Last month I went to a seminar in Austin,
Texas led by Dr. Alan Wolfe, Director of the Bosi Center for Religion and
Public Life at Boston College. The topic was his recent book, Political Evil: What It Is And How To Combat
It. My blog readers know I have been asking questions about evil in God Of Our Silent Tears. http://www.godofoursilenttears.com
Wolfe was looking more narrowly at political evils, ranging from corruption
to genocide.
I need to first explain something more about
my interest in and commitments concerning this question of the religious
perspective on public life: There is a small point on my resume
that some Nevadans might easily have missed on my resume. I spent several years
as an adjunct professor at Mercer University’s School of Law teaching an odd
little course called Religion, Law, and Legal Practice. It ended in a
spiritual/ moral exploration of how one’s faith might shape how one practices
law and how one’s practice of law might inform one’s faith. I published an
article on “Practicing Law and Christianity At The Same Time.” But the course
began with what seemed to me to be the essential foundation: the theology of
law. What is law for in God’s eyes? What, if anything, is God doing through law?
What good is law? I don’t say this to claim any expertise about questions of
theology and public life, just to say I have been wrestling with them for a
long time.
Wolfe looked at two opposite approaches to
understanding and responding to evil in public life: Augustinian and Manichaean.
I think he took the wrong tack on Augustine, but what he had to say about
Manichaean approaches to politics is just crucial. Manichaeism was a philosophy
popular in Augustine’s day, the 5th Century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism
In fact, Augustine was a Manichaean before he became a Christian. It was a
dualistic philosophy, holding that the universe is a great battleground between
the forces of goodness and light on the one side and the forces of darkness and
evil on the other. Since Augustine was reacting against Mani, that makes
Manichaeism a good foil, but the idea of a cosmic battle of good vs. evil is
older. Zoroastrianism, dating back to the 7th Century BCE, is the
apparent root of this moral dualism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism
After Zoroaster and before Mani, in Jesus
day, Zoroastrian-Manichean style dualism was decidedly in vogue. The best
documentation of first century dualism is the War Scroll of the Qumran
Community at the Dead Sea at the time of Jesus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Sons_of_Light_Against_the_Sons_of_Darkness
The Qumran Community saw themselves as Sons of Light whose mission was to unite
with other Sons of Light in order to vanquish and annihilate the Sons of Darkness.
The object of the game is a world of peace and harmony. The means is
extermination of the bad guys. Major swaths of the Book of Revelation reflect
that sort of dualism. (Revelation had a close call getting into the canon, and
was probably included in spite of its dualism, not because of it.)
Wolfe’s point in Political Evil is that American foreign policy in late modern
times, especially since 9/11, has been based on a Manichaean word view.
Remember the “axis of evil.” He relates that shortly after the second invasion
of Iraq, the government of Iran acting through Swiss diplomats attempted to
negotiate a new relationship with the United States, offering all sorts of
concessions on nuclear weapons, recognition of Israel’s right to exist,
withdrawal of support from Hezbollah, etc. – a much better deal than we could
hope for today. But we would not negotiate with an “evil” power. That is just
one example. Wolfe’s point is that our good vs. evil moralism has been so
ineffective as to be immoral because it perpetuates war even when peace might
be possible. Our approach to many genuine evils – terrorism, drugs, crime, etc.
– has been “A War On (fill in the blank).” Identify the bad guys. Eliminate
them. Problem solved. Except it isn’t. Wolfe documents the ineffectiveness of Manichaean
policies, particularly in foreign affairs.
Another example is our reliance on the
criminal justice system to address social evils. The United States has the
highest incarceration rate in the world. Americans constitute 5% of the world’s
population. But we make up 25% of the world’s incarceration. The Soviet Union
is in 2nd place. We spend $24,000 per inmate annually. Yet, crime
persists. Often when we analyze our problems politically and sociologically, it
is likely we will find that they are considerably more complicated than
identifying and removing the bad guys. A drone takes out five terrorists, but
how many more does it create? When American authorities learned that an Indian
deputy consul was not paying her maid, an option might have been to call the
Indian ambassador and tell him to tell this deputy consul to pay her maid. (That’s
how my grocery storekeeper father used to get soldiers to pay their grocery
bills. Call the CO.) Instead they responded with aggressive criminal
prosecution. That did not get the maid paid. It got the victim taken into
custody, her family forced into hiding, security withdrawn from American
consulates in India, American diplomats expelled, American businesses attacked,
etc. We proved how aggressively moral we are, but what good did we accomplish
for anyone? Undoubtedly the deputy
consul was morally wrong. But did a publicly humiliating arrest followed by a
body cavity search really make us moral? Were we really trying to help the maid
or were we robotically acting out of our Manichaean narrative of
self-righteousness?
The world is a complex muddle. I do not
understand it. Many of you know far more about politics and sociology than I do.
