Zionism Unsettled and Conflict in Small Spaces

It's such a little place.

That's an American bias, but so it goes.  It's a little sliver on the map, a slender fleck nestled on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.  Just a tick over 10,000 square miles, which sounds like a whole bunch, until you realize it's just a third of the size of my ancestral Scotland, and a quarter of the land mass of my home state of Virginia.

It seems odd that such a small patch of earth would have such an outsized influence on the global conversation and my own faith, and yet it does.  This is the land the Creator of the Entire Universe gave to his Chosen People?  This is where my entire sacred story arose?  Point Zero Zero One Eighth Of One Percent of the dry land on one tiny little planet in this functionally infinite multiverse?

Lord, you baffle me sometimes.

It's so small.  So fragile and precious.  Like that hoped-for child, born too soon, their frail body filled up with tubes, struggling for breath.

I was thinking about small things, yesterday, as I read through another of the books for my doctoral research.  My focus: small churches, those intimate communities in which ties of blood and relationship run deep.  I am not studying small communities through the lenses of the American Big Church, but rather looking at them for what they are: Little tribes, in little places.  Those communities can be beautiful, joyous, life-giving and intimate.  They function on a deeply human scale, unlike the giant shiny Jesus Malls of AmeriChrist, Inc.

In that, little churches have much to offer us.

But when a small community fights, it burns bright and hot with the focus that comes with limited space and longstanding relation.

In a tribe, you can't just take the American approach to conflict, which is to polarize and then storm off to some other place where everyone is exactly like you.

In a tribe, there is no other place to go.  You are defined by that network of relationships.  They--and the limited space in which you are both rooted--are you.  Conflict is inescapable in close quarters, and managing conflict effectively there is both hard and necessary.

As I read through the carefully researched principles of effectively moving through conflict in intimate community, it played out across my mind and resonated with my recent re-reading of a controversial publication of a subgroup of a committee of my denomination.

Zionism Unsettled, it's called.  There's been much discussion of the place of such a publication in the life of the Presbyterian Church (USA).  Should we endorse it?  Should we disavow it?  Should we refuse to even distribute it?

This document comes as we Presbyterians are trying to find a way to make ourselves servants of God's peace in the thickets of a multigenerational level-five conflict in the Holy Land.  It's a mess, tight and hot as a family-church argument.

Zionism Unsettled speaks from one partner in that conflict.  It arises from the slightly misnamed Israel/Palestine Mission Network, which was established by the church for the express purpose of creating ties to the Palestinian Christian community.  That, it has clearly done.  As such, it articulates that position, and does so in a way that legitimately articulates the heat of the argument.  It's a more measured document than others I've seen, but it is explicit about its purpose: to express the pain of the Palestinian people.  It does that, and like all anger, it's worth hearing.

But against the principles of conflict resolution as they play out in tight-knit communities, it cannot be the basis for Presbyterian engagement with that conflict, not if we are true to our calling to serve peace.  Why?

Does it accept the faith of the Other?  It is hard to see that it does.  "Simply put, Zionism is the problem," it says.  Meaning that the hope for Zion--a central part of Jewish identity--is stated as the issue.  The issue is them, it says.  By defining the Other's best hope in terms that radicalize and demonize, it cannot be a foundation for deescalation.

Does it define the conflict neutrally and mutually?  It does not, because it speaks--explicitly and intentionally--from one perspective.  That is a legitimate perspective, and one that needs to be heard.  But it is not enough.

Does it clarify the point of conflict?  Sort of, in that it articulates the struggle to find a mutual place in the land, and expresses some of the tensions that conflict creates.

Does it reflect critically on self?  No.  Reading through Zionism Unsettled, there is no meaningful treatment of Palestinian violence against Israelis.  I will not, not for a moment, apologize for Israeli aggression or oppression.  It's a real thing, and a part of this conflict.  But there's no meaningful treatment of the mutual cycle of violence.  Terrorism, we hear at one point, was taught to the world by Israel.  No mention of Palestinian hijackings, or killings, or suicide bombings.  Nothing.

