Category Archives: Culture

The false glory of John Piper’s god

Posted by on January 16, 2012 23 comments

Recently I was asked (by Kait Dugan, check out her blog) about how John Piper (check out this video for some context), about whose perverse theology I’ve written about previously, manages to come to understand God’s glory as a sort of self-directed hegemonic tyranny. What are the theological moves that lead one to come to think “the glory of God” in terms of chauvinistic self-aggrandisement? Why would one come to conceive God as a self-directed center of power whose “glory” consisted of simply asserting and impose his own supremacy and domination?

My first instinct in responding to this question is to point out that it really isn’t as much of a formally (and that word is the key qualifier here) theological issue as it is fundamentally an issue of gender and power. Piper interprets God as a self-directed man, concerned ultimately which the maximization of his own power (which is of course “good” because this one particular male really is supreme and thus deserves and warrants this rigorous self-fixation). I think it really is just the upshot of thinking God according to the logic of patriarchy.

If there is a theological reason for it, I’d have to say that it is the functional (though not acknowledged or admitted) rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity speaks of a God that does not seek the maximization of any singular self or, but rather of a united yet multidirectional and primordially other-directed love. The God who is Triune never is concerned with “himself.” Rather “the Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand” and the Son has come “not to my will but the will of him who sent me” and the Spirit “will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears.”

The Triune God is never concerned with the maximization of a “self” since God is not a self, but rather a singular reality of three identities (to borrow some language from Robert Jenson). No identity of the Trinity seeks their own, but always and only seeks the maximization of the other(s). Thus the Son offers up the kingdom to the Father and the Father places everything in subjection to the Son and so on. The glory of the Triune God is thus the glory of an othering that seeks only to empower, never to claim power for one’s own. Piper’s nontrinitarian theology of self-directed glory is the denial and opposite of this. Indeed the “glory” that he proclaims is nothing less than the projection onto God (at the expense of the witness of the Cross) of patriarchal, homicidal power, the power of sin and death. This is the “glory of God” that he so adores.

The irresistible devolution

Posted by on August 11, 2011 26 comments

One of the interesting things about the now old News Corp phone-hacking scandals is how evangelical and radical Christians who publish under their umbrella have gone about justifying their involvement with an entity that is demonstrably evil. For example, radical Christian and new monastic superstar Shane Claiborne is well known for his many books, including the bestselling book, The Irresistible Revolution which, as you are probably aware is published by Zondervan, a company own by News Corp.

For a radical Christian pacifist, who calls us to follow Jesus wholly, I found Claiborne’s response to questions about the approriateness of utilizing the News Corp to spread his message rather telling:

“I want to have the broadest readership possible,” Claiborne says by phone, “I don’t want to be someone who just speaks to the choir.” He says smaller publishers have their advantages but the books he has written for them cost “two or three times” more than what they would if Zondervan published them.

Claiborne, who has preached his message via Esquire, Fox News (also owned by News Corp), Al Jazeera and many others, says the key is to “protect the integrity of the message.” If he is convinced the medium won’t change the message, he will work with organizations despite not “[agreeing] with all of their approaches or decisions.”

But even if the message is protected, his work is being used to help enrich a rather well-maintained corner of empire. He feels “conflicted” about this. “I don’t think that the world exists in 100 percent pure and 100 percent impure options,” he says.

. . . . There’s good and bad in each of us, he says, “we are called to work on the log in our own eye, and I’m sure as heck trying to work on the compromises that I make so that those are minimal when it comes to integrity.”

His response, in other words is to oddly assert a sort of Niebuhrianism. Obviously in an ideal world we wouldn’t publish our radical Christian manifestos of hope with publishers who have no ethics and exist solely to produce profits, even at the cost of dehumanizing and oppressing others. But we live in the real world. In the real world sometimes we need to compromise with evil media empires in order to sell enough copies of our book. We may not feel good about this, but this abiguity is an unavoidable tension in which we must live if we wish to deal with “the real world.”

