Taking Off the Gloves

June 26, 2010

In chapter 6, this book turn a turn from the wearisome to the farcical, and I’m afraid I lost my patience.  I no longer have the patience to write 10,000 words slowly and politely deconstructing the argument of each chapter.  Chapter 6, although massive (65 pages) and full of details crying out for attention, does not merit such time.  So, I’m going to whip through it in one rather tempestuous segment.  I’m going to promise to keep this under 2,500 words, though methinks I can dispose of it even quicker than that.  

VanDrunen’s argument in this chapter seems to be that, although the universally-held position of the Reformers and their heirs for 150 years on the two-kingdoms was always hobbled by blatant inconsistencies, that they were unable or unwilling to recognize or expurgate, that finally, 270 years after the Reformation, in a new land across the sea, under the sunny influence of Enlightenment philosophy and still reeking of gunpowder from a recently successful revolution, the Virginian heirs of the Reformation finally realized what their forefathers had been trying to say but hadn’t been able to enunciate properly, and embraced the true, pure form of the two kingdoms doctrine--separation of Church and State.  It turns out, though, that this isn’t his argument; it is only Stuart Robinson’s, a Civil War-era Kentucky Presbyterian who constructed this narrative so as to make his own bizarrely innovative position look historical.  VanDrunen begins by appearing to endorse Robinson’s narrative, but on a closer look at the historical evidence, dismisses it for a still more fantastic one.  No, it turns out, the Virginia Presbyterians in the 1780s did not consistently embrace two kingdoms teaching either, for they still thought it was fine for the Church to give its input on civil affairs.  No, it wasn’t until another 80 years later, 350 years after the Reformation in the midst of an attempt to defend Negro slavery from ecclesiastical censure, that the true meaning of the two kingdoms doctrine was finally understood, in the idiosyncratic and novel teaching of Stuart Robinson and James Henley Thornwell.  Finally, upon closer examination of these figures, VanDrunen concludes that, although they got close, these men too failed to purge the two kingdoms view of its inconsistencies and realize its true genius, because they too still felt that the Church might have something to say at least on the moral dimension of civil affairs.  The true meaning of the Reformation view, it seems, continued to remain hidden to its heirs, until God brought VanDrunen himself along to purge it of its inconsistencies, and present it pure and unspotted before the world.  

Purged of its inconsistencies?  What a joke!  How, I must ask, is one to make sense of the claims that the Church must limit its preaching, teaching, and application to the prescriptions of Scripture only, and that therefore the Church must confine itself only to spiritual affairs, offering no insight on civil affairs?  What Scripture, I must ask, are we talking about, if it is one that speaks only of “spiritual” matters and has no insight to offer on “civil” matters, whatever those two terms might mean (and VanDrunen has yet to offer us anything coherent they could mean in his usage)?  I’d best quote the whole paragraph in which this claim transpires, because you have to see it to believe it: “Thornwell suggests a position quite similar to Hodge’s, namely, that though there may be a relatively small class of ‘purely political’ issues, there are a wide range of issues for which the church and state have overlapping jurisdiction, namely, civil issues about which the Bible has something to say.  Perhaps one cannot blame Thornwell too much for tripping on this matter, for the matter of assigning respective jurisdictions to church and state had tripped his Reformation and Reformed orthodox predecessors as well.  As discussed in previous chapters, their incoherence involved enunciating the two kingdoms doctrine and then trying to find a civil aspect to religious concerns and thus entrusting magistrates with protecting religious purity as a civil responsibility.  The issue here with Hodge and Thornwell entailed the reverse scenario.  American Presbyterians had in significant ways (though not entirely) rejected the idea that the state was to enforce religious purity as a civil task.  But Hodge, despite his stance against the Spring Resolutions, held on to common American Presbyterian notions that the church should project its voice directly into political and other cultural affairs.  Insofar as Thornwell echoed similar concerns after enunciating his spirituality doctrine, he lapsed into incoherence by finding a religious aspect to civil concerns and thus entrusting the church with promotion of civil good as a spiritual responsibility.  Thus, Thornwell’s thought illustrates the continuing difficulty with which Reformed theologians sought to apply their two kingdoms doctrine in a theoretically and practically consistent way.”  

