ISIS and the Purposes of God

"It's all part of God's plan," we like to say.

"It all works together for good," we say, part of the mysterious plan of God's providence.  This was something, frankly, that I used to believe myself.  We just let go, and let God, and all will be well.  All we have to do is trust that it'll all work for the good.

But as my faith has evolved and grown over the decades, I no longer believe that to be so.  Most particularly, I no longer believe that every action of every human being is part of the divine intent.

The recent actions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria seem an agonizing case in point.  As they butcher their way across that troubled region, murdering and enslaving and raping, all of the bloody and difficult work to rebuild Iraq seems close to unraveling.  Whether we should ever have poured the lives of our citizen soldiers into that misbegotten quagmire in the first place is another, painful matter altogether.

Right now, though, that mess seems only to be deteriorating, spinning down into the dark chaos of ignorance, violence, and tribalism.

From that mess, the release of a video in which ISIS beheaded American journalist James Foley really did strike home.  As the son of a journalist who spent time in that troubled region, I feel the anguish of his family and friends strongly.  How would you watch as your loved one is forced to speak words he does not believe, and then is butchered like meat?  What a monstrous thing.

More significantly, how does a human being do such a thing to another?  And not just to one man, but to many, many others.

It is that latter reality, the actions of the ISIS members, that I cannot claim as part of some broader overarching divine plan.  Nor, frankly, would I ever tell someone that the murder of their loved one was a necessary part of God's plan for our lives.

It is not.

I believe this, oddly enough, because I will not allow myself to deny the humanity of the individuals responsible for this horrific act.  It would be easier to write them off as monsters, because they act as monsters.  That would make it easier to cope with them, and far easier to kill them.  Dehumanizing the Other always makes it easier to kill them.

But they are sentient beings, albeit ones who have chosen to live under the thrall of a monstrous ideology.  They are still free to choose their actions.  It is what makes them culpable, ultimately.

If God had structured creation as one single linear narrative, in which there was only one beginning and only one end, then this would not be true.  The members of ISIS would just be part of that story, and the blood and the suffering they inflict would have always have been their purpose.  God's purpose.

And if it is God's purpose, then they are not to blame for their actions, not in any meaningful sense.  If there is no freedom, there can be no sin.

I no longer believe, because it does not seem to be so, that there is only one way things can happen.  That's just not how God made things.

And if creation is not just one story, if we are indeed free to choose to move down other potential paths, then our choices count.  The Creator has laid out, clear as crystal, what it means to live rightly and in peace with one another.  If we choose the hateful path of bloodshed and sorrow, then God will allow us to shape our time and space into that dark thing.

Is that God's gracious desire for us?  No.  Neither is it necessary for us to choose that path.

Turn away, God says.  Turn away, because you don't need to live as you are living.  If only more of us realized that.

Walking Away From Iraq

When do you walk away from an irresolvable mess?  When do you walk away from a mess that you yourself made?

After over a decade of American military engagement, tens of thousands of American casualties and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, Iraq today is falling apart.

As U.S. forces have stood down, the nation that we've left behind crumbles like a drying sandcastle in the desert wind.

Mosul has fallen, as 30,000 U.S. supplied Iraqi troops fled the city before an advancing insurgent force of 800.  In the north, Kurdish rebels have seized Kirkuk.  So much effort, so much energy, so many lives, and it is not possible to say that it made anything better.  Different?  Yes.  Better?  No.

There are reasons for this.  Iraq itself was held together by despotism.  That--as in Tito's Yugoslavia--was what gave that nation-state cohesion.  Assuming that waving the magic wand of democracy over a people will suddenly change the social dynamics?  That was, is, and will always be a tragic neoconservative foolishness.  Democracy must arise organically.  It cannot be imposed.  Empire?  That you can impose.  But a republic must be the creature of the people who yearn to be its citizens.

Our adventurism there, undertaken under false pretenses and with amorphous goals, has been a disaster.  I feel that strongly for the Iraqi people, who have and do suffer mightily.  But I feel that equally strongly for the men and women of our military.  These are Americans, my fellow citizens, doing their duty with honor, and being sent--for decades--into a bloody fray that served no coherent strategic or national purpose.

Now that we're finally out, things are collapsing.  The false stability we provided--the illusion of a nation-state, maintained only through our agency--is gone.

There will be those, as there always are, who want to double down.  Our only weakness was lack of commitment, they will insist.

And yet I can't imagine, not for a moment, that America has a heart to throw itself back into that fray.  The mess there is ancient and deep, and goes well beyond the cruel despotism of a now-dead tyrant.  There are hatreds and lines of conflict that run deep into the culture of that region, ones that have not been worked through to the point of resolution.

That we broke through the surface of one mess does not mean that the problem was solved.  We just shattered the evil that was repressing another evil.  Had we been thinking longer term and seeing clearly, we'd not have acted as we did--or at least been willing to acknowledge our motivations.

So now, with one mess replacing another, we are left with mess.  We cannot spin it as success.  Nor, frankly, does doubling-down work.

From church life, I know this.  If a ministry or church is failing, and has critical flaws in its assumptions about life together, pouring energy into failed efforts does nothing.  Simply "doing it harder" does not work.  It must be done differently.  It must be re-created.

But if a failing community does not want to live together differently, then it will fail, no matter how much energy and noise it pours into the process of doubling down on "the way we've always done it."  That desire for change must be organic, rising intrinsically from a repenting culture.  In a church, that desire is a work of the Spirit, given freely, and responded to freely.

Where that change comes in a society?  I cannot say, as I'm not quite sure even our fractious republic has that one down yet.

Again, the values of the good culture--freedom, tolerance, mutual care and a sense of shared purpose--cannot be imposed.  They can be taught, and modeled, and encouraged.  But they cannot be imposed.

Which is why sometimes, if you've modeled and worked and tried, and still nothing has changed for the good, you need to walk away.