Against the Stream

Horsley, Jesus, and Empire

Last night biblical scholar and historian Richard Horsley spoke at DePaul University. It's always difficult for me to judge the quality of public lectures of the kind that he presented, since by necessity they have to be broad enough to appeal to a wide, non-specialist audience, but then they tend not to tell me anything I didn't already know, or at least strongly suspect. But in Horsley's case, I think that he did about 3/4 of a good job of laying out the issues involved in analyzing how the message of Jesus has something to say to contemporary issues of empire and its implications.

The 3/4 that was solid pertained to the historical and sociological issues that he has dealt with so well in his work over several decades. It was interesting for non-specialists, intriguing for those of us who study these things, and it was engaging and accessible.

the 1/4 that could have been done better was the application of those historical and sociological data to the contemporary issues around the question of empire. I give him credit as a historian, he was only willing to go as far as the historical evidence allowed him to go, but from my perspective as a theologian and ethicist, a proper analysis requires a consideration of the eschatological and even apocalyptic dimensions of Christ's teaching. Because Horsley wants to understand the kingdom of God as only being a temporal and historical reality that Jesus was preaching as a mode of resistence to Rome, he wasn't able to consider the proleptic aspect of it as a reality that is brought about, not through human action, but through divine action. 

This is the Moltmannian in me, I confess, but I think that when we think about Christian faith and Empire, we cannot read the history of Christianity as about the human desire to throw off tyranny and oppression, but at most about our ability to anticipate and live into a new reality in the here and now, but a reality that is brought about by God. This was missing in Horsley.

I should mention, that I don't mean this to be a brand of quietism. Anticipation is an active stance vis-a-vis the coming kingdom of God. It calls us to enact the values of the kingdom in the midst of our history and our society, and that means "taking arms against a sea of trouble" even though we may not "by opposing end them." An exodus community is one that continues to journey in the world, but does so with its eyes and its actions firmly fixed on the coming kingdom of God.

Bias and Discourse

Yesterday's post touched on the "work" of right wing bomb thrower David Horowitz, who has been hammering away at the "liberal bias" charge in academia for quite a while now. I'm not the only person who has taken note of the speciousness of his claims. In the latest Columbia Journalism Review Nicholas Lemann writes the following:

Horowitz has been campaigning for some time against ideological bias in universities — journalism schools and law schools are only his latest targets. What he says he is for is the kind of ideological balance that he didn’t find on professional school faculties, which is an idea that sounds much more commonsensical and innocuous than it really is. The great American universities in their current form are the result of their having embraced, in the late nineteenth century, the “German model” of higher education, in which professional scholars conduct disinterested research according to strict rules. The idea of objective journalism emerged at about the same time. So did institutions like think tanks and professional associations. All these Progressive Era inventions were aimed at creating trained experts who would rise above their personal passions and biases in order to expand knowledge in ways that would benefit the public. Columbia’s journalism school was founded by Joseph Pulitzer in precisely this spirit.

.......

At the very least, to carry out Horowitz’s program would require our asking prospective faculty members (and, perhaps, students, too) to tell us their political views, which we don’t do, and which seems intrusive to me. What’s more important is that Horowitz assumes that everything we teach has a political view embedded within it. Journalism is not physics, but most of what we teach does not have any obvious ideological content. There is not a liberal or conservative way to teach students how to write clearly and accurately and quickly, or how to work by high ethical standards. Almost all the craft-style teaching we do in the various journalistic media, and much of the subject-matter teaching, have no ideological dimension that I can see. To follow Horowitz’s prescription would be to make our school more ideological, not less.

Just so. Lemann points the heart of the problem, and to my mind, this result is no accident, but is the very agenda that Horowitz is pursuing. Once you've created an expectation of ideological inspection at universities, you can begin to target individual faculty members on the basis of their ideology, targetting them for denial of tenure or for elimination of their programs because they don't tow the proper ideological line.

But there was another dimension of Lemann's article that I thought was worth pursuing as well. He points out that the ideal of objective journalism, when properly practiced, requires the scholar to put aside personal bias and report the facts as they occur. In any quantitative field, you'll find the same committment, but what happens in nonquantitative and/or qualitative fields, like, say, Religious Studies.

