Raif Badawi, Faith, and Liberal Thought

After writing yesterday's post reflecting on violence and faith after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, I was painfully reminded of how very real the dark confluence of political power and faith remains.  Yesterday, I glimpsed a tiny blurb in the paper, less than a paragraph.  It was the story of a Saudi man by the name of Raif Badawi who was to be publicly flogged.  Fifty lashes, in front of a crowd, for the crime of "violating Islamic values and propagating liberal thought."

More specifically, Badawi created a blog called "Free Saudi Liberals," where he--as a liberal Muslim--engaged in free, peaceful, and open discussion about society and faith.

As rough as that might seem, it's just a drop in the bucket.  These are the first fifty lashes of a thousand-lash sentence, to be carried out over the course of a ten year prison sentence.  The quarter-million dollar fine, the Saudi state's forcibly divorcing him from his wife, and it's imprisonment of Badawi's lawyer for the crime of representing Badawi?  Horrid, but almost an aside given the brutality of the rest of the sentence.

Here, a man who did nothing more than I am doing right here.  He wrote about what he believed, about tolerance and a liberal approach to the integrity of other human beings.  For that crime, he will be beaten bloody in public, given one week to recover, then beaten again, twenty times.

It reminded me of the above scene, only repeated, once a week for twenty weeks.  Or twenty five weeks, as Jesus only gets forty lashes before the crucifixion.

What's remarkable, at least in my eyes, is how little play this is getting in the American media.  In Europe, it's everywhere.  In the Guardian.  In the Telegraph.  Our Canadian neighbors have noticed, and noticed the connection between Charlie Hebdo and Badawi.  

But on the front page of American CNN?  Nothing.  Nothing on FoxNews, either.

Wouldn't want to offend our dear Saudi friends and business partners, I suppose.  Especially after they've so nicely boosted our economy and punished Russia with all that cheap gas they're pumping.

Violence to silence speech is violence to silence speech, whether inflicted by terrorists or by a government.  And whenever it is used to enforce a belief, that belief is inherently illegitimate.

If a way of life cannot stand on its own integrity, without the gun or the whip to coerce it, then it is a false thing.

Liberal Christianity and "Sex Work"

Inara from Firefly?
She is not real.

Years ago, I found myself in Amsterdam.  It was the stopover point on a trip to west Africa, and I spent just about twenty four hours in the town, flying in one day, and flying out the next.

In the evening of that first day, I wandered the town, noshing on some forgettable Chinese in some dive restaurant, and then drifting about the streets taking in the sights.

One of the places my wanderings took me was the red light district.  I was in Amsterdam, and I was twenty, and I was curious.  What was this place like?  

Oh, I'd seen plenty of prostitutes before.  As in "seen with my eyes," and not "frequented."  Sorry, kids.  There's no Jimmy Swaggart salaciousness I can share on that front.

My home church, the place I was baptized and where my parents were married?  It's located on 14th street, which was smack in the middle of DC's flesh industry in the 1970s and 1980s.  You couldn't leave church after an evening event without getting propositioned for either sex or narcotics. 

It was not a safe place, meaning, it was exactly where a church needed to be.

But prostitution in Amsterdam was different. This was state-sanctioned. Safe. Respectable.

It was also, as I discovered in my walk through that neighborhood, really depressing.  There they were, in their makeup and lingerie.  Bored young women, sitting out in store windows, looking as sexual as a side of beef at Fuddruckers.  I thought about the women I knew, and saw my friends in those empty faces.  It was dismal.

There is almost nothing positive about sex work, something that was highlighted in an interesting recent piece in

This is real. She is 14 and homeless.

the Christian Century.  The author of that piece interviewed a sex-work advocate, who talked about the "business."  According to that advocate, individuals who work in that trade do so for two primary reasons.  

Reason one: they have been forced into it.  They are being trafficked, meaning they are either in debt-slavery or under physical coercion by an individual or group that is profiting from the sale of their bodies.  This is abusive, predatory, and monstrous.  It is also the primary face of sex work globally.

Reason two: they have been forced into it.  Wait, you say.  That was the first one!  Well, it's the second reason, too, only with a difference.  This coercion has to do with macroeconomics.  Meaning, individuals "choose" to become sex workers because they have no other economic choices.  They can't find work enough to sustain their lives and their families, and so they "choose" to fall back on what they perceive as their only remaining option.  It is a choice made of desperation, and reflective of the brokenness of the world around them.  It's like working endless, backbreaking hours on the line of a Foxconn factory.  Or an Amazon fulfillment center.  It is work of last resort.

Reason three: They're a member of a respected order of consorts, who roam the universe in a tastefully appointed shuttle, dishing out tea and sage advice to a carefully selected clientele.  Yeah, I'm sure in some universe that happens.  But in this one?  Not so much.

