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Today's
Stories
June 18,
2004
Gary Leupp
The "Long-Established" Link?:
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi
June
17, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
16, 2004
Lenni
Brenner
A Question for Kerry Supporters
Davey
D
Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan
Daniel
Wolff
Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner
Abuse?
Bruce
Jackson
Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake
Patrick
Cockburn
Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power
Facilities
Gary
Handschumacher
Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads
JG
Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop
Mario
Benedetti
Obituary with Cheers
Vicente
Navarro
Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who
is Rodrigo Rato?
Website
of the Day
Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch
June
15, 2004
Harry
Browne
Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe
Neve
Gordon
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
David
Palmer
Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI
John
Blair
Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming
Dave
Lindorff
God Wins in TKO
Bill
Quigley
Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step
In
Patrick
Cockburn
Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast
John
Chuckman
John Kerry, Political Placebo
June
14, 2004
John
Stanton / Wayne Madsen
Torture, Inc: Oliver North Joins
the Party
Kathy
Kelly
Requiems: What Happens When Compassion Dies?
Bruce
Jackson
Bush Gets Testy About Torture
Lee
Sustar
Strikers Defy Visteon's Company Thugs
Kurt
Nimmo
The Desperate Censors: the Republican Plot to Kill Farhenheit
9/11
Jim
Davis
Hard Right Nativism
Eliot
Katz
Death and War
Uri
Avnery
The Nightmare Comes True
Website
of the Day
Instruments of Statecraft
June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto
and Runnymede
Team
CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary
Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe
Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt
Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg
Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st
Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
| June
18, 2004
Imprimatur
of the Almighty?
The Christian
Question in American Politics
By JUSTIN
E.H. SMITH
In
his 1844 work On the Jewish Question, Karl Marx, himself of Jewish background,
reasoned that Judaism is a religion, religion is superstition, and consequently
any progressive thinker will aim towards the complete dissolution of
the Jewish identity in the struggle for socialist revolution and proletarian
utopia. The subsequent century and a half have demonstrated, if nothing
else, that religion is not at all on its way out. It may be irrational,
but, as Marx’s contemporary Kierkegaard already convincingly argued,
rationality is tedious, and only what is irrational has the power to
command our passionate commitment.
Kierkegaard
has triumphed over Marx, at least in this respect. While a few creative
anachronists like the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins have declared themselves ‘brights’
(we’ll see if this meme can survive a few years of natural selection)
who are simply too clever to need the crutch of religion to get themselves
through the day and who believe everyone else should pull themselves
together and proceed likewise, those of us with a more sensitive finger
on the pulse of the Zeitgeist concede that religion is, like it or not,
a force to contend with.
And, for
us Americans, this doesn’t mean just any religion. George Bush
père, however gauche in coming right out and saying as much,
was correct to announce that the US is, for the most part, a Christian
nation (according to the polls it is more so than Israel is a Jewish
nation, India a Hindu nation, or Egypt a Muslim nation), and so the
religious world-view in need of attention from those of us perhaps not
quite as bright as Dennett and Dawkins, but still concerned with understanding
our fellow citizens, is, again like it or not, Christianity.
Many on
the left are likely to think of Christians as natural enemies. Christianity
has given us literally cannibalistic Crusaders, the Inquisition, Opus
Dei, pandering Nazi collaborators in the Vatican, Jerry Falwell, Pat
Robertson, and countless other despicable and hypocritical public prayer-
mongers. To think in this way is, however, to forget about, e.g., the
early Christian martyrs who went to the grave in the name of equality,
the Quakers who ameliorate the conditions of prisoners without judging
them, the Liberation Theologians who have struggled against CIA-backed
dictatorships throughout Latin America. And it is also to forget about
Christ himself.
So could
there be any way of taking Christ back from his right-wing kidnappers
and promoting laudable political ends in his name? And why bother trying?
One good reason to try is the reasonable worry that secular political
principles such as justice or equality just aren’t sufficiently
commanding or powerful to drive real change in society. One must go
beyond, to a principle such as love, in the Christian sense of agapê,
unconditional charity that reflects God’s infinite love for his
creation.
St. Augustine,
for one, believed that an earthly political order could only achieve
good and desirable ends if it modeled itself after the divine order.
