The Promise and Failure of "the Secular"

One of the strange features in the Milbank article discussed in my previous post was his mention of the necessity to physically defend "the physical space" of the church "in the name of secular justice."  This surprising endorsement of "the secular" reminded me of a working document released a little while ago by the Roman Catholic Church, on the Church in the Middle East.  This document laments the lack of the separation of religion from politics in the Middle East and proposes the necessity of a secular government (modeled on European forms of religion, secularity, and government of course).  It seems a surprising move coming at a time when the pope is encouraging Europe to reconstitute itself through a return to Christian roots and the abandonment of secularism.  

Beyond a Common Ground: Levinas, Fanon, and Touching the Other

"To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it.  It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly:  to have the idea of infinity."  E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 51

This past weekend I went to a conference at Duke Div on "Friendship at the Margins."  During lunch on Saturday, various "practitioners" were invited from the community to lead sessions on how friendship influences their ministry.  I led one about forming friendships with refugees.

Sex, Colonialism, and Anglicanism: the ethics of mourning.

When I have time, I enjoy reading the New York Times online with my morning breakfast.  As I opened the "world" section of the paper, I noticed a headline and read the article at once:  "Same-Sex Couple Stirs Fears of a 'Gay Agenda.'"  I shut the computer and finished my breakfast, trying to think through the problems, again.

Skyler and I have been talking a lot about the Anglican church in Africa and the issue of homosexuality.  We are Anglicans, in AMIA (and so under the Rwandan Anglican church), and want to go to over to Rwanda.  We've also been following the Ugandan Anglican Church's response to the proposed bill that would allow the execution of homosexuals (interesting enough, a bill that came a month after three American evangelicals gave a series of talks on the evils of the gay rights movement, how it would destroy a family-based society, and how homosexuals can be converted into heterosexuals--read more HERE).

The article I read at breakfast discussed the arrest of a same-sex couple in Malawi after having a party to celebrate their engagement.  The whole article painfully illustrates the complexities of even holding a discussion on this topic between the two continents, let alone reaching some kind of mutual understanding.  For instance, the article quotes the Rev. Zacc Kawalala, who says, "The West has its gay agenda.  It wants to look at Africa and say, 'If you don't accept homosexuality, you are primitive.' But we're not as wicked as the West." Another person comments, "These immoral acts are not in our  culture; they are coming from the outside.  Otherwise, why is  there all this interest from around the world?  Why is money being sent?"  Discussing a different case, in which a person was arrested for putting up posters supporting gay rights as human rights, a police spokesman commented, "You wouldn't allow a poster that says, 'Let's Rape the Women,' would you?"

Within these few quotes we encounter the history of European and American imperialism, in the idea of its "agenda," in its self-professed superiority over the "primitives," and in its attempts to control politics through finances.  We have the creation of a cultural unity by the declaration of the "transgressor" as fundamentally and irredeemably "alien" (the purity of Ugandan culture being safeguarded from the "threat" of homosexual acts by declaring these deeds "foreign").  This cultural practice is, sadly, something countries in the West share (note, not "used to have").  Finally, we have a question that vexes our own political institution, namely, that we all agree government needs to legislate morality, we just disagree on whose morality it ought to legislate.  The idea common among many that homosexuality is wrong but that the government should not legislate against it depends ultimately on the evaluation of how socially "harmful" such an act is to the political body (I will have to speak further on this attachment to the governmental investment to "ensure, maintain, or develops it life"--to quote Foucault--at another point).  And if this latter analysis is correct, then we return to the first two problems with even more force:  how do we talk about these problems beyond "the West's" past and present assumption of "cultural strength"?  Given the deep history of imperialism, how can we expect those who've experienced the horrors produced by our imperial endeavors to not assume that we are, once again, trying to export our own sense of our superiority?  In short, we can't figure out how to discuss these questions within our own country, even among the predominantly white, middle-to-upper-class Americans that form a large portion of the Episcopal and Anglican church.  How can we do it across these divides?