"O Lord, They have our blood on their hands" may be a true statement, but it is not the foundation for healing.  "Oh my God, I have your blood on my hands" is where that begins.

Does it establish a joint purpose?  It does not.  It is primarily a deconstruction of the Other, not a document that seeks vigorously and intentionally to build common ground.  That is implicit in its title.  Deconstruction has its place, but it ain't what you do when you want to build something.  Sorry, my pomo folk.  That only goes so far.

Does it celebrate and hold up places of agreement?  Here and there, it tries.  There are whispers of that hope throughout the document.  It is worth honoring that attempt, so hard to do from a place of such deep pain.

So how to relate to such a document?  I think it is important to hear it, and to stand in relationship to it.  To that end, it is important that we not tell those experiencing pain and oppression that they have to shut up, and that we will not share their voice.  It's good that we're no longer seriously considering removing that perspective from our denominational web presence.

But it is equally important to be clear: if we are to serve peace in the heat of that intimate, tribal space, we have to stand not with one party or another.  If Zionism Unsettled was presented as the official position of our denomination, we'd be doing just that.

We need to be clear that it is not.

It's a hard place to inhabit, those close quarters of relationship.  It is easier to go with the bright clarity of binary conflict, to let the certainty of pain and fear become your narrative.

But if we--friend to both, torn by our love for both--are going to step into the heat of a conflict in a small community, we need to do the harder thing.

Whether the fragile breath of peace survives in those little places is the business of our Maker.

“We Have to Burn a Muslim and Eat Him.”

The headlines have been particularly ugly, but they are not even close to the horror that lies within the articles.

The ugly news comes out of the Central African Republic, a landlocked but resource-rich African nation that is--despite its mineral riches--crushingly, desperately poor.   After an armed Islamic movement from the north overthrew the government and installed their own leader, the country has been trapped in a cycle of violence and retribution.  The conflict between the Muslim community in the North and the majority Christian communities of the South is spiraling out of control.

Most headlines articulate this as a war between faith traditions.  Islam and Christianity at war!

It's typically brutal stuff, so much so that it's easy to either turn away or tune it out, but one story really stuck with me.

It involved a single death, that of an unarmed Christian man who wandered into the wrong neighborhood.  He was killed by an angry mob, one that had, in the manner of mobs, become convinced that he was carrying grenades to attack a nearby mosque.

He wasn't, of course, but that made little difference.  He was hacked with machetes, and his throat was cut, and then he was hacked at some more.   Then his mutilated remains were dumped near a Red Cross base.

When his body was returned to his neighborhood, the reaction was intense.  The article reports fear, of course, and sorrow.  And rage.  Among the reactions noted by the reporter who observed the scene:

“All the Muslims will die in the country,” vowed one woman, shrieking loudly.
And as Pumandele’s body arrived in his neighborhood, a dirt-poor, mostly Christian community, one man yelled, “We have to burn a Muslim and eat him.”

That last statement just stuck with me, particularly given the assumption that this is primarily Christian/Muslim conflict.  When an angry, frightened human being screams such a thing, where does it come from?  A conflict between competing faith claims?  Is this a statement that reflects an interfaith disagreement?

I cannot see it as such, at least not from my side of the fence.

Rage at the loss of a neighbor and friend will stir such a reaction.  It's human.  If one of my friends or one of my children had been killed, I'd feel it too.  I'm not sure about the eating part, but rage does all manner of disproportionately horrible things to the object of a violent intention.

But as a reaction, the yearning for revenge is not a Christian yearning.  Oh, sure, Christianity has been used to justify all manner of terrible things.  Amazing, how easily a tradition can be warped.  At the heart of our faith, though, there is no justification for retributive violence against an enemy.  It is radically antithetical to everything we believe.

One can bend and warp what Jesus taught to legitimize vengeance or violent coercion, sure.   Or that sense of Christian identity can just be washed away in the blood-red fury that we feel when "we" are threatened, as a family, a tribe, or a nation.

But that reaction, very human, very primal, is decoupled from the teachings of Jesus in such a radical way that describing it as "Christian" seems fundamentally inaccurate.

