The Featherblog

Intolerance and Egalitarianism: A Follow Up

2012-01-28T07:12:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-27T09:59:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-27T08:47:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-25T18:15:00.000-06:00

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?

2012-01-24T07:59:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-21T16:42:00.000-06:00

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?

2012-01-20T23:08:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-18T22:24:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-18T19:14:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-10T16:38:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-08T19:08:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-07T14:08:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-07T09:34:00.001-06:00

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?

2012-01-06T17:57:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-06T09:26:00.002-06:00

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?

2012-01-02T08:42:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-01T22:33:00.000-06:00

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!"

Predictions for 2012 (UPDATED)

2012-01-01T15:44:00.000-06:00

Okay, my first blog post for the New Year! I've decided to go out on a limb and make some predictions for events in the coming year. When I am wrong, you may gloat at my wrongness. I reserve the right to say, "it doesn't matter." So, with that, here we go:

Mitt Romney will win the Iowa Caucuses. Ron Paul will come in second, and Rick Santorum third, making Rick Santorum the default anti-Romney of the culture warriors of the Christian Right (and neoconservative warmongers everywhere) -- a spot Santorum will hold until the end of the primaries.
Ron Paul will not win any primaries, but will place a respectable second in just about all of them. He will not be given any speaking time at the GOP convention.
Santorum may win the South Carolina primary. He will not win any other GOP primaries, and will place second only in a few. He will suspend his campaign for lack of funds sometime before the convention.
Mitt Romney will be the GOP nominee for president. He will choose Condoleezza Rice as his running mate.
That won't matter. Barack Obama will be re-elected in November 327-211 electoral votes (I'm assuming Indiana, North Carolina and Nevada vote Republican again; otherwise, the map looks identical to 2008).
Democrats will narrow the GOP majority in the House but will not win enough seats for a majority. I'm not sure at this point whether the GOP will win control of the Senate.
Sometime in April, the Arab League will finally tire of the Syrian government's refusal to live up to any of the myriad agreements with the opposition to stop killing people and will refer the matter to the UN Security Council. By May, after a round of UN demands, the Security Council will authorize a no-fly zone over Syria and the creation of safe havens. NATO (mainly Turkey, the US, France and Britain, as well as some US Gulf allies, such as Qatar, the UAE and possibly Saudi Arabia) will lead the military operations. The war against Syria to depose the Ba'ath government will last about 120 days, and will end with the toppling of the current Syrian government. Assad and his family, however, will have escape options Qaddafiy never had.
Iran and Hezbollah will bluster and even provide some covert support to the Syrian government (and in the case of the Al-Assad family, Iran will provide a place of exile), but in the end, neither will go to war to defend the regime in Damascus as both will determine their own survival depends on their not waging war.
In the case of Hezbollah, the end of the regime in Damascus will mean it's end as a military power. Hezbollah will be disarmed at some point (not in 2012), with a portion of its fighting force pensioned off and the remanded folded into the Lebanese army. Hezbollah will accept this in exchange for a cementing of its role as the main representative of Lebanon's Shia community in Lebanon's politics and society.
In the case of Iran, the Islamic Republic's leadership will decide that bolstering the emerging dictatorship of Nuri al-Maliki and the Iraqi Shia is more important to Iranian security than saving the Ba'ath regime in Syria.
Israeli military forces will not participate in the UN war against Syria in any way, shape or form.
Republicans in the US won't know how to oppose the UN-led war in Syria. They will want to oppose it because it's something Barack Obama is doing, but then it will be the US bombing Syria, which is something most of them have wanted to do for a long, long time. Rick Santorum will eventually voice the most coherent GOP response: "Why stop at Syria? Bomb Iran too!" Outside of the neocon nationalists, this view won't go over well.
But because of this, more people will take Ron Paul seriously. It will be too late for his campaign, however.
Democrats in the US won't know how to deal with the UN-led war in Syria either. But they will generally back the Obama administration on the matter.
The war in Syria will have no significant effect on US domestic politics. It will be over several months before the general election, and will have no serious near-term economic, political or military consequences.
The Sunni government that will come to power in Syria following the ouster of the Ba'ath will be dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. It will make security guarantees to Syria's Christian and Alawite communities that will largely be kept. That government will also become the base of support for a renewed Sunni opposition to the Shia government of Iraq.
For all the talk in both Washington and Tel Aviv, neither the US nor Israel will attack Iran in 2012. Enough comfort will be taken from the fact that Hezbollah is no longer a significant threat to anyone and that Tehran has lost its most important ally.
Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin will both face sustained Arab Spring-style protests and low-grade revolt following their (contested) re-elections.
The banking crisis in the EU will continue to limp along unresolved. Austerity will continue to bit hard in Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, but none of those nations in the Eurozone will leave in 2012. Greece will leave the Eurozone, but not in 2012.
Another sustained round of Occupy Wall Street protests will hit the West beginning in late spring. These will be somewhere more violent, but largely because authorities are going to be less tolerant of protests than they were last year.
Charles will not become of king of Great Britain in 2012.
And the world will not end on December 21, 2012.

Well, that's that. Let's just see how prescient I am (or am not) in the coming weeks and months.

UPDATE: Ooops, there's one predication I most definitely did want to make that I forgot about.

In late summer, the US Supreme Court will issue a 5-4 ruling striking down the portion of the Affordable Health Care Act that requires Americans to purchase health insurance. The majority will actually go one step farther in their opinion, striking down a 1942 court ruling, Wickard v. Filburn, that gives the U.S. government the constitutional ability to regulate certain kinds of economic activity.

(Okay, this last one may merely be wishful thinking on my part.)

What's The Matter With Democrats?

2011-12-28T14:22:00.000-06:00

Thomas Frank, the author of What's The Matter With Kansas? (and the new book, Pity the Billionaire, on the Tea Party and populism) suggests an interesting answer when talking about populist anger at inequality and decline of the middle class in the U.S.:

I’m speaking here of the liberal culture in Washington, D.C. There was no Occupy Wall Street movement [at that time] and there was only people like me on the fringes talking about it. The liberals had their leader in Barack Obama … they had their various people in Congress. But these people are completely unfamiliar with populist anger. It’s an alien thing to them. They don’t trust it, and they have trouble speaking to it. I like Barack Obama, but at the end of the day he’s a very professorial kind of guy. The liberals totally missed the opportunity, and the right was able to grab it.

...

One of the problems with liberalism in this country is that it’s headquartered in Washington and its leaders are a very comfortable class of people. Washington is one of the richest cities in the country, maybe the richest. It’s not a place that feels the crisis, that feels the economic downturn. By and large, the real estate market stayed OK. The city continued to boom. The contracts continued to flow. What we’re talking about here is the failure of modern liberalism. At one time it was a movement of working-class people. The idea that liberals wouldn’t feel economic pain was ridiculous. That’s who liberals were. No more.

...

It is true that the Democrats completely imagine themselves as being the party of the professional class, and that is an elite. It’s not the elite, but it is an elite. The Democrats very definitely identify with academia. That’s the home of the professions, where they come from.

Frank does note, and correctly, that the Tea Party's assertion (shared by many non-Tea Party people on the right) "that the free market is an act of rebellion against [this elite] seems pretty fanciful. I can say it stronger than that. It is absolutely preposterous."

Democrats have essentially become a bloodless party, one in which passion is intellectually and emotionally suspect. (UPDATE: And yet, Democrats are also not a terribly intellectual party either. They haven't jettisoned thought in quite the same way, or with the same fervor, that the GOP has, but they have generally substituted sentimentality and "professionalism" as substitutes for actual ideas.) Technocratic professionals don't get angry, andy they expect all others to be technocratic professionals. (Barack Obama, as an African American man, would never have had a political career had he ever showed any kind of anger publicly, or been rumored to even have a temper. It would have been the kiss of death. So technocratic "competence" [sic] works well with his personality. But it also means, in the post-Bill Clinton Democratic Party, he trusts and believes bankers and other assorted "experts" far too much.) It is as if the Midwest clerisy, which is phlegmatic and reasonable to its moist and sentimental core, has come to dominate the Democratic Party and its elites.

The problem is, most people aren't professionals. Most people don't have careers. They work at jobs, and they do so not for personal fulfillment or to save the world, but to care for the people they love. (And can there be any better reason to do anything?) They see the core of the Democratic Party, grounded as it is in academia, for the elite it truly is. One that is not open to many people, dismissive of the way they live and work, and terribly disconnected from the realities of their lives. (And this is the reason I believe identity politics to be a distraction, because it's a way to keep the clerisy amused with something that is more or less trivial, or at least tertiary to the real exercise of state and social power.) If Occupy Wall Street gained any traction, it has largely been because the ranks of the clerisy -- where so many young liberals feel entitled to encamp -- are increasingly closed and increasingly insecure. Now professionals are feeling the pinch that mere workers felt in the 1980s and 1990s when factories closed and their jobs made obsolete. THAT wasn't supposed to happen to the do-gooder administrators of society, who were always supposed snuggle down securely in tenured positions making sure we all think good thoughts about each other (always punishing us when we don't) and hoping those good thoughts alone will make the world a better place.

Ahh, but I've just let some of my resentments show.

Like Frank, I'm not sure where things go. Neither American political party is capable of dealing effectively with the world we inhabit. And I'm not sure I'd have anything good to say even if they did.

More on Violence, Scripture and Humanity's Relationship With God

2011-12-26T09:43:00.001-06:00

I just finished reading Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld's book Killing Enmity: Violence and the New Testament. It's one of a couple of new books that sparked my attention, and that I'm reading over the break. (The other is Amos ~~Young's~~ Yong's The Bible, Disability and The Church: A New Vision of the People of God.) Mostly because I'm intrigued by what others have to say about scripture, violence and how we who are God's people understand God in, with and through violence.

Neufeld deals with what is for many good bourgeois Christians a difficult subject -- the violence in scripture. Particularly, what appears to be God's role in the violence of scripture. I qualify the term Christian with bourgeois because I have come to believe in bourgeois life there is an expectation that violence should not be normative*. And if ideals of progress are embraced, there is a notion that violence is neither becoming less normative or should (or could) become less normative. Regardless, for the bourgeois, violence is not a normal part of human existence, and it is not normative or ideal. It is an aberration. So, violence in scripture seems to be a moral puzzle -- how could a loving and compassionate God do this or allow this? (A question I have heard over and over, including from my father.) How could God's faithful people do these things and still be faithful or still be God's people?

This is the question I believe Neufeld is dealing with as he examines New Testament parables, the crucifixion and atonement, hierarchy and subordination, and the images of divine warfare used in the some of the epistles and in John of Patmos' Revelation. I don't share these bourgeois concerns, mostly because I do see violence as a normative part of human existence -- and an inevitable one. I do believe scripture is the product of a relationship with God in which God promises that God will act to save God's people, and will do so in miracles rather than through human efforts ("The Lord helps those who help themselves" is definitely not a biblical principle, and is not part of our ongoing relationship with God). But God is present with human beings in all human actions -- including our violence -- and God saves human being through and in acts of violence (the crucifixion being the biggest example). So, Neufeld is right in his conclusion when he writes:

We will not often find violence-free rhetoric in the New Testament with which to express this wondrous mystery [the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the victory over violence, not the victory of violence], most especially when 'violence' is conceived of in broad terms ... . Might that be because grace is encountered, received and enacted within a world marked by violence? The words of scripture participate in the incarnation, an enfleshment that takes place in a violent world. The Word always speaks to us in the Scriptures from within this world. Our wrestling with the issue of violence happens in a world in which violence resides not only in our social and political relationships but also in our minds and imaginations. Might that be why suffering, vulnerability and sacrifice are always both evidence of the reality of violence and, in the light of the cross, the scandalous means by which the violence that produces them is subverted and finally overcome?

In the end it is the ingenuity of God's love, the compassion at the heart of grace and the persistent drive towards reconciliation and restoration that the writers of the New Testament wish to narrate. They do so with the consciousness that both they and their readers are participants in that story that is still unfolding. And they do so with words and images that are at hand. It would be tragic to be preoccupied with and dismissive of their means and to miss the story they are telling, the news they are announcing. With all its twists and turns and surprises, that story is always much bigger and mysterious than any ethical, theological or ideological distillations. It is in the nature of the 'gospel' -- 'news' -- that all such distillations are at their very best transitory. Scripture will, thankfully, always slip out of our firmest grasp. (p. 150-151)

We wrestle with violence in a violent world. We wrestle with God, and God wrestles with us, in a violent world. And even if God is not violent in God's-self, human beings cannot help but understand or perceive the encounter with God in ways and shapes and forms that are violent or can only be understood as or in violence. Neufeld's last metaphor is that of Jacob wrestling with the mysterious stranger at the ford of the Jabbock in Genesis 32, and he writes:

[W]hen struggling with question of violence in the New Testament we wrestle with the full humanity present in the pages of the New Testament, and the full humanity of the community of listeners and wrestlers. But in the morning, even if limping badly, we call the place 'Peniel'. ["For I have seen God face to face, and I have been delivered," ESV, Genesis 32:30.]

I do believe, I confess and I preach and I teach, that human violence is a reality. A reality in which God is present, and not absent. Scripture even tells us that God commands our murderous violence (Deuteronomy 7), but perhaps the lesson to draw from that is there are some things God commands us to that we should not do (as Israel does not). My great ethical concern is the morality of social violence, and state violence in particular, and I see no writ in scripture that God's people are called to govern, rule or have any stake in the outcome of state or social violence. It is not a means to the end we seek, and I believe quite firmly that no understanding of "love of neighbor" can ever be grounded in violence.

At this point, I was going to have a snarky aside, but thought better of it.

----------------

* The essence of my snarky aside was going to focus on the nature of violence in bourgeois life. It has been impersonalized and exported. That is, made the result of bureaucratic and administrative processes, and then forced upon others. So the good bourgeois never has to deal with the reality that the world they depend upon -- the order of state and state-managed markets -- is inherently violent because they never see the actual violence or those upon whom the violence is done. This is not inherently snarky, accept that I was going to focus on the womanist, feminist and liberationist theologians Nuefeld cites throughout his book as being deeply opposed to the violence of hierarchy, patriarchy, oppression and domination. It has been my experience that most such theologians are also self-professed socialists (and very bourgeois, making them clerisy through and through!) and thus deeply committed to state violence to order the world.

Isaac, Jesus and the Place of God in Human Violence

2011-12-14T09:26:00.000-06:00

I'm an unrepentant reader of the ugliness and messiness in scripture. I am attracted to it, I gravitate toward it, and I don't have ethical or logical problems with it. "Why would a good God do that? Why would a good God let that happen?" Not my questions.

In fact, I believe the ugliness and messiness speak specifically to human existence. And God's presence in our lives.

I don't think I've blogged much about here about the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22. I think we all know the story. It begins with God "testing" Abraham. In Hebrew, נִסָּה test, with the implication that knowledge is being sought, or that the heart is being measured, and in the case of this passage, The Theological Diction of the Old Testament (vol. 9, p. 450) says, the author of the Genesis 22 passage "seeks to show how someone who fears and obeys God should relate to God." Which is all well and good. That Abraham is the subject of this story, and his trust in the promise of God is the subject of this story, is generally accepted and general taught. Abraham's faithfulness in regards to his son (whether that son is Ishmael or Isaac) is the model of faith in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Doing what God says is what it means to follow and trust God.

Well, maybe. The problem I have with this interpretation is that it reduces Isaac to an object in Abraham's faith drama. He's no longer really a person. And by making this a "test," we've also made it clear that God didn't really mean for Abraham to slit his son's throat there on the mount of the Lord. That makes this a game. That makes faith a game, God's promise a game, it makes Abraham's faith less than real because it's clear, if this a "test" in the sense that many of us understand that word, that none of what is going on is real. I remember, for some reason, one afternoon in Army basic training, the afternoon we spent then putting on and "clearing" our gas masks. (As well as taking them apart, learning how they worked, and seeing a nasty little film about what chemical weapons did to rodents.) After hours of this, we were graded on how quickly we could get into chemical protective gear. I think we had to have the masks out of their pouches, on, cleared and the hoods over our heads in under 18 seconds. There were no chemicals, no clouds of poisonous gas, just men with stop watches yelling at us. It was a "test" as we understand it -- timed, graded, you could pass or fail but there were no real consequences for either (since everyone was tested until they passed).

But if we stick with the implications of the Hebrew, then what we have here is a quest for knowledge, and not a graded examination. God may have been testing Abraham, but God was not administering a test. And God isn't the only one learning something.

(Personally, I think the best version of this story is Bob Dylan's...)

So, I think it would be better to examine what Abraham's faith looks like from Isaac's standpoint. Because that's the standpoint I think that matters. It's our standpoint. Neither Abraham nor Isaac could truly know that God did not mean it what God said: "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I shall tell you." (Gen. 22:2, ESV) Isaac has to assume that when Abraham binds him, and raises the knife, his father absolutely has to mean it and, following the command of God, God absolutely has to mean it.

And that tells me that we, as human beings viewing this from Isaac's perspective have learned a couple of things:

God is capable of commanding some human beings to do horrific things.
And those human beings are capable of following through with that command.

We now know this. We cannot help but know this. And we know this about the God who called and promised things to us through this man Abraham. We know this about the very same God. Nothing is the same anymore. From this moment forward, the God who gathers and names a people, the God who promises that we shall be a blessing, that we shall father a nation, that we shall inherit a land -- this is the same God who is willing to have our throats slit, to command that they be slit. We are inheritors not just of Abraham's promise, but also of Isaac's experience. Because of what we now know about God, learned about God that day.

And so now God becomes much more involved in human violence. But only selectively, and throughout the Exodus and Deuteronomistic narratives, God makes it clear that God alone saves God's people in miraculous acts that drown an entire Egyptian army and its Pharaoh. Gideon gathers an army of over 30,000 to battle the Midianites, and God makes sure only 300 do the actually fighting, to make sure that Israel knows God alone delivers, and not human effort. Still, God is present in some of the worst stories in scripture (Judges 19-21 come to mind). I don't know of an instance in which God intervenes to stop an act of violence. There are many violent acts in scripture which go unjudged and uncommented upon, which go unpunished and unanswered. Not even God comes off well much of the time, but God is always somehow present in with human violence, which is often times viewed as a judgment upon those being violated. (And make of that what you will.)

And what has this to do with Jesus? I've written before I've never been happy with Anselmian atonement narratives, mostly because they become a game God is playing with God's-self, a game to which we are mere spectators. And we are not mere spectators. We are actively involved. Because we are doing the killing.

I think the crucifixion story of Jesus Christ is a bookend for the Isaac story. Not in a sacrificial way ("I asked you to sacrifice your son, now I shall sacrifice mine," God says, which is ridiculous when dealing with the Triune God), but rather how God has decided to deal with and be present in the reality of human violence.

It is as if God, understanding by this point the awfulness and depravity that human beings are truly capable of, has become incarnate in order to be subject to it. Perhaps even to experience it. In the crucifixion, God is no longer commanding the awful things to happen, but incarnate as Christ is prophesying the awful things that will happen as the logical conclusion of a ministry that pronounces unearned forgiveness. (I owe the late Gerhard Forde this understanding.) God has learned enough about us to know how we are likely to react when God, present among us as a lone human being, seems to make promises, or is heard to make promises, that aren't kept. God on the mountaintop in fire and thunder terrifies us. God drowning Pharaoh's soldiers is terrifying. God as a sweaty, stinking, sometimes crabby human being with no army and not much in the way of followers is another matter entirely. That God is something a frightened, angry mob can deal with.

And so God issues no commands. Instead, God surrenders utterly to us, to the worst we are. God lifts no hand to stop the lash, to halt the procession to Golgotha, God does not come down off the cross. This is a test in the Hebrew sense -- what are we learning in this moment? It is the lesson of Abraham -- we are capable of the most horrific things, in this case the mob-sanctioned execution as a rebel of a man whose only crime was to offend sensibilities and forgive us our sins.

But we learn more than that. God is still God, even dead and buried. And here, at the empty tomb, we learn God's ultimate answer to human violence -- it has no meaning. It answers nothing. From the experience of Isaac, we now know that God has shared our place on the mountain, wondered where the sacrifice would come from, watched the knife rise into the air, and then -- unlike us -- did not save God's-self. We were saved. God stayed Abraham's hand. But God did not stay ours. We slit the throat. We walked away. We said "we do not know him." We demanded God's death because God didn't save us in the way we wanted. We betrayed God to the authorities and then hung ourselves in despair.

God's answer to the violence God became a part of In Genesis 22 is to give in to that violence, to surrender to it, to show us that violence is powerless in the face of God's promise. Christ is the answer to Isaac.

On Gifts, Sacrifice and Relationship

2011-12-08T09:09:00.001-06:00

Sometime ago -- April 2009, to be exact -- I wrote a post on Cain, Abel, sacrifice and exile:

Some might say that Cain's offering was inferior -- not firstfruits. Maybe. But it may also be that God was partial to Abel's "choicest of the firstlings" as opposed to whatever grain and fruit Cain offered. ... [Farming is] hard work, and perhaps he felt that God did not reward his work well enough. But maybe the sense of rejection he felt when God favored the firstling of Abel's flock was intolerable. Tilling the land wasn't just what he did, it was who he was, and clearly he saw that who he was simply was not good enough for God.

Not good enough. Our capricious God liked Abel's sacrifice and not Cain's through no stated fault of Cain's. I've had time of late to consider this lately (some of you know why, and the rest of you will just have to ponder) , and something else about this passage early in Genesis struck me.

The entire story of Cain and Abel prefigures the history of Israel from Sinai onward -- sacrifice and offer, follow the law and be blessed, or fail to offer proper sacrifices, to follow the law and Israel shall be cursed. It is almost the entire Hebrew Bible writ small.

It occurred to me today that Cain has something Abel does not -- a real relationship with God. Abel just gave, and God received. (That's fine, you may say, but we cannot know much about Abel's relationship with God because he is dead. True enough. But work with me in regards to what we actually have in Genesis 4.) Abel's relationship with God is a very passive relationship, perhaps even a very pagan or idolatrous relationship. Abel gives, God takes. God may be pleased, but God is not giving anything to Abel.

But Cain's failure -- which I state above is God's doing, and not Cain's -- to deliver a sacrifice that God will accept begins a different kind of relationship, in which God gives to Cain. And receives nothing from Cain. First God gives advice ("If you do well, will you not be accepted?", implying Cain was at fault for the failure of his offering to please God), then accusation and curse ("When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive, and a wanderer on the earth.") and finally a promise of some kind of protection or vengeance ("If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold."). It may stink as a relationship -- who wouldn't want to be happy and content giving to God and knowing that God had accepted all they'd given? Because I'd really like to be there right now... -- but it is far more than what Abel had. In sinning, and in fear, Cain lived in a relationship with God that the sinless, approved and accepted Abel did not.

It prefigures Israel's tempestuous relationship with God, in Egypt, in the wilderness, in the take-over of Canaan, in conquest, exile and regathering. It says that in sin, and the consequences of sin (wandering in the land of exile), we have a relationship with God that cannot be matched by those who are "sinless" and whose offerings are accepted. (The story itself may imply that such people don't really exist, since Abel is killed and therefore nothing can be said of his relationship to God.) That in sinning, space for relationship with God is opened that cannot otherwise be opened -- God is transformed from a mere receiver of sacrifices, a kind of fat and happy God who smiles on the one making the offering (suddenly, a bronze Buddha statue surrounded by clouds of incense and rotting oranges comes to mind), to an actual being interacting with the creation. To a God who has something meaningful to say to the creation.

Interacting with the created, who need God's gift because our gift to God is unacceptable. Sometimes, it's not much of gift -- a mere mark to state whoever kills me gets it back seven times! -- but it's more than first fruits. Perhaps a true relationship with God can only begin in our sinfulness, because only then are we open to receiving what God has to give us, rather than lining up and dumping our offerings into the mouth of Vaal.

