Selling Our Souls: Bacevich on This Age We Live In

Today's Amulet?

Andrew Bacevich is a thinker I admire. The essay (excerpted below) appears in August’s Commonweal, and is another in Bacevich’s line-up of penetrating critiques of our culture– and especially of our triumphalism. Like theologian Douglas John Hall (click here for a link), he calls our triumphalism for what it is: the false bravado of a (mostly unconscious) desperate, fearful society that has cut its ties to its moorings, and floats perilously in the chaotic seas of post-modernity.

Difficult to remember as we walk down aisles of sumptuously overstocked grocery shelves, is the saying (variously attributed), that any society is only three meals away from a revolution. While jarringly dramatic, the saying points to the anxiety that nips at us humans: our awareness that life is fragile; that the line between meaning and meaninglessness is thin; that chaos is always lurking at the edges of civilization. The barbarians are at the door, and they are us.

At the risk of oversimplification, I think it is fair to say that part of Bacevich’s argument– and, more fully, Douglas John Hall’s– is that Western Christian religion (with notable exceptions, to be sure) has been complicit in creating our present predicament. Institutional Christian religion has done this by accommodating, supporting, and legitimizing the political, technological, and economic powers that have gotten us to this point. To be fair, it was an honest mistake: the blessing and glory of human progress certainly seemed to coincide with God’s very own blessing and glory. What Christianity forgot (and this is more Hall than Bacevich), is the cross– and all of what being a disciple of that God means.

Commonweal is a Catholic publication, so Bacevich appropriately refers to Catholicism. With some important qualifications, we can read “Western Christianity” where he writes “Catholicism”:

Confronting the twentieth century, Catholicism stood fast. This was its mission: church as bulwark against the disorders afflicting the age. The excitement of Vatican II (I was a teenager when the council convened) derived from the sense that the church possessed a hitherto unsuspected capacity to adapt its witness. Rather than merely standing in lonely opposition, the church intended to engage—and then redeem—modernity.

Catholics in the twenty-first century find it increasingly difficult—perhaps impossible—to sustain any such expectations. The problem is not simply that the institutional church today stands dishonored and discredited, but that it has misconstrued the problem. The ramparts it persists in defending—a moral order based on received, permanent truth—have long since been scaled, breached, and bypassed, and have fallen into ruin.

What went wrong? The great American historian Henry Adams—dead nearly a hundred years—offers a more cogent answer to that question than any we are likely to hear from Rome. Recalling his return to New York City after a lengthy stay in Europe in “The Education of Henry Adams,” the historian rendered this verdict: “The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway,” a panoply of false gods clattering in its wake. That failure had created a vacuum. The heresies that were filling that vacuum filled Adams with foreboding.

Worse, he could see no reason to consider Christianity’s demise as anything other than definitive and irreversible. Yet a century later we remain largely oblivious to its implications. We still don’t understand what hit us….

via Selling Our Souls | Commonweal magazine.

 

Owning God, Part 2: Shahbaz Bhatti– “A Martyr” Says Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury in Pakistan in the last

Assassinations of high-profile public figures in Pakistan in the last three months have prompted reflection and concern in that country and elsewhere. The proximate cause is Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy law; the underlying cause is the deformation of religion known as fundamentalism. The assassins– and those who support them– dishonor God by claiming that their “religion”– or particular interpretation thereof– contains all of who God is. They want to own God for themselves.

This fundamentalism– whether it’s in Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Argentina, Uganda, the United States, the United Kingdom, or the United Arab Emirates– is religion out of balance.

Here are some words from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoken in response to the assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti– the latest Pakistani official killed because of his criticism of that country’s anti-blasphemy law.

The archbishop’s words are religion in balance.

Said Williams, “[Those who supported Mr. Bhatti's killing] inhabit a world of fantasy, shot through with paranoid anxiety.” He went on to characterize these violent fundamentalists as “wholly uninterested in justice and due process of law, [and] concerned only with promoting an inhuman pseudo-religious tyranny.”

In the end, he said that Mr. Bhatti died “for all practical purposes as a martyr. Not simply for his Christian faith, but for a vision shared between Pakistani Christians and Muslims.”

via BBC News – Pakistan Christian minister Shahbaz Bhatti ‘a martyr’.

 

Anxiety and Change

Iranian authorities prepare to quell pro-Egyptian demonstrations. Bahraini police break up protests. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas reshuffles his cabinet, in preparation for the possibility of new elections. And for his Fox News viewers (a highly anxious group), Glenn Beck diagrams  how the pan-Arab Muslim Caliphate soon will be knocking on Europe’s doorstep.

Precisely what kind of pressure we should place on the Iranian regime; or precisely what level of support we should give the Egyptian military–  these and other specific policy questions are not illuminated by thoughtful theology. However, particular attitudes and perspectives– attitudes and perspectives that increase the likelihood of forming successful policies– are the result of thoughtful theology. For example:

1. We should be suspicious of the notion that democracy is the perfect answer for every people, everywhere and at every time. Some of the rhetoric about democracy elevates it to the status of a quasi-religion, as though everyone can, and will, be saved once democracy is established in their land. While freedom and democracy are compelling ideas that share common ground with a theological/moral understanding of the intrinsic worth of each and every person qua person, democracy is not an unambiguous good in all times and in all contexts. Wise American leadership in support of democratic reform movements needs to be discerning, timely, crafty.

2. We– especially we “can-do” Americans– should be suspicious of the temptation to mistake being powerful, with having the ability to control outcomes. The first does not mean the second. We can bring power to bear– say, in Iran– but we cannot dictate that the reformers will overthrow the Iranian theocracy, or that, if they do, some unintended consequence then becomes even more threatening. Recognizing this kind of limit is the virtuous outcome of thoughtful theology, and is also hopefully the lesson of our hubris in Iraq. The world is not plastic, yielding to how we mold and shape.

Grasping at the perfect answer, and attempting to control outcomes, are stock responses to anxiety. Thoughtful theology– thoughtful grounding in the Transcendent One– guards us from over-reliance on our own frail human capabilities, guards us from over-reaction to events, and gives us patience for issues to ripen– so that our policies actually have a chance to fulfill their intent.