Against the Stream

The Ethics of Satan

The Satanic Temple has been in the news a great deal lately. They are the group behind the campaign to get Baphomet statues erected in public spaces around the country, and their leader has been in the news a great deal lately, often quite effectively flummoxing Fox news anchors who can't quite figure out what to make of him. At it's core, the Satanic Temple is a bit of atheist tricksterism, intended to infuriate conservative Christians and promote a thoroughly secular agenda.

Via James McGrath (to whom I am increasingly tempted to simply farm out all of my theo-blogging) I see that there has been some discussion of the so-called "7 Precepts" of the Satanic Temple, and their alleged moral superiority to the 10 Commandments of Judaism and Christianity. Apparently this has gotten some traction in the atheist blogosphere, and James decided to address it himself. The seven precepts, as the Satanic Temple defines them are:

1. One should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.
2. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
3. One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
4. The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo your own.
5. Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.
6. People are fallible. If we make a mistake, we should do our best to rectify it and resolve any harm that may have been caused.
7. Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.

Now, in some ways, this is not a bad starting point for a moral conversation, and I could probably get behind several of the principles on this list. Others would require a bit more discussion or clarification. For example, it's not at all clear to me that "the freedom to offend" is something that I should take at face value as morally permissible, or as something that I'm obligated to "respect." Similarly, it's not clear to me what moral status pertains to conforming our beliefs to science. Certainly that's true of areas that science addresses, but it's not clear to me how broadly that's intended to be applied. And it's not clear that either of these is more morally compelling than "Don't murder," "Don't Steal," "Don't Covet" and "Don't Commit Adultery." However, the general appeal to empathy, compassion, wisdom, and justice is all well and good.

But what's striking about this is how little it has to do with Satan or Satanism. Again, recognizing that the Satanic Temple is attempting to be provocative, it still associates itself with a set of symbols and with a religious movement that is best known for embodying none of those principles. Modern Satanism can be traced back to the formation of the Church of Satan by Aton LaVey in 1966. Certainly you can point to predecessors, such as Alastair Crowley, but any contemporary movement basically has its roots there. But LaVeyan Satanism was created to embody precisely the opposite of the values that the Satanic Temple claims to favor. It's best understood as a religious application of the principles of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism -- selfishness, hedonism, and the disregard of moral principles such as, for example, justice, empathy, and compassion. It's a sort of symbolically freighted neo-Nietzscheanism. Like LaVey's Church of Satan, the Satanic Temple is atheist, in that they don't believe in God or in a literal spiritual figure of Satan. But there is really nothing else to connect what the Satanic Temple claims to stand for with what is commonly known as Satanism.

Now, far be it from me to tell anyone that they can't call themselves Satanists if they want to. But it's a sort of a strange thing. It would sort of being like saying "Yeah, I'm a Gandhian, except for the non-violence part." Granted, there are a lot of Christians who say essentially that with regard to Jesus: "Sure, I'm a Christian, except for the whole 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' bit." But that's hardly a convincing argument for the use of the term.

But leaving that aside, James makes an important point about the difficulty of translating the morality of the Ten Commandments to a contemporary setting:

The ten commandments are an ancient human invention, not a divine one. The same goes for Satan, who emerges from a figure with the title “the Accuser” (ha-Satan in Hebrew) and develops into a rebellious angel, before becoming a figure who stands as a symbol for individualist and capitalist selfishness in the hands of Anton LaVey, and more recently as a teacher of empathy and compassion in the hands of The Satanic Temple.

Figuring out just what the continuing significance of the Ten Commandments is in the modern world, and who it applies to, is by no means a simple task. As James suggests, it's an ancient code. And I would suggest, it represents not the "divine word" on every dimension of human behavior, but rather a very human attempt to translate and understand what they felt God was calling them to do and be in their own specific time and place. It's also not at all clear to whom the Ten Commandments was intended to apply. Certainly it can be read as a set of universal moral principles, but it's far more likely that it was originally understood by the Israelites to embody their specific and particular covenant with their God. Thus, while one can glean universal moral principles from it (e.g., don't murder, don't steal again), that was probably not how it was originally intended.