In my case, I'm a Christian theologian doing my scholarly work out of my Christian convictions. My work is rooted in my deepest commitments. Although I can and do make arguments for atheism in my classes, in order to analyze them and get my students thinking about them, my research presumes the existence of God and the truth of Christian doctrine, and then proceeds from that.

This doesn't imply that no debate takes place among theologians. Far from it. Some of the best times I had as a graduate student took place when I was precepting for a class taught by two professors with very different theological positions. But here's the rub: Neither of them was arguing from a position of neutrality. They were invested in their positions, as I'm invested in mine. Does this bar us from the realm of acceptable academic discourse? I think not. The way that we do our discourse is different, but it's still scholarly discourse.

Within my department are many scholars who have commitments to particular religious worldviews, and there are also several who don't subscribe, at least explicitly, to a particular religious worldview. How we each "do" religious studies is in some way rooted in the commitments we bring to the field. Thus, a Jewish ethicist and a Christian ethicist can converse about the similarities and differences in their approaches, and do so with an Islamic ethicist to bring in yet further nuance to the conversation. In the process, we each come to a better understanding both of our own ethical approaches and the approaches of other traditions. This is the kind of scholarly inquiry that is perfectly well placed within an academic setting. But it doesn't require ideological neutrality. What it does require, however, is for us to lay our cards on the table in conversation.

What Horowitz wants is not for us to lay our cards on the table, but to hire for specific ideological allegiences. Whatever the similarities and diversities within our department, one thing we don't screen for is political ideology.

Empire and DePaul

I don't usually post about things having to do with my work at DePaul University. Academic blogs are risky endeavors, particularly when they dig up dirt on their own institutions. But given the recent spate of right wing attacks on DePaul University over our series on "Confronting Empire," and particularly since I'm a member of the organizing committee, I think that there are some things to be said that I'm in a position to say. However, before I begin I want to make clear that, as with all things having to do with this blog, I speak for myself, and not for DePaul University, the Religious Studies Department, or for the Confronting Empire organizing committee.

With limited time and energy, there's only so much ground that I can cover, but there are three aspects of this controversy that I want to touch upon right now. First, why I am involved in this project; second, what do I mean when I talk about empire in the modern world, and as it relates to the United States; and third, the controversy at DePaul.

Why I am Involved in the Empire Quarter

My involvement with the Empire Quarter is an extension of my involvement in issues of religion and globalization. I teach a course on the subject, and I am particularly interested in the moral and political dimensions of the way that religion interacts with the increasingly dynamic and destabilizing aspects of the global economy. I'm also interested in the creative possibilities for new ways of organizing social, political, and religious relationships in light of globalization. My research touches in part on the significance of civil society as a category of social analysis, and I have become particularly interested in the import of civil society on a global as well as a national level.

What Do I Mean By Empire?

So then, how does globalization intersect with the concept of empire? At its best, globalization is about breaking down the boundaries between nations and cultures and creating a kind of a socio-cultural mischung in which everyone takes the best of the variety of cultural influences available and creates new kinds of dialogs and relationships. It can also create economic opportunities and open up the possibility of democracy where democracy hadn't previously existed.

Yet, globalization often fails to live up to its best potential. At its worst, it is about the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy and the weak by the strong. It is about corporations moving from countries with social contracts and moral expectations to kleptocracies that will allow anything for the sake of a bribe in the right hands. It is about violating workplace safety, fair wage, pollution and unionization rules, and moving to wherever those rules are weakest. This benefits nobody but the richest and the most powerful, since it undermines all of those hard-fought moral rules and laws within countries that already have them, and undermine the ability to get them in the countries that don't have them.

I have to confess that there has been improvement on these fronts over the past several years, but much work still needs to be done, and it can only happen if folks take seriously the moral and political implications of globalization.

So, where does empire fit in? First of all, a lot has to do with how one defines "empire" in the first place. For simplicity's sake, I'd like to define it for my purposes as "international hegemony maintained through force or the threat of force, military or economic." Military force is the primary means by which any empire seeks to maintain hegemony, but economic power can be deployed as well.