* * *

NOTE: The Cain and Abel story is, however, something of a sideshow. Abel dies before having progeny (an assumption based on the fact that none are listed), and all of the featured characters of Israelite history trace their lineage to Seth, Adam and Eve's third son.

Spelunking in the Folios

2011-11-23T13:56:00.001-06:00

When I'm not busy being a seminary student, or writing and signing songs, I work in the seminary library -- the Jesuit-Krauss-McCormick Library, though in this age of acronyms as names, JKM Library. I don't do anything terribly glamorous. I'm simply the assistant to the special projects and rare books cataloger. Mostly, this involves lots of grunt work, searching for books, putting them in boxes, and so forth.

It is an understatement to say the library has some significant issues, mostly surrounding how it was put together. The Krauss part of the library, which is the Lutheran part, was assembled over several decades as a number of smaller Lutheran seminaries -- like Suomi Seminary and Rock Island Seminary -- were glued together. I believe, but I may be wrong, that more than half-a-dozen separate Lutheran seminaries came together to make the Lutheran part of JKM. The Jesuit part explains itself, though Hyde Park's Jesuit seminary went out of business many years ago. The McCormick seminary is itself a couple of collections glued together. A lot of books brought together over time.

It is one thing to bring libraries together; it is another thing entirely to actually rationalize the collections. And that part was never done. Depending on the cataloging strategies used at each of the predecessor libraries, one book might be at half-a-dozen different call numbers. Which makes dealing with duplicates ... interesting. A goodly portion of our collection -- most everything before 1980 -- was not in our computerized catalog. Which was an accreditation issue several years ago. There was, at some point, a recon of all the material from B (philosophy and religion) through BS (the Bible) and BV (ministry and worship). In a recon, the shelf list card catalogue is scanned and bibliographic records, along with bar codes, are generated from the cards. This is how you can look a book up on Worldcat and find it. But JKM Library did a recon of the rest of the library, BX (church specific) through Z (reference). After the first surge of barcoding, I've been going through and cleaning everything up -- finding books missed in the first barcoding.

And I just went through the folios, books too big even for the OVERSIZE section. This was a messy section, given how old the books were (letter covers of century old books and older turn to power, and the paper used from the 1850s onward also crumbles and becomes powder). But what was stunning was just how many of the folios, which had been in this library's possession for many decades, had never been cataloged. Here's my e-mail report on what I've found this week:

All of the folios with barcodes are stacked in the shelves nearest the east wall. There are three exceptions:

The Codex Vaticanus BS64 V2 1868, which had no barcodes, but you catalogued and labeled vol. 3. so I brought the other four volumes in, and they are on the cart with the four oversize volumes waiting to have the labels applied (Bill told me to let Miranda do it).
The British Ordinance Survey of the Sinai Peninsula 1868-69, five volumes. I brought this in because vols 1-3 are labeled such, but the remaining two are labeled maps and plates. On the same cart.
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecum PA3381.B669. The barcode says vol 4, the book says vol 3. SL in book.

A number of folios had no barcode or LOC number (most come from McCormick collection, Virginia Theological Library, and some have an accession #, though some have no acquisition information in the book). I give title, author, publisher and date of publication as best as I could determine:

The Palaeographical Society - Facsimiles of Manuscripts and Inscriptions (Oriental Series) / Edited by William Wright / William Clowes & Sons, Charring Cross Rd. 1875-1883
Three very large folios of maps by the Palestine Exploration Fund, one undated on the cover (at this point, I was tired of breathing dust and trying to untie ancient double knots), one dated 1880 and one dated 1884. In addition, there is a separate book entitled Map of Western Palestine / 1880 / Palestine Exploration Fund.
Voyage de La Syrie / author appears to be Leon de Laborde / Institut de France, edited by Firmin Didot et Freres, 1837. Same author and publisher produced Voyage de L'asie Mineure, 1838.
Egypt, 1890 II by William Blair. Collection of photographs pasted in book with handwritten captions. I could not find publication information.
Description de L'Egypte ou Recueil des observations ... 1809, De L'imprimerie Imperiale. We have two volumes, tome premier from 1809 and a second volume of natural history etchings. I could find no date for second volume.
A Complete Genealogical, Historical, Chronological & Geographical Atlas / M. Lavoisme, published by M. Carey & Sons, Philadelphia, 22 May 1821. Third American Edition.
Carte Generale, this appears to be the record of some Frenchman's trip from Paris to Toboslk in Siberia in maps (though it includes a map of Kamchatka). Barry looked this up on Worldcat and it appears to have been published in 1761 or thereabouts. There are only 13 other cataloged copies of this worlwide.
Illustrated History of Chicago / Chicago Herald / 1887
Chicago Great Central Market / Marshall Fields & Co. / 1921, it has the number D154318.10
Appendix Codicum Celebernimorum Sinaitici Vaticani Alexandrini / Edit. Constantine Tischendorff / First Volume / has number B.30920a
Atlas of Ancient Geography / Dr. William Smith / 1874, two copies (both in equally bad condition)
Rand MacNally Atlas / 1889 / bears number Maps R18 (we have another copy that bears Maps R18 vol.1, and now that I think about it, I may have noted this book twice)
Mitchell's New General Atlas / 1879
Atlas of Twenty-Four Large Engravings to Hami[lt]on's Ancient & [Modern] State [of Egypt] / no publication date or information, may have been on cover but rubbed off, letters and words in brackets are attempted reconstructions (I feel like I'm dealing with ancient Sumerian). Sometime 1870 to 1890, but possibly earlier based on nature of engravings.
Untitled Jewish worship book, no easily discoverable publication information (I took it to Esther Menn, who looked it over), was in someone's collection in 1833 (dated) and used to study Hebrew.
Six volumes of the collected Herald & Presbyterian, late 1880s and early 1890s. Four of these are wrapped in plain brown paper and tied up in string.
Mizraim, Vol II. A collection of prints and engravings of modern and ancient egypt, late 19th century. Probably the largest folio we have.

The following books have LOC numbers but no barcode or SL:

BS18.G493, The Masoorah, three volumes -- two hardbound and one softbound (index?). Hebrew.
HA205.A4B and A5Bgl, two statistical atlases of US Census, 9th and 11th.
DF261.C65 A512c Corinth, two volumes 1-1 and 1-2.
N7830.G24 Stori Della Arte Christiani, 1881, 6 volumes.
CC165.S24 Sardis II Part I
PF817.2 J52 (I did not note the title of this one)
BX8901.H531, I did not note the title of this, but call no suggests somethintg Presbyteriany, and it could possibly be one of the newspaper folios)
PJ3801.C822 (I did not note the title), 10 volumes
BS15.G493 (I did not note the title)
BV2830.T3 Maps, Protestant Missions in Latin America, two volumes, giant computer generated maps from the late 1970s or early 1980s. Now, there is a barcode from the previous recon for one book with this title BV2831.T239p Maps.
NA4150.B312, I did not note the title of this.

The following books have SL but no barcode:

DS102.P18, Survey of West Palestine Plates. Red clip in SL.
DT73.M3 C531m / C532m / C532e Eight volumes on the survey of Medinat Habu and Mastaba of Mereruka, red clip in SL.
DT62.T4 N326 Deir El Bahari, 4 volumes, two copies of vol. 1, red clip in SL.
AN2.C532, Chicago by Chicago's Builders.
PA3401.C822, Corpus Inscriptionum Atticarum &etc, red clip in SL, cards marked removed in 1966.
DS99.H3 R456 Voyage dans le Haouran &etc.
BS764.W29 1910, Facsimile of Washington Manuscript of Deuteronomy and Joshua, Greek.
DT57.E32M, The Temple of Deir el-Bahari. This looks like a part of a major collection of such books at the very same call number in oversize, and not folio.

There's a lot of detail here. (I didn't note some titles because, having call numbers, I didn't know they would be problems.) The notation "red clip" means the book has cataloging issues (such as serial, or not enough information on card to generate a proper bibliographic record). This library has been something of a mess -- a few years ago, I discovered a book that had been acquired in 1967 and then set aside to be cataloged and then ... was never cataloged. (We are not alone in this; a couple of years ago, a university library in Israel discovered one of our books in their library when they remodeled, the book having been there since the 1970s, and the librarian returned it in the hopes it had not been missed -- it hadn't.)

The books that most interest me are the unnamed Jewish worship book and the giant folio from Napoleon's expedition to Egypt. The worship book was beautiful once, with locking claps (they fell off long ago) and commentaries within commentaries. I suspect it is much older than 1833. I've seen 300-year-old books, we have a few on the shelves. Generally, they are in better condition than 150 year-old books or even 200-year-old books. The cover of this book hasn't disintegrated or come apart and it looks like it could be that old. It still is beautiful, and I wonder where this book has been -- who used it, where was it used, who owned it. And the Napoleon folio, which is a first edition. The engravings of "life" in Egypt are quite lovely. Somewhere along the line, even though the folio was never cataloged, the spine for the first volume was shored up.

It's kind of stunning just how easily it is to lose track of things. And not keep track of things. Or not even know what you have.

My Idea of a Life Well Lived (Or Why I Tend to Like Scoundrels and Hustlers)

2011-11-04T23:09:00.000-05:00

Martha of Ireland (now there's a name!) at Internet Monk describes what that life is like the first of two posts entitled "Top Ten Things People Hate About the Catholic Church). It is an awesome list. And I agree fully with her explanation of item #4, "The Protestant Work Ethic versus the Catholic Idea of Success," which posits a far better notion of "holiness" than any tawdry, tee-totaling pietist could ever endorse:

Or, why the Anglo-Saxon race ruled the world (British Empire version or American Pioneer Spirit version) and why all Papist nations are socially backwards, cannot innovate in technology or science and are mired in poverty, superstition, and misery. The Church indoctrinates us to expect pie in the sky when we die, and spends a massive amount of time and effort fixing our eyes on the world to come instead of inculcating the virtues of thrift, sobriety, hard work and manifesting the will of God through our lives in this life. This means we have a feckless, shiftless attitude of contempt to the affairs of the world and are content to run around in rags and beggary, while bribing saints and idols to do magical favours for us.

The best example I can give of this is to swipe another example from “Brideshead Revisited” in the character of Lord Sebastian Flyte, the aristocratic, handsome, wealthy, socially prominent and attractive figure the narrator meets at Oxford.

In an ordinary novel (or made-for-TV movie), we’d have a happy ending where Sebastian sobers up, meets a lovely girl (or nowadays comes out of the closet and ends up with a lovely guy), settles down to marriage and family life and buckles down to the successful career that his education and status in society deserve. Or if we were still going with the religion angle, he’d become a wildly successful society preacher saving the souls of bright young things like he was, or a cardinal, or end up as a male equivalent of Mother Teresa (or maybe St. Damien of Molokai, only without the leprosy, because leprosy isn’t glamorous when you’re the one suffering from it). Either way, he’d have a glittering, fulfilling career and a visible and measurable by the standards of the world record of achievement, whether in the service of God or Mammon.

What does Evelyn Waugh do with him?

He succumbs to his alcoholism, goes abroad to lead a dissolute life with pathetic little attempts to make some kind of a go of things and finally ends up in Morocco trying to join a monastery because he wants to be a missionary to lepers or cannibals or savages of some description. This is impossible, of course, because he’s not fit for it, and eventually he ends up – after bouts of drinking and falling ill – being taken in by the monks and given a pity job as a kind of under-porter, halfway between being a lay man and being a religious, and (through the character of Sebastian’s youngest sister, Cordelia, telling Sebastian’s uncomprehending friend Charles about where he ended up and in what state), Waugh forecasts his life: unexceptional save for his periodic falls off the wagon and shame-faced return to the monastery, years going by like this, getting older, becoming something of a joke to the novices and tolerated affectionately by the older monks, “a familiar figure pottering round with his broom and his bunch of keys” and “He’ll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he’ll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he’s expected” until his eventual death which will be no more edifying nor uplifting than his life and the best his sister can anticipate for him is that “Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.”

Waugh also has Cordelia tell Charles “The Superior simply said, ‘I did not think there was anything I could do to help him except pray.’ He was a very holy old man and recognized it in others.” “Holiness?” “Oh yes, Charles, that’s what you’ve got to understand about Sebastian” and “I’ve seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God.”

And that, my dears, is the Catholic notion of success and why we will never get anywhere with an attitude like that.

Some Observations on Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-04T09:49:00.001-05:00

Occupy Wall Street reminds me an awful lot of the anti-globalization movement that arose in the 1990s. The people are roughly the same, much of their critique of the world is the same (though more deeply rooted this time), and I'm afraid much of what they want is the same too.

My closest encounter with the anti-globalization folks was in 2000, when I was working for BridgeNews in Washington covering one of the annual World Bank-IMF summits. (Such are the privileges of being a financial journalist.) I was Bridge's "outside" man, covering the demonstrators, who had stated they wanted to blockade the summit and shut it down. In response, the DC police -- who seemed to recruit several legions of auxiliaries out of nowhere -- showed up in their armed and armored finest. It was a week of continuing stand-offs, the entire center of the District of Columbia shut down. I got pepper sprayed several times by the police (because as a reporter, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time) and because I was a reporter with IMF credentials, none of the protestors would talk to me. I have a bunch of photos from the demonstration.

As I think about that time, I am reminded of something John Payne wrote recently in The American Conservative about Occupy Wall Street:

As I interviewed some of the protesters that night, I discovered that many of them were not driven by a blind rage against capitalism but were simply trying to assert some modicum of control over institutions they believe are running over them roughshod.

A lot of what the anti-globalization movement was trying to do, I think, was to take the international institutions central to the "world order" -- the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization -- make them somehow accountable to people other than the global elites who run them. And to better serve the needs of the world's poor. And it's not that I think either of these things are on their face bad ideas, but they are impossible ones. The only thing worse than sclerotic, pretend nation-state democracy would be sclerotic, pretend global democracy. There is simply no way to create global institutions that would in any form be accountable to people other than those who run them. The Left's idea of democracy -- deliberations that lead to consensus -- combined with the ideological desire to achieve certain kinds of outcomes is a recipe for endless committee meetings (trust me, I've been there) combined with a bullying of those who refuse to agree with the "desired" outcome. This can barely get done by a dozen people. (Seen that too.) You cannot do this in a world of (now) 7 billion people. Nothing else would ever get done.

But the protestors weren't wrong about the global institutions that were the focus of their ire. When I worked in DC, the World Bank had just acquired a brand new headquarters, a building of steel and glass that would have looked wonderful after a thorough pelting by rocks and bricks. (Though I do fondly remember the Bank as the place where I actually ran into Yasser Arafat!) The most I can say for the IMF is that it has an amazing cafeteria in the basement. And don't get me started on the folly of trade managed by treaty and international regulation....

That week of protests, NPR ran a piece about some of the protestors in DC, and what they sought. One bit of audio included a young man rather sloppily strumming a guitar singing

Why do we have to pay for food?
Why do we have to pay for rent?

I think that more or less encapsulates the economics of what calls itself "The Left" (for lack of a better term) in the West, or at least North America, these days. To call it Marxist would be unfair, because there's almost no intellectual substance to their economic aspirations. I suspect real Marxists -- and I know there have to be a few out there, somewhere in San Francisco and Berkeley and New York -- would on the one hand consider this a teachable moment and on the other deride all this as tawdry sentimentality. It's the sort of primitive communism that animated the likes of the Diggers (look it up). John Derbyshire put it this way in a review of Corey Robin's book The Reactionary Mind when he describes the economic and social outlook of the Left as:

a shallow and jejune utopianism. Corey Robin wants to cast down the mighty from their seats of power and exalt the meek and humble. He seems to think that the meek and humble, thus exalted, will conduct themselves with heroic restraint. History offers whole Himalayas of corpses as evidence to the contrary.

This is the whole of the Left that I have experienced since sometime in the mid-1990s. No one reads Capital anymore. No one even bothers to read Horkheimer, Adorno and Gramsci anymore (with the exception of Matt Frost). They have read third- and fourth-hand distillations of cultural Marxism penned by third-rate intellects, they've read about Derrida and Foucault, and they've absorbed the pointlessness of identity politics, and seem to think that the reason the world is the way it is is because cruel and greedy people are in charge instead of kind, decent, compassionate and selfless ones. That fairness and kindness and sharing -- their understanding of socialism -- would just work if it's actually tried.

Like so many people educated in the West anymore, they have a critique of power without any real understanding of power because they aren't really educated in the ideas and methods of power. No one, not even young white men from prominent families, are formally educated in the ways and ideas of power unless they pick those books up themselves. Because universities in the West no longer teach about power (and its too-often tragic outcomes), about the nature of power and the character of those who wield it, they simply teach the critique of power. And learning a critique without learning the thing itself is building a house without a foundation. It will crumble at some point. (I got this foundation-less education at both Georgetown and LSTC.)

And so they critique a world they don't really understand, and believe their sheer earnestness will fix things.

That, I think, is the whole of this movement. It does reflect an honest frustration with the world -- there is moral hazard for those who borrow thousands to go to school but not for those who leverage ~~billions~~ trillions in speculative credit default swaps. The rules are rigged in favor of those with more against those who have less. That allegedly liberal or progressive politicians do little to further real progressive goals once in power. To the extent that Occupy Wall Street (and the anti-globalization movement that came before) shine a light and ask some good questions, then I support them. I won't join them, but I can sort-of support them.

But to the extent that they want to enact sentimental and unrealistic goals, that they want to attempt to rearrange the world toward utopia, well, the 20th century tells us how that ends. Thankfully, they are so muddled in their thinking that action -- real action -- will likely not be possible. Since they will all be too busy in meetings trying to find consensus to act.

Another Perpetually False Promise

2011-11-03T08:51:00.001-05:00

In response to the Citizens United ruling a year or two ago, a group of Democrat legislators have proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving the government the power to regulate donations and financial support to political campaigns:

SECTION 1. Congress shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in kind equivalents with respect to Federal elections, including through setting limits on—
the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, Federal office; and
the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates.
SECTION 2. A State shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in kind equivalents with respect to State elections, including through setting limits on—
the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, State office; and
the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates.
SECTION 3. Congress shall have power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

A short report on the filing -- the amendment will not pass in this or any other form -- quotes Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin:

“By limiting the influence of big money in politics, elections can be more about the voters and their voices, not big money donors and their deep pockets,” said Harkin of the amendment. “We need to have a campaign finance structure that limits the influence of the special interests and restores confidence in our democracy. This amendment goes to the heart of that effort.”

I appreciate that so many people believe money is the problem in politics. And they believe the promise echoed by Harkin here that if you regulate money with the aim of reducing it, you will reduce its prominence in electoral politics. (And I think the Citizens United opinion is intellectually defensible on First Amendment grounds. Not that corporations are "individuals" with "rights," or that money is speech, but that corporations are peaceable assemblies in which individuals with rights can petition the government for a redress of grievances.)

But a couple of things about campaign finance "reform." First, I don't believe it's about fairness. It's about hobbling opponents by preventing them from acting. This has been one of the aims of campaign finance regulation since the Federal government started doing it about 100 years ago (it was a stated aim a century ago). Most people I know who support regulations on the financing of political campaigns are progressives in one form or another, and they are angry that their progressive agenda is not or cannot be enacted. And many tend to blame an "unfair process" on this. Because people would vote for progressive policies if they just knew about them or understood them, and they would if candidates for political office could run without being beholden to moneyed interests. So, they seek the rejigging of the process in their favor. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with this in democratic system in which the rules are constantly up for grab. But I'd like a little honesty. It's not about fairness, it's about creating advantage in hopes that advantage will produce the desired political outcomes.

Second, this promise that someone limiting the role of money and "special interests" (a loaded phrase I do not like, because it assumes that there is a "general interest" and that only that "general interest" is good or morally legitimate) will change politics for the better. And that there is even a way to limit the influence of money. Congress and the states have been at this for 100 years, and doing it in earnest since the 1970s, and yet money has not gotten less important with every new bit of legislation, it has gotten more important. It's as if attempting to create a dam to prevent the flood has only made the flooding worse. There are numerous theories as to why this is, and I cannot settle on one. I take it as a truism.

But I am convinced there is no magic democratic world in which self-interested money does not play even only a small or minor vole in politics. (And what money is not self-interested?) Harkin's promise is a false promise, beguiling yet utterly untrue. And yet, like so many promises made by democratic governance (and modernity itself), it is so beguiling it blinds believers to the reality, thinking that just one or two more sets of laws will make the promise come true. It is unfazed by the evidence of the senses, which merely convince the believers to double down and do more to make the promise come true.

It is a good thing the amendment won't pass. (Though this is the appropriate way to deal with the problem in our system of government.) Were it to pass, it will both fail at what it seeks to accomplish and at the same time give Congress (and the states that follow) far too much power to determine what is legitimate political speech and who can speak (because while money may not be speech, the ability to organize and raise money is). Because in our society, money will always find a way. Always.

On the Clerisy and Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-01T09:10:00.002-05:00

I came across possibly the best analysis I've seen yet of the phenomena that is Occupy Wall Street, from self-confessed Marxist Kenneth Anderson over at the Volokh Conspiracy. Anderson, referencing Christopher Lasch's analysis of the protestors as part of a "New Class" of managerial workers, has this to say about the protestors, what has driven them into the parks, and what their demands probably really are:

The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing — and by the fact that it is actually, two distinct strands, a privileged one and a semi-privileged one. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work [italics mine - CHF]. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google.

The New Class has always operated across the lines of public and private, however, the government-university-finance and technology capital sectors. It is not a theory of the government class versus the business class — as 1990s neoconservatives sometimes mistakenly imagined. As Lasch pointed out, it is the class that bridges and moves effortlessly between the two. As a theory of late capitalism (once imported from being an analysis of communist nomenkaltura) it offers itself as a theory of technocratic expertise first - but, if that spectacularly fails as it did in 2008, it falls back on a much more rudimentary claim of monopoly access to the levers of the economy. Which is to say, the right to bridge the private-public line, and rent out its access.

Anderson goes on to say that the difference between these lower elites and the bankers of the upper elite is that the OWS protestors no longer have any social or economic position they can effective leverage in a global market. There is no demand for the skills they have, no desire to employ them at what they want to do, and thus they have absolutely no comparative advantage. And thus no rents to collect. As long as finance continued to produce the kinds of non-overtly subsidized profits that could continue to fund both the non-profit virtue industry as well as fund (and and other the end, pay for) student loans, then more then enough of the young and virtuous could be employed. But not anymore. As Anderson notes:

The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.

In effect, a generation of young people has educated itself very specifically, and now with the economy drying up, there is no demand for what they supply.

I think this is a fascinating analysis, and generally correct. It corresponds with some things that I have seen, embedded deeply in a seminary of a socially, politically and sometimes theologically liberal confession. Because what Anderson is describing is the clerisy, that class of educated professionals who have administered industrial democracy since its invention in the latter half of the 19th century. Economist Deirdre McClosky in her book on bourgeois virtues noted that the clerisy were deeply bourgeois in the values and social expectations but were also those group of bourgeois who were completely alienated from the actual production of wealth. They have no idea where money comes from, how value is added, how wealth is produced. Indeed, the clerisy tend to take the means of production, and the production of wealth, as a given.

The clerisy in the West is both secular and religious. But liberal protestant churches (such as the one I am in) are run by the clerisy, by people who effectively have no real understanding of, or much appreciation for, the creation of wealth. The general view of money and wealth for the liberal protestant seems to be:

Money is icky and bad ...
... But no one should ever have to struggle for money.

Now, there is a reality of any sophisticated, civilized society -- that there will be enough surplus economic production to support a class of people who produce nothing of value, or something of unquantifiable value, and in doing these things, contribute to the well-being of the society. Clergy, government clerks, artists, poets, scholars, all of these people are subsidized to one extent or another because they do not "produce" or aid significantly in the production of goods and services. What the clerisy Anderson describes, people yearning to do "virtuous non-profit or government work," forget is how dependent their work is on the wealth produced and either shared or extracted from others. Whatever the sins of the financiers -- and they are legion -- you cannot create a large class of people who exist solely on the backs of others. And across the Western world, from California to Greece, governments have found themselves unable to keep the promises made to government workers because they end up being far too costly. Every dollar paid to public employee or retiree has to come from somewhere.