The earthly city must be a reflection of the City of God. Augustine
believed that, in the defense of Christendom, war is often necessary
(though, he says, always regrettable), and the only way to wage war
without in so doing sinning is to “[b]e peaceful… in warring,
so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them
to the prosperity of peace.” Loving thine enemy, then, is not
incompatible with killing him. Indeed, killing him can itself be an
act of love.
This example
suggests that no principle, no matter how divine and powerful in its
inception, is immune from transformation into a reason for aggression.
With good reason then, it has been widely agreed in the modern liberal
tradition that a healthy society can’t permit itself what the
late American political philosopher John Rawls calls a “comprehensive
doctrine,” i.e., a world-view that contains specifically moral
values and the cosmological theories that ground them. At most, the
government of a liberal society can tolerate groups such as churches
that find it necessary or convenient to appeal to some comprehensive
doctrine or other, but itself cannot express commitment to a comprehensive
doctrine.
And yet
our current president invokes the sanction of the Almighty at every
opportunity, and last year our vice president quoted Benjamin Franklin
out of context on his Christmas cards, asking “[a]nd if a sparrow
cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an
empire can rise without His aid?” Manifest destiny is alive and
well.
Can, then,
the United States continue to be considered a liberal society, as Rawls
thought it was? And I mean ‘liberal’ here in Rawls’
own sense, not in the banal and empty sense promoted by Rush Limbaugh
and happily, ignorantly accepted by the establishment left— liberal
as in the view that liberty is the supreme virtue of a political order,
not as in Susan Sarandon showing up at the Oscars in an electric car.
The answer
is that those in power will make the United States as illiberal as its
citizens allow them to make it. For George Bush fils is not astute enough
to comprehend the value of leaving comprehensive doctrines to the churches
and focusing on the merely political ends of liberty and justice. In
Bush's hands, moreover, otherwise merely political virtues have been
magically transformed into core features of a comprehensive doctrine.
For him, liberty, justice, and other secular political virtues only
become comprehensible when referred back to a transcendent moral order.
Weighing in decisively on a riddle first posed by Plato in the Euthyphro,
for Bush it is not that God, if he exists, would be constrained to approve
of liberty and justice because they are good in themselves, but rather,
they are good because God, who in fact exists, in fact does approve
of them.
As Bush
has demonstrated, then, concepts that were once innocuous and universally
positive staples of secular liberalism can be facilely incorporated
into an illiberal comprehensive doctrine. In his remarks to the US Conference
of Mayors on February 23, 2004, to choose one of many examples, Bush
asserted that “freedom is the Almighty God’s gift to each
man and woman in this world.”
Secular
principles, though, even when kept safe from the sort of sacralization
Bush has pulled off vis-à-vis freedom, even when we come down
on the opposite side of the Euthyphro problem and affirm that justice,
equality, etc., are good in themselves and God, if he exists, should
approve of them, even then, these principles may still be rather too
nebulous to be of much real benefit to the disadvantaged. St. Augustine
already demonstrated centuries ago that even those who justify their
actions by appeal to God’s unconditional love might not really
have your best interest at heart. Shouldn’t I be all the more
careful to watch my wallet, and my back, when someone in power starts
to invoke justice as a reason for pursuing his preferred course of action?
It should
not really be surprising that secular political principles, just like
those that draw on a transcendent moral order, also tend to come up
only when their self-proclaimed defenders wish to exploit these nebulous
notions for their own ends. It is worth noting, in this connection,
that almost every dictatorship to emerge in the twentieth century, even
North Korea, made sure to include ‘democratic’ somewhere
in the official, long-form version of its name.
On the
conception of politics suspicious of the invocation of both overtly
religious principles like love as well as secular concepts like freedom
(which in the case of Bush’s rhetoric is just a religious wolf
in secular sheep’s clothing), the best concepts to focus on are
the rather more earthly ones, not so much concepts as plans of action,
like the provision of food, water, and medicine, the balanced distribution
of scarce resources, the alleviation of pain, and the elimination of
overt cruelty.
Some may
be alarmed by the suggestion that this orientation, while at once the
more materialist (in the Marxist sense), is also much more truly Christian
than the one that perpetually boasts about its commitment to something
higher. But Christ never resisted pulling off miracles such as the one
involving loaves and fishes on the grounds that food is a lowly, earthly
thing and so can have no part in his revolutionary moral movement. His
insistence that what really matters is the kingdom-to-come only gained
the legitimacy it did in the eyes of his followers because he took seriously
their suffering here and now and alleviated it.