Well, I bet he lapsed into incoherence, because it’s impossible to enunciate something like Thornwell’s spirituality doctrine without doing so.  But tell me, Dr. VanDrunen, why it is incoherent to find a “religious aspect to civil concerns?”  Oh wait, you can’t do that, because you’re just a historian, right?  Could’ve fooled me.

The root problem here is, as I have insisted before, the methodological separation of Reformed political theory from Reformed political practice, as if the former could be established without reference to the latter, and then used to prove that the latter was incoherent.  Notice how VanDrunen puts it above: “their incoherence involved enunciating the two kingdoms doctrine and then trying to find a civil aspect to religious concerns and thus entrusting magistrates with protecting religious purity as a civil responsibility”--as if there were a temporal sequence: first they enunciated this pristine “two kingdoms doctrine” and then they tried to find a civil aspect to the religious side of it.  But of course, it wasn’t like that...it was all part and parcel of the same theory.  And, simply as a matter of historical probability, it is extraordinarily unlikely that for hundreds of years, all the proponents of this theory consistently failed to say what it was they meant to say, consistently failed to see that their “real” theory differed from the one they sought to propound and apply.  As it turns out, unsurprisingly, it was not.  Their real theory simply wasn’t what VanDrunen tries to make it out to be, as Steven Wedgeworth very neatly summarizes here: http://www.credenda.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=218:two-kingdoms-critique&catid=96:theology&Itemid=122.  Again, I can’t really imagine how it could’ve been, because I still can’t find a way to actually make coherent sense of what this “pure Two Kingdoms” theology is, in VanDrunen’s mind. 

Essentially, then, what VanDrunen is asking us to do is to suspend our historical disbelief in order to try and imagine a fictional real doctrine lurking hidden behind the stated Reformed teaching, and he asks us to make this leap into historical incoherence in service to a theological proposition that he has never made any effort to establish the coherence of, because he’s supposedly just a historian.  I’m sorry, I just can’t go with him along that road any longer.   

The worst part is that the would-be heroes of the fantastical narrative of this chapter just aren’t very good heroes.  John Cotton appears as the villain, because after all, he persecuted Roger Williams and wouldn’t allow religious freedom.  In the words of Brian Regan, “Wow, you’re breakin’ some new ground there, Copernicus.”  VanDrunen makes little effort to go beyond traditional prejudices here.  That doesn’t mean I’m a fan of John Cotton; no, but I’d much rather go with him, a man of principle, than the next set of actors that strut across the stage--the Virginia Presbyterians in the 1760s-80s.  These men, VanDrunen wants to say, finally broke free of the bonds of inconsistency that had tied up the Reformed tradition for centuries by espousing the separation of Church and State.  But then, it turns out, as even VanDrunen must regretfully admit, that actually they didn’t do this out of principle, but simply because they happened to be the religious minority in Virginia, and “Separation of Church and State” was a way of getting the Anglican establishment off their backs.  When the opportunity presented itself of them being co-established alongside the Anglicans, they jumped at the opportunity, before lapsing back into separationist mode as soon as the opportunity disappeared.  Hardly the most principled lot.  In any case, VanDrunen is unhappy with them himself, because they failed to see that, as a corollary of freeing the Church from state control, they needed to keep the Church from, on its part, giving advice to the state.  Oh, heaven forbid that the Church might ever want to do anything like that--that would be too much like...oh, I don’t know...Isaiah?  Elijah?  John the Baptist?  Jesus Christ?  

So onto the stage strut our pair of arch-heroes, Negro servants in tow, grovelling as appropriate--James Thornwell and Stuart Robinson.  VanDrunen momentarily entertains some doubts that perhaps their motivations in keeping the Church out of anything besides “spiritual affairs” were more a matter of trying to protect slavery than of theological principle, but tries to gloss over these objections: “The consistency of and motivation for Southern Presbyterian advocacy of the spirituality of the church are interesting and difficult questions, but this section will delve into them only lightly.” (249)  Wait, hang on a second--it might well be that the masterminds of your pet doctrine actually just cooked it up so they could hold onto their African slaves, but you don’t see that that really matters to your point?  Actually, it makes sense that VanDrunen would not think that it matters, because this kind of mind/body dualism has been an operating principle all along--if he can just distill the intellectual theological essence of the doctrine, it does not matter what ugly practical applications it was wrapped up in.  This is perhaps understandable for a systematic theologian, but it is just bad history.  A footnote acknowledges the debate over Thornwell and Robinson’s motivations, but while it lists six sources that have been written to make the case that slavery was their chief motivation, it lists only two for the contrary position, one of which hardly counts, because it is by D.G. Hart, a buddy of VanDrunen’s who has the same polemical axe to grind.  