Is the United States an empire then? Certainly many think so, and more and more books seem to be coming out that not only accept the label of empire for the United States, but even embrace it, as the outcome of a process by which a reliably fair and free country has come to take the reigns of international peace and the expansion of liberty. For my own part, I'm unsure. It seems to me that the United States has many of the characteristics of an empire, but it also strikes me that many of those characteristics are peculiar to the current administration -- refusal to seek multilateral solutions to international problems, bellicose and Sabre-rattling foreign policy, exploitation of weaker nations, strong-arming of supposed allies, and failure to act in a consistent manner with regard to what we claim to be our deepest principles. But it must be said that these are not necessary elements of U.S. foreign policy, and could be handled differently by a different administration.

From my perspective, getting involved in the Empire Quarter was a chance to bring this kinds of issues to a broader audience, through the variety of speakers and events that we had organized.

The Controversy at DePaul

I suppose its typical of an academic to plan an event around an interesting topic, and then fail to realize that it will have consequences outside of the academy. Alas, this is a trap that I, at least, fell into with regard to the planning of this quarter. I had no idea that there would be any controversy, in part because I wasn't sure that it would have much impact. But it seems that at least some segment of the student population was incensed by the topic, and their indignation found its way to the notorious Frontpagemag.com, which did a rather inflammatory article on the subject.

Frontpage is, of course, a propaganda organ of David Horowitz's various right-wing organizations, which all exist to extinguish the idea of academic freedom under the guise of promoting it. Their task is aided by their complete and total disregard for the truth, and so it was with the article they published about the Empire series.

In the first place, and rather humorously, they described the series as "Confronting Amerikan Empire." This is always red meat for the right-wingers, but it could lead to some confusion, since nowhere in any of our literature do we use that spelling of "American." It is typical of horowitzian distortion (you know you've made the big-time when you've got your own adjective!) that they would plaster this on their headline, despite its complete irrelevance to our program.

They have some fun with the fact that we refer to ourselves as the "Empire Committee," comparing it to Star Wars (did the Empire have committees in Star Wars?), which is again humorous, if you like obvious and shallow jokes, but really has nothing to do with us.

Here's my favorite quote from the article. After listing the goals of the quarter, the author then writes:

In other words, it is to be a one-sided campaign of on-campus brainwashing designed to turn DePaul students into Manchurian candidates of radical political correctness.

I'm particularly fascinated by this conclusion, given that, to the best of my knowledge, the author didn't talk to a single member of the organizing committee. If he had, he may have discovered that we share in common a commitment to raising the issues, not imposing an ideology upon our students. This may be a confusing concept for the author to grasp, however, since based upon the tenor of his article, Manchurian-candidate style brainwashing is precisely his agenda.

Had the author contacted even one of us, he might have discovered that, far from seeking to provide a single unitary view of empire, we sought a variety of very different perspectives on Empire. We invited a variety of people, many of whom couldn't come. We considered others, who were out of our price range, and are actually bringing to campus several speakers who are very critical of the application of the term "empire" to the United States. However, since none of us were consulted, it is unsurprising that none of this is reflected in the article.

Since Religious Studies is targeted specifically, and two dear colleagues are mentioned by name, I do want to say a word about my department. I am frankly offended by the ill-informed drivel that the author spews regarding my colleagues and my discipline. As is so typical of Frontpagemag.com, it uses guilt by association and a complete misunderstanding of the very task of the academic study of religion to smear very good people. While the author, and the followers of David Horowitz in general, seem to feel that the purpose of any academic discipline is to mask the ambiguities and failures of the United States beneath a veneer of patriotism and triumphalism, what actual grown-up scholars do is consider the wide variety of different reactions to the United States in the world. This entails actually becoming knowledgeable in a wide-variety of different traditions and texts, and learning how to read and interpret those texts. When a professor assigns a text in a class, he or she is not necessarily endorsing that text. In fact, we will often assign texts with which we deeply disagree, because we think that, our disagreement notwithstanding, the texts themselves are important.

