Scott R. Paeth is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. He works in the fields of Christian Social Ethics and Public Theology.
Redstate.com's Eric Erickson went on Fox Business the other day and made some rather ... amusing ... comments about the scientific evidence that men are supposed to be the "breadwinners" in the family because ... birds, I suppose.
In response, Ed Kilgore made a very astute observation about the nature of the world that conservatives think we should all go "back" to, a world where the men do the working and the women raise the kids (which is, not work?). Ed wonders what the policy implications should be of desiring such a world:
If you are a conservative misogynist who doesn’t believe in using government to achieve desired social means any more than is necessary, it gets tough .... After all, many women are in the work force instead of staying home to be “full-time moms” not because they are lacking the beneficent servant-leadership of a man, but because the menfolk can’t earn enough to support a family alone. An economy characterized by high and growing inequality isn’t terribly conducive to large families and stay-at-home mothers outside the very privileged classes. And anyone saying “it used to work” might want to consider the kind of collective bargaining agreements, minimum wage laws, and subsidized housing arrangements we “used to have”—back before we all understood that those items were socialistic and hence un-American.
And this is really the crux of it. Conservatives have a mythic view of society, one that doesn't conform to any actual society that's actually existed, but which is best understood by imagining that all conservative policy is based on watching repeated Leave It To Beaver marathons.
Russell Brand, not generally one of my favorite commentators, gives Margaret Thatcher a sort of eulogy:
The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.
For my part, I've always thought Sinead O'Connor's "Black Boys on Mopeds" summarizes my feelings about the Thatcher era quite well.
Apart from the headlines, I haven't been following the whole Pussy Riot case in Russia particularly closely. I've know the broad outlines of the case, and I was aware that several of the members of the "punk feminist collective" had been tried and imprisoned for allegedly disrupting a church service to protest Vladimir Putin. But beyond that, most of the content of their protest had escaped me.
I was fascinated, then, to read Betsy Philips' post at ThinkProgress about a recent Vanderbilt University panel exploring the deep religious roots of Pussy Riot's protest, and its connection to the larger currents of Russian politics and history:
What Spektor explained was that the new church stands on a site of monumental rhetorical significance, a site that is always seen as meaningful by the people who have power at the time. So, it’s not just a church, not even just a cathedral, but a monument to who controls Russia. And the Church Patriarch has been incredibly supportive of Putin, seeing him as a man who is erasing the mistakes of history—in other words, erasing the erasure of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Pussy Riot, as Tim Beale later pointed out, is trying to disrupt this marriage of church and state, since the state uses religious leaders and religious symbolism to further the state’s agenda. Beale further went on to quote some from Pussy Riot about how they imagine religion as a “pool of creative wisdom” from which everyone is free to draw out what is meaningful and useful to them, whereas they see their opponents as using it as a political cudgel, which they think corrupts the Church.
The members of Pussy Riot drew from that pool of "creative wisdom" in formulating a prayer to the Virgin Mary, calling on her to side with them against the power of repression in contemporary Russia, particularly the repression of women:
Pussy Riot in the You Tube translation says, “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist,” “Mary, Mother of God, is with us in protest!” and “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away.” But Critical Mass Choir’s website has a translation from Carol Rumens that maybe gets at the spirit of the song better than a literal translation (It does for me, anyway, but my Russian is terrible) — ” Join our protest, Holy Virgin, please” and then “Virgin Mary, Mother of God/ Holy feminist, we pray thee/ Virgin Mary, Mother of God/ Be a fucking feminist, set Mother Russia free.”
For Philips, this prayer evokes memories of Liz Phair and the Riot Grrrl era of '90s rock. But for me, it evokes nothing less than Mary's own Magnificat:
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour;
he has looked with favour on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed;
the Almighty has done great things for me and holy is his name.