As a Christian ethicist, a large part of what I do is attempt to understand just what the continuing relevance of the Christian tradition is to the moral problems facing the world today. The Bible is one of the sources to which I refer, not because it presents me with a list of infallible moral rules, but because I understand myself to be attempting to follow in my own context the same God that Jesus followed, and that the ancient Israelites followed in their own times and places. And just as the Biblical law was reinterpreted and reunderstood in different contexts throughout the Bible, so too we need to understand how God is speaking to us in this time and place, and what God is calling us to do and to be here and now. We read the Bible, not because it gives us answers, but because it helps us understand how others have framed the question, in confrontation with the same God we seek to follow.

On James's Facebook page, Hemant Mehta, The Friendly Atheist, makes an interesting observation:

[The Seven Precepts are] less about mocking (in my opinion) and more about how these values, which were essentially whipped up in a hurry, seem to contain more compassion than a list where nearly half of the commandments require everyone worship a particular deity and has been used by politicians to push Christian beliefs into policy decisions. 

The "Satanic" aspect is the least important part. It could've been written by some dude in his basement. The point is: If it's so easy to come up with a set of worthwhile values, why do some people insist on putting up the Ten Commandments on public property instead?

Now, on the one hand, I'm no more in favor of attempts to plaster the Ten Commandments in every conceivable place than Hemant is. I tend to think they serve the same civic function as other ancient codes of law do -- to remind us that we are law-giving and law-obeying people. This, I take it, is the reason why it's carved on the Supreme Court building: Not because it's intended to be the foundational law of a democratic republic (which it emphatically is not), but because it represents a paradigm case of "law making as civilization making" and helps to remind us that we are a nation of laws. This is a far cry from the conservative Christian attempts to emblazon them everywhere as a testimony to the fact that we are a "Christian nation" (funny though, they aren't nearly as eager to do that with the Beatitudes).

However, I think Hemant doesn't really realize the import of what he's saying. Of course a set of moral precepts designed by modern, western, secular people (whether "whipped up in a hurry" or not) is going to appeal to modern, western, secular people. These rules are less normative in that sense than they are descriptive. They tell us what we as a liberal society already believe (and again, this has quite literally nothing to do with Satan, as he himself notes). It's not much of a moral challenge to tell people to do what they are already inclined to do anyway. For those of us who believe that we are called to a morality that transcends mere attempt to reflect who are are back to ourselves however, there is a much greater challenge: To try and relate our moral responsibilities here and now to the transcendent reference point that we strive to approximate in our specific time and place, and who we believe is testified to in a set of texts that is emphatically not of our time and place.

How this is to be done is not an easy task, and it's not a task that I need the Satanic Temple or Hemant Mehta to sign on for. But for me and those who work within my tradition, it is the central moral task, and again I would simply define it in this way (following James Gustafson): "What is God enabling and requiring us to do and be in this particular time and place."

And if I were to reconfigure the Ten Commandments in such a way as to help me answer that, I could certainly not do better than the words of Jesus: "To love God above all things, and to love your neighbor as yourself."

Iraq's Lessons For Syria

As sabers rattle in preparation for an escalation of the conflict in Syria -- putatively with ISIS, but really it's just an enormous open-fire scrum there now -- it's worth revisiting the debate in the run-up to the Iraq war. Check out this episode of Charlie Rose, vis Vox, in which Michael Walzer and Christopher Hitchens, among others, debate the prospect of war.

 

I've always been sympathetic to Walzer's approach to the morality of war -- not wholly pacifist, in favor of humanitarian interventions under some circumstances, but also demanding a high bar for the moral justification of armed conflict. Here he is a cogent voice of reason in response to Christopher Hitchens, who for his part offers nothing but smarm and condescension.

As the Vox piece notes, it's remarkable how much Walzer and David Rieff got right in their analysis:

Walzer and David Rieff, by contrast, aren't really representative of the debate as it occurred then, mostly because thoughtful, nuanced criticism of the case for war wasn't given a lot of voice in most media outlets. Walzer rightly notes that the war would require a huge occupying force and cost a fortune, at a time when conservative pundits were predicting the war would be a "cakewalk" and administration officials were saying it would be so cheap it could be paid for with Iraq's own oil revenue. Rieff predicts the "fragmentation of Iraq, a war between Shia and Sunni" with eerie prescience.