This materialist-cum-Christian
approach is also more useful in simply trying to figure out what’s
going on in the world. As Gore Vidal once brilliantly put it, politics
is a matter of who gives what money to whom for what, and nothing else.
The talk about freedom coming from the Bush crowd should not be of any
interest to the politically perspicacious; it is only the oil wells
and the contracts give without competitive bidding to insiders that
are relevant to our understanding of what we are doing in Iraq.
This may
seem an excessively strict interpretative approach with respect to contemporary
events, but much less so if we look back a few hundred years. Who today
really believes that concern for the savages’ souls had anything
to do with the colonization of the New World? The colonizers wouldn’t
have been nearly so concerned if the preterite natives hadn’t
been sitting on huge reserves of natural resources. Of course they wouldn’t
have been. And of course no one would be talking about freedom and democracy
in Iraq if this talk didn’t lubricate the path to greater riches.
There might be some who are sincerely convinced by the rhetoric (Bush,
perhaps, in contrast with Cheney), but this is due to a deficit of clear-sightedness,
not an abundance of virtue.
I have
been claiming that the truly Christian approach to political questions
is the one that shuts up about principles and concerns itself with mundane
questions like the distribution of goods. Of course, the Gospels say
a lot of different things, and one might reasonably object that there
is no answer forthcoming to the question: What are the core, essential
features of Christian doctrine? But loving thine enemy seems fairly
central, and it is difficult to imagine --St. Augustine’s strange
argument for love through battle notwithstanding-- an enemy taking any
expression of love seriously that does not express itself through an
earnest effort to alleviate his or her suffering. This love, according
to Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians, is the supreme
virtue a Christian can manifest: “Faith, hope, and love abide,
these three, but the greatest of these is love.” Also central,
evidently, is the imperative to avoid making a big scene of one’s
piety (Matt. 6:1, 6:5, 6:16, 6:23).
On both
of these counts, conservative Christians could evidently use some remedial
Sunday school. The best way to teach them the relevant lessons about
Christianity, though, is not to deride religious faith as an unfortunate
medieval vestige in the modern world, as the left at least as far back
as Marx and Engels has so much relished doing. Marx and Engels were
right about the historical collusion of the church establishment in
Europe with state power, a collusion that at various times made the
two bodies indistinguishable. But this tradition has been wrong to hold
that religion can only ever be an opium for the masses. Religion can
be many things in many different contexts.
In the
current context of presidential prayer breakfasts, national days of
prayer aiming for the re-election of the current crusading president,
prayers for the victory of preferred football teams, campus crusading,
coerced displays of religiosity in the workplace and in public life,
sincere and unhypocritical religion has the potential to expose religion’s
shameless exploiters for what they are, to drive them out of the temple,
as it were. The best way to do this is to proceed in Christ’s
image: with unconditional charity towards the victims of pseudo-religious
aggression, charity that has no need to piously advertise its own divine
sanction. The Christian right, in other words, can best be resisted
not by condescension, but by the shining example of conduct rooted in
the moral core of the New Testament.
It is
by no means necessary that such conduct flow from commitment to the
theological doctrines of the trinity, the resurrection, transubstantiation,
etc. I’m inclined to doubt, in any case, that the majority of
Christ’s self- appointed representatives themselves really believe
in such things. Their declarations to the effect that they do are performative
utterances, announcing and thus bringing about membership in a certain
social group, rather than describing an inner conviction that some proposition
about, say, bread’s taking on the substance of Christ, is true.
How many practicing Catholics today, after all, understand the first
thing about the metaphysics of substance, that recondite doctrine that
emerges in Aristotle and takes shape over several centuries of Scholastic
hair-splitting? But how can they ‘believe’ in transubstantiation
without such background knowledge? Again, belief here can only be understood
as an expression of group identification, not of epistemic assent.
And again
it will be useful to return to Matthew 6:1 to remind ourselves that
to follow Christ cannot be merely to proclaim one’s group membership
or to dress up in one’s Sunday best. All of this is mere piety.
The religious life, in contrast, consists in deeds that flow not from
beliefs but from love, performed for no other reason than the alleviation
of suffering, and witnessed only by oneself and by God (should s/he
happen to exist).
Justin
E. H. Smith teaches philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal,
Canada.
He can
be reached at: justismi@alcor.concordia.ca
Weekend Edition June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto
and Runnymede
Team
CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary
Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe
Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt
Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg
Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st
Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
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