(Ir)religiosity

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend on both Facebook and Twitter over last several days in the wake of the horrific events that took place in Oslo, Norway on Friday. Despite numerous reports to the contrary, including his own 1,500 page “manifesto,” many Christians (including one in a NYT op-ed published today) have taken to denouncing Anders Behring Breivik’s religiosity. We see this all the time when some who appears to be even marginally Christian is guilty of acts of violence and terrorism. In an attempt to save face or perhaps preserve that Christian tradition from being (further) tarnished (which is more than a little ironic given its history) folks will claim that Breivik “wasn’t a true Christian,” that he is clearly a psychopath whose behavior is rooted in mental imbalance(s) rather than bedrock religious convictions, and that he is “only a cultural Christian” (which somehow gets you off the hook?). And so on.

While I can understand and certainly resonate with the sentiments that might lead one to denounce Breivik’s behavior as completely incompatible with Christianity (I am a theologian after all!) I am more than a little uncomfortable when persons try to downplay the fact Breivik’s actions might be religiously motivated or completely ignore his Christian affiliation at all (cultural or otherwise). Of course Christians should be outraged. Of course we should publicly denounce such terrorism as completely incongruent with the best exceptionalism of the Christian legacy. Of course we should. But passion for the best of what we have to offer should not — should never — lead us to simply ignore monstrosities perpetrated in our name nor should it give us license to turn a blind eye to the dark parts of our history. We hold those things within us. We have to own them.

Issues of religious identity and Christian definition aside (those are certainly at play here, though I think one should be suspicious of the intent behind the move to write off someone like Breivik as something other than Christian) the real problem here is that there is an insipid double-standard at play when it comes to identifying and condemning religiously motivated terrorism, one that leaves a long but unacknowledged tradition of Christian exceptionalism and racism perfectly enact.

To but it bluntly, when “a cultural Christian” is to blame, acts of terrorism have nothing to do with religion. When a Muslim is involved, however, it is quite the opposite. This is the framework operative in our collective imaginary (despite the fact that many Muslim terrorists appear to be motivated by anti-imperialist sentiments rather than religion alone). Muslims are terrorists, Christians are not. These categories have become so deeply engrained in our psyche that the knee-jerk reaction to any terrorist attack is to place blame upon Islam.

Immediately following the violence in Oslo the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal both jumped to xenophobic conclusions. Even a newspaper as “progressive” as the New York Times wasn’t immune to the sociological inertia. The same thing happened after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. In times of crisis and in response to heinous acts of violence our most foundational — and, by and large, dualistic, even Manichean — stereotypes come in to play. And it would seem that in the American imaginary, liberal, conservative or otherwise, the category of the Muslim is conflated with that of the terrorist. There is a deeply essentialist if not racist double-standard at play when it comes terrorist and religion. The common perception, even the default position, is that Christianity is the exception, while Islam is the rule.

Mark Juergensmeyer, who has written extensively on religion and terrorism, has a piece in Religious Dispatches today that get to the heart of the problem.

Is this a religious vision, and am I right in calling Breivik a Christian terrorist? It is true that Breivik—and McVeigh, for that matter—were much more concerned about politics, race and history than about scripture and religious belief, with Breivik even going so far as to write that “It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian atheist (an atheist who wants to preserve at least the basics of the European Christian cultural legacy (Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter)).”

But much the same can be said about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and many other Islamist activists. Bin Laden was a businessman and engineer, and Zawahiri was a medical doctor; neither were theologians or clergy. Their writings show that they were much more interested in Islamic history than theology or scripture, and imagined themselves as recreating glorious moments in Islamic history in their own imagined wars. Tellingly, Breivik writes of al Qaeda with admiration, as if he would love to create a Christian version of their religious cadre.

If bin Laden is a Muslim terrorist, Breivik and McVeigh are surely Christian ones. Breivik was fascinated with the Crusades and imagined himself to be a member of the Knights Templar, the crusader army of a thousand years ago. But in an imagined cosmic warfare time is suspended, and history is transcended as the activists imagine themselves to be acting out timeless roles in a sacred drama. The tragedy is that these religious fantasies are played out in real time, with real and cruel consequences.

The bottom line is we need to be more consistent. Either we create religious identities that are so pious and so pure that they apply to virtually to no one (which would likely cause more problems than solutions) or we own up to the fact the religion is always constituted within particular contexts and is always the result of some cross-pollination. This leads to some really beautiful things. It also leads to terrorists like bin Laden and Breivik both of whom may not have been motivated by religious convictions alone but were without a doubt influenced by them. Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, be it Muslim, Christian or something else. Until the legacy of Christian exceptionalism and xenophobia is properly dismantled and an equal standard applied to all religious traditions in the wake of acts of terrorism we will only create more create more Breiviks and bin Ladens.

