Things fall apart
The centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world
The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is
drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while
the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-- William Butler Yeats
It is a dark time. I awoke early
this morning, while it was still dark, at the hour when Mary Magdalene went to
the tomb (John 20: 1), and looked out across the Atlantic. The moon was shining
a stream of light across the water, and directly above it was the loveliest
Morning Star I have ever seen. It could have been the Star of Bethlehem
floating there in the Eastern sky. “For we saw his star in the East and we have
come to worship him.” (Matthew 2: 2)
It is a dark time and I am looking
for that star. I do not need to tell you of the darkness. San Bernardino.
Colorado Springs. Paris. Charleston. Random violence stirs our fear and in panic
we race into racism, xenophobia, religious prejudice, all expressed in violent
ways to defend ourselves from “them.” “Their” violence prompts “our” violence
to which “they” respond with more violence. My vague pronouns reflect the fact that
the violent actors in my list of cities were Muslims, Christians, and white
racists, but those are just a few of the possible categories of “others” who
fear “us” and prompt “us” to respond in kind, however that “us” may be defined.
Violent religious intolerance has
surged since the end of the Cold War.[i]
We focus on Fundamentalist Islamic violence some of which affects Americans and
Europeans, though most of it is directed against Non-Fundamentalist Muslims.
But we also see Hindu violence against Sikhs and Muslims in India, Buddhist
violence against Muslims in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and Israel’s treatment of
Muslims and Christians is often regrettable. Of course Israel is acting out of
fear. We are all acting out of fear. It is fear that drives the Liberty University President to urge a crowd
of cheering undergraduate Fundamentalists to gun up so “we can end those
Muslims.”[ii]
Racist genocidal fanaticism? Yes, plus a blasphemous distortion of the
Christian faith just as ISIS is a blasphemous distortion of the Islamic faith.
But that’s just name-calling. It doesn’t analyze what is happening on all fronts. And it doesn’t lead to
reconciliation or advance the Kingdom of God.
So I want to start with this
question: what’s really going on here? We can blame it on a sect of Islamic
Fundamentalists, and certainly there is a whole truckload of truth in that. But
what about the Planned Parenthood attack in Colorado Springs? What about the
racist shootings at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston? For that matter, what
about the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon or Sandy Hook or
Columbine or the Amish school shooting? Of course there are differences –but if
they are completely different, how come they look so much alike? Is a murder
somehow more ideological if the ideology is Islam than if it’s white supremacy,
nihilism, or ironically a pro-life mass murder? Is there a common thread
running through all this violence?
The Sources of
Religious Violence
Five books have shaped my view of
religious violence.
Fields Of Blood: Religion
And The History Of Violence by Karen Armstrong.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good
People Are Divided By Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
The New Religious
Intolerance: Overcoming The Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age by Martha Nussbaum (a
Jewish author, but I found this book in a jihadist-leaning Palestinian
bookstore in East Jerusalem):
Not In God’s Name:
Confronting Religious Violence by Jonathan Sacks.
The Powers That Be: Theology
For A New Millennium by my late hero Walter Wink.
From
those wise writers, I have learned the following things we need to remember if
we are to have any hope of stemming “this blood dimmed tide”:
1.
The causes of violence are
complex.
Religion (ours or theirs) is not the primary cause. The vast majority of
conflict in the world has not been about religion. It has been about power and
wealth. Even the so-called “Wars Of Religion” in the 16th Century
saw Protestants and Catholics on the same side from foot soldiers up to
monarchs on one side against Protestants and Catholics on the other. Even the
so-called “Wars of Religion” were about state autonomy versus empire. But
religion has often been enlisted in the fights, and we religious folks have all
too often joined right in to drum up support for the powers that be to wage
war, persecute minorities, and perpetrate violence for their non-religious
ends. Religious folks have historically been prime dupes. Our hands are not
clean but I believe historian Karen Armstrong would say that there are
propagandizers and manipulators behind the trigger pullers. To find them, half
the moral is “follow the money.” The other half is “follow the power.” Note: it
isn’t just about the trigger puller. It isn’t even just about the jihadist figurehead.
