Orientalization is an objective offence: answering our objectors

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Asian American, Benedict XVI, Chinglican, cross, cruciformity, epistemology, forgiveness, Hong Kong, Josh McDowell, objective truth, offence, ontology, orientalization, relativism, resurrection, Rick Warren, Saddleback, Theology

Last week, one of the big stories in evangelical news concerned a fairly heated conversation that Asian American and Hong Kong evangelicals have been having about Rick Warren’s Red Guard Facebook photo. Unintentionally, this blog participated in bringing this issue to a wider public. The story was also picked up by the news media, keeping the issue public even while Warren has deleted the photo, issued a response on one of the most visible bloggers’ blog, and apologized conditionally on his public Facebook wall.

The question that some have asked us is: now that there has been an apology, why have we left our blog posts up?

Our answer has been that it is important to maintain the integrity of the public record. But this is not enough for some who object to what we are doing. For our objectors, that sort of answer is a secular one, that to be public is to be ‘worldly’ (as opposed to being ‘churchly’) and that to be on the record is to fail to love Warren; after all, doesn’t St. Paul tell us that ‘love keeps no record of wrongs’ (1 Cor. 13.5 NIV)? Accordingly, their charge against us is that we are not being Christian. Here are some of the more popular ones that I hear:

• Rick Warren has done a lot of good for the kingdom. By leaving the posts up, you are damaging his ministry by tarnishing his reputation. He took down his post and apologized. Shouldn’t you take down your post before you wreck his ministry?
• I’m not offended. I’m sorry if you were. Even so, Rick Warren has apologized because you are part of the group of highly sensitive people that was offended. Shouldn’t you stop focusing on yourself and your pride and refocus on Jesus?
• If you keep the post up, all that the outside, non-Christian world will see is Christians bickering. That is a poor witness, and you are making it worse. How will the world understand us by our love? How will the church be able to reach the world for Jesus when all we do is fight?
• You need to reconcile with Rick Warren. Reconciliation can only happen when you forgive him. Forgiveness means that you have to wipe the slate clean, just like God does with our sin.
• I am not perfect. Rick Warren is not perfect. You are not perfect. Who are you to judge Rick Warren? You would never want to be judged like you judge him. That’s why Jesus says not to judge.

What our objectors want is a theological answer. This is it.

The short answer is: we have left the posts up because we are Christians, and our theology is orthodox.

In the late modern world, Christians who practice orthodox theologies have often felt themselves besieged by a world that no longer believes that truth is objective. Objective truth means that what is true exists outside of one’s subjective experience and remains true despite attempts to subvert it in favour of alternate ideologies, especially powerful political interests. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI called the modern loss of this sensibility the ‘dictatorship of relativism,’ the notion that in a world where truth is merely reduced to one’s individual perspective, then the stories that are told in that society will be co-opted by powerful individuals and institutions with the ability to stamp their version of truth onto the world and call that ‘the truth.’ For those of our critics who are uncomfortable with a Catholic citation, note well that this has also been a common evangelical complaint, one that is often heard in apologetics classes written by Josh McDowell, church-state relations seminars using the work of Charles Colson and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (oops, I did it again: another Catholic!), taught especially by the neo-Reformed tribe to defend their allegiance to the Gospel’s propositional truths, and generally complained about by culture warriors opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, ideologized public education, and the encroachment of the state onto matters of religious freedom. Although the writers of this particular blog have often felt that the theological divisions between Catholics and evangelicals are becoming increasingly artificial, we grant for the readers of this particular post that they are still separate ecclesial entities. And yet they agree on one core contention: that truth is objective.

Without stating our position on the above culture war issues, we affirm as orthodox Christians that we believe in the objectivity of truth.

From Kathy Khang’s reflection on Warren’s public apology, we know that Khang believes strongly in the objectivity of truth. After all, she meant what she said when she wrote that she ’emailed Rick Warren and there is no “if”.’ She is saying that her being offended by the image is not merely a subjective feeling. Unlike Professor Sam Tsang, neither Khang nor her Korean American family had any connection with the Cultural Revolution. So too, Tsang, who spent the last weekend preaching at a retreat hosted by a pan-Asian American church whose origins are Japanese American, told me (and I quote with his permission), ‘I heard from my Japanese brothers and sisters when I preached this weekend. loud and clear, We’re with you!‘ These non-Chinese Asian Americans had no subjective reason to be offended. But they were. This is because the offence was objective.

What was objective about the offence was its complicity with a process of orientalization.  Orientalization is the process by which ‘orientals’ are made. ‘Orientals’ are a collective image of Asians and Asian Americans as collectively different from persons from the West, a set of images that regards them (as Edward Said famously put it) as static, backward, conservative, kinship-oriented, and immutably exotic. As theologian J. Kameron Carter describes it, orientalizing ideologies have been responsible for the problem of race in modern theology, including (as he fascinatingly makes the argument) the enslavement and subsequent subjectification of African Americans in American life. This is because modern orientalizing ideologies conveniently located those of different coloured skins from ‘white’ Europeans as inferiorly different, which meant that they could be colonized, traded as objects, and subordinated into inferior positions. Indeed, despite recent conflicts in the last twenty years between Asian Americans and African Americans, scholars and activists of race have long recognized that their common experience of racialization should have made it easy to develop solidarities between the two groups. That solidarity is hard to come by is a subject for another discussion.

The point, though is that orientalization was, is, and continues to be a process of continual offence, regardless of how it is received subjectively. This puts to rest the notion that the offensive Facebook photo could not have been offensive because some Asians and Asian Americans–perhaps even a large swath of them–were not subjectively offended by the post.

No, we believe in the objectivity of truth.

