Intolerance and Egalitarianism: A Follow Up

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous asks me in regards to my post from earlier Friday, The Intolerance of Egalitarianism:

[I]s toleration really enough, especially in the body of Christ?

This is a good question. And one that needs some thought.

The emphatic, simple answer is: NO. Mere tolerance is not enough for the body of Christ. Acceptance isn't even enough for the body of Christ. Inclusion is what the body of Christ is and does to those Jesus gathers to himself. I am included in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in baptism in the way all of the baptized are included. I cannot be more emphatic about this.

But ... There is a nuance to this emphatic.

Those who see themselves as called to be the body of Christ in the world -- those called to be the church -- must be careful about what exactly it is they are accepting and including into. It's easy for people to come to believe that the cultural and social norms of their time, place and class are the norms of the Kingdom of God and of the Body of Christ. What are people expected to adhere to, to conform with, to be included in? What does it mean to be the body of Christ? Are the ideals and values and practices had in the community the values of the kingdom or merely the values of the community? And how do you tell?

But ... There is nuance to this as well.

Because (as a Lutheran) I believe in an incarnational God, a God enfleshed in time and space. That means God is also present in community and custom too. And thus, in some ways, the values and customs of the sanctified community ARE the values of the kingdom. Because God is present in the physical articulation and assembly of God's people. And, to an extent, God is present AS that very community.

But .. There is yet more nuance to this. 

Because the majority will, practice and custom of the community is not all there is to the articulation of God on earth. Or even on some cute little green acre of earth. (Or benighted, dusty acre of earth.) It's demands are not God's will for all people. Or even all people within its reach. The guest, the stranger -- that person is also the presence of God on earth. That person is also God incarnate.

And so, both those welcoming and the one being welcomed must remember that they meet God in the other. Yes, among any group of people, there is a "This is how it is done here." And it would behoove a wanderer or a guest to learn those things. (It would also be nice of those in the majority custom do this teaching with tolerance, patience and kindness, as opposed to cruelty and cluelessness.) Especially if the wanderer is settling down. But the settled community would also best remember that "This is how it is done here" has its real emphasis on the "here." "This is how things are done here" is NOT the same as saying "this is how people do things." And God help the community that mistakes the "This is how things are done here" with "This is how all well-adjusted people should or should want to do things." THAT is the true intolerance of the liberal.

And the settled community should also remember that there are true and honest differences in individual human beings -- and not merely abstract groups, because we are children of the Living God, and not merely the sum of which Venn diagrams we belong to -- that, because those differences, even differences of "choice," reflect the many ways in which God is present in the world and to the world, should at least be tolerated.

Because too often the demand for conformity (and the mistake that conformity within the community of the faithful is THE proper practice of the sanctified community) is an end in and of itself. And this gets me back to the original part of Millman's claim, that the more egalitarian the community, the less defined and visible the hierarchy and thus the identifiable place within the community, the more the community needs and enforces conformity. And the less tolerant that community is of actual, individual human difference.

Quadrilaterals Will Do That to You

Was it the saying goodbye to Descartes, or the twelve tones of the spirit that did it? Whatever it was, I do like the title...

The Intolerance of Egalitarianism

Noah Millman, a blogger over at The American Conservative, made this brilliant observation the other day in response to Rod Dreher's rediscovery of tolerance and acceptance in the small Louisiana town where he grew up and recently moved back to:

Not being a Southerner, I can’t comment on Rod Dreher’s post on freak-toleration from direct personal experience. But I suspect part of what he’s seeing is the difference between a hierarchical society and a conformist egalitarian one, the difference between hierarchical Louisiana and conformist Iowa being somewhat similar to the difference between hierarchical (and famously eccentric-tolerating) England and conformist Sweden. A hierarchical society depends for its stability not on the notion of everybody being the same but on the notion of everybody knowing his or her place. And you can make some kind of a place for just about everyone. The question then is whether people will tolerate being kept in their place by others when it starts to chafe. 

My own hometown, New York, follows neither of these models, but is dynamically heterogeneous. We pride ourselves on being “diverse” and “tolerant” but what that winds up meaning in practice is that the overall society is a negotiated coalition among smaller sub-cultures, each of which tends to figure a surprisingly high degree of internal conformity. When a group is struggling with other groups for a relative share of power, dissent is harder to tolerate. On the other hand, when no group actually dominates local society, disaffiliation – to join another group, or none – without physically leaving becomes a much more realistic option.

Millman puts his finger on something very, very important, something I noticed not long after I arrived at this midwestern Lutheran seminary. The American Midwest is very egalitarian. And very conformist. In fact, that intolerant conformism is because of its egalitarianism, and not in spite of it.

Some years ago, when I Jennifer and I were living and working in Logan, Utah (I was a reporter for the Herald Journal), I had a conversation with her (ELCA) pastor (I was not Christian at the time, and worshiped with the small group of Muslims at the Logan Islamic Center) about what it was like to live as a member of a tiny religious minority among the Mormons. The pastor did not like it. I asked him why? (What I really I wanted to ask was: Do they forbid our worship services and arrest us? Make us wear distinctive marks on our clothing? Force us to convert upon pain of death?) His response was interesting -- they do not accept us as fellow Christians.

(Well, of course the Mormons don't, I replied, since they have a very different understanding of what it means to be church then Lutherans do, and Lutherans are not part of that understanding of church.)

But I also contemplated his essential angst: They do not accept us. This, I think, is the core of liberal understanding of tolerance. Mere tolerance is not enough -- acceptance is what is needed. (Another ELCA pastor in another circumstance used basically those words.) The pastor in Logan lived at the intersection of the Midwestern Lutheranism's political and cultural piety (his background was Norwegian). It is not enough to merely tolerate people -- they must be accepted as well. They must be equals in the community and in society.

I know, this sounds really good on the face of it. And in many ways, it is. But it is also has a long, dark, cold shadow. The main problem I have experienced with this notion of "tolerance as acceptance" is that it isn't tolerance at all. It doesn't tolerate real difference or non-comformity. It merely seeks the expansion of conformity. And it has been my experience that actually makes life harder for non-comformists. Not easier.

I see the ELCA's struggle with homosexuality and in particular the ordination of clergy in open homosexual relationships. (Please note, I am generally supportive of what the ELCA is doing in this regard, since I believe it means we are open to God's call.) Liberals call this diversity, and maybe it is, but what it really means is that grounds of acceptable conformity have been expanded. You can be gay, and married, and still conform to the expected social norms since gay and married has been added to social norms. For the liberal (in general), since no one should be discriminated against for things they cannot control -- race, gender, and now sexual orientation -- certain expressions of these things are now part of allowable conformity. (So long as they are phlegmatic and bourgeois.)

But in a conformist society like Millman's Midwest, if we are all more or less the same, then we must all be more or less the same. Expanding the ground of allowable conformity actually makes things more difficult for non-conformists (of whatever kind, and this usually means people who are simply different) because in saying the society will now accept you for the things you cannot change, it will become less accepting of things you can (or should be able to) change: aesthetic choices, interests, outlook on life, so on. So, fail to conform to the expanded norm -- a big deal in a society that is averse to obvious hierarchy (midwesterners are extremely uncomfortable with me when I use sir and ma'am) -- is the fault of the one who fails to conform, and not of the society or community in which they find themselves.

Because this model of acceptance is not of individuals but of abstract groups of people into which individuals can be slotted. Midwesterners in general, and ELCA Lutherans in particular, love stereotyping. ("Tagging" as one pastor put it.) In fact, prior to being in this culture, I'd never been among people for whom stereotyping was such a virtue.

(I grew up in the 1970s -- stereotyping people was wrong. THAT'S what lead to discrimination and racism.)

At this point, I have to admit that I am not so interested in acceptance. I like tolerance. Can we build a community here and generally be left alone, to do what we have been called to do? Or leave people alone who want to be left alone? That to me is the high water mark of life in society. I am not so interested in equality as I am in liberty (both individual and collective), and I am perfectly okay with significantly more inequality and social unfairness than a lot of people in the ELCA simply because I focus on how much freedom there is for those who choose or feel called to not conform. And building community among like-minded non-conformists. (Which, yes, is itself a type of conformity. But this is why I really like Millman's city.)

