Religion and Violence

The followers of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be unto him, have a problem.

It's a problem that surfaces again and again, headline after headline, as those who interpret Islam as requiring violence act out their interpretation.  Villagers are butchered in West Africa.  Bombs explode in crowded markets.  Authors and cartoonists and filmmakers are murdered.  It's ugly, and it's horrific.

Having read the entirety of the Quran, and read the Hadiths, and familiarized myself with the core of Muslim faith in my own secular study of religion, I see no reason Islam must be violent.  It is not, as its most radicalized opponents assert, an inherently violent religion.  That does not mean that I believe Mohammed, peace be unto him, was a pacifist.  He was perfectly willing to pick up the sword, and did on a variety of occasions.  In that, he was less like Jesus or the Buddha, and more like, well, the dude whose picture graces this blog.  If the Quran is to be taken seriously as an authentic exposition of his life and teachings, he was a warrior prophet.  Arguing otherwise is absurd.

But though he was a warrior, the faith that rests on his prophetic critique does not require war.  The framework of the Muslim life is the practice of the five pillars.  Faith in God, regular prayer, pilgrimage, charity, and the discipline of fasting?  Do those things, and you're a Muslim.

Those are gracious, good, positive things.  It's why so many millions of Muslims have no difficulty coexisting with their neighbors.  There's nothing, nothing at all, in the deep and authentic practice of their faith that stirs them to violence.

So why this seemingly relentless drumroll of horror, which is doubly...no... exponentially more horrible to those whose practice of Islam leads them to live charitable, gracious lives?

The reasons are many.  It's...complicated.  Islam exists in a region of the world that is economically troubled, and that in the next century will become even more troubled.  When the oil dries up, developed economies will transition to other sources of energy, ending the temporary growth that has made prosperity possible in that region.  That, coupled with political oppression, the dark residue of colonialism, endemic unemployment, and climatic resource depletion?  Things are going to be...messy. 

But perhaps the greatest challenge Islam faces is a challenge that badly burned my own faith: the fusion of religion and the power of the state.   For a millennia and a half, Christendom--the dominion of Christianity--was enforced at the edge of the sword.  Faith and the state were one.  The demands of faith are enmeshed with the laws of the state.

Whenever this is the case, religion becomes inherently violent, because the power of the state ultimately rests on the power to coerce compliance with a set of laws or social norms.  It is why so many were butchered in the name of Jesus, to "protect the faith" from impurity.  It was a horror, and one that Christianity must never forget.

If an individual can be imprisoned or physically punished for blasphemy or hewing to another faith, then they are living in a violent faith system.   I think folks like Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins are fools, and radically misrepresent faith.  But if a "Christian" government threatened them with imprisonment or sanction to protect my sensibilities, then my faith would be violent.

Therein lies the challenge for a faith tradition that exists in an area of the world where religion and the state remain dangerously entangled.  

The Child and the Ball

It was a day for chores, as they often are.  A small list of Things that Must Be Done lay before me, laundry and groceries and cleaning the kitchen.  Somewhere, in there, there was also writing to do.  The laundry went in, and as the machine chugged away, I left the house.

Before going to pick up the groceries, I made a quick stop at a nearby sports store, one of those big mega box super centers.  I was going there to buy a ball.  A football, to be precise.  That's an American Football football, that pointed ovoid pigskin unique to that peculiarly Yankee sport.

Every once in a while, my older son will suggest going out to toss one around.  We've done that since he was old enough to throw, and I mark each occasion now.  He's almost sixteen, and so every one of those moments is precious.  Two and a half years, and he'll be away.   The football we've been throwing reminds me of this, as it's the same one I had when I was his age and tossed it around with my dad.  Meaning, it's many years past spent.

"Dad, we really need a new one," he said, and holding the shredded, slowly leaking object.  Cheap as I am, he was right.

So I found myself perusing a vast wall of basketballs and footballs, all covered in logos.  Forty bucks?  For a ball?  Huh.  It's been a while.  But there on the floor was a bin, filled with footballs.  None had labels or logos, but they seemed identical in every other way.  Regulation size, same manufacturer, same materials, and half the price.  

I picked one of those out, and headed to the checkout aisle.  Only one was open.

In front of me, a young mother was buying workout clothes.  Sitting in the seat of her cart, a tiny guy, a little towheaded monkey with bright green eyes.  He looked to be just a little over a year old, just recently walking, not quite to that age when you stop counting in months.

In his hand, there was a little blue ball.

He held it up in his hand, and showed it to his mother.  He showed it to the cashier, who smiled warmly back.  He looked at it, and patted it with his other hand, and then he dropped it, backwards, over his shoulder into the cart.  His mother smiled at him, and handed it back.

She continued with the transaction, and he patted the ball again.  Then he threw it.

