Against the Stream

Religious Radicalism and Social Context

Ryan Cooper makes an interesting point today at The Washington Monthly:

The case for jihad as some kind of special radicalizing force is rooted in the fact of Islamist terrorism and analysis of the more violent parts of the Koran. I don’t buy this. From my nonbeliever point of view, the major religious traditions have very many potential interpretations, and which ones are dominant depend greatly on the social conditions of the age. Indeed, Razib Khan makes a persuasive case that the content of religious texts is essentially irrelevant: “The key insight of cognitive scientists is that for the vast majority of human beings religion is about psychological intuition and social identification, and not theology.”

That may be too strong. But it is surely the case that the social context of a particular religion is enormously influential over which doctrines are expressed in mainstream religious circles and which are forgotten. Who today bothers with Leviticus 19:19, which forbids planting two kinds of seed in the same plot?

The answer to that last question is, of course, some people. But it is hardly viewed as being a central religious teaching, even among Jews. There are other aspects of the tradition that are far more central to Jewish self-identification.

And this has always been the case with Christianity as well. The internal tensions among the texts of the Christian tradition have produced multiple interpretations that are often mutually incompatible. What creates a particular dominant tradition has far more to do with the social context in which the interpretation takes place than with any objective assessment of what the core elements of Christian identity are. When, in 1oo years, opposition to homosexuality seems as backward and antiquated as support of slavery seems today, it will not be because Christian discovered that they had always been objectively wrong on the question, but because they will be asking questions of Christian responsibility in a changed context.

And of course this pertains to Islam as well, as the quote above indicates. As a scholar of religion, this strikes me as so self-evident that I'm often surprised it needs stating, but we keep coming back around to the same questions again and again, buffetted by loudmouths on both the left and the right, and so periodically, it does need restatement.

The Gospel According to Doctor Who

This weekend I spoke at a symposium in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the BBC's Doctor Who. It was a great time, and it made me think about a few themes related to Doctor Who and religion that I've been thinking about for some time.

A few months ago I came across this short feature on the idea of Doctor Who itself as a religion:

 

Now, that's an interesting question, and the video explores it well, but it's not really the question that interests me. I'm more interested in the way that the narratives and characters on Doctor Who illuminate themes within the Christian theological tradition.

And, perhaps surprisingly, the linkages are often quite explicit, and nowhere more-so than in the climax to the three-part episode that ends Series Three -- "Utopia," "The Sound of Drums," and "Last of the Time-lords." NB. Spoilers for Doctor Who Series Three follow.

In this series of episodes The Master returns to Earth and, masquerading as the British Prime Minister, develops a plan to destroy the human race and colonize the earth with the Toclafane, a race that is revealed ultimately to be humanity's own future state of existence. Ultimately, the Doctor is captured and reduced by the Master to an ancient, wizened state. Martha escapes with a mission from the Doctor, and spends a year travelling the earth attempting to fulfill the mission.

At the climax of the episode, Martha is captured and brought to the Master, who is holding the Doctor in a cage. She then reveals that her time travelling the earth has been spent telling people about the Doctor, and urging them to concentrates their thoughts on him, so that at a single moment they will all be calling out his name at once, all around the world. Via a bit of technological hand waving (which is known, no doubt intentionally, as the "Archangel" network on the show), this combined thought allows the Doctor to renew himself and escape from captivity. In defeat, instead of destroying or humiliating the Master, the Doctor instead says "I forgive you."

The Master is ultimately killed, though not by the Doctor, who actually encourages him instead to join him on the TARDIS as a sort of prisoner/companion. Refusing to regenerate, the Master truly dies (well, sort of ), and is genuinely mourned by the Doctor.

It's hard to miss the rather overt Christian overtones in this episode. First and foremost is the idea of Martha as a sort of "evangelist" for the Doctor. Although the Master believes she's travelling the world seeking a weapon, she's actually spreading the message of the Doctor, of his care for humanity and the length's he's gone to save it. It is not hard at all to translate this to the message that Christian evangelists give as they spread the Gospel.

Then there is the fact that Martha's act is itself an act of self-sacrificial martyrdom. She travels the world, at great risk to herself, to spread the Doctor's Gospel. When she is finally recaptured, she is willing to die rather than renounce the Doctor.