The author of this piece takes a big, broad swipe at Religious Studies, without ever considering the merits of particular courses or particular topics. Again, this is good for right wing propaganda, but makes for lousy journalism, and even worse understanding of the academic task.

The remainder of the Frontpage.com article meanders off into issues that are beyond the scope of this post, such as the decision last fall to invite the reprehensible Ward Churchill to speak on campus, and a number of other issues about which I must plead ignorance.

What this controversy signifies to me, in the end, is that the idea of empire is a subject that desperately needs further exploration and analysis. The job of a university isn't simply to study what we already know, but to apply what we have come to know as a society to the world in which we find ourselves. Is the United States an empire on par with ancient Rome or China? There are many who say yes, but, as the Frontpage article indicates, in saying so they provoke outrage in many others. What is the cause of this outrage? Is it justified? In the end does the idea of empire actually provide a helpful template for understanding the role of the U.S. in the world?

I honestly don't know. I'm involved in this project because it is a question that's worth answering. What else should a university do?

Spying on Profs

I think that Atrios is right about this. It's in the same category as Horowitz's abohorant ABOR legislation -- it exists to drive progressive thought in academia into the closet through intimidation and the misuse of law.

I'm hoping to post something else today, related to the recent publicity around the DePaul Unversity "Confronting Empire" series that I'm involved with, but for now, let me just quote Atrios:

The point is to intimidate, and the power to do so doesn't come from some idiots with a web site it comes with the implicit threat that you'll show up on O'Reilly one day and suddenly "professor nobody" will become Wingnut Enemy #1 over some out of context classroom quote.

There are a lot of professors who would just as soon hide under the covers, no matter the legitimacy of their work, than suffer such a fate. Not everything a professor says or does is political, and not every professor has an obligation (or even the right!) to speak out on political matters, but if the University exists to promote the intellectual, political, social and moral formation of active and conscientious citizens (as I believe it does), then it can't act as though the world of which it is a part and in which it lives and moves and has its being is irrelevant to its mission.

Justice Cthulhu Strikes Again!

William Saletan has a good piece on Scalia in Slate today. As I've mentioned before, Scalia is transparent to the point of invisibility when it comes to reading the law in a way that will lead to the conclusion he wants, despite his constant harping on the other justices for doing just that. But Saletan does a good job of breaking down just how that rank hypocrisy is on display in the Oregon assisted suicde decision. Here's a sample, but go read the whole thing:

Principle 1 is to beware value judgments disguised as fact or reason. In Casey, Scalia derided his colleagues for reaffirming Roe v. Wade. He accused them of invoking "what the Court calls 'reasoned judgment' ... which turns out to be nothing but philosophical predilection and moral intuition." In Stenberg, he faulted the other justices for applying a standard that "can not be demonstrated true or false by factual inquiry or legal reasoning. It is a value judgment."

That was Scalia's principle on abortion. On assisted suicide, however, the principle gets in his way. The latest case, Gonzales v. Oregon, involves a law, directly approved twice by Oregon voters, that lets doctors prescribe drugs so terminally ill people can kill themselves. Years ago, then-Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri asked then-Attorney General Janet Reno to block the law. She refused, citing states' rights. Ashcroft asked his Senate colleagues to pass legislation to block the law, but they refused, too. So, when President Bush took office, Ashcroft got Reno's job, ordered up an in-house legal memo that said assisted suicide wasn't a "legitimate medical purpose," and declared that the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 gave him authority to strip the license of any doctor who prescribed lethal drugs under the Oregon law.

Six of Scalia's colleagues conclude that what counts as a "legitimate medical purpose" is a value judgment and that on such questions, a 30-year-old law aimed at hippie stoners doesn't authorize the U.S. attorney general of 2001 to superimpose his moral intuition on the assisted-suicide-policy decision of Oregon voters. Scalia, however, says Ashcroft's definition of "legitimate medical purpose" isn't a value judgment; it's pure reason. He repeatedly calls it the "most natural" and "most reasonable" interpretation of that phrase.