But again, whatever we are to think of the ignoble heroes VanDrunen has scripted for us, we come back to the same mystifying question--just how is it that Scripture--we are talking about the same Scripture, right? Genesis through Revelation, 66 books and all that?--does not have anything to say about, to use Robinson’s words, “wrong moral views of social and civil affairs,” and not just wrong moral views, mind you, but wrong moral practice?  (If you think that was a convoluted sentence, at least it wasn’t as convoluted as this paradigm.)

Essentially, what VanDrunen leaves us with are the alternatives either to accept his historical narrative and grant that the Reformers must’ve chucked Scripture out the window as soon as they started thinking about these matters, or else to trust that the Reformers must’ve had a few ounces of Biblical sense and so discard his historical narrative.  I’m no big fan of the Reformers’ political theology, but I know which alternative I’ll take.  

(There, only 1914 words..)

Abortive Politics

May 21, 2010

If the idea of the left-wing and right-wing parties joining to form a coalition government here in the UK isn’t weird enough to us Americans, a woman at church last Sunday pointed out to me another huge disconnect between American and British politics.  In Britain, she said, it’s an open question who Christians are going to vote for; most likely, in a sizable and reasonably diverse congregation, fairly equal numbers of the members will vote for the Tories, the Lib Dems, or Labour.  But in America, so far as she could tell, it was pretty much assumed that if you were Christian, you were voting Republican.  She recounted the bizarre experience some of her friends had had of receiving emails from American friends back in 2008 asking for prayer that Obama wouldn’t win.    I regretfully assured her that her impressions of the polarization were quite accurate.  But why?  

Why is it that Christians in the US are so politically partisan compared to their British counterparts?  Is it because good and evil are so much clearer in US politics than in the UK?  I must confess that I’ve never seen anything to suggest a clear division of good and evil between the Democrats and the Republicans.  Is it because Brits simply don’t take their faith seriously enough to apply it to politics?  I suppose there might be something to that, but I don’t think that’s a fair criticism.  Let us pause to consider this, though.  A flexibility among Christians with regard to political affiliation could imply an underdeveloped sense of the Gospel’s relevance to political life; however, it may well simply imply a healthy understanding of the provisionality of politics.  In our modern societies, it is important for Christians to recognize that, although there may be in theory a robustly Biblical politics, none of the existing political options comes close to embodying it, but each of them does offer some prospects of achieving some provisional goods that Christians can recognize as genuine public goods.  In such a situation, complete abstention from voting is a legitimate route to take (and is more or less my own persuasion), on the grounds that each of the options represents a sufficiently flawed, unChristian, and untrustworthy platform that it would be wisest not to support any.  But it is also potentially legitimate to, acknowledging the essential rottenness of all the options, weigh up the provisional public goods of each option, and vote for the one that seems on balance the best, all the while granting that your Christian brother may well weigh things up a little differently, without this implying any fundamental disconnect between your ultimate values.  Such a sense of provisionality seems (so far as I have discerned in my very brief time) to dominate the thinking on politics among British Christians, but not among Americans.  American Christians, for the most part, have trouble letting go of the idea that political allegiances are matters of ultimate value, and should be a religious battleground.  

The chief cause of this religious partisanship, so far as I can tell, seems to have been the abortion debate.  Of course, that’s far from the only issue on which Christians line up with the conservative party line, but my sense is that it’s the tail that wags the dog.  Where would Christians have gotten the idea that all these conservative policies were Christian policies?  Why should love of gun rights be a particularly Christian political position?  Or opposition to immigration?  Or being perennially hawkish about military action?  Etc.  The closest thing I’ve been able to come to an explanation is simply this: when Roe v. Wade happened, the Democrats happened to be dominated by socially liberal leadership (McGovern), and so the Republicans were able to position themselves as the anti-abortion party.  Christians, fired with fanatical political activism over the abortion issue, flocked more and more to the Republican banner and began assimilating its ways, even if there wasn’t anything very Christian about them.  The abortion issue was one on which Christianity had a clear answer to give, and so it came to be the only one on which Christianity had any answer to give.  And, since Democrats are seen as the embracers of abortion, which is clearly wicked, they can be easily demonized in the popular Christian imagination--they must be wicked, filthy people, and so every political stance associated with the Democrats must be a wicked, filthy one...no need to investigate the matter much further.