Accordingly, we observe that the initial Facebook photo post was offensive because it objectively objectified Asians and Asian Americans. This was an offence because it treated Asians and Asian Americans as objects, not as persons. There is a difference. A person is someone with whom one shares communion. A person has agency to converse, has the ability to either agree or to disagree, is capable of talking back and thinking and walking together with people with whom he or she can relate in the myriad of ways that persons can. An object has no agency. An object cannot be communed with. An object has no agency to converse, has no ability to either agree or disagree, is incapable of talking back and thinking and relating. Orientalization is the process of reducing Asians and Asian Americans from persons to objects.

Whatever one feels about being treated as an object and not as a person, and whatever one intends in even the accidental, ignorant proliferation of images and discourses that perpetuate this objectification, is irrelevant here. The objective truth that treating people like objects and not as persons is a violation of any person’s objective dignity as an imagebearer of God himself. In short, the objective truth that is declared by the Christian faith is that all humans are made in the image and likeness of God and thus have dignity as persons. To objectify another human–that is, to deny a human being his or her personhood and agency by reducing him or her to an object–is to offend against this objective truth. This objectification need not be subjectively intended; in other words, Warren did not need to have any malicious intent in posting the photo of the Red Guard. Neither does this objectification need to be subjectively received as such; the result was that, of course, some Asians and Asian Americans were fine with Warren’s humour. Instead, the process of objectification describes an observable, objective effect: objectively speaking, does the photo with its caption treat Asians and Asian Americans as persons with whom to be communed or convenient objects to be used as the butt of jokes? Was this the image of a person made in the image and likeness of God, or was it the image of an object that could be conveniently used to make a funny point?

Warren’s initial response suggests that the latter is true. That Warren then declared ‘it’s a joke!’ indicates, regardless of whether he was thinking this or not, that it was inconvenient for him that the ‘orientals’–the objects–were talking back as persons. He did not need to think this. Again, we are looking not at his subjective experience, but the objective, observable situation. His message was this: ‘orientals’ should not talk back; ‘orientals’ should be content to be the objects that they are; ‘orientals’ should not be listened to as persons. Those offended were framed as ‘orientals,’ suggesting that the ‘oriental’ image displayed on the photo should not be read as a Red Guard with whom communion can be shared. She was an object–an ‘oriental’ object–whose sole function was to make a funny point.

Our contention is that attempts are now being made to twist this objective truth. Warren’s initial defence achieved an interesting twist on the relationship between persons and objects. Warren then explained that the ‘disciples’ would have understood his humour while the ‘self-righteous’ would not have comprehended it. Perhaps unintentionally at a subjective level and likely without malicious intent, Warren was saying that Asians and Asian Americans are to be regarded by the disciples of Jesus Christ–the church–as the objects of jokes and those who would dispute this use of humour are the ones who are self-righteous, the ones that would in turn crucify the Lord of glory.

Understanding this theological twist is key to comprehending why it is that those who are arguing for the objective, dignified personhood of Asians and Asian Americans have been suddenly framed as the enemies of Christ. Regardless of Warren’s interior motives, the theological effect that has been achieved is that those who are defending the personhood of Asians and Asian Americans are framed theologically as the offensive aggressors, the ones who are now crucifying Warren for his use of humour. In so doing–again, regardless of personal motive–Christian theology has been rewritten. Defenders of personal dignity are framed as aggressors. Those whose actions (regardless of intent) result in the objectification of persons are described as Christ-like martyrs. The irony could not be more striking.

This theological twist is magnified by the attempts to erase and rewrite the public record. To advocate this is (according to our objectors) to advocate forgiveness and grace. From the deletion of comments on Warren’s Facebook wall calling for a public acknowledgement of the objectiveness of orientalizing offence to the vitriolic objections of our objectors pleading for us to delete our posts, attempts are being made to ‘wipe the slate clean.’ It is in this context that Warren’s response on Professor Sam Tsang’s blog and his conditional apology on his public Facebook wall should be read: they are attempts to wipe the slate clean without acknowledging the objective truth that orientalization is an objective offence against the dignity of human persons. As theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it in Discipleship, this is ‘the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.’

Although Tsang acknowledged Warren’s first response as an apology, it is better described as a responding comment. In this comment, Warren stated that the photo was ‘instantly removed.’ Whatever one’s subjective interpretation of the passing of two days might be, this is not objectively true. It is objectively true that Warren’s ‘instant’ response was to suggest that those who did not find his joke funny were ‘self-righteous’ whereas those who were giggling were like the ‘disciples.’ Moreover, Warren tells Tsang to contact him ‘directly.’ A better word choice here is ‘privately.’ Attempting to hide the objective truth that this incident began publicly, the response here wipes that slate clean and puts the blame on Tsang for not approaching him through a private channel. Khang then attempted to do exactly as Warren said: she sent an email to Warren ‘directly.’ It was met with a generic, indirect response. This suggests that ‘private’ is indeed a better word.

As Khang eloquently states, the effect of this maneuver (whatever its intent) was that she was ‘silenced.’ Indeed, that initial response generated three tactics by which the objectively existing public record has been fudged. In particular, the tactic that has been used is to turn the objective offence of orientalization into a subjective experience. First, Warren himself touted his credentials as someone who initially wanted to plant a church in Japan and then the doors were closed. Second, immediately after this comment, L2 Foundation’s D.J. Chuang (himself a member of Saddleback Church) then commented on each of the bloggers’ walls (including this one) reiterating, ‘That post was removed immediately and personally by Pastor Rick as soon when he learned how the photo was offensive.’ Third, Asians and Asian Americans themselves–likely without any prompting from Warren or Saddleback–began to accuse the bloggers of failing to represent the universal experience of Asians and Asian Americans, for many proclaimed themselves that they did not feel offended, that is, that they did not subjectively process the objective offence of orientalization as a subjective offence.

Note: though these photos are from the public conditional apology and have a later date than those described in these present paragraphs, they illustrate the types of comments that have occurred. As Khang notes, earlier comments that would have been available were deleted along with the original photo.