Tonk, tonk, tonk, it went, as it bounced away, back into the store.

I went and retrieved it, and handed it to him with a smile.  "There you go," I said.  He took it and looked at me, a little skeptically.  Then his little free hand waved, very slightly.  He smiled.  I smiled back.

His mother was done, and she looked at her child and sighed.  "Alright, now.  Time to put that back."

There, on the counter, a bin of little balls, placed there for little eyes and little hands.  Ah.  I remember this part. 

She gently removed it from his hand, and put it back in the bin, and began to wheel the cart away.

On five.  Four.  He looked confused, a little baffled, wondering what this had to do with the fun game with the ball.  Three.  Two.  As they wheeled away, the realization: the game with the ball was done, even though he was not.  One.  The face scrunched, and there came the cry.

It did not strike me in that moment as a selfish cry.  Oh, sure, there's plenty of brattishness and self-absorption out there, God help us.  But this was not a greedy child.  Just a confused one.

Here was a ball, set out to play with, one of hundreds.  He had picked it up, because he was supposed to, in the same way a bee is drawn to a flower. The people had smiled.  He had smiled.  He had thrown it.  It had been brought back, with smiles.  And now, suddenly, the ball had to be taken away.

He did not yet grasp the idea of "belonging." Or "ownership."  Or "buying."

It was just a ball, right there to be played with.  Ten thousand years ago, a heartbeat in evolutionary time, a human child coming across such a thing would have explored and examined it, and done as they pleased with it.

But now?  Now the game is much more complicated, in ways that his little mind--just coming into awareness of others---simply hasn't wrapped its head around.

He understood what it meant to be friendly, and to play, and to enjoy and acknowledge the presence of others.  The larger game, though?  That was confusing.

I can understand his confusion.  That "ball" does not "belong" to anyone, not in any way you could discern if you sorted through the atoms that comprise it.  It is not "owned," except by the social agreement of the human beings that blorted it and a couple million like it out of some factory in China.  These are abstractions, part of a vast and complex game we human beings are playing.

For this little pup, just coming into awareness of himself and the selves around him, of course it's a bit confusing.  Why can't I play with the ball that's been set there for me to play with?  There are so many of them.

It confuses me sometimes, too.

Oakland, The Black Block, and the Ethics of Anarchy

Given the absence of any membership fee for the Occupy Movement, it was perhaps inevitable that there'd be the kind of unpleasantness that was seen in Oakland this last week.  Yesterday, the reportage of the actions of a few non-representative human beings was extensive, as the seemingly inevitable masked and black-clad young men smashing things made their always-welcome appearance.

Their actions diluted and distracted from what appears to have been an entire day of nonviolent direct action, as large crowds of demonstrators...families, kids, veterans, young people, blue-collar workers, and folks of all races and creeds...loudly but peaceably expressed their resistance to the structures of consumer culture that have cast our society out of balance.

Many media outlets identified the window-smashers and rock throwers as representing the actions of anarchists.   They're wearing black?  They're smashing things?  Must be anarchists.

Here, though, I must demur.

There were anarchists present in Oakland that day.  The anarchists, however, were the ones who showed up during the daylight hours.  They were the the students and moms and the kids and the workers.   They were the peaceful ones, the players of music, the chanters of slogans.  The smashers and throwers and breakers of [stuff]?  Not anarchists, not really.

Why not?  Aren't they the archetype of the anarchist, so definitive that they might show up in a children's picture book, under "A is for Anarchist?"

Anarchy, as I have and will continue to assert, is the fundamental ethical refutation of coercive power.   "No-power-over" is, after all, what that word means.  It stands in radical contrast to the power of the state and the subsidiary but related power of the marketplace.  It is not a system of government, but instead an ethic, a worldview that defines the actions of a human being no matter what the structural context in which they find themselves.

From that as a conceptual foundation, engaging in violence means that you haven't grasped or internalized the ethic you purport to live by.  Violence is, after all, the application of coercive power.  If you claim to reject coercion as inherently destructive to the integrity of human beings, and yet inflict direct and material harm on others to get what you want, then you have not internalized the slogans you wear on your black t-shirts.

You aren't an anarchist.  You're a hypocrite.

There is more to anarchy than saying "I can do anything I want, and no-one's the boss of me."  That is the ethic of solipsism, the delusional assumption that the entire universe revolves around you and your needs.  That ethic gets along just fine with consumerism.

Anarchy goes deeper, requiring an individual's rejection of violence even as a means of achieving their own needs.  For that, an anarchist turns to nonviolence, expressing their will while intentionally refusing to allow the ethos of violence to define them.

The folks who smashed and burned are no more anarchists than those men who recently attacked and cut the beards and hair of peaceable Amish-folk are Amish.