It is perhaps this seemingly insurmountable divide that points us in the exact direction we must travel:  we cannot discuss the question of sexuality apart from the operations of European/American, Christian, colonial endeavors.  The inability to "bypass" this painful, problematic history forces all of us to go right through it, into the middle of it, and try to find our way out.  The "West's" arrogant pretensions are cut out from under it by this lingering awareness of its guilt, a history that cannot be forgotten or evaded, but must be confronted and mourned.  

It's the "Western" Anglican church's inability to mourn this tragic history that creates its tendency towards amnesia.  As Behdad argues in a different context, this kind of amnesia functions as a "Freudian notion of negation," a "repudiation, by means of projection, of an association that has just emerged" (__A Forgetful Nation__, p. 4).  In "negation," one "may acknowledge an event, but the subject either denies its significance or refuses to take responsibility for it" (p. 4).  The refusal to take responsibility often takes the form of projecting "his or her guilt onto others by blaming them for what has occurred, attempting thus to hide the implications of his or her own action" (p. 5).  The Church of Uganda identifies this kind of projection in the issue of women's ordination.  They say that comparison of women's ordination to homosexual ordination is insulting, for the patriarchalism of Western Christian missionaries actually curbed the religious leadership of women traditionally found in Ugandan society, and that Ugandan Christians started allowing women into positions of leadership before the West.  In other words, the Western church tries to secure the high ground by projecting their own sinful heritage (patriarchalism) onto the African church; they then tried to use this "disavowal" (they are backwards and guilty, we are moral leaders) to advocate their continued leadership (as "innocent" moral authorities).  

The conservative American Anglicans under African leadership (AMIA), have often used this post-colonial context to berate the "liberals."  However, placing oneself under the authority of bishops in Rwanda does not ipso facto mean that the colonial history has been effectively confronted,  mourned, and surpassed.  Churches like AMIA have the ability, and calling, to remind the "Western" church that it cannot declare itself a moral authority on sexuality and dismiss its African brothers and sisters.  To do so is to take the position, again, of imperial sovereignty.  But these AMIA churches do this not from a place outside of the problem, but from an awareness that they too have been formed inside of the problem.

Perhaps it would be easiest for white, Western Anglicans to start by mourning the loss of their cultural supremacy as well as their sinful enactment of and attachment to this supremacy.  Most realize that the project of imperialism was indeed sinful (though most mistakenly think of it as "safely" lodged in the past and overcome); but recognizing that a broken attachment was/is sinful does not mean one no longer suffers from the loss of it.  The loss must be acknowledged, which is why the mourning must address both the loss of the sinful power and the sinfulness of the power now lost.  

This ethical stance of mourning is not an attempt to stall the church, to bide our time, to wait passively or ignore the political urgency of people who face jail, and possibly death, for being gay.  Much needs to be said.  But we won't get anywhere if we keep trying to ignore or evade our guilt, for our attempt to render ourselves "innocent" not only ignores the imperialist history, it reenacts it.  To begin with mourning necessitates starting in a place of dependency--we do not know how to mourn this history, and so we cannot mourn it alone, but we must seek the help of those whose did not benefit from the cultural supremacy but suffered under it.  

(it should be noted that I stuck with the term "western," sometimes in quotes, sometimes not, because it was introduced by the persons in the article and it provided a convenient shorthand; it should be read with all the typical qualifications and disavowals.  

Can I wear your clothes? (missions and alienation)

Portrait of Nicolas Trigault in Chinese Costume, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1617

The early Jesuit missionaries to China translated themselves into the native garb. As a religious order, they first wore buddhist robes, projecting an image as new, religious messengers. The first missionary, Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607) made the decision, saying, "Now the robes are being cut and soon we will be made into Chinese" (quoted in __Journey to the East__ by Liam Matthew Brockey, p. 33). The robes, however, were soon dropped, as the missionaries decided on a new image: as educated literati. The Buddhist monks were not as socially powerful as Ruggieri imagined; his first companion, Matteo Ricci, donned the outfit of a mandarin scholar (of Confucius), and even grew out his hair and beard so as to allay himself more closely with this educated and socially powerful class. When describing his new costume, Ricci declared that the robes were "very similar to what the Venetians use in Venice" (43).