In so doing, the record–the objectively existing public conversation that exists outside of Saddleback’s private control–has been fudged. Warren declares his solidarity with all Asians by touting his missionary credentials. An Asian American himself comes to Warren’s defence on each of the blogs. Asians and Asian Americans unhappy with the bloggers declare that they are not subjectively offended. The problem is that none of these responses got at the heart of the objective offence of orientalization. To be missionary minded toward Asians does not erase an act of orientalization. To have a prominent Asian American evangelical come to one’s defence does not lessen the objectivity of this offence. To have Asians and Asian Americans declare that they did not subjectively receive the offence as an offence does not mean that it was not an offence. Orientalization is an objective offence. But this process of damage control has subverted the perception of orientalization as objective. It is now subjective simply because people now say it is.

And the result is that those who protest the objective offence of orientalization are silenced. Khang tells us that she ‘felt silenced.’ No, Kathy, you do not only feel silenced. You were objectively silenced.

Following the publication of a Religion News Service article, though, Warren then issued a public conditional apology on his Facebook wall. The apology was conditioned by an if: if we were offended, then the apology applies to us. What this amounts to, however, is the further subjectification of an objective offence. It suggests that the offensiveness of orientalizing objectification is conditioned by how it is subjectively received. It means that if someone is not offended, then an image that strips human persons of dignity by turning them into objects is not offensive for some people. Kathy Khang is right to object to the conditionality here: ‘Words matter,’ she says. Or to quote her in full:

There is no “if.”  I am hurt, upset, offended, and distressed, not just because “an” image was posted, but that Warren posted the image of a Red Guard soldier as a joke, because people pointed out the disconcerting nature of posting such an image — and then Warren told us to get over it, alluded to how the self-righteous didn’t get Jesus’ jokes but Jesus’ disciples did, and then erased any proof of his public missteps and his followers’ mean-spirited comments that appeared to go unmoderated.

I am hurt, upset, offended, and distressed when fellow Christians are quick to use Matthew 18 publicly to admonish me (and others) to take this issue up privately without recognizing the irony of their actions, when fellow Christians accuse me of playing the race card without trying to understand the race card they can pretend doesn’t exist but still benefit from, when fellow Christians accuse me of having nothing better to do than attack a man of God who has done great things for the Kingdom.

Khang is objecting to the process of objectification being framed as just another subjective experience. It is not subjective. It is an objective offence. There is therefore no ‘if.’

To resist this silencing, our objectors say, is to fail to forgive. In so doing, we are accused of being the ‘self-righteous’ who are crucifying Warren, tarnishing his reputation, and bringing shame to the church by continuing our bickering. To cease to be objects of orientalization, to assert ourselves with the personal dignity that is objectively ours by virtue of our creation, is to sin, according to our objectors. Our actions are described as prideful; our assertions are characterized as divisive; our call for Asian and Asian American agency is judged as judgmental. Our objectors seem, in short, to be able to wield the power to define what is good and what is evil. On the other hand, we as orthodox Christians committed to the objective truth of the person are not only incapable of wielding such strange sovereignty; we refuse to do so because we understand this seizure of truth to be eating from the very tree of the knowledge of good and evil for which our ancestors were cast out of paradise. And yet for not capitulating to our objectors’ theological rationality, we are labeled as the ones who should be cast out of the church. Indeed, this has already happened to at least one of us this week: Professor Sam Tsang has been asked repeatedly by our objectors whether or not he is a ‘born again Christian.’ Our objectors are powerful. They have, it seems, the power even to excommunicate.

In other words, the situation in which we find ourselves has degenerated precisely to the point where it could be called a ‘dictatorship of relativism,’ a scenario in which what is true is dictated by might and not by an objectively existing truth that cannot be bent by the powerful to their own interests. By calling this present situation a dictatorship of relativism, we in no way imply that Rick Warren is a dictator. We are saying instead that our communion with our brother, Rick Warren, has been co-opted by a relativist ideology. This is a sad state of affairs because relativist notions of truth hold no possibility for objective forgiveness and reconciliation.

They preclude it.

The objective of this practice of relativism is to return this present situation to a certain status quo, a situation in which Asians and Asian Americans are not in active conversation with Warren, the state of affairs that existed prior to Monday morning. In this status quo, however, Asians and Asian Americans will not have been reconciled to Warren as persons. We will still be objects, ‘orientals’ who cannot and should not speak back. But this ‘peace’–this constructed harmony in which there will be no more visible contestation–does not return us to the objective truth declared by the Christian faith that all humans are created as persons in the image and likeness of God. It leaves us with a situation in which the objectified are still objects and the persons are not reconciled.

An orthodox Christian theology bears witness against this dictatorship of relativism. An orthodox Christian theology insists on the objectivity of truth and insists further that that objective truth is to be found in the person of Jesus Christ. It is from Jesus, not from our objectors, that the cross is truly understood, that the forgiveness of sins is achieved, and that the communion of persons is realized and restored. It is because truth is objective–it exists outside of what anyone says it is–and it is objectively found in Jesus.

‘The light shines in the darkness,’ the Gospel according to St. John (1.5) begins, ‘and the darkness has not overcome it.’ The true light of Jesus Christ’s objective truth subjects this dictatorship of relativism to a crisis. While the discourse has fudged the objectivity of objectification, we recognize in Jesus, the very image and icon of God, that redemption means the restoration of all human dignity from processes of objectification. As St. Irenaeus puts it in his interpretation of the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of one like a son of man coming as the glory of God, ‘The glory of God is a human being fully alive’ (Adversus Haeresus IV.20.7). Confronted with the person of Jesus Christ, the subjectifying logic of orientalization crumbles. ‘The time is fulfilled,’ the Lord declares (Mark 1.15), ‘and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the Gospel.’

