Reevaluating John Thomas’ demands, we can see that his suggestions are not escapist but necessary. We cannot simply legislate more rights; we must regain our imagination and believe in the transformative power of words and rituals. It is not that Thomas is merely arguing that we should exercise private forgiveness and let the State commit its terror. That is what bad religion does: denies the connection
between the personal and the political and asks its people to bandage the State’s wounded. No, the goal of religion is and should be radical: to defeat the State (and its crimes) by dissolving it into beauty, mercy and joy. True religion recognizes that there ought to be a separation between Church and State-since both are in fact, different kinds of States with the same limitations-but that any just State depends, in a sense, on religion.
I am sure I will be mistaken here by people who will think that I mean a Church or a specific religion or even a belief in a particular God. I do not. What I mean by ‘religion’ is that rupture, that impulse, that demands to be universalized but cannot be codified-that contains within it both the radical prescription for equality and the moment-to-moment-ness of mercy. And by religion I also mean the requirement that someone believe in something more than can be codified, something more than the infinitization of their preference. Because the desire to codify allegiance and infinitize preference is exactly the sinister impulse that produces a State. The opposite-the demand to universalize the subjective by extenuating its circumstances-is the impulse of religion. It is precisely by believing in something more than ourselves that we allow a demand that is larger than our own preferences to be placed on us. Just as the State functions to guard against a too-rapid assimilation of any preference, a God works against and finesses one’s belief in the self-evidence of his preferences.
But to return to the question of Jesus and its political relevance, I must say that it was not enough to simply admire him. One had to believe in him. And I think that still holds, if not in the particular (we do not have to believe in Jesus per se) than in the general sense: first, that we must be transformed rather than convinced by an idea to be powerful and second, that we must see a difference between the idea and ourselves. That gap between ourselves and our ideas is what is powerful about believing in something rather than respecting something. Respect can easily bend toward respecting anything that already accords with our preference. Believing in something other than ourselves requires us to reckon with the difference between what we would like to be true and what is stated as true. Sometimes the former truth will win out, sometimes the latter. That is not necessarily important. What was important-what was true-was the process of reckoning the gap, not the content of the conclusion. A State allows people to line up with ideas that they respect and creates partisanship, gulfs between people that are irreconcilable because they admit no gaps. Religion requires each person to radically examine both the alterity of another person and the possibility of radical similarity (that the same impulses, motives and trials that mold us mold others, too) that allows for union amidst difference. It also requires that we allow every person her archeology-that we try to discover the manifold reasons someone became the person that they are, with the opinions that they have.
And this is my final point-one that will chastise me more than anyone else. I believe that most of the time the political conversation is the wrong conversation, and disagreement-the battles in the so-called marketplace of ideas-is the wrong method. It is the wrong method because it does not ask for the other person’s archeology but argues, instead, against their most recent belief as if a flat sentence could accurately stand in for a complex human. It is the wrong conversation because it believes that facts and arguments change peoples’ minds, and it allows people to assume that their motives are somehow different than other people’s motives. I have thought of this often as I have listened to the fights over Prop 8, and felt that most of us were having the wrong conversation-not, mind you, that the conversations weren’t vital and emotionally necessary to the people making them, but that by pretending the issue was a political issue rather than a human issue both sides made arguments that were completely inaccessible and foreign to the other. I believe that the religious impulse is the desire to discover another person’s archeology so that you can speak in the language that their experiences happened in. I also believe that religion recognizes (and this is where I condemn myself) that history is psychological, not structural. The consequences of history might be structural: they might be bigoted, racist, sexist, imperialist. But religion says that the chances are high that the motives of history are psychological-that they arise from needs that are common to everyone that we distort with insecurities that are common to everyone. Religion requires that we see our own hypocrisy in every bad act, and that we forgive it-not because it is foreign and repulsive to us, but because it is so familiar, because we were there inside it somewhere. Religion requires that we see history as a thousand-million acts of human frailty and alienation that we try, sometimes horribly, to overcome. And so religion must speak differently about justice than politics because it knows that speaking in structural terms is to already misunderstand the human. That is why religion’s response to suffering is guttural: it grieves for the perpetrator and the victim in the same sorrowful sigh.
Religion must confront structural injustices. That was Bonhoeffer’s point. But it must also achieve real peace by wreaking a transformation in every single individual. And this transformation will produce a person who radical knowledge of her own capacity for sin allows her to forgive other sinners without leaving the side of their victims. That was John Thomas’ point.
Ash, I have so much to say about these posts. They are wonderful. It may take a while for me to formulate my response because my thoughts are still so fragmentary at this point, and this builds a lot on what I have been thinking about for many years and more particularly recently. The response I want to give right now involves this statement of yours, among many others: “I am wondering, specifically, if we can have a politics of what we live for rather than merely a politics of what we are trying to protect against.” This is exactly what I have tried to articulate about a Mormon aesthetic for years. The politics of beauty, mercy, and joy. Yes, and I think we can have a similar aesthetic, one that does not merely reflect the way we live but that helps to create the way we live as well. I would add grace into your formula as the power that allows such transformation of individuals to take place, and I might have to add that it will be grace that will allow such a transformation of Mormon art. Please forgive me for how short this is. Your ideas are worthy of a much greater response, which I hope will come soon.