One of the great puzzles that mass society/social democracy/industrial capitalism has never been able to fully solve has been the puzzle of what to do with the fact that thanks to capital, fewer and fewer people can produce more and more wealth. What becomes of those who are superfluous? If John Taylor Gatto is right, a little more than a century ago, capital tried to permanently organize the world so that there was a place for everyone, and that everyone would find their place. But that arrangement did not hold for very long. Creating do-nothing managerial work, making some the permanent keepers and managers of others -- especially earnest, angst- and guild-ridden young people who desire to do good and think the best way, or the only way, to do so is in the context of the therapeutic state -- was one solution. But it may be in the process of falling completely apart as well.

Which gets me to my last point in this missive. Anderson is right that the clerisy does not dignify labor. Indeed, the clerisy -- particularly that of the liberal church -- denigrates labor. The only work it truly values is work done on computers in cubicles. The only product it truly understands is paper. It does not know what to do with or how to value any other kind of labor. In this, I am with John Robb, that the future belongs not to those who lobby the state, but those who build resilient communities. The protestors are right to bring the sins of finance to the attention of whoever will listen -- to borrow a slogan from ACT Up, I'd like to see someone wave a sign that said "Investment banking = death" -- in hopes that someone's conscience will be pricked enough to prompt action. Just don't count on it.

It is, however, a fool's errand to expect or demand that not-for-profit virtue work be made available again. It is also extremely arrogant, selfish and self-centered.

The only way for individuals and communities to survive in the coming age is for people to work together, and for individuals to have a real skill and to be willing to do hard work. By real skill, I mean making something you can sell, or fixing something so it can work again. And by hard work, I mean hard work -- not in office buildings, not in business casual, not demanding professional credentials, and not producing paper.

Most Things Turn Out Okay, More or Less

2011-09-04T22:17:00.001-05:00

I really shouldn't be blogging. I have other things to do. But... I cannot help myself.

I'm back at seminary, slaving away [sic] in the library, helping with the final recon project, which means putting barcodes on books. A good portion of our seminary library (itself the product of what might be a dozen mergers of smaller seminaries and their collections over the decades) is not in our electronic card catalog. This became an accreditation issue. And so, we sent out the "shelf list" -- the card catalog that the librarians themselves use to keep track of the library's holdings -- to be scanned (reconned), and then from those scans, smart computer software generated "smart barcodes," barcodes attached to electronic records about the books. It's an arduous task, but it beats just simply slapping a barcode on a book and then creating a new record for each book.

But enough about the tedium of library work.

One of my tasks is to re-integrate the recently scanned shelf list cards back into the shelf list catalog (because about a third of the library had been reconned some time ago, and books after a certain date came equipped with electronic records). So I was integrating some of the H's of the Library of Congress system. Can't remember which part of the H's, but it was that section that dealt with Marxism, Communism and the Christian response. Most of our books along these lines dated from the 1920s through the 1970s.

The titles broke down into three general categories: something must be done about Communism now or we are all doomed (!!), the church must do something to take Communism's claims seriously or else it will lose all its relevancy in the tide of revolution or, worse, be partly responsible for the destruction of the world (!!!), or we must seek to understand exactly what communism is. All three approached their subject with the fierce urgency of the now, for there may be no tomorrow if the Reds take over, or there may be no tomorrow if we fail to appreciate that Marxism offers the world's poor the hope of freedom, or there is no tomorrow if have no idea what we are talking about.

Something. Must. Be. Done. Now. Or. All. Is. Lost. There is more than a little implied doom in all that fierce urgency of the now.

It gave me pause. Yes, I understand that in 2011, I have a very privileged position from which to critique the hopeful or frightened writings of those living in 1958 or 1972. I know things they do not and cannot know about the world they live (and I have inherited from them). But I myself engage in more than a little fierce urgency of the now here at this blog.

And all these book titles, and subjects, are an important reminder -- things may rarely turn out as well as we hope, but they also rarely turn out as badly as we fear.

The Real Class Struggle

2011-08-31T09:39:00.001-05:00

Anthony Gregory does yoeman's work in a recent piece for The American Conservative about the Tea Party and class consciousness in America:

The Tea Party’s rhetoric of defending the little guy against the powerful has always seemed discordant to the left, which regards such class consciousness as its own domain. The left has long identified itself with the idea of two classes in society—the common people and the power elite—each with its own, usually conflicting, interests. When left-wingers speak this way, conservatives like Limbaugh accuse them of “class warfare.” But neither side grasps the full picture: in fact, it was the classical liberal tradition that first employed the class analysis that has survived to this day in altered forms.

The piece got me to thinking. One of the reasons class arguments no longer really resonate with the American Left (or with the Western Left, for that matter) is that class no longer really matters. The Left no longer talks about class, and hasn't done so since the 1960s, when the New Left was ascendant in at least the English-speaking world. Today, the Left speaks of identities -- race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation.

I think most of this can be laid at the feet of the Frankfurt School and their Italian friend Antonio Gramsci. These Marxist thinkers focused on the "social discourse," on language and how language is used by ruling elites to maintain social control and perpetuate certain ideas. This notion of "hegemony," as I understand it, was Gramsci's answer in the 1920s to the "persistence of capitalism" (!!!) at a time when, by all rights, at least according to good Marxists, capitalism should have disappeared in a puff of revolutionary smoke. Capture the tools of hegemony -- the institutions that control the "social discourse" -- and you can change the language of hegemony, and thus change how a society thinks.

No doubt some useful ways of thinking about and critiquing power came out of the Frankfurt School. But mostly, in taking the command to engage in a "long march through the institutions" (Gramsci's words), the world-be Marxist revolutionaries of the West became convinced -- or deluded, depending on how you want to look at things -- that the revolution was indeed a dinner party. That capital could be challenged, and defeated, by clever semiotics.

Whether the New Leftists of the 1960s actively believed this or not I do not know. They did, however, live like this. They wrote and published and taught and organized within the institutions they found, hoping to change them. And change them they did.

But you simply cannot be a real revolutionary if you have a mortgage. Of if you have tenure and a pension to protect. Real revolutionaries don't have health insurance either.

And so something very interesting happened. These cultural revolutionaries, who took up teaching jobs in universities and seminaries (especially Roman Catholic and Liberal Protestant seminaries), who worked in government, think tanks, to a lesser extent in the media, and founded consultancies to help corporations learn another "discourse," became an incredibly conservative group of revolutionaries. They were not truly challenging power. Instead, they demanded its expansion and the inclusion of the formerly excluded, just as they broadened the "social discourse" to include discussion of many people who had formerly not been talked about in polite on intellectual company (save as the subjects of medical or sociological investigation). And in many ways, I suppose this is a good thing, since it allows people to be honest and true to themselves and yet participate meaningfully in communal life.

But at the same time, the focus on discourse ignored many real things, such as war, economic policies (in particular the deliberate deindustrialization of the United States, a process begun in the early 1950s) and even the elite and popular self-conception of the United States. Eventually (I think sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s), the only question the thing that had once been the Left in the US could ask of a social act, process or institution is "does it discriminate?" or "is it properly inclusive?" That became the breadth and width of its moral judgments. It was as if the actual organization of working people, the actually changing of the state and society became an icky thing, an untouchable thing, something that belonged to another era. Bygone days. Old promises.

(Thankfully, this also means, for the most part, America's cultural revolutionaries aren't busy shooting people and setting up internment camps to eradicate class enemies. They may wish to deprive opponents of social space in which to speak and even language in which to think, but that is nowhere near the same thing as organizing firing squads. And yes, organizing firing squads is what real revolutionaries do.)

More importantly, the Left overestimated the power of language. All capital cares much about is profitability, and if it can profit from "diversity" and "inclusion," if it can produce an acceptable rate of return on a new discourse (and all the ways consumer capitalism markets goods and services), then capital does not ideologically care how it's bread is buttered. So long as there is always more, or the chance for more. So, in many ways, these dinner party revolutionaries not only failed to challenge capital, they enabled it. This "social discourse" of diversity is so embedded in our culture now that there's nothing really subversive about it. The long march through the institutions is mostly done, and the marchers have mostly won. Now, they have become a clique of elderly politburo gerontocrats defending their "revolution." Champaign for everyone!

So back to Gregory's piece on the Tea Party. In many ways, the cultural conservatism that has, in part, fed the Tea Party is an intellectually hollow mirror-image of this "leftish" cultural marxism. If social discourse and identity matter, then opponents would create their own social discourse and identity politics! And so the ache felt across the country because of industrial and trade policies deeply embedded in elite governance cannot be adequately spoken of anymore because the Left no longer speaks the language of economics and the Right can no longer do so coherently. The Tea Party's rage in inchoate, like the rioters in the UK several weeks ago. The people who are the Tea Party know something is wrong but they cannot think their way into seeing clearly, and there are almost no elites in the US capable of leading or organizing them well. The Tea Party knows elites when it sees them (looking at the people who successfully long marched through institutions to effectively control them), but it also fails to see the economic elites whose policies continue to contribute to the intense insecurity and unease they feel.

I'm not sure there are answers. I have become increasingly convinced that we are living in a post-ideological and perhaps even post-political age. Politics in Modernity made some huge promise about the ultimate meaning of human existence, promises made most fervently around a century ago and to a great extent promises renewed and somewhat expanded upon in the decade or so following the Second World War. What people seemed to realize, though, is that while the state might promise something akin to earthly salvation, what it delivers best is suffering, deprivation and death. The state might promise to be the ultimate meaning to human existence, but what it delivers best is meaninglessness. I think people seem to realize this. It doesn't stop conflict, nor does it end trust in government or the state.

But human beings want meaning, as individuals and as a community. We sense the state does a horrible job of that, but we also remember the promises. And they are enticing and beguiling promises. We don't trust ideologies anymore because we know what they are capable of prompting human beings to do, but without those same ideologies, human beings cannot coherently organize the state in any positive way to accomplish any good. And so, people rage.

This is a dangerous place to put people. They want to state to work to secure their lives, livelihoods and the shot at a decent wellbeing for their children, but people no longer know how to do this. They no longer know how to organize, or even think about organizing, any any models or ideas we have of mass politics can always be logically linked to mass murder at worst, and exactly where we are at best. The liberal democratic state, for its part, is no longer up to the task, and barring a renewal I don't expect will come, will only get worse at this. Elites in the West increasingly are incapable of governing because they cannot think very well anymore, and they certainly cannot challenge the economic power that is diminishing the lives of so many (but enriching theirs). And I think the people they govern know that. But the governed have no idea what to do either.

I have no answers. I have no proposal for a program. I only have observations. Something is happening. There is no telling what people will do when they hold on to the promises of Modernity in the face of their slow but constant evaporation. God help us all if they suddenly get a language to articulate their real fears and desires.

The Moral Idiocy of Humanism (And Liberal Religion)

2011-08-23T09:40:00.000-05:00

Michael Lind encapsulates all of my issues with humanism (secular and religious) in a nifty little essay at Salon:

For all the variations, the common theory of human nature underlying contemporary secular humanism seems to be cosmopolitan utilitarianism, the conviction that human beings, if liberated from superstition by science, would behave less like selfish, scheming social apes and more like self-sacrificing social insects, giving their all for the good of the 7 billion members of the global human hive. [Italics mine - CHF] "Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of human ideals…" says Humanist Manifesto III. "Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness."

The secular humanist movement avoids the difficult question of the coexistence of in-group altruism and inter-group rivalries by imagining, with John Lennon, that conflicts would vanish if only people stopped being religious and patriotic.

The bit I put in italics is the best description of the misguided ideals of the Enlightenment -- that human beings, liberated from superstition by science, will act less like selfish individuals and more like hive insects, cognizant of the whole of humanity as their "tribe," the collective to which they owe allegiance, loyalty and love. And since the late 18th century, thanks to the likes of Schliermacher, the liberal church has been the handmaiden to this Humanist agenda, advancing it as its own.

In his essay, Lind correctly notes that science -- so far as it is a neutral observer rather than a culturally constructed way of knowing and manipulating things (and this assumes neutral observation is possible, and I'm not sure it is) -- can tell us nothing about human beings ought to act. Science, at its best, can describe the "is" but never the "ought." Humanists who believe science does or can are engaging in an act of faith no different than confessing Christ as the Risen Son of God or Muhammad as God's messenger. Their's is a hope in the unseen.

And, I will add, the unseeable. Because it is a false hope.

Lind probably wouldn't go that far. But he notes that much of Humanism's professed faith (citing various manifestoes issued since 1933, elite documents which probably reflect the rough humanism believed in by most humanists) is tawdry and sentimental. And for many humanist intellectuals, it is a faith in the whole of humanity that demands the global organization -- world government -- of human beings in order to create the conditions whereby people can stop being primates and become bugs in the great global hive. Bugs whose live do not matter and have no meaning save that they are lived and sacrificed for the good of the hive.

But I would certainly go that far. In fact, I'd go farther. In order for Enlightenment Humanism to realize its dreams, it must wield state power, because the state is the means of human organization in Modernity. And various forms of it have wielded state power, from Naziism to Soviet Communism to Liberal Democracy. Lind quotes both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt as convinced believers is Darwinian evolution, comparing their 100-year-old confessions with the unwillingness of today's Republicans to confess much of anything other than a literal reading of Genesis as factual truth (as opposed to poetic truth). But Lind fails to mention that both Wilson and Roosevelt were also strong believers in Social Darwinism. Indeed, 100 years ago, people did not believe in Darwinian evolution without believing in Social Darwinism. They were a bundled pair. And that was Darwinism in power.

And the Liberal Church -- the church which surrendered to the truth claims of The Enlightenment -- has been the chaplain of Humanism in action, chaplain to the state, muddling a theology of the Kingdom of God from the promises of the Enlightenment and the ability of industrialization to create wealth never before seen in human history. Human beings became good enough to create the Kingdom of God and welcome Jesus upon his return. So the Liberal churches have abandoned an understanding of human beings as grounded and trapped in their sinfulness and needing that relationship with God in order to relate in love with each other for a tawdry and sentimental anthropology grounded in the hope that, once freed of superstition, human beings would become good enough -- on their own -- to be less selfish and cruel and more altruistic and self-sacrificing. Less like monkeys, more like ants.

I agree with the Radical Orthodox that the church must challenge the truth claims of the Enlightenment and Modernity. (I also appreciate he risks involved in this; Rome stuck its fingers in its ears and for decades sang an off-key "la la la!" in attempt to ignore the Enlightenment and Modernity, looking only very stupid in the process.) This does not mean loudly and stupidly proclaiming "the Earth is flat" or "God created the world in six 24-hour periods some 6,000 years ago, as calculated more or less by Bishop Ussher."

Rather, it means proclaiming what we understand morally about the nature of humanity. It means refuting Humanist optimism, and being uncompromising in doing so. When it is said, "people are good enough," we must respond with an emphatic "no, we are not." When some unattainable goal is put forth (such as eradicating poverty) and it is said "yes, we can," we must loudly and constantly proclaim "no, we can't." We may have even have to say, on occasion, "we must not" or "we should not even try." We must stand against the false hope in human beings with what we understand to be a very real hope of God's grace present in Jesus Christ. (Remember, I am speaking now to the church and of the church.) And we must be careful how we use the tools of Modernity. I'm all for John Millibank's refutation of the social sciences, but I also understand that to be impractical and even a bit foolish.

More than anything, it means confessing that as human beings, we are neither monkeys (constrained solely by our natures) nor insects (existing solely for the well-being of the hive). Both views tend to rob human beings of their dignity, and both also tend to serve power. (I am more concerned about the latter, however, as it becomes a way for the powerful to sacrifice the weakest against their will. In a socially and political liberal religious confession, opposition to "nihilistic individualism" tends to become an embrace of a "nihilistic collectivism" that does in fact see the whole of humanity as a kind of hive for which we should all live, sacrifice and die. Or be compelled to live, sacrifice and die.)

And it means, I think, challenging the notion that literal truth is the only truth that matters. Poetic truth is a truth far more powerful than literal truth, and science has a problem with poetic truth because it cannot be measured. Humanists do believe in a poetic truth (indeed, the various flavors of scientism only work as ethical systems when they embrace poetic truth), but as Lind points out, it is a tawdry and sentimental truth that does a poor job of ascribing meaning to human endeavors and cannot truly reflect human hopes. Poetic truth is an entirely subjective truth (albeit one people can share), and as Science and Humanism profess a faith in the "objective," at some point, the language of Enlightenment is going to fail us. Which is okay.

As the church, we have a language for that truth. It's called worship. It's called liturgy. And this is the language, the poetic truth, we should speak constantly to the world.

What Happens to Obsolete Military Alliances

2011-08-02T14:21:00.002-05:00

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in the early 1950s in response to the consolidation of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and the "dropping" of Iron Curtain across the continent. It was designed to fight exactly one war -- World War Three, the grand clash between the United States and the Soviet Union fought primarily in Europe and the North Atlantic (hence, I bet, the alliance's name).

There were several different "scenarios" for such a war, and by the 1970s, it became institutionalized as beginning in the Fulda Gap, a place that was once between the Germanies* where Soviet motorized rifle divisions would first drive into Western Europe. But it would have been a global endeavor.

In any event, the USSR and its attached military "alliance," the Warsaw Pact, went out of business in 1991. Kaput without any real kablooey. At that point, it would have been perfect for NATO, its one and only trained for war now an utter impossibility, to have had a great victory big party, invite the losers in a show of magnanimity and shower them with food, beer and wine, woken up the next morning and in the blurry headache of the hangover, gone right out of business. American troops should have permanently left Europe with a promise that, if needed, we'll come back. And in order to prove that, we'll practice coming back every now and again.

Instead, NATO did not go out of business. It found new things to do, focusing on stuff like international trade, climate change and the drugs trade. (I wonder how many good conservative American militarists know that U.S. money for NATO funds action on global climate change?)

And since that one-and-only war became an impossibility, NATO has waged four wars -- in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and now Libya. NATO remains engaged in all of these places, with troops on the ground still maintaining peace in Bosnia and Kosovo, troops on the ground maintaining not much of anything in Afghanistan, and planes buzzing Libya bombing stuff with no sign the bombing is accomplishing much or that it will ever come to an end.

So this is what happens to obsolete military alliances -- they just wage war until they are finally beaten (or exhausted, same thing) and only then can they truly go out of business. At some point, some people may begin to wonder: what was the point of winning the Cold War, anyway? Because I'm not sure I know.

---------------

*That just looks so strange, referring to Germany in the plural.

Yes, But Why Is It Worth Saving?

2011-07-30T08:13:00.001-05:00

Even discarded bits of pop culture can prove illuminating. Some years ago, Jennifer and I were listening to the Big Broadcast on WAMU in Washington, and one of the very old radio programs Ed Walker was running was Space Patrol, which in the early 1950s told the story of Command Buzz Corry and his faithful sidekick, Cadet Happy, as they patrolled the Solar System for the United Planets battling evil, accented villains such as Prince Baccarati [sp?], a generic Commie-Nazi villain of American post-war pop culture, who wanted to destroy the peaceful democratic order of the United Planets and restore his dictatorial monarchy.

In one episode, Corry and Happy, on patrol somewhere between Neptune and Planet X (Baccarati's home base, where he plots his evil with all of his enslaved minions), are talking about why the Space Patrol is so vigilant in trying to stop all of Baccarati's plots before he can carry them out. Being new to the outfit, Happy wants to know. Corry responds by saying something like:

If we don't, Baccarati may stage such a spectacular attack that the people of the United Planets will be frightened into surrendering, traumatized into giving up without a fight.

The program's sponsor was Ralston-Purina, the maker of Chex cereals, and test pilot Chuck Yeager was RP's spokesman for many of the show's adverts. A clear connection was made between Air Force test pilots and the valiant men of Space Patrol, between the imagined villains of Corry's solar system and the real villains America faced in the 1950s.

Growing up in the military, and around those who made participation in the defense of the country the life's calling, I'd always discerned something of a mixed message from them -- they staunchly defend a country they aren't entirely sure (because of its decadence, cowardice and lack of gratefulness) truly deserves to be defended. Nowhere had I heard this more clearly articulated than in this lost bit of popular culture. And not a terribly significant piece either.

But this idea doesn't get talked about much. I do believe history belies much of this thinking -- Americans did not capitulate after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and no one simply curled up and called for surrender after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Northern Virginia. But this idea, that Western societies are too fragile and too cowardly to defend themselves, especially when faced with the conspiratorial evil of Communism/Islamism, and thus need to be defended by a vigilant elite willing to do just about anything to ensure that those societies are never "traumatized" by attack, does appear to be pernicious, and it does appear to be bigger than America, as Stephen Walt notes in a recent blog entry:

What is even more striking about conservative extremists like Breivik is their utter lack of confidence in the very society that they commit heinous acts trying to defend. On the one hand, they think their idealized society is far, far better than any alternative, which is why extreme acts are justified in its supposed defense. Yet at the same time they see that society as inherently weak, fragile, brittle, and incapable of defending itself against its cruder antagonists.

This is really an old story: American hard-liners used to believe that the decadent Western democracies couldn't stand up to Soviet communism, and previous generations all believed that the current wave of immigrants would bring some sort of fatal infection to an otherwise healthy body politic. We've suffered a similar wave of paranoia since 9/11, somehow believing that a handful of radicals in Central Asia posed a mortal threat to a society with 300 million people and a $14 trillion economy. (Of course, the real threat turned out to be the self-inflicted wounds that we suffered in Iraq, Afghanistan, and on Wall Street.) By contrast, those of us who are more sanguine about such matters have greater confidence in the inherent strengths of a liberal society and are therefore more worried about departures from these principles undertaken in the name of "national security."

For many on the right who think and speak this way, they have reduced the communities and societies which they wish to save to abstract ideals, bereft of any real people. Indeed, real people just get in the way of defending the good. I'm not sure which is more attractive here -- being the virtuous defender of a noble idea, or being virtuous battler of irredeemable evil.

Who Edits This Stuff?

2011-07-20T14:27:00.001-05:00

I love Wikipedia. I find reading Wikipedia pages a fun way to waste time, and learn a (very basic) thing or two.

So, I was reading this today on Gamera, the Japanese monster turtle (full disclosure: as a child, I loved Gamera and Godzilla films), and came across this description:

Gamera also has the ability to fly. Generally, Gamera pulls in his arms, legs, head, and tail into his shell, fires flames out of his arm and leg cavities and spins around like a flying saucer, a precedent unheard of in turtles.

Yeah, so far as I know, no turtles in nature can fly, much less pull their head, arms and legs and spin around, shooting flames out the arm and leg holes. Who edits this stuff?

How Not to Hear to God

2011-07-18T12:12:00.002-05:00

Over the course of my very short (so far) pastoral career, several people have thrust into my hands copies of Craig Rennebohm's (with David Paul) Souls in the Hands of a Tender God: Stories of the Search for Home and Healing on the Streets, mostly because I have worked with the homeless and the mentally ill on Chicago's north side (at Uptown Lutheran Church) and have loved every minute of it. Rennebohm is a UCC pastor who has worked with the homeless and the mentally ill in Seattle, and he appears to have done it with compassion with faithfulness.

I am about a third the way through the book, and so I make this comment knowing he may deal with this matter later in the book. But I'm also somewhat bothered by an attitude that Rennebohm and Paul take in the book. In the fourth chapter, "Approaching Mary," Rennebohm and Paul tell several stories of people who struggled with mental illness, and how often the grandiose -- religion, government, extraterrestrials -- are present in the hallucinations and visions of the schizophrenic. They write:

Each type of illness expresses itself according to its own patterns. Hallucinations and delusions, for example, are generally symptoms of schizophrenia--as when a woman I'll call Veronica believed she saw a store-window mannequin come alive and start talking to her, or when Al heard God's voice in the shower telling him to stop washing because he was hopelessly dirty and there was no way he could ever be clean. Both were in fact experiencing schizophrenic episodes. (pp. 60-61)

After a brief discussion of the role guilt plays in depression, the authors then emphatically state the following:

God was not speaking to Al in the shower; his neurotransmitters were creating hallucinations and playing havoc with his sense of reality. (p. 61)

I find this statement troubling. Very, very troubling.