We have congratulated ourselves on killing Osama Bin Laden, Nasr Ibn Ali
al-Ansi (Al-Qaeda), Abu Sayyaf (ISIS Syria), Abu Nabil (ISIS Libya),
Abdirhraman Sadhere (Al-Shabab), etc. But terrorism increases after our
victorious coups. Why is that? As Bob Dylan said, “The executioner’s face is
always well hidden.”
2.
We are groupish. This goes back to Darwin,
who did not say we are selfish. In The
Descent of Man, he explained how survival depends on cooperation. As a
result our DNA is wired through millennia of evolution to be altruistic, even
sacrificial, within our group; but aggressive and destructive to people outside
our group. Interestingly, the rise of cities led to broadening the definition
of the in-group to include more people. Trade with far off peoples broadened it
further still. In both cases, religion was the social mechanism that extended
trust and caring farther out into the human species. Religion’s basic function
is the opposite of war mongering and violence. It establishes the basis for
trust and cooperation.
3.
Altruistic evil is the child
of pathological dualism[iii]. “Dualism” is the belief
that the universe is a battleground between ultimate good and ultimate evil.
This runs against the grain of monotheism, the Jewish-Christian-Islamic belief
that we have one source, one destiny, one meaning; so evil is never ultimate.
When bad things happen, when we suffer, we are tempted toward “pathological
dualism” in which we blame some “other,” demonize some “other,” regard
ourselves as victims whose victim status means we are not only innocent but
entitled to unleash all our destructive hatred on the “other.” Pathological dualism (we are good victims; they are bad perpetrators) reduces people from the status as persons responsible for their own
lives to that of victims, passively blaming “others.” It licenses “altruistic evil,”
horrors committed for ostensibly good and noble causes. Finally, altruistic
evil discredits the very religions that are our best hope for a peaceful and
just world order. The prototype of pathological dualism is “the good guy with a
gun against the bad guy with a gun.” The practical problem with that picture is
that each gunman thinks he is the good guy. From the religious perspective,
that is the rhetoric of a heresy repudiated by the Church since the first
Century, by Judaism since the 4th Century BCE, and by Islam
thereafter in a medieval controversy with dualists in Iran. It is a persistent
heresy, manifesting in Judaism at Qumran, in Christianity with the Gnostics,
and in Islam in medieval Iran; but it is not now, has never been, and never
will be the teaching of any monotheistic faith. We repudiate this heresy
because it makes people smaller, meaner, and blinder.
4.
The myth of redemptive
violence – not
the orthodox teaching of any religion – is the prevailing moral assumption of
the world. It is what Paul meant by the spiritual power “of this present age.”
It is drummed into us thorugh movies, tv, internet, journalism, and all
non-religious voices; so it is not surprising that some religious leaders have
been led astray and proclaim the myth of redemptive violence as Christianity,
though it runs 180 degrees opposite to the teachings of Jesus. The symbol of
the myth of redemptive violence is the good guy with a gun shooting down the
bad guy with a gun. The myth rooted in dualism says the evil people oppress the
good people until a good hero rises up and slays the bad people – and we all
rejoice because we love aggression and just need a moral pretext of victimhood
to set free our baser nature. Walter Wink traces that destructive thirst for
vengeance elevated to a moral principle back to the ancient Sumerian creation
myth in The Enuma Elish. He shows
that the Biblical creation story is written to repudiate the myth of redemptive
violence and that Jesus’ mission and ministry were completely devoted to
overcoming that false and bloody creed with peace and justice. His death on the
cross was a paradoxical defeat of violence with love vindicated by the
Resurrection. But, notwithstanding the teachings of Christianity, Judaism,
Islam, and other world religions, the vast majority of us still place our faith
not in the Prince of Peace, but the myth of redemptive violence.
5.
Violence arises from a
failure of empathy/ participatory imagination. Rabbi Sacks offers a cogent
analysis of sibling rivalry in Genesis because, following Rene Girard, he
regards sibling rivalry as the primal “genesis” of our violence. Regardless of
the source of violence, he shows that in Genesis hatred is vanquished and violence
allayed by seeing oneself in the other’s shoes. He tells the story of a rising
star in a neo-fascist party who was shocked to discover he was a Jew.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes of how fear blocks our capacity for
“participatory imagination,” the ability to see the world through another’s
eyes. This loss makes our world smaller and leads us to turn “others” into
something less than human, in fact to make them screens for the projection of
all our worst impulses and imaginings.