My theological model for church is exile. I realize that is a difficult model for the ELCA to wrap it's heart around because it is a confession of settled people who don't see themselves as exiles and who don't think exile is a desirable or normative human condition. Which is funny, given that once, so many of them packed up and migrated -- Abraham-like -- to a land far away.  Most human beings wish to belong to a community of other human beings. I know I do. And I also know that here I've found a community that actually seems to want me in its midst. (Which, to be fair, was also true of the Saudi Muslims in knew in Columbus, Ohio.) But I also know the brutal and fiery result of the community's demand for conformity. No matter how egalitarian and accepting a community or society will be, someone will always find themselves on the wrong side of the demand to conform, who will be thrown underneath its wheels, who will always be wounded by it. Because it will be experienced as brutality. Or it will actually be brutal. (It was both for me.) I don't necessarily want to be accepted, or rather, I do not want to be made to fit into some great broad category that has been predetermined as "acceptable." I merely want the space to do what God has called me to do among the people God has called me.

Frankly, I want to be tolerated. And I don't think that's too much to ask.

After An Octave, I Certainly Wouldn't Complain

Okay, a brief refresher course on the long unused English Liquid Imperial Measurements. Ready, okay:

4 gills = 1 pint

2 pints = 1 quart

4 quarts = 1 gallon

9 gallons = 1 firkin (you knew that, right?)

18 gallons = 1 kilderkin 

36 gallons = 1 barrel (this is NOT the barrel used to measure crude oil, which is 42 gallons)

54 gallons = 1 hogshead (but pay attention, this is not always true)

72 gallons = 1 puncheon

108 gallons = 1 butt (two hogsheads are one butt ... there's an obscene joke in there somewhere)

216 gallons = 1 tun (two butts are a tun ... that too is an obscene joke)

1 gallon of wine = six quart bottles

1/4 cask = 13 dozen quart bottles

Octave (or 1/8 cask) = 6 and 1/2 dozen quart bottles

Which means that 

1 cask = 52 dozen bottles, or 624 bottles of wine

Which is an awful lot of wine. Enough to drown perhaps an entire brotherhood of monks for a week at least, depending on how many brothers there are how they hold their wine. And how stingy the abbot is.

But careful, because

1 Hogshead of wine = 43-46 gallons

(and just for fun, and to make sure you're paying attention)

1 Hogshead of rum = 45-50 gallons

Now that you have a passing familiarity with measurements that aren't used anymore, this little advert from the back of a 1946 issue of Blackfiars, the monthly journal of the English Dominicans:

Obviously, Albert H. Wetz was selling wine in staggering amounts. For communion, of course (wink wink), but I find myself wondering: who on earth would complain about communion wine not being strong enough? Or is there something going on in English Catholicism in the middle of the 20th century, perhaps a Great Weak Wine Crisis, the kind of wine that didn't give Father Marsh quite the nip and tuck he needed after a long Sunday of confession and baptizing and dominus vobiscum. And what is the highest strength of wine "permissible by Canon Law?" I suppose I ought to google that. Someday I will.

(Approbation is a good thing. No, I didn't know that, though it's fairly easy to ascertain from the context.)

Apparently, these folks still make and sell wine. I wonder if I can still get a firkin of the stuff. Sorry, an octave. That's still a lot of wine.

(And I'm going to write the nice people at Mt. Gay Rum and see if they sell rum by the hogshead. The proper rum hogshead, and not some piddly wine hogshead...)

Can You Feel the Love Tonight?

So, how does a 27-year-old man show that he is the father of a nation  -- and the figurative father -- of 24 million people?

Simple: you show him caring for those people in a very fatherly way.

This is Kim Jong Un from a Korean
Central News Agency photo describing his visit to Korean People's Army Air Force Unit 354. The news article that goes with this photo is the usual stuff you'd read from the KCNA about a visit of the Great Leader (any North Korean Great Leader) to any outpost of the state in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He observes with great interest, he takes part in a very personal way in how the soldiers live and train, he exhorts their commanders to take good care of the soldiers who in turn tell of their love for their leader and their country (pilots singing songs while they fly over Pyongyang), and finally he shows he cares for the soldiers themselves by (in this instance) making sure they have enough water in their bathhouse and that it is the right temperature (checking it "personally").

This is typical of all of the stories I've ever seen and Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

Now, I will not pretend I've made anything resembling an exhaustive study of North Korean propaganda. It's a hobby for me, and I'm an amateur. But what I never saw Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il photographed doing was what Kim Jong Un is doing in this photo -- hugging two air force officers.

No, he's not just hugging them. He's holding them. He's comforting them. My guess is the two men are weeping, expressing their gratitude. (Whether it is real or faked is a question for another time.) The KCNA story does not explain the photo, and does not caption it (at least it does not do so in English; it may do that in Korean). There is a tenderness communicated by the photo. Even Kim Jong Un knew (or was well-coached) on how to look for this photo. He's not quite the Virgin Mary with an all-knowing, all-caring and all-forgiving smile. But he is not bewildered either. He looks like a man who is comforting small children, and is slowly growing comfortable with that role.

This is, I think, an interesting way to construct an image of fatherly care for a young man who otherwise has no accomplishments of his own. Kim Il Sung could at least claim to have made the revolution and defeated the Americans in 1953. Kim Jong Il could at least claim to be Kim Il Sung's son, and co-ruler during the last decade of the elder Kim's life, who made North Korea a nuclear power and sent rockets into space. Both men could at least claim they were strong protectors. Kim Jong Un can claim ... well, not very much.

Except that he cares for his people.

Plus, It's Better Than Burning

I came across this recently while cataloging some bound periodicals in the seminary library. At first, I thought it ought to go on my other blog, Stuff Found in Library Books, because it is found in a library book. But this is actual content, not something that fell out when shaking to book or popped out when flipping pages. So, it goes here.

The Word is the magazine (now) of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese, the Arabic-speaking flavor of orthodoxy in the United States. (Jennifer and I have worshiped at St. George's in Cicero, and I love the liturgy in Arabic!) Once upon a time, it was published by the Syrian Orthodox Archdiocese, before some mergers created a bigger church. We have copies of The Word bound going back to 1957 or 1958, and I spent a little time wandering through them (I work too fast, my boss keeps telling me, and she trouble keeping up with me, even when I plow through 90 volumes of Roman Catholic periodicals). And I found this somewhat strange yet charming item in Father Buben's Question Box, an advice column, from February 1964:

What starts out as promising something a bit dour ends up as a charming invitation to the joys of married life. "[B]y all means, don't let her escape." This sounds like advice from a man who knows the joys of which he speaks.

Something else of note. It is interesting how important cotillions -- debutante balls -- were in Arab-American Christian communities in the 1950s and 1960s. Late spring was full of photos from Syriac churches across the country, from San Francisco to Brooklyn, featuring comely young dark-eyed lasses in their finery. Sometimes with an aged (but strangely smiling) orthodox bishop in his finery (which was usually more ornate than anything the women wore). By the early 1970s, however, the cotillion photos were gone. They still had lots of pictures of bishops and archbishops, however, and nary a one in a strapless cossack.

Wait, Palestine Has an Ambassador to North Korea?

There are places hierarchies send people because, well, they are out of the way and they are a good place to shove people who have caused trouble. Or they are such awful places to send people that those sent will get the message -- you have done wrong. Not so much wrong that the bosses are going to arrest you and send you to prison, or fire you, but just enough wrong to be sent to that very special place where wrongdoers are sent. Because that place is so awful, so miserable, so boring that the wrongdoer will do anything -- anything -- to get out of that place.

So, my question is this: What on earth did Ismail Ahmed Mohamed Hasan do to deserve being the Palestinian ambassador to North Korea? Or are there worse postings for an ambassador from Palestine?

And aren't those flowers lovely?

Pyongyang, January 19 (KCNA) -- The dear respected Kim Jong Un received a floral basket from Mahmoud Abbas, chief of the Palestinian National Authority, with the approach of the lunar New Year, Juche 101. 