I had every intention of reading through Žižek’s latest book on violence and relating it to my thoughts in the previous posts.  But I’ve been super busy and had some trouble getting my hands on the book (trouble with Amazon, but that is a different story).

Incidentally, I was reading through Caputo and Derrida‘s Deconstruction in a Nutshell last night for a totally different project and ran across a provocative quote.  I thought I float it and see what your reactions are.

A little background.  The book has two parts.  Part I is the transcript of a round table discussion that took place at Villanova University in 1995 between Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and others.  The point of the discussion was to dispel many of myths and false understanding of Derrida’s thought and the project of deconstruction.  The book is fascinating in that respect.  If you’ve ever tried to read Derrida you know that he is not the easy thinker to understand.  The discussion provided a rare moment of transparency.  Part II is an extended commentary on the discussion by John Caputo.

The immediate context of this quote has to do with the setting and format of the discussion.  Captuo notes that the discussion is, in a way, violent towards Derrida.  Derrida, a native French speaker, was asked to spontaneously and succinctly answer, in English, questions regarding a philosophy that he has not only dedicated his life toward, but one that he repeatedly insists defies short, sound-byte type definitions.  Captuo playfully asks forgives for the “multiple violence” placed on Derrida, for forcing him to answer in a foreign language (OK, I have to admit that I find Derrida’s English to be much better than mine!) questions about his thought that simply cannot be adequately expressed in an hour and a half.

Ok, enough of that.  Here’s the quote.

“There is no pure non-violence, but only degrees and economies of violence, some of which are more fruitful than others.”

Interesting.  No doubt he is right.  I find it particularly interesting — and I’ll probably pick this up in a later post — that many of us tend to focus on nonviolence only apropos to physical violence.  Which is ironic considering most of us will never have a real chance to exercise that nonviolence by choosing not to act physically violent towards the other.  We do, however, have all sorts of chance to act nonviolently and fail to do so.  In fact, I would argue that most times we simply fail to recognize the violence in which we participate or perpetrate.  It never shows up on our radar screen.

I’m not saying this to suggest that I am categorically against nonviolence.  Quite the opposite.  I am, for all intents and purposes, a theoretical pacifist, falling just shy of absolute pacifism (I’ll take this up later on too).  I use the word theoretical here to point toward the absurdity of my calling myself a nonviolent person in reference to a specific type of violence (physical) while simultaneously engaging and participating in numerous other forms of violence.  It could even be argued that nonviolence, in terms of its opposition only to physical violence, serves as a sort of religious fetish that precludes us from confronting the other forms of violence in which we participate.  If that is true then perhaps we should hold our physically nonviolent dogma a bit more loosely in order to become more holistically nonviolent.

But I’m already getting ahead of myself.  I’m interesting in what you think of the quote.  Agree?  Disagree?  Don’t care?  What are your thoughts?

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In response to my last post, Andrew offers what I a think is a good working definition for violence.

For me, and I suspect for others, violence is most easily described the way the concept Force is described bythe formula “force equals mass times acceleration.” Another way to state this is to say “force is the quantity that, when applied to a mass, produces acceleration.” In this way, I think it is both simplest and most comprehensive to describe violence by its effect rather than its myriad causes.

Violence is that property which, when applied to an entity (be it an entelechy, social structure, or any other kind of object) through some action or process, produces injury or damage.

I agree.  Violence — be it subjective, systemic, or symbolic — is that which causes injury or damage to, and demands the subjugation of, a particular autonomous entity.

I would also want to draw attention to the fact that this definition allows some emphases that have — at least in Christian theology — often been ignored.  Here I am thinking particularly of the violence of language and the violence of ideology especially as it pertains to certain Christian concepts (e.g. evangelism, missiology, nonviolence, etc.).  It would seem, if we are to accept this definition, that insisting upon ideological and linguistic conformity — as these ideas at lest in there more traditional forms tend to do — would be to do violence to the other and thus undermine the Christian project altogether.