6.
We cannot live without
meaning and identity. In my book, this is the most
important point. No human society has ever lasted without a religion or
some ideology that took on ultimate significance (Fascism, Communism, etc.)
Religion makes meaning out of life.
We find our identity through belonging to a community, especially a
faith community, people who find meaning not just in the same way but together.
Sacks and Haidt agree that our Western culture, which is spreading through
globalization, is devoid of meaning and its universalism threatens our sense of
identity. Terrorism and mass violence are cries of protest against that vapid
shallow imitation of life. Jihadists and nihilistic white teenagers alike have
“Imagine(d) there’s no heaven . . . . nothing to kill or die for . . . .
imagine(d) all the people living or today” and cried NOOOOO!!!! Sacks says that
the joining of a cause and dying for that cause gives the existentially
desperate person a brief but ultimately meaning-making identity. And we respond
to terrorism by splitting into extremes, in desperate search of a group
sufficiently at odds with banal secularism that joining it will give us an
identity. Hence,
The centre cannot hold . . ..
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
A Christian response
to religious violence
We begin in darkness. We probe the nature of the
darkness. The darkness is the context of the Morning Star shining in the East
over the choppy waters below. Christians are stargazers. Our place on this
planet is to see the star and to be the star -- both at once. Jesus called us “the light of
the world.” (Matthew 5: 15) How shall we be the light shining in the midst of
this particular darkness?
Giving the culture a
meaning transfusion. We
do not write laws or command armies. But laws and armies, while having their
role to play, have proven ultimately unable to curb religious and ideological
violence. So it is just as well that we do not write laws or command armies.
Instead, we shape culture. We have abdicated that role in recent decades. But
our mission is to show the world the way to a meaningful life, one in which
there may be nothing to kill for but there is decidedly something worth living
and dying for, and yes there is a heaven, a realm of God’s justice waiting to
come to earth when we are ready. The best thing we can do to counter terrorism
is to infuse our society with faith, hope, and love. We need to spread some gospel right now.
Spreading gospel requires us to intentionally and
deliberately commit to a robust campaign of non-coercive, non-manipulative,
tolerant, relational, hospitable, attractive evangelism. There are specific
ways to do this. People at our diocesan convention 2015 learned some of the
basics. If we want to give our culture a meaning transfusion, we must – I truly
mean must -- make the effort to learn and practice a
robust evangelism. We can no longer afford to live with:
The best lack all conviction
But that
does not mean we offer our gospel in opposition to other religious traditions.
Authentic Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and the other world
religions also infuse the culture with meaning and identity. They are not our
enemies or competitors. They are our allies. For example, when ISIS sets out to
radicalize a teenager, the first thing they try to do is separate the teen from
his mosque. They want the youth alienated, especially from orthodox Islam. The
mosque provides meaning and identity, the antidotes to jihadist radicalism. If
we want to prevent American teens from becoming jihadists, the best thing we can
do is support our local mosque.
I attended the Parliament of the World’s
Religions this Fall. People from all sorts of different faiths gathered in
friendship and respect. I attended multiple workshops on combatting religious
violence. Our own Dr. Aslam Abdullah, a Las Vegas imam, led the best workshop.
We Christians discredit ourselves when we disrespect other religious
traditions. We are far more attractive (and therefore evangelistically
successful) when we treat our co-religionists with respect and partner with
them in acts of charity and the quest for social justice.
A society in which the religions
flourish and faith communities treat each other as friends is a better place to
live than the lonely atomistic individualistic cynical world we Westerners
inhabit today. Such a world would not drive people to crazed violence committed
in existential despair.
A different narrative of God and a
different picture of the world. It is essential that we return a sense of meaning and
identity to our culture. And it is true that different religions can work
together for that essential goal. But that does not mean just any religion will
do. As we have seen dualism and the myth of redemptive violence are at
the root of religious intolerance and terrorism. Those dark doctrines do not
need us – they have the largest most effective propaganda machine the world has
ever known – and we do not need them.