The floral basket was handed over to an official concerned by Palestinian Ambassador to the DPRK Ismail Ahmed Mohamed Hasan on Thursday. -0-

About the term "floral basket." Kim Il Sung was constantly receiving floral baskets. As was Kim Jong Il. Not an issue of The People's Korea that I have from the late 1980s goes by without Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il receiving a floral basket from someone: the foreign minister of Mozambique, the president of Bangladesh, the chairman of the Juche Study Committee in Uruguay, the second-vice secretary of the Korean-Finnish Friendship Society. Floral baskets for the erstwhile leader of North Korea is a big news item. On North Korean holidays, such as the birthdays of Great Leaders and Dear Leaders, the list of floral basket senders would simply go on and on. There was probably not an uncut flower within 100 kilometers of Pyongyang. There must be something in Korean culture -- either the real culture or the invented mishmash that is the Juche Religion of the DPRK -- that gives status to the floral basket, or to the one receiving the floral basket. And funny, all those short little stories about floral baskets, and I'd never actually seen a picture of one. Until now.

Running a flower shop in Pyongyang would be a very lucrative business, all those flower baskets.  Well, it would be, if you could legally do business in North Korea.

(I will, at some point, dig into the box where I keep all those copies of The People's Korea that I have and go through them. It will be fun! It was something that got mailed to the San Francisco State University student newspaper, and no one else wanted them. All kinds of nonsense got mailed to our newspaper. Including a number of poorly made and horrifically racist rants by one Mark Margoian of Waukegan, Illinois. Which I kept, by the way. And if I'm feeling particularly daring, I'll dig those horrible things out too.)

The Very Strange Gift

This is what happened to Jacob on a dark night as he prepared to meet his estranged brother Esau in the desert:

22) The same night [Jacob] arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23) He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. 24) And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. 25) When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26) Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” 27) And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28) Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” 29) Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. 30) So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” 31) The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. (Genesis 32) * * * I have this gift. It's hard to explain, and I've not really done so previously, because I've never been sure how to. I also don't want to come off as conceited either. I'll try and describe it to the best of my ability. Because it's not the kind of thing that makes much sense. Even to me. (And I'm not purposefully trying to tug at heart strings with this and the previous blog entry. It's just where I am right now. Cavanaugh and Kim Jong Un can wait.) I listen. I listen well. I am extremely tolerant of the very odd. And the very marginal, especially the homeless. Homeless African American men seem to get this. Perhaps it is my physical size, and they assume I will not be afraid. But whatever the reason, I often find the homeless talking to me. On occasion, I will get whole life stories -- that happened once at the 55th St. Green line station, a man in the bus kiosk sat down next to me and just started telling me his life story. And we talked -- well, he did most of the talking, telling me how he was homeless but got off the streets into subsidized housing and how grateful he was for that, and then about his family life grown up in Chicago, and his mama, and all sorts of things. I get that a lot, life stories. For some reason, strangers seem to know that I can be trusted to listen. And I do listen. I even listen to the mentally ill. In fact, I try to especially listen to the mentally ill. When I was working for The Oil Daily in Washington, there was a homeless woman who would arrive (or was deposited) at the corner of 14th St. and New York Ave. Time and the elements had not been kind to her, and it was impossible to tell how old she was. But she always had nice clothes, and three very fat suitcases in very good condition. Wherever she slept, it appeared she was safe and warm. But she couldn't stay there. And so, she wandered the corners of 14th and New York, chain-smoking, having animated conversations with people who were not there, loud conversations about laser-beam eyeballs, the theft of souls, the Central Intelligence Agency and federal prison. (It was like listening in to one side of a phone conversation.) It was fascinating watching this woman function. She rarely stopped talking, and never seemed to engage in conversation in the "real" world. And yet, she was fully cognizant of the world around her -- she could get out of the way of things, navigate around people, handle coffee and lunch. She never begged, at least for nothing more than cigarettes. But always talking loudly about eyeballs and souls. And going to prison. Mental illness fascinates me. I think it says something interesting about God in whose image we are made. My wife Jennifer is dyslexic, quite severely. That is how God made her. It is not a disorder to be fixed. Her dyslexia, and what is very likely very mild Asperger's, are who she is. And this tells me something of the God in whose image she is made. Because she is whole. Complete. And so, the schizophrenic is whole and complete too. And in the image of God. So, our task is not to "fix" those who are "broken," but to make room for them with us in God's world. Because they too are created in the very image of God, and how they are made tells us something of the God whose image we are all made in. So, because I think because I am open to the encounter, in particular, with the mentally ill -- because I am not frightened by them -- I have been the recipient of a great deal of grace. Of life stories. It's only increased as I have done my seminary studies, learned what this being a pastor thing is really all about. Wear a clergy collar on the streets of some Chicago neighborhoods, and it's as if you are wearing a big blinking, neon advertisement for this kind of thing. Yeah, people will ask you for money. I take seriously Peter Maurin's admonition that meeting a beggar is meeting Jesus, and I always try to have something -- even a small blessing, even a silent prayer -- for someone who begs. But some will ask for more -- your time, your attention, your effort. And they may even give you something in return. I have received a lot of grace in these encounters. I have had to accept that they happen when I least expect them, when they are least convenient, when I am sometimes least prepared. And so, I have learned to be prepared. The oddest of these happened about a week-and-a-half ago, on a cold Monday evening. My friend, Sean Foley, was on an extended layover in town on his way to academic conference in Beirut (yes, THAT Beirut). We met to have coffee downtown, in the loop, and I put him back on the Blue Line to O'Hare. I had a Metra Electric train 10-trip ticket with one trip left on it, so rather than take the Green Line "L" back to Hyde Park, I decided to take the Metra. Which meant walking up Michigan Ave. to the underground station at Randolph and Michigan. So, as I was walking, a homeless African-American man came up to met just as I crossed Washington St. and asked me: "Will you pray for me and give me a blessing?" Now, he may have been asking passersby that question all afternoon. And who knows, maybe more than a few people prayed for him. But in all the years I have wandered streets and been accosted by the homeless, I'm usually asked for "spare change" or a hot meal. And not a prayer and a blessing. (Once, in Minneapolis, a drunken Indian thought I was John Candy...) Jennifer and I have been worshiping the last several years at an African-American Lutheran church on the West Side, Bethel Evangelical. And slowly, thanks largely to Pastor Albert Starr, Jr., I have been learning how to pray publicly. And so, I asked the man's name -- Philip -- and I took his hands, and I prayed. For a warm place to sleep. For a hot meal. For all those on the streets of Chicago, and everywhere else, who need those things. I prayed for bread from heaven, for the saving power of God, and I prayed for these "in the mighty name of Jesus." All the while, Philip would echo "amen!" and "yes, Jesus!" And then I blessed him. I made the sign of the cross on his forehead, blessing him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Telling him he was forever God's beloved child. And then I did so for his friend, and African-American woman in wheelchair whose name I wish I could remember but don't. He then asked me for $20. (Well, yeah, so what?) He smelled of cheap wine and swore whatever money I gave him was only for a place to stay. I gave him what I had, $5. And blessed him again. I long ago gave up worrying what people in need or who beg do with the money I give them. That's between them and God. Again, it could be that he'd asked everyone who passed by for a prayer and a blessing. Perhaps it was how he tried to get $20 out of people. But I don't think so. It's strikes me as a really bad ploy. Not many people walking about downtown Chicago have the time or energy for eye contact, much less an active prayer and blessing. So, maybe there is something about me. This kind of thing happens enough that I need to consider the possibility. As strange as it may be. But I have to admit, every time something like this happens to me, I am overwhelmed. It is overwhelming, this giving of God's grace in the world, this bearing the blessing of God to the world. I never quite know what to make of it all. Who am I that some people seem to see this in me? To ask -- no, demand -- a prayer and a blessing? Who am I that someone would ask this? And what is this gift I have that some people see this in me? Who am I?

The Only Promise Worth Having

I apologize for not updating the Cavanaugh book review. I got stuck this weekend in some personal doldrums and have not been able to sit down with chapters six and seven and work out a synopsis. And I didn't update Stuff Found in Library Books on Monday either. Same reason. I promise I will get to that Thursday.

Frankly, this blog has been something of an intellectual distraction from some things I have been dealing with for the last two years. I would really like to talk about it all, but I do not feel that I can at this point -- really, I just don't feel safe enough to do that. It's difficult and unpleasant and church related. It could more or less make the last six years of my life all for naught. I mean, not really -- nothing's ever wasted -- but it also could simply make it all pointless. And that's about as far as I'm willing to go with this.

So, this is a personal blog entry. And it's peripherally related to the above.