The robes were habitable because familiar: the missionaries could see themselves in those clothes. The robes were habitable because the Chinese were habitable: soon we will be made into Chinese. Not so different. Literate. Educated. Hierarchically organized. A different experience from the Africans. Primitives. Without proper clothing, proper society, or proper religion. Not even the inverse, but the absence: a human void (quick, take the empty land!).

If I had time, I would love to investigate missionary fashion. Clothing as the marker of a habitable population. A people we think approximates us. Or is too far away. Whose outfits--or lack there of--suggest a human absence. The naked savage. Lacking civilization. A bad thing. Then a good thing. When people tired of civilization. The noble savage. We can now see ourselves in their naked bodies.

Our image of ourselves, standing in between. No encounter. We create the identities. Who do you say you are? No response. Or, every response, a translation. Who do I think you say you are? What? I can't understand you. What language are you speaking? (I was told earlier this week, by an Iraqi refugee, that I would soon learn to speak refugee....)

There is no point lamenting our inability to have a direct encounter. We can never move beyond ourselves. We must be thrust out of the way. From outside. Someone must take our place. If they dare.

Salvation means alienation, and "salvation is of the Jews" (Jn. 4.22). And because people will not be alienated even for their own salvation, they roll away the alienation on to the Jew (Barth, CD I/2, 511).

Let us not lie to ourselves. Any "alienation" that comes easy is another form of donning chinese clothes. An easy move. I have already absorbed them. They can reflect me. I can see myself in them. They are habitable, so I will wear their clothes. No alienation, just absorption. In their clothes, I translate them. More so, I absorb them. Engulf them from within. I hypostasize their culture. It is I who hold up their lifeless clothes. It is I who animate. It is I who am....the Spirit.

Blasphemy. The dangerous edge of empathy, of seeing myself in others. A loving attack, all the more vicious because it is an empathy over which I am the master. The terms are under my control. I choose whose clothes I will wear.

No one will be alienated, not even for salvation. It is an offer we refuse, a gift we reject. But to refuse our own alienation, to reject salvation, is to...turn against the Jews. To roll off our alienation and place it on another, the Jews (how often "primitive" African religion was understood as a degraded form of Judaism...).

We cannot be saved "unless we are prepared to become Jews with the Jews." Barth penned this in the 1930s. "By being hostile to Jewish blood, the world simply proves that it is the world: blind and deaf and stupid to the ways of God" (511). "In the Jew, the non-Jew has to recognize himself...and in the Jew he has to recognize Christ, the Messiah of Israel" (511). The one we rejected, the one on whom we rolled off our alienation, the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. Let us be clear: the one who comes to displace us is the one we want to kill. The one we do kill. But, by the grace of God, the one who lives again!

Christ's flesh, a space of alienation. A wound. The stigmata--an opening of the flesh, a making of space. A way of becoming habitable by what is foreign.

In Jesus, we are brought out of the dialectic of habitation. No longer are you the one who threatens to occupy me, to cut open my flesh. Nor I to you. A space exists between us, which neither of us can occupy, or, more properly, a space which already occupies us both: a shared wound.

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.

To live for the one who died and was raised for us. It is a call to alienation; to salvation.

It's a call we know we will resist.

Not a matter of changing clothes then. Of entering "the other." Of celebrating difference. The offer of alienation is a devastating offer. A gift of becoming ill at ease. It makes us hesitate. We no longer know where we stand. Or, more precisely, we finally see that where we stand (and who we are) is never something we can possess. We cannot speak the truth of who we are. Someone stands in our way, blocking our vision, halting our speech. It is either a terrifying assault. Or a gift of joy. This one is the end of ourselves--hallelujah!