What the world needs now is a different story, a story of
peace practiced in the face of violence, of love overcoming hatred. We need
Jesus – his words, his example, his living presence giving us the strength not
to strike back. We need a religion true to the Genesis creation story, true to
God’s rejection of violence in the Flood and new creation, true to the stories
of reconciliation, true to Jesus – and incidentally true to the original social
function of religion to extend trust and relationality beyond the confines of
our group out into the wider world.
We do not want the President of Liberty University speaking
in the name of Jesus without a vigorous response from the orthodox Christians.
Again, we cannot even survive if:
The best lack all conviction, while
the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
We better
get ourselves some conviction right now.
A
spiritual discipline of knowing one another. I have said we need to publicly profess
our faith out loud, and that our faith must be a Bible-based Jesus-centered
commitment to the practice of peace in the face of violence. But how do we
practice that faith? How do we propound it by word and deed? Not with a coercive, dogmatic, hitting people over the
head with the Bible sort of encounter. The story of the New Testament is about
encountering the other in a very different way. Jesus formed his band of followers
out of political and religious antagonists. They got to know Samaritans,
Syro-Phoenicians, Roman Centurions, rich people, poor people, sick people,
sinners, crazy people, all sorts of folks. And they were themselves transformed
by their encounters. That’s evangelism.
The Epistles are guides to relationship
for people who had regarded each other as “other” until they found themselves
bound together in the Body of Christ, and they didn’t know how to manage that.
But they learned. They befriended one another and in time became the Church.
The story of Pentecost is about all
different nations and languages gathered together hearing the gospel each in
their own language. They did not all become alike. They kept their languages.
They were different, but they were together.
This is the spiritual discipline of participatory imagination, imagining our
way inside someone else’s skin, seeing the world through their eyes. This
discipline can be disturbing and humbling. But it enlarges our experience and
makes us wiser, kinder, slower to judge, readier to lend a hand.
Such spirituality would be quite
countercultural. These days we are segregating ourselves into communities that
look and think alike. We watch only the news networks that will give us the
facts to reinforce what we already want to think. But what if we chose instead
to get to know people different from ourselves, to engage them in conversations
not to straighten them out but to learn from them. What if curiosity replaced
dogmatism?
If we grew the Christian faith and then
practiced it – by practicing it I mean precisely this spiritual discipline of openhearted
gracious relationship – that would change the world. We would not all suddenly
fall into each other’s arms in a love fest. But the society would not be nearly
so highly conductive of the energies of fear and hatred.
Jonathan Haidt says we are biologically
wired to distrust and think ill of
people who are not in our group. But he then adds we are not hardwired to distrust and think ill of others. We can change
our hearts and minds. But how? It does not happen through confrontation or
rational argument. (This is where my friends are – I say this in love – missing
the boat in berating the xenophobic, fearful, prejudiced public figures today.)
People change when they get to know each other. So this requires us to get
acquainted with people of other faiths personally, but it also means having
respectful caring encounters with our fellow Christians who are saying things
we find morally repugnant.
Conclusion
It is a dark time. But the dark time
is when the Morning Star shines brightest. I have seen it over the Atlantic and
I have seen it in the eyes of people of faith who refuse to succumb to the
darkness of dualism, redemptive violence, and altruistic evil. It is a dark
time, but a time in which hope is on the brink of dawning.
[i] Religious violence is not
entirely new. From ancient days, Jews persecuted Samaritans. Christians
persecuted Jews. Pagans persecuted Christians. Confucians persecuted Buddhists.
All of us, certainly including Christians, are apt to persecute dissenting
sects within our own general faith. Christians have treated Mormons harshly.
Protestants and Catholics have a tortured history. So this is not new. But it
is dramatically heightened in the Post Cold War Era.
[ii]
Clearly demonstrating why Pope Francis says Fundamentalism is a “disease” that
afflicts all religion, not just Islam. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3343363/Fundamentalism-disease-religions-says-Pope.html
[iii]
These terms and this analysis are from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Not In God’s Name.
No comments:
Post a Comment