From Jesus, we understand that the cross was the last resistance of those who wish to pronounce for themselves what is good and what is evil. By challenging the logic of objectification, Jesus challenged the reduction of persons into objects by the powerful to preserve their own interests. For doing this, Jesus was betrayed, beaten, flogged, and crucified. Jesus was silenced. But in that process, that which was hidden from the foundations of the world was revealed. The challenge to objectification provoked the murder of the Lamb of God. Objectification is revealed as a process of violence, for its perpetrators and defenders must silence, must fudge, and must kill those who object to the reduction of persons into objects. But by killing Jesus, the power of such dark practices is broken, for the illegitimacy of their actions is revealed. As St. Paul says of the cross, ‘He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it’ (Cor. 1.15). The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

From Jesus, we then understand forgiveness to be the love that he shows us in his resurrection as an embodied person, seeking not vengeance but communion with those who abandoned him and crucified him. Having rendered the power of sin and death powerless by exposing its illegitimate core, Jesus does not return in vengeance. He rises from the dead to love the very people who abandoned him and killed him. He calls Mary by name. He breathes the Holy Spirit on the followers who abandoned him at the cross. He invites St. Thomas to put his finger in his nail marks and his hands in his side. He reinstates Peter with the words, ‘Feed my sheep.’ He sends the Holy Spirit on the church at Pentecost, from where the people that St. Peter accuses of crucifying Jesus grow into the first Jerusalem church. This is forgiveness: the maintenance of the cross on the public record as a moment when the things hidden from the foundations of the world were revealed and exposed, and yet the unexpected embrace of the crucified one toward those who did not know that they had killed the Son of God. In his resurrection, Jesus forgives, and the cross is transfigured–it is not erased–into an instrument of love. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

From Jesus, then, we understand the church to be a communion of persons, the very Body of Christ that lives out the objective truth at the core of our common existence: that we are made for communion with God and with our brothers and sisters. If orientalization has happened in this Body, it must be confessed, exposed, and forgiven. That it has no place in the church does not mean that it does not happen. When it happens, it must be revealed and not fudged; it must be judged and not excused; it must be confessed and not covered with fig leaves. As St. Peter writes in his first letter (4.17), ‘The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God.’ The result, as St. Peter emphasizes in his entire letter, is that the church will perfect its communion in visible suffering, with its members clothed with humility. Indeed, the truth that would be manifested in the love that is shown would finally ‘cover over a multitude of sins’ (4.8). The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

And thus, if our critics have only the view that we must participate in their revision of Christian theology, then we must refuse for the sake of our participation in the objective truth manifested in Jesus Christ and handed down by his apostles. As St. John proclaims in his first letter (1.5, 7), God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. We must then walk in the light as he is in the light.

This, then, is what forgiveness entails. It is to call Rick Warren into fellowship with his Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters as persons, not as objects. This manifestation of communion must not be hidden from the world; it must be manifested in the full, visible unity between himself and those whom he mistakenly objectified. Warren must thus acknowledge that he, though likely without malicious intent, committed the objective offence of orientalization. He, as well as his followers, must commit themselves to a fuller communion with their Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters. In particular, he might himself accept the invitation to a public conversation about the lingering offence of orientalization in the church, seeking to discern with us all how we might live in the power of the Holy Spirit as ‘the holy catholic church, the communion of saints.’ That catholicity would be the sign that the kingdom of God is among us, that Jesus is present, and that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

No, It Is Not Self-Referential

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Anglican, Archbishop of Canterbury, Benedict XVI, Canterbury, Caritas in Veritate, Catholic, Catholic social teaching, catholiclity, communion, critique, ecumenism, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Friedrich Schonborn, Humanae Vitae, John XXIII, Judaica, Judith Butler, Justin Welby, labour rights, Leo XIII, love, Mater et Magistra, neo-evangelical, ontology, Paul VI, Pius XI, Pope Francis, Prophetic Critique, Quadrogesimo Anno, Rachel Helds Evans, Rerum novarum, socialism, Tim Challies, witness

Addressing an Anglican conference at Holy Trinity Brompton yesterday, Friedrich Cardinal Schörborn declared that the election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio to the papacy as Pope Francis was due to certain strong, supernatural ‘signs’ before and during the conclave events. He then compared the appointment of the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to the election of the pope, calling it a ‘little miracle’ and ‘a sign from the Lord’ for the churches to move to closer unity.

By now, readers of this blog will know that such a declaration is the sort of thing that makes me ecstatic, both in the emotional and charismatic sense. After all, I am an Anglican, but I self-identify as catholic, and I am often conflicted over calling myself ‘Anglo-Catholic’ because I am not an Englishman and harbour no desire to return to that odd, dominating construct we once called the British Empire. That is why, after all, I’ve styled myself a ‘Chinglican.’ For some, these ambivalences may read as falling precisely into what Pope Francis–then Cardinal Bergoglio–condemned prior to the conclave: the ‘self-referential’ Church as a sick, old, and dying Church because it fails to participate in the missio Dei.

Indeed, even when I was an evangelical–that is, when I thought like an evangelical, I spoke like an evangelical, I reasoned like an evangelical–I was accused of being un-missional because it was alleged that I was more interested in church politics, contemplative spirituality, and complex theological terminology than in making the faith accessible through attractive programming and simple language. One time, for example, I was in the home of an evangelical mentor when I pitched the idea of having a class on eschatology, as many people to whom I had spoken (both those in the church and not) expressed a curiosity about the Last Things. He raised his finger and pointed at me: ‘You,’ he said. ‘How dare you. People are lost, and all you want to do is to make things more complicated. Our job is to make things easier for people to understand so that more people can teach this stuff. Who do you think you are?’

He was, in short, calling me ‘self-referential,’ a traitor to the cause of the mission to expand the kingdom of Christ through evangelism and discipleship.