In the end, the clothes don't matter. You are never a space I can inhabit. Yet, we can never leave each other behind. We are bound to a space between us that neither of us can navigate. Which doesn't mean it is impassible. For it is a space that has already been traversed. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. (It is only from here that we can move beyond Rilke, who wrote, "love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other").

Lord Jesus, help me love my neighbor, the stranger whom I despise (the samaritan!), the one who speaks to me of my own alienation, and who therefore, I want to reject. Help me see them as a reminder of your grace, as a testimony to your resurrection, and as a renewed invitation to live by your Spirit, with thanksgiving and joy.

The True Standard Religious Game

I kept looking out my window at the buildings instead of watching the cars in front of me. A new town. I had never heard of it until I was asked to come out there for my interview. Driving through High Point, I searched for landmarks, tools to help me make a quick exit. I was also looking for landmarks to confirm that I was in a conservative, southern town. It's a habit I picked up somewhere, even though I grew up in a small, conservative southern town. Or especially because I grew up there: condescension proves I have grown beyond it.

It wasn't a navigational landmark, but I became quite fascinated by a small brick building with a couple of small windows, the True Standard Holiness Church. I started my mental attack immediately. True Standard? Am I going to find the old church, the Standard Holiness Church down the road? Is it redundant to qualify the "standard" with "true"? How have they determined what the true standard is? How do they know they embody it? Why do we Christians keep trying to justify ourselves as embodying the "true" standard? Do we need to split churches every time we think we possess the true standard?

The barrage of questions didn't last long. Suddenly, I found myself in a kind of religious crisis. Like my church? The AMIA. "Orthodox" anglicans. Turning to tradition (a claim to possess the true standard!). Those sinful Episcopalians. Not to mention the debates within AMIA. Are we anglo-Catholic? How high of a liturgy? What can we alter in it? Should the sermons follow the lectionary? What does it mean to be "anglican"?

Oh no, I thought, I'm one of them. I'm part of the "true standard" church. And there is no way out! Not that I'm trapped in AMIA. But that I'm trapped in a "true standard" church. It's not just them, it's me. It's my Christianity that is frail; it's my Christianity that amounts to nothing more than contradiction and sin. My Christianity! My faith--petty! Insignificant! A display of sinful arrogance and self-justification!

"Christianity twisted like a snake in the hands of those who sought to us it: millenarian prophets, authoritarian and radical missionaries alike, British abolitionists, Khoekhoe preachers, and racist settlers all sought to control its language in a climate of intense power struggles, but none was able to establish final ownership" (Elizabeth Elbourne, "Prelude" to __Blood Ground__, p. 5).

A whole book investigating the complexities of Christian language, the way it is used in our world, or, for this book, in the world of colonial South Africa. It's disturbing. Where do I fit in the scheme? More importantly, where is God? What does Jesus think about this dizzying array of options? About our complex motives, the factors beyond our control, the forces that make us the specific sinful humans we are? Is Christianity just like any other language, a tool to be used within power struggles? Is it nothing but another game of violent self-assertion?

I couldn't find an answer. I started wondering: is this a religious crisis, a crisis of faith? Two days after my ordination interview, and I'm wondering whether there is anything worthwhile in Christian faith. Or, at least more worthwhile than any other product of the sinful human race.

But what are my options? To give up? To embrace atheism? But that is simply another option within the "true standard" religious game. I see through all this depraved religiosity, I see the root and the cause, and I have now risen above it and will call others to the true standard!

Starting a new church won't get me out of it either. Didn't all these schisms occur because a group thought it possessed the true standard? The same thing, over and over again. A rejection of one standard becomes, unsurprisingly, a new standard. Even the rejection of all claims to possess "the true standard" becomes a new standard, the standard. Nor can I just abstract from these concrete religious assertions and find solace in a pure, mystical religion. Mysticism, in this sense, is simply cautious atheism: I see through this utterly human construct called institutional religion, but instead of seeing nothing (atheism), I see a pure truth above and beyond the sinful institution. Behold, the true standard!