Of course this is exactly the sort of ethical logic that books like Claiborne’s constantly rail against, holding up by contrast the radical politics of Jesus. So when it comes to say, war, the answer is obvious: a complete and radical break with “the world” for the sake of faithfulness to the Gospel. But when it comes to money, and “soft violence”, the kind we don’t easily see, the kind that sustains corporate behemoths like News Corp, well then we have to learn to live in world where things aren’t so black and white. When it comes to “violence” (which always seems to mean simply an ethical disapproval of war) we must not shirk the duty of obedience and faithfulness. When it comes to money, influence, and success (even “good” influence and success in “good” ministries), well then we have to be ok with some compromises with the powers in order to get things done.

Of course one obvious difference between these two contradictory positions that folks like Claiborne tend to take is that simply saying “War is wrong” doesn’t exactly cost us anything or make us ask the hard questions about what violence really is and how it is happening all around us and in us. The reason money, influence, and success are so much harder to simply chuck under the bus of faithfulness and obedience is because we can’t do that without being self-implicating. And there’s the rub.

All of which seems to give further evidence to the fact that “war” and “violence” are not the preeminent capitulations the church has made to the powers. Indeed, arguing about why Christians must be anti-war may well distract us from the real issues, and indeed the real violence that the church consistently ignores for the sake of its own comfort and success.

Or to put an even finer point on the matter: What we really need to be able to do be honest about money. Nothing melts away faux radicalism faster than demanding the people talk about money and change how they relate to it concretely.

Christianity is not a cultural project

Posted by on August 10, 2011 24 comments

One of the central features of what we might call “post-evangelical discontent” is the general state of being sick of hearing about a “personal relationship” with God as central to the meaning of being a Christian. Talk about “personal relationships” with God is pietistic and individualistic drivel through and through, and we must move beyond it to talk about what really matters, namely embodied discipleship in the church, which is a political, cultural reality in its own right. What is vital for those seeking to move beyond their post-evangelical discontent is to stop fixating on such evangelical niceties and pieties, and understand Christian identity in terms of culture, that is the church as a specific cultural project that, through its own life and the virtues it forms in its members, embodies the kingdom in the world.

Now, to be sure I agree that talk of a “personal relationship” with God is theologically problematic, especially in its fundmentalist-evangelical use. The idea that God is primarily interested in having some sort of emotional involvement with us as precious individual snowflakes is, quite obviously stupid. However, I also find it problematic to move, through a sort of short-circuit from this insipid individual relationalism to construing Christianity as primarily a cultural project. The reason this is problematic is because Christianity is not a cultural project. To be a Christian is not to adopt some new cultural identity, ecclesial or otherwise (as the cross-cultural translatability of the Gospel message in the New Testament shows). To be a Christian is rather to be called to witness to the act of God in Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. This can happen in any culture and in many forms, which is part of the beauty of God’s ongoing work of raising up witnesses by the Spirit.

As such, we need to pause in our rightful distaste for false pieties before seeking false sanctuaries in construals of “Christianity as culture.” Statements like the following should be roundly rejected:

If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.

It may interest folks to know that this statement comes, not from the pen of leading authors who write books on theology of culture, or the meaning of being the church in the post-Christendom world, but from Anders Behring Breivik, the architect of the recent terrorist attacks in Norway. I use this quote here not to say that the advocates of Christianity as a cultural project would somehow endorse Breivik’s actions; obviously they would not. My point is more basic: Christianity is not a cultural project and to construe it as such is always to set it in the service of some ideology or politics other than it’s call to witness to Christ. Just as we must reject false pieties, so too must we reject the false security that would have us imagine that Christianity is a culture rather than a calling that breaks into all cultures and forms of social life.

As if it needed to be said

Posted by on March 21, 2011 40 comments

It’s good that a recent NY Times article has drawn attention to the unending evangelical idolatry of marriage and family and their correspondingly shameful treatment of single pastors, and especially of single women pastors.

Well known theological hack and neocon ideologue, Al Mohler gives us a rather striking display of his own idolatrous and anti-biblical views on the matter saying that “if [students seeking to enter the ministry] remain single, they need to understand that there’s going to be a significant limitation on their ability to serve as a pastor.”

It seems to me that the Apostle Paul believed the exact opposite of the shit that Mohler’s spouting here (1 Cor 7:28-38). Funny how explicit rejection of the clear teaching of the NT can be made to go hand in hand with blustering proclamations about inerrancy. Add it to  the laundry list of evangelical self-contradictions I guess.