At Religion Dispatches, George Schmidt offers an analysis of the morality in George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, looking in particular at what Reinhold Niebuhr can tell us about the differences in leadership style between Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister:
Placing traditional theodicy aside for a moment, the question after all this misery is simple: Why did Eddard die? At the outset, identifying Eddard’s death as a simple tragedy misses an important point that is often made by Christian realists. Tragedy, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed in The Irony of American History, elicits “admiration as well as pity” for a man like Eddard. We pity him for such a terrible finality while we admire his conviction and compassion for Cersei and her children.
However, tragedy does not account for the way in which, to quote Niebuhr once again, “virtues are vices.” This lack of dialectical thinking, according to which human agency is essentially either virtuous or sinful, is unthinkable in Christian realism. An idealist who quickly classifies an event as tragic fails to take into account the evil that is an “inevitable consequence of the exercise of human creativity”: the evil that is in the good.
Irony, however, notes that the very quality that made Eddard worthy of praise ultimately led to his downfall. For Niebuhr, irony is fundamentally a religious category, presupposing a divine judge who “laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations.” The Christian realist interpretatively locates irony in spaces of “hidden meaning” that “elicit not merely laughter but a knowing smile.” This “knowing smile” in turn acknowledges the failings in the virtues themselves by revealing absurd juxtapositions of “strength and weakness; of wisdom through foolishness; or foolishness as the fruit of wisdom; of guilt arising from the pretensions of innocency; or innocency hiding behind ostensible guilt.”
By contrast, Tyrion does not trust in the nobility of others:
Upon the execution of Eddard Stark, in perhaps the major juxtaposition of the series thus far, Tyrion Lannister is then appointed to the newly vacant office of Hand of the King. Eddard’s moral sentimentalism prompts his trusting of those who would ultimately betray him, whereas Tyrion devises elaborate ruses to trick would-be enemies. Unlike Eddard, Tyrion is not deluded by moral illusions and therefore capable of predicting the direction of self-interest in the pursuits of those around him.
This leads him to a consideration of Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, in which Niebuhr reflects on the way in which niavety about the role of self-interest in political life has hobbled the ability of Christians to effectively and sucessfully fight for social justice:
It’s the charge of the transcendent that differentiates Christian realism from pure realism. Which is to say that Christian realism’s emphasis upon transcendence, provides an enduring, critical judgment, centered on the Gospel, upon any accommodation of the ideal in politics. In Simon Critchley’s formulation, this imperative is experienced as an “infinite demand” that interrupts the politics of accommodation that so often weigh down realist efforts. Christian realism, in other words, finds its fulfillment in a synthesis between the two Hands of the King, Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister.
In the main, I agree with Schmidt's analysis, though I still have cause to wonder whether or not Martin has any such transcendent moral vision in store for us at the end of his story. Thus far he's been fairly scornful of the idea that the end result of the political struggle is the establishment of social justice, and seems to be suggesting that, in the end, all succumbs to dust and entropy, or that on the whole those willing to give themselves wholly over to their will to power will ultimately prevail.
How he ends his story will tell us much about the moral world in which he dwells.
Conor Friedersdorf draws our attention back to the days before the beginning of the Iraq war, when there was a massive, global anti-war movement that was essentially over-ridden and ignored by the administration in the rush toward war. Indeed, I can recall President Bush arguing that the protests were irrelevant because he couldn't "govern by opinion polls."
But what's often forgotten retrospectively is how viciously the anti-war movement was mocked and made the target of irrational hatred. I remember it vividly, but Conor performs a valuable service by collecting some of the classic expressions of anti-war hatred from the beginning of the war. Here are a few of the gems he recalls:
Glen Reynolds: "the 'anti-war' movement is objectively on [Saddm's] side, and not neutral ... When your movement is the key tool of a nasty dictator it should give you pause, shouldn't it?"
Andrew Sullivan (who also referred to the anti-war movement as "objectively pro-terrorist"): "Almost the whole academic class, the media elites, the college-educated urbanites, the entertainment industry and so on are now reflexively anti-war. Worse in fact: there is very little argument or debate going on in these sub-populations, simply an assumption that war against Saddam is wrong, and that all right-thinking people agree about this."