There's a homeless woman here in Hyde Park, I'll call her Shawna. I've seen her around, and gotten to know her, off and on since Jennifer and I arrived six years ago. Helped her out with a dollar or two, bought some toiletries for her when she was living in a halfway house. Mostly, though, I took the time to listen to her. At first, she did what a lot of street hustlers always try to do -- talk up that she was trying to get her life together. So that whatever I could give her would not be "wasted." But after a few encounters, our conversations became a little more human. She stopped trying to pretend she was getting her life together, and instead started talking about her hopes that her life could be put back together. Again, mostly I listen. I think that's the most important thing anyone can do for anyone. Especially someone lost on the street.

So, a couple of weeks ago, during our first big freeze, I ran across Shawna, trying to pilot her bicycle across an icy street.

"Good morning," I tell her. In my cheerful way that must puzzle and frighten some.

"No, it isn't," she responds, and then she tells me all about the difficulties she is having trying to find a warm place to stay. A warm, safe place to stay.

"Do you know what that is like?" she asks me.

"Only kind of. Not like you, but kind of." And I explain to her when Jennifer and I were homeless for a month in San Francisco many years ago. Because there were no jobs and we ran out of money and friends to help.

She nods and wonders if San Francisco really is a better place to be homeless -- no winter and all that. I respond that I really don't know.

And then she asks me: "Am I going to be okay?"

She starts to cry, and wonders what it was that she did that God should punish her the way God has. She relates some of the awful things in her past -- and they are awful. Then she stops to breathe, and looks at me.

I take a deep breath. "You're going to hate my answer. If by okay, you mean you'll have a place to sleep and food to eat, I don't know if you're going to be okay. I can't tell you that. I wish I could, but I can't. But I can tell you this: you have not been abandoned by God, even though it feels like it. You are not alone. I know it feels like it. I know you feel like God has left you, forgotten you, but God hasn't. God is with you. And that means no matter what, you are okay. I'm sorry, I can't give you a better answer than that. It's all I have. It's all I know. It's a terrible answer."

"No, that's a good answer," she says. "Thank you for being honest. And you're right, I know God is with me. It's hard, but I know it. Every day I wake up, I know God is with me."

She notes how icy the street is, and says to me she probably should walk her bike rather than ride it. And then she asks me: "Would you pray with me?"

So I take her hands, and we pray. I pray. She prays. On the sidewalk, in the cold, I call out to God, remembering God's care for God's people in the wilderness, remembering the times Jesus came among those who were sick and lame and cast out and his healing them and making them whole, and I demand -- as Israel demanded -- that God care for Shawna in the wilderness. As we prayed, our breath made little clouds that floated and evaporated in the air. She then asks me if I could help her out, and I give her what I have -- $8.

And then Shawna looks at me. "You do know what it's like."

"Only kind of." And I tell her a little bit about my current situation. How I've been studying to be a pastor, but have had some ... difficulties. Many I caused for myself. It has not been the easiest journey, and some people on this journey have been unwilling to get to know me, to really meet me, to know who I am.

"There are a few people who think I shouldn't be a pastor," I tell her. "And right now, they count more than others. I don't know what's going to happen. All I know is I have to trust God. It's all I have."

"Well," she said. "I know you should be a pastor. I just know it. Remember, God is with you too."

She blessed me. I blessed her. And we went our separate ways.

It's been strange, because at times when I have most needed some kind of reassurance that I am truly called to this, to be a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Shawna pops into my life. And she always manages, in our encounters, in her circumstances, to remind me that I am indeed called. Because there are times, given what I dealing with, that I need that reminding. It's hard to remember sometimes.

So, wherever you are Shawna, I hope that you have managed to stay warm. And safe. Because I look forward to meeting you again.

And I ever get ordained, I want you to be there.

On The Spot Guidance

Here is the Great Successor Kim Jong Un (do the North Koreans even call anymore comrade anymore?), the "Genius among the geniuses," talking with his minions from Acme about the bat-wing rocket sled and the anvil balloon and the best way to use iron birdseed and a powerful electromagnet to catch the roadrunner giving some kind of "on-the-spot guidance" (Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were always giving on-the-spot guidance to farmers and factory workers and soldiers and students) to a collection of North Korean soldiers.

I! Love! Those! Hats! No, those aren't hats, they're half-turbans! Perhaps they double as flotation devices. Maybe they work like frisbees, and allow North Korean soldiers to while away the time -- when they aren't singing songs in praise of the "Genius among the geniuses."

The Hollow, Empty Freedom of America

So, here I am, continuing with William Cavanaugh's Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. This review/synopsis will cover chapter four, which deals with the messianic nature of American nationalism.

Cavanaugh begins with a discussion of American exceptionalism, and he says there are two kinds -- one which is explicitly Christian, which sees America as the"New Israel," and the other, which is grounded heavily in the Enlightenment (especially in Kant and Hegel), which sees America as history's final meaning and end. America as history's telos. While the first kind of exceptionalism is explicitly theological, the second kind avoids theological language or biblical imagery "out of respect for the human conscience." (p. 93) For Cavanaugh, the American exceptionalism founded in Enlightenment philosophy is much more important than what he calls Judeo-Christian exceptionalism:

This kind of exceptionalism is based not on the particularism of the election of Israel by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but in the universalism of certain concepts of freedom and right. In the Enlightenment narrative, the tragedy of religious violence can only be solved by a recognition of the indeterminate nature of the truth about God, at least on a public level. It is this recognition that has given priority to the freedom to worship the god of one's choice, or not god at all. The priority of freedom to the good becomes not just a political theme but an economic one as well. The priority of freedom is embodied in democracy and free markets, which hold the key to the happiness of all. The nation that is the vehicle for this hope for the world is exceptional, therefore, not because it was chosen by a particular act of the biblical God but because it is based on something prior and more universal, the freedom of the human will. The United States is not a successor to a past "chosen people," but is, a Colin Powell has said, the first "universal nation," the first to break the bonds of particularity. (p. 92-93)

Two things are very important here. First is what Cavanaugh describes as "the priority of freedom." And the second is the universality of America as the ends of human history. Before I review Cavanaugh's deeper discussion of these two (especially what "the priority of freedom" really means), I need to note that Cavanaugh's great concern about the theologizing of the American state in an Enlightenment context makes America an "empty shrine," which can then be filled up by whatever content its various worshipers choose to fill it with. That, for some believers in the American civil religion, that is the whole point -- America itself is the thing that can be agreed upon. But Cavanaugh believes that explicit biblical exceptionalism actually puts America in the Bible story, and thus makes it accountable to something other than itself. Enlightenment exceptionalism has no means of accountability.

The deepest theological danger inherent in American exceptionalism, then, is that of the messiah nation that does not simply seek to follow God's will, but acts as a kind of substitute god on the state of history. When the concept of chosenness becomes unmoored from the biblical narrative, the danger is that the nation will not only be substitute church but substitute god. When the shrine is empties of the biblical God and replaced with the generic principle of transcendence, the danger is that we will not come to worship God but will worship our freedom to worship God. The empty shrine is surreptitiously filled. Our freedom itself becomes an idol, the one thing we will kill and die for. (p. 96)

From here, Cavanaugh begins a fairly thorough exploration of Roman Catholic theologian Stephen Webb's views on American nationalism as outlined in Webb's book American Providence, and finishes with a brief examination of German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (who influenced Leo Strauss). I mention this the way I do because I believe Cavanaugh focuses on Webb's book because Webb's book is reflective of how many American Christians have come to understand their place as Americans and their nation's place in history.

For Cavanaugh, Webb believes the following:

• God is active in history.
• The purpose of history is to open up the world in ways that allow human beings to choose Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.
• America is doing more than any other nation to make the opening possible. In fact, American government, society, institutions and capitalist economy are better ways of opening the world to the Jesus than all others.
• America in and of itself is universal freedom.
• But the point of the freedom to choose is the ability to choose Jesus, and nothing else.

Cavanaugh finds numerous problems with the approach, the foremost being there is no standard by which to judge American actions. "The danger is locating God's activity in America," Cavanaugh writes, "in that America itself becomes the criterion for locating God's activity in the world." (p. 99) According to Cavanaugh, there is no mention of what Jesus does in the Gospels -- no love of neighbor, no healing, no reconciling, nothing.