Some years ago, my friend John Hartwell (God rest his troubled spirit) told of a a time he had spent in a mental hospital, and of a young lady who claimed God was speaking to her. "What was God saying to her?" I asked him. "Oh, that we should love and care for each other," John responded. "Was God really talking to her?" I asked. "I don't know," he said. "She wouldn't stand still long enough for me to ask. She liked to jump up and down."

I find myself wondering about Rennebohm's God. How exactly is that God present with people? How does that God speak to humanity? And, if every voice we ever hear God say to us is merely malfunctioning neurotransmitters, are we really capable of listening to God? Or are we now missing something?

Rennebohm could have said that Al wasn't hearing God's voice because of what God said -- a kind and compassionate God would never have said such a thing. But he didn't said that. Instead, Rennebohm made a categorical statement: the voice of God, as such, doesn't exist -- it is merely our brains going haywire.

Which makes me wonder -- what then of all the times God speaks in scripture? To Abraham? To Moses? What of all the speaking God does to and through the prophets, many of whom see, and speak, and act in ways that would today be clearly indicative of some kind of illness. What would Rennebohm have made of Hosea marrying a prostitute on the "command" of God? Or Ezekiel's visions of cherubim and wheels and the scroll he ate that gave him the power to prophesy judgement to unfaithful Israel? What of the word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah, which included a command not to pray for God's people because God won't hear that prayer? Or Isaiah's unclean lips, made clean with a burning coal? Or Mary's "meeting" with the Holy Spirit? Or Paul's being struck blind on the road to Damascus?

For Rennebohm (at least so far in the book), God's presence seems merely to be a non-anxious, compassionate, professional and caring presence. And this is fine. But it is limited entirely by being incarnate. In this construct, God can only be present to us as and in another human being. There can be no supernatural presence, no communication from outside our ordinary experience. Nothing save the sweet and pleasant presence of the rightly guided and properly trained.

I bring this up for several reasons. First, because twice in my life, God has spoken directly to me. Been in my head. (At prayer, alone, in mosques in San Francisco, 1991, and Columbus, Ohio, 1994.) It is an absolutely terrifying experience, one I do not hope to ever repeat. I have also had other-than-ordinary encounters (I do not know any other way to explain them) with something divine, at the Greyhound bus depot in San Francisco in 1991 and again at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Someday I will explain these things in greater detail. But not today.

The point is, God is still speaking to human beings in ways that don't involve being incarnated in some non-anxious professional listener. God has at least spoken to me, and I know that God has spoken to others as well. As the UCC is happy to say, God is still speaking.

Which leads me to my second point. Are we still capable of listening? Are we so concerned with health and wellbeing on the one hand, and conformity to social norms and having people become well-adjusted contributing members of society that we are no longer capable of hearing God when God speaks to us through prophetic voices? Many compassionate, caring people wish to see others conform and be well-adjusted, but the desire to have people conform and be "properly socialized" and well-adjusted can also be an incredibly brutal, uncaring and violent act, one that damages people.

Would Isaiah (or any of the three Isaiahs) been able to give us any of those visions had they been medicated and hospitalized? What of Jeremiah on prozac, to make him better-adjusted, and thus more supportive of the government? Or Ezekiel on haldol and risperdol? What of his visions? It may be that God no longer speaks to God's people prophetically, but it may also be that we, in our "scientific" understanding and acculturation, and our desire to create and impose a very narrowly constrained normative human existence, with the ability to medicate people toward that norm, it may be we are simply no longer capable of listening. Or even hearing.

And this brings me to my final point. I do not have a major, or even minor, mental illness, so I do not have that struggle. I do not wish to seem uncaring, but I have come to believe that what we call mental illness tells us something fascinating about God. I have come to believe that all human beings are whole and complete, and each whole and complete human being says something wonderful and interesting about the God whose image we are made in. My wife is severely dyslexic. This is not a disorder, and she is not incomplete because of her dyslexia, as difficult and painful as it is for her to function in a non-dyslexic world. But her dyslexia tells me something about the God whose image she is made in.

I see the same with the "mentally ill" that I have met. To treat someone who has schizophrenia as someone who is somehow not whole or right is to miss what such a thing tells of us God. The God whose image they were made in, the God whose wholeness and perfection they reflect. Mostly, I find this something to meditate, to help me as I encounter the "mentally ill." And no doubt the Rennebohm does too, at least to an extent.

I have no easy answers. And I know how some of this might sound to those who struggle with mental illness. And I fear, perhaps too much, the desire of some to make others conform to a norm, whatever that norm may be. Tolerance, for me, is how much room is open for non-conformity, for the weird, the odd, the aberrant, and tolerant bourgeois social democratic liberalism is rarely as tolerant as it claims because its desire for conformity -- however expanded and inclusive that conformity might be -- is so powerful and unyielding.

But it may be that the God that bourgeois sensibility has reduced to a sentimental, non-anxious professional presence is too small a God. Far too small a God. The Israelites, and the followers of Jesus throughout history, often times found the experience of God to be as terrifying as it was comforting (and often times terrifying and comforting at the same time). To be met by God was to be overwhelmed (as Mary was), to be engulfed, to risk annihilation at the very hands of the infinite. This terrifying God who calls, gathers, redeems and loves God's people may sometimes only be truly be apprehended by human beings on the ragged edges of reason and sanity, a God whose infinity fills our finiteness and utterly overwhelms us. I'm not sure Rennebohm gets that God.

And I'm not sure how much the church really gets that God either.

Okay, So Why Isn't This Taken Literally?

2011-07-15T15:06:00.035-05:00

I have been a long-time observer of Dispensationist Christianity and its various end-times teachings crafted around a fascinating editing of different passages from Ezekiel, Daniel, Matthew and Revelation. My mother, for some ungodly reason (she is not a believer in any sense of the word) took me to the movie The Late Great Planet Earth when it first came out in 1979, and I suspect that event more than any others sparked an interest.

Dispensationism is the default setting for non-denominational Christianity in the United States, so much so that belief in a particular fulfillment of biblical prophesy, and not confessing the Apostles or Nicene Creeds, are what it means to be Christian for many Americans. (It was the Christianity I was exposed to in high school, for example.) In fact, I think it would be safe to say that dispensationism is a confessional identity.

One of the things I find amusing is that, as they edit together various bits and pieces of "prophetic" scripture to tell the story of Israel's physical regathering and coming war with the ~~Soviet Union~~ ~~The European Union~~ ~~Iraq~~ Iran _____________ (fill in the blank; it keeps changing), they take some things very literally, some things very figuratively (days and weeks in Daniel actually meaning years), and many things they simply ignore. All things, however, point not to events more than 2,000 years ago, but events today. And, oddly enough, political and historical events American believers in dispensationism always seem to be on the right side of. Hmmm.....

Anyway, I was spending some quality time with Ezekiel today, because I haven't before, and came across this fascinating end of one particular series of commands God gives to Ezekiel regarding the fate of Judah. It's chapter 12, and God commands Ezekiel to "prepare for yourself an exile's baggage, and go into exile in their sight." The goal is that the people, especially the rulers, of Judah may see Ezekiel hauling his worldly goods around, ask him what he's doing, and he will tell them what God is going to do -- "I am a sign for you: as I have done, so shall it be done to them." Exile is coming, war is coming, famine is coming, and it is in exile and war and famine that Israel will be chastened for its sins.

And then it gets interesting at the end of chapter 12:

[26] And the words of the Lord came to me: [27] Son of man, behold, they of the house of Israel say, 'The vision that he sees is for many days from now, and he prophesies of times far off.' [28] Therefore say to them, Thus says the Lord God: None of my words will be delayed any longer, but the word that I speak will be performed, declares the Lord God."

Not 2,000 from now. But today. Sure, these few verses only apply to the oracle of Ezekiel walking around with his luggage. But you know, the next time I have to argue with a dispensationist who uses uses creatively edited scripture to make a point, I'm going to do some creative editing myself.

Modernity and Tragedy

2011-07-15T09:29:00.002-05:00

Ugh. After a long period of being very sick, and an even longer period of not wanting to blog (blogging comes in bursts with me, it seems), I'm finally up to comment on something.

David Brooks has an interesting column in today's (Friday, 15 July) New York Times. He's wrong when he writes "[t]he fiscal crisis is driven largely by health care costs," (it's driven most by America's insistence on living beyond its means, whether that "living" is waging war in the Middle East and dominating the world or being "generous" to the poor and supporting the elderly) but he is correct when he notes:

We have the illusion that in spending so much on health care we are radically improving the quality of our lives. We have the illusion that through advances in medical research we are in the process of eradicating deadly diseases. We have the barely suppressed hope that someday all this spending and innovation will produce something close to immortality.

There is, I believe, a larger point to this. The aim of Modernity and the Enlightenment -- both stated and unstated -- is the eradication of the tragic. Specifically, Modernity and Enlightenment seek the end of death, suffering, accident, inequality, misery and poverty. Modernity and Enlightenment believe that human reason, combined with science (technology and industrial production) and rightly guided (by Morality and Reason to become Progress) can effectively bring about the Kingdom of God on earth, or something akin to that kingdom. It may be these ideals are not as passionately felt as they were 100 years ago, but they are still very intensely felt, and the desires of Modernity and Enlightenment have been almost completely impervious to human history, and humanity's inability to alter the tragic conditions and nature of human existence.

Modernity and Enlightenment have been quite capable of staggering change, mostly in terms of technology and organization. But that change has mostly been engineering, not moral. It has not altered the fundamental nature of human beings because it cannot. It cannot eradicate sin and all that springs from human sinfulness. And it is a delusion -- albeit an incredibly powerful delusion -- that somehow this engineering and organizational change can facilitate moral change. It cannot. We cannot evade the tragic, no matter how much we try. There will always be poverty, suffering, misery, accident, inequality, hierarchy and death as long as we are humans existing this side of the eschaton because those tragic elements are essential to the human condition. No amount of production, no amount of wealth, no amount of communication, will make us good enough to share what there is with all who need. Not because there isn't enough, but because we are people incapable of doing that kind of good.

In scripture, God may promise an eventual transcendence of the tragic, and we who are called by God in Christ to live that kingdom live out that transcendence. But we do so also knowing that God came into the world not to negate or eradicate tragedy but to participate in it, and to be present with us in the midst of it. The goals of Modernity and Enlightenment are misguided, and the Liberal Church is deeply misguided when it mistakes Modernity and Enlightenment for the Kingdom of God. When it mistakes the goals of Modernity and Enlightenment with the promises of God. And when it mistakes society and the nation for the church, the community of people called out to follow.

Priorities

2011-06-02T06:58:00.000-05:00

I'm fascinated by how NBC reported this story of a fight that broke out on a United Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., to Accra, Ghana. At about the 2:30 mark of the report, the reporter says:

The pentagon told us it costs $9,000 per plane per hour for an F-16. There were two involved here.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If I may. It's funny how suddenly the cost of using military forces becomes relevant only when the operation involves something remotely resembling the actual defense of the United States. When U.S. forces are used to patrol the skies of some far away land -- or bomb that same land -- then cost no longer matters. I don't recall ever hearing how much patrolling the no-fly zones over Bosnia or Iraq cost, how much the bombing of Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have cost, how much the occasional air strikes on Somalia have cost. Or the drone strikes in Pakistan.

Forgive me for thinking that somehow the defense of the United States actually involved defending the country. Clearly, it doesn't. Actually defending the country appears to be something we as Americans simply cannot afford. But killing people abroad? Apparently we can't be bothered with accounting for the costs of that.

On Prophets and the Mess of the World

2011-05-26T14:21:00.001-05:00

Eugene Peterson has this truly insightful thing to say about prophets in the Bible in his introduction to the prophetic works of Jewish scripture from The Message: Remix:

Basically, the prophets did two things: They worked to get people to accept the worst as God's judgment -- not a religious catastrophe or a political disaster, but judgment. If what seems like the worst turns out to be God's judgment, it can be embraced, not denied or avoided, for God is good and intends our salvation. So judgment, while certainly not what we human beings anticipate in our planned future, can never be the worst that can happen. It is the best, for it is the work of God to set the world, and us, right.

And the prophets worked to get people who were beaten down to open themselves up to hope in God's future. In the wreckage of exile and death and humiliation and sin, the prophet ignited hope, opening lives to the new work of salvation that God is about at all times and everywhere.

The Confessional Nature of Anglo-American Nationalism

2011-05-25T08:28:00.000-05:00

My last post, and much of the "controversy" (sic) over Barack Obama's birth certificate, got me thinking about England's "Glorious Revolution of 1688" and the nature of Anglo-American nationalism. As I recall, I think most of this comes from Benjamin Kaplan's Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe.

For those not familiar (and I am not as familiar as I would like to be), the "Glorious Revolution of 1688" was the toppling of the Catholic Stuart dynasty and installation as King of England one William of Orange, a good Protestant Dutchman. In the Whig version of history, it was a non-violent uprising against the alleged injustices and usurpations of James II (the Stuarts themselves had been interrupted by the Civil War and Cromwell's über-Protestant Protectorate), in which England as a mass (or at least the Protestant elite) rose as one and ousted the king without the head-chopping and bloodletting that had convulsed the country a half-century earlier. Kaplan's not quite so sanguine about the matter -- he notes that William was actually the leader of an invading army that was helped by most English elites.

What is interesting, however, is how willing England's elites were to get rid of a more-or-less English monarch (the Stuarts were Scottish but related to the Tudors) and replace him with a Dutch prince who probably spoke no English whatsoever merely because of religion -- William was protestant and James was Roman Catholic (who had produced a Catholic heir). Now, granted, there was more to this than that. The great struggle in England in the 17th century was over monarchical absolutism, with the Stuarts (beginning with James I) claiming to be absolute kings akin to Louis XIV of France while parliament was claiming absolute power. (Hint: Parliament wins.) But it is the religious component that fascinates me most.

There is a confessional aspect to Anglo-American nationalism. It is not enough merely to be born in a place, or to speak a language (though that helps; the English were paranoid about foreigners and language as far back as the 13th century). One must confess one's national identity. A perfectly good English monarch is tossed overboard for being Catholic (and thus representing all things foreign and tyrannical) in favor of a foreign noble who, by being Protestant (and willing to defer to parliament), can confess the right national identity.

In a popular age, it is not enough merely to be born in the United States. One must confess one's Americanness. And in the right way, too. I've long believed the United States is not so much a nation as it is a confessional church with a flag and an army. Our political discourse isn't so much about ideas or even ideology (though we live in an ideological age), it is religious. It is about the exegesis of sacred documents (Constitution, Declaration of Independence, other significant foundational documents) and overt confession of what those documents are believed to mean. Because we don't, as Americans, really share anything else. Not language. Not culture. All we have in common are governing principles. And that's it.*

For many, Barack Obama isn't a proper American because he doesn't confess the right kind of Americanness. (Bill Clinton didn't either.) His skin color and African heritage on his father's side are a convenient proxy for this. Were he a Herman Cain or Congressman Alan West, confessing the same ideals they do, the right would not question his "Americanness" one bit even if he had been born in Kenya of a Muslim father. (For the left, it doesn't matter where he comes from because he confesses, for them, the right kind of Americanness.) The political right, like many rightist religious groups in this country, is eager to impose its understanding of sacred doctrine on all and demand allegiance to that understanding by all. Failure to confess that understanding places one outside the confines of what it means to be a citizen and participate in the civic life of the nation. (Lutherans should be familiar with this use of the law to exclude.) For their part, the progressive left shows every desire to have its own confessional identity that will exclude some from participation in civic life. And it is doing so. There is law enough for all.

Because these two confessional camps are increasingly mutually exclusive and increasingly unwilling to allow opponents to "commune" (again, sorry for the religious language, but it is what I believe is happening) and participate in the sacramental aspects of the state, I believe conflict is coming. Because unlike in a church group, where people can walk away and start their own churches, the conflict here is over the state -- the right and ability to rule others against their will. At some point, someone will decide the stakes are far too high to let the other side win. That way lies strife, war and dictatorship. Which I have long believed is coming to this country.

--------------------

* This really should give pause to libertarians.

Includes Roman Catholics, Communists and Muslims Too!

2011-05-24T09:12:00.000-05:00

Stanley Fish, in a column about the public discussion of Jews and Jewishness in the West today, writes this at the New York Times:

An important part of the protean and shape-shifting history of anti-Semitism is illuminated by Matthew Biberman’s brilliant book Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature. Biberman traces the intertwined careers of two characterizations of the Jew — the Jew as devil, an impossibly strong alien being who blocks and destroys everything that is good, and the Jew as sissy, an effeminate, slight, pasty figure who stays in the background and assimilates, but who, because of his having disappeared into the woodwork, is able to rot it out from within. (This quick summary does not do justice to the richness of Biberman’s analysis.) So you can have the fierce barbaric Jew (Israel as the atom-bomb wielding destroyer of Arab armies, at least in 1967) and the insidiously bland Jew, the obsequious figure who, while no one’s looking, takes control of everything. That means that whatever a Jew does there are a number of pre-packaged, and often mutually exclusive, narratives in which to place him, and, by and large, they are not positive ones.

This notion of the almost supernaturally strong, essentially evil enemy who is at the same time weak and cowardly and blends in so as to destroy society from within also forms the substance of English anti-Catholicism (though it tends to focus on the person of the pope, rather than average Roman Catholics), was central to anti-communism and has found new life in anti-Islamism in America.

I cannot speak to how other societies view enemies real and imagined, but it seems the kind of paranoia reflected in English anti-Catholicism/Semitism/Communism/Islamism is an essential fact of Protestant Anglo-American culture. It is foundational, an essential fact that some in the culture can transcend in times and place, but not for any great length of time. It is something that cannot be explained so much as it explains. It is so much a part of the culture that many Jews -- particularly right-wing supporters of Israel -- have embraced the language, images and logic of this paranoid-conspiracy thinking when they intellectually deal with Muslims and Islam (and even Arabs in general).

This fear is not grounded in much fact, and so reason cannot explain it away or even ease the fear much. (In the 18th century, there were never more than 100,000 Roman Catholics in England, and yet occasionally the English public would erupt into paroxysms of violent anti-Catholicism in which fear of a take-over of the country by the pope -- that century's version of the sharia scare -- was primal, and said take-over would end English liberty because rule by the pope was the very definition of tyranny.) But it is grounded in some fact -- Roman Catholic Stuart pretenders hung around in France making ominous noises for decades after the Revolution of 1688; Jews did seem to play a overly huge role in finance and the professions Europe in the 18th and 19th century during a time of several social dislocation; Communists did actually believe they were going take over the world (science allegedly proved the inevitability of revolutionary socialism); and Revolutionary Muslims did attack the United States throughout the 1990s and spectacularly on September 11, 2001. But the fear departs from the fact by creating a moral universe of both irredeemable evil and cowardly weakness incarnate in the same opponent.

I wish I understood where this fear comes from. It does seem to be primal to Anglo-American Protestant existence. (The King of England would take on many of the features of the pope in the run-up to the American War of Independence.) I want to root this with the Scots-Irish protestant, but it appears to be just as English as it is Scots-Irish. So I have no idea where it comes from. But it is fascinating. And frightening to behold.

The Yearning of the Spirit

2011-05-16T08:43:00.000-05:00

This amazing quote comes from a piece by Jamie Manson at the Religion Dispatches web site, and the italicized bit echoes my experience and understanding utterly:

Like Wallis and Claiborne, my partner and I have a deep passion for working with the poor, the hungry, and the homeless. Our commitment to this work does not come simply from a desire for the common good, but from the yearnings of our spirits [italics mine - CF]. I’m a Catholic with a Master of Divinity degree and my partner grew up evangelical and attended a Midwestern Bible college. For us, the margins are a sacred place where we have some of our deepest experiences of “church,” the way Jesus envisions and incarnates it in the gospels. It is in the face of the broken and desolate that we most clearly see the face of Christ. [Again, italics mine - CF]

I've said before, though not articulated it fully, that I don't really believe in the common good. And I don't. I follow this call because I have to, in order to be true to myself. To live with myself. To be at peace with myself. If that sounds selfish, in a way it is. No one acts without a lack of self-regard or self-concern, even if that self-concern is the righting of the soul by doing for and with others.

And the margins are sacred. They are amazing places where God shows up all the time. That's why I love doing ministry in cities. It's the randomness of unplanned and unprogrammed encounters. I never know exactly when I will meet God. When God will meet me.

The Appeal of Choice Theology

2011-05-09T11:44:00.000-05:00

I do not believe that human beings can or do make the conscious and "free" to choice to follow God. My life experience tells me this, but also my understanding of scripture does as well. There may have been many people who followed Jesus because they thought it would be a neat idea, but the disciples -- Simon, Matthew/Levi, John and James the sons of Zebedee, Saul of Tarsus -- were the people Jesus called. People Jesus came to while they were minding their own business.

In calling them, he invited -- not commanded, as I don't see God commanding so much as inviting, but maybe compelled, in the better sense of the word -- them to follow him and do his work. Not just to believe, but to do. And to be a people called. It was understood as an overwhelming experience, an encounter in which the one called understood there was no saying "no," no not following. For whatever reason.

That's been my experience. And not just as a follower of Jesus. I was a Muslim for 15 years, and was so because it was also something of a calling. I am grateful for the time I spent with brothers and sisters in Islam, and met a great many Muslims who are better at being "Christians" -- at loving their neighbors, and of caring for the "least of these" -- than many Christians are. And while I am Christian now because of my experience at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, it is not because I somehow decided that I could no longer "believe" what I had believed about God or belong to the community of people who submit to God as Muslims. (Because I still miss being part of that community. I miss it very much.) It is because, standing beneath the towers, watching them burn, watching people die, standing powerless in the midst of this event*, I understood that I was met by God that day -- and would later come to appreciate that the God who met me was the risen and resurrected Jesus Christ, thanks to the love and compassion of other Christians. It was Jesus who told me, that day, in the midst of fire, terror, fear and suffering: "My love is all that matters." And: "This is who I am."

So no, I don't believe for a minute we "choose" to follow God. God calls us. God gathers us. Forms. Sometimes, even, against our own will. Israel did not ask to be freed from slavery in Egypt, did not appeal to God to do something. Israel simply groaned. It was God who yanked Israel out of Egypt, unwilling, unasked. And promised them something they never wanted, never asked for, never demanded.

Questions of will come up at this point. I don't know what to say. Predestination makes my head hurt, and I simply do not believe in double predestination of any kind. God is not an intellectual puzzle, a set of ideas, concepts bounded by an introduction and a conclusion, something we try to tie up neatly in a little fancy box. We experience God in all God's awful glory. I don't know what to make of human will when it comes to God. More importantly, I don't really care. I know, like Matthew at his tax booth, that when Jesus said, "follow me," I followed. I didn't really see myself as having any choice. My "will" was irrelevant in the matter. Because I knew that in order to live with myself, I had to follow. I know when I have met others who have been called to follow. We compare notes, and we follow together. We extend that invitation to others, but mostly, I don't care about those who have not been called.

Because I really don't know how they've been called. Or not. I'm not interested in saving the world. God has already done that in and through Jesus Christ.

But there are lots of people who do believe we can -- and do -- choose to follow God. I may not buy it, but it a huge part of the American religious landscape. And I think I get the appeal of "choice theology," the ability of the human will to make a conscious moral choice to follow God and adhere to God's teaching. Choice theology is both radically egalitarian and democratic on one hand, and extremely conservative on the other. It is a critique of predestination (especially double predestination) on one hand, and universalism on the other.