It finds no foundation there.  Its heart lies more in the claims that power has over us.

Cleansing the Temple

Over the years, the story of Jesus whomping on the moneychangers and the sellers of temple livestock has become one of my least favorite passages of Scripture.

There's a reason for this, of course.  Christians get all temple-cleansy when we're at our most vociferously self-righteous, when we're most eager to toss out the heretics and the unbelievers.   We all want to be Jesus, stomping into the temple and snapping his whip like Indiana Jones, while the Apostle Short Round scampers around around poking' 'em in the knees and generally being annoying.  We particularly want to be this way when we are faced with those who don't see the world the way we do.

I've heard that passage from Mark 11 pitched out by conservatives eager to rid the church of the apostate worldly corrupt influence of liberalism.  Clearly, the moneychangers represent the interpersonal decadence and corrupting influence of libertine culture.  I've also heard it mirrored right back by those on the left who are eager for the church to be rid of the hateful, bigoted voices of patriarchal oppression.  Clearly, the moneychangers represent the reactionary forces of cultural stagnation and capitalism.

It's the primary proof text we go to when we're looking for an excuse to fight, hate, and demonize others.  Given how often I see it paraded around, you'd think it was as important as the Sermon on the Mount in its entirety.  Watching it used as a biblical warrant for scorched-earth hatred on both sides in an intractable church conflict was deeply painful.

But this week, in perusing John's version of this story, I found myself noticing something I can't remember ever seeing before.  Sure, I might have seen it, but maybe I didn't remember.   As John tells it...and John is as ever the minority report in the face of the unified witness of the Synoptics...there was a detail that just sprang out and bopped me on the noggin.  John places the story at a very different place in the narrative, right near the beginning, reflecting the very different purposes of that Gospel.

That wasn't it, though.  I knew that already.

What got me were a couple of details that John has that are utterly missing from the other Gospels.  John is the only story to mention the whip of cords, a familiar image if we're visualizing the tushie-kickin' Jesus lays out.  There is another detail, though.

In John, Jesus does not use that whip to attack the sellers of animals.  Instead, he "drove all of them out," but by all of them, the Gospel writer means "both the sheep and the cattle."   He also poured out the coins and knocks over the tables...both objects, not people.  And he tells those selling doves to "Take these things out of here!"

He gets those dogies rolling, sure.  But what is most markedly lacking in the Johannine version is an attack on the persons themselves.   Jesus assails the system that comprises the ritual economy that has sprung up around the temple.  He actively disrupts it.  What he does not do is go a-whuppin' the people.  He challenges them, sure.  But as John tells it, he does not seem bent on driving them out, too.

That is a non-trivial difference.

We may not like that version as much.  It doesn't satisfy our hunger to put a hurting on those who oppose us.

But there are times when the minority report is worth hearing, just so we don't imagine that every conflict we want to justify is as important to God as we'd like to think it is.

The Evolution of Presbyterian Conflict: An Abstract

In order to understand the conflict dynamics of the Presbyterian system of church polity and governance, it is first necessary to examine the way in which the constituent members of this socio-ecclesial unit developed.   Specifically, we must explore the adaptive and evolutionary pressures that shaped the genetic precursor of all modern Presbyterians:  The Scotsman.

Presbyterianism has shown considerable cross-cultural memetic robustness in the globalized faith milieu, establishing itself successfully in both sub-Saharan Africa and throughout East Asia.  However, in order to develop a robust and testable paradigm for understanding Presbyterian polity cross-culturally, an ecclesio-genetic assessment of the Scotsman's dialectic of difference becomes necessary.

In a recent journal article (Williams et al., "Dontcha Be Lookin' Under Thair, Laddie: The Archetypal Kilt in Contemporary Presbyterian Socio-Sexual Conflict Dynamics," Journal of Evolutionary Ecclesiology 59, 2010), I argued that the dialectics of difference that manifest themselves in Presbyterian parliamentary decisionmaking are radically formed by the neurocranial evolution of the Scotsman.