The politics of celebrity commentating

Posted by on March 3, 2011 6 comments

It’s always struck me as quite odd how the throat-clearing that goes on at the front of so many quasi-intellectual essays talking about recent celebrity drama/gossip/insane meltdowns inevitably takes the form of the author establishing with absolute clarity their own complete and utter disinterest in celebrities. Apparently the only way you can establish yourself as a compelling voice about this particular facet of pop culture is to claim that you yourself, unlike that huddled masses crowding around the tabloid displays in the checkout lines, are above even giving a shit about our nation’s economic and entertainment elite.

Why is this? I can only surmise that its a kind of ressentiment or at best a sort of tactical self-deception that the author knows they’re going to need to engage in in order to stomach talking about people much richer and famous than they. In order for me to sound both current and interesting, I have to feign complete disinterest in the matter I’m about to spend a whole bunch of time having a metadiscussion about. If I were to admit being interested in the banal topic I’m writing about, all fictive authority and supercool pop cultural street cred would melt away and I’d be just another talking head passing on celebrity gossip on EW.

Allow me to venture an unprovable, but I think quite probably true hypothesis about what’s actually going in most celebrity commentators. If anyone really and truly doesn’t care that much about Brad and Angelina’s most recent adoptions and affairs, I’ll wager its the talking head who is forced to sit across from them and act interested as they interview them. By contrast it is online magazine writer, whose book likely sits somewhere around #1,079,836 on Amazon, who actually does care, feverishly, about what’s going on in celebrity culture and how they can write about it in a way that establishes themselves as decidedly above the fray of the cultural trend of celebrity fascination. Indeed, I’d contend that there’s a good case to be made that it is denial of interest in celebrity culture that is the most developed and potent instance of celebrity fascination itself. People that really don’t care about celebrities don’t care enough to prattle on about it.

Oh god, I need a gummie bear, or ETEWAF Now!

Posted by on December 30, 2010 8 comments

Stop what you’re doing and read the hell out of this right now. Patton Oswalt has written the best treatment to date offering a Hegelian theological approach to saving pop culture through a cosmic death-resurrection apocalypse. This is fabulous stuff. The video here is funny, but the full article must be read by all.

Barth and the “No Country”

Posted by on October 11, 2010 28 comments

Today’s post at the KBBC on Barth in dialogue with the Coen Brothers’ film, No Country for Old Men has been a real treat. It seems to me that this dialogue which has been helpfully rendered by Coutts serves, among other purposes, to show us the utter radicality of Barth’s understanding of salvation. The film mercilessly and starkly portrays the utter ferocity and ubiquity of evil in the world. There is, ultimately no country for old men, or for anyone. Barth, I think, would agree with this. The “no country” is indeed all that there is for the old man, for humanity as it is. The sheer banality and ferocity of evil in this world is, quite simply, something with which we cannot deal. There is no way to deal with it, to, as it were, “have dealings” with it in such a way is to make life come out even marginally ok. There simply is no country there that can be had, only a wasteland.

Thus hope, if there is to be hope can only be hope for a new world that in no way could have been inferred, unfolded, or derived from the old. If there is to be redemption it can only the redemption that is new creation in the most fundamental sense. As such it makes perfect sense that the Coen brothers would refrain from including anything “redemptive” in their account. For any such redemption would be but a falsifying of the radicality of the problem which is that we all inhabit the “no country” of death. Any redemption that might come to us, that might bring us into a new country, or as Psalm 66 has it “into a wide open place” can only come from beyond, from a resurrection beyond death, a resumption beyond rupture.

In a sense, as has been discussed in the comments of the original post, one might argue that Carla Jean could be construed as a Christ-figure, but I think we can only say this in the strict sense that her death, refuses to “deal” with the evil that is Chigurh but rather manifests a sort of independence over against the determination his power seeks to impose on her. In that she does somewhat image Christ’s death, or perhaps better, a martyr’s death.

What the Coen brothers so rightly withhold from us is any image of resurrection. If there is to be a resurrection, an irruption of new creation beyond the “no country” we have, it can only come from beyond the story that the movie (and the world) is. This seems to get at the profound truth that the resurrection cannot be inferred from anything immanent within the course of the story that is the world.