Scalia chides the court's majority for confusing "the normative inquiry of what the boundaries of medicine should be—which it is laudably hesitant to undertake—with the objective inquiry of what the accepted definition of 'medicine' is." Those silly justices—they applied Scalia's principle when it didn't lead to the result he wanted! To justify Ashcroft's interpretation, you have to spin it as objective, not subjective. Accordingly, Scalia opines, "The use of the word 'legitimate' connotes an objective standard of 'medicine,' and our presumption that the CSA creates a uniform federal law regulating the dispensation of controlled substances ... means that this objective standard must be a federal one."

I wonder when we can stop acting like Scalia is a principled jurist and as a nation simply recognize him for what he is: An authoritarian elitist intent on using the law to enforce his own brand of moral hegemony.

Mirror Images?

I've been trying to carve out some time over the last few days to write about Joe Loconte's recent spate of articles on the Christian left in the New York Times, but with the start of a new quarter, it had to be put on hold, and as a result, smart folks like Slacktivist and Jo Guldi have beat me to the punch.

But there is still much to be said, only a fraction of which I can say here. Regular readers will know that I often get frustrated with Wallis's appeals to nonpartisanship, when, in my view, he's pretty solidly on the left of things (he, of course, disagrees). Nevertheless, I think Loconte's criticisms are off-base on a number of fronts.

First, in criticizing Wallis's move from scripture to public policy (about which, more below), Loconte writes:  "Isaiah, an agent of divine judgment living in a theocratic state, conveniently affirms every spending scheme of the Democratic Party. This is no different from the fundamentalist impulse to cite the book of Leviticus to justify laws against homosexuality."

Oh, there is so much wrong about this (though, I acknowledge Jo's critique of Wallis on this point as well). In the first place, my own reading of Wallis is not that he is simply trying to read a public policy off of a biblical command (a la Leviticus and homosexuality). Rather, he is referring to Isaiah's eschatological vision of the Kingdom of God to provide a social ideal that ought to govern our public life. This is an ideal that embraces justice and peace as goals worthy of our best efforts, and sees the hand of God active in movements to bring those ideals about.

Oddly, Loconte contrasts Wallis with Reinhold Niebuhr  and Martin Luther King. Now, leaving Niebuhr aside for a moment, how is Wallis's appeal to prophetic calls for justice different from King's use of the prophet Amos, declaring "let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream"? Both Wallis and King take that eschatological vision, and apply it the the injustice and unrighteousness they see in society, holding that vision up in contrast the world as it is.

Niebuhr is different insofar as how he uses (or doesn't use) scripture, but he nevertheless upholds a prophetic vision of justice as an eschatological ideal to which we are responsible as moral beings. Depending on what you read of Niebuhr, he will either hold the religious underpinnings of this moral agenda at arm's length, or he will embrace it explicitly, but it's always there. And while it's true that neither Niebuhr nor King became "partisan priests" (as Loconte puts it), neither, I would  claim, has Wallis. Nor have I, nor have my friends in the various progressive Christian movements.

Wallis is right that God is not a Republican (or a Democrat), but liberal or progressive or leftist Christians are also neither Republicans or Democrats, regardless of our party affiliations. My Christian faith isn't in service to the Democratic Party any more than Niebuhr's was. (Niebuhr, in fact, never joined the Democratic party. He ran for Congress one time, as a socialist, and thereafter joined the Progressive Party). We are not partisan in the sense that we want to see Republicans lose and Democrats win. If we are partisans at all, we are partisans on behalf of the idea that our Christian faith demands of us that we be on the side of the poor, the outcast, the dispossessed, the least among God's people, and that we strive to make real a society in which the needs of these children of God are given priority.

To the degree that the Republican Party is willing to embrace that ideal and have an honest conversation about how that is possible, progressive Christians are here to engage in that conversation. To the degree that Democrats sell out to the powerful and the wealthy, we have no interest in supporting them. This is not partisanship, this is principle. We support whoever supports us.

This is in stark contrast to the Religious Right, which is currently a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party, as the ties between Ralph Reed, Jack Abramhoff, and the Republican establishment have demonstrated. Progressive Christians would do well to learn from that particular example and not sell their souls for the kind of political power exercised by the Christian coalition.