Jonah Goldberg: "what's so damning about the knee-jerk opposition of so many anti-war liberals -- it's based in animus, not logic. Almost every week I have to debate some opponent of the war on CNN or radio, and most of the time, I get the sense that their reasons for opposing Bush are echoed in McGrory's sentiments. They don't like war for vague, emotional reasons." As Conor notes: as though being emotionally averse to war was a character flaw.
Brenden O'Neill: "Most of the new antiwar groups express an entirely personal opposition to war, one based more on moral revulsion than effective political opposition ... Protesters voice a personal distaste for violent conflict, rather than organizing a collective stand against it. And when opposing war is about making pompous moral statements about me, myself, and I, you can count me out." Again, as Conor notes, the strange accusation that taking a moral stand against war is some kind of personal failing.
Conor goes on to note several more examples, and remarks that he could easily multiply examples exponentially. But the point is clear: It wasn't enough for those in favor of the war to believe that the anti-war movement was wrong. They went out of their way to vilify the movement as being pro-Saddam, pro-terrorist, pro-American capitulation, anti-Israel, spineless, effete, and cowardly.
And please bear in mind: After all was said and done, the backers of the war were proved to be totally wrong. The anti-war movement was shown to have been completely right, and yet ... as Chris Hayes noted the other night, the rewards have continued to flow for the past decade toward those who backed the war, and the opponents of the war are still treated like patchouli aroma-ed, hackeysacking, drum-circling hippies, despite having had the better arguments at the time, and despite having been vindicated by history.
Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Max Boot, and even the liberal Hawks like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein who were all in favor of the war have either maintained their standing or gone on to more and more prominent platforms. And in many cases, I don't begrudge them that. But it remains worth asking: Is there any price to be paid for having been so totally wrong? And will an apology ever be forthcoming from many of those -- apart from Andrew Sullivan -- who were wrong at the time and engaged in this kind of vituperation? Doubtful. Being pro-war means never having to say you're sorry.
But for the rest of us, I hope that the lesson of the past decade has been that it is always better to begin from a place of deep skepticism about war in general, and about the necessity for any particular war. While it should be possible to overcome that skepticism in the rarest of circumstances, it should never be easy to do so. And while refusing to support war as a matter of principle in the vast majority of cases may mean that there are places and times where we could fight and perhaps should fight but don't, it is, I think, better than fighting in places and at times when would should not and must not, as was the case in Iraq.
At Politial Animal, Samuel Knight makes a good argumenta propos of Secretary of State John Kerry's renewed push for a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
Obama might be right that “there’s no point to negotiations if the expectation is that everything must be figured out in advance,” as the AP reported. But it’s hard for one party to negotiate when its counterpart refuses to stop — even temporarily — actively encroaching on its territory. Unless President Obama was able to privately convince Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a settlement freeze — recent criticism Obama offered in public has been very mild, that he doesn’t consider the settlements to be “constructive” — and was able to convey that to Abbas, it doesn’t seem likely that the talks will go anywhere. In other words, Kerry is wasting his time.
This is right, I think. And it needs to be said more frequently in the United States, particularly with regard to the situation on the West Bank. Gaza is it's own, mostly separate, issue. But in the West Bank the key problem with the peace process is the contining construction and expansion of the settlements. Knight goes on to quote an Amnesty International official:
The villagers say that the expanding Israeli settlement of Halamish has blocked their access to a nearby source of water, a spring. For holding weekly protests against this settlement, they have suffered greatly at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Israeli military law imposed in the occupied West Bank places sweeping and arbitrary restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly. This makes any unauthorized peaceful protest by Palestinians a criminal offence. Palestinians engaging in such protests face arrest and excessive force from the Israeli military on a regular basis.
Authorities keep wanting to treat the settlements as though they are extraneous to peace. They're not; they're essential. Until they are removed, no peace is possible.