In Britain, where the abortion issue never became politicized*, Christians never flocked to one party en masse, nor did they start attributing life-and-death significance to politics.  So, while we may allege that have not sufficiently put faith in politics in the sense of putting faith into politics, making their Christianity central to their political involvement, they seem to have thereby avoided our error of putting faith in politics in the sense of making an idol of politics and thus losing our grip on the Christianity that we were trying to bring into the public sphere.  

*Note: It is particularly odd, as this woman and I were discussing, that the abortion issue should have become politicized in the US and not the UK given that in the former, it was was a judicial decision, and in the latter, a legislative one.  Historically, an independent, unpoliticized judiciary has been seen as a chief bulwark of freedom, but American Christians have heedlessly chucked that ideal out the window in their single-minded pursuit of a political solution to the abortion problem, a problem that is not a fundamentally political problem.  And so, even while decrying “liberal activist jurisprudence,” we have aggressively and explicitly tried to turn our entire political process, at every election, into an attempt to stack the Court with politically-aligned judges to overturn abortion.  And so we have connived with the liberal activists for the destruction of an independent judiciary, so that we now regularly expect Supreme Court decisions to fall along partisan lines.  

Review of The Shock Doctrine

April 26, 2010

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is a must-read for anyone in the modern West.  Okay, that’s a broad statement, so let me try one more focused: it is a must-read for Red-state Christian America.  Too long have we blindly thrown our weight behind the idea that capitalism would bring peace, freedom, and prosperity to the benighted Third World, and have we, with dangerous syncretism, imagined that its onward march was the vanguard of the Kingdom of God, trampling over secularists in our race to declare its victories as the offspring of our Christianity’s genius.  We glibly reassure ourselves that we are “pro-life” because we decry the crimes of abortion doctors, all the while ignoring the blood of the neoliberalism crusade’s millions of victims.  Naomi Klein calls on us all to wake up and smell the ugly stench of reality.  What makes this book so compelling is that it transcends standard debates about whether the “free enterprise system” or state-run enterprise works better, by examining the actual track record of the Chicago School, pure capitalist notion of free markets, and concluding that this “free enterprise system” has never existed.  We are accustomed to treating “the government” and “private companies” as two antithetical actors, and yet this assumption is no longer true, if it ever was.  

Take Lockheed Martin, for example--the US government is their biggest client, and Lockheed receives a greater share of the federal budget than do several large governmental agencies like the Department of Commerce.  What we have now is a corporatist state, an unholy alliance of government force and market greed, each of which is dangerous enough on its own, but which together are a truly terrifying combination.  In this combination, the government imposes a “free” market by force on unwilling citizens, then helps make sure that big corporate or political supporters get the lion’s share of that market, at the expense of most of the citizenry.  These corporate giants then come to wield the lion’s share of political power as well, which they continue to use for their benefit.  At the same time, this alliance means that, as things like war and disaster relief become for-profit enterprises, large corporations position themselves both to exploit and to encourage political and social chaos worldwide.  

Klein’s core thesis is that all of this has been the direct result of the attempt to apply Friedmanite Chicago School economics, a thesis that does not need to rely on tendentious causal connections or vague post hoc ergo propter hocs, since in many cases she can show how self-avowed Friedman proteges were the architects of these enterprises, which were enthusiastically hailed by Friedman and his cohorts.  Shortly after I started reading this book, I looked at some of the reviews on Amazon and decided to check out the small cluster of 1-star reviews, just to see what the opposition was saying.  A common complaint seemed to be: “This woman must not have read Friedman!  Friedman’s ideal wasn’t all this stuff that she’s portraying--dictatorships and oligarchical economies and a powerful corporatist state--he wanted freedom!”  Yes, but these people must not have really been reading this book.  The point isn’t what Friedman’s ideal was, just as the point isn’t what Marx’s ideal was.  With both, the problem is that their ideal, while great on paper, simply did not reflect the way real societies function, with real power interests that will protect themselves.  Especially if read with Polanyi’s argument about the inherent unnnaturalness of the self-regulating market in mind, The Shock Doctrine strongly suggests the conclusion that Pinochet-style violence, repression, inequality, and corporate dominance is the inescapable result of the attempt to apply Friedmanism in the world as we know it.  Forget the facile equation of capitalism and “freedom” or “democracy”--a democratic society, Klein shows, will revolt against the attempt to impose such an economic system, and so it can only be imposed by force or chaos, and then freedom is out of the picture.