And of course, then there is the content of her message, specifically the idea that, if they desire salvation, it is essential that humanity, for all intents and purposes, pray to the Doctor, and doing so actually does empower the Doctor to effect their salvation. Furthermore, this is an act that people undertake solely as an act of faith. There is no guarantee, and really no reason that people should focus their minds on the Doctor, but they do, and in doing so, they receive salvation.

And, finally and most powerfully, there is the Doctor's decision to meet the Master's evil, not with his own wrath and judgment, but rather with forgiveness. One could argue very persuasively that this is wholly due to the fact that they are the last two Time Lords. But it doesn't change the reality that the Doctor's first imperative regarding the Master is to offer forgiveness.

More could be said, and I'm hoping that I can expand these ideas into something of greater length in the future. It should be noted that Russell T. Davies is not himself religious, but in this episode in particular the religious overtones are so overt as to be (for me at least) wholly inescapable.

Just What Is Up With Pussy Riot and Religion, Anyway?

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.

He has mercy on those who fear him,

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm

and has scattered the proud in their conceit,

Casting down the mighty from their thrones

and lifting up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things

and sent the rich away empty.

He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,

to remember his promise of mercy,

The promise made to our ancestors,

to Abraham and his children for ever.

 

Christian Realism and "A Game of Thrones"

 

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.

Marcus Mumford and "Spiritual But Not Religious"

 

Returning briefly to the "Spiritual But Not Religious" question, I notice that there's been some recent stir about Marcus Mumford's reluctance to own the label "Christian" in describing himself, despite a) coming from a strongly Christian background, b) clearly still believing in God and having some form of reverence for Jesus Christ and c) suffusing his music with strongly Christian themes, symbols and tropes.

His reticence seems clearly related to what I mentioned last week: The failure of Christianity to make itself attractive and credible in the contemporary context. As he says to Rolling Stone magazine, in answer to the question of whether he's a Christian: 

“I don’t really like that word. It comes with so much baggage. So, no, I wouldn’t call myself a Christian. I think the word just conjures up all these religious images that I don’t really like. I have my personal views about the person of Jesus and who he was. … I’ve kind of separated myself from the culture of Christianity.”

Clearly what's being said here is not that he's separated himself from Christ, but that he's separated himself from a particular kind of cultural expression of Christianity, presumably one that is rooted in the kind of evangelical baggage that I've mentioned, which often trades in  sexism, homophobia, and intolerant narrowness.

Refusal to be boxed into a definition of Christianity that is associated in the minds of many Rolling Stone readers with authoritarian ecclesial structures is understandable, and I give Mumford the credit he deserves for wanting to dissociate himself from that. At the same time, it's worth noting how he continues:

His spiritual journey is a “work in progress,” Mumford said, adding that he’s never doubted the existence of God and that his parents are unbothered by his ambivalence toward the Christian label.

There is something salutary in refusing to be rushed into a commitment to a particular way of expressing one's understanding of spiritual truth. To those who want to label him a Christian in order to dismiss him as well as those who want to label him so in order to claim him, Mumford refuses to accept the label.

Lillian Daniel, for whom I have exceptionally high regard, comments on this line of thought:

People will explain to me that without the Church, they are traveling light, without all that Christian baggage. But what exactly is this baggage? It’s people—who might actually be some of the best road companions there are.

Certainly, Marcus Mumford got one thing right—the Church is something you enter at your own risk.

Because you might actually bump into humanity there. You might hit up against something you disagree with. You might have to listen to music you don’t like. You might get asked to share your stuff. You might learn from a tradition far older than you, and realize how small you are standing before such a legacy. You might even be asked to worship something other than yourself.

As I've mentioned before, I get exactly what Lillian is talking about, and largely agree with her on the merits. At the same time, I think that this is a conversation taking place within the Christian fold. It's not that Mumford has genuinely placed himself outside of it. Rather, as I read it, he is unhappy with what the word "Christian" has come to mean, and so refuses the label in order to be free to embrace what the label implies.  He doesn't want to be a Christian because that makes it more difficult to embody Christ.

Cathleen Falsani says it very well:

I didn’t hear Mumford’s remarks as a wishy-washy equivocation about the precepts of Christianity or a capitalist concern about alienating non-Christian fans. Rather what I took away from his answer was a keen wariness about other Christians and our too-often brutal judgmentalism.