My question is theological: What do Christians believe about the world, the
evil in it, and how we are to deal with a world that is both good and evil at
the same time?
My starting point is Jesus. How did he
respond to the dualism of his day? As I read the Gospels, he resoundingly
rejected it. Take for example the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds (Matthew
13: 24-30). The world is a mixed field of wheat and weeds. You can’t pull up
the weeds without killing the wheat. You have to let them grow together and let
God sort it out in the end. (We’ll see shortly that parable is crucial to how
Augustine saw both the church and the state – both mixed fields of wheat and
weeds). Remember the Sons of Light vs. the Sons of Darkness at Qumran. Well,
check the Parable of the Unjust Steward Luke 16: 1-8. Jesus tells the story of
an embezzler but the surprise is the embezzler winds up being commended, not
condemned. And Jesus says, “The children of this world (darkness?) are wiser in
this generation than the children of
light.”
How many bad guys did Jesus destroy? How
many did he forgive? How many disputes did he resolve by helping one side
destroy the other? How many did he reconcile? Look at his choice of disciples.
There were zealot revolutionaries and tax collector collaborators with Rome.
There were harlots and Pharisees. There were Jews and Gentiles. Again and
again, Jesus warned that a violent insurrection to throw out the Roman bad guys
would only bring down death and destruction. His way was one of healing,
reconciliation, and the subversive power of truth and love – all acting in the
mixed field of wheat and weeds where the sons of this world are apt to be wiser
than the goody two shoes religious folks. From the cross, he interceded for his
very killers. Jesus had no agenda to pose as a Manichaean/ Zoroastrian/ Qumran
Son of Light.
Three sets of books from bygone days still
shape my thinking here. The first set is about St. Augustine. Book One is Garry
Wills’, The Confessions Of A Conservative
(1979). Nowadays, we think of Wills as a historian of the church and religion.
But in the 70s he was a political pundit, a free market laissez faire conservative protégé of James Burnham and William F.
Buckley, Jr. writing for National Review.
Wills’ experiences, however, kept driving him back out of his ideology to
older models of conservative thought from the likes of G. K. Chesterton, John
Henry Newman, and eventually St. Augustine.
Wills’ Catholic Christianity did something
that is a rare thing in our time. He changed his politics to fit his religion
instead of the other way around. (Yes, it has been studied – as usual by Robert
Putnam – and modern Americans routinely modify their religious convictions to
match their more important values, the political ones; their politics routinely
win, so they change their theology to fit. Hmmm. “Thou shalt have no other gods
. . .. “ issue). He did not convert to liberalism, but to a classical conservatism
that recognized we are all in this together, we need each other to get by, the
world cannot be purified with any brand of political weed killer, it is getting
along as best it can, and as it does, “we get to carry each other.” (U2) That
is pure St. Augustine. Neo-cons sometimes think I’m a liberal. Liberals often
find me uncomfortably conservative. But I make a lousy moderate. If I have to
wear a label, I’m an Augustinian.
Right now, I’m finishing a brilliant book
by communitarian philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine And The Limits Of Politics. It’s a little heavy on
philosophy-speak for most readers. Too much talk about “epistemic endeavors” etc.
for me to recommend it lightly. But you might find it helpful to look at this
lucid and accessible review from Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon. http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9611/reviews/glendon.html
For those who dread the idea of any
theology of public life, fearing that it will be dogmatic and exclusive, it
helps to remember that our first such Christian theology of government was
profoundly inclusive, a theology for a state that could be pluralistic, a
theology that would absolutely refuse to insist on making the political field
of wheat and weeds align with our churchly field of wheat and weeds. We don’t
have it figured out well enough to impose anything on anybody but we nonetheless
can and must act responsibly in the public square. Elshtain’s words here
suggest how:
The clean and the unclean come together within the Church,
within the boundaries of human communities . . .. Given that “a darkness
attends the life of human society,” few should sit comfortably on “the judge’s bench
. . .. “ But sit there the judge must, “for the claims of human society
constrain him and draw him to this duty; and it is unthinkable that he should
shirk it,” but he must needs sit uneasily . . .. Amidst the shadows that hover
over, above, among, there are nonetheless two rules we can follow: “first, to
do no harm to anyone, and secondly to help everyone whenever possible.” This is
the ethic of the pilgrim: of the one who is tethered to this earth and its
arrangements through bonds of affection and necessity but who recognizes at the
same time that these arrangements are not final.
The second major influence on my view of
religion and public life was from the theological father of Anglicanism,
Richard Hooker, specifically his 3-volume treatise The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Sounds dry but it reads like
Shakespeare. Hooker’s goal was to defend the Anglican way of being church,
including the Anglican relationship between secular and church institutions, as
legitimate. The Roman Catholic challenge was that we had shifted too much
authority to the laity and opened the doors of reason a bit too wide. We
weren’t functioning in the mode of the Middle Ages, which our critics claimed
was ordained by God.
