support structures in the building’s underground parking garage crumbled due to years of unchecked water corrosion.
Last week an Atlantic story reported that the country’s infrastructure was not prepared to withstand the kinds of record heat the nation has experienced so far this summer. In Portland, a power cable on a bridge warped under 112-degree heat, forcing the city to close down its streetcar system.
More than seventy-seven million Americans do not have access to adequate home internet connections, a reality that came to light during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Urban schools are falling apart. Some Americans don’t have clean water to drink. Cities are still dealing with the legacy of early-twentieth-century redlining.
Joe Biden wants to do something about these problems.
A federal infrastructure bill would not have prevented what happened to a private condo complex in Surfside, nor can it directly reverse the results of climate change, but there is a very good chance the president’s 1.2 trillion-dollar bipartisan proposal would save lives and and more fully honor human dignity. Democrats and Republicans should care about this. So should Christians.
In the early nineteenth-century, during America’s first era of infrastructure development, evangelical Christians were some of the country’s strongest supporters of what were known then as “internal improvements.”
On May 24, 1844, Samuel B. Morse, a devout Calvinist and the son of a famous clergyman, sat in the chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court and sent the first transmission across his new invention, the telegraph. The words he typed came from Numbers 23:23: “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?”
As historian Daniel Walker Howe has noted, Morse’s choice of phrase could not have been more appropriate. He believed that the telegraph, and by extension all internal improvements and technological advancements, furthered divine purposes in the world. He would later say that the biblical verse he sent across the wires that day “baptized the American Telegraph with the name of its author”: God.
According to Howe, in the early years of the republic God’s blessings on the United States went hand-in-hand with scientific progress and the expansion of the nation’s transportation and communication infrastructure. Telegraphs, roads, bridges, canals, and railroads would help build America and, at the same time, help the Gospel spread to every corner of the continent and beyond. These efforts to expand across North America, giving people the option to rise above the tyranny of place, would make the nation exceptional, and its people free. This was what God had wrought for the United States.
Infrastructure development—both in the 19th-century and today—promotes human dignity and the American promise. It should be especially high on the list of priorities for the evangelical members of Congress, those lawmakers who love to make appeals to the providential history of the United States. Christianity teaches that human beings are created in the image of God and thus called to exercise creativity in the world. Improvements in transportation and the communication of knowledge (whether through a telegraph or the internet) open significant possibilities for such work. They provide a scaffolding that enables human beings to thrive.
The freedom to move, pursue useful ambitions, and improve oneself– staples of the political philosophy of 19th-century Whigs and 20th-century Republicans–are life-giving. Today’s conservatives would be foolish to break with the past and reject such an investment in the nation’s future.
But sometimes breaking with the past, at least in part, can be a good thing. Those who understand American history in all its complexity know this.
Morse worshipped a God of progress, but the pursuit of progress too often led him, and his generation, to dark places. For Morse, progress meant keeping Catholics out of the country. He even mounted an unsuccessful bid for mayor of New York City on the Nativist Party ticket in 1836.
Progress, as Morse understood it, also led him to defend slavery. He infamously said “Slavery per se is not a sin. It is a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom.”
Morse’s God did not provide the same opportunities to poor Irish and German immigrants that he did to white middle-class Anglo-Americans. Under the banner of “Manifest Destiny,” his God purged the continent of the indigenous people who stood in the way of progress.
Morse’s life and career remind us that nineteenth-century infrastructure development opened up the American Dream for some but not all Americans. A society that does not offer all its inhabitants the freedom of movement, ambition, education, and creativity bears disturbing resemblance to a slave society. The leaders of democratic societies work hard to secure these things for their people.
Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure proposal is expensive, but it should also offer hope. It is an American investment in those who were left out of previous internal improvement efforts. In this sense, it represents yet another step toward lifting America out of slavery.
Not only will the president’s plan create jobs, but it will improve public schools in poor neighborhoods, connect less-privileged Americans to the information superhighway, integrate urban neighborhoods segregated by interstate highways, strengthen public transit, and repair broken roads and bridges in urban areas. It is an attempt to look squarely into the past and fix what is broken.
It’s time to add infrastructure to the pro-life agenda.
John Fea is the Executive Editor of Current.