Rogue Preacher

I understand that politics is about rhetoric and hyperbole. Through rhetoric, the art of persuasion, politicians, activist and yes preachers attempt to sway public opinion to their cause or viewpoint, whatever that may be.

Lately though I have notice a disturbing trend in the political rhetoric. It has been escalating in absurdity in the effort to win cheap political points. And of course there are many who I could point to who are guilty of this: Councilor Stephen Orser of London On. and his use of a Nazi propaganda posters in council chambers in his crusade against fluoride in the water or perhaps Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto and his fight for subways and holding off the attacks of the “war on cars”.

It seems the rhetoric gets more exaggerated with each passing year. In the 80’s we had the “war on drugs”. I could see that, and even possibly getting behind using the term “war” in such a manner. Today though, we have the “war on sugar”, the “war on Christmas” and like Rob Ford said, the “war on cars”.

I for one find this analogy distasteful and disrespectful. War is not a term to be used lightly. War is ugly, brutal and devastating and it leaves it marks on those who suffered through it for the rest of their lives and the lives of their families.

Comparing a disagreement about public policy between light rail and subways as a “war” is ludicrous at best. It belittles the sacrifice of so many and the loss of life in actually wars and the scars that are born, internally and externally, on those that fought in real “war”.

By using this kind of inflammatory language the rhetorician does nothing but polarizes the debate. Remember the “you are either with us, or with the pedophiles” from Minister Vic Toews? There can be no debate, discussion or agreement reach. Polarized.

I am not sure how many Christmas trees have lost their lives in the “war on Christmas” or how many Elves now have prosthetic limbs. Although it is entertaining to imagine a war torn field in France perhaps with bloody Christmas trees, but it is also quite ridiculous.

I am not sure how many Hemis are buried or where the monument is the brave sacrifice of so many carbs and fuel injectors for the greater benefit of our society as they sought to defend the way of life of car culture.

My hope is the next time and each time a politicians use such outrageous rhetoric we as engaged citizens would write to them and explain to them what real “war” is like, the horrors of “war” and how their glib treatment of those who suffered through “war” is unacceptable.

Let us use our voices to help politicians dial down the rhetoric so we can make our cities, provinces and nations work again. So that we don’t fight a “war on Christmas”, but instead disagree over the implications of a religious holiday being forced upon a secular society and what are the limits of public versus private space. I would much rather be part of that debate then fighting a so called “war on Christmas”.

The question of public spaces being free of religious symbols has reached new heights in the European Union. Countries like France have sought to ban outward symbols of religion, focusing of the veil wore by Muslim women, but not exclusively. The government law has also attacked outward expressions of Christianity and Judaism, amongst others. Although it should be noted that the focus that drove the enquiry into the religious symbols and the new law did stem from the desire of French secular society to mask the veil.

And while this debate has captured much attention on both sides of the issue, about freedom of expression and religion versus that of women who are oppressed and forced to wear the veil, I wish to focus rather on the veil itself as a symbol of wholeness. In contrast I also wish to draw attention to secular societies mantra of a separation of religion from the state and therefore a separation of private and public lives as a symbol of disfunctionality.

In essence that the veil allows Muslim women to enter into society as complete and whole human beings, while the rest of secular society must learn to live with split personalities, the private religious personality and the public non-religious persona. As such I hope to demonstrate in this reflection that Muslim women are actually more whole and actualized human beings then the supposedly free moral agents of secular society.

Secular society has for centuries now sought a separation between the church and state, between a citizen’s private religious belief and having those beliefs hoisted upon society at large. As such societies have pushed religion to the private realm. Religious believers have had to lead in effect double lives because of this forced separation. This has naturally caused that religious believers are not whole persons therefore in their public dealings.

Personally this has been brought to the forefront recently in the Canadian 41st election. Religious beliefs have no place in the public debate we are taught. The discussion centers on public policy and private religious beliefs held by the leaders of the political parties do not seem to come into play. This assumption is based on the secular argument that religion has no place in public policy.

The problem with this assumption is the belief that citizens, or leaders, can distance themselves from the very beliefs that have spurned them to public service and participation. In essence, that the faith beliefs of individuals form their morals and values and whether we wish to admit it or not, those same values influence who we vote for and the policies we would support. Yet secularization teaches us to separate those morals and values out from our choices; that our choices are to be free of private influences and for the public good only.