I say this only to return to another question:  I wonder, can these concepts be freed from ideology and re-appropriated in such a way that does not perpetuate violence against seemingly potential ideological converts?  I want to suggest that somehow they can.  This will be something I explore in another post.  For now I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about violence lately and I think I may do a series of posts on the subject.  To begin I want to simply pose a question: what is violence?  This seems simple to answer but I want to intentionally suspend for a moment the Christian preoccupation — I daresay a fetish — with nonviolence and pacifism as a response only to overtly physical violence.  My reasoning  here is simple.  The Christian doctrine of nonviolence, its goodness notwithstanding, seems to ignore other, perhaps more dangerous forms of violence from which physical violence may or may not be derived.  With that in mind it would be interesting to consider what it might mean to be, in our world, a truly nonviolent person, that is one who denounces more than overt acts of physical violence.  Indeed, expanding our definition of violence calls into question the viability of nonviolence as a normative form of behavior.

So again, without resorting to the more myopic definitions that all to often dominate theological discourse, I ask what is violence broadly defined?

To get the ball rolling, here is a quote from an interview with Slavoj Žižek whose latest book addresses this very subject.

We should shift the perspective and ask, what if some kind of violence needs to go on to keep things the way they are? What if what we think of as violence is a distraction? To understand this, we must distinguish between subjective violence, systemic violence and symbolic violence.

Subjective violence is violence that is actively done, which can be attributed to a certain subject, such as a murderer, the police, a mob, terrorists – you can see who did it.

Systemic violence is anonymous violence. An example is George Soros. He has done wonderful things with his foundation, but if you look at his market speculation with currencies 10 years ago, what was the effect? Hundreds of thousands losing their jobs in south-east Asia. It was a social tsunami. This is anonymous, systemic violence.

And then you have symbolic violence. Today in the West, there is an obsession with harassment. Anything that another person does to you can be harassment. There is something very violent in this extreme sensitivity to another person’s proximity. I’m opposed to the ideology of tolerance, because what we call tolerance is a form of intolerance. (Link)

So let’s developing a working definition of violence.  How would you define it?  Do you agree that it involves more than overt acts of physical violence?  If so, what more should be included?

I was watching this video of the 2004 Emergent Conversation the other day and I was immediately struck by a quote from Walter Brueggemann about the violence attributed to God in the Hebrew bible.

“God is a recovering practitioner of violence.”

If you watch the video, the quote comes at about 29:00.  For some of the context behind what he is saying and the question he is responding to start at about 25:00.  Or watch the whole thing.  It’s definitely worth it.  There’s also a part two here.

But I want to return to that quote.  The problem of God and violence, be it in the Hebrew Bible or in the atonement, is not new.  And I am by no means have the answer, or an answer at all really.

I have to admit that I was put off by that quote when I first heard.  But I’ve been thinking about it since then and it has grown on me.  This of course questions the traditional view that God is static and completely unchanged.  I know that.  To be honest,  I don’t really have much vested interest in defending that claim that God is wholly static.  But I want to set that and any knee-jerk reactions we might of God being disrespected aside here if we can.

The main rebuttal of any suggestion that God might be participating in violence is that an text that attributes violence to God is simply the projection of human desire onto God.  So, the x group of people wants to kill and dominate y group of people.  So x group imagines that God commands them to kill y group.  That may make sense, but I don’t know that I am satisfied with that answer.  Neither is Brueggemann.  He thinks, and I tend to agree with him, that such an argument is a very slippery slope.  So, at what point do actions/virtues attributed to God in scripture cease to be human projections?  Or, are all attributes to God projected?  That may very well be true.  But we still have to deal with the violent projections.  What makes a projection of love better than a projection of violence?  The answer to that seems obvious, but it must be dealt with.

Things start to get really hairy really quick.

What do you think of Brueggemann’s quote?  Do you think that God might be “a recovering practitioner of violence?”  Is there any truth to that?  If so, what does what are the ramifications?  If not, why not?

I’m really liking Ron Martoia’s new book Transformational Architecture: Reshaping Our Lives as Narrative. Most books of this genre, at least most of the ones I’ve been exposed to, concede that we have essentially gotten the Christian message right from the beginning and simply need to change our method — so it is cooler, more attractive, and most of the time, more enculturated in the American ethos of consumption and individualism –  to “reach” more people. Ron’s book challenges that assumption.  He questions the institutional church’s interpretation of the Christian story suggesting that, “Our problem isn’t just one of method, but of message as well.” I like that.  And I think that part of it means to follow the way of Jesus is the humble willingness to question everything, even our appropriation of the story itself.