It has been years since this experience, but I finally have a reply. To make my response, I’d like to appropriate critical theorist Judith Butler’s reply to those who call her anti-Semitic for criticizing Israeli state policy: ‘No, it is not anti-Semitic,’ she says, because of the internal contestations within Judaic tradition about the state and because she is hanging on to a narrative of dispossession and precarity within Judaica. In the same way, my appeals to the Christian tradition, particularly a revisionist Anglican one with a deep desire for fuller catholicity, can be framed similarly.

No, I say. It is not self-referential. This is because of the inconvenient fact of Catholic social teaching.

After all, May 15 is the day that we celebrate the promulgation of decisive encyclicals in Catholic social teaching: Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, Pius XI’s Quadrogesimo Anno, and John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra. Now, Catholic social teaching can often be confused with Catholic sexual teaching. After all, most of what people know about Catholic social teaching is drawn from Monty Python’s ‘Every Sperm Is Sacred’ in The Meaning of Life, a hysterically hilarious lampooning of Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s encyclical condemning artificial birth control as contrary to the natural gift of children through the unitive and procreative sex act. It’s so funny, in fact, that you should see it yourself:

To be sure, this misconception is not altogether unjustified. It has in fact been highlighted in recent forays into public politics by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in their opposition to the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate to require religious organizations that do not only serve members of their own faith to insure their employees for artificial contraception, including medications deemed by the bishops to be abortifacient (like Plan B). In addition, it’s fairly well-known that the current Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, was the ‘godfather of Proposition 8‘ when he was bishop of Oakland, raising money to promote a grassroots initiative to write into the state constitution that California only recognizes marriage between one man and one woman. Most recently, Archbishop Allen Vigneron has also told Detroit Catholics who disagree with these socially and sexually conservative stances to refrain from taking communion, implying that opposition to contraception and alternative kinship structures is the definitive Catholic view on sexual and social relations.

Whatever your stance on sexuality issues and traditional family values, these bishops’ interpretation of Catholic social teaching isn’t necessarily wrong or even misguided (it is, however, a particular strand of Catholic sexual teaching emphasizing natural law that is debated among Catholics). Instead, what you can say about it is that it elevates a part of Catholic social teaching that’s actually fairly latent in the encyclicals I just named. It’s actually a bit of a derivative dogma, something that can be drawn out of the concerns of Catholic social teaching as articulated in Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum.

See, Catholic social teaching is best articulated as a Catholic response to current political economic conditions, namely, the threat of unfettered market fundamentalism, what sociologist Max Weber would call the ‘iron cage’ of industrial capitalism with its disenchanting bureaucratic logic permeating everything it touches in the world, what Leo XIII called the ‘new things,’ rerum novarum. While commending socialists for attempting to better labour conditions, Rerum novarum rejects a socialist ideology that places property ownership in the hands of the state and out of the hands of workers themselves. Proposing a Catholic alternative to socialism, Leo XIII emphasized human dignity, arguing that it is the state’s duty to protect the dignity of workers, even as workers themselves had the right to own property, pursue human development in the arts, and make personal time for family. That‘s where the family doctrine comes in: Leo XIII affirmed the family as a basic unit of social relations to which all workers had a right as a matter of basic human dignity. In other words, workers have a right not to be subjectified by the state or the market into cogs in their industrial machine; their human dignity with the basic need for creativity and sociality must be fully recognized.

That‘s Catholic social teaching in a nutshell, a key theme that carries through the encyclicals that the Church is in solidarity with workers as they contest state and market modes of subjectification for their right to basic human dignity.

Anglican though he is, Justin Welby has taken Catholic social teaching as a sort of guiding light in introducing a new social priority to the Church of England: going after the corrupt banks that got us into the global economic mess that we’re in. What is needed, Welby argues, is a whole different way of imagining and managing the financial system, where the banks are not self-serving, but instead see their institutions as serving people. This is very close to what Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in Veritate, where the Pope Emeritus notes that both justice and the common good both emanate from a will to love and that what is probably needed is a global financial regulator to keep markets from becoming unfettered.

This is why the healing of schism is so important. The Church’s role is not simply to speak words of love; it is to demonstrate it in action. Longing for the recovery of Christian tradition for the sake of healing schism is not self-referential because there is a distinct social priority at the heart of catholicity: bearing witness to the reality that there is another way of being in the world. Who knows what this will mean for Canterbury and Rome? If Bergoglio’s words to Anglican Southern Cone primate Greg Venables is any indication–he told Venables that there was no need for an Anglican Ordinariate because Anglican charisms were already a gift to the church catholic–might it be possible that the next few years might hold within it a full return to communion between the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church? Might this in turn signal a new springtime for Catholic social teaching in which the Church will be seen as decisively on the side of the poor and fully oppositional to any sort of self-serving institution that neglects the common good?

Home reunion in turn might clarify some of the things that came to light in the tenure of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. I’ve often noted that both did a fantastic job at one key thing: managing to polarize their entire communions on the left and the right, even as an impulse to catholic reunion has sort of been latent among the faithful, slowly rising to the surface. The appointment of Justin Welby and the election of Pope Francis doesn’t signify a break with Williams and Ratzinger. It’s a sign, as Schönborn put it so eloquently, that the Church is coming into all the truth, that the Spirit is moving among the people of God to rebuild the witness we shattered through our schismatic actions. Indeed, as we saw in Welby’s ‘Journey in Prayer’ pilgrimage through rural and urban dioceses in the Church of England, as well as Pope Francis’s coming out onto the loggia and then into the midst of the people to the chagrin of his security detail, we saw two prophetic priests emerging in the power of the Spirit declaring to the people of God that the time has come, the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel, the Gospel not as an ideology, but as a whole new way of being that places love and forgiveness at the basis of human dignity, justice, and the common good. In short, in the faces of Justin Cantuar and Pope Francis, we are seeing Jesus and following him.