  

How did we ever trick ourselves into believing that if we just removed the impediments to letting society be run by greed, we’d have a free and peaceful world?  Greed means that Lockheed Martin will fund war propaganda to get us to invade Iraq, and who’s to tell them that’s off-limits?   

Now, this book has some flaws, of course, which can get quite annoying at times.  For one thing, Klein doesn’t always seem to realize the radicalness of her own thesis--the thesis that we can no longer dichotomize business and government, since the two have increasingly merged their interests, personnel, and operations.  Repeatedly, she falls back into talking as if we’re dealing with a straightforward government vs. business, public vs. private battle, in which the public sphere is always the good guy, and private business is always the bad guy.  All of the problems, on this narrative, stem from not enough government--if only the government were bigger and stronger, all would be well.  And this gets tiresome--for some reason, whenever some crucial task currently administered by government isn’t getting done, it’s because the government is underfunded and sapped of resources, but whenever some crucial task currently administered by a private company isn’t getting done, it’s because they’re lazy, corrupt, and inefficient.  This is a rather dubious picture.  However, that said, the book does force us to rethink some of our equally dubious conservative assumptions--namely, that a private company will always do a job better than the government will, or that governments cannot do a fair bit of good in restraining baleful inequalities within society.

Also, Klein is terribly one-sided in her telling of the story.  She never really gives Friedman, et. al., a chance to tell their side of the story; when she does quote them or give a bit of their perspective, she immediately makes snide mockeries.  I think this tale could be even more compelling than it is were she to give them a fair hearing, to say, “Here’s what this movement wanted to achieve.  They really wanted these great goals, and they really thought these things would happen, and here’s why.  But here’s why those dreams failed when they met reality.”  Without that kind of sympathy and perspective, this ends up sounding propagandistic at times.  

Of course, another related criticism is that, as would surely be the case in any book of this size and scope, there are some places where the argument seems much weaker, and somewhat strained.  Was there really foul play going on here?  Was the story really that simple there?  Are we really to believe that this policy was such a bad thing?  She has some really damning material when she’s discussing Chile and the South American juntas, and also when she discusses post-9/11 developments and the Iraq War.  Most of the stuff in between contributes valuably to her thesis and narrative, but in some of it, it feels like she’s overreacting.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly for us Christians, this book is handicapped by the fact that it is written in an almost relentless torrent of moral passion, but a passion without any clear basis.  As a Christian, I can offer all kinds of reasons why most of the phenomena described in this book are indeed evil and appalling and should be resisted.  But what’s her basis?  At times, it seems to be an unswerving devotion to democracy.  Time and time again, her objection to Friedmanism is that its adoption in a society has to be undemocratic--it will not be supported by the majority of the people, and so the rulers have to find some way of imposing it against their will.  I’m not convinced this is automatically wrong.  After all, the purpose of rulers is to rule, is to make hard decisions that may not be popular, and if the rulers are in fact wiser than the ruled, that may mean they will take the right course of action, even if it is not generally supported.  But there is a difference between governing and oppressing, and in most of her examples, the actions taken were not merely undemocratic, but violent and deceptive.  So, a Christian can get angry about this as well.  She also seems to operate on the assumption that there’s a huge range of tasks in a society that ought to be provided by the government rather than for a profit.  Many of us may not entirely agree with her here, but I do begin to see the benefits of leaving the profit motive out of the picture when it comes to basic services for a society, even if that doesn’t mean it’s best to put the central government in charge of them.    And as Christians, we should agree that there is something wrong and dangerous about companies making a profit off of disasters, violence, and people in great need.  Biblically, the principles are clear--if your brother is weak and poor, you can’t try to make money off of him; you have to help him at your own expense.  Capitalism says, “Aha!  This person or this country has been brought to its knees--now’s the chance to make a killing!”  Finally, she is operating on the assumption that the people of a country have a right to a fair share of the products of their country, and that huge income inequality is an unjust state of affairs. I have a feeling that many people from my background will not share these assumptions, but I confess that I’m finding it rather difficult to object to them.  