The primal Scot approached issues of disagreement and social krisis in a unique ethno-martial way.  Confronted with economic ("Ye pae me wha ya owe meh, ya hamshanker!") or interpersonal ("Tha's ma waif yar humphin', yah feckin' baz!") disagreement, the primal Scot did not rely on traditional manual or pedal technique for resolving conflict.

Instead, the reflexive instinctually-mediated reaction of the Scot facing a territorial challenge is to rapidly accelerate their neurocranial os frontale (forehead) into the considerably less-structurally sound nasal, sinus, or maxilla region of their conflict partner.

This "headbutt" or "MacDougall Reflex" (MacDougall et al, "Ooo I'ma Breaik Yer Faice: The Neurocranium and the Church of Scotland, 1873-1952,"  Congregational PseudoScience Quarterly, 7, 1996) meant that individuals with larger and more prominent os frontale features were more likely to be favored in socioeconomic, interpersonal, or territorial conflict.  This conveyed a statistically significant reproductive advantage.

exhibit a

Over tens of thousands of years of Scots evolution, the net effect was to produce individuals with significant and prominent os frontale (see exhibit a).  To support this large bone mass, the frontal lobe of the Scot expanded accordingly, producing an incidental and entirely accidental increase in cognitive ability.

The combination of the "MacDougall Reflex" with the collateral expansion of cognitive function provides us with a clear causal ecclesio-evolutionary link to current Presbyterian polity.   Robert's Rules of Order, for instance, at its essence provides a socio-linguistic proxy for reproducing the classic Scots dialectic of difference within a parliamentary system.  Within the framework of parliamentary procedure, the essential principle remains the same.

It's still just banging our heads together.

This understanding of the socio-genetic precursors of the Presbyterian system of governance represents a significant advance in our understanding of the underlying character of our polity, and presents many opportunities for further research.

Engaging Conflict: The Man in the White Hat

This Sunday was a bit rough.  My sermon, which was technically a fundraising sermon, was brutal in it's frankness.  Leavened with humor, sure.  But the message was clear:  all is not well.

The Bible study that followed was equally rough.  There's much to commend the little community I serve, but it faces some immense challenges, challenges I feel unable to meet.  As we enumerated the issues facing the church, like a huge building that slurps up precious time and resources and a fellowship life that is deep and strong...but more like a family than a church startup...I made a point of noting another challenge the church has faced over the past several years. 

That challenge was my own dislike of conflict.  And I do dislike it.  Having watched as conflicts blew apart the church with which my community is yoked, and having worked to resolve the tensions within my own fellowship that have sapped and impurified our precious spiritual fluids, I know how destructive conflict can be.  I naturally prefer to be collaborative, to find consensus, to seek common ground.  But sometimes, that just doesn't work.  Barack, I'm talkin' to you, my friend.

Conflict can be necessary.  Communities that are undergoing change must experience conflict if they are to grow.  Systems that haven't worked, don't work, and will not work need to be dismantled if a community is to thrive, and honey, that means somebody's gonna get riled.  The question is, how do you go about that?

One of the gathered group joked that my fear of conflict might mean I "fought like a girl," and made flappity motions in front of himself to demonstrate.  I joked back that, no, I fought mostly from an armadillo-like fetal position.

This, however, isn't really true.  This church has required me to intentionally engage in conflict.  I perhaps haven't done it as much as I should have, but Lord knows I have had to do it.  When I have, it's usually in the form of simply being firm and clear about where I stand, and why.   It's about being strong but not hostile.   It's about presenting people with truth, but not beating them up about it.  Do I get angry?  Sure.  Anger can be useful, but only as an emotional indicator that something is wrong.  Acting while in the heat of anger only deepens wounds.   Instead, you have to be willing to use that energy to actively resist broken things without contributing to the brokenness.

As I was writing this post, I encountered a striking video (thanks, Jonathan!) that shows some pretty amazingly constructive use of conflict.  It's a scene of mob violence in San Fran last night, shot from a police helicopter, in which a drunken crowd "celebrating" the World Series attacks some people in a car that tried to drive through them.  It's ugly stuff...but watch it, and look for the Man in the White Hat. 