Another angle on the matter would be to suggest that the story told in No Country for Old Men articulates, in the most profound way possible, the reality of Holy Saturday. As Alan Lewis puts it, Holy Saturday, is not the day before the resurrection in the disciples’ original experience of the event, rather it is nothing, a void, “the day after the end.” That is precisely the reality of the world which No Country for Old Men so starkly presents. There is no assurance that a resurrection is coming, and no reason to think there should be. If there is to be a resurrection it can only be an absolute and utter miracle that explodes and dissolves the whole reality that is the “no country”.

Precisely by eliminating redemption from the film, the Coen brothers have demanded that we think redemption in the most radical and truthful way possible—if we can bear to do so, wagering on a word of hope that hangs in the air and defies us the moral and religious certainty we so deeply crave.

9/11 and fear

Posted by on September 13, 2010 5 comments

Gil Anidjar has an excellent article up at the ABC Religion and Ethics page, which speaks well to the culture of fear that continues to be inculcated in America after 9/11. Well worth a read. Here’s a segment:

One thing the prophets, poets, and philosophers of old did not endlessly rehearse is, “Be afraid, be very afraid! There is danger everywhere. Remember what was done to you and how it has hurt and, above all, frightened you. Build onto yourself higher walls, therefore, make bigger bombs and better security gates, for your own exclusive care and protection. And make sure those immigration laws are tighter than what is inflicted on them bankers!”

It should be obvious that, though we can all-too easily be persuaded otherwise, we are not all vulnerable in the same manner. We are not exposed to the same risks and we do not all have the same life expectancy.

Those among us who are more privileged, more protected, as it were, may or may not have a choice in the emotional response we experience with regard to the state of the world. But it does seem like we might have some choice in what we embrace and condone by way of our collective behaviour, our politics.

On the anniversary of 9/11, therefore, I remember the schoolchildren who, over the course of the Cold War, were taught fear on their flesh by crouching under their desks. And I remember the role played by shoes today in the pedagogy of fear.

That is why I want to believe that the American president might address the nation and the “international community” with the following words:

“My fellow Americans, and fellow Westerners, do not be afraid. Verily, I say unto you: Do not fear the shoes of our neighbours. Do not fear them at airports first. Perhaps, you will learn not to fear them at the entrances of mosques. For the love of God, or that of the poor (the downtrodden), the widow (the refugee), and the orphan (the immigrant).”

Louie and Jesus

Posted by on September 10, 2010 6 comments

A brief plug: the best combination of hilarity and profundity on TV right now for my money is Louie (the brainchild of the star, comedian Louis C.K.). The most recent episode, “God” deals in a shockingly profound way with theological issues related to growing up with Catholic guilt, and the all-too-common (across confessional lines) abusive fixation on the suffering of Jesus.

Very much worth a viewing. Intended for mature audiences, etc.

The evangelical-vampiric construction of femininity

Posted by on September 9, 2010 2 comments

Among the new articles just published at TOJ, one of the most helpful is K.J. Swanson’s critique of the various evangelical Christian responses to the Twilight series. Given all the evangelical (and Catholic, lets be equal opportunity offenders here) uproar over the Harry Potter series it is pretty amazing that most Christian responses to the Twilight series has been at at most neutral and often glowingly enthusiastic.

As you might expect this divergence has everything to do with sex, particularly Twilight’s portrayal of female sexuality. Says Swanson:

Beth Felker Jones explains in Touched by a Vampire, “the themes of Twilight are all about what it means to be female.” This question of what it means to be female is one evangelicals have been trying to help girls answer for years. Whether it’s the formidable Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood or the franchised Every Man series, the evangelical media has produced an entire industry of relationship advice books that are not primarily about managing one’s love life, but are, rather, instructional guides to help readers personify “authentic” masculinity and femininity. And with the publication of books about Twilight written by evangelical Christian authors for adolescent girls, the evangelical conversation about Twilight has actually merged with the genre of evangelical relationship texts for young women. The manner in which such books respond to the cultural impact of Twilight follows the evangelical trajectory of placing gender at the heart of Christian faith, normalizing and spiritualizing patriarchal interpretations of femininity.