But most importantly, no cross. And no resurrection. Cavanaugh states that "Webb explicitly rejects the idea of reading history from the underside, that is, from the point of view of the poor majority of the world's population." (p. 99) They do not matter. They are not actors in history. For Webb, the poor are recipients of God's grace, but only because they exist for the "nonpoor" (Cavanaugh quotes Webb) to engage in acts of charity. Charity itself is good, but achieves nothing a grand scale. Only governments and nation-states can do that. (Webb very much espouses a theology of glory.)

Cavanaugh also states that Webb has no room for the church as God's agent in history. Salvation is for the world and for individuals, but there is no church. And thus, no way to embody the grace of God collectively and in community, and to speak the judgment of God, since the only actor in Webb's history that matters is the United States of America, which embodies God's will for humanity in the here and now.

Finally, Cavanaugh deals briefly with German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt (who figures in the last chapter of Webb's book). For Cavanaugh, Schmitt is important because of his belief that sovereignty is the power that decides the exception. Because of this, the sovereign cannot always be subject to the law. The purpose of politics is to decide who is a friend of the nation and who is an enemy. For Schmitt, the church has no business telling the state how to use this power. Webb goes even farther, and states (according to Cavanaugh) that attempts by the church to tell the state how to act in this regard is an attempt to exclude God from history. (!!!!) As Cavanaugh notes:

The problem, in my view, is that the political presence of the biblical God is mediated through the official discourse of America, and not through a distinctively Christian body that stands under the explicit authority of Jesus Christ. The church as mediator between God and America -- a church that has the critical distance to pronounce judgment as well as blessing -- is in danger of being erased. What has happened in effect is that America has become the new church. When the relationship of America and God is this direct, there is little to check the identification of Gods' will with America's. America is God's people, the bearer of God's salvation to the world. ... Without the irritant of the body of Christ, the body politic is free once again to divinize the political authority, to transfer the sovereignty of God to the sovereign state. (p.104-105) 

Cavanaugh then concludes the chapter with a brief discussion of Israel's sovereignty in scripture, noting that Israel was more a people than a polity. For most of its history, it was intertwined with enemies and truly sovereign, or was conquered and administered by foreigners. This is a point that I have long focused on, and have concluded from the scriptural narrative of Israel's history that God does not intend for God's people to be a polity, but rather, to be subject to polities while at the same time interacting with them. Cavanaugh also focuses on Paul's description of the church as a grafting on to Israel, the opening up of Israel to all humanity, so that God's chosenness may include all people.

I think Cavanaugh's discussion of Webb contributes something important. Again, Webb is not crafting or creating an idea, but rather is reflecting a reality -- this, I believe, is how many American Christians already view the American state. It is primarily a conservative view, and one very focused on the military and war making, but I believe this view -- that the important actor in history is the United States of America -- is also one held by more than a few liberal Christians as well. 

It also explains an interesting understanding of "freedom" current on the right. As someone with libertarian tendencies, I've always found the conservative belief in "freedom" to be somewhat at odds with how conservatives actually act. Freedom is not a thing to use in any meaningful way. It seems like it's a hollow, empty freedom, this freedom that Lee Greenwood sings about. What good is it if it's not used? But it's not supposed to be used, this "freedom," because this "freedom" itself is the end of human existence, and that end is embodied in the United States of America. It explains, I think, why someone like Rick Santorum can speak of freedom on the one hand, and restricting human action on the other. The freedom he speaks of is not the freedom to act without harming others, but the very purpose and meaning of history. That is why the "priority of freedom" is so important.

In effect, many conservative American Christians are mystical nationalists, and not really Christians at all.

Chapter five is a short chapter on how to do penance for the inquisition, and I probably will not deal with it. And so, I will lump chapters six and seven together, which deal with the liturgy of American nationalism and the church as a political entity.

On Democracy, Technocrats and Temporary Autocrats

This is why I like the London Review of Books. This piece, about the debt crisis in Europe, is one of the most cogent defenses of democracy as a form of government that I have ever read. Runciman says it's best attribute is that it is more flexible than non-democratic forms of government, and that in times of crises, democrats can experiment in with temporary autocracy in ways that autocrats can never experiment with temporary democracy. And I'll buy that. He also writes:

What no one can know is what happens when relatively wealthy democracies suddenly and permanently become a great deal poorer, even if they don’t fall below the threshold of doom. There are simply not enough examples of this happening to be confident of the outcome. In those circumstances, do temporary autocrats give their power back? Well, you might say, we’re going to find out. But that’s another puzzle about the current European crisis: power hasn’t actually been handed over to temporary autocrats. It’s been given to technocrats, which is different. The assumption is that experts’ superior knowledge gives them the right to take decisions, and ensures that people will abide by those decisions.  

Yet we live in an age which is deeply suspicious of experts, particularly of the kind currently trying to sort out the mess in Greece and Italy: economic experts, drawn from the world of banking. The past few years have not been a good advertisement for their particular brand of superior knowledge. Moreover, in democracies, the problem does not tend to be a lack of knowledge. These bankers were not having their views suppressed by the regimes they have replaced; they were simply not being listened to in the way they would have liked. The problem for democracies in a crisis is not that no one knows what to do, it’s that no one knows how to get other people to do what they are told.

Runciman also writes about what he calls Western fatalism -- "the belief that we can know how things will turn out, because the scientific order of the world follows regular patterns." The battle in the West over how to deal with the financial crisis is between optimists, who think things will be okay in the end, and pessimists, who believe we are finally getting our comeuppance. But as Runciman notes, almost no one (at least no one legitimate, and certainly not me; I may not like democratic governance much, but I accept there are no viable alternatives in modernity) is advocating for another kind of political or economic system to deal with what he calls the first major democratic crisis of the post-cold war world. And it likely won't be solved:

We want the system we’ve got, because we know it’s the least bad one on offer. In the past, democracies in crisis have always had to fear being swept away by some plausible ideological alternative. The current argument between the optimists and the pessimists has all the hallmarks of an ideological dispute but without any of the content. We don’t have an alternative. The fear is that the political system we’ve relied on in the past might not be up to the task at hand, but it’s the only one we’ve got. You’d think that would make it easier for us to fix it. My fear is that it’s going to make it harder. It makes it more likely that we will drift along with our fate, and into the unknown.

Me? I don't know if I'm an optimist or a pessimist. Probably a little bit of both, mostly because muddling along into the unknown is what people do. It is what we have always done.

Migrant, Tourist, Pilgrim, Monk

That's the title of Cavanaugh's third chapter of Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church, and it's a brief exploration of Christian identity in the world globalization and nation-states. I'm always leery of discussions of identity. Not because such conversations aren't important, but because words and ideas can be used to convey more than the actual reality does.

Nonetheless, this is a book about being church. That's a question of identity. And this chapter is important, if somewhat limited.

Cavanaugh first looks at migrants and tourists, two types of people he sees as prime types in globalized modernity. The migrant is stateless and sees the world from the bottom. The tourist is cosmopolitan -- a pretend stateless person -- who sees the world from the top. More than describing such people, Cavanaugh says these types (he admits they are stereotypes, but drawn from reality) perform an important function for the modern nation-state. In talking about the U.S.-Mexico border (though he could be talking about any international boundary crossed by people legally and illegally seeking work), he writes:

The purpose of the border is not simply to exclude immigrants but to define them, to give them an identity. That identity is a liminal identity, an identity that straddles the border and defines a person as being neither here nor there. (p. 74)

Again, I don't want to give too much weight to these words, but despite being an American, I have a somewhat different experience of borders and work, having twice crossed international frontiers (both times legally, though in the case of Saudi Arabia, my stay was long enough to become an illegal one) looking for work. There's a fair amount to this assertion of his, and that people without rights as nationals -- or nationals of the nation-state they inhabit -- are important in globalization. However, it does put the lie to one of Cavanaugh's earlier statements that in a globalized world, capital moves while labor doesn't. Clearly labor does. It just doesn't do so easily, or often as legally as it could.