One of the sub-sections of our assumed story that I struggle and wrestle with is evangelism.  Without going into too much of a diatribe, it has always bothered me that a lot of what passes as “evangelistic outreach,” when you really look at it, has amounted to nothing more than coercion aimed at creating cookie-cutter Christians.  Of course the fear of hell is usually incited and contrasted with the eternal bliss of heaven, somewhere, someday.  Rarely is actual transformation spoken of and there is usually no follow-up or attempt at discipleship.  The number of “converts” almost always trumps any suggestion of radical lifestyle alteration, because we are all just waiting for Jesus to come back right?

Now, that may be a bit overstated.  But I think there is some truth to it.

I think evangelism is part of the message that we have gotten wrong.  And I think we should reevaluate our approach, our definition, and maybe even our use of the word itself.

In the book’s introduction Ron offers an interesting alternate definition of evangelism that I think bears some reflection.

God’s original architectural plans for human “heart space” designed us with cravings, longings, yearnings, that sit at the intuitive level of our lives.  These primal elements, architected deep in the core of our being, drive our desire for transformation.  In other words, “evangelism” is really about helping people along in a journey for which they have desire already built into them at the center of their hearts.

I like that.  I think it is a good new working definition of evangelism.

Here’s why:

• It’s about finding a personal story, an extended narrative, not just a conversion — and sometimes coercive! — experience that will later lose its luster.
• It’s about finding community, a place where the personal narrative can be sustained and nurtured, not restricted and truncated.
• It’s about God’s ongoing story of redemption, restoration, and renewal, not a one-time event, but a process of holistic transformation.

So instead of dominating others with rigid dogmatism, instead of insisting that persons essentially assume the same script and the same story, freedom of creativity and imagination is allowed as persons are encouraged to find their voice and then within a particular local, and contextual community, live that story out in their own peculiar way within the larger framework of God’s narrative of restoration and renewal.

With this approach tangible transformation and actual response to grace are demanded and expected as individuals and communities continually participate in the life of God and partner in the work of realizing the divine commonwealth.

To me, that looks more like the way of Jesus than what has passed as evangelism in the past.

What do you think of Martoia’s definition?  Do you think this more narrative-centered, conversational approach might be more effective than the modern approach of the past?  And, do you think there might be a better word or phrase besides “evangelism” that could be used, something with less baggage that might better communicate the invitation to participate?

For easy access, here are all the links for this series.

Part I: Only Americans Matter
Part II: We Draw Our Circle Too Small
Part III: Patriotic Fixations
Part IV: Media Violence and the Ease of Abstraction
Part V: Final Thoughts

Part I: Only Americans Matter
Part II: We Draw Our Circle too Small
Part III: Patriotic Fixations
Part IV: Media Violence and the Ease of Abstraction

I suppose it’s time to wrap this series up.  It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted on this topic, so let’s revisit a few things.

In Part one, I introduced the overall thrust of my thought: in the western world — particularly in the US — nations tend to suppress, ignore, and even omit non-domestic acts of war, violence and terrorism.  The most obvious and visceral example for me as American — there are of course numerous such examples, too many to recount in a single post really — is the recent and ongoing lack of coverage and general unconcern en masse about the occupation of Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

Part I: Only Americans Matter
Part II: We Draw Our Circle too Small
Part III: Patriotic Fixations

Last time, I mentioned the problem of patriotism and its synonymic relationship to nationalism and ethnocentrism the by-product of which is the arrogance of American exceptionalism not to mention the sorrows of empire itself.

The final reason for this cult of indifference and triumphalism — at least when related to non-domestic acts violence in the manner I have for this series — may be perhaps the least obvious of the three and its influence, while subtle, is very damaging.  This phenomenon as less to do with media coverage and national pride and more to do with our unconscious reaction to violence in the globalized information age.

The reality is that we have become desensitized to violence in general have little to no reaction when faced with actual violence perpetrated in acts of war. Read the rest of this entry »

Part I: Only Americans Matter
Part II: We Draw Our Circle too Small

Last time, I mentioned the first reason we as Americans tend to both individually and collectively — individually as preoccupied public population and collectively via the manufacturing of consent through the politically driven corporate media machine — suppress and ignore non-domestic acts of violence: the political symbolism of the current Bush regime and the reality of assumed indirect consequence.

I concluded by noting that we “draw our circle too small” only including in our spheres our care those who look and act like us; in short, those who remain “citizens” of the particular and arbitrarily created — usually as a result of geopolitics and social convenience — “nation-state” in which we live.

The second justification for our indifference stems from, and is the direct result of, the first.  It is the intense and deep-seated emotional feeling most of every American, of virtually every political stripe is overcome with this time of the year.  I am of course speaking of the feeling of many, rightly or wrongly, call patriotism. Read the rest of this entry »