Be sure to check out the whole article and the two forthcoming installments which will complete the series. One final parting shot from Swanson’s apropos critique:

It is ultimately fitting that Twilight should be so often called a “guilty pleasure,” for at the very core of its narrative, we find guilt being linked to pleasure; a teenage girl wooed into physical intimacy but denied that intimacy the very moment she acts on her feelings. The mixed message of Edward’s pattern of seductive arousal, followed by shaming rejection, puts Bella in the position of needing to break Edward’s rules in order to honestly express what she feels. Bella is called a “bad girl” not because she is kissed, but because she kisses back. Kurt Bruner worries that Twilight will teach young readers that “even good girls are eager to have sex before marriage,” but he has no words of critique for Edward’s erotic pursuit of Bella. The cost of evangelical praise for Twilight is a deepening of the split between sexuality and spirituality wherein young girls have no recourse but to remain frozen like an obedient Bella would or become “bad” by reciprocating as Bella actually does. Either choice allows shame to reign where dignity should abide.

Best. Review. Ever.

Posted by on June 29, 2010 13 comments

Its been a while since I’ve indulged in something linking to a movie review, but this is just too damn good to pass up. Drew McWeeny’s review of the latest Twilight schlock is just utterly fantastic:

Here’s where I have a problem.  I don’t care if they get married or not, because in this film, “get married” is just code for “now we can do it.”  Their marriage isn’t about building something together or creating a family.  Their marriage isn’t about time they’ve spent together and time they want to spend together.  It’s all hormonal.  It’s all impulse.  Bella Swan is defined as a character purely by who she wants to sleep with, and I don’t care if she actually consummates the act or not.  This movie is driven from start to finish by the real estate between her legs, and if that sounds blunt or harsh, good.  I want it to sound ugly, because I think it is ugly.  Deeply ugly.  She’s the weakest, most dependent lead in a film that I can imagine.  There is nothing interesting about Bella aside from her desire for these two boys.  It is a narcissistic teenage fantasy taken to a disturbing depth.  Nothing in the world of these movies matters beyond the resolution of whether or not Bella is going to bone Edward.  And when.  And how.  And whether she’s going to bone Jacob as well.

There is talk of love, but there is nothing like love in these movies.  These are not stories about love.  They are stories about infatuation, temporary teenage madness.  And, hey, man… I may be ancient at this point, but I remember what it’s like when you’re a teenager and everything feels so important, and I’ve seen films that get that frenzy just right and they still manage to feature real character work and stories that are interesting and actual events.  You can make a great movie about the rush of teenage love.  You can use it as a backdrop for all sorts of stories.  But for that to be the thing that holds us as an audience, we have to believe that there’s something behind it.  I have yet to see anything in any of these movies that would connect these characters beyond narrative convenience.

Bella doesn’t love these men because of things they have done together.  Instead, everything they do together is because they “love” Bella.  It’s a pissing contest.  And both of the guys are just as poorly defined and as grotesque as Bella in what they represent.  Edward is her “dream man,” and as depicted in the films, he’s basically a control freak who treats her like an object to possess.  He lies to her.  He manipulates her.  He is unable to tolerate her interacting with anyone else.  Ladies… if you have a chance to marry a man who acts like Edward while you’re dating, do it.  And then you can look forward to broken bones and mysterious bruises and a slow and methodical separation from friends and family until you exist only for him.  Which is obviously what you’re looking for, right?  Ooooh, romantic.

Or if Edward’s love isn’t the right kind for you, then maybe you can get lucky and earn yourself a Jacob.  A guy who is hot enough that he knows you will love him, and if you don’t, then it’s just a matter of time.  After all, look at his abs.  He doesn’t offer anything more substantial than Edward in terms of emotion or support, but he does have those abs.  He’s also got body heat, so obviously he is a better choice for Bella.  He has one scene where he actually tells her that he has not imprinted on her as a mate, as is the way with his kind, but that doesn’t matter.  We’re still supposed to believe that this is important, that this struggle over this pathetic, empty dishrag means something.

I love women.  I love all sorts of women.  And because I love real women, actual flesh and blood human being that happen to have a slightly different arrangement of chromosomes than I do, I despise these movies.  I hate them for what they offer up as a value system.  I hate them because there are girls who mistake their own chemical response to the male leads in the movie as an actual affection for the story that’s being told.  They invest on the surface level, and in the meantime, there is this poisonous cancer, this vile insidious message that’s being sold to them underneath.  I hate these movies because they tell girls that this is their value in the world.  Who you bang defines you.  You are worth your vagina and nothing more.  You are who your man is.  That is all.