And then he begins to wander into what I think could be an interesting discussion if he kept it up. Which he doesn't:

The modern nation-state was born of the attempt to protect the rights of humans as humans. The Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 declared all human life as such to be the subject of rights. As Giorgio Agamben points out, however, the more "life" became the subject of rights--that is, the more life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, health, the satisfaction of human needs, and so on, became the subject of rights--the more "life" became inscribed into the political order and brought under sovereign control. This process is completed when state sovereignty becomes linked to the nation (from nascere, to be born). Political life in the nation-state is not derived from the conscious and free subject, but from the bare fact of birth. The key political question now takes the form "Who is German?" or "Who is American?" and more pointedly "Who is not?" Migrants and refugees challenge the link between nativity and citizenship. The nation-state may choose to confer citizen status on some migrants and refugees. Unless that takes places, however, migrants retain a liminal status. The person without a nation-state is what Agamben calls "bare life," whose biological needs may be attended to by humanitarian relief efforts, but whose full identity as the bearer of rights is constantly held in question. (p. 74-75)

Two things pop out from this passage. The first is the expansion of rights necessitated the expansion of state power. For example, if suddenly the U.S. Constitution were amended to grant all Americans the right to a free lunch, the state would have to act to make sure those rights could be realized. More rights for individuals requires more state power.

The second, for me, is how citizenship/nationality have become in the nation-state what baptism was in Christendom. An accident, the result of being born in a particular place amidst a particular group of people. The United Nations has as one of its fundamental rights the right to nationality, that no one in theory can be without it. Because, as Cavanaugh notes here, civic and social -- and even human -- rights all flow from holding nationality. But why can't I choose my nationality? Or, more importantly, why can't I choose to have none at all? I can renounce my U.S. citizenship, but it is a meaningless gesture, since I'm still subject to U.S. law and taxes as long as I reside in the U.S. Statelessness is not a real option in a world of nation-states, at least not a voluntary one. And the only real choice is to obtain some other nation's citizenship or nationality. And I'm not rich enough to do that easily.

Back to Cavanaugh. His ideal Christian type in the world of nation-states is the pilgrim. That's important for him because Constantinianism gave Christians the illusions that we are a truly settled people, that the world and its arrangement seem more permanent than they truly are. He's a little too enamored of globalization, spends a little too much time quoting from newspaper and magazine articles on economics and politics, but in the end, I think he's right to want this is our primary identity:

To embrace the identity of pilgrim now is first of all to embrace a certain kind of mobility in the context of globalization. The church has been unmoored and should joyfully take leave of the settledness of Constantinian social arrangements that gave it privilege and power. To accept our status as pilgrims on our way back to God is, as Augustine saw, to accept the provisional nature of human government. Our status as pilgrims makes clear that our primary identity is not what is defined for us by national borders. The pilgrim seeks to transgress all artificial borders that impede the quest for communion with God and with other people. 

Loyalty to the nation-state is not eclipsed by a simple cosmopolitanism, however, for like the migrant and unlike the tourist, the pilgrim travels on foot and does not enjoy a commanding view of the globe from above. Again, humility is the key virtue of the pilgrim. A church that desires to be a pilgrim does not claim the power to treat every location as interchangeable and impose global solutions on the world. As it was before, pilgrimage today in a kenotic moment. The church on the periphery finds itself in solidarity with the migrant and with other people whose identity is liminal. The pilgrim church is itself a liminal reality, occupying the border between heaven and earth. The term peregrinus, from which "pilgrim" is derived, recognizes this liminal status: the meaning of the term in Latin includes foreigner, wanderer, exile, alien, traveler, newcomer, and stranger. Like the Israelites, whose care for the alien and poor was motivated by their own remembrance of their own slavery and wandering, the pilgrim church is to find its identity in solidarity with the migrant who travels out of necessity, not in order to transcend all necessity. (p. 82)

In his brief discussion of monks, Cavanaugh talks a bit about settledness. Citing St. Benedict's orders for monasteries, Cavanaugh writes that the only real purpose of settledness is to be able to greet the stranger and wanderer properly. Only in the settled community can the kind of obedience necessary to truly "enter communion with God and with others" because this process takes a great deal of time. And only in settled communities can the kind of human relationships exist that truly create and sustain communities. Not the imagined and mediated relationships of citizenship in a nation-state of 300 million people, but real relationships on the human scale of congregation, town and neighborhood.

But Cavanaugh is clear -- the point of the settled life, of creating the settled community, is to welcome and stranger and care for the wanderer. One way of living is not better than the other, nor more desired than the other. (I would add, at this point, that both ways of living are callings. The host cannot be without the guest.) Both need each other to fully live out their callings as people of God. Cavanaugh ends the chapter this way:

Following Jesus on our pilgrimage through this world clearly relativizes any national borders that define some people as "illegal." Their primary identity is bestowed by Christ; it is Christ we welcome when we welcome the stranger. This position put the church at the margins of the law and at the margins of any national identity. Before we are Americans, we are Christians. But that marginality is accompanied by a rootedness in the concrete needs of a particular people, a rootedness that stands as the basis for hospitality to the migrant poor. The church should respond to globalism by enacting a more truly global story of all things made one in Christ. At the same time, the identity of the universal Christ is found in the one lonely migrant who knocks at the door, looking for rest. (p. 87)

Okay, from here, it is on to chapter four, which is all about the messianic nature of American nationalism.

One City, Or Two?

Okay, I will continue with the review of Cavanaugh's book, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. It looks like I'll probably do this one chapter at a time.

Cavanaugh (who is listed on the back of the book as "a senior research professor at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology and professor at DePaul University," so it is probably safe to assume he is a Roman Catholic, though he may not be) begins chapter two speaking about unity. In particular, the Christian desire for unity and what that unity becomes "when the longing for participation in God and the eschatological framework is lost." Cavanaugh writes:

In Christian thought, the gathering of the many into one is not accomplished by an act of binding one to another. In the body of Christ, the many are gathered into one by means of each one's participation in the head of the body, who is Christ. [Come on Lutherans, how is this done? BAPTISM! Thank you.] The body of Christ has a transcendent reference, which, according to Paul, allows for diversity within unity (1 Cor. 12), since the interval between each one and God allows for a diversity of ways of participation within God's life. (p. 47)

At this point, I'd add, or say, that the reality of the call of diverse people with diverse talents and so forth is proof itself of the diversity within unity of the church. But no matter, let's let Cavanaugh continue:

How will a modern liberal nation-state resolve the question of the one and the many in the body if participation in Christ is no longer the common goal? Liberalism is said to allow for a greater pluralism of ends: there are no longer two cities--the followers of Christ and the "world"-- but one city with a diversity of individuals, each with the freedom to choose his or her own ends, whether to worship no god, one god, or twenty. But the longing for unity persists, along with the fear that diversity will produce conflict and tear the body politics apart. In the absence of a transcendent telos, plurality is not simply a promise but a threat, one that must be met by an even greater pull toward unity. But what could be the source of unity in a nation-state of diverse ends without a transcendent reference to participation in any single god? It can only be that the nation-state becomes and end in itself, a kind of transcendent reference needed to bind the many to each other. (p. 47)

At this point, Cavanaugh's theocentrism -- and unadulterated Christian view -- becomes clear. No doubt there are philosophers, religious and secular, who would square this circle without any reference to God (and who would even argue the need for a transcendent meaning in organized human communities) or Christ. I will grant that. But I do believe Cavanaugh is correct here, however, when he posits that the nation-state has become its own transcendent meaning absent other meaning with the ability to compel or coerce adherence. This is especially true in the American context.