That said, we do want to be taken seriously by people in power, not simply because they want to use our ideas to win elections (as Loconte points out, it's ridiculous to host panels like "I don't believe in God, but I know America needs a spiritual left"). We want our ideas taken seriously because we have ideas that are good for the nation, and that are morally preferable to the ideas of the religious right. I'd happily stand up and debate the relationship of the Bible to public policy with Joe Loconte, if our goal is to figure out how to make a genuinely better  society. But it's making a better society that's the goal, not getting or keeping political power.

It's also worth pointing out the straw-man quality of Loconte's quip. I doubt highly that he can find me an example of where Wallis uses the Bible to "affirm every spending scheme of the Democratic Party." In fact, Wallis has been on record for years in supporting any number of different kinds of strategies, including, but not limited to, government-sponsored programs, to increase social justice. He's supported community initiatives, groups like the 10-point coalition, and the action of small groups of citizens working within civil society to transform the social landscape. It's not only about "spending priorities." It's about social priorities. If we can come to an agreement on those, then we can have a very legitimate and pragmatic debate on the best ways to achieve those priorities. And in that case, I suspect that Wallis, Loconte, and I would all find we have a lot in common about the variety of different kinds of programs we'd support.

One last note: Loconte is simply wrong in attributing Isaiah's vision to a "theocratic state." Here we suffer from a lack of theological imagination. While it's true that Isaiah's vision is ultimately "theonomos" (in Paul Tillich's sense of the word), it's not "theocratic." From Tillich's perspective, such theocracy would undoubtedly be "heteronomos," and Tillich would be right there. But the eschatological vision of a kingdom of peace and justice is not about who rules the state, but about who rules the universe and who rules in the hearts of human beings. It is not when Christians control the state that justice reigns, but when a new law is written on our hearts. That vision of the consummation of all things remains in imagined future. But that imagined future can have an impact on how we live our lives today, if only we'll allow it to. How that translates into public policy requires what John Bennett used to call "middle axioms" by which we can translate Biblical injunctions into public priorities. Perhaps our time would be better used developing those middle axioms rather than sniping at those who believe, apparently with Loconte that "the Bible is a priceless source of moral and spiritual insight," but who, apparently unlike him, also believe that the Bible means something in terms of how we live our lives, both privately and publicly.

PS. Evidence that Loconte doesn't really know what he's talking about: Calling Stanley Hauerwas a "liberal." I can here Stan howling from here.

PPS. Further evidence that Loconte doesn't know what he's talking about: accusing Wallis and other progressive Christians of ignoring human rights issues (middle axiom!) and questions of the family. In fact, I just got my new issue of Sojourners the other day, and the cover story was all about the importance of family. Now, I wonder when Loconte will be publishing his apologies to Jim and Stan.

What Amy Says

In response to Atrios's question about who speaks for evangelical Christians, if not whack jobs like Pat Robertson, Amy Sullivan comes up with a pretty good list:

I need the caveat, of course, that the evangelical community (and even the conservative evangelical community) is very diverse and doesn't have one acknowledged leader. But given that, there are a few different groups of people who should be (and sometimes are) featured as evangelical voices. For religious leaders, there are Ted Haggard of New Life Church and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, Brian McLaren of Cedar Ridge Church, Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church, Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church, and Franklin Graham (Billy's son). Political voices include Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Richard Cizik of NAE, Joseph Loconte of the Heritage Foundation, and Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

And then, of course, there are your white liberal evangelicals (Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, Tony Campolo) and your black evangelicals (Herb Lusk, TD Jakes).

I heard Teg Haggard on Christopher Lydon's Open Source last month, and though I thought he was almost totally wrong, I respected the way he engaged in the conversation. It was a pleasure not to tune in only to hear a conservative evangelical spouting Coulteresque strident talking points. I can listen to Haggard, as well as most of the others that Amy mentions above.

New Year's Resolution

Well, I'm a day late, which doesn't really bode well (I blame typepad!); but here it is: My New Year's Resolution is to blog more frequently. I hope I'll also blog more substantively, but if I can't do both, at least I'll try to do one.

That is all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programing.