Ashley -
There’s much that’s important and profound here, a few things that I find confusing, and a couple of points I wish to make.
Firstly (as you might have expected) I applaud your argument that Christian faith (as distinct from religion) imposes upon us a different understanding of history, what Niebuhr called the Biblical or revelatory understanding. While the humanistic or rational notions of history, which modernity has given us, expect that history will inevitably progress as more and more human beings are sufficiently educated or trained or brought into the light of rationality, Christianity teaches us that, rather, we are beings too limited for that. Humanism argues, “If only all people understood what I understand, all would be well.” Biblical theology answers that history is tragic.
You use the term ‘hypocrisy;’ the Biblical metaphor is original sin. While original sin does not exist per se, it is a poetically accurate term for our weaknesses. Human beings are capable of imagining the transcendent (this, I would argue with Katy, is the theological distinction between ourselves and animals, but of course both our stances are inherently assumptions), but we live within the confinement of the particular. Thus all we do, all we make, all we imagine or seek to build is limited in some way, and our sins come when we ignore that fact and proclaim our particular understandings or politics or agenda are in fact universal and absolute, a perfect image of justice or righteousness or charity. But that is idolatry, for perfection is impossible.
This is not to say that reform is futile; to acknowledge that sin is ever-present in the world is to ensure that we must ever be vigilent against it. Acknowledging that suffering cannot be eliminated does not release us from the scriptural command to try. Indeed, accepting the radical impossibility of the commandments of Christ primes us to realize that they are in fact radical, and that sin is present even in the comfortable world that we mistake for righteousness. This, I think, is what Thomas means when he borrows these notions of imagination and transformative language from Walter Bruggemann. The first task of religion is to upend the world rhetorically, to equip us with a language capable of describing those sins that we normally do not even recognize, and to make us conscious of how profoundly different the Kingdom of God is from the world around us.
That is prophecy; it comes from outside the institutions of the world.
Finally, the distinction between religions and states. This is where I am somewhat confused; particularly in your first paragraph on this page, I don’t quite grasp what the difference or relation between the two should be, in your opinion. Bonhoeffer argued - and I think you’re following him to some degree - that ‘religion’ (that is, organized worship, distinct from faith) was useless; that rather, the demands that the existence of Christ placed upon each of us was to act in emulation of him in daily life rather than in abstract ritual. That I am not so sure I agree with; I believe that the stories that liturgy tells and the particularity of the rituals of churchgoing provide a space in which the rest of the world can be metaphorically upended. This is to say that I don’t think religion is as personal and private a thing as you seem to be following Bonhoeffer in arguing.
Rather, I believe in the Body of Christ, the spiritual unity of the believers. This communion, I think, is imperfectly mirrored in both religion and the state, but ultimately transcends either.
The most powerful paragraphs for me and what I view to be the heart of these posts are the third and fourth on this page. Several ideas from the third paragraph have kept coming back to me—the idea of belief in, not just respect of, Christ; its corollary idea, reckoning the gap between ourselves and our ideas; and the most wonderful idea of religion demanding that people “radically examine both the alterity of another person and the possibility of radical similarity . . . that allows for union amidst difference. It also requires that we allow every person her archeology—that we try to discover the manifold reasons someone became the person that they are, with the opinions that they have.”
First, reckoning the gap between our ideas and who we are.
You have mentioned this idea to me before in the sense that scriptures themselves are not true but that we are made true through our grappling with them. In my semester-long battle with the OT, this statement has come to increasingly describe my experience. But I have constantly wondered if it would be possible for us to be made true by wrestling with the scriptures if there were not something inherently true in them. This problem surfaces again in my fraught relationship with orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Is right belief all that is really needed? Why would there be “right” practices if there wasn’t something inherently true about them as well, something by which we are proved or reckoned? Further, and more recently, can orthodoxy even be true at all when God remains shrouded in mystery and our orthodoxy is so often conditioned by our philosophical/historical context?
Does the content of our conclusion really not matter? But I suppose that is your point and the point of the entire gospel. No matter what conclusion we come to, personally or collectively, we will have to be reckoned by the grace of Jesus Christ. That said, I do think Mormonism’s collective theological language needs to be changed from one of truth-seeking to one of reckoning, the call for which language you have presented here. And I believe the content of that language, which you and I both have expressed frustration at not being able to tap into, will be that of the victim, which you mention in your last paragraph.
Which brings me to the second point of yours, considering radical alterity and the possibility of radical similarity:
This is where you make your most profound theological and hermeneutical move, and it is a move that is quintessentially Christ-ian. It is that of not just considering otherness, which is easy enough to do in the abstract sense. Everyone is other from everyone else. But you are drawing attention to the fact that that otherness can be and often is radical. It is easy enough to accept otherness that is comfortable for us. It is easy enough for us to respect others. But, if as you say we are to believe Christ not just respect him, we cannot simply respect others. We must take the same actions toward others as he did; they are actions beyond inclusion. They are actions of embrace and of understanding others’ “archaeology.” And in a Christian context this means we grieve with, bear up, and bear with others, others who are impossibly different from ourselves.