Growing up as a pastor’s kid, undoubtedly Mumford knows this all too well. And as someone who is newly accustomed to standing in the unforgiving glare of celebrity’s spotlight, he surely also understands our cultural obsession with putting people on pedestals and knocking them off with great glee and heaping doses of schadenfreude.

What I heard in his reticence to label himself a Christian was not a denial of faith, but instead something that falls between Dorothy Day’s famous “Don’t call me a saint — I don’t want to be dismissed so easily,” and Soren Kierkegaard’s, “Once you label me you negate me.”

I don't think one can listen to the lyrics of a Mumford & Sons song and not take very seriously Marcus Mumford's attempt to seriously interrogate what the elements of the faith he was raised in mean for him today. Doing that, for him, quite understandably means refusing to wear the uniform, but he still talks the talk through his music. As important as it is to understand the role that the Christian community plays in creating the possibility of following Christ in an authentic way, it is equally important to recognize how difficult the church can make that task as well. What's more, it is also crucial to recognize the authenticity of the honest search, after all, that's how this Grace thing works, too.

Miroslav Volf on the Cross and Resurrection

I am a great admirer of Volf's writing, and this reflection is both theologically powerful and deeply moving.

A Bit More About Materialism

Conor Cunningham offers a critique of the kind of "ultra-Darwinist" materialism, in particular its epistemological incoherence:

 

 As Cunningham points out, if everything we believe in is an illusion, including not only our understanding of God or our sense of self, but anything that we believe to be true about our world. It creates a self-destructive paradox: Materialism is in this regard no more a "true" description of the world than religion is, it is simply one meme among others, and gives us no more reliable a guide to the way that the world "really" is. Materialism this throughgoing, Cunningham points out, "fatally undermines itself.

Perhaps it is for this reason that so many materialists are so eager to keep the full implications of metaphysical materialism under wraps.

Resurrected from the Dead

Rob Bell on Resurrection.

 

Happy Easter! Χριστός ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ανέστη! 

He Descended Into Hell

Religion News Service has an article today about Holy Saturday and the doctrine of Christ's decent into hell:

Every Christian knows the story: Jesus was crucified on Good Friday and rose from the dead on Easter Sunday. But what did he do on Saturday?

 That question has spurred centuries of debate, perplexed theologians as learned as St. Augustine and prodded some Protestants to advocate editing the Apostles' Creed, one of Christianity's oldest confessions of faith.

Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and most mainline Protestant churches teach that Jesus descended to the realm of the dead on Holy Saturday to save righteous souls, such as the Hebrew patriarchs, who died before his crucifixion.

The idea of Christ's descent into hell is, I think, symbollically central for an understanding of the Christian doctrine of salvation. Of course, as the article points out, some evangelical leaders, emphasizing a particularly blinkered understanding of Biblical authority, reject the doctrine, and thus fail to understand the degree to which the entire process of divine kenosis culminates in the descent into hell, representing Christ's solidarity with us in even the most godforesaken dimensions of the human condition. If, as the ancient theologians taught "what is not assumed is not saved," then absent the descent into hell, there is a dimension of human experience that remains unredeemd.

One needn't believe in an literal, or at least eternal, view of hell and damnation in order to believe in the importance of Christ's descent into hell. On the contrary, one may believe that Christ's redemptive activity is precisely that which saves us from the hell that he himself suffered. He deprived hell of its enternity, not to rescue us from divine wrath, but from our own experience of god-abandonment.

Here, as is so often the case, I find Jurgen Moltmann's insight to be instructive:

The logic of hell seems to me not merely inhumane but also extremely atheistic: here the human being in his freedom of choice is his own lord and god. His own will is his heaven or his hell. God is merely the accessory who puts that will into effect. If I decide for heaven, God must put me there; if I decide for hell, he has to leave me there. If God has to abide by our free decision, then we can do with him what we like. Is that ‘the love of God’? Free human beings forge their own happiness and are their own executioners. They do not just dispose over their lives here; they decide on their eternal destinies as well. So they have no need of any God at all. After a God has perhaps created us free as we are, he leaves us to our fate. Carried to this ultimate conclusion, the logic of hell is secular humanism, as Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche already perceived a long time ago.

 

Good Friday