Initially I wasn't going to comment on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war. Having watched its beginning, observed its execution, and gladly welcomed its end, I figured all that could be said about the war had been said, at least by me. Yet I've been somewhat surprised to discover that, despite the overwhelming evidence that the war was a) a horrible idea to begin with, b) was a complete disaster as it was waged, and c) a criminal enterprise in which the American people were systematically and willfully deceived by our leaders into an unjust and brutal act of aggression, the architects and apologists for the war have used its tenth anniversary to pretend that they were right all along and the war was actually a great idea.
In the first instance, the best response to this is simply to link to MSNBC's fine documentary on the project of deception that was the selling of the Iraq war. If you haven't seen it, I recommend it (NB, this is actually part 2, I recommend watching the whole thing at the MSNBC site):
There is little doubt now that the Bush administration, and its major policy makers, quite explicitly lied in order to convince Congress and the American public to back the war. Those members of the administration who did not outright lie were at least willing to be made "useful idiots" in the perpetration of the deception. This is absolutely the best that can be said about administration members like Lawrence Wilkerson and Colin Powell. Others, like Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and George Bush himself, along with their lieutenants (Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz), should be branded as war criminals.
Yet if the case is so clear, how is it possible that there are still so many of the war's architects and supporters willing to support it? In large part, I suppose, it's classic self-deception. In the case of the war planners, there is also the element of self-righteousness, along with a strong concern for defending their legacy. The capacity for those two elements -- self-deception and self-righteousness -- to create willful moral blindness is well documented. So I suppose I shouldn't be quite so surprised that the war planners are so busy these days defending themselves instead of hiding their heads in shame and self-disgust.
Yet there are also those, generally intellectual supporters of the war rather than planners themselves, who have used the anniversary of the war to defend their own support. Their support for the war was, perhaps, at the time excusable. They were, after all, the ones the administration was attempting to deceive. But after ten years, their continued insistance that they were really in the right, despite all evidence to the contrary, is quite stunningly morally obtuse.
Serious Christians must apply their teachings with discernment about the real world, not a preferred dream sequence. There must also be historical perspective. Would the world really be better today if Saddam’s murderous Baathist regime were still in place? How so? American anti-war activists, religious and otherwise, have been in high dungeon since the Vietnam War, but rarely if ever consider the genocide, slavery and suffering that ensued after the U.S. withdrawal they sought. The Korean War killed 10 times as many Americans and Koreans as the Iraq War, and was far more disastrous in many ways, leaving North Korea’s tyranny in place and South Korea a dictatorship for another 40 years. Yet historically, 60 years later, it is now considered a measured success, a key moment in the West’s survival during the Cold War that spared now prosperous and democratic South Koreans from North Korea’s dark, impoverished servitude. World War II was the “good war” that killed over 400,000 Americans in under 4 years and that entailed the U.S. air force’s incinerating countless German and Japanese cities while in alliance with a Stalinist tyranny little if at all morally better than the Nazis, and leaving half of Europe in captivity to that surviving tyranny. And yet the alternatives were even worse.
One has to admire the audacity of a sentence that begins with an invocation of the real world and then immediately moves into the realm of counter-factual hypotheticals; that pleads for an historical perspective than then utterly misrepresents the history of the last half-century and more of American warfare; that accuses opponents of fleeing to a "preferred dream sequence" and then constructs its own fantasy of the Iraq war that never was.
Tooley criticizes the Christian opponents of the war for "forgetting" things that, far from forgetting, we were constantly engaged with. Specifically, he refers to the brutality of Saddam's regime, arguing that the war that we began and botched was better for the Iraqi people than ongoing continuing tyranny. In light of how badly the aftermath of the invasion was handled, and how poorly we planned for a post-Saddam Iraq, how foolishly we allowed the Iraqi military to vanish into the general population in order to launch a guerrilla war against us, and how madly we refused to even consider the sectarian tensions lying just beneath the surface, that is at best a dubious proposition. It is not at all clear that the last decade of suffering among the Iraqi people would have been better than the alternative. Iraq has not yet become the flourishing flower of freedom, democracy, and tolerance in the Middle East that we promised at the time it would be. And there is little evidence to suggest that over the long term it will become one.