There is no place outside of this circle. A "turning against the religions...is manifestly impossible, whether in the form of mysticism or in that of atheism. For in making this judgment it will have to judge itself...The real crisis of religion can only break in from outside the magic circle of religion and its place of origin, i.e., from outside man" (Karl Barth, CD I/2, 324).

What, then, is the way forward? How do we move beyond the true standard religious game? If Barth is right, we don't. We accept the condemnation. We make no claim that Christianity, in any form, has escaped the game. We "must not allow ourselves to be confused by the fact that a history of Christianity can be written only as a story of the distress which it makes for itself" (337). "Even Christianity is unbelief" (338). The "sum total of even the Christian religion is simply this, that it is idolatry and self-righteousness, unbelief, and therefore sin. It must be forgiven if it is to be justified" (354).

We accept the condemnation. We trust that Jesus will forgive us, especially for our religion. We stop striving to justify ourselves, to vindicate our religion, to contrast our purity with the sinfulness of others, to proclaim our possession of a way beyond religiosity. We too are judged. But in Jesus, we are forgiven. We need not find a positive spin on our history. Our history has been taken out of our hands; we do not need to find security in our ability to construct a purer religion. Not "only our security before God, but the very security of our being and activity, and therefore our security in relation to men, rests absolutely upon our willingness in faith and by faith to renounce any such securities" (332). We are free to renounce them because, in faith, by Jesus Christ, we do not need them. Our security before God does not rest on our Christian religion; it rests on God's gracious forgiveness of our sin. Christianity is the true religion, according to Barth, always on the analogy of justified sinners. It's false and sinful when considered in and of itself. Its truth, just like its justification, lies outside of itself, in Jesus Christ.

My "orthodox," "traditional," "anglican" church can either point towards itself, towards another form of the true standard religious game. Or we can accept a more humble and insecure place, as another form of sinful religion, and, hopefully--and this is what is peculiar to Christianity--as a witness to Christ's mercy on us pious sinners.

Natural Theology and Colonial Missions

I'm currently reading Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa by David Chidester. It's part of a larger reading project which could simply be titled: "Oh no, I'm going to be a missionary....". The critical aspect of the project will involve reading books that describe various missionary practices and theologies as they pertain to the "project of civilization." The shape of the modern world is the product of Christian missions (it was the Pope who blessed the "age of discovery" as a part of the Church's mission and divided the world between ruling European powers). J. Carter has argued that the idea of race is born out of a theological discourse (if you want a kind of genealogical point of origin, he points to 15th century Spain, and the blood purity laws passed against Jews: race develops from the biologization of heresy). I want to get a better grasp of how missions was configured and deployed from this point forward; the goal is to better identify, clarify and personally feel the problem of modern missions. The constructive aspect of the project is to find a way forward. I hope to read some more general works on missions, but I'm expecting to get most of my help from Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. These two theologians identified the problem of Christian missions (though they didn't call it that) and started to push theology past it. Through Barth and Bonhoeffer, I hope to reconfigure a theology for Christian missions.

In Savage Systems, Chidester highlights a peculiar feature of colonial comparative religion: when the colonial boundary (the "frontier") is being contested by an indigenous population, the people are deemed to have no religion. However, "when the frontier closes, and hegemony has been established, a dominated subjected people are discovered to have a religion that can be inventoried and analyzed" (69). For example, the Hottentots lacked a religion from 1600-1654, then had one once a European settlement was established. When this establishment expanded, the Hottentots were again deemed areligious (from 1685-1700). Once the expansion ceased and the settlement was stablilized, the Hottentots were seen to possess a native religion. However, the colony started to spread again in 1770 and thus the Hottentots were again deemed to lack any religion (69). Even when they were deemed to have a religion, it was a religion that either resembled the stubbornness of the Jews or the superstition of the Catholics (70): "the Hottentots were credited with a religion that discredited them" (70).