And yet, here is where those obsessed with developing distinctive theological identities will cry foul. Home reunion, it might be alleged, will soften distinctive points in Catholic and Anglican theology, riding roughshod over disagreements over papal primacy, the role of women, the place of LGBTIQ populations, the veneration of saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary, the scientific inerrancy of Scripture, and the alone in justification by faith. In fact, as Rachel Held Evans pointed out in a post yesterday, it seems that it is evangelicals who are becoming more and more obsessed with constructing a distinctive identity, one that is becoming narrower with each blog post. In the spirit of attempting to remain distinctively evangelical, for example, the latest denial of Christian catholicity comes from Tim Challies, who rejects ‘mysticism’ as a subjective experience that challenges the inerrant authority of Scripture. Evans takes Challies to task by showing him how much she has grown from reading widely in the Christian mystical tradition. She even goes as far to say that Scripture cannot be a mediator between humans and the divine because we have no need for a mediator.

Here is where I can offer Rachel a bit of a corrective, as well as a parable for those who might oppose any sort of catholic reunion for ideological purposes. Our faith is mediated, but not by the Scriptural text, yes. It is through the sanctorum communio, what Bonhoeffer noted in his doctoral dissertation was the social manifestation of Christ in the present. To that end, we might note that Justin Welby offers evangelicals a different way forward, one that calls evangelicals out of being ‘self-referential.’ Welby has quite the evangelical life story. After all, he came to faith through the Alpha Course through the evangelical Holy Trinity Brompton, a church that has also given evangelicals some of their cherished anthems like ‘Here I Am to Worship,’ ‘Everything,’ ‘Beautiful One,’ and ‘Consuming Fire.’ But unlike much of the anxiety among evangelicals over a distinctive evangelical identity, Justin Welby has no trouble taking on Catholic social teaching as a moral compass. Neither is he averse to conversation with Rome–one that will prove to be interesting in the Franciscan pontificate–nor is he unaware of the vast diversity of theologies, liturgies, and politics in the Anglican Communion. Justin Welby might thus serve as an example to evangelicals on how to be an evangelical. His story is also a parable to those who entrench themselves in ideologies that are inimical to catholicity. You see, evangelical identity is not achieved by being self-referential. It is by participating in the mission of God through the church that is becoming more catholic as the Spirit leads us into all truth. In the words of the Lord Jesus, it is to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow our crucified and risen Lord.

Co-crucifixion and the new sociality effected by the Resurrection are hardly self-referential.

Dispatches from the War on Christmas 2012

Tags

Benedict XVI, Charles Taylor, Christmas, culture wars, ecumenism, First Things, Hannukah, IHOP, Jewish-Christan relations, Jon Stewart, Maccabees, N. T. Wright, Peter Leithart, Reform impulse, secular, secularization, Stephen Colbert, War on Christmas

I’ve heard an awful lot this Advent season and Christmas octave about keeping “Christ” in “Christmas.”  Blame it on me, maybe, for being a religious studies guy hanging around evangelical circles, but I swear, it’s more than the local churches with the signboards (or in the suburb where I live, the IHoP) displaying a sign with said call to conserve Christ in Christmas. Everybody seems to be talking about it: local pastors decrying the decay of secularism, worship leaders sermonizing before they lead their worship set, whispers among the laity about how terrible public schools are for disemboweling the season of any meaty references to the Incarnation.

Sure, keeping Christ in Christmas has been a staple of the “war on Christmas” that Fox News alleges to have been happening in a secular(izing) West.  I say “alleged” because Jon Stewart has a fairly convincing refutation of the notion.

But apart from pulpit thundering in evangelical churches and pundits on Fox News, the battening down of the hatches for the Christ child seems to have been an in-house affair.

This year, though, it seems like even that house is falling apart, for not only is there a secular war on Christmas, but a theological one.

First Things first. As Churl noted (and I commented recently), Peter Leithart thinks that we should not only keep the Christ in Christmas, but the canticles there too, songs like the Benedictus Deus, the Magnificat, and the Nunc Dimittis that he thinks no Christian knows. One wonders, of course, how the Divine Office app keeps on getting voted About.com Readers’ Choice Awards’s “Best Catholic Website, Podcast, and Mobile App” yearly if that really is the case.  No matter, though, for Jeffrey Barbeau has written a rejoinder to Leithart, attempting to put the supposedly denuded Christmas hymns in the violent context of the English Reformation and Civil War.

For both Leithart and Barbeau, the Grinch who stole Christmas is none other than biblical theologian N.T. Wright, who seems to have been right about everything ever since his NT tomes hit seminary bookstores in the early 1990s. For Leithart, it’s Wright’s historical scholarship that has thankfully stolen Christmas away from the allegedly inane, apolitical songs we sing about the Christ child, no crying he makes. For Barbeau, Wright is a bit more of a bogeyman in Leithart’s hands, forgetting the political violence of early modern England because he doesn’t tune into BBC’s The Tudors. Move aside, John Piper: the Reformation has a new anti-Wright defender.

Either way you look at it, the central theological problem here is Wright on history: what happens to theology when you put the messiness and violence of historical reconstruction back into the picture?

And that brings us to the Holy Father. With the release of the third installment of Jesus of Nazareth on the infancy narratives, Pope Benedict XVI has been met with wild protest about how he, like Wright, has stolen Christmas. Secular protest about his historiographical method aside (courtesy of The Guardian), Vox Nova has a very interesting post on Benedict’s view of history that makes him sound eerily similar to Wright. The Bishop of Rome may affirm the historicity of the infancy narratives, but like Wright, it would seem, the affirmation of history in and of itself has played into a theological war over how political Christmas should be. Add to all of this L’Osservatore Romano‘s statement on how same-sex couples live in an “alternate reality,” and we find the pontiff in the real Grinch-y pickle of fighting the secular powers that be with the weapons of Christmas.