Choice theology is radically egalitarian and democratic because it makes every human being, regardless of social position, wealth or stature, utterly and completely equal before God. Every human being is capable of making the choice to believe in God and God's promises, to follow God, and through that faith, receive the promises made by God. No human being is destined for Hell, all can choose to be part of God's kingdom. In this, it is incredibly empowering. It gives a great deal of agency to human beings, a great deal of power to decide individual fates and communal belonging. Where dour Calvinism had to invent signs of election for the uncertain, choice theology gives a certainty that "I have chosen" or "I continue to choose." It makes the choosing, the confession of Christ, the mere acknowledgement of the majesty of God, the central act of worship, because that is what makes the Christian community. The Christian community is created not by God calling it out, or Christ gathering it together for a meal, but by the Christians who confess. It is a true community of choice. It is, in fact, the ultimate community of choice.

And anyone in the community can adhere to the teachings of God. The teaching is democratic too.

But that's where choice theology also becomes very conservative. I read recently (somewhere online, in a fairly reputable essay -- wish I could cite the source) that English establishment Christianity (and even dissenters like the Methodists) in the late 17th and 18th centuries believed in a kind-of casual universalism. That all Christians in a Christian society would be saved. Pietism -- and that's what Methodism was -- sought a greater expression of what it means to truly be a follower of Jesus in a society where everyone is baptized (by law) and thus Christian. Choice theology does not say everyone is saved. In fact, you must actively choose to be saved. Otherwise, you are not. In creating a community of choice, it also creates a community defined almost entirely be shared confession -- by ideology. It becomes a much less tolerant community of intellectual difference (as ideological communities tend to be, even when they are "diverse"). Confessional conformity and adherence to the teaching are essential elements of belonging to the community, and failure to do so gets someone kicked out of the community, since confession and adherence are all that are seen uniting people. (As an aside, as liberal Christian confessions are becoming ideological communities, they are becoming significantly less tolerant of intellectual difference, even as they pursue "diversity.")

What choice theology does is emphasize the human will, and seeks to square the omnis of God with the ability of human beings to make moral choices. Since the Second Great Awakening of the early-to-mid 19th century, choice theology is the strain in American religiosity that cannot be avoided. That's why I am at great pains to preach that God gathers the community -- in baptism and communion -- and why, despite not wanting to, I had to recently defend the ELCA's position on homosexuality -- because God gathers the community. And if God gathers and calls people, who are we to argue? Even if it means we must live in the tension of what God's teaching says or appears to say. (Arguments of equality and fairness are made from the basis of the American civil religion, and have absolutely no basis in scripture.) The sanctified community is not formed by right-thinking people who choose to create an alternative community, but rather is formed by God, who has called God's people -- and God calls all kinds of people -- out of where they were into the wilderness to form them. And give them teaching. And forgive them when they are utterly incapable of following it.

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* I believe the experience of and encountering God in utter powerlessness is actually an important one for a life of faith. Bourgeois religion, whether it is Islam or Christianity, is about control, about the exercise of power, about the organizing of the world. Perhaps responsibly, but it sees powerlessness as a vacuum into which power and agency must be poured. But it is in real powerlessness, in the real admission that we have absolutely no control, that we truly are found and met by God.

Of Shrines and Trials

2011-05-02T23:54:00.002-05:00

It was 2003 or 2004, I think, when I came across a news article in a UK newspaper -- The Independent, I think, though it may have been The Guardian -- detailing how a group of Afghan Sufi Muslims were turning the graves of fallen Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters into ad-hoc shrines. Where they would invoke the power of the fallen mujahedin in their petitions to God.

There was a lot of power in the place where the fallen were buried, one Sufi leader told the newspaper. They struggled in the name of God, they fought in the name of God, and they died in the name of God. They were closer to God than the rest of us. That made the ground where they fell, and the ground where they were buried, sacred ground. Holy ground.

The Sufis were not, however, pining for the days of the Taliban government, and they weren't fighting for Al Qaeda or even supporting the organization. Indeed, Afghan Sufis had been oppressed -- quite viciously -- by the dry and brutal legalism of the Taliban. And they were not supporting the Taliban in its fight against the United States, or the Northern Alliance, or the Western allies. And they understood the irony of consecrating ground where their enemies and oppressors fell, and beatifying those now safely dead enemies.

But the Sufis did know holy men, and holy ground, when they saw it. Even when those holy men were their enemies.

That's the interesting irony behind the desire not to allow whatever place Usama bin Laden might have been buried to become some kind of shrine or monument to the late Al Qaeda leader. Those Muslims most likely to turn his grave into a shrine, to venerate him as a saint, to draw upon his "power" and have it used on their behalf in their petitions to God, are the kinds of Muslims most likely to blown to bits by Al Qaeda types. In Pakistan, Sufis have been frequent targets, along with the Ahmadiyya (who are considered heretical in the way many Sunni consider the Shia) and the country's small Christian minority, of a sometimes brutal campaign of violence -- mostly bombings.

I appreciate that the Saudis did not want Bin Laden's body. I can even appreciate that the Bin Laden family did not want the body. And I suppose that even in Saudi Arabia, there was the risk of Usama's grave becoming an informal shrine, a pilgrimage site, a place of prayer. I find that unlikely, given the Saudis -- whose official Islam is as dry and legalistic and the English Calvinism that gave birth to the settlements of New England -- have done a good job of pulverizing just about every shrine they could find. Centuries old sites, many connected with important figures from the Qur'an and Islamic history, have been demolished. Even that built on the Prophet Muhammad's grave was demolished. (To be fair, even the kingdom's modern founder, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, was buried in an unmarked grave -- at least that is my understanding.) Saudi Sufis have long complained about this. Very quietly, but they have complained.

So it is unlikely, had Usama Bin Laden's body been kept around, that it would have become the kind of religious center that, say, Ayatollah Khomeini's tomb has become. (Khomeini himself came from a Shis Sufi tradition, well outside the mainstream of Iran's Shia clergy.) Because he wouldn't have had a tomb. But an unmarked grave is somewhere, and even if no one quite knew where, I could see someone deciding, "well, it might as well be here," and passing a place off as Usama's tomb. It wouldn't have been on the Saudi Tourism Ministry's list of preferred destinations, and visiting the place would have earned you some time in lockup. But someone could have made a nice living "hosting" the grave of the sainted Usama Bin Laden!

But who know what will happen in a century or two or three, when Usama has passed into the realm of myth, when relics of him may be collected. I fully expect that the compound in Abbottabad to become some kind of shrine -- probably run by the same kinds of Sufi Muslims who would otherwise find themselves on the receiving end of jihadi violence.

(This is not to say that Sufi Muslims are inherently peaceful. The 19th and 20th centuries saw lots of Sufi-led resistance to colonialism -- the Naqshabandi in the Caucasus Mountains and elsewhere, the Sanusids in Libya, the various Mahdists of Africa. While it is likely in the short term that the Revolutionary Islam embraced by Bin Laden will become a criminal enterprise, along the lines of Colombia's FARC, I can see a day long from now when Al Qaeda could be a Sufi order of some sort, practicing a spiritual discipline rooted in whatever understanding of jihad makes sense at the time. I'm not predicting, I'm just saying...)

Now, someone asked me if Bin Laden should have gotten a trial. No, he should not have. I have come to believe in something I call "rough justice" -- that there are people who have acted in such a way that frankly, what they really need and the best they are going get is to be strung up by the mob. Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena strike me as relatively good examples of this in action. Manuel Noriega would have been another. I can just as easily argue for mercy in either case, as with Chile's action in refusing to hand former East German leader Erich Honecker over for trial. I was not terribly excited about the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, foul as he was. Muammar Qaddafiy is a man who strikes me as in need of rough justice. Frankly, so does George W. Bush.

This is a matter of sensibility for me, and not a hard and fast rule. Generally, when it comes to certain kinds of crimes or human acts, such as those committed by heads of states and heads of governments, or by soldiers, or by guerrillas and terrorists, the legal process simply becomes morally inadequate. It spirals to absurdity. I would never vote against the prissy human rights lawyers who prosecute such crimes (they always seem to win)*, but believers in the "rule of law" conveniently tend to forget that laws can rule because men are prepared to do violence. Often times terrible, horrific violence. Which is why I was generally in favor of mercy for Pinochet and Honecker. It was not worth burning down anything to get "justice" for the victims of either. Both were old men, their regimes defunct, and I'm not sure what measure of satisfaction anyone could get from imprisoning unrepentant old men. I have no idea what justice means in instances like these. I'm not sure anyone else does either.

UPDATE 03 MAY: I'd like to clarify something. Typically, a trial is about the establishment of guilt, whether in the English tradition where innocence is first assumed and the state must prove guilt, or in the continental system, where guilt is assumed (on the basis of state charge) and innocence must be proved. (Given prosecutorial power in the U.S., there isn't much daylight between the two stances anymore.) A trial is, ideally, a tool to establish guilt. Which means that not guilty has to be a realistic, possible outcome. Trials do not exist, at least in theory, to determine how guilty the accused is. However, in most cases I've cited above, guilt has already been assumed, and not just by non-state accusers, but also by the "legal process." The point of a trial is, well, I'm not sure -- to confront the accused with the pain and suffering the accused has caused? Public catharsis? If that's the case, a trial is really just a slow-motion, legalistic lynching anyway. If the point of trying Usama Bin Laden is to find him guilty and punish him -- to serve justice as angry and aggrieved human beings understand it -- then why bother? A rope and a lamppost or a tall tree will suffice. You say we're better than that, that's what we have law for? No we're not. No one is. Look how the law is being used. And by whom.

Rough justice cannot be taken for others, either. Prissy European human rights lawyers sitting in judgement in the Hague (or wherever such ridiculous people sit) cannot adequately take any kind of real justice for Rwandans, or the people of Sierra Leone, or Liberia, or Sri Lanka, or Libya, or whoever. The only real justice -- if such a thing is to be had -- they can find is the justice they make for themselves. The Rwandan genocide actually ended the way it needed to be ended, by Rwandans. And not outsiders. This is a matter of human dignity.

So no, the idea of a "trial" for Bin Laden was absurd. Not just from a legal standpoint (given the mess the Bush and Obama regimes have made out of the legal system for terrorism suspects), but morally as well. What justice can there be for anyone who lost anything that day? And what is human justice but vengeance with the occasional possibility of mercy -- a possibility already foreclosed upon in the case of Bin Laden? As it is for so many others? I don't know if justice was done in killing Usama Bin Laden. I suspect, however, that Sunday's assault on the compound in northern Pakistan is probably as close as we could ever get.

Really, law is the triumph of brute force wrapped up in a neat little package anyway. Justice is the triumph of brute force enveloped in pretty words. Sometimes, for justice to be real, to make sense, it must shed the law and its cloak of pretty words and simply act. Mostly, it will be ugly and bloody. Most human struggles are. And it will rarely satisfy. Most human struggles don't do that, either.

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* That's only because the prissy human rights lawyers have never taken on anyone truly powerful. In this, they are hypocrites, mostly.

Bin Laden's Death and a Matter of Honor

2011-05-02T11:13:00.001-05:00

I was working for the Saudi Press Agency at the kingdom's U.S. embassy in Washington when the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq in March, 2003. The Saudis I knew were not terribly supportive of the invasion, but they didn't like the Iraqi government much either. They also knew there wasn't much they could do, and that the Kingdom was tacitly supporting the invasion.

In the first week of the invasion, when the Iraqi army appeared to give little effective resistance to the American advance, a few Saudis I met in the embassy were a little glum. "We don't expect them to win," one told me. "But they do need to fight well. They need to show they can and are willing to fight to protect their country and their families."

There is no sin in losing to a superior force if you at least acquit yourself honorably on the battlefield. This is both a matter of honor (in the premodern sense) and dignity (in a modern sense)*. To be utterly overpowered, to never have a chance to fight and die in a "fair" fight, to feel that you have been defeated fairly rather than unfairly is, I think, almost as important as whether you win or lose. The West's way of war -- technologically effective, impersonal, overpowering and overwhelming -- is a way of war of the deprives those who are defeated of their honor and dignity. (This matters, because it's impossible to make peace or even reconcile people to their defeat if they do not believe they maintain some amount of honor and dignity in the fight. It means that "winning" wars in such ways effectively does not matter.)

To stand, to fight, to even die like men -- that's important. We ignore that reality at our peril.

This came to me last night as I considered the scant reports we have now of Usama bin Laden's death at the hands of U.S. commandoes in north-eastern Pakistan. As of this writing, it appears he died on his feet, fighting, and it was important that he did so. I do not know if this was intentional or not, but the Obama administration gave bin Laden an honorable death. Granted, unlike Saddam Hussein, bin Laden probably reconciled himself to dying years ago. And with his faith, he likely had no fear of dying either. I suspect he was not inclined to be captured alive.

And capturing him alive presented any number of problems -- where to keep him, how to treat him, how public a spectacle he is to become. Treating him the way U.S. forces treated Saddam Hussein, the public humiliation of something like a health checkup, photos of bin Laden in a cage in Cuba, would have enraged too many people. Granted, Saddam was a coward who talked big about fighting to the end but hoped, instead, to live and rule another day. He did not. The American desire to humiliate bin Laden was intense, and it is good we were not given -- and did not take -- the opportunity to act upon our worst impulses.

This doesn't matter because somehow those waging war on the United States will say to themselves, "the Americans are now honorable, so we can stop fighting." They won't stop. But in the outrage to come -- about the violation of Pakistani sovereignty, the dumping of the body at sea -- many will at least be able to say bin Laden died fighting, that he died like a man. There will be some begrudging admiration from friend and foe alike. It will provide something resembling an ending.

The only problem I have with how the administration has acted has been with what they did with the body of bin Laden. I would have seriously considered giving the body to the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia, knowing that the burial rules and customs of the Wahhabis require burial in an unmarked grave. The Bin Ladens could have buried their wayward and long-disowned son deep on private property and no one would ever know where. It does, however, make sense that the administration feared they would no longer have control over the conversation if they released the body. The burial at sea -- I suspect with the presence of a Muslim cleric and maybe a Muslim service member or two for a proper funeral -- was basically a dumping, a way to easily get rid of a now-inconvenient artifact, something too hot to handle. It's clever they are justifying this by motioning to bin Laden's "religious beliefs," but this was all about not wanting to keep the trophy too long.

Because it would have been too tempting to want to do something awful to the body. Something humiliating. (I can just see the likes of John McCain and Joe Lieberman demanding that Bin Laden's body be publicly displayed and "desecrated"...) Something that would have only angered Muslims across the world. It would have been Americans at their absolute worst. In according Usama bin Laden the dignity of dying in a firefight, dying on his feet, and then dumping his body in the deep blue sea, the Obama administration has also according the Muslim world a matter of respect. Some honor. Some dignity.

Real power is knowing when you don't have to, and don't need to, and probably shouldn't, lord it over others. There's much that I don't like about Obama, and the actions of his administration, but he does have a more sophisticated and effective understanding of power than many in the GOP, who confuse barking orders and threatening people with real power. Who confuse brutalizing and humiliating people with defeating them. And, like Israel's Likudniks, confuse strength with aggression and domination.

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* I have come to believe that dignity and honor are roughly the same thing. Honor being a pre-modern, very tribalist notion (that requires a community), while dignity is its modern and much more individualistic articulation.

A Libertarian Confession

2011-04-23T14:54:00.001-05:00

It is still Holy Week. And while I have busied myself with trifles (see previous post), I have also been doing the work of the church. So this posting will be short too. I have a song to practice for worship tonight...

In polite company I often times call myself a libertarian. (In impolite company I call myself an anarchist, which is closer to the truth.) But I feel compelled to explain exactly what I mean by this.

The libertarianism I largely espouse is prophetic. It is not law. I believe that involuntary collectivism and communalism is humanity's inescapable lot. There is much voluntary cooperation between human beings, but there is much that is not. But that said, those who believe in the moral legitimacy of some kind of collective or communal aspirations for human beings often ignore that collectivism and communalism often times demand the unwilling sacrifice of some human beings -- their time, their talent, their wealth, their lives. Those who believe in a common good often ignore the very real fact that "common good" they seek is usually seen by an individual or a tiny handful of individuals and it is imposed -- with a combination of consent, assent, indifference and begrudging acceptance in the face of raw power -- on the community. Most days, I doubt there is even such a thing as the "common good" at all. Just the self-interest of those individuals who have or aspire to power over others.

In fact, all that is left, then, is raw power -- the power to coerce, to compel, to control what Gramsci (and, I believe, the Frankfurt School) saw as the language of discourse, so that people have little intellectual choice but to assent or agree to the exercise of power.

And power will ALWAYS -- I cannot emphasize this enough -- ALWAYS be used on those least able to resist it. Believe in "justice" all you wish, but in the end, the power you use creates and sustains marginalization, impoverishment, and suffering. Any power that can corral the wealthy can annihilate the poor. Any power which can elevate the marginalized can also further push them into the margins. Guess which is easier? Even well-used power will do these things eventually.

I believe libertarianism is, or can be, a prophetic critique. Individual human beings matter. No one should be sacrificed against their will for the alleged wellbeing of all. No order is so important, necessary or righteous that some individuals within that order can be thrown away because their lives are less valuable or are viewed as a threat to the community or collective. And yet, that is what all collectivism and communalism does. It throws human beings away. Regularly. And calls it righteous.

In the end, I believe it is important for those who have been marginalized, abused, and excluded from whatever involuntary community they find themselves in, from political and social power, to have safe places to flee to. Where they can build some kind of community with others like them. This is why I like big cities. And why I'm not keen on civil rights movements. I do not understand -- why would anyone demand to part of a community or a society that has clearly rejected them?

That makes absolutely no sense to me.

The Hot, Hot Sounds of Araby

2011-04-21T10:09:00.001-05:00

Another non-political post. Well, mostly.

The cover of "Dardanella," taken while perusing a University of Chicago special song collection.

From 1918 through to roughly 1922, there was a genre of popular American tunes that focused on the exotic east, and forbidden love. This was roughly the time Rudolph Valentino was playing "The Sheikh" in movies. I've come across a couple such songs -- "Dardanella," which was a small-time hit, "Hindustan," "Sheik of Araby" -- but I know there are a number of others. It is a kind of orientalism in popular song, using the motifs of the seductive, unrestrained, romantic East, a place of harems and purple sunbirds (from "Hindustan") and camels and forbidden love and whatnot. There are a few songs that refer to a place called Araby (a term probably concocted by English Romantic poets). It goes farther East, to China, but most of the romance seems to focus on what the Pentagon now calls the "Arc of Instability."

It is interesting this is an immediate post-WWI phenomenon roughly contiguous with "Coon Songs" (oh please, don't ask). I suspect it has a lot to do with the shock of WWI, and America's contact with the world, which had always been seen by some elements of American culture as decadent (like the seductive East). It has been too long since I've read Edward Said, but I don't know if he deals with this element of orientalism in 20th century popular culture or not. It didn't really last very long, and aside from Valentino, it didn't leave much of an impression. There are musical motifs that suggest the East -- bouncing rhythms, minor keys, bending strings -- but I'm not exactly sure what era of music they come from. (They come from somewhere.) Those motifs, those musical ways of depicting the East, are reflected in Maurice Jarre's score to Lawrence of Arabia, but also very effectively in the Madness song "The Liberty of Norton Folgate."

And while I'm not exactly a fan of the most current pop music (Katie Perry is about all I can take, since there's actual music there, which cannot be said for Ke$ha or Rihanna), it is interesting to hear some of the world influences in very modern dance pop. Eventually, real Arab music will find its way into an American dance hit. Mostly because Arabs have too much music you can dance to. And they know how to use synthesizers.

This is just a long introduction to the fact that I'm going to have to write one of these orientalist songs. Not that I wanted to. But as I was struggling with sleep last night, a half-verse attached to a melody came into my head and stayed there 'til morning -- surely a bad sign. "When Saud was king of all Araby / from sparkling sea to burning sand / the holy land of the Mohammedans / crisscrossed by the caravans." Yeah, it's doggerel, and in minor chords too. I've not sat down and figured this out on the ukulele, but I just know that sometime today (in amidst everything else I have to do) this will happen. It's going to be called "Veiled Girl of Araby," and like every other ersatz 20s song I've been writing since last fall, it's going to be about love -- this time, mysterious and forbidden love. I will keep true to the form.

But unlike messers Bernard, Black and Fisher, or most other Tin Pan Alley hacks scribbling away at their pianos, I have actually met a few "veiled girls of Araby." And, I have actually been to the Araby in question. So this is going to be fun.

Hmm, now, what rhymes with Nejd?

On Hammers and Nails

2011-04-20T08:47:00.000-05:00

Been a busy month so far, mostly with Lent, Holy Week and Easter-related activities. And it will be busy for another week or so. Anyone missing blog posts is just going to have to be patient.

But I want to write this quickly. It's an aphorism -- "To a man who has a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail." That is, the solution to any particular problem at hand tends to be based on the tools at hand. If all you have is a hammer, chances are, you will treat most problems as if they are nails, since that is what hammers are deigned to deal with. And what they deal with most effectively.

The opposite, however, is also true -- "To a man who sees nothing but nails, every tool begins to look like or be used like a hammer." (I realize that formulation is not as clever as it could be...) It is possible to be blinded by the real nature of the things in front of you, and to think that they are nothing but nails. I base this observation on my experience of the Progressive Left, which treats all social problems as if they were akin to segregation and discrimination in need of the constant and never-ending expansion of legal rights and legal equality. Everything is a nail that can only be deal with by the hammer of a never-ending civil rights movement. But the criticism equally applies to liberal internationalists and the neoconservative fellow-travelers who want to save the world. Ot just about anyone else.

Not everything is a nail, or a screw, or even a cotter pin. And not everything you can hold in your hand is a tool. I am reminded of the Taoist story of the man who was angry because the gnarled pine tree couldn't be cut down to provide good lumber to build a house. A monk showed the man that the tree had value of its own, apart from what the man wanted to make of it but couldn't. Sometimes problems aren't. And sometimes tools aren't either.

Identity and Interest

2011-04-05T09:49:00.000-05:00

I had a conversation, when I was working at BridgeNews in Washington, D.C., with one of our economics reporters about Palestinians and Israelis. The person -- whose name I cannot remember -- was more than just a reporter. He had apparently invented a series of algorithms that were able to predict, with alarming accuracy, the behavior of some segment of the market or the economy or something.

The guy was also Jewish and a supporter of Israel. The second Palestinian uprising had just started, and he confessed he did not understand -- why did the Palestinians bother fighting the Israelis, when that was pointless? It would be better for them to try and improve their lives by starting businesses and the like. I tried explaining that for the most part, the Palestinians were fighting for the dignity, their sense of self-worth as human beings, and that there were no Palestinian property rights an Israeli government would respect anyway.

He appeared not to understand. "Dignity does not feed a family," he said.

There is a certain materialist approach -- poverty and lack of opportunity are the cause of terrorism, for example -- which assume that material lack is responsible for the world's unrest and violence. All that needs happen is that people need to become either better off or hopeful that with hard work they can be become better. Improve material conditions, and you reduce violence. This drives much (though not all) progressive and conservative thinking on the world, for example. Whether you wish to "share the wealth" of "kickstart development," you are subscribing to the view that the causes of most human angst are material, concrete and tangible, or somehow very closely related to the material.

I don't but it. It is my experience -- both personally and having known a number of Palestinians -- that human beings will sacrifice more for intangibles than they will for concrete things. A full belly is not so meaningful if people regularly humiliate you in the process. Yes, human beings will sacrifice a great deal for people they love. In Dubai, I watched grown men suffer significant personal degradation and humiliation because they knew they needed the jobs they worked in order to care for wives, children and extended families. It happens here, too, though not quite so brutally. But there are points in which people can and do snap, in which they will no longer live with their degradation, and will rise up to do something about it. Even if it expresses itself in an inchoate burst of rage that ends up destroying the self. Which it often does.

You deprive people of their dignity as human beings at your own risk.

This all came to mind as an acquaintance on facebook asked a question -- a rhetorical one, I think, to which I responded, about looking for a poor fiscal conservative who does not have health care. I don't wish to read too much into the question, but I suspect a little bit of materialism in the question's sarcasm (or vice versa). People vote, or should, their material interests -- and I suspect (but I am open to being proven wrong) the person who asked the question is inclined to believe people do, or ought to, vote their interests. Their material interests.