Observe, by contrast, just how much arrogance, and how little substance, there was to the pro-war side in 2002. It's much the same now. The issue is not that ISIS is not horrible and should not be stopped, the issue is whether the strategy currently being contemplated will stop them. And what the pro-war side has consistently failed to do, from 2002 till now, is explain in a convincing way just how their policies would actually lead to a positive outcome to the conflict, and for the region. The fact that Hitchens is incapable of responding to Walzer's objections with anything better than a confident "well, I don't think that will happen" or "I think that's trite" demonstrate the vacuity of his position. All he really knew was that he wanted a war, and therefore any objection was merely an obstacle in his way. He was more than happy to unleash his formidable rhetorical power in order to bypass those objections. It's the quintessence of sophistry, and Hitchens was a master of it.

We refused to listen to cautious and thoughtful voices then. Perhaps, just as a change of pace, we should listen to them now.

"Make Like Jesus": Christus Victor in "The Leftovers"

The Leftovers is woefully underwatched. On the one hand, that's not too surprising, given the fact that it's a relentlessly depressing show that began its first episode this season with an extended vignette that had nothing directly to do with its plot, featuring a prehistoric woman who watches as her family as crushed by a cave-in, gives birth to a baby on her own, and then dies of a snakebite while protecting her newborn child.

In what comes, there will be spoilers. Be warned!

If you are not familiar with The Leftovers, here is a recap of its basic premise: The whole show takes place in the aftermath of an "rapture-like" event, in which a substantial proportion of the world's population suddenly disappeared. In the context of the show, it's make clear that this isn't the "Rapture" per se, but an event with some similarities to the idea. All sorts of people have disappeared, and nobody is able to come up with a good reason as to why.

The first season of the series tracked Tom Perrotta's novel pretty closely. It included such things as a man named Holy Wayne who claimed to be able to overcome peoples' grief through the power of his hugs, an Episcopal priest who spent his days trying to prove that the "departed" (those who disappeared) where actually morally horrible people in order to show that whatever had happened it wasn't the Rapture, and a white-clad cult of mute smokers called "The Guilty Remnant" who believed that the world ended the day everyone disappeared, and who recruited their members by silently stalking them and conspicuously smoking in their presence. It was -- undeniably and inescapably -- weird and depressing. Yet it was also engrossing, offering a picture of a world very much like ours, but attempting to recover from an undeniable trauma.

The second season has necessarily departed from its source material. The main action has taken place in the town of Jardin, Texas, where nobody disappeared on the fateful day, and which viewed itself as blessed because of that. Kevin Garvey, the protagonist (as much as there is one) from the first season, has moved there with his girlfriend Nora, his daughter, and the daughter of Holy Wayne, who came to them through a convoluted set of circumstances involving Kevin's step-s0n. There they meet the Murphy family, their new next door neighbors, who have twin children who were actually born months apart. Meanwhile, Kevin's ex-wife, a former Guilty Remnant member, and his half-brother, have dedicated themselves to destroying the cult. Nora's brother Matt has also relocated to Jardin, with his comatose wife, who he insists woke from her coma on their first night in the town, and is now pregnant.

If this sounds like an enormous amount of plot, rest assured, it is. Yet the show has so skillfully developed these characters and their situations, that it makes for compelling television.

During season 1, Kevin witnessed the suicide of the leader of the Guilty Remnant, Patty, after he had kidnapped her and then attempted to let her go. In season 2, he has been haunted by what, to all appearances has been her verbose and incredibly obnoxious ghost. Over the course of the season, he becomes increasingly distracted and distraught, and after confessing his situation to Nora, she leaves him. Desperate to fix his life, he pursues a radical solution, going to Virgil, who is related to the Murphy's, and taking a poison that Virgil insists will allow him to cross over and confront Patty in the nether realm, and defeat her there.