This creates within citizens a type of schizophrenia. We are asked to make decisions and set policies upon what we believe to be the best for society, but we are also asked not to have our private religious views enter the debate or influence our decision. This position has not only created a split personality in citizens but as placed a veil between public and private lives, obscuring one from the other.

The veil worn by Muslim women has for centuries identified them and set them apart within society, it has also served another feature. It has allowed for Muslim women to participate in society as whole human beings, no distinction between public and private, between religious and secular. The veil represents who they are as private individuals as well as public figures. The veil allows them to be fully human in the public setting. It stakes a claim to the public space of the private religious leanings yes, but it does more than simply that. It allows for the full participation of private individuals in the public sphere, in other words, as whole human beings.

The veil has become a symbol, yes. A symbol of Islam, but also a symbol of what a complete human may look like. Such a symbol though is a threat to secular society, which seeks to encourage individualism to maintain discontent in society. The very social contract is based upon such individualism and the threat of violence held by the state. Individuals give up their private desires for the safety and protection of the state. Yet individuals are being encouraged to continually seek what is in their best interest. Essentially a state of war between individuals remains at a cease-fire, but with no long-term solution in place.

So long as society maintains a scapegoat, a visible minority, the problems facing the type of schizophrenia that secularization causes will continue to go undetected. The specter of religion will always be enough to unite the individuals into suppressing the very rights that they continue to hold dear, the freedom of expression, religion and being a whole individual in society.

It remains in society’s best interest therefore to continue to sow discontent between individuals and to separate individuals into private and public beings. By doing so secularization continues as an uncheck monster forever veiling the truth of wholeness of human beings from the very citizens of society it seeks to protect.

Place and space are two distinct concepts but concepts that have been used inter-changeably far too often in dialogue surrounding the church’s place in the world and its space within secular society. In both cases, place and space has been, at least since the enlightenment, a move within the discourse to speak of both space and place as a physical limited space that has barriers, edges and a perimeter and within these specific boundaries the church must claim either its space or a place in civil society.

The concept of spatiality has been used in a very Baconian sense; it is limited and quantifiable. It can be measured and defined and as such there is a limited amount of space that exist that the church must share with the rest of civil society. And in this sense the church’s place in the world has been slowly eroded as secular society has slowly taken root over the last few hundred years and begun to occupy more space within civil society. The space that the church occupies as a result has continually contracted.

The advent of the social contract and the necessary negotiated pluralism of western democracies have slowly forced the church from a place of prominence in civil society to a separate sphere altogether. The church ended up being regulated to the “private” sphere of influence of citizens’ lives while the “public” sphere has been reserved for reason and pluralistic debate of the kind that reaches for the common good. This separation of private/public space has in a sense created a separation in citizens’ lives from the public realm and has encouraged the thinking that there is indeed a limited amount of space. The agreement as to how this is done is through the social contract of a given nation state. In the case of the United States of America there is a sharp distinction between these two spheres, while in Canada this separation is not as clear, but tends toward the relegation of religion to the private sphere.

A consequence to this is that the nation state becomes the one polis that all people in a pluralistic society become subject to above all others. Pluralism in this sense of dividing space is that it requires a tempering of an individual citizen’s particular religious commitment to his/her commitment to the nation state. To keep peace among a large population with a variety of religious views, the nation state is therefor held up to be the means by which the common good is reach and particular religious convictions must either come in line with the nation state or become antithesis to the social contract.

The basic assumption therefore is that the nation state is one polis, or one city and within which there is a division of goods and labour which follow certain binaries or dichotomies: civil society and the state, sacred and secular, eternal and temporal, religion and politics, church and state. This modernist thinking has for too long though occupied our thinking about the church’s place in society and where our space is in civil society.
Instead of seeing civil society made up of finite goods and labour, writers such as William Cavanaugh have reached back to the writings of Augustine for inspiration on how to re-imagine modern society, the one polis or one city and map a place for the church in the world and space in secular society; from one city to two.