But I don't think people do. I think people vote their identities, not their interests. (Yes, the two are often intertwined.) America is the sanctified community. But what does it mean to be sanctified? Americans are good and decent people. But what does it mean to be good and decent? Americans are history's chosen people. But what does it mean to be chosen? Progressives and Conservatives have understandings of this that overlap less and less as time goes on. (Though oddly enough, both seem to agree on the need to bomb brown people into submission.) But none of these are, on the face of it, matters of interest. They are matters of identity. Neither fills the belly or pays the mortgage or sends the taxman away happy and satisfied. All tell stories of who the self is in relation to others and to the world.

A poor person who would in many ways "benefit" from state-run health care might strenuously oppose such a thing because the sanctified community he or she believes he or she is or should be a part of doesn't manage people's lives that way. I, for example, do not believe the welfare state is "the sanctified community" or even a terribly caring one because the welfare state is still the state, and the state needs force to function, and while kind people do care for each other, they don't threaten to shoot people as part of that caring. Which is what the state does -- threaten to shoot people if they don't behave.

Some Thoughts on Corporations, Taxes and Personhood

2011-04-04T18:37:00.000-05:00

Meagan McArdle over at The Atlantic has an interesting proposition -- abolish corporate taxes completely and instead collect taxes from individual human beings.

She's written about this before, and she does so again in a piece on why General Electric probably paid U.S. federal income tax in 2010 (and also why probably is the best answer, given the complexity of corporate taxation in the United States). Taxes neither excite nor agitate me, but I suspect there is more wisdom in her position than not.

A lot of this hinges on the legal definition of corporations as persons. I've never been a fan of corporate "personhood." The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision of 2010 was the right decision -- not because corporations are persons entitled to free speech rights, but because corporations are covered under the last clause of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The corporation itself doesn't have rights -- it cannot -- but its shareholders have rights as a group of people assembling and petitioning the government.

I recall there was, in the late 1980s, a much more egregious ruling in which corporate personhood was affirmed. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. -- a monopoly power provider in Northern California -- did not have give space in its billing envelopes to a consumer advocacy group which wanted to say not-so-king things about PG&E because the company had a "free speech" right not to distribute a message it disagreed with. I find this decision repugnant because the issue is PG&E's state-granted monopoly, which makes its "customers" a captive audience. That, however, didn't seem to enter into the decision making calculus. Oh well.

Back to McArdle. Unlike a lot on the libertarian/anarchist fringe, I don't get all that hung up on taxes and taxation. I dislike paying for the warfare state, but that is not so much a dislike of paying taxes (I find it interesting that the people most angry about taxation are those most likely to support war, conquest and domination) as it is what taxes go for. Were America a normal country -- one that did not take upon itself the management and policing of the world, or even part of it -- I'd likely be a social democrat. But America isn't, and I'm not.

The problem with taxation is that governments like collect as much as they can but they also don't want to tax people who can fight back. Historically (and this has been true for as long as humans have written history), the rich shift the burden of taxation to the poor. And they are generally successful in doing this. It's easier to collect taxes from the poor (they may have less money, but they cannot effectively fight back). It's easier to have the poor support the rich, especially if government empowers them to take (or does the the taking and then transfers that money to wealthy). I do not like the language of "fair share" in regards to taxes, and I have no idea what a "fair share" of taxes from the wealthy would be. That depends on what a community or society want government to do. And we can no longer agree upon that in America.

But I do know, as much as I dislike the Progressive Era and the New Deal, that the very wealthy of those eras in the United States actually taxed themselves. That 90% top marginal tax rate was not the work of bank robbing anarchists and socialists suddenly wielding state power, it was the work of bank owning plutocrats. I'm not arguing for 90%, or any other rate, but just noting that the wealthy were not the victims they decided in the 1960s and 1970s that they would be.

Some More (Unsolicited) Advice for the Libyan Rebels

2011-03-31T08:39:00.002-05:00

Oh what fun we've had in the last six weeks! You folks were winning. And then you weren't. And then the French and the American air forces showed up, allowing you to win again. And now you aren't. To be crass, it's like a tennis match. With tanks and bombs.

It's clear at this point that not all Libyans support the uprising against Muammar Qaddafiy. Many do. Possibly even most. But not quite enough. Qaddafiy still commands a fairly well organized army, one that is still fairly cohesive despite being pounded from the air and losing both armor and artillery and the ability to effectively use armor and heavy artillery. It can still defeat you on the ground. What we had all hoped would be a fairly happy rerun of the December 1989 revolution in Romania has not happened. Qaddafiy has far more support in Libya than Nicolae Ceaucescu had in the end, and I suppose we can thank the tribal nature of Libyan society, as well as the fact the The Brother Leader had put many of his close family members in charge of those bits of government most important to him. (Modern state institutions like Egypt's or Romania's, with their desired basis in professionalism and competence rather than familial closeness, can easily betray a dictator if they see their best interests served in doing so. Political parties are also not families. Family is, well, family.)

So, some advice. As romantic and wonderful as a charge across the desert in Toyota pickup trucks is, beating the crap out of regime forces with the help of French and American fighter jets, it's clear you've strung yourselves out too far and aren't a coherent enough fighting force to effectively hold territory. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

The French and Americans really are on your side. Don't take the alleged impartiality of the UN Security Council resolution too seriously. The West is working for you. The presence of CIA advisors should be proof of that, not to mention all the bombing. Take advantage of that. Form a defensive line somewhere -- I'd recommend Ajdabiya, but I understand y'all may be retreating from there as well -- and then, with the help of all this allied air power, hold it. (For inspiration, let me suggest to you Surah 105 of the Qur'an, which relates the account of how God sent the birds to drop stones on Abraha's army besieging the Ka'aba in Makka and destroy that army. If such a comparison, birds sent from God with the US and French air forces, seems blasphemous to you, consider that Kuwaitis were more than happy to make that link after the 1991 war to liberate their country.)
Organize, organize, organize. Yes, as I noted, the dash across the desert probably seems adventurous and romantic, all Lawrence of Arabia/Norman Schwartzkopf-like. (And perhaps there are stories from Libyan history as well.) But you aren't an army, you are an armed mob. And the difference is being able to stand, defend and hold a position. Which you can't. Even becoming a militia at this point would be an improvement. Slow down. Time is now on your side. Qaddafiy cannot legally re-equip his army (tanks and howitzers gone are gone for good), and allied air power will continue to wear it down. If Qaddafiy thinks he can outlast Western force, I'd suggest a quick Wikipedia search under "Hussein, Saddam" and "Milosevic, Slobodan." (This may also inspire you to slow down.) Westerners may come off as sissies initially, but when we decide to wage war, we are relentless.
Form a proper government already. See the above section on organizing. You are getting there. But even Cote d'Ivoire has a proper, internationally recognized government.
But realize now your are conquering a country, not liberating it. Western reporters wandering around Tripoli a few days after the bombing began, in allegedly unminded moments, would get snippets of talk from Libyans stating something to the effect of "a week more of this and Tripoli will rise." Maybe. But it has been nearly two weeks now, and none of the cities currently under Qaddafiy control have rebelled. It could be those under Qaddafiy's rule -- some, many, or most -- are still oppressed by his regime and still too frightened to rise up. But it could also be that, at least in places, there is significant real support for Qaddafiy and his war aims. It is impossible to tell with dictatorships. It could also be the intervention of NATO has changed how Libyans in Qaddafiy-ruled areas view their government. Like Russians facing the Wermacht in 1941, they may be willing to fight for a regime they hate because it is fighting against foreign force. I do not know. But once it was clear this was no longer a mass, popular rebellion against a hated government and had become a civil war, the obvious outcome is that someone was going to be defeated and ruled against their will.
Foreign forces are coming ready or not. I know y'all have said you don't believe you need foreign troops to help. And some of you may actually believe the UN resolution authorizing the war prevents foreign soldiers from intervening. It doesn't. The West has already committed itself to the success of your increasingly haphazard rebellion, and if defending Benghazi and protecting Misurata cannot be done from the air, well, then it will be done on the ground, probably with French Foreign Legion regiments and U.S. Marine battalions. This will likely make any regime partisans fight all that much harder.
Get ready for a long war. It's nice that Mousa Kousa showed up in London, resigned his old job and denounced his former employer. He also doesn't matter much. Until the Qaddafiy regime leaders on the UN Security Council resolution 1970 list of sanctioned people and people prevented from traveling start defecting, the regime is still solid and still united and will still stand whatever ground it holds. You are going to have to take that ground meter by meter, probably, especially at the end. This is why you need to organize. To break Qaddafiy, you will need to break his state. Every bit of it. Without tiring or flinching. It's very likely going to take awhile. And when you are done, you will have to rebuild just about everything from scratch. This is the course you have committed to.

Again, I suspect I have told y'all anything you don't already know. And I haven't said anything your supporters in Washington, Paris and London don't already know too. May God be with you.

The Things You Find in Church!

2011-03-30T15:44:00.001-05:00

Workers building a new sound booth in the choir loft of our church found this today after pulling up some floorboards...

Yes, it's an empty pouch of Beech-Nut chewing tobacco, valued at 10¢. Clearly someone was doing something they were not supposed to be doing.

Here's the odd part. The tax stamp clearly dates the tobacco from 1910. Yet St. John's was not built until 1924. Does chewing tobacco keep that long? And who would use 14-year-old chew? And did St. John's ever put spittoons in the choir loft?

King David as Sacrifice

2011-03-30T13:34:00.002-05:00

And now for a change of pace. It's been a while since I've blogged biblically. So here goes.

At the church where I am currently interning, St. John's Lutheran in Somonauk, Illinois, the pastor and I have split up Lenten preaching buy focusing on the Gospel during the midweek services and the other scripture readings on the weekend.

I'm preaching this Saturday and Sunday, and so it gives me a chance to do something I truly love -- preach from the Deuteronomistic History. In this instance, the reading is 1 Samuel 16:1-13, where the Lord commands the prophet and judge Samuel to anoint David as king to replace Saul, who has lost his legitimacy in the eyes of the Lord.

It's a fascinating story [as always, all quotes come from the English Standard Version]:

[16:1] The LORD said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul, since I have rejected him from being king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go. I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.” [2] And Samuel said, “How can I go? If Saul hears it, he will kill me.” And the LORD said, “Take a heifer with you and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.’ [3] And invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do. And you shall anoint for me him whom I declare to you.” [4] Samuel did what the LORD commanded and came to Bethlehem. The elders of the city came to meet him trembling and said, “Do you come peaceably?” [5] And he said, “Peaceably; I have come to sacrifice to the LORD. Consecrate yourselves, and come with me to the sacrifice.” And he consecrated Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.

[6] When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely the LORD's anointed is before him.” [7] But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” [8] Then Jesse called Abinadab and made him pass before Samuel. And he said, “Neither has the LORD chosen this one.” [9] Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, “Neither has the LORD chosen this one.” [10] And Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel. And Samuel said to Jesse, “The LORD has not chosen these.” [11] Then Samuel said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” And he said, “There remains yet the youngest, but behold, he is keeping the sheep.” And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send and get him, for we will not sit down till he comes here.” [12] And he sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome. And the LORD said, “Arise, anoint him, for this is he.” [13] Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon David from that day forward. And Samuel rose up and went to Ramah.

Samuel is grieving Saul's lack of faithfulness, but the Lord tells him there's no time for grieving. He must find another king. Under cover is going to sacrifice with a cow (more on that later). It's strange that Samuel's appearance with the cow causes more than a little fear in Bethlehem, but he invites the town elders to sacrifice.

What happens next is strange. He looks over the sons of Jesse almost as if this was a casting call (I can almost here him say, "Lemme see yer teeth" to Abinadab and Shammah and the others), as if it were one of the sons of Jesse, and not the cow, he had come to sacrifice. First, Samuel gazes on the oldest son, Eliab, and is convinced he's found the new king of Israel. But God tells him:

Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.

It's an odd thing for God to say in this passage, because no sooner is the youngest son David brought forth than the narrator describes him as "ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome." So, the Lord does see as men see, apparently.

But consider how David is described -- ruddy, handsome, with beautiful eyes. My Grandfather Marsh was a very handsome young man, and according to what I've been told, people often said he was too pretty to be a boy. But ruddy and beautiful eyes are words we don't often use to describe men. Particularly beautiful eyes. in Semitic poetry, this description of the eyes is most frequently reserved for girls, cattle and gazelles (and often interchangeably).

So, back to the cow. The Hebrew word used here is בקר (bqr) a good semitic word meaning cow. Heifer is more specific, a cow that has not yet calved (and thus does not produce milk). We don't know why Samuel is bringing this cow -- under what sacrificial pretenses -- but we do have two examples (and only two) from the Hebrew Bible of times that heifers are specifically to be sacrificed.

First, in Deuteronomy 21, we find the following method of antoning for unsolved murders:

[21:1] “If in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess someone is found slain, lying in the open country, and it is not known who killed him, [2] then your elders and your judges shall come out, and they shall measure the distance to the surrounding cities. [3] And the elders of the city that is nearest to the slain man shall take a heifer that has never been worked and that has not pulled in a yoke. [4] And the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which is neither plowed nor sown, and shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley. [5] Then the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come forward, for the LORD your God has chosen them to minister to him and to bless in the name of the LORD, and by their word every dispute and every assault shall be settled. [6] And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, [7] and they shall testify, ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it shed. [8] Accept atonement, O LORD, for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not set the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of your people Israel, so that their blood guilt be atoned for.’ [9] So you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst, when you do what is right in the sight of the LORD.

The word here for heifer is the same בקר as used in the Samuel passage. The heifer in question atones for shed blood when no one can specifically be made accountable for that shed bled. It is an act of communal repentance while at the same time denying responsibility. It's also an act in which people can be reconciled. Interestingly, it involves a symbolic washing of hands.

The second time God instructs Israel to sacrifice a heifer is in Numbers 19, as part of a communal purification ritual:

[19:1] Now the LORD spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, [2] “This is the statute of the law that the LORD has commanded: Tell the people of Israel to bring you a red heifer without defect, in which there is no blemish, and on which a yoke has never come. [3] And you shall give it to Eleazar the priest, and it shall be taken outside the camp and slaughtered before him. [4] And Eleazar the priest shall take some of its blood with his finger, and sprinkle some of its blood toward the front of the tent of meeting seven times. [5] And the heifer shall be burned in his sight. Its skin, its flesh, and its blood, with its dung, shall be burned. [6] And the priest shall take cedarwood and hyssop and scarlet yarn, and throw them into the fire burning the heifer. [7] Then the priest shall wash his clothes and bathe his body in water, and afterward he may come into the camp. But the priest shall be unclean until evening. [8] The one who burns the heifer shall wash his clothes in water and bathe his body in water and shall be unclean until evening. [9] And a man who is clean shall gather up the ashes of the heifer and deposit them outside the camp in a clean place. And they shall be kept for the water for impurity for the congregation of the people of Israel; it is a sin offering. [10] And the one who gathers the ashes of the heifer shall wash his clothes and be unclean until evening. And this shall be a perpetual statute for the people of Israel, and for the stranger who sojourns among them.

A red heifer -- פרה אדמה (parah adomah). The word פרה for heifer here is a synonym for בקר. But the interesting word here is אדמה. David is described as "ruddy," אדמוני (JPS Tanakh notes the meaning of this is uncertain), but the Hebrew word אדמוני clearly is related to אדמה in much the same way red is to ruddy in English. In any event, the sacrifice of the red cow that has never worked the soil -- outside the camp by the high priest, and devoting the entire animal to destruction so that's its ashes may be used to ritually purify those who have come into contact with the dead -- is what is important here.

When the narrator describes David as ruddy with beautiful eyes, I don't think he's describing a young man so much as he is describing a sacrificial animal. David, in becoming king, is being sacrificed, to purify his people and to atone for shed blood. Granted, Saul was anointed to (and even kissed by Samuel), but there's something about David's anointing that strikes me as so similar to the woman who pours the jar of ointment over Jesus. Saul's anointing doesn't do that for me. Don't know why.

But it isn't that David himself, David as David, is the sacrifice -- it's that David's kingship, David's monarchy, David's calling to be king, is the sacrifice itself. A living sacrifice. To atone for the sins of his people and to keep his people in ritual purity. His rule is a sacrifice to God and for God on behalf of God's people.

There are two directions I want to go with this. First, there's the idea that calling or vocation is a living sacrifice to God. Christians have all been anointed in baptism to be what God has called us to be. I hope to develop that idea a little bit more.

But more importantly, David's is a sacrifice that prefigures Christ. David's sacrifice is completed by Christ, who makes perfect this atonement for shed blood (and Pilate, in that most Jewish of gospels, Matthew, even washes his hands of the whole thing) and to make his people ritually pure. Being sacrificed outside the city. Jesus is the sacrifice. I tend not to like sacrificial theology, especially Anselmian (is that a word?) reasoning which states Jesus had to die in order for salvation to happen (because then atonement becomes a game God plays with God's-self, rather than anything involving human beings). But I think the symbolism here is too constant and too clear to conclude otherwise. I don't know what it means, and I don't intend to draw logical conclusions from all of this. But I will, as always, preach a message of Grace -- in Christ's death and resurrection, we are atoned for, the blood we have shed made good, and we are made right (ritually pure) with God.

I haven't finished this, obviously, and these are just musings on the scripture reading. But this is more or less what I'm going to preach.

Obama's Speech

2011-03-29T08:38:00.004-05:00

I haven't listened to a presidential speech in a while. I boycotted all of Bush Jong-Il's speeches, and was right to do so, since listening to him simply made me angry. And up to last night's speech on Libya, I had also ignored Barack Obama. When presidents talk, I just get angry. Last night was not much different.

Mostly it was twaddle and nonsense. Americans are not "reluctant" about using force, given the number of times we've gone to war since 1950 and the constant state of war since 1948. If anything, we are less reluctant about killing brown people now than we ever have been, merely because there is no other great power to threaten us if we go too far. Obama mentioned the Libyans who helped the pilot whose F-15 fighter-bomber crashed without also noting that the Marines who came to rescue the pilot fired upon those same Libyans and injured a number of them (and killed several, if I remember the reports right).

And of course there's the idiocy of humanitarianism. I cannot even begin to express how foul and evil a justification this is for making war, the helping and bettering of others and the protection of the "innocent." Obama stated as one justification for bombing Qaddafiy's forces the fact that Muammar Qaddafiy used his air force to bomb civilians in cities who could not fight back. If this is a criteria for intervention, I wonder when the United States and its NATO allies will bomb Israel in defense of Gaza, which itself is regularly pounded from the air by Israeli fighter-bombers and whose people cannot adequately fight back or defend themselves against attack.

Oh, right. Never.

I have long had a disdain for much of the ethics of war in the West, with Just War Theory and all of that. I have been told I do not understand how these things work, and maybe that's fair, but I don't see the long, deliberative process at work that these processes of reasoning out when a government should go to war seem to require or mandate. All I see is justification after the fact, the decision to go to war first and then a self-righteous declaration that war is being fought allegedly not for our advantage, but to benefit of the people we are "helping." George W. Bush could have given most of that speech, and it was completely in line with Obama's intention to have America continue to dominate the world he set forth in the Nobel Peace Prize* (sic) speech. I also see essentialism at work, that the people making the decision to go to war are good people, the people they are fighting are bad people, and the people they are defending are innocent people -- and it is always this way. There is never any reflection about the suffering our actions cause, and that we might not be the people we think we are, that the evil will so clearly see in others also resides in us, and is easily empowered by our self-obsession with our goodness and righteousness.

I also do not understand this focus on "innocence." I remember from the time of the Bosnian War, meeting various Leftists in the United States and reading European Leftists who complained the Bosnian Muslims were not properly "innocent" because they (unlike European Jewry in the WWII) had the audacity to fight back, and thus were undeserving of help. Theologically, this makes utterly no sense, since in the Christian frame of ethics, none are innocent save Jesus Christ. "Innocence" should not be a requirement for assistance. But this also becomes self-serving, because we decide to justify our help by determining the people were are aiding (by bombing them) are "innocent" somehow and the people we don't help are clearly guilty and deserve to be bombed by whoever isn't us that's bombing them. Again, this isn't well-thought out prior reasoning, it's after-the-fact justification. Always.

(Honest, I really do not understand this, and am convinced the desire to "save innocents" and inflict "justice upon the guilty" is really an excuse to exercise power, dominate others and inflict suffering upon people. I see no other reason for any of it. Helping them is only a cover for these things. If someone could explain this innocence thing, I'll listen. I won't be convinced, but I promise I'll listen.)

And that last bit leads to another important point -- every bleeding heart humanitarian has someone's suffering they simply do not care about. Or are willing to empower and call righteous. (See Gaza.) So, in the end, their humanitarianism is completely situational and very selective. And they refuse to be called on this, since they are self-righteous -- good people waging war to defend the innocent from evil. As an excuse to wage war, it is too noble, to attractive. It will lead, has already led, to far too much war, destruction, and domination.

Obama did touch upon the one real reason the West should act -- because had Qaddafiy won two weeks ago (and if he still wins), refugees will flood not only Egypt and Tunisia, but Italy, Malta and Greece as well. Hundreds of thousands, probably more than a million. Qaddafiy would have been in charge of a broken, sanctioned, blockaded, impoverished country with few resources. Libyans would have suffered greatly under those sanctions, as Iraqis did in the 1990s. He would have had no reason to behave himself in Africa or elsewhere, and his connections with some of the world's worst regimes would have been the only economic ties he would have been able to retain and strengthen. The material support Qaddafiy gave to Al Qaeda in Iraq beginning in 2007 would have continued, and probably also strengthened. (That many Iraqi veterans of the anti-US war in Iraq are now fighting Qaddafiy's regime is proof that even dictators can face blowback.) Once Europe and the world more or less committed itself to supporting the rebels in their struggle to overthrow Qaddafiy, they were in.

And there is only on way this ends -- with the death of most or all of the senior Libyan officials on the sanctions list of UN Security Council Resolution 1970.

I have the same argument for those who complain about the West's "failure" to stop the Nazi efforts to exterminate European Jews in WWII: the only way to help them is to the bring the war to as quick an end as possible. You "protect" the civilians of Libya by waging a war that removes the threat as quickly as possible. That threat, as just about everyone has concluded, is Qaddafiy's government. Obama and Nikolai Sarkozy do seem to understand that, and they do seem to be waging war toward that end (even if they are rather cagily or stupidly saying they aren't).

So I don't so much object to Obama's actions as I do his language, which is dishonest, deceitful, self-righteous and self-serving in the extreme. And those words he did mean -- all that crap about humanitarianism -- are frightening and horrific. Because they promise war without end.

-----------

* Some people suggest Obama ought to return his Peace Prize. That isn't fair. The Nobel committee was merely premature in giving him the award. Sitting American presidents who have won the prize -- Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919 -- have always done so after they waged their wars of mass destruction and slaughter (Roosevelt the Philippines War, Wilson the Great War to End All Great Wars and Make the World Safe for Democracy and Reparations). The committee acted in haste. Obama needs at least one more war, and then he will be properly eligible for the Peace Prize.

The Economics of Rebellion

2011-03-28T12:35:00.000-05:00

Something else about the legitimacy of governments and the state (though more about governments than the state itself). The Arab uprisings are showing that the ability of people to organize to challenge a government has gotten easier, and the costs significantly less, than they used to be.

The ubiquity of cell phone cameras makes it possible to film things far less conspicuously than was once possible. The Internet makes it easier for scattered groups of people -- Libyan exiles, for example, living in Washington DC, London, Rome and Dubai -- to organize and mobilize. The amount of cell phone video coming out of Libya in the initial days of the February 17 Revolution, for example, was clearly well-organized and well-planned. And recently similar video came out of Daraa in Syria. Gone are the days when the leveling of Hama would take place in relative secrecy (and have to be filmed very surreptitiously, as one Hama video I remember seeing on ABC news in 1982). Libyan exiles are using their network to aid the Syrian opposition, with results that may end up being similar.