Wright, Leithart, Barbeau, the pope, his detractors, and First Things may all be stuff sophisticated Christians like these days. I mean, we must be smarter than the masses of co-opted American Tea Party fundamentalist-evangelicals clamoring for Christ in public Christmas pace Bill O’Reilly. But really, if this is what I’m reading this year in First Things, I don’t see much here that’s different from Fox News’s War on Christmas.

After all, Charles Taylor would call all of these skirmishes over the Christ in Christmas–be it his existence, his presence, or his nature–an “impulse to Reform” a “rage for order.”  The idea, as Taylor outlines it, was that in late medieval Christendom, there were a series of “reforms” where spiritual “elites” attempted to purify the practices of the masses and bring them to a higher form of spiritual intensity.  These reforms, as Taylor shows, looked like things as diverse as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Protestant Reformation(s), and the formation of Calvinist city-states in early modern Europe.

What’s hilarious in Taylor’s account is that it’s precisely this impulse that led to the secularization process in the first place. As Taylor reads it, this “rage for order” coincided with the development of “civility” in early modern Europe where states tried to discipline would-be citizens to be able to directly participate in the workings of a civil society.  This created a sphere of action where some practices could be thought of as merely “natural” without any “supernatural” engagement, and in time, the conditions of belief changed such that there wasn’t much of a need to consider spirituality seriously in the public sphere, although private fascination with individual spiritualities where you’re on this quest to find personal fulfillment would always “cross-pressure” this emphasis on the immanent. Give these cross-pressures enough time, Taylor hints, and these new religious subjectivities will begin to contest the very meanings of secularity.

And this brings us back to the plethora of theological views on the War on Christmas. What’s fascinating about all of them is that they are all strangely modern and can even wear the odd secular costume. Give Wright, the Holy Father, and Fox a little read, for example, and what you might find is that at stake is a fairly modern understanding of history, be it Wright’s critical realism, Benedict’s historical criticism, or O’Reilly’s rights of the religious majority. I mean, it’s perfectly OK if Wright wants the prodigal son of history to come home to the older brother of theology. But can we “sophisticated” modern historian-theologians all please remember that maybe we shouldn’t be behaving like secular academics and pundits at Christmas?

So in the spirit of Leithart, maybe I can suggest something both radical and old-fashioned at the end here, courtesy also of N.T. Wright. Anyone who has managed to actually read The New Testament and the People of God will be struck by how prominent a role the Maccabees play in Wright’s narrative. Moreover, anyone who has been following the daily mass readings leading up to Advent will have gotten an earful from the Maccabees in the first readings.

But what Wright notes about the Maccabees in relation to Jesus’ theology of the Kingdom of God was that Jesus upended the Maccabbean ideal of a messianic warrior with a “double revolution,” confronting the will to power in both Jew and Gentile, enacting a kingdom founded on a different ontology altogether. (OK, sorry, I stole “double revolution” from tome #2: Jesus and the Victory of God.)

And that brings us back to Jon Stewart. In 2008, Stewart asked Stephen Colbert if he could interest him in the Maccabbean celebration, Hannukah. In light of Wright’s analysis, there is a bit of irony here. Christmas, the coming of Christ with his proclamation of a new kingdom of God, once upended Hannukah’s ideals. But if Christmas is now a site of modern religious contestation, perhaps it’s also time to start thinking about who the collateral damage of such a war might be. Jon Stewart has already said his piece. Maybe it’s time for more of us to start singing this song.

can i interest you in hannukah? from camille c on Vimeo.

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. at the Qingming Festival

Tags

Asian American, Benedict XVI, China, Chinese, civil rights, class solidarity, death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, dissident, Eucharist, exodus, Glenn Omatsu, Holy Week, Hoodie Sunday, human rights, I Have a Dream, Lent, liberation theology, Malcolm X, March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Moses, mountaintop, Promised Land, Qin Shihuang, Qingming Festival, radical, Sam Wells, Spring and Autumn Period, Third World Liberation Front, Tiananmen, Trayvon Martin

清明時節雨紛紛
路上行人欲斷魂
借問酒家何處有
牧童遙指杏花村

The drizzling rain at Qingming time
The rending flesh of the pedestrians
Where to find a pub to drink my sadness?
A cowherd points to Almond Flower Village.

–杜牧 Du Mu

Since before the days when Qin Shihuang conquered the various warring states that came to constitute the imperial Middle Kingdom, there has been the tradition of the Qingming Festival. Originally commemorated in memory of the accidental burning of a Spring and Autumn Period official’s servant, the festival has developed since the Tang Dynasty to be a day to honour the dead by sweeping the graves of ancestors, carrying willows and flowers to ward off evil spirits, and more recently, remembering the deaths of intellectual dissidents in twentieth-century Chinese history.

Typically, Qingming Festival falls on April 5.

But this year’s Qingming Festival falls on April 4.

And incidentally, April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think this warrants some theological reflection, particularly from Chinese North American Christians, about our solidarity in the struggle for human rights.

On the night before he died, King preached at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. His sermon came to be known as, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and his words that night foreshadowed his assassination the next day:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!  And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man: mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Incidentally, Sam Wells also has a great meditation on death and Steve Jobs through the Mountaintop speech as well.

Asian American scholar Glenn Omatsu protests the domestication of the Asian American participation in the civil rights movement. He points specifically to King and says that the invocation of his tradition of non-violence has overshadowed the radical actions taken by the Third World Liberation Front in 1968 to found ethnic studies departments in California universities. For Omatsu, it’s not the legacy of King that needs to be reclaimed for our solidarity for rights, but that of Malcolm X.

I take issue with Omatsu.

When King said that he had been to the mountaintop, it would be right to think that he’s invoking Moses climbing Mount Nebo to look over into the Promised Land that he wouldn’t be able to enter with the beloved community. Most would remember his dream articulated at the March on Washington that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” For Omatsu, it’s precisely this that has led to a neo-conservatism among Asian Americans who believe themselves to have made it economically as “the model minority.” America is finally colour-blind, say the suburban dwellers; the dream has been realized. Omatsu is disgusted.