Given this reality, what confuses me, frankly, is the response of many of my liberal Christian brethren and sistren to "sex work."  There's much talk of supporting sex workers, of valuing them, of destigmatizing them.  This is all well and good.  Jesus doesn't ask us to take up stones, particularly against those who are powerless.  The way our culture penalizes and imprisons those who find themselves in that "business" is also absurd, given that it is almost never a chosen path.

But the elephant in the room, the one that many leftist Jesus folk seem unwilling to articulate clearly, is that sex work is fundamentally antithetical to a healthy, progressive, and faithful understanding of human sexuality.

It marketizes and commodifies human intimacy.  If we have a problem with the transactional character of our culture, and we value authentic human relationships, then this industry is one that is inherently problematic.  Wealth is a social proxy for power, and introducing it into sexuality fundamentally changes the character of what should be a God-given blessing.

It radically objectivizes other human beings, and does violence to their integrity as persons.  The same folks who defend sex work as legitimate have lately been describing oppressive and aggressively depersonalizing actions as "rapey."  Ever done that?  Then I'd challenge you now to go to Google Images, turn off Safesearch, and google the word "rape."  The people you will see are part of the sex "industry."  Once you've recovered from that horror, tell me that what you saw was a positive addition to human dignity and God's love for all God's children.

It relies on labor that is, outlier anecdotes aside, either physically or economically coerced.  As such, the best support for a "sex worker" is to provide either refuge or options to get out of the "business."

And then there's the whole Jesus thing.  If you believe that a commodified, depersonalized, coerced sexuality is a part of the Reign of God Jesus declared, tell me why.  Because no reading of any text or narrative tradition I am familiar with justifies such a belief as having integrity within the path Jesus taught.

Alright, fine, maybe Pope Alexander VI wrote favorably of it, but if that's where you're going, consider the company you're keeping.

Ultimately, the challenge for faithful Christians is not to demonize or condemn individuals who find themselves trapped in patterns of life that both depersonalize and are not chosen.  But neither is our job to affirm every path.

Agreeing With Rick Santorum

I don't, not really.   But as we're exposed more and more to the wit and wisdom of someone who actually has a conceivable shot at the nomination of the GOP, his vigorous...and I believe genuine...courting of the far right "base" of the Republican party has gotten him in a bit of trouble.   Two recent statements in particular have gotten him in hot water.   In the first, he suggested that when President Obama encouraged young people to go to college, that was a snobby thing to do.   In the second, he took issue with the idea of the separation of church and state.

Both of these statements haven't been received well, for reasons that are relatively obvious.   They should scare the bejabbers out of anyone who wants America not to emulate the dynamics of Afghan culture.

And yet there's truth in both of them.   Not the truth Mr. Santorum thinks is in them, but truth nonetheless.

Let's look at college education.  For Candidate Santorum, the issue with going to college is that...well...it makes you less likely to believe the way he believes.  The more you engage with the great thoughts of humankind, the more you study physics and biology, heck, the more you study religion and how it came to be, well, the less likely you are to share Santorum's belief system.   It doesn't mean you can't be deeply faithful, mind you.  But it does diminish the odds of you being radically, rigidly ultraconservative.

He's totally wrong about the value of education.  And yet, hidden under all the crazy, he's right.  He may not know it, but he's right.

As I've suggested before, that college is increasingly the only goal of our secondary education system is a problem.  Why?  A variety of reasons.   College just isn't for everyone.  Not everyone's vocation requires the engagement with the sorts of things you get as part of a liberal arts degree.   I've known some bright, successful, capable human beings who didn't go to college, and chose instead to focus on developing their skills in their chosen field.  Like, say, a guy I know who is a highly competent mechanic.  He was as driven and as called to that field as any teacher or lawyer.  A four year degree for him just would not have made a lick of sense.

If it was something you could do without incurring a huge debt?  Then, sure.  Give it a go.  But that is not where we are.  It would be pointless, if you are a young adult with a clear sense of what you want to do in life, to start your adult life tens of thousands of dollars in debt for an education that didn't prepare you for that life.  

And the idea that such a human being has less value?  Preposterous.  Offensive.  Absurd.  And though I'd like to say it isn't, assuming that an absence of higher education means less valuable is a real feature of our society.

And as for religion in the public sphere?   Well, Candidate Santorum shows here that he has no clue, none, why the separation of faith and state is so vital.   If the integrity of our republic is to stand, no one belief system can ever be permitted to use the power of the state to enforce its doctrines or teachings.  That would, rather obviously, impinge on the Constitutional liberties of all those who do not share that particular tradition.  It would also betray the essence of Christian faith.  

Santorum does not get this.   Nor, frankly, does he understand that when you step into the public sphere as a person of faith, you need to be able to articulate your faith in ways that resonate with those who do not share it.  This was the one great truth coming out of Richard Neuhaus and his classic work The Naked Public Square.  Neuhaus was Catholic, and conservative, but he understood the necessity of recognizing the dynamics of faith in a democratic culture.