But even if that were not so, what Tooley forgets is that this is not a valid reason to wage a war. Furthermore, it was not the reason we were given for the war. The war was waged, the Bush administration repeatedly insisted, in order to root out the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein most certainly had. The purpose of the war was never presented as being, first and foremost, about the creation of Middle Eastern democracies. Indeed, that very idea of "nation building" was something that Bush had repeatedly criticized when he was running for President.
The Bush administration usually relied on three separate rationales for the war: First, because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that he was refusing to relinquish, and that he refused to allow U.N. weapons inspectors into the country to enforce their mandate; second, because of (as it turns out non-existent) ties between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda; and third, in retaliation for Saddam's past acts of genocide against the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shiites in the south. As an afterthought, someone like Wolfowitz may have included comments about creating a democratic ally in the region, but that was always given as a pleasant side effect, not a reason for war.
We now know that we were lied to about the weapons of mass destruction. We know that the administration knew the case was bunk at the time but made it anyway. I remember very well having conversations with colleagues in 2003, many of whom were, like me, against the war, who nevertheless fully expected that we would quickly find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They were shocked to discover they were wrong. Frankly, I was surprised myself, so well did the administration's disinformation campaign succeed.
We also know that there were no operational ties of any kind between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Whatever informal contacts may have existed at one point, they did not amount to collusion or cooperation. And again, we know that the administration was aware of this at the time, and deceived us about it.
But then, what about the human rights case? That's all that the supporters of the war really have to go on today, but could it have been the basis of an invasion at the time? The answer to that is more complicated, precisely because I do believe one can make a moral case for humanitarian interventions. But even so, Iraq did not qualify on several grounds.
First, the genocide argument was invalid precisely because the purpose of humanitarian interventions in cases of genocide is made on the basis of the necessity to stop an ongoing genocide. But the crimes that served as the grounds for our invasion had taken place years before. That doesn't make them less horrible, of course, but it does mean that the alleged purpose of humanitarian interventions -- to stop an ongoing atrocity -- could not be met in the case of Iraq.
On the general question of Saddam's tyranny, which Tooley makes much of, there can be no question that it was real and even the critics and opponents of the war were, despite Tooley's protestations, both well aware of it and quite willing to criticize the regime for it. But there is a difference between recognizing that Saddam Hussein was a monster and believing that this served as a reason for launching a war against Iraq. There are many brutal dictators in the world, yet even Tooley does not believe, I suspect, that this requires us to invade their countries to remove them. Ultimately, as the Arab Spring has demonstrated, those who live under tyranny are responsible for overthrowing it, and are capable of doing so. While we may give them aid in some cases, it is not our responsibility, nor is it within our capacity, to overthrow dictators as a matter of course. And if we can't justify it in a general sense, there has to be a higher barrier to overcome when looking at the particular case of Saddam Hussein.
Similarly, the argument, which is now at the core of the pro-war dead-enders' case, that overthrowing Saddam opened the way for a future free and democratic Iraq fails to meet the minimal standards for the justification of war. It is simply not the case that we can justify a war because we wish for a more just government in another country, or that we would prefer a friendlier regime. Even if it turns out that in twenty years Iraq is, despite all evidence at the current moment, a beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East, that will not have retroactively justified the invasion. It will be a happy outcome to a disasterous folly, but it will make the folly no less disastrous.
One argument that Tooley makes is interesting, if only to demonstrate the degree to which the pro-war case has deteriorated over the past decade. He argues that the war was justified by the fact that failing to go to war required us to have U.S. troops continually stationed in Saudi Arabia, which, he argued was dangerous and untenable, and provided an excuse for Al Qaeda to target the United States. Of course, much of that is true. The solution, it seems, was to have those U.S. Troops instead in Iraq, where the situation was even more dangerous and untenable, and which was an even greater provocation to terrorism, providing a full decade of justification for Al Qaeda operations in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. That Tooley fails to recognize the ridiculousness of his argument on this score is ample testimony to the intellectual bankruptcy of the pro-war case.