In conclusion, this book is a wake-up call for Christians in the Western world who are accustomed to take it as one of those inevitable facts of life that the two-thirds world is poor and oppressed, and who subconsciously (or even openly) attribute it to the native incompetence and wickedness of these peoples: “We’re Protestant Christians, and so we’ve figured out how to prosper; they’re not, so it’s no wonder they’re condemned to keep wallowing in poverty.”  This book alerts us to the fact that this poverty and oppression is the result of particular decisions and policies largely emanating from our shores, policies that we have enthusiastically supported as long as they made us richer, and that we have a responsibility to repent of.

American Exceptionally-Grateful-ism?

March 1, 2010 

A recent blog post by Doug Wilson claimed that while he has recently written against American exceptionalism, this does not mean he is against American gratitude; indeed, we Americans should be grateful for living in a uniquely blessed nation.  While I appreciate his opposition to the idea of American exceptionalism, something many Christians unreflectively embrace, I must confess that I am still a bit skeptical.  One source of my skepticism is that saying you oppose the idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t mean you actually do.  I know plenty of people who would say, “Oh no, I don’t think America is better than everyone else...I just think that we aren’t involved in all those wicked things that other empires have done, and I think that we’re called to use our power to bring peace and justice throughout the world.”  Right...pardon me for being unconvinced.

Second, I’m a little leery of this idea of gratitude he has in mind. 

There’s a responsible kind of gratitude and a naive kind of gratitude.  If a kid is grateful to his parents because they buy him all kinds of junk food, then that gratitude is not necessarily a good thing--it would be better if was, to a certain extent, ungrateful, because he didn’t want to keep eating junk food.  More seriously, if the Emperor Nero had leaned back at one of his banquets and thanked the Roman gods for bringing him such wonderful luxury, we would not count that gratitude a virtue but a culpable naivete about the fact that this luxury was made possible by the suffering he had inflicted on thousands of others.  Wilson says, “Liberals are ungrateful whiners....They are surrounded by unbelievable blessings, greater than any people in the history of the world have known, and they avoid the grace of gratitude by complaining about the pollution, the fact that we stole it from the Indians, the additives in the bread, and the fact that it is all propped up by CIA assassinations overseas.”  I raise my hand timidly-- “But, shouldn’t we be upset that we murdered thousands of Indians to get this land?  Shouldn’t we be disturbed that there are strange chemicals in our food?  Shouldn’t we have some nagging discomfort, if not moral outrage, about the fact that it is all propped up by CIA assassinations overseas?”  I’m looking for some follow-up qualification from Wilson, along the lines of, “These are all important concerns, but we must remember at the same time to be grateful for the genuinely good things God has given us,” but he never gives it.

Finally, Wilson seems to think that we are exceptional in one respect--our Founding Fathers knew better than to think we were exceptional, and so they enshrined safeguards of limited government in our Constitution.  “The founders knew that we were in no way unique, and that really was unique.”  In other words, America isn’t exceptional, we just have an exceptional Constitution.  And although Wilson does not major on this theme, his comments got me realizing that this idea is quite pervasive in our circles.  “Yes, yes,” we say, “we’re happy to admit that America has got zillions of problems, and shouldn’t pretend to be ‘God’s chosen people,’ but it’s an established fact that we do have the best political system in the world, cuz we had such smart founders.  It’s only because we ignored our Constitution that we have problems.”  

Well, maybe.  But one nice thing about studying political thought at a British university is that you quickly find out that they are aware of quite a number of problems in the American constituion, as have been other European political thinkers for the last couple centuries.  O’Donovan happens to think that in one crucial respect--the separation of the legislative from the executive--the American constitution is fatally flawed.  Of course, this doesn’t mean that he thinks that the British system then is perfect.  No--it has serious flaws too, and could be well served to borrow certain elements from the U.S.  This seems to me an eminently sensible position: all constitutions have their pros and cons, most have fairly serious flaws, and even the best is only good for some nations, not for all. 