But Rick may not have read that one, because, you know, it says the word "Naked."

And yet, again, there's truth buried under the crazy.  People of faith who are not hypocrites bring their faith into every action they undertake.   If we are citizens of a democratic republic and Christian, then the teachings of Jesus will inform our actions as citizens.  It will govern how we vote, how we speak, and our positions on social issues.   In so far as that is true, we are full participants in the public square.   We may also publicly declare that foundation, should we so choose.

But if our intent is to persuade others who do not share our faith of the validity of our position, then we must do so in ways that step outside of the language of our faith.   This is something that fundamentalists and ideologues do rather badly.

Mysticism, Liberalism, and Post Modernity

Yesterday, as I walked to get dinner on a clear and beautiful Fall evening, I found myself inexplicably musing on a tension that exists between my own strain of flagrant and unrepentant liberalism and the liberalism of post-modernity.

I'm unquestionably a liberal, by any meaningful definition of that term.   I think the first response that any sentient being needs to have to an encounter with the new or the different needs to be openness, consideration, and forbearance.   That leads me to be open to gays and lesbians, open to people of other faiths, and open to individuals of varying political philosophies.  It doesn't extend to tolerance of intolerance, violence, and hatred, of course, but otherwise, we cool.

Underlying that worldview is a rather fundamentally mystic view of the nature of existence.  I believe that all things are interconnected, that I and you and everything are woven together in ways that we understand only through a glass dimly.  That sense of interconnectedness is itself undergirded and founded on my Christian faith, as I see my Creator's work all around me, and the potential grace of the Nazarene and the light of the Spirit in every human being I encounter.

Here, though, if I am honest, I think my foundation for liberalism diverges from that of secular post-modernity.

As I grasp that worldview, the underlying assumption is that all meaning is socially-mediated or derived from particular individual contexts.  There is no "truth," at least not with a capital "T", beyond those truths that we fabricate for ourselves.  What is good is what we individually say is good, and it is not possible to make any assertion of the good that extends beyond individual preference.

Within the context of that radically individualistic and particularistic worldview, tolerance of other perspectives arises from the assertion that if no perspective is normative for all, then no perspective is invalid.   We must accept all perspectives, because our own is just ours.

While both can yield acceptance of the stranger, one is an ethos of separation and difference, another, the ethos of interconnectness and union.

This, I think, may be one of the more significant distinctives between being a progressive person of faith and a secular progressive.  

Defending the Bible from Conservatives

Just when you thought American conservatism could not jump the shark further than it already has, it has come across my desk that a group of ultraconservatives lead by the spawn of Phyllis Schlafly has decided it needs to correct the Bible. The Bible, you see, is too liberal. The Conservative Bible Project aims to fix that.

No, really. I can't believe it either. In fact, I was initially sure this was some sort of subversive performance art project undertaken by a mischievous progressive pastor. Heck, I wish I'd come up with the idea. But best I can tell, it isn't a joke.

On the Conservative Bible Project website, we hear that much of Scripture has been translated by "professors" and people who are "higher educated." They have a point there. If you spend your days studying koine Greek, ancient Hebrew, and Aramaic, there just isn't time enough to spend getting your daily requirement of talk radio.

These "Biblical Scholars" have rendered the Bible dangerously liberal. The language they used reflects liberal values which must now be replaced with proper conservative language. There are also sections of the Bible that are troubling to conservatism...so those sections will be deleted.

Three examples:

Number One: The project is deeply troubled by the use of socialist language. One example was the term "labor" and it's related term "laborer." Labor is another way to describe unions, which are opposed to free market values. It's clear evidence of liberal influence. I checked in the Bible to see if this was true. Lo and behold, it is. In the King James Version, the term "labor" is used one hundred and six times. Clearly, the team of liberal academics convened by King James I in 1604 were under the influence of the AFL-CIO. I'm not sure what word will be used in the Conservative Bible, but I'll guess "independent contractor" and "consultant" are in the running. I look forward to reading their version of the Parable of the Independent Contractors in the Vineyard.

Number Two: The language used is unclear. It needs to be refined. Take, for instance, the terms "Holy Ghost" or "Holy Spirit." That could mean anything. So those terms are out. Instead, the Conservative Bible Project uses the term "Divine Guide." And no, this isn't Oprah coming up with this. It's the far right. Really.

Number Three: Some of what Jesus said was too liberal. The project in particular targets Luke 23:34, which I defended here in terms of language and context just a few weeks ago. The idea that a) Jesus would forgive people and b) that he seems to forgive them based on their ignorance of His True Nature flies in the face of conservative teachings about personal responsibility. The Conservative Bible Project condemns these words of Jesus as a "Liberal Falsehood." So out they go.

Curiouser and curiouser...