In the end, I think there can be little doubt that the verdict of history that the Iraq was was both an enormous strategic blunder and a mammoth act of political corruption is undeniable. It was one of the worst periods in U.S. history. And if the number of U.S. casualties is much lower than other disastrous American wars, that fortunate fact does not make the war any less of a moral and political failure. And again, apropos of the idea that the war made life better for the Iraqi people, it should not be forgotten that our relatively low level of casualties was more than compensated for by the vast number of Iraqi civilian casualties that took place during our decade of occupation, including, it now seems many children born with horrid birth defects as a result of our use of depleted uranium weapons.
We may never get to see the war crimes trials that the architects of the war deserve. But we should remind ourselves constantly that they are worthy of them. Instead, we allow them to live among us as ordinary citizens, in some cases teaching at prestigious institutions, in others given positions like President of the World Bank, and in yet others treated as elder statesmen. This is an example of something that Chris Hayes mentioned in his conversation on the war after a re-airing of Hubris last night -- the incentive structure for the pro-war camp, who were willing to lie or collude in deception for their paymasters, compared to the incentives for speaking out against the war and blowing the whistle on deception is exactly the opposite of what it should have been. Whistle-blowers were punished, shunned, and in some cases imprisoned, while war criminals were rewarded.
The Iraq was was and remains a national shame and disgrace. We should never forget it, and we should learn our lessons, chief among them the lesson that we should always, always be sceptical of the case for war, and only support those wars and intervensions that rise above the highest bars of credibility and necessity. In all other cases, we should stand opposed.
Over at Tony Jones' blog, he has launched another of his "#progGod Challenges." This one deals with the question of the crucifixion, an appropriately Lenten topic.
I can think of several ways to approach this question, but at heart, I assume the question that Tony wants to raise is "why did Jesus have to die on a cross specifically, rather than -- say -- of old age or by tripping down a flight of stairs?" In other words, what is it about the cross that is of theological significance? What does it tell us about the nature of God-in-Christ?
Christian theology is founded on the idea that the death of Christ is somehow at the heart of the possibility of human salvation. Through is death we are redeemed. The Christian doctrine of atonement is rooted in this idea. But the central question is how it might be that his death redeems us, and the fact of the cross is at center of the answer to that question.
It is deeply theologically significant that, not only did Jesus have to die, but he had to die this death. The cross reveals something of both the problem at the heart of the human condition and what the nature of its solution is.
In his book The Crucified God Jürgen Moltmann addresses the question by noting that the cross was a particular kind of death -- a political death -- imposed by the Roman Empire, not against common criminals, but against political enemies. The fact that Christ died on the cross revealed that the Gospel message is incompatible with, and stands in opposition to, the civil religion of the Roman Empire, which is a form of idoltry.
In his death, Jesus is revealed to be the victim of the structures of political oppression and subjugation. He is subjected not simply to death, but to the horrible, brutal, humiliating, and public death of the subversive and the insurgent. In his death, Jesus Christ is declared by the Empire to be the enemy of Empire. What's more, through his death, Jesus is revealed to stand in solidarity with all of the victims of Empire.
Jesus dies, abandoned and alone, forsaken by all, even God, to die the death of a social outcast and a political pariah. But in his death, Jesus reveals that the Good News of the Gospel is precisely that God stands on the side of all of those who are abandoned, alone, and forsaken, that God is with them in their forsakenness, has shared their suffering in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the resurrection of Christ, has overcome and redeemed it. As Moltmann writes:
“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.”
What's more, through his redeeming of the suffering of the victims in his death and resurrection, Jesus also opens up a new possibility: That of redemption and forgiveness for the perpetrators as well. They are not left with their crimes, but may be forgiven in repentence, and ultimately reconciled with both their victims and with God. Again Moltmann:
The one will triumph who first died for the victims then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes when is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God.
This ties in as well to some themes raised by Rene Girard, who is my other "go-to" thinker on this subject. Christ is, in Girard's model, the final scapegoat, who through his unjust death reveals the corruption and evil at the heart of the entire sacrificial system of human religious consciousness, exposes its illegitimacy, and thus breaks the sacrificial cycle once and for all.