Augustine concepts are not new; they have merely ceased to be applied in modern political thought. For Augustine there is not one city, but two cities that use the same amount of finite goods and labour, but use them for different purposes. This is not to say there is a competition for the goods, but that the two cities exist simultaneously and use the same goods but for different ends. The nation state uses these goods and labours for the common good, but the church would use these goods and labours to help transform the earthly city or the nation state.

Underlying Augustine’s proposition of two cities is that while they use the same goods and labours and occupy the same space, they also exist temporally, that is through time. The earthly city is on a trajectory towards the heavenly city and the role of the church is to help guide that transformation. Augustine basis his thought upon the realized kingdom of God through the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross that was inaugurated and the not yet that is the fallen and broken world in which we live as we await the return of Christ.

For Augustine the already is not some principle or transcendental reality, but is a reality to which the church bears witness too in history. Christ has been triumphant and the powers and principalities of the world are passing away. The kingdom of God has been realized. But it is also not yet, not because God is holding back from fully enacting the kingdom, but because humans are holding back, trapped in sin due to the fall. As such, coercive government, of the kind that enacts a Hobbesian social contract where the threat of violence against individuals is held by the state, is not natural but a result of the fall. The earthly city of which is the nation state uses the threat of violence and has dominion over and against other rational human beings is seen by Augustine as necessary for the common good, but is antithesis to scripture and the will of God.

The role of the church therefore becomes one that bears witness to the heavenly kingdom. It does so, as Cavanaugh has demonstrated, by enacting a comedy during a tragedy. To illustrate this metaphor Cavanaugh compares the two-city model of Augustine to Richard Strauss’ opera Ariadne auf Naxos. In the opera the host has two performances to be played, a tragedy and a comedy. The composer not wanting his masterwork of the tragedy to be followed by the frivolous offering of the comedy is outraged. The situation becomes worse when the announcement comes from the prima donna that they have to leave early, so both offerings must occur simultaneously.

The tragedy, the earthly city and the comedy, the heavenly city, therefore occur at the same time, in the same place and make use of the same resources; the stage, the audience, the space and time. In Christian theo-political imagination then the comedy is meant to save us from the tragedy of violence that we impose on ourselves through the nation state and the social contract. The church interrupts the tragedy of the earthly city by enacting the comedy of the redemption of Christ. The church does not allow the earthly city to define one public space, but constantly redefines what is truly public.

The church therefore is not a separate institution relegated to the private sphere in citizens’ lives. It is not enacting a wholly separate drama either. The church seeks to work with other actors and players to try to divert the tragedy into the drama of redemption. As such, when we envision space and place we must always remain aware that the church is not separate or competing for limited space, but is in fact part of the tragedy told and the comedy meant to transform. In a very real sense there are two cities that exist simultaneously and that space and place are not limited in a Baconian sense. Space and place exist both physically and temporally across time. Space and place are also not limited by human reason but are open to the abundance of God and they occur both here in the earthly city and also simultaneously in the heavenly city at the end of time.

The tensions held by Christians are prevalent throughout Christian thought, practices and theology. We hold in tension the realized kingdom of God, inaugurated by the passion of Jesus Christ, but that kingdom is also not yet realized for Christ is yet to come again to judge the living and the dead. This is but one example of the kind of tension that Christians live in. In many other places throughout scripture and in the traditional practices of the church we run into tensions between not only how things ought to be, but also contradictory messages and practices in institutional structures and in Holy Scripture also.

This contradiction is intimately present in post-enlightenment western states where there is a distinct separation between church and state. This separation became a necessity, philosophers and political theorist thought, in order to prevent the kind of religious wars that was sweeping through Europe between Protestants and Catholics just prior to and during the enlightenment. Yet this separation creates another tension that Christians have yet to resolve.

Paul was aware that Christian needed to be part of the collective whole of a society, if they were going to speak to society about the kingdom of God and the injustices present within it. This is abundantly clear in Romans 13:1 where he writes, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” Yet, if we follow the directive of Paul to its natural conclusion then we run the risk of losing the very prophetic tradition that Jesus himself belonged to. This tradition is ripe with examples of prophets and martyrs calling society back into relationship with God through the covenant, whether that is the Old Testament covenant or the New Covenant inaugurated by Jesus Christ. Without this prophetic voice, society runs the risk of straying from the will of God and being totally unaware that they have strayed.