Hooker said that God had made us in such a
way that we need each other. We can only live human lives, we can absolutely
only live holy lives, in relationship with each other, and that relationship
has to be ordered in some way. It requires some structure. True in church. True
in state. But Hooker denied that God has prescribed any particular structure.
Instead, Hooker insisted that God insists that we work it out ourselves. The process
of working it out is essential to our process of sanctification. Put another
way, sorting out our relationships with each other is how we become
Christ-like. It is a collective spiritual exercise.
Here’s what I draw from Hooker: God is not
a Monarchist or a Revolutionary. God is not a Democrat or a Republican. God is
not a Communist or Fascist. God is not a Capitalist or a Socialist. (The last 3
Popes have been quite emphatic about the spiritual and moral deficits in either
of these economic models. Those who say Pope Francis’s critique of capitalism
is “Marxist” apparently haven’t understood either Marx or Francis). What God
does insist on is a political process in which we all have a voice and are
active agents in and among ourselves. A godly political order cannot be imposed
from above. God wants us all engaged in the process, sharing in the ordering of
power. Whatever structure we come up with will be a mixed field of wheat and
weeds. It will not be perfect. It may not even be very good. But what matters
is that we work it out ourselves, hopefully guided by hearts yearning in a
Godward direction. Augustine before Hooker insisted that absolutism blocks the
process of friendship for which human society was created.
Do you see how far Augustine and Hooker
are from the Manichaean/ Zoroastrian/ Qumran battle of good guys against bad
guys this is? It’s a world of conversation and compromise, recognition of each
other’s interests, of trade-offs and good-enough solutions, of checks and
balances, not fights to the death. It’s a world in which power does not consist
in aggression or dominance but in relational influence based on trust formed
through a track record of fair dealing.
The third set of books, the one that
really brings it all home, is Walter Wink’s trilogy (The Powers That Be, Unmasking The Powers, Engaging The Powers). Wink,
a gentle man whom I knew from Jungian workshops at Epworth by the Sea) was
enough of a devotee of depth psychology to take Augustine’s view of human
nature seriously even though it is decidedly unacceptable to modern people.
Augustine knew that we are each a mixed field of wheat and weeds – the wheat is
our innate godliness, the Imago Dei,
our Original Blessedness; the weeds would be the something broken in each of
us, the twist that pulls us off course so that we are not who we were intended
to be. Augustine called it “original sin.” Unfortunately that term gets caught
up with some literalistic notion of inheriting the sin of Adam through biology.
It’s a metaphor, people. (Augustine’s understanding of “evil” as privation of
the good makes the popular misconception of original sin ludicrous. Evil is
just love gone wrong.) Original sin means that the world is full of falsehood,
greed, cruelty, and all manner of evils – and that each and every one of us has
certain inclinations that are nothing to be proud of. We are each a mix of good
and bad. In a delightful little book by the Jesuit brothers Linn, Good Goats, they point out that in the
parable of the sheep and the goats, we are all, each and ever one of us, both
sheep and goats. A priest once asked a group of 2nd graders if the
good people were blue and the bad people were red, “what color would you be.”
One insightful Augustinian 2nd grader answered, “I’d be stripy.”
We
are all stripy. That’s Augustine’s point. But not all of us are willing to
acknowledge that stripiness. Being sinful isn’t half as big a problem as
pretending that we are not. Part of our sinfulness is aggression. We have
aggression pent up inside because social constraints rightly prevent us from
acting it out. So what do we do with it? We project it on others. We see the
others as evil, so that we are justified in doing the most horrible things to
them. Because we are righteous and they are evil, it is moral for us to torture
them, to kill them, even to kill a reasonable number of innocents as collateral
damage because we are so good and they are so bad. Being convinced of one’s
righteousness is a morally precarious state. At a minimum it invites folly;
often, atrocious acts of evil.
This is what Wink calls “The Myth of
Redemptive Violence.” Wink’s myth is derived from the Enuma Elish, the Sumerian
creation myth in which the world is formed from the dismembered remains of the
first bad gods who were slain by the next generation of good gods. The plot is
acted out over and over on stage and screen. Bad guys oppress innocents for two
thirds of the film, until our righteous indignation is vicariously vindicated
by the violently rampaging hero who takes the bad guys out. Pour some weed
killer on the world. It will be just fine when the credits roll.
Against that prevailing moral scenario,
which Wink insists is the true religion of Western society – Christianity is
not -- I wish to add my name to the line-up of realists like Augustine, Hooker,
Wink, Elshtain, and Wills. I’m not that good, not that smart, not that spiritual.
I am not a Son of Light so I have no right to judge the Sons of Darkness. I am
a forgiven sinner doing my best and hoping the other forgiven sinners will bear
with me as we stumble along the road together.
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