I just want to point out that this is the first time that the categories of “awesomeness” and “Things that make you want to gouge your eyes out with your pinky, shove scalding hot pokers in your ears, and repeatedly slam the door of a 1950s-vintage, American-made sedan on your head” have become unified in one post.

H/T: Brad E.

I need you in my world

Posted by on June 21, 2010 14 comments

Things have been way to serious around here lately.

Why Novak is completely worthless in every way imaginable

Posted by on April 21, 2010 53 comments

Daniel Larison rightly gives Novak a skewering over his recent tirade of stupidity on the ever-further nauseating First Things blog:

One of my commenters pointed me to this bizarre item* by Michael Novak at one of the blogs at First Things. Novak writes:

We again need such Christian realism. Such tough-mindedness. The most dreadful war of all time is just ahead of us, is already well begun. Many of us want to save the Christian Holy Places, and Israel, too–our best ally in the world, the creator of the most economically creative and democratic society in its region.

Fulfilling this desire will not be easy in the next twelve months, fateful months, clock-ticking months. If the nuclear capacity of Iran is not destroyed before functioning nuclear weapons are in their silos or other weapons platforms, the whole world will experience blackmail.

To make an object lesson, one nation in particular is on notice that it is listed as first for destruction.

How will we live with ourselves if Israel is annihilated with nuclear bombs? How will we survive? How will our understanding of the Word of God survive, if the fleshly, tangible heart of Jewish and Christian faith is obliterated?

He goes on to urge a war of aggression against Iran to “prevent” the absurd fantasy of the Iranian destruction of the Holy Places. It is bad enough that Novak invokes Niebuhr (!) in support of this mad call for unprovoked, unnecessary war, but when he says that the “most dreadful war of all time is just ahead of us, is already well begun” we can safely say that he has lost all touch with reality. WWII remains the most dreadful war of all time, and nothing on the horizon even remotely compares to the loss of life and destruction that occurred in that war. So there is nothing realistic at all about Novak’s “Christian realism,” and neither is there anything Christian about it if that word is to have any connection to the teachings of Our Lord.

Even under very broad interpretations of just war theory, there cannot be a just war when the other party has inflicted no grave, lasting injury on us. By definition, preventive war cannot be just, and yet it is most certainly preventive war that Novak and other advocates of attacking Iran demand. War is sometimes necessary and permitted for the restoration of peace. There is no justification for destroying what peace exists to satisfy our irrational fears of a deterrable and containable threat. There is no conceivable justification for initiating hostilities to attempt to stop the potential future acquisition of a weapon that the other state is very unlikely to use against us or our allies. To start a war for such a reason would be a crime against God and man.

What would make such a war even more unjustifiable is the improbability of success: a war against Iran might delay an Iranian bomb, but it would not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program and it would almost certainly make the acquisition of such weapons an even higher priority to deter future attacks. Meanwhile, the consequences of such a war could be very bad for U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf states, as well as for Israel and our Gulf state allies, to say nothing of the potential damage it would do to the global economy and the hardship and suffering it would inflict on the Iranian people. Thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of people would die, many more would be injured and displaced, and our government and the governments of any states that helped us would obviously be implicated in yet another illegal war. Beyond the loss of life and resources, the damage to our national reputation would be staggering.

Novak warns against the “blackmail” that will follow if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, but the only one engaged in a sort of blackmail here is Novak. He would exploit the emotional and religious attachment Christians naturally have for the Holy Places to inspire support for massive, unnecessary bloodshed. The message is quite clear: if you treasure the sacred places where God revealed Himself, you will endorse my monstrous proposal, and otherwise you probably don’t really care about these places or the revelation itself. The proposal is horrible, and the manipulation being employed to advance the proposal is simply despicable.

As for the Iranian threat, Novak is simply wrong. The “whole world” will not experence blackmail from Iran. Most likely, no other state will experience anything of the kind. It is possible that Iranian nuclear weapons could push other states towards nuclearization, in which case the danger would be an arms race and not Iranian “blackmail.” That would be undesirable, but it would not be worse than the regional conflagration that an attack on Iran would cause. Israel’s nuclear arsenal will ensure that Iran would never attempt a nuclear first-strike against Israel.