Much more, obviously could be said on this topic, but I'll stop there for now. Perhaps for Easter, Tony will present a #ProgGod challenge about the necessity of the Resurrection, which is the other, equally important and indispensible, part of this equation.
In Friday's New York Times, Samuel Friedman asks about the theological dimensions of Katherine Bigelow's film Zero Dark Thirty. Writing about the way that the discourse has been framed in sometimes unhelpful ways, he notes that the movie may have opened up a thorny but legitimate avenue of discussion:
So, by the first argument, the film is flawed because it does not follow the historical record. By the second, the film is flawed because torture does not work. What neither argument takes up, but what some theologians have been wrestling with throughout the “global war against terror,” is what a civilized society should think about torture even if it does work.
In that respect, “Zero Dark Thirty” may have done an unintended favor to the national discourse by positing that torture, at least sometimes, succeeds. How do we feel about that? The numerous awards for the film already suggest that we feel tolerant, even approving. Polling by the Pew Research Center has shown a swing between 2004 and 2011, from a majority of Americans rejecting the use of torture against terrorist suspects to a majority favoring it.
I find the increasing support of torture in the United States stomach turning, but Freedman notes that it does raise what are in many respects very morally important questions. Freedman goes on to survey some of the debate:
In 2007, as opinion was shifting, Professor Gushee of Mercer University helped write “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture.” While condemning Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, and while affirming the nation’s right to self-defense, the declaration stated near its end:
“When torture is employed by a state, that act communicates to the world and to one’s own people that human lives are not sacred, that they are not reflections of the Creator, that they are expendable, exploitable, and disposable, and that their intrinsic value can be overridden by utilitarian arguments that trump that value. These are claims that no one who confesses Christ as Lord can accept.”
At least one such person offered a prominent rebuttal. Keith Pavlischek, who was then a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, faulted the declaration for not adequately distinguishing between captured terrorists and prisoners of war, and for not precisely defining torture.
At a theological level, he argued that the document had “explicitly repudiated Christian just war teaching.”
Pavlischek has a strange reading of the Christian just war tradition if he believes that a document that repudiates torture in any all of its forms, regardless of its effectiveness, in some sense "repudiated" it. The just war tradition has always relied in the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, and defined those who are prisoners, helpless, and represent no threat as being noncombantants. Even enemy soldiers in that circumstance can be restrained, but not harmed, shot, killed, or tortured. It is a wonton perversion of the Christian tradition to suggest anything else.
And once more, it is worth noting the bizzare quality of a debate about the morality of torture among Christians, who at the foundation of their faith, follow a man who was tortured to death. That, if nothing else, should create an instant and innate revultion and opposition toward any form of torture among anyone who would call him or herself a Christian.
It took a while for all of the threads to begin coming together for me in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings in December. I spent a lot of time watching the news, reading reports, responding to friends online and engaging in at times quite heated debates on the subject of guns, but over the weekend the various pieces began to gel and I realized that yes, there truely is a cult of guns in the United States. The unique confluence in the U.S. of ideology, tradition, and a quasi-religious belief in the absolute character of one's right to wield a weapon the only purpose of which is to kill things has produced a sub-culture for whom the very idea of regulating guns in any way, shape, or form is as anathema as denying a Roman Catholic access to the Body and Blood of Christ.
It really gelled for me on Saturday, as I was reading Gary Wills' article in the New York Review of Books entitled "Our Moloch." Wills writes:
The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.
Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol’s teeth. The White House spokesman invokes the silence of traditional in religious ceremony. “It is not the time” to question Moloch. No time is right for showing disrespect for Moloch.
When I first read this, I thougt to myself: "Well, that's a clever bit of rhetoric, and I certainly find the demenor of many gun enthusiasts off-putting, but I'm not buying the 'guns-as-gods' angle."