There is an enormous amount of symbolism embedded in these actions, not least of which is that Virgil, who becomes Kevin's guide in his journey to the nether realm, has the same name as Dante's guide to the afterlife in The Divine Comedy.

What I found most striking about the Christ-imagery in "International Assassin" though was the way in which it was a departure to the usual "sacrificial atonement" motif in most of popular culture. In fact, The Leftovers itself has played with that idea -- that someone takes a punishment intended for someone else -- just this season, when Nora's brother Matt leaves the purportedly "safe" enclave of Jardin to live among the denizens of a camp outside of town, constituted mostly by strange and unseemly characters trying to gain entrance to Jardin. At one point, Matt comes across a naked man imprisoned in a stocks. "Do you want to free him?" asks a woman nearby. "Yes," answers Matt. "Then take his place," she responds. He walks away, but later returns and does exactly that, and in the process, gains the trust of the camp-dwellers, as he puts it, by "refusing to let anyone take my place." Matt the minister has found  new flock to pastor through his sacrificial act.

 

This, however, is not the Christ-imagery of "International Assassin." Far from taking a punishment on someone else's behalf, Kevin's road to resurrection involves him confronting the ghost of Patty and defeating her. In the context of the strange dream-logic of the nether world, this means that he has to kill her. This proves far more difficult than he had realized however, as Patty has disguised herself as a little girl, and Kevin has to throw her down a well to finally rid himself of her. Even then, he eventually has to descend into the well along with her, and drown her with his bare hands. Only then does he find himself resurrected, as he emerges from the ground (after, I assume, three days), and in some mysterious way "changed."

It's unsavory to associate this story with the Christ narrative, but actually it echoes one of the oldest explanations of how Christ's sacrificial death is salvlific, the so-called Christus Victor model. This model of the atonement was popularized in the 20th century by Gustav Aulen, whose book of that name give modern form to the idea, but it goes back to the earliest of the Church Fathers.

Here, for example, is how Origen expresses it at one point:

"He [Christ] disarmed the principalities and powers 
and made a public example of them, 
triumping over them in it [the cross]."

It's expressed differently depending on who you read, and the precise nature of triumph differs from writer to writer, as is the question of who is defeated, but the basic idea remains the same: Christ atones for human sin by a victory over death. What we see in "International Assassin" is a literalizing of the conflict, by pitting Kevin as the Christ-figure against Patty the Satan-figure, and his killing of her as the victory through which he triumphs over death itself.

What's striking about this presentation is the way in which the show is willing to depart from the usual, and quite overused, conception of sacrificial atonement in order to embrace a different, and arguably controversial, atonement theory -- that death is an enemy that is to be defeated, and that salvation comes through a confrontation with evil through which death is overcome. Fond as I am (at times) of the sacrificial atonement model (though I would reframe it more in the vein of solidarity and incarnation), the use of this alternative offers a different shade of meaning to the nature of atonement, and reveals that The Leftovers has got a lot more going on theologically than it might otherwise appear. From the beginning, the show has necessarily embraced an exploration of religious themes, and it is particularly remarkable for portraying a conflicted yet sympathetic minister in the character of Matt. The Leftovers is not an easy show, but it is rewarding, and well worth the time spent exploring its themes.

Christians In Name Only?

Via James McGrath, an illustration of the many contradictions of conservative Christianity in American politics:

As James notes, far from being a condemnation of Christianity tout court, it should rather be read as a condemnation of those who are "Christian In Name Only," who self-consciously call themselves Christians while embracing an ideology which bears absolutely no resemblance to any values Christians themselves claim to support. It's what happens when the right wing of the Republican Party and the right wing of the Christian faith become so close to one another that they are indistinguishable.

As James notes:

If you fear others, hate others, judge others, and fail to hold yourself to a high standard of love and self-sacrifice, and fail to be humble and repentant because you fall so far short of that high standard, then you are compromising everything that Jesus taught and stood for. In that case, what meaning does it have to claim that you are a “Christian”? None whatsoever. It is a tribal designation that you identify with, but which has been emptied of all the content that is distinctive to the one who is looked to as its founder and historic focus.