Therefore if Christians hold themselves accountable to the state’s laws as suggested by Romans 13 they run the risk of losing the prophetic tradition and being unaware of the new movements of the Spirit in the community. Yet Christians cannot simply remove themselves from the social contract of any given nation state; they still must be held accountable and subject to the laws of that state. This tension, like so many other tensions in Christianity is between the realized and the not yet, and it can have adverse effects on the church as a whole and specific denominations within the body of Christ.

So when do Christians ignore the laws of a nation state for the sake of justice and when do they adhere to those laws? Furthermore, is there a time for violence to overthrow unjust political structures and if so, what kind of violence? Is there a time when it becomes necessary to over turn the nation state in the creation of something new, something that furthers the kingdom of God? In other words, doing the right thing according to established law is precisely what must be suspended in order to dissolve a body of established law that is unjust.

This tension is nothing new in many ways, for this question of suspension of law to dissolve a body of established law that is unjust rings with echoes of Luther. Therefore the question becomes, when does violence, and what form of violence, becomes a necessity of the Christian community and can those actions be done within the confines of the Christian tradition?

Politically, the threat of violence is held by the state. This violence is held by the state to help create and preserve order. This is the basis of the social contract for Hobbes and in many ways it rings true for many nation states in the world today. The state has two kinds of violence according to Walter Benjamin, which he elaborated upon in his essay, critique of violence, written in 1921. They are law-instating violence and law-preserving violence. In both cases the state uses violence to bring about a state of a peace between citizens within a certain geographic boundary.

Law-instating violence is done when a polity comes into being, but it can also be done by a military in innovating coercive action to handle an unruly population. As an example of this we have to look no further than the current unrest in Libya. The Libyan government is using this kind of violence against its citizens in an effort to maintain control and keep the current legal framework in power. The second kind of state violence, law-preserving violence, is the kind of violence used by the state to preserve peace amongst its citizen. This is exactly the kind of violence that Hobbes envisioned in Leviathan. The police and courts use the threat of violence and violence itself to maintain the institutional structures of society.

Neither of these two types of violence are Christian in any way, although they may have been done in the name of Christianity, that is for sure. For Christians, these two types of violence represent earthly ventures and do not reflect the Kingdom of God, whether that Kingdom is realized or not. Because these types of violence are not grounded theologically it is extremely difficult to accept them within the bounds of Christian doctrine, although many have sought to use portions of scripture to justify these types of violence. Christians therefore need a third type of violence if they are to exercise some level of political will upon the nation state. (I want to state at this time that violence does not have to be physical to be violence. What is being sought is the end of unjust laws, therefore the destruction of law and possibly the government that imposed the aforementioned law, is violent; but physical harm may never occur.)

Benjamin puts forward an interesting proposition, divine violence as a third type of violence used and unleashed against the coercive force of a legal framework. This does not mean that God acts directly with humans as passive observers. It means that through the body of Christ in this world, the church, Christians can engage in the prophetic tradition as a means of correcting unjust structures within society.

We have recently seen examples of this type of violence against legal frameworks that are unjust in our world. The general strikes and protest in Egypt are precisely the kind of violence that needed to occur against an unjust political regime. The outright destruction of the laws of the previous Egyptian government was a requirement. And from this death the new Egypt is reborn.

Political action and violence therefore allows for the continued act of creation through the body of Christ. Although, it should be noted that I believe the kind of political action that usurps unjust political structures fully cannot at anytime resort to classical violence, the first two kinds that Benjamin spoke of. The kind of violence that is required is a divine violence that subverts the current political structure much like the sacrifice of Christ subverted the need for a physical revolution. Simply being willing to stand and say no more, becomes in essence joining with Christ upon the cross to break the cycle of the first two kinds of violence and join with Christ in inaugurating the Kingdom of God.

In conclusion, I believe that Benjamin’s divine violence shatters and destroys are pre-conceived notions of violence. The concept of violence is subverted through the sacrifice of Christ allowing Christians to stand in the shadow of the cross and face unjust structures of society knowing that there sacrifice will lead to new life, to resurrection.