He enters from the bottom of the screen at around 10 seconds, as the mob pounds on the car.  For the next two minutes he aggressively asserts himself.  He talks people down.  He pulls people away.  Finally, he interposes himself physically between the remnants of the mob and the people in the car.  He stays there until the cops arrive...and doesn't leave until the event is over. 

Is he engaging in conflict?  Yes.  He's right there in people's faces.  He is physically moving them.  He is physically preventing them from doing harm, and in doing so is taking a significant risk.  He is hardly passive, and hardly nonconfrontational.

But his attitude is clearly not one of anger, and it makes a difference. 

That is conflict done right.

Discover Your Conflict Management Style

The second of the churchy books I've been tasked with reading deals with a question that is really quite significant.  The question is:  "How do you deal with conflict?" 

This is a big one.  As much as we'd like to imagine that church is where we all gather around to eat buttered crumpets and be kind and sing happy Jesus songs, the reality is that managing disagreement is an absolutely vital skillset.  If you are somewhat conflict-averse, or have approaches to conflict that aren't constructive, then Bad Things will happen to you.  That's true in life, and it's really most sincerely true if you lead a congregation.   Having just watched point blank range as a congregation with a dysfunctional approach to conflict blew itself to pieces, I can attest to the importance of knowing how to deal with disagreement.

The book is another Alban Institute publication, this one entitled:  "Discover Your Conflict Management Style," by Speed B. Leas.  It includes a conflict style assessment tool that sorts out your conflict management preferences into a six-category typology of conflict management preference, and then lays out what each of those different categories means for how we manage disagreement.

A few thoughts:

Plus Side:  His name is Speed.  This is, in and of itself, awesome.  He's a demon on wheels, baby.

Plus Side:  The self assessment tool included with the book is useful.  It's always helpful to have an interactive component to teaching any concepts, and being able to see where your preferences lie relative to what's being presented helps reinforce it.  Knowing that you tend one way and that you've got approaches that you actively prefer really does help grasp how you're going to act...and whether that tendency is constructive.  It would be easy to skip through a book like this assuming you aren't ever going to deal inappropriately with a disagreement, and nodding your head at the wisdom without realizing you don't ever put that into practice.  The assessment tool is a good reality check.

Plus Side:  The core typology of conflict management being presented is logical and feels complete.  Each of the six approaches to conflict make sense, reflecting the spectrum of how we tend to deal with the stuff that could...or does...divide us.  They do occasionally blur into one another, and occasionally it seems that one category has morphed into two or more, but so it goes. Approaching conflict in this way seems generally constructive.  Leas has laid out a solid set of criteria, and they really are helpful in getting your head around this issue.


Negative side:  Layout Matters.   If what you're doing is writing a story, or an essay, this matters not.  But this isn't a book book.   It's only 30 pages long.   It has sections you're supposed to write in and mark up.  It's a workbook.  And as a workbook, it needs to own its workbook-ness.  If the first exercise you want folks to do is at the back of the book, and there's information you don't want them to get to until they've done that exercise, well, put the exercise first.  Or put it right after the introduction. 

It feels clumsily assembled.  That sense of structural awkwardness is reflected in the conflict inventory, which really does feel like it was laid out in WordPerfect back in 1996.   It continues elsewhere, as the categories blur into one another, as individual sections seem to start arbitrarily, with few visual cues that you've just transitioned.  It's not critical, but when you find yourself working around the awkwardness of a layout as you navigate and score an assessment instrument, it doesn't lend confidence.  It could use some editing, and a reprint after a graphic designer has gone over it for usability.