I will simply add that it becomes much, much harder to make the case in a public forum that Christianity has anything at all to add to social life, or that Christianity is a way of life that is both rational and morally worthwhile, when there are so, so many people out there calling themselves Christians who seem to want to demonstrate the opposite.

Kasich Goes Full Niemöller on Donald Trump

 

Republic candidate John Kasich has decided to call Donal Trump out on his rhetoric, by using a clip of retired Air Force Col. Tom Moe paraphrasing Martin Niemöller's famous anti-Nazi statement. Here is what Moe said:

"You might not care if Donald Trump says Muslims should register with their government, because you're not one," says Moe, to an ominous soundtrack. "And you might not care if Donald Trump says he's going to round up all the Hispanic immigrants, because you're not one. And you might not care if Donald Trump says it's okay to rough up black protesters, because you're not one. And you might not care if Donald Trump wants to suppress journalists, because you're not one. But think about this: If he keeps going, and he actually becomes president, he might just get around to you. And you better hope there's someone left to help you."

Compare to Niemöller's original:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemöller is a fascinating figure, having been a hero during World War I and an early supporter of the Nazis and then joining the anti-Nazi Confessing Church once it became clear to him just what the Nazi agenda was really about. His church was fire-bombed by Brown Shirts and he was eventually imprisoned for his opposition to the Nazi party.

Later he was asked by a fellow prisoner about his early support for the Nazis:

I find myself wondering about that too. I wonder about it as much as I regret it. Still, it is true that Hitler betrayed me. I had an audience with him, as a representative of the Protestant Church, shortly before he became Chancellor, in 1932. Hitler promised me on his word of honor, to protect the Church, and not to issue any anti-Church laws. He also agreed not to allow pogroms against the Jews, assuring me as follows: "There will be restrictions against the Jews, but there will be no ghettos, no pogroms, in Germany."

I really believed, given the widespread anti-Semitism in Germany, at that time—that Jews should avoid aspiring to Government positions or seats in the Reichstag. There were many Jews, especially among the Zionists, who took a similar stand. Hitler's assurance satisfied me at the time. On the other hand, I hated the growing atheistic movement, which was fostered and promoted by the Social Democrats and the Communists. Their hostility toward the Church made me pin my hopes on Hitler for a while.

I am paying for that mistake now; and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.

One can only hope that cooler heads prevail in the United States today, and we don't all wind up paying for similar mistakes in the future.

Donald Trump: Tyrant-in-Training

An article at Lapham's makes the case that Plato's Republic can offer an excellent analysis of how someone like Donald Trump comes to power, and what kind of government they represent:

As Trump never ceases to remind us, he remains at the top—or near the top—in national polls. What explains the Trump craze?

Plato would not have been surprised. He would diagnose Trump as an aspiring tyrant.

The Republic offers a detailed description of how it is that democracies (of which Plato was not fond) transform into Tyrannies, and how thoroughly Trump fits the mode of incipient tyrant:

Of course, a full-fledged tyranny does not occur until someone suited to the role manages to seize the reins of power. Consider, though, the characteristics of the tyrant that Plato warns against in his Republic. Tyrants arise from democracies that allow for everyone to pursue his or her own ambitions. Some individuals who are governed by “a gang of harmful appetites” and have a habit of “bragging speeches” amass wealth with a purpose only to satisfy their hedonistic desires. In a democracy, this kind of person “frequently goes in for politics and bounces up and says and does whatever happens to come into his head.” Moving from democracy to tyranny, the worst form of government, the proto-tyrant is “drawn toward utter lawlessness” and transforms into “a monstrous winged drone.” Tyrants are “faithless” as well as “friendless,” according to Plato. “Passion lives…in him in complete anarchy and lawlessness, as his sole ruler, and drives him…to dare anything that will provide sustenance for himself and the unruly mob around him.”  A tyrant is therefore prone to foreign wars and redistributions of wealth to favor himself and his allies.

It's hard to read this description and not feel as though, whatever may come to pass in the next election, we now rest on the cusp of a descent into tyranny, and it may be that even wise leadership won't be able to pull us back from the brink.