This may seem a "duh" moment, but consider: the costs of challenging and even toppling a government have gone plummeted, while the return on that investment has skyrocketed. At the same time, the cost of maintaining government control and stability has increased significantly and the return on that investment has declined significantly. A government without solid moral legitimacy and/or enough loyal backing to defeat a challenge is a government that will face trouble sooner or later.

But make no mistake: this is about control of the state in the belief that kelptocratic, authoritarian governments are not accountable to the people while the state can and should be. These are revolts to make the state work better. I believe all the same applies in the West, that Western populaces will eventually come to the same conclusions as Arabs facing down dictators and kings, but we have yet to see what will happen if Westerners try to organize -- really organize -- to topple unresponsive and unaccountable governments. Eventually, citizens in the West will discover elections cannot do this. I don't know when that will happen, or how badly Western regimes will behave in order to protect themselves. But I'm fairly confident this will eventually reach the West. Not today, not tomorrow. But sometime.

It is only a matter of time.

Musical Discovery

2011-03-26T13:45:00.002-05:00

As my discipline for Lent, I have been playing scales -- mostly on my guitar, but also on my ukulele. I have never been a terribly skilled instrumentalist (I have, over the last 20 years, learned how to sing well), and it has been something of a challenge, teaching my fingers to work the fretboard(s) as fingers. But I've been learning a fair amount, I think.

Mostly what I have been playing, over and over again, are scales/available notes in the first position (first through fourth fret) for C major, F major, G major and D major (just learning that one). I futzed with C major yesterday on the uke, thanks to an amazingly nifty iPhone app I originally bought that has all this stuff on it -- it's a tuner, metronome, scale guide and chord handbook. (The guitar bit of the app has about a zillion different alternate tunings...)

Music is a bit like math or foreign languages for me. I have a good ear, can master sounds (I pick up accents easily, and when I travel abroad, if I hear the local language, I cannot help but pick it up and start to use it), easily remember what I hear, but I always get clobbered on the bits and pieces of a foreign language that matter -- vocabulary. (Grammar is actually fairly easy for me.) Math is similar. Past basic algebra, math is a conceptual blur for me. Higher mathematics are simply too abstract for me. I cannot look at a formula and make much sense of what, exactly, it is trying to communicate. I can cypher well, know my multiplication tables, can do long division, even fairly easily do percentages (and I often prefer to do these things by hand), but the rest just leaves me confused. My one experience of calculus -- an econometrics class at Georgetown -- was not much fun (my B- was an act of grace on Julia Devlin's part), as I could never make sense of what a bivariate regression was trying to prove or what the answer meant. In any event, I could rarely get the same answer out of the same regression twice. My father is an immensely gifted mathematician. I am not.

(As an aside, I was also never really good at reading music either. I can know the value of a particular dot when place on a particular line of written music -- "That's an F# played for two beats!" -- but I never really had a feel for the abstract language of music and how to read it. Once I heard something, then I could play it, and I can always follow along to notes when someone else it playing, but I cannot sight read. I can pick out a melody, though, which I couldn't do at 15. And I simply cannot attach the F# on the page to an actual tone of F#. Which makes singing from a score impossible for me.)

Music theory, to the extent I have ever studied it, has always done the same thing to me. Abstractly, it has made absolutely no sense to me. I have a fairly good ear, but I don't really know what I'm doing when I write songs or melodies, save that things sound good and right to me. It's all kind-of cook bookery, what World Controller Mustafa Mond says of science in Brave New World.

Another example: I cannot tell you the physics of building bicycle wheels. I cannot even tell you much about the engineering of bicycle wheels. But I know how to build bicycle wheels, and I can do it pretty well.

But this year, something has changed. I've actually spent a fair amount of quality time with my guitar, learning to play other people's music. The first breakthrough of sorts came in November, when I was compiling Christmas songs to play and transposing them. I've long known that songs in the keys of C, G and D were fairly easy to play, because sharps were easier to play than flats. That limited what I could play. But a fair amount of Christmas music was in F (one flat) Bb and Eb, and as I was going through the ELCA's simplified keyboard accompaniment book, I realized how to adjust the capo to easily play songs with flats in them. Now I don't have to transpose chords on the music sheet to play in F (or Bb, or Eb), I just put the capo on the third fret (in F), and know that the F chord is fingered as a D in that position. I've gotten good enough at this that I don't need much mental preparation for it.

Stupid, huh? But I noticed something this morning as I was playing my scales: that the notes you play in a scale will also match the notes of the chords you can finger in scale's key. I know, I've discovered nothing somebody couldn't have already told me, but I've also really learned it the only way I can truly learn anything. I went through the C major scale and wrote down all the chords I knew I could finger from the notes in the scale. It was actually a really good exercise.

I have always wanted to take a basic music theory course, and I think once I get there I might even have some idea of what I'm doing. As I learn to finger the guitar -- and not just strum the damn thing (my finger picking is getting better, and I can even sing and pick, though picking suffers when I do) -- I may actually get a better tactile feel of the instrument, and thus be able to take what are for almost imponderable abstractions into the "real" world and make them concrete. That would be awesome. I would like, at some point, to have some idea of what I am doing when I make music.

Redeeming Politics and Redeeming the State

2011-03-26T10:07:00.000-05:00

Whew! I have finally finished Peter Leithart's book, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom. It took me longer than normal because, in my current schedule, reading deeper books is a somewhat sporadic affair. (I renewed this book four time, for example, and at 340 pages, it's not all that long.) And I have finally figured out what Leithart wants to accomplish.

Leithat wants to redeem politics, and through that redeemed politics, wants a redeemed state. A state which can be a ground for Christians -- and individuals and as church -- to live out faith in love (to borrow a Lutheran phrase which he does not use). He tears Yoder's history apart because he wants to preserve the ability of Christians to purposefully use the state to act. Leithart does a reasonably good job of proving John Howard Yoder's history wrong -- there were no "pristine" Christian church that in the two centuries before Constantine swore off violence and statecraft, only to be later seduced by the serpent of power. Yoder's history is an Anabaptist narrative, and it does not reflect the reality of the pre-Constantinian church. Indeed, I have read several church fathers from the second century AD in which they write two things about persecution:

As Christians, we are willing to suffer persecution and even die as martyrs -- witnesses -- to the faith at the hands of the Roman state because Jesus Christ our Lord did;
But we shouldn't have to, because as Christians we are the Empire's best citizens, praying for the emperor and for peace.

Leithart also writes two very important things: that the church pre-Constantine had no systematic theology about either war or the state. This is true enough. We confess nothing about the state, one way or the other, and from that, it is clear there was little or no theological dispute about the Roman state (even during the persecution of Diocletian). There was also no systematic theological approach to soldiers, the Roman army and war. Leithart states that Tertullian's and Origen's opposition to the military has less to with war itself and more to do with the pagan religious rituals central to state worship. If the objection is pagan idolatry, and not war itself, Leithrt asks what then would happen when the state and its agents were stripped of pagan idolatry and need for pagan ritual (such as sacrifice)? Every clue we have suggests that Christians easily accommodated themselves to the Roman state.

There were also regional differences in how Romans view the military:

Opposition to military service was most prevalent in safe "interior of the Pax Romana" and [was] less prevalent in the frontier provinces menaced by the barbarians." The exception to this generalization was Rome, where the church was more accommodating to military service than elsewhere. The Hellenistic East, with its base in Alexandria, was the most rigidly opposed to military service. (p. 262)

This makes sense. Where military service was seen as a necessity for survival, it was most likely to be theologically accepted. But not to the point of needing to be confessed. The church also early on decided that homicide in war is not "murder" in the sense of the law -- νομος -- and thus not punishable, though St. Basil did state that soldiers fighting in war needed to abstain from communion for three years, presumably to do some kind of reflection and penance (Leithart, p.276).

Let me state up front that I still agree with Yoder's theology, even as his history has been shredded. Leithart does not. He was to "re-baptize" the state, set it on a new trajectory, to become a place and ground where the Kingdom of God can be made known:

... only through reevangelization, only through the revival of a purified Constantinianism, only by the formation of a Christically centered politics, only through the fresh confession that Jesus' city is the model city, his blood the only expiating blood, his sacrifice the sacrifice that ends sacrifice. An apocalypse can be averted only if modern civilization, like Rome, humbles itself and is willing to come forward and be baptized. (p. 342)

Only that? If Leithart has a partisan political axe to wield, he doesn't us it in this book. He has no program, confesses no understanding of what a "baptized" politics would include, what the polity's confession of Christ as Lord would mean. Before I go farther, it's necessary to quote Leithart at length on his exceptionally accurate description of politics in modern nation-states:

Modern states, first, do not welcome the church, as true city, into their midst. They are happy to welcome the church if it agrees to moderate its claims, if it agrees to reduce itself to religion, or private piety, or aesthetical liturgy, or mystical piety. Modern states are happy to be Diocletian, supporting the priesthoods as a department of the empire. The modern state will not, however, welcome a competitor. It will not kiss the Son as the King of a different city, and it will not honor the Queen unless she is a floozy. [I'm not sure I've ever seen that word in print before -- CHF] All modern states denounce the Constantinian system; that is what makes them modern states. There are differences, and important ones. Totalitarian states attack the sacrificial city of the church, seeking to turn it into Diocletian's sacrifice of Christians. Democratic states more or less peacefully marginalize the church, and the Christians of democratic states too often cheer them on. For all their differences, totalitarian and democratic systems are secretly united in their anti-Constantinianism.

Second, because the modern state refuses to welcome the church as city, as model city, as teacher and judge, the modern state reasserts its status as the restored sacrificial state. This means that there must be blood. Medieval life was rough and brutish in plenty of ways and had it share of blood. But believing that the Eucharistic blood of Jesus founded the true city provided a brake on the bloodshed. Bishops imposed the peace and truce of God, and monks and others continuously modeled Christ before kings. Modern states have no brakes. Modern nations thus get resacrilized because they are resacrificialized, they demand the "ultimate sacrifice" (pro patria mori), they expel citizens of the wrong color or wrong nationality or religion. In modernity, "Constantinianism" that Yoder deplores becomes a horrific reality, as the church has too often wedded itself to power.

This is the origin of nihilistic politics. Nihilistic modern politics is not the product of Stoicism or nominalism or any other system of ideas. Nihilistic politics is the product of the history of Western politics, from Constantine's desacrificialization of Western politics back to modernity's re-sacrificialization. Nihilistic politics arises when the modern state reassumes the role of sacrificer but then realizes that there are no more gods to receive the sacrifice--no more gods but itself. And there can be no more goats and bulls, since animal sacrifice is cruel and inhumane. Yet there is blood, more blood than ever, more blood than any ancient tyranny would have thought possible, and all of it human. ... [W]e might say that modern nations are post-Christian; they benefit from the covenant privilege of handling the sword and the fire but refuse to listen to Jesus when he tells them how to avoid cutting or burning themselves. (pp. 340-341)

I think this is a marvelous description, and Leithart clearly states at the end what he believes: the church as separate sovereign, empowered to advise and restrain the state. He points to many examples (Ambrose upbraiding Emperor Theodosius) of the church acting courageously before power. And it's true -- the church has done so. Also essential to Leithart's thesis is a kind of dispensationalism (he does not use the term). Under the "new covenant," humanity are now full-participants in God's creative work, and waging war is one of those works. (Yes, trust me, this is what he writes.)

Here I have to state, I am still theologically with Yoder and Hauerwas. For Leithart's thesis to work, there has to be a kind-of high water mark when the church and state functioned best together, and modernity is really a fall from good medievalism. I do not know where Leithart falls politically, whether he would sup gladly with the like of Walter Wink, but clearly Leithart believes the "powers" to be redeemable. And he knows what a redeemed world looks like -- building a cathedral as cast in a medieval painting. A world of harmony and order.

But let me suggest something else -- nihilistic politics is politics. There is no difference between power wielded today and power wielded in Christendom 1,000 years ago because human beings are no different. The nature of power is no different. Because the powers are born as a result of human sinfulness, did not pre-exist, and thus cannot be redeemed because, once humanity is redeemed, there are no powers. It is my understanding that Christian theology understands essential human institutions -- family, state, and church (religious community) -- to be things we walked out of Eden with. Thus, they are redeemable, and God uses them to impose God's good order on the world. I don't believe this. I see no scriptural evidence that we walked out of Eden with any of these (not even family, which one can assume most easily), and thus all of these human institutions are created in the fall. Nowhere in Eden are human beings ever given dominion over other human beings. Yet outside of Eden, we insist upon having it. Leithart wants to redeem the unredeemable.

Second, in a liberal age -- an age of individual freedom and autonomy -- anything that even hints at illiberalism is a non-starter. Monarchy, hierarchy, elitism, all of these things are human realities that liberalism effectively denies, and most of the supporters of the above, even if they are principled (I believe in the moral superiority of monarchy to democracy, for example), are still, in the end, advocates of illiberal government. Leithart's ideas are fundamentally illiberal. In a liberal age, no one will listen.

Finally, I must always hearken back to the political ideas that animate me so -- opposition to state violence. Leithart, like all who want to preserve the state's ground (and the church's) to act on behalf of justice, seek the possibility of having their faith active in love manifest itself as violence or coercion. The problem is, if love is relational, then it must be experienced or encountered by the other party in the act of love as love. Violence is -- how do I say this? -- open to significant misunderstanding. You are asking a lot of people you are clobbering (or bombing, or incarcerating) to see what you are doing as an act of love.

If it is not experienced by the other as love, is it really love?

I think Leithart says some very worthwhile things about Constantine, that he was not who we think he was. The early church was complex and faithful and human But until I know exactly what kind of things he thinks a "redeemed" state would do, I have to say no thanks.

What The Resolution Really Says

2011-03-24T21:43:00.001-05:00

Something caught my eye the other day as a read through UN Security Council Resolution 1973 -- the resolution that authorizes military action against Libya to "protect civilians." This is the operative section is paragraph four, which comes after wading through many paragraphs of preamble ("Recalling," "taking note of," "reiterating," "considering," blah blah blah):

4. Authorizes Member States that have notified the Secretary-General, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, and acting in cooperation with the Secretary-General, to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory, and requests the Member States concerned to inform the Secretary-General immediately of the measures they take pursuant to the authorization conferred by this paragraph which shall be immediately reported to the Security Council ...

Two things. First, the purpose of the resolution makes the defense of civilians and civilian areas under attack the purpose of the military action. This, of course, is cover for assisting the rebels, but suppose the military situation turns, it could just as easily be invoked by Qaddafiy's government to demand protection for Tripoli. It won't happen (the protection, not the call), since the goal of the intervention -- at least from the Anglo-French perspective -- is the end of Qaddafiy and his government. Neither country will use their military to protect him or his forces, or cities he controls, even if the "law" allows it.

The second thing, however, is more interesting. The resolution explicitly excludes a "foreign occupation force." This has been taken to mean (by the press) no ground troops, but that's not what the words say. It doesn't say "foreign combat force," it says "foreign occupation force." This is enough wiggle room to drive the French Foreign Legion or a Marine Expeditionary Unit through. The difference, in my mind, is simple -- no one can send troops in to occupy and govern Libya, but it says nothing about troops in to help the rebels fight.

I'm not saying that will happen, or was even planned. But lawyers write these documents very carefully. If they had wanted a resolution that would explicitly forbid all foreign (non-Libyan) ground troops from being in the country as part of this, it would have said so. That it doesn't suggests someone (in Paris, probably) wanted to keep the option open.

May Your Hell be Properly Hellish. And Properly Permanent.

2011-03-24T16:05:00.001-05:00

I never know quite what do when someone says something like this:

Evangelical opposition to Bell is exemplified in a succinct tweet from prominent evangelical pastor John Piper: "Farewell, Rob Bell."

Page Brooks, a professor at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, thinks Bell errs in a conception of a loving God that leaves out the divine attributes of justice and holiness.

"It's love, but it's a just love," Brooks said. "God is love, but you have to understand you're a sinner and the only way to get around that is through Christ's sacrifice on the cross."

The problem I have with what Brooks says is that for him, salvation is not accomplished by Christ's death and resurrection, but by the belief in that death and resurrection. There is a significant difference. Salvation is no longer done by God's act in Christ, but by my act for myself. I am saved not by God's action for me but by my faith in God. This is what Brooks and his ilk are actually saying. God is therefore irrelevant to salvation in this set-up.

If God is sovereign, then God's act alone saves. And you must be open to the possibility that Christ's atoning death and resurrection saves even those who do not confess that reality (some or all). Otherwise, human salvation is *ENTIRELY* a product of human action -- individual human faith in God's work in Christ.

The Narrowing Legitimacy of the State

2011-03-22T09:05:00.001-05:00

I have wanted to write this essay for a long, long time, and tried twice to do so for Lew Rockwell, but was never happy with where it went. Some of my "big think" pieces were never as well written as I'd like. But since many of these ideas are central to what I blog elsewhere (on Libya, for example, or my theology of the state), it's about time I set out and write these down.

I've long believed that the legitimacy of the state -- that is, the state as seen and judged by those it governs -- has been declining. But I've come to conclude that decline is not the right word, as we are not heading to an anti-state moment. Rather, the ability of the state to act and justify its actions is getting narrower. People are demanding as much of the state but becoming much harsher in their judgement of the state. And the state can no longer assume that because it acts, it can justify its actions merely because it's the state. ("It's the right thing to do because we say so. Nyaaah!")

Allow me to try and explain.

The modern state -- the state birthed in the Protestant Enlightenment -- possesses two very important monopolies. The first is on the moral and lawful use of violence and coercion. The state alone can compel human action and punish human beings for actions against the law or for failing to act. This is "moral" because many (perhaps most) human beings through time have viewed state violence (violence done by those who have been appointed agents of the state) as having a moral legitimacy that mere individual violence does not have. And this is a trait of the state for as long as human beings have lived together. This is not new, and it will not go away. This monopoly on lawful and moral violence is what makes the state the state.

The other monopoly the state possesses is that of meaning. The state alone, especially from early 19th century through to about the middle of the 20th, took to itself the sole or primary right to construct the narrative through which human life within (and often outside) the state would be valued and given purpose. The state would author the story and create the ideas that would determine the purpose and meaning of individual and collective human life, what human beings would live for, contribute for, sacrifice for and die for. The state would accept no alternative narratives, no different meanings -- all were considered threats to the creation of a state-centered society (society being that community contiguous with the nation-state). The state was the sole creator and sustainer of human purpose, and would accept absolutely no dissent.

This is why even liberal states were, 100 years ago, incredibly intolerant, persecuting and prosecuting those holding alternative narratives.

In the West, this is largely an artifact of the Protestant Reformation, in which the church was effectively made subsidiary to the state while at the same time made contiguous with the state. Protestants, especially Germans and Scandinavians (but also the English to an extent), tend to confuse church, society and state because they all historically had the same boundaries.

All of this, particularly the monopoly on meaning, was necessary for the creation of mass societies, in which there were only individuals standing alone but also collectively as a mass of citizens before the state. The only subsidiary institutions and identities the state could allow in mass society were those that accepted the state as the center of society. Liberal Christianity, fraternal and professional organizations, trade unions, nationalistic and patriotic groups, all accepted not just the moral legitimacy of the state but also if its narrative, and its central place in human organization. They accepted the monopoly. There were degrees of liberal tolerance for non-conformity, but such tolerance was based on the state's ability to be magnanimous about the "threat" non-conformity posed (or didn't) to the state.

It was a time when the state could act, claim its justification for acting as "there is a state interest," and make that claim stick.

But nothing can last forever. The high water mark of this monopoly on meaning was the First World War, in which states -- liberal and those less-than-liberal -- were able to thoroughly organize societies and mobilize resources to fight the war. In doing so, states had to make promises about why the war was being fought, as mass war requires mass participation (if nowhere else, in the minds of the state's citizens, which really is the most important real estate a state controls), and had to create narratives in which the state fighting was ever-virtuous and the states being fought were utter evil. There is no way the sacrifice demanded of Europe's "citizens" (and also of Americans for the two years the United States was mobilized) could ever be justified given what the outcome of the war was to be -- death, suffering, destruction and utter defeat for someone.

In a way, Europeans slowly (but only slowly) began to recoil against the reality of state-centered society and state-imposed meaning. Yes, the nation may be united in purpose, but if that purpose could only be realized in mass death and mass destruction and mass suffering, what was the point of it? Where was the promise of a better world? But I say only slowly, as Fascism and Communism sought to give meaning to the suffering, to find a noble a virtuous purpose in the suffering and destruction. A new world out of the old for the masses of humanity.

The Second World War came without the cheering crowds that greeting declarations of war in July and August of 1914. It was the necessary sequel to the first, because the first hadn't really settled anything. And even though the state was able to mobilize, it did so without the utter brutality and totality the state mobilized for the First World War (save for the Soviet Union). And although the planners in the West had hoped to create a mass global community in and through the UN, the people of the world had other ideas.

Slowly in the West (and eventually elsewhere), people become consumers. This is much derided, mostly on the Left in the United States, who lament the loss of proper politics. After all, a consumer is nothing but a passive actor, taking in what is easily at hand. But consider it this way for a moment -- a citizen can be conscripted, mobilized, propagandized, made demands of, forced to sacrifice, so on. But consumers really cannot be. Consumption is a one-way deal -- you provide, I consume. My consumption is necessary to your survival, but you live and prosper not by making demands of me or compelling me to sacrifice but by providing me with what I want or what you have convinced me I want. This may have been an accident, the result of post-WWII American industry seeking markets for products, but people became consumers not just of goods and services but also of government. With the same expectation that the state would be a provider of services, and not the active organizer of humanity.

This was a slow change. It did not happen immediately. But the excesses of the state, particularly the monopoly of meaning, were taken to heart by many (though not all) liberals in the West. The total state had never set well with the liberal mindset, always seeming something of a betrayal of liberal ideals of individual freedom and autonomy. This isn't to say liberalism always wins -- it didn't in the Gettysburg Address, and it didn't with Woodrow Wilson -- but the ideas of liberalism are powerful and compelling.

In the West, in particular, the state began to surrender, slowly, its claims to a monopoly of meaning. And this gave room for new, non-state meanings to arise. Let me be clear what happened and is happening here. People are not opting for new meanings that reject or sideline the state, nor are they creating alternate structures of governance. Rather, they are saying to the state:

The good life, the meaningful life, is not a life of sacrifice for the state, it is not building grand and great monuments for the state, it is not marching together to a bright new future planned and promised by the state, it is having families and loving children and doing satisfying work and worshiping God (or not) in a community of people who have come to care about each other, a community which on some level includes the nation. We will sacrifice for the defense of our homes if we have to, and at times come to the aid of others, but our lives have value outside what someone in a uniform or who leads a political party or who manages a state program tells us they have. And that value we ourselves give our lives comes first.

In Europe, the state became a provider of services to consumers. Monopoly provision of services, yes, but a long way from Bismark's notion that the state provides welfare as part of its deal in which citizens sacrifice for the state. The state in the West, and increasingly all over the world, can no longer justify its actions by saying "we are the state." Not in a world of consumerism, liberalism and human rights. The state has to work much harder to do less than it could 100 years ago. At times and in places it is still very illiberal, especially the United States, where the powers the President is accumulating lie more potential than kinetic (mostly at home; it's plenty kinetic for denizens of non-American nations) but would still make a Caesar blush. But the state is morally accountable to people in ways no one could have imagined in the midst of the First World War. And states, increasingly, cannot hide from that accountability. No matter how hard they try.

The state, in this, is still expected to protect people, and it is still expected that the state will educate, provide health care and a basic level of economic security for the society's most vulnerable people. The welfare state is the ideal for much of the world. But it is a consumer welfare state, not a citizen welfare state. Welfare exists in order to allow people to define their own lives most successfully, rather than orienting their lives in service to and sacrifice for the state. (Whether this works is another matter.) The state is expected to provide its goods and services professionally, efficiently and at a cost people can afford. Meaning is less and less one of those services.