If you yield to the ethics and instruments of the Enemy, you serve the purposes of the Enemy.

Rand Paul, Racism, and the Libertarian Conundrum

This morning, I read yet another piece on Rand Paul, the libertarian son of libertarian icon Ron Paul. Dr. Paul, an ophthalmologist, is currently a Tea Party favorite, having won the Republican primary for one of Kentucky's Senate seats. He's...well...interesting. Yeah, he's youngish, and photogenic, and his family is photogenic. But unlike other tea party folks, he speaks with what to me seems strangely flat affect.

Though the talking points coming out of his mouth are red meat to the Tea Party folks, they are delivered as a slow, deliberate, passionless mush. In terms of rhetorical style, he makes Al Gore sound like Benito Mussolini. Populist firebrand he ain't.

I can appreciate that.

Dr. Paul has been attacked vociferously on the left following comments he made about the Civil Rights Act, which enforced integration in the South. This has been taken, I think, as some form of tacit pandering to the racism that still weaves it's way through some corners of the American South. That may in some ways be true. When politicians speak of the rights of the states and localities and corporations and individuals and against the federal government, it's hard not to hear echoes of the Confederacy.

But when Dr. Paul was asked about the Civil Rights Act by progressive talking head Rachel Maddow, it was something of a loaded question. His response...which was to muse in the abstract about whether it was a good thing for government to mandate actions on the part of businesses (meaning, in the context of that law, you have to serve non-whites) was immediately attacked as coddling racism.

Honestly, though, it wasn't. I don't for a moment think that Rand Paul is a racist. He's just articulating a consistently libertarian position. Government is bad. Period. Unfortunately, that philosophical resistance to all things federal works under the assumption that localities and groups of individuals will always act in ways that respect the liberties of others.

They...um...don't, you know. That, I think, is the biggest challenge for anarchists and libertarians. If every human being acted in accordance with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, living a life filled with compassion for strangers and the Other, then we could be anarcho-libertarian and all would be well. That's the character of the Basilea Tou Theou, way I see it.

But we are not now in that place, or rather, we are only there in part. Which means that in the here and now, there are individuals and groups of individuals who actively work to impinge the liberties of others. Government...particularly if it is by the people, for the people, and of the people...exists to protect the liberties of those who are oppressed. The exercise of the power of the state in defense of those liberties is not monstrous or oppressive.

It is, as both Paul of Tarsus and St. Augustine recognized, necessary.

Anarchism, Violence, and the Law of Liberty

Over the last few months, there've been some dark and disturbing echoes of the early 1990s. Back then, the political dynamics of American society echoed with the shouting of the Angry White Man. Because people were mad as hell, and weren't going to take it anymore. Mad about what? Well, you name it. They were mad about the Man. They were mad because they felt out of control of their lives. They were mad because things were changing, and they felt that this wasn't their country anymore, and dammit, someone out there was to blame.

That inchoate, formless, aimless rage was mostly directed against the gummint, and was tolerated right up until Timothy McVeigh detonated his van next to the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The bloody reality that the rhetoric created tamped down the hatred for a while...or at least the public acceptance of that form of speech.

Now, many Americans are up in arms about health care auguring in the Union of Soviet American States. There are again twitchings towards force of arms to resist the taking away of our fundamental right to be bankrupted by little Billy's hernia operation. Obama's election really did rile folks up, and the rhetoric on the blogs of America's ultra-conservatives has again become almost indistinguishable from the manifestos written by McVeigh.

Truth be told, the kamikaze attack on the IRS building in Texas and the recent shooting at the Pentagon aren't really Tea Party related. Both attackers were libertarian/anarchist, with a healthy dose of plain ol' disturbed human being thrown into the mix.

The challenge, of course, is that the radical and anarchic individualism that lives deep in the American id can swiftly turn to the use of force to fight the powers that be. It's a classic tool of the anarchist on both left and right, as sabotage and terror are used to undermine the power structures that oppress. You can't build a new world where you're free to do whatever you damn well please without doing some ending-of-the Fight Club destruction, or so the argument goes. Put on your black bandana! pour yourself a Molotov cocktail! You need to blow it all up, tear it all down, and then do a tabula rasa hard restart.

Problem is, this perspective doesn't strike me as truly anarchic. Anarchy is, as I grasp it from my admittedly Jesusy perspective, the radical opposition to human beings having coercive power over other human beings. It stands against both cultural and economic power structures because those power structures are almost invariably used to aggregate power in the hands of a few. It isn't really a particular socio-economic system, because the underlying assumptions of both societies and markets depend on coercive power.