Cavanaugh then harshly examines the views of Martin Marty, describing Marty as believing there is only one public square in America, and too close an adherence to specific religion (such as the Jehovah's Witnesses) create a dual loyalty that endangers the public square. In the liberal state, the state comes first, creating space where many voices -- secular and religious -- can speak and contribute to the common good. But for Marty, pluralism requires surrendering some of religion's truth claims to the state, in order for a civil civic space to exist:

The basic assumption is that the nation-state is one city, within which there is a division of goods and a division of labor, and these follow certain well-worn binaries: civil society and state, sacred and secular, eternal and temporal, religion and politics, church and state. (p. 49)

And the discussion of these things is neither reasoned nor reasonable as John Courtney Murray would have it. Pluralism is an insoluble problem and in the American context has found its solution in the nation-state itself:

The nation-state is made stronger by the absence of shared ends, and the absence indeed of any rational basis on which to argue about those ends. In the absence of shared ends, devotion to the nation-state as an and in itself becomes more urgent. The nation-state needs the constant crisis of pluralism in order to enact the unum. Indeed, the constant threat of disorder is crucial to any state that defines its indispensability in terms of the security it offers. Pluralism will always be a crisis for the liberal state, and the solution to the crisis is to rally around the nation-state, the locus of a mystical communion that rescues us from the conflict of civil society. (p. 53)

In casting itself as "one people," the leaders of the nation-state must always disguise the "sinister reality" of what it is the state does -- and the primary sinister reality is that violence, Cavanaugh writes. In fact, Cavanaugh goes as far to describe the American attachment to war as a kind of blood sacrifice to and of American nationalism (which itself has religious qualities). Religion is dangerous, Cavanaugh writes, because it challenges the primary loyalties to the nation-state itself and encourages more specific loyalties:

"Religion" in public is dangerous because it tries to impose unity on plurality. At the same time, however, religious and lethal devotion to the unity of the nation-state itself is assumed to be a normal part of one's civic duties. Plurality is desirable only at the level of civil society and only as long as it does not interfere with the sacred duty to stand together at the level of the state. There is only one temporal city. The church may jealously guard its sacred space within that city, but it may not demur from the state's monopoly on violence. (p. 55)

At this point, Cavanaugh wanders into territory first explored by Augustine. Are there two cities, a City of God and a City of Man, or is there only one city? Cavanaugh states the problem is one of space -- both the City of God and the City of Man are seen to share the same space. How to divvy that space up, to delineate it? The Constantinian solution was to have the church use the state to rule the city. The solution proposed by Martin Marty is for the church to place itself "within the city but outside the state" because it's the state's job to rule the city. And so, we moderns examine the matter by trying to figure out how the two -- the church and the state -- share the city. Because there's only one city.

But what if there isn't only one city? Cavanaugh writes:

Augustine has no theory of church and state, no spatial carving up of one society into spheres on influence. There is no sense that there is a single public square in which the church must find its place. Augustine complexifies space by arguing that the church itself is a kind of public; indeed, it is the most fully public community. The city of God has to do with ordering matters that are considered public, because the city of God makes use of the same temporal goods as does the earthly city, but in different ways and for different ends. There is no division between earthly goods and heavenly goods, secular and sacred; there is no sphere of activities that is the peculiar responsibility of the earthly city. The city of God, therefore, is not a part of the larger whole, but is a public in its own right. (p. 57)

The people living in the earthly city do share an end -- love of self and the contempt of God. And the unity created in the earthly city is not a real unity, "but a false order, a restraint of vice through vice." The city of God exists within the earthly city as a mere wanderer, using that city's order to its benefit as the church continues its journey through the world.

Cavanaugh writes that Augustine doesn't so much place the two cities in space, rather he places them in time:

The reason Augustine is compelled to speak of two cities is not because there are some human pursuits that are properly terrestrial and others pertain to God, but simply because God saves in time. Salvation has history, whose climax is in the advent of Jesus Christ, but whose definitive closure remains for the future. Christ has triumphed over the principalities and power, but there remains resistance to Christ's saving action. The two cities are not the sacred and the profane spheres of life. The two cities are the already and the not yet of the kingdom of God. (p. 59-60)

The church is a witness to the already in the midst of the not yet. The church is the witness to the triumph of Christ in the midst of the brokenness of humanity. The church is eternal, the nation-state is temporary. It has already met its end in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has reconciled the entirety of God's creation. The crucifixion is an act in the not yet, but the resurrection (to which we are all joined in baptism!) is the already, and the already is what is truly real. The not yet is still apparent, but it has no permanent meaning in the face of the already. Cavanaugh also describes the two cities as "performances" -- they are verbs rather than nouns -- without clearly defined boundaries:

The task of the church is to interrupt the violent tragedy of the earthly city with the comedy of redemption, to build the city of God, beside which the earthly city appears not to be a city at all. (p. 63).

And so onward, to chapter three.

Killing for the Telephone Company

I often peruse the new books section at the JKM Library, and despite our current impoverished condition (there are frequent claims we don't really acquire new books anymore), I'm always relatively impressed by the new volumes on those shelves. Maybe there'd be more if the seminary's (and library's) financial situations were different. But if I see something interesting, I usually pick it up and try reading it (and with Amos Yong, don't have much success, since the book itself is too unpleasantly written to read).

But then I spied William T. Cavanaugh's Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. I make no pretense of the fact that the issue that drives me theologically, morally and ethically is that of the relationship between Church and state and Christian and state. It's really the only thing I can get passionate about (as friends who know me and have grown frustrated by my single-mindedness can attest to). And I do so from a very critical standpoint, one that questions the very moral foundations of the state as an entity. Which is why I am so happy to have found Cavanaugh's book. Where was it eight weeks ago when I so desperately needed it?

I have just finished the first chapter, "Killing for the Telephone Company": Why the Nation-State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good. It's an essay I've quoted from before.

Cavanaugh's thesis is simple: the state is not an organic development arising from the needs of the human community, but rather the product of deliberate conquest and the simplification of social space. And, as the subtitle of his chapter notes, the state is not a reflection of any kind of common good (or even any single entity called society, which doesn't pre-exist the state), but rather a very specific good arising out of the claims to monopoly power first exercised by absolute monarchs in the 17th century:

According to [Joseph R.] Strayer [author of On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State], the development of regularized systems of revenue extraction and accounting, law courts, and assemblies were undertaken with reference to its advantages for particular parties [italics mine, CHF], namely the royal household and the properties classes, and without reference to anything like a common good. The common people came into the purview of the emerging bureaucracy almost exclusively as a resource for revenue extraction. At the same time, the very definition of what is "common" had begun a gradual transformation. The centralization of royal power involved a transfer of rights from local bodies that had previously been the primary recipients of communal life. Legal right and the administration of justice as not created by royal power but was usurped from manorial lords, churches, and communities. If Strayer is accurate, this process took place to serve the particular interests of dominant groups, and not as the expansion of common space. (p. 13)

War is the primary means by which state power is truly expanded, and states made war in order to expand power -- not only against other emerging states, but also against the people they governed. Cavanaugh points out the greatest expansion of domestic, non-war related state power and spending in the United States coincides with both World Wars (he could have added the War of Confederate Independence from 1861-1865, the war in Southeast Asia, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Cavanaugh also states that, contrary to the ideas of the Burkeans and others, the state is not created by "civil society." Rather, unitary civil society is the creation of the state. The great English-language theorists of the state, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, both saw the state as acts of will which individuals surrender to and contract with. Both also saw the state's sovereign will as absolute -- there could be no competing wills. Cavanaugh writes of Hobbes:

In his view, the state is not enacted to realize a common good or common telos [end or meaning], but rather to liberate the individual to pursue his or her own ends without fear of interference from other individuals. In the peculiar new space created by the state, the individual members do not depend on one another; rather, they are connected only through the sovereign--as spokes are to the hub of a wheel. (p. 20)

For Locke, political space has only two poles: the individual and the state:

The state is enacted immediately from the needs of the solitary individual to protect his person and possessions. The world belongs to all humankind in common, but it is quickly withdrawn from the common by human labor. (p. 21)

According to Cavanaugh, the 16th and 17th century theories of sovereignty -- the ones that more or less still hold sway in our world today -- "do not yield much in the way of the common good." They are founded on the individual (and this is also true of 19th and 20th century collectivist understandings as well, which is why ideological opposition to individualism on the left almost always becomes a kind-of nihilistic collectivism which continues to advance state power) that sees the only basis of individual cooperation as "the contracts" in which the state mediates between interests and wills. In this, Cavanaugh writes:

The body politic does not pursue a common good, but instead seeks to liberate the individual to pursue his or her own ends. ... [S]overeignty is not there mere gathering of the many into one, but the creation of sovereign individuals related through the sovereign state. (p. 23)

This is problematic for many libertarians. For if the goal is the expansion of individual liberty, then the maximization of that liberty involves destroying anything that could interfere with that liberty. Any intermediary institutions that can protect people can also stand in their way. Thus, the expansion of individual liberty as commonly understood also requires the expansion of state power as a way of destroying anything that might have a separate identity from the state. So, whatever civil society there is exists to serve the state and its ends. For example, the church is domesticated and privatized.