Negative side:  Conflict Context Matters.  As I worked my way through the questionnaire that was assessing my conflict management style, I found myself struggling a bit.    I'm aware that while I'm far from perfect in dealing with conflict, my own responses to disagreement tend to depend on the nature of that disagreement.  Are we working through divergent options for a new worship schedule?  Then I'm going to be "collaborative."  Am I discussing the right of women to be ordained leaders in the church?  Then I'm going to be "persuasive."  Am I dealing with someone who has been sexually harassing another congregant?  Then I'm going to be "compelling," in the way that a man-portable rotary cannon is compelling.   The booklet recognizes this in the narrative sections, and notes the ways in which different styles and approaches can be appropriate.  But I found myself longing for an instrument that somehow integrated this into itself.  One possibility would be laying out short descriptors of conflict situations of varying degrees of intensity, and then having the respondent answer questions based on that context.  That would help assess whether you're able to read a conflict environment well enough to apply an appropriate strategy.  Trying to be "collaborative" in an intractable stage 5 conflict, for instance, would be an exercise in futility.

This booklet is, ultimately, a useful tool, even if it's a bit frayed around the edges.  Though it comes out of a publishing house that focuses on church issues, it's not really a "faith" book at all.  Unlike other lightly baptised organizational literature, it makes no effort to position itself as church-focused.  I appreciate that.  It's just a general guide to dealing with disagreement and the messes of organizational life.  

No Good War

Earlier this week, there was a small demonstration here in DC. That's not even vaguely unusual. There's always a small demonstration here in DC. The event was in front of the White House, and was a group of progressive organizations gathering to protest the war in Afghanistan.

Opposition to the war in Afghanistan is now the majority position among progressives in the United States. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center showed that 56% of Democrats favor removing US/NATO forces from the region as soon as possible.

I dislike war. I dislike it intensely. It is among the most broken of human institutions, and is in almost every way antithetical to the core virtues of Christian faith. It is never, ever, ever a good thing, any more than an amputation is a good thing. But here I part ways with the majority of my progressive brethren and sistren. The conflict in Afghanistan is not one we can walk away from.

Both the Taliban and the al-Qaeda cells that they so willingly incubated are the mortal enemies of pluralist democracy and progressive values. The systematic terrorizing of the Afghan people prior to 2001 was monstrous, and there is no reason to believe that our withdrawal would result in anything other than that for Afghanis.

Permitting Afghanistan to return to it's pre-2001 state would also be a catastrophic strategic error, as egregious a mistake as our misbegotten war in Iraq. Yes, many Americans are tired of war. Our sense of national purpose following the 9/11 attacks was utterly squandered. But we can't delude ourselves into thinking that the Taliban pose no strategic threat to the United States or our allies. Sure, they themselves do not. They have no capacity for military operations on a global scale. But the safe haven they provided for Bin Laden cannot be permitted to re-emerge.

The conflict in Afghanistan isn't a good war. No war is good. But some wars are necessary.

Celebrating Interfaith Conflict

Interfaith struggles have never made a tremendous amount of sense to me. Given that pretty much all of the world's religious traditions reject the idea of violence and embrace love for the other as somehow central to existence, it remains an amazing testament to human smallness that we continue to use faith as an excuse to have at one another.

This afternoon, in a moment of random faith-based dithering around on the internet, I encountered a lovely little side-scrolling flash beat-'em up, in which you can pit the iconic figures of all of the world's great religious traditions against one another. It's like that online classic Bible Fight, only for Unitarians.

The creators of the game have come under fire, predictably, from Islamic organizations outraged at the image of the Prophet. Why they don't like his nifty-keen flame attack is beyond me. The little game studio that made the game has since taken it off line...but, the Internet being what it is, it's going to be around for a while.

I'm more concerned, frankly, that the creators of the game imply that the Holy Spirit Attack can be used by both the “Father” and the “Jesus” character. That’s clearly taking the side of the Western church in the 880 Council of Constantinople, and exacerbates the filioque schism between Eastern and Western churches that began in the year 1054. The last thing we need to do is open up that can of worms again, eh?

And there is the little matter of the game folks totally misidentifying Krishna as Buddha. Oh well.

Even if it is just a tiny bit irreverent, the game is both funny and intentionally poignant. It clearly is a commentary on the religious hatreds that have torn and wracked humankind…even when those hatred are antithetical to the teachings of the founders of the faiths in question. As a follower of Jesus of Nazareth and a gamer, I’m completely in favor of such truth-telling.