The popular image of the anarchist, which many self-proclaimed anarchists have embraced, is completely at odds with the core ethic of anarchy. For those who reject the power of government and the market, the use of violence to resist that power means that you have internalized and are acting upon the very ethic of coercive power that you purport to reject. Inflicting harm or the use of violence to bring about a particular end is totally at odds with renouncing power over others.

When an angry soul strikes out against the Fed, or the IRS, or Wall Street, or the Pentagon, they aren't serving the cause of freedom from coercion. They are only showing that they haven't really internalized their resistance to power, and that they don't understand the Law of Liberty.

Which, I suppose, makes the Amish the only true anarchists. Or perhaps the Shakers.

So Ron Paul, Noam Chomsky, and Jesus Walk into a Bar...

Whenever my theopolitical ramblings show my disdain for capitalism, an old friend has taken to calling me a commie. This is just not true. I am not a communist. I would never, ever, ever describe myself as such.

I prefer the term anarcho-syndicalist.

Yeah, I know, I know. I'm the world's most insufferably bourgeois suburban anarchist. I've named it and claimed it. When I sit in the breakfast nook of my little two-story rambler, I'm not plotting the overthrow of the global hegemonic power structures. I'm just bustling kids off to school, drinking my coffee, and doing church work on my laptop while my puppy snuffs and chews in the background. Yet still and all, if I had to define my political philosophy, it would be some peculiar fusion of Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky, some blend of hopeful American libertarianism and clear-eyed free-will collectivism.

The reason for my perspective is, unsurprisingly, theological. Christian faith is essentially anarchic. It is also syndicalist. Why?

An honestly examined Christian faith leads to an anarchist perspective because Christianity is a faith tradition ungoverned by laws. We do not have laws. We have a single defining principle. That principle is the ethos of radical love of both God and the Other. It is a principle not just written down, but fully lived through the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

This "law" is not something we perceive as a "law" at all. It is not a coercive mandate, to be imposed upon others by force of arms or force of wealth. Those of us who have tasted of the presence of the Holy Spirit know that those ways of enforcing social norms are shallow, empty, and destructive. They are, to use biblical terms, "powers and principalities," and they cannot define our life together. When we are radically oriented towards the sovereignty of our Creator, those sociopolitical forces cease to have any governing meaning for us.

Instead, our governing purpose is an expression of the purpose and design of creation. We act on it not out of fear of physical or spiritual punishment, but out of joy in participating in a grace that radically transforms our reality. Jesus-followers are a people who have moved beyond the need for the Law to enforce social norms or moral behavior. The reality of our participation in Christ renders the law unnecessary. We haven't rejected it. We've just transcended it.

That does not mean, of course, that we're out there wearing black bandannas and lobbing Molotov cocktails at our local Dennys. That would defeat the purpose of our liberation. That purpose is...well...not just about us as individuals. Being rooted in a transcendent love, the goal of the Christian is not the furtherance of our own hungers or needs or wants, but the furtherance of that love. We do not burn with the fires of righteous hatred of those who oppress...because in Christ, we love them.

It is from that love that the syndicalist part comes in. Here, I wander off a bit from the classical form of anarcho-syndicalism. The "syndicates" that traditional leftism is talkin' 'bout are typically trade unions. According to that model, the way to get things done is to wave flags and parade around and go on strike. Stick it to the Man! Fight the Power! The Free People's Widget Collective demands twelve weeks of paid vacation, dental benefits, and a dark chocolate fondue fountain in the break room!

Therein lies the problem. Trade unions and other associations of common material interest are absolutely crappy at expressing the ethic that Jesus taught. While individual members of those associations might live according to the Great Commandment, the associations themselves seek their own collective power and profit. Individual human beings are capable of repenting and changing their attitude towards others. Nations and corporations and unions and associations have a much, much harder time doing this.

So instead, I see the shared expression of our anarchic faith played out most perfectly in the church. Why? Churches...real ones...are free associations. They act collectively out of a sense of shared purpose, undertaken devoid of coercion. While they have governing structures, real churches view those governing structures as structures of convenience, ones that are inherently imperfect. I follow the Presbyterian Book of Order because it helps frame and guide our life as a community. It does not make me better than Baptists, or Pentecostals, or Episcopalians, or Catholics. Well, maybe a tiny bit better than Pentecostals, but not so much that Jesus cares.

Real churches...meaning ones that exist for the joy of expressing Christ's love...also intentionally struggle against the power dynamics that can corrupt the lives of secular collectives. The church exists to serve others, and to support others, and to share joy with others. Healthy congregations look beyond themselves and don't see a world full of infidels, heretics, and enemies. They see children of God who are worthy of the free and generous application of God's love. Period.

I may have some difficulty persuading my session that we are, in fact, all Christian anarchists. A presbyterian anarchist seems almost a contradiction in terms. And yet, if we have the awareness that it is not our structures but the Spirit that matters, we are.