The Arab revolt of the last few months has been, I think, an interesting example of this. Most Arab states were formed in anti-colonial movements, and were expressions of national unity and greatness as a way of resisting outside domination. Long ago, however, these states failed to be able to deliver any meaningful services to the people they governed, and the meaning they created became anachronistic. The idea of the liberal consumer welfare state (that's a mouthful) is powerful, and along with dignity and government accountability it was what was being fought for on the streets of Tunis and the streets of Cairo. And possibly even in Tripoli and Banghazi. It is what the Shia of Bahrain are fighting for. That value we ourselves give our lives comes first.

But these revolts also offer a preview of the crisis to come in government in the Western world too. Liberal governance promises accountability, but this is often a difficult promise to keep -- what does it mean for government to be accountable? And accountable to consumers? Because you cannot dictate to consumers the terms under which they consume. We no longer live in the world of Phillip Dru: Administrator. The European Union and the United States will face the fact that the elites who rule are not properly accountable to much of anyone, and certainly not in elections. The same ideas that government exists to empower people which were used to topple Hosni Mubarak are also the same ideas animating the Tea Party and the protestors who occupied the Wisconsin state capitol. There is less coherence in the United States, is part because the Left and the Right have constructed ideas of citizenship and consumerism that are utterly at odds with each other. But also because America is a country held together by a confession of credal documents that founded and empower government -- without the state, you don't have a United States of America. (You would still have France without a French state, or Egypt without an Egyptian state.) We don't share enough culture to be held together by anything other than our ideas of government. And when we don't share those, we share nothing. You don't have a United States without the United States government.

However, I'm going to leave this discussion for another time.

We don't live in a libertarian moment. Or even an anti-state moment. People are protesting to make the state work better, to work for them. But it is an interesting moment, and one that is generally positive for liberty. Consider: no state could fight the First World War today. People would not accept it. Even in the last two states to mass mobilize, Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, such a war would be impossible. I do not believe Iranians and Iraqis would countenance mass mobilization. But the downside is states no longer need to mass mobilize for war or even ensure the loyalty of all citizens. Professional armies and mercenaries (from Qaddafiy's West Africans to Xe) are significantly more loyal to the state than masses could be at this point. The state still retains that monopoly on force, the willingness to use it, and the ability to justify it.

But we do live in a time in which the state's authority is growing narrower. It is easier, thanks to technology, for those of us who question the moral legitimacy of the state to speak and be heard. There are more ways for people to listen. There is no longer one overarching narrative of power and meaning in most of the world's nation-states. States and governments are no longer believed to so embody the ideals they claim to represent. They are now more accountable to those ideals -- including freedom -- than ever before. And when they fall short, people will challenge them. It will not always be good or easy. And elites who rule will frequently continue to do so with little regard for the people they rule. All of these things are true, always have been and always will be. But it is a good day to believe in freedom.

And it is a good day to say "no" to the state.

Not How You Help Anyone

2011-03-19T23:25:00.003-05:00

Sometime in 2004 or 2005 -- probably mid-spring 2004, I do recall the season -- I sat in a rather posh little cafe having lunch with Amatzia Baram discussing what was then the state of the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. Baram was one of Israel's leading experts on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a sometime advisor to Israeli Labor governments, and of course a decorated veteran of the IDF. He is also very charming and very funny. I had taken a class from at Georgetown during his sojourn in the United States (which included a stint at the spectacularly misnamed US Institute for Peace). He had taken something of an interest in my career, and was curious as to how I was doing and where I was going.

But we were also discussing the problem of Iraq. I had opposed the invasion, and he -- while not opposing it -- did not consider it particularly wise. He also said the occupation had turned out to be a disaster, though he believed on both points, the invasion and the occupation, that there really was no choice.

I disagreed. I said there was a choice.

Baram liked a challenge. In his class (which was people mostly by overeager undergrads begging and whining for an "A" because otherwise Goldman Sachs would not look kindly on their applications), we did an interesting little role play exercise -- he was Saddan Hussein and students each took the role of April Glaspie, hoping somehow that we could say something to dissuade Saddam from his August 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait. I still believe that telling Saddam, when he referred to Kuwait as a "Gerbil's hole," that even gerbil holes are someone's home, was clever. But nothing could probably have kept the Iraqi army in Iraq that summer.

In any event, Baram asked me what the choice was. I said it was simple: grab a chunk of Iraq, the southern part of the country from Al-Nasiriyya east, including Basra, and hold the far western board with Jordan, and then mobilize and equip an Iraqi rebel army. (It would have been harder in the north, given the lack of Turkish cooperation, but it could have worked given the lack of control Iraq had over its own air space.) Provide them air support, let them organize the government, and then let them do the fighting. With support. As they gained parts of the country, Iraqis would have likely defected and rebelled, knowing they were backed by US air power, and that there was an Iraqi alternative to the Baa'ath government. It had the beauty, I argued, of keeping the United States out of direct control of any kind over Iraqi civil government, and it invested Iraqis in their own liberation.

I think it would have worked, allowing the Iraqis to rise up and seize their own dignity and liberate themselves. Baram dismissed it out of hand, saying it would not have. We'll never know.

So we come, a few years later, to Libya. I admire and respect the rebels, and was very optimistic -- too optimistic, it turns out -- for their prospects during the first few days of the uprising against Qaddafiy. I had hoped the rebels would be able to prevail without Western military help. It became clear about 10 days ago that wasn't possible. And once that became clear, I had hoped any Western military assistance could have cooperation given to a roughly equal partner.

And now that hope has been dashed too.

The statements that came out of Washington and Paris (and I'm guessing London too, though thank God Tony Blair has shuffled off to retirement and we're not hearing his prissy and sanctimonious voice on this) in the last few days, since the passage of UN Security Council resolution 1973, has been maddening, reminiscent of Bosnia and Kosovo and some of the more thoughtful neoconservatives on Iraq. "We must protect civilians from the Qaddafiy government, which has lost all international legitimacy."

I can see this nonsense coming out of Washington, but for Sarkozy to say it, when his own government recognized the rebels a week ago as the legitimate government of Libya, boggles my mind. It's as if that rebel government, for the purposes of war-making, no longer exists.

This is the West's moralizing at its worst. We protect the innocent from the evil. We are the powerful good who always ride to the rescue. Our bombs always fall with the noblest of intentions, and that makes those killed by them less dead. The Libyans have become objects -- as people always seem to -- in our self-obsessed moral drama. Always helping innocent victims against evil. Always doing good in a world full of bad.

Our idea of helping people is to do for them, not to do with them. This permeates the entire ethic of help grown in the West, its secular and religious notions.

Instead, the Libyans can and should have been full partners in a fight for dignity and freedom. Recognize their government and they become full participating subjects, partners, and not merely objects in a liberation and protection fantasy that we have created, in which we are the only real moral actors and everyone else is simply a spectator or an object, who exist only to receive the order we do. I would have thought someone in the Quai d'Orsay would have gotten that (Washington is incapable of understanding that non-Americans and non-Israelis have any sense of dignity, certainly any dignity worth fighting and dying for), but clearly not. So, the cavalry flies off across the Mediterranean. To save the innocent people of Libya!

(They aren't so innocent. Many senior figures from the Qaddafiy regime now inhabit the rebel government. You do not get to be Qaddafiy's interior minister by holding ice cream socials. You do not rebel against a government like Qaddafiy's merely by marching and singing "We Shall Overcome." Innocence should not be a requirement for help, but it seems morally to be.)

I fully expect the Libyan rebels and the exiles supporting them to wholeheartedly accept the assistance. It saves their rebellion, and any hopes they have for an immediate future of a Libya they govern. But the stakes have changed. Because they no longer really are partners in their struggle. The language used by Western leaders clearly states that. Had Obama or Sarkozy talked about aiding the Libyan rebels, or had Washington recognized their government (which it should), that would be one thing. But the talk is of protecting civilians. The same kind of nonsense talk the prolonged the Bosnian War, and deprived the Bosnians the right to fight and die like dignified human beings.

Western leaders are hypocrites no matter what they say or do. All people are. But the powerful are especially vulnerable to such charges, usually because they are so self-righteous about the power they use and when and why they use it. If "protecting civilians" oppressed by their own governments (or not, from the standpoint of Paris) is the gold standard for the use of virtuous power, then where do you stop? Who will protect the civilians of Bahrain? Of Yemen? Of Palestine? Or of those Libyans who die from Western bombs or rebel guns? Oh right. Nobody.

This isn't to say the rebellion isn't worth supporting. Qaddafiy and his government are worth getting rid of. The Libyans themselves tried to, and bless them, it wasn't quite enough. Absent the rebellion, the West would be right not to topple even an odious regime like Libya's. But I had hoped this time might be different. That we could treat the Libyans like equal women and men in a fight for liberty and dignity. The chance was there.

But clearly, we're not capable of taking it.

Church and Empire

2011-03-17T08:53:00.001-05:00

On of the things Pete Leithart is trying to do with his book, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom, is to question Mennonite John Howard Yoder's ideas on the "Constantinian Deal," the arrangement between the church and the imperial state that Emperor Constantine is supposed to embody.

Leithart doesn't directly question Yoder's theology. Rather, he says Yoder gets the history of the early church wrong, and the nature of the "Constantinian Deal." Leithart states at the end of chapter 11: "At every point Yoder can point to evidence to support his claims, and at times he provides a provocative new framework for addressing a question. As I demonstrate in the following chapters, however, his claims are, as historical claims, sometimes questionable, sometimes oversimplified to the point of being misleading, sometimes one-sided, and sometimes simply wrong." If Yoder "got Christian history wrong, that sets a question mark over his theology."

I do not yet quite know what it is that Leithart is attempting to do with his book. It has been a fascinating read, and I am just about to start with chapter 12, "Pacifist Church?" Leithart outlines what is at stake today theologically and ethically at the end of chapter 11:

Still, it was an empire, and there's the rub. If it an empire, no matter how Christian the emperor might be, it is not good.

So, at least, is the widespread opinion among Christian thinkers. Yoder and other theological critics of Constantine have three main criticisms of Constantine and Constantinianism with regard to his imperialism. First and foremost, Constantinianism simply is the identification of nation or empire with the purposes of God. By misidentifying the location of God's action in history--which Christianity assigns to the church, but Constantinianism assigns to the price, the empire or the nation--Constantinians operate on the premise "the one nation or people of government can represent God's cause in opposition to other peoples who, being evil, need to be brought into submission." [Leithart is quoting Yoder.] This is ecclesiological and eschatological "heresy"--ecclesiological because the church gets absorbed into some worldly system, eschatological because the eschatological community, the church, gets absorbed into the realm of this world (empire) and because the eschatological order is dragged forward into the present age. As a result of the collapse of the church's independent identity and [merger] of Romanitas with Christianitas, the mission of the church was, after Constantine, profoundly distorted.

I think Leithart sums things up well here, even if he doesn't agree with this. At best, nationalism confuses where God acts in the world, and how God acts -- in the nation, through acts of national glory. Acts of national violence and sacrifice become in and of themselves redemptive, and are viewed that way. (A good example of this is the e-mail making the rounds equating the sacrifice of American soldiers for "freedom" with the sacrifice of Jesus for salvation.) At its worst, nationalism is idolatry, a false religion that substitutes the nation for God as God. Granted, Yoder is a Mennonite, a theologian in a church that has significant problems with the state and a church which is rooted in the Radical Reformation, which itself was almost militantly anti-statist. (Lutheranism could use a great deal more anti-statism, and could stand to learn a thing or three from the radicals, as Lutherans are far too comfortable with the state, its means and ends.)

This is especially an issue with Americans, who as a powerful people convinced of and obsessed with their virtue and giving their nation-state an almost religious significance (a key element of most Conservative American Christian churches is the belief that God has formed a covenant with the United States of America -- a covenant for which there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever), are inclined to view their nation and its purposes as synonymous with that of God's. The United States of America isn't so much a a nation as it is a confessional church (our creed is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address)* with a flag and an army. It has been my experience that all God and Country "Christians" tend to put country first, as if God only exists to legitimize the actions of the state. Especially in the making of war and the enforcing of laws.

Progressives are not immune to this. The whole notion of progressive politics is one in which the nation-state still comes first. The nation is the sanctified community of God in which the call for the poor is expressed, in which justice is to be realized, in which compassion shown. The United States of America is the entity to which God speaks when God demands justice and mercy. The nation, for progressives, is still a confessional church with a flag and an army.

I cannot, and will not, speak to the nationalism of others for two very important reasons. First, Americans are uniquely powerful as a people and a nation, and thus are able to act upon our deluded fantasies of self-righteousness in ways others are not. I do not know how the people of Uruguay would act if they were powerful, but they aren't, and so their nationalism is not so likely to beguile them or lead them into acts of mass destruction.

Second, I'm an American, and the only nationalism I am compelled to support is that of my country. (Though some would insist I also support Israeli nationalism.) So it's going to be the nationalism I will criticize most harshly.

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* Actually, there's more to the American "creed" than that (Supreme Court rulings, for example, some speeches and essays), and the political dispute between "right" and "left" in this country is essentially a theological dispute over hermeneutics, how one reads, interprets and synthesizes ideals and promises about government from the credal documents.

What if Qaddafiy Wins?

2011-03-14T15:12:00.002-05:00

I have a confession to make. It is very difficult for me to remain a principled non-interventionist with the events in Libya.

I'm trying, but really, I'm not trying all that hard. I'm not going to cheer the Pentagon, or it's moral (or -giggle- immoral) equivalent in Paris, as policy makers and planners and generals and staffers struggle with what to do and how to handle the rebellion in Libya. But all the same, it would be nice to see the militaries of the West do something, well, useful for somebody, and bombing Qaddafiy's army, air force, command and control centers and logistics would be useful. It would be nice if that somebody were not Lockheed Martin, Boeing or SAIS. I do not know if that is possible or not.

My ambivalence here is based largely on my experience in the U.S. Army in Panama in the 1980s. I did not sign up to be a soldier in 1980s Central America, but there I was. I was a clerk in an MP unit on the Pacific side, at Ft. Clayton. To say that I hated every minute of it would be a significant understatement.

On one hand, I saw what the huge American military presence meant for many Panamanians. It became clear we were an occupying army, and most of the Panamanians I met were sullen and angry about it. Even with the unrest of the 1970s and Omar Torrijos' wresting of the Panama Canal from American sovereignty. I watched the ships pass through the Panama Canal out my barracks window: Japanese freighters, mostly, with the occasional cruise ship and even Soviet transport. I loathed riot control training, our morning exercises learning to beat Panamanians. We had no business being in Panama. The canal wasn't worth a single life. Not one.

And yet this was also the time of Manuel Noriega. And I remember how fraught our relations with the Panamanian Defense Forces were. Long before the general became a big deal in the United States, there were regular incidents between his forces and ours. The military police were on the forefront of this because as part of the canal treaties, a number of U.S. military facilities were jointly patrolled with the PDF. Panamanian soldiers regularly drew weapons on Americans, ran smuggling operations to steal from the military stores, and generally worked to make our lives fairly difficult. One afternoon, a friend and I wandering around Panama City had to run from four machine-gun toting PDF soldiers who wanted to ask us questions. "Never let them detain you," was one of the first things we were told when we arrived, because our safety under the status of forces agreement could never be guaranteed.

There was a PDF unit whose symbol, painted on the side of the trucks they drove around Panama City and Balboa, was a crude drawing of a dog holding a severed human arm -- dripping blood -- in its mouth.

One afternoon, an elderly Afro-Panamanian who worked at one of the army barracks shining shoes (and in the evening playing steel drums in a calypso band) asked me: "We see what his soldiers do to you. You see what his soldiers do to us. You Americans have the power. You can do something. You should." I didn't disagree with him. As one soldier in the middle of the mess, I was powerless to help or save anyone but myself. And the people who commanded us had other ideas -- supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, for example.

And so when George H. W. Bush finally invaded Panama in December 1989, destroying the not-so-vaunted PDF and eventually capturing Noriega and spiriting him away, I had mixed feelings. (I was not there for the invasion.) On the one hand, it was another example of American brutality at work. On the other, it was actually reasonably well fought, and a truly odious regime -- and its military -- were eradicated. I do not know how Panama is run today, but I'm guessing it is a better place to live an ordinary life than it was in 1987.

The most serious disagreement I have with the invasion is that Noriega didn't owe Americans justice. He owed Panamanians. He never should have seen the inside of an American courtroom or prison. He needed to be handed over to a mob of his countrymen and then strung up from the tallest tree in Panama City. And left to swing long enough for the tree sloths to climb down and cling to his body.

I have no such experience of Libya. I have known some Libyans, exiles, who I have come to like and respect. Some years ago, I watched Libya's UN ambassador threaten a Libyan exile I had attended grad school with. I won't shed many tears should the West go to war to help the Libyan rebels. I won't demand my government do that, and I'll caution about consequences. But I'm not going to be all that opposed.

I do not know how the fighting in Libya will end. Qaddafiy right now appears to have the edge in terms of sheer firepower, but the rebels are highly motivated to fight in ways Qaddafiy's forces are not. It took a lot of pounding for Qaddafiy's troops to take Zawiya. It looks bleak, but two weeks ago, it looked like Qaddafiy was doomed. So, anything could happen. And I can do nothing about it regardless.

But something to consider: what if Qaddafiy wins? Because that's a possibility. What will remain is a Libya that is internationally isolated -- recognized by many governments in the Third World but not in the First -- and I suspect sanctions will be tightened as Western regimes, embarrassed, harden their stance. It will become difficult if not impossible to legally trade of do business with Qaddafiy's Libya. The West may even put in place a military operation to impose a blockage on Qaddafiy's Libya, to ensure that sanctions are adhered to. It is the natural extension of a no-fly zone, and if that is imposed, it will likely stay in place.

And what will remain is a broken Libya, one in desperate need of reconstruction and unable to secure much legally. Rebuilding will take place, to the extent it will take place, in an environment of serious material scarcity. The people, and not Qaddafiy, will pay the price of sanctions, the same way Iraqis did following the end of the Kuwait War in 1991. Qaddafiy's government will, of course, use access to food and medicine and rebuilding material as a tool to reward and punish. And that doesn't even begin to touch how his regime will brutalize people -- especially in the east -- who rose up or fought for the rebels.

Libyans will flee this broken, brutalized, impoverished country in Mariel style, taking to boats to flee to Italy, Malta and even Greece, filling refugee camps in Egypt and Tunisia. If European governments are afraid of a refugee crisis now, they will have a significant one on their hands should Qaddafiy win the war.

Finally, Qaddafiy will have absolutely no incentive to behave himself internationally. He may never bomb another disco again, but he will have all the incentive in the world to make life difficult for Western nations by supporting dictators and warlords in Africa. (This also, it should be noted, makes life really miserable for Africans.) And because all, or even most, trade with Libya will likely be illegal, Qaddafiy will create (or further develop) networks with dictators and other shady characters who will be happy to sell him whatever he needs. And as sanctions drag on, European oil firms will find access to Libya's crude far too tempting, and something akin to the corruption of the UN's Iraq oil-for-food program will quickly arise.

So, it is better, at this point, to simply screw up the courage and commit to aiding the rebels. Not just with a Libya-wide no-fly zone, but also with ground strikes to destroy Qaddafiy's armor, artillery and supply sources. To destroy his communications. Because the rebels deserve better than valiant deaths. And because Qaddafiy really deserves to swing from the tallest lamp-post in Tripoli.

Honor, War and Empire

2011-03-14T13:13:00.001-05:00

For what it's worth, Peter J. Leithart writes in Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Civilization about the Roman way of war:

The Roman Empire did not have a grand strategy in the sense that moderns think of it. The Romans lacked the technology in both cartography and communications. There is something to be said for the thesis that Rome's empire was an "unexpected" empire that expanded through a ripple of defensive alliances. Security in the negative sense of safe roads, unpillaged fields, untransgressed borders does not, however, explain Roman imperial behavior. As Augustine knew, what guided foreign policy and imperial expansion was Roman love for honor, philotimia, which expressed itself in a lust for domination (libidio dominandi). Romans gained glory and honor by conquest, and by the titles and honors paid to conquerors back home. When a rival treated Rome with mockery, that insult needed to be avenged, with clemency if possible, viciously if necessary. Earlier in [the Emperor] Domitian's reign, Nasamones massacred Romans and plundered the camp of Flaccus, but then drank themselves to death on the spoils. This gave Flaccus the opportunity to "annihilate them, even destroying all the non-combatants." The same Domitian whose helpless Dacian war we have noted was "elated" and boasted to the Senate, "I have forbidden the Nasmones [sic] to exist." Terror kept barbarian pride in check; the sacrifice of barbarians and rebels maintained Roman honor.

This was, to the Romans sense, a defensive posture. Romans reasoned, If the barbarians get uppity, they might attack. To be safe, we need to make sure they never get uppity. Shock and awe keep them in their place, and any sign of weakness only encourages them. [Italics in original.] Roman imperial policy may be described as a pursuit of "security" so long as it is understood that security meant honor. Virgil had written that the Roman Empire existed to subdue pride, superbia. That was true, but Romans came to define superbia as any opposition to Rome.

Make whatever connections to our time and place that strike your fancy.

Days of Intellectual Decline?

2011-03-14T09:21:00.000-05:00

Matthew Phillips, writing over at Mondoweiss, says something very interesting about the nature of ideas and intellectuals in America in a piece examining comments made by Congressman Anthony Weiner on Israel at New York University. I'm not going to deal with the substance of Weiner's comments, but rather this:

Consider the prominent American Zionists of the past century, those who were tasked with explaining their understanding of Israel to fellow Jews. From men as different in orientation as Louis Brandeis to Arthur Hertzberg, these men—whatever one might think of their views—were often deeply learned, approached Zionism seriously, and were informed in their understanding of Israel by some very broad, liberal values. Who are their most visible heirs today? Democrats like Anthony Weiner, Joe Lieberman and Alan Dershowitz? All three are not merely dishonest but dishonest in an easily demonstrable and clumsy way. More that, none, I would venture, are sincerely interested in Zionism, or concerned with the fate of the Israeli people—in fact, their careerism shines through everything they say; they have clearly played up their Zionist leanings for the sake of their constituents or their reputation. Of course, times have changed, and as Israel’s behavior in the world has gotten cruder its more sophisticated backers are perhaps no longer up to the task. But it really does not bode well for Israel that, as the Baird-Wiener “debate” further revealed, the historically important task of protecting Israel’s image in the U.S. has now fallen almost exclusively into the hands of careless and vulgar propagandists.

I do not know if popular ideas were always vulgar. I do know that intellectuals rarely influenced the world directly, but were "translated" for popular consumption by newspaper editors, commentators, and radio broadcasters -- things that tend not to survive well. Books and essays by theologians and philosophers do. For example, while Sayyed Qutb did concoct many of the ideas that have been taken up by Islamist Revolutionaries, it would be inaccurate to state that Qutb is behind Revolutionary Islam, since his ideas were mashed together with others by many preachers (who put their own spin on Qutb, or who even made his ideas their own) and writers and editors. So, I have no idea whether the Zionism of Brandeis and Hertzberg were "popularized" by the careless and the vulgar.

Yet Phillips notes something interesting. There is a significant lack of intellectual rigor and thoughtfulness in American politics today. And there has been for some time. On the outer edges there is some, but what intellectual rigor there is on the left and right seems not to percolate to the center, where the right remains dominated by ignorance, fear and outrage, and the left by a tawdry spirituality and sentimentality for "justice" and "equality." Politics has always been emotional, and there has always been a role for the polemicist, but it is as if all that political activity has become these days is identity politics and self-righteous assertions of virtue ("Yes We Can!" and "Change We Can Believe In!"). I'm not even sure I see real, live operative ideas anywhere anymore. All that seems to remain is the vulgar. And the violence of the state.

What I don't know right now is how true that's always been.