Miroslav Volf, the wonderful man you heard lecture, develops the theological concepts of exclusion and embrace in his book Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. He suggests that innocence is a false category, as you have intimated. We are all alien to one another and to God and we are all hypocrites even in our pretended acts of goodness. Victims and perpetrators alike share a certain degree of responsibility, “solidarity in sin”:
“Solidarity in sin underscores that no salvation can be expected from an approach that rests fundamentally on the moral assignment of blame and innocence. The question cannot be how to locate ‘innocence’ either on the intellectual or social map and work our way toward it. Rather, the question is how to live with integrity and bring healing to a world of inescapable noninnocence that often parades as its opposite. The answer: in the name of the one truly innocent victim and what he stood for, the crucified Messiah of God, we should demask as inescapably sinful the world constructed around exclusive moral polarities . . . and then seek to transform the world in which justice and injustice, goodness and evil, innocence and guilt, purity and corruption, truth and deception crisscross and intersect, guided by the recognition that the economy of undeserved grace has primacy over the economy of moral deserts” (84–85).
Seeing the world in these terms requires a new hermeneutic, as well as a new language, both written and visual. This is the idea I am trying to develop for the Harvard paper. The new language is the language of the marginalized voice and the language of our shared victimhood. (At the same time, this language is not all that new. Isn’t it the language Christ spoke?) The new hermeneutic is one that embraces these marginalized voices and allows them to speak in their full power. Now, this admittedly sounds awfully feminist and queer and liberation theology-ish, I know. The hermeneutical embrace, however, welcomes these voices as an essential part of the community/body of Christ and not just as something to be considered. The body of Christ does not reject those parts that are less comely, less functional. And perhaps our image of the body of Christ is flawed to begin with. The body of Christ (both the Church and Christ’s physical body) are fundamentally wounded and healed at the same time. Exempting certain voices and bodies (less able or less traditional) is akin to taking salvation upon ourselves and attempting to heal the body of Christ. This is the most damning and unchristian action of all. Only Christ heals; we welcome and embrace in his stead.
For me the language of the victim is one that can be best expressed artistically—through word and image—and that must be expressed in these ways to be effective. Art, along with religion, holds the power of transformation for institutions and peoples; it awakens them to a greater knowledge of their first stories and of how those stories affect those institutions and those peoples. But those first stories can be flawed. I don’t think Matt would entirely agree with this. From a chat we had a couple of weeks ago:
Matt: i don’t think adam and eve existed, but i think the fall is a true story about the way we are. and that is why ashley sanders is wrong about aesthetics. though ultimately i think the difference is semantic.
me: I don’t see how your last two statements relate?
Matt: which last two?
me: adam and eve true story, ash wrong about aesthetics
Matt: ah, because, if i understand her correctly, she believes that the poetical nature of religious experience is ultimately less important to, and even destructive of, the ethical.
rather, i would say that the way we come to understand the human condition is inherently aesthetic and poetic; it relies upon story, and it is ultimately more normative than ethics, which are always limited and contingent.
I agree that the way we understand “the human condition is inherently aesthetic and poetic.” And I agree that ethics can be “limited and contingent.” But as a writer I steadfastly think these two should always be married. But the ethic must be a Christian one. And it is the Christian hermeneutical ethic I just outlined above. In some cases our foundational stories need to be rewritten to include (for me, particularly women’s) marginalized voices. This goes back to that Adrienne Rich lecture on politics and poetry. I couldn’t find it, but this is an even more synopsized version of what I mean:
“There’s a permeable membrane between art and society. A continuous dialectical motion. Tides brining the estuary. River flowing into sea. A writer describes the landmass-“stained” current of the Congo River as discernible three hundred miles out on the ocean. [3] Likewise: the matter of art enters the bloodstream of social energy. Call and response. The empathetic imagination can transform, but we can’t identify precise loci of transformation, can’t track or quantify the moments. Nor say how or when they lead, through innumerable unpredictable passageways, toward recreating survival, undermining illegitimate power and its cruelties.
“Nor how newly unlocked social energies, movements of people, demand a renewed social dialogue with art: a spontaneous release of language and forms.
“René Char: The poet bursts the bonds of what he touches. He does not teach the end of bonds. [4]
“She cannot teach the end of bonds; but she can refuse to justify, accord with, ignore their existence.” http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2006/spring/rich-permeable-membrane/
Thus, I would say, some of our foundational stories need to be rewritten. But where it is not possible to do so, we must write new ones. And those stories must be those of the traditionally marginalized and the so-called victims. Not only that but we must write stories that don’t absolve us from complicity in the victimhood of others. Poetry must have a theo-ethical dimension. Poetry and art hold a certain degree of power in influencing people in awaking them to their own social obligations although they cannot ultimately repair the damage that is done. But true art is dialogic, and a true Zion politic would be dialogic as well.
The beginning of this really made me think of A Softer World: http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=26