Until we’re willing to grant this, and stop kidding ourselves that our Constitution is the envy of the world, we’re going to keep falling into subtle forms of American exceptionalism, and imagining that we figured out how to curb government power.  After all, it is manifestly clear that we have failed to do so, and it’s worth asking whether that’s just because we ignored the Founders, or because the Founders got it wrong too.  

Christians in the Military?

February 28, 2010

There's a lot of debate right now over whether or not we should openly permit gays to serve in the military; but hardly any Christians seem to be asking the much more important question--should Christians serve in the military?  The early Church Fathers, as a general rule, thought not.  Ah, we say, but that's because they were pacifists, and we know better than that now.  Well, no, not necessarily--for one thing, opposition to killing is not the primary reason they cite for their concern.  Rather it is, as we see in Tertullian's The Military Chaplet, a concern that enlisting in the military would require a kind of allegiance and loyalty that only God could properly command, that it essentially committed one either to idolatry, or to invite severe punishment by refusing to engage in the practices required of a soldier.  Ah, we say, but this does not apply now.  Rome was pagan, and so their military was deep in idolatry, but we're secular, and so none of our practices can be idolatrous.  

Unfortunately, it's not that simple.  
So-called "secular" phenomena can be every bit as religious as those associated with traditional religions.  After all, the main idolatry that the early Christians were concerned about, and martyred for refusing, was the emperor-idolatry--declaring absolute loyalty to the state and its rulers, and participating in rituals and symbols designed to enact their allegiance and reverence to the state.  How different really are things now?  Not very, if you listen to William Cavanaugh in The Myth of Religious Violence.  He cites the historian and US diplomat Carlton Hayes, who identified "the American religion's saints (the founding fathers), its shrines (Independence Hall), its relics (The Liberty Bell), its holy Scriptures (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution), its martyrs (Lincoln), its inquisition (school boards that enforce patriotism), its Christmas (the Fourth of July), and its feast of Corpus Christi (Flag Day).  According to Hayes, the flag occupies the same central place in official ritual that the eucharistic host previously held: 'Nationalism's chief symbol of faith and central object of worship is the flag, and curious liturgical forms have been devised for 'saluting' the flag, for 'dipping' the flag, for 'lowering' the flag, and for 'hoisting' the flag.  Men bare their heads when the flag passes by; and in praise of the flag poets write odes and children sing hymns.  In America young people are ranged in serried rows and required to recite daily, with hierophantic voice and ritualistic gesture, the mystical formula: "I pledge allegiance to our flag and to the country for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."  Everywhere, in all solemn feasts and fasts of nationalism the flag is in evidence, and with it that other sacred thing, the national anthem.'"

It is truly bizarre that Protestants, with all their paranoia about any hint of Catholic Eucharistic devotion, have no objections about any of this except the omission of "under God" from the pledge, since they feel that we need to bolster the sacral dimensions of the pledge by affirming that God himself has commissioned this nation.  

But, I stray from the matter at hand.  What about Christians in the military?  Well, Tertullian has an interesting concern about the crown of laurel leaves that soldiers were to wear: "Is the laurel of the triumph made of leaves, or of corpses? Is it adorned with ribbons, or with tombs? Is it bedewed with ointments, or with the tears of wives and mothers? It may be of some Christians too; for Christ is also among the barbarians. Has not he who has carried a crown for this cause on his head, fought even against himself?"  

How dare Christians wear a symbol that commemorates the state's slaughter of its enemies? Tertullian asks.  This seems like overkill to us, but we need to ask ourselves--should Christian American soldiers object to bedecking themselves in apparel and symbols that honor the triumphs of US soldiers against its enemies in many unjust wars?

But here's Tertullian's biggest concern: "Do we believe it lawful for a human oath to be superadded to one divine, for a man to come under promise to another master after Christ, and to abjure father, mother, and all nearest kinsfolk, whom even the law has commanded us to honour and love next to God Himself, to whom the gospel, too, holding them only of less account than Christ, has in like manner rendered honour?... Shall he carry a flag, too, hostile to Christ? And shall he ask a watchword from the emperor who has already received one from God?"

Is this kind of loyalty a thing of the past, or do modern militaries also go too far in the allegiance they demand?  It's certainly a question worth asking, as, when you look at the kinds of loyalty oaths that the various branches of the military demand, and how they describe the kind of allegiance they involve, it certainly borders on idolatry.  I won't name any names here, but it's certainly worth reading up on some of the material on the US military websites.