This is why the language of rights -- civil rights, human rights -- are so important to the expansion of state power:

The rise of rights language goes hand in hand with the rise of the nation-state, because political and civil rights name both the freeing of the individual from traditional types of community and the establishment of regular relationships of power between the individual and the state. Marx was wrong to dismiss rights as a mere ruse to protect the claims of the bourgeois classes. Nevertheless, individual rights do greatly expand the scope of the state because political and civil rights establish binding relationships between the nation-state and those who look to vindicate their claims. The nation-state becomes something of a central, bureaucratic clearinghouse in which social claims are contested. The nation-state is fully realized when sacrifice on behalf of the nation is combined with claims made on the state on the basis of rights. (p. 36)

This is a theological book, and in this Chapter, it appears Cavanaugh is laying the foundation for what he believes the church (for like John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas before him, is speaking only to the church) should do as it thinks and acts in the context of the nation-state. For Cavanaugh notes that the nation-state presents itself as:

... the keeper of the common and repository of sacred values, so that it demands sacrifice on its behalf. The longing for true communion that Christians recognize at the heart of any true common life is transferred onto the nation-state. Civic virtue and the goods of common life do not simply disappear: as Augustine perceived, the earthly city flourishes by producing a distorted image of the heavenly city. That nation-state is a simulacrum of the common life, where falls order is parasitical on true order. In a bureaucratic order whose main function to adjudicate struggles for power between various factions, a sense of unity is produced by the only means possible: sacrifice to false gods in war. The nation-state may be understood theologically as a kind of parody of the church, meant to save us from division. 

The urgent task of the church, then, is to demystify the nation-state and to treat it like the telephone company. At best, the nation-state may provide goods and services that contribute to a certain limited order; mail delivery, for example, is a positive good. The state is not the keeper of the common good, however, and we need to adjust our expectations accordingly. The church must break its imagination out of captivity to the nation-state; it must constitute itself as an alternative social space, and not simply rely on the nation-state to be its social presence; the church must, at every opportunity, "complexity" space, that is promote the creation of spaces in which alternative economies and authorities flourish. (p. 42)

I do not know Cavanugh's religious affiliation. He cites Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novum and Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno -- and the whole of Catholic social teaching, which tends to look to an idealized middle ages as a way of creating structures that will protect people and look after them -- positively. And he cites a story told by political scientist Michael Budde about the unwillingness of the a group of Roman Catholic bishops in an unnamed state to conceive of a way of dealing with poverty that was more than lobbying legislators as an example of the church's failure to see itself as creating "authentically common spaces among the haves and the have nots."

For Cavanaugh, the failure is primarily one of imagination, a failure which careens across political lines from liberal Christians who see in the welfare state something of the Kingdom of God and in conservatives who see in the United States of America (and its wars) something of God acting deliberately and purposefully in history:

In seeing the nation-state as responsible for the common good, the church mutes its own voice in such crucial matters as war and peace, and it is pushed to the margins. Just-war reasoning becomes a tool of statecraft, most commonly used by the state to justify war, rather than a moral discipline for the church to grapple with the questions of violence. The church itself becomes one more withering "intermediate association" whose moral reasoning and moral formation are increasingly colonized by the nation-state and the market. To resist, the church must at the very least reclaim its authority to judge if and when Christians may kill, and not abdicate authority to the nation-state. To do so would be to create an alternative authority and space that does not simply mediate between state and individual. (p. 44-45)

It is early yet, and I do not quite see where the book is going. So I'll keep my comments short here. First, those of us who believe as Cavanaugh advocates -- and I am one -- will have our work cut out for us, especially in very statist confessions like the Lutheran churches of North America. Lutherans have in their confessional DNA the belief and expectation that church, people and polity will be one in the same. (It is our heritage.) The northern European understanding of the nation-state is much more "organic" than the English understanding (though no less false), and thus the idea that the church serves the state and the state rules the community bounded by the church in which all share culture, faith, language and telos (which is more or less true in northern Europe and Scandinavia) does not lend itself easily to Cavanaugh's subsidiarity. This is especially true under the progressive church's preferred ruling ideal, multiculturalism, which just as intolerant as any other form of assimilationism, demanding the complete surrender of any alternative claims of explaining and structuring society and seeking the power of the state to enforce its claims.

Cavanaugh also says the church is different. A claim we can make as believers but one we cannot "prove" to the satisfaction of non-believers. It will also be interesting to see where Cavanaugh takes language like this:

Salvation history is not a particular subset of human history; it is simply the story of God's rule, not yet completely legible, over all of history. (p. 45)

Such language, when used sloppily (or deliberately), can justify all kinds of things. One of the reasons I don't break bread with the religious left is that such language seems to be an excuse to use state power and wield it illiberally. But also because Cavanaugh is right. There really is no common good in the nation-state. At least there's no common good separate from the specific exercise of power for specific advantage.

But the truth it, the medieval world cannot be reclaimed is simply because modernity won't allow for it. And by that, we who are moderns simply don't live in a world where medieval organization or arrangements can or will make any sense. We live in a world of the individual. So, if I have to choose between nihilistic individualism and nihilistic collectivism (and I believe that is the only real organizational choice modernity gives us), that's an easy choice -- nihilistic individualism. Because at least there's space within that to work with others and make something different.

But Isn't That The People's Job?

I've noticed some heartburn in the West from the New Year's message delivered by the Korean Central News Agency (there's no permalink, click on the article "Joint New Year Editorial):

We must develop our single-minded unity without interruption into the solidest one which is carried forward generation after generation. Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader of our Party and our people, is the banner of victory and glory of Songun Korea and the eternal centre of its unity. The dear respected Kim Jong Un is precisely the great Kim Jong Il. The whole Party, the entire army and all the people should possess a firm conviction that they will become human bulwarks and human shields in defending Kim Jong Un unto death, and follow the great Party for ever. [Emphasis added - CHF] We must become true persons who keep pace with their leader and his true comrades who work untiringly to creditably realize his intentions however hard the times are.

I'm not entirely sure what the heartburn is about. Isn't this what all governments, more or less, demand of the people they govern? That they become "human bulwarks and human shields" defending the state and its leadership, which never puts itself or its members at risk?

I mean, I know we live in an era in which this kind of sacrifice for the state is passé. Which is why in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, George W. Bush asked not for sacrifice, or commitment, but rather told Americans to "go shopping," visit Disney World and "enjoy life." Clearly, the sacrifice was for a small group of others to make. The war would not even get paid for by raising taxes (which is, to be honest, what governments ought to do in wartime to cover expenses, if for no other reason then to show people that war is burden to bear and ought not to be a permanent condition). Clearly, Bush would not openly ask Americans to be a bulwark and a shield for his leadership. No Western leader in our consumerist age would. Or could.

Americans are very lucky, right now. The United States can wage war almost with impunity. There is little cost and little risk. Our capital-intensive form of war needs fewer and fewer bodies (the age of the mass armies has passed as has the age of the mass factory and the mass office and even the mass media), and thus does not need to conscript anyone. Those we attack are weak and far away, and possess no ability to retaliate in an effective manner. And so no American leader need demand that Americans be "human bulwarks and human shields" against some enemy, real or imagined.

But aren't we anyway? I can imagine that American leaders would, if the need arose, toss away the lives of the people they govern without any thought. A day will come -- I believe this fully -- when American planes will bomb a people who can and will fight back. Effectively. We have for so long fought that weak that we have no idea what it is to fight the strong and the resolved. I do not know when that day will come, or who those people will be, but between our decaying power and our righteous (but terribly misguided) certainty that we are history's meaning and direction, I believe it will come.

And then you watch. The demand will be made that we be bulwarks and shields. It will come.

Officers and Their Hats

I remember when I was in Panama, and how tall the hats that the soldiers of the once-upon-a Panamanian Defense Forces were. Lots of armies in Latin America had soldiers wear tall hats like this:

Is that a very tall you're wearing, or are you just happy to see me?

But I've never seen any army whose generals and officers wear hats quite as giant as those of the Korean People's Army. Those aren't hats, they are giant soup bowls with brims. They are almost sombreros. I wish I knew where the style came from, because I don't think Soviet Army officers wore giant mixing bowl hats. I don't think anyone's army officers wore hats quite that big.

"For those moments between the passage of the black 1977 Lincolns bearing giant portraits of the Late Dear Leader, we have hidden in our hats chips, salsa, guacamole, and gooey cheese-food product dip. Because the Great Successor must keep his strength up!"