For that matter, Jerusalem is also considered holy in the eyes of Muslims. I have no idea how Westerners can claim to “know” that the Iranian government would be so moved by religious apocalyptic fervor that it would engage in suicidal nuclear warfare, but they also seem remarkably certain that the holy status of Jerusalem in the eyes of Muslims somehow doesn’t really “count” and will be tossed aside at a moment’s notice. We often see this selective reliance on the beliefs and statements of people in other states. When Ahmadinejad or some other figure of authority in Iran makes demagogic, bellicose statements against Israel, these statements are regarded as essential for understanding the thinking of the Iranian government. On the other hand, when their politico-religious authorities say repeatedly that they regard the use of nuclear weapons as abhorrent, we are supposed to dismiss these statements automatically.

* That is, it is genuinely bizarre, but it’s actually sadly predictable and normal for many of the people at First Things.

If you read Novak’s whole post it’s simply too extraordinary for words in terms of its gargantuan absurdity. He evokes all these emotions about how precious and amazing it is to be able to pray and meditate on the same hill where Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount . . . precisely for the purpose of urging Christians to utterly and completely violate the content of the Sermon itself. What matters to Novak is us being able to posses the geographic space where the Sermon allegedly happened, but he doesn’t give a fuck about the Sermon itself. After all if some country might potentially pose a threat to a piece of land where Jesus maybe preached “Love your enemies” our true and righteous response should be to launch a war of aggression against such types, right?

This guy is a sub-Christian joke who recommends immoral, illegal, and inhumane actions for the sake of a crude and insipid ideological platform. Fortunately if exponents of this political program are as stupid, clumsy, moronic, and dottering as Novak, I imagine people will be able to more easily just laugh and ignore them.

Umm, yes please!

Posted by on April 17, 2010 17 comments

I’ve got to say, this recent open letter from Hans Kung to the bishops of the Roman Church is quite arresting. Whether one agrees with every point Kung makes or not, I think the common quasi-catholic tendency to dismiss Kung as a half-baked liberal is simply laziness and disingenuity. As far as I’m concerned, as Protestant who longs for mutual openness, recognition, and unity between all Christians, Kung’s words here are, on the whole, right on.

Christianists?

Posted by on April 14, 2010 30 comments

Andrew Sullivan has become known for his use of the term “Christianist” to describe those who, claiming Christianity as their warrant, propagate and promote a distinctly conservative, quasi-theocratic political program. Thus it generally refers to the religious right, and other such conservative Christian groups and movements that seek, under the banner of their faith, to obtain and wield social and political power.

The rationale for the term is pretty straightforward. Basically Sully doesn’t want people of this political orientation to be perceived as the true or only representatives of Christianity. Just as many Muslims protest certian theocratic and radical political agendas being identified with “Islam” so Sully protests the Religious Right’s political agenda being identified with “Christianity.” Thus, just as it has become common to speak of “Islamism” as a particular political ideology which does not exhaust or define Islam as such, the argument is we should learn to speak of “Christianism” in a similar way.

Not all Muslims are Islamists. Likewise not all Christians are Christianists. The former terms name theological and doctrinal allegiances, while the latter speak of specific political agendas that dishonestly present themselves as pure iterations of the religion they adhere to.

I get all this, and it makes sense to me. My question though is if this is really a good idea, terminologically speaking, and what its really supposed to do. On one level, sure, I’d love an easy way for the world to understand, simply through terminology that I have nothing politically in common with the ideology of the Christian Right. But, is the coining of the term “Christianist” really worth the trouble? And doesn’t it smack of a sort of self-righteous distanciation?

“Well, I am a Christian, but so-and-so is a Christianist.” Does not this language do little more than absolve us Christians of our responsibility for those who propagate these ideologies? Aren’t we just distancing ourselves from them precisely for the purpose of making sure everyone knows that our hands are clean? Who does this language really serve? It seems to me that it only serves us, satiating our desire for no one to think that “we” are in any way connected to “them.”

I’m not saying I’ve totally made up my mind. Maybe it will prove to be a useful term. But for the moment I find it hard to find anything really helpful about it unless I’m in a mood to feel innocent, at a safe distance from the actions taken by the Christian Right. At worst, one could argue that this language is an attempt to dodge some very real repentance that we may need to undergo. If we’re the Christians and they’re the Christianists, we don’t need to repent and seek to redress the wrongs being done, we can just be content to lob rhetorical volleys of well-crafted descriptors.

What do you think?

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