But a closer look at King’s sermon complicates things. Sure, King is a Moses figure, but the Promised Land of which King speaks does not refer to a colour-blind nation. Rather, it’s about a global human rights revolution in the second half of the twentieth century, a call to freedom just like Moses called on Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee–the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

King had been to the mountaintop. He had seen the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Albany Movement, the Civil Rights Bill, the March on Washington, the March on Selma, and the action for which he was in Memphis. Like Moses, King had been to the mountaintop, and he had seen the Promised Land of justice and equality for the least of these, the coloured colonized by white supremacy and the impoverished trampled by an economic oligarchy. Interpreting the story of Exodus through the lens of solidarity, he sees that Pharaoh’s tactic for keeping the slaves enslaved is to divide them among themselves, to keep the ministers only thinking about themselves and preaching irrelevant airy-fairy hopes of white robes, milk and honey, and streets of gold over yonder while people here go naked, live in slums, and stay hungry. “But whenever the slaves get together,” King preached, “something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.”

For King, at that moment, what was needed was direct action for the case at hand: justice for sanitation workers in Memphis wearing black T-shirts and holding signs that read, “I Am a Man”: “Let us keep the issues where they are,” he said. “The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.”  Here, he fuses the Moses tradition with the Jericho Road in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. As he puts it in the speech, just like the Samaritan stopping on the “Bloody Pass,” we too must realize that the plight of the sanitation worker in Memphis is our plight as well. He imagines the priest and the Levite passing up the bloodied robbed man because they fear that he might be bait to lure them to bandits, or worse, he might be a con artist himself. King speculates that they probably thought, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” He then interprets the Good Samaritan as asking: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” King then continues:

That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

It was for this that King knew that he was going to his death. He talks about getting on the plane from Atlanta that morning, of the pilot’s voice coming over the public address system saying that because King was on board, they had had to take extra security cautions because of the threats on King’s life coming from Memphis. He remembers that before what we now know as the Civil Rights Movement happened, he had been stabbed while signing books, and the blade had come so close to his aorta that The New York Times reported at the time that if he had just sneezed, he would have died. He knew this because what he was doing was radical because he wasn’t just calling for everybody just to get along in a colour-blind nation. (And by the way, as James Cone points out, King and Malcolm X need not be pitted against each other, but can rather be seen as complementary figures in the black liberation movement.)

He was calling for class solidarity as the rubric of racial reconciliation and social justice. He had protested the Vietnam War, particularly because African Americans were disproportionately drafted, and now he was marching on poverty, calling for economic action on the part of everyone listening to him: “If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school–be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.” He was calling for both marches and outright boycotts on unjust corporations, “bank-ins” to take money out of mainstream banks and put them in black banks, and “insurance-ins” where black people could buy insurance plans from black insurance companies. He was calling for an Occupy movement before there was an Occupy movement; he was advocating precautions for the beloved community before the idea of subprime mortgages targeting African American populations was even invented. And for him, this Memphis case of sanitation workers was the perfect case where the rubber met the road because for King, the measure of a society was how the sanitation workers were treated. Radical? Yes. It’s what got King killed.

Perhaps it’s only right that the anniversary of the assassination of King and the Qingming Festival fall this year within Holy Week in the liturgical calendar. Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable was offensive precisely because as Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in Letters and Papers from Prison, it focused Christian practice on being “the Man [sic] for Others.” It was told to a lawyer who wanted to justify himself for having fulfilled the commandment of loving one’s neighbour as oneself. Jesus turned the lawyer’s world upside-down, telling him to go and do as a Samaritan would have done to go out of his way to help a bloodied stranger of the wrong geopolitical stripe on the Bloody Pass of the Jericho Road.

This was arguably what got Jesus, Bonhoeffer, and King killed. The offence was a radical view of the neighbour. Will we indeed love our neighbours as ourselves? What if the neighbour is of the wrong nationality? the wrong race? the wrong class? King’s words ring in our ears: The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

This is a question for reflection for Chinese North American Christians today. Qingming Festival is a day to honour the dead, yes. But to be Christian is not merely to honour our own dead, those within our own family or those within the diaspora that we call “Chinese.” King’s legacy–one that also garnered us civil liberties–begs us to come out of the convenient labels that we’ve constructed for ourselves–“Chinese,” “Asian,” “Asian American”–and realize that our solidarity with the poor for justice cuts across racial, ethnic, and class lines. There is a saying among Chinese in the diaspora that we should only sweep beneath the awnings of our own homes. The irony of this year’s Qingming Festival is that it calls us precisely to repent of this notion.

Yes, we honour our ancestors today. Some of these, yes, are the Chinese political dissidents that we remember yearly. But one of these is also the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Try that, friends, for much-needed reconciliation between Chinese American and African American communities today. Perhaps our Chinese churches should bring hoodies and a bag of skittles to church too. It is, after all, the Qingming Festival.

But more than that, as the Qingming Festival and King’s assassination anniversary both fall in Holy Week, we also remember as Christians the one who has gone before us from death to life, Jesus Christ. We have hope in King’s vision not because of King’s death, but because the resurrection of Jesus Christ at the end of this Holy Week reminds us that King’s blessed hope is ours as well. Strangely enough, this has been precisely what Pope Benedict XVI has been saying to the faithful regarding charity during this Lenten season:

The Lord’s disciples, united with him through the Eucharist, live in a fellowship that binds them one to another as members of a single body. This means that the other is part of me, and that his or her life, his or her salvation, concern my own life and salvation. Here we touch upon a profound aspect of communion: our existence is related to that of others, for better or for worse.

Qingming Festival and the assassination of King are not the end of the story of solidarity–indeed, of communion–with the least of these. They are the beginning: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”