Then I got an email from Sojourners magazine to an article entitled "9mm Golden Calves," by James Atwood. Atwood makes a similar point to Wills:
An idol's followers boldly claim divine status for it. Former NRA executive Warren Cassidy was clear when he boasted, "You would get a far better understanding [of the NRA] if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world." Not to be outdone, Charlton Heston, during a speech as NRA president, intoned, "Sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blued steel—something that gives the most common man [sic] the most uncommon of freedoms, when ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument that symbolizes the full measure of human dignity and liberty."
And again I thought to myself that the rhetoric, while sharp, was a bit much. But I started to think about it a bit more.
At the very time I was reading these articles, I was engaged in a heated online debate on the subject of gun control with someone who was arguing strenuously with me that, as a matter of fact, requiring registration and background checks on guns was akin to asking individuals to register their religion. Because firearm ownership was a Constitutional right, there was no regulation of any kind that could be justified, just as there was no regulation of any kind regarding religion that was justified.
That's when it struck me: For this guy, it really was a religious principle. He wasn't making a 2nd Amendment argument; he was making a 1st Amendment argument. For him, guns, and the ideology that had built up around them, were as much a religion to him as anything else. True, he may have some other religion as well, but that doesn't change the fact that guns are an object of worship for him. It just means that he's, at heart, a polytheist.
The ideology of guns in the United States is a cult: a set of practices and traditions that have built up around a set of narratives that its adherents tell themselves about who they are, where they've come from and what it is that grounds and gives meaning to their existence. "Guns" in the collective sense, become gods, because they are the source of security and the primary obsession of gun cultists.
To be perfectly clear about this: Not every gun owner is a gun cultist. Not even every ideologically committed gun owner is a gun cultist. But for alarmingly many of those who own and keep firearms in this country, thier commitment to their guns seems to outweigh any other commitment that they may have, even to the larger society itself.
I've been struck with the number of times it's been pointed out in the last few months that there is a "gun culture" in the United States, and the number of times my gun-supporting friends have pointed out to me that I'm not part of that culture, and therefore don't understand the worldview that motivates them. And it's true, I'm not part of that culture. But a culture produces a cultus, as set of practices that give definition to one's life. When that set of practices is threatened, it produces massive resistance, and this is exactly what we have seen in the past month and a half in the debate surrounding guns. No regulations are acceptable, because, at best, they will make things unacceptably inconvient for gun owners. But in its most extreme form, the ideology of gun ownership converges on a form of paranoid apocalypticism, and the end result is the seizure of all guns and the imposition of Tyranny.
Behind this worldview is the unspoken truth that the members of the gun cult far too often want to keep their guns so that one day they can fire them at U.S. soldiers and police.
Eric Bohlert comments on this rhetoric, and demonstrates the damage that this apocalypticism can do:
We already knew from 2009 that far-right voices were fretting about the need for a citizen's militia to stop Obama's destructive ways. Now four years later, with gun control initiatives pending, the frantic rants have escalated and Obama's fiercest critics are rationalizing their insurrectionist chants by comparing the president actions to those of Hitler. The comparison isn't just offensive, it's also inaccurate: the Nazis actually loosened restrictions on private gun ownership (except for Jews and other persecuted groups).
That kind of ugliness not only pollutes our public dialogue, it also gives comfort to gun radicals who embrace the rhetoric. In early 2009, fearing what a friend described as "the Obama gun ban that's on the way," conspiracy nut (and Alex Jones fan) Richard Poplawski lured three Pittsburgh policemen to his apartment, then shot and killed them at his front door.
All the right-wing chatter today about how Obama's following Hitler's lead by allegedly voiding the Second Amendment only adds fuel to an unwanted fire.
Martin Luther once said, said "Show me that which thou lovest most, and I will show you thy god." Paul Tillich, in a similar vein, used to argue that religion was a universal fact of life, since to be religious was simply to be "ultimately concerned." Our object of worship is that which concerns us ultimately. We all surround ourselves with idols of one kind or another, but few of the idols that we worship are as destructive as the idolotry of guns. They are, I am now convinced, truly our Moloch, the devourer of our children, and the seed of violence in our society.
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