The difference between Jews and Catholics seems to be based on a different failure. Jews stubbornly resisted Christian conversion, and thus exhibit a moral failure that explains their nonconversion; Catholic superstition is a sign of ignorance. Thus, the Hottentots' resistance to Christian conversion stemmed from either a moral or an intellectual failure. The intellectual failure was ultimately traced back to a different kind of moral failure, laziness. All three features could be tied together; Georg Meistert claimed in 1687 that the "absence of any religion among them was equivalent to their lack of literacy and industry" (45). Given their "bestial" language (37), the Hottentots necessarily lacked the ability to produce any kind of natural religion (and therefore, any proper human society, and therefore, any proper humanity per se).

Even though the recognition or denial of Hottentot religion constantly shifted, the missionaries zeal to analyze and discover (or produce) the native religion remained constant. Whether the verdict was positive or negative, the question was always being posed (and not only by missionaries but also by travelers, explorers, scientiests, and colonial administrators). No observer thought that the Hottentot's would exhibit the marks of "revealed religion," but they all pondered whether they were capable of producing a natural religion.

Natural theology, in the broadest sense of the term (especially as it is developed on the mission field in colonial Southern Africa), is the search for a merely natural (meaning, non-divinely inspired, not revealed) religiosity. What the European observers tried to catalogue was whether Hottentots had any idea of God, a transendent creator, and whether they developed any kind of rituals and ethics to relate to that idea. They knew that the Hottentots had various customs and rituals; the question was whether these rituals marked the presence of a rudementary knowledge of God or whether they marked mere superstition (and hence ignorance, laziness, and the absence of religion).

Chidester catalogues how the answer to this question varied according to the solidity of colonial control. In short, fighting natives had no religion (and hence were subhuman); conquered natives were religious after all (and hence capable of being absorbed into civilization). What interests me is how this compartive procedure stems from the search for a "point of contact" within the indiginous culture that would prepare it for the gospel. If the people resist the gospel, then they either lack a cultural starting point altogether (which makes them less than fully human), or they exhibit a cultural moral failing that prevents the gospel from taking root (laziness or stubbornness).

The search for a point of contact thus brings with it a compartive procedure. The missionary's native culture--a culture that has accepted the gospel--bears the marks of proper human culture. It has proven to be receptive to the gospel, and therefore (either naturally or by grace), has been brought out of sinful resistance. Those who refuse the gospel fail to measure up to the proper form of human receptivity (modelled by the missionary's culture). They lack what the sending community possesses: industry, civilization, intelligence, language, literacy, piety, a proper understanding of authority, etc. The resistant native population, within this strategy of comparison, can only be registered as a lack, as an absence, as the inverted image of the (colonial) missionary. They therefore lack religion. The dominated population is no longer violently opposed to the colonial settlement; they therefore exhibit some kind of potential harmonization within European conquest. They have some unformed religious potential.

This comparative natural theology held a privileged place within colonial missions. Missionaries (and other European observers) continually searched for--and registered (or produced) the presence or absence of--an African "unknown God." Convinced that there ought to be a "point of contact" (an African natural religion), European missionaries expressed shock at how uncivilized (and bestial) the areligious African were. Once they were brought under colonial control, their continual resistance to the gospel was read as a deformed religious response (on model with the Jews and Catholics). Natural theology, therefore, operated as a kind of intellectual backdrop (already worked out in missional polemics with Muslims, Jews, and later Catholics) through which to register the human differences encountered in the colonial world. The debate surrounding natural theology (i.e. Karl Barth's strident rejection of it) ought to be placed within this context. Natural theology is not just a doctrine but a disposition, a way of inhabiting the world that carries with it certain procedures of comparison and judgment whose concrete force can be most properly felt on the colonial mission field. In other words, the practical outworkings of natural theology are what Chidester describes in, and calls, "Savage Systems."