It would not be funny if I said that Rick Warren was the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’

Tags

Asian, Asian American, Chinglican, Deadly Vipers, Eugene Cho, Evangelical, Lifeway, Mee Maw, mental illness, orientalism, orientalization, psychology, Rick Warren, Rickshaw Rally, Soong-Chan Rah, Southern Baptist, trauma

UPDATE: The contents of the following post concerned a post by Pastor Rick Warren that has been deleted on the afternoon of 24 September 2013. It also coincided with an apology on Sam Tsang’s blog, Engage the Pews, which Tsang has accepted and on which he has written further reflections. Following the examples of other bloggers such as Sam Tsang, Kathy Khang (More Than Serving Tea) and Wm. Darius Myers (Death Pastor), we will be leaving this post up in order to maintain the integrity of the public record. After all, contrary to the comment by L2 Foundation’s D.J. Chuang that appeared on all of our respective blogs that the post was ‘immediately and personally removed’ by Warren, we acknowledge that while the apology may have been personal and may indeed be encouraging for a catholic way forward, a response following two business days is not ‘immediate.’ Indeed, given this post’s attention to the historical genealogy of these Asian American interventions into the orientalizing practices of prominent American evangelicals, it is an imperative that this post, as well as the others, remain up as a record of this episode so that we can propel further conversation that would lead to a radical de-orientalization of American Protestant practice. As Tsang and Khang have said on their respective blogs, the apology may be accepted, but the conversation is far from over.

UPDATE #2: We recognize that Rick Warren has issued a public apology on his public Facebook page. We welcome this. Following the reflections given by Professor Sam Tsang and by Kathy Khang to this apology, we have also decided to maintain the integrity of the public record by leaving this post up.

The recent Facebook photo posted as a joke by Pastor Rick Warren describing the staff at Saddleback Church as members of the Red Guard at the height of the Cultural Revolution is a bit difficult to process. Indeed, its invocation of the Cultural Revolution has troubled many a Facebook friend of mine for what they are now terming ‘cultural insensitivity.’  I should thus post a trigger warning, for I have reproduced it here.

Indeed, that he then used the comments section to lecture this Thing’s good friend Sam Tsang on humour in New Testament exegesis makes the situation even more ironic. I mean, one would have thought that Sam Tsang’s composition of the foreword to the new Chinese translation of N.T. Wright’s New Testament and the People of God would position Tsang as the exegete. To the extent that our friend was then incensed by this reply, he wrote a response lambasting Warren for his culturally insensitive humour.

To defend Rick Warren as ignorant of the concerns of Asians and Asian Americans (and by this, I include the Asian Canadians who are posting all over my news feed, as i take ‘American’ to be indicative of the ‘Americas,’ not only the nation-state styling itself as all-encompassing American) simply because he is an older white pastor living in Southern California is no defence at all. Indeed, at least as he is cited in geographer Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions, he claims that his own church is largely composed of Asian and Latina/o Americans. In fact, Wilford points out that Saddleback’s whole idea of the ‘small group’ where members meet in homes to discuss Christian spiritual formation is drawn from Korean megachurch pastor David Yonggi Cho’s ‘cell group’ model; whatever one may think of such a model, the point is that Warren is no stranger to Asia-Pacific churches. Moreover, Southern California itself could hardly be described as an Asian American terra incognita; in fact, Metro Los Angeles boasts a high concentration of Asian Americans, and one of its cities in the San Gabriel Valley, Monterey Park, in fact served as the key case study for geographer Wei Li’s doctoral work on Chinese ethnoburbs in North America. Finally, Saddleback has itself planted a church in Hong Kong, which itself is no small feat, for The Purpose-Driven Church calls church plants to research their social surroundings in order to be relevant in their local evangelism. Indeed, Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions reveals that Saddleback itself is ingenious in its transformation of the postsuburban landscape’s fragmented geographies into purpose-driven sites through which God teaches Saddleback members how to reframe their scattered lives into purpose-driven ones. One would expect no less of its Hong Kong incarnation.

Any question that we ask about this situation, then, should not focus on why Rick Warren is ignorant of the concerns of Asians and Asian Americans. It should instead interrogate why he ignores them.

After all, this is not the first Asian American challenge to orientalization in American evangelicalism. Indeed, in light of previous excursions into evangelical antiracism, one might be able to illustrate how Warren’s declaration that Asian Americans are humorless because of a joke taken at our expense might be understood if Asian Americans were to make a joke at his expense.

That joke is: who would find it funny if Warren were the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’?

That I now have to explain this joke suggests that it is probably not funny. In fact, now that I have likely offended you, I need to explain to you why you have been offended.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Lifeway Publishers’ ‘Rickshaw Rally’ curriculum was but one of the episodes in contemporary Asian American evangelical challenges to the white privilege that has gone long uncontested in American evangelicalism. Published as the Vacation Bible School (VBS) material in 2004, the theme featured a white girl in a kimono with chopsticks in her hair, a karate-kid key chain, and name tags shaped as Chinese take-out boxes. As Soong-Chan Rah puts it in The Next Evangelicalism, Lifeway ‘caricatured and generalized all Asian cultures with various stereotypical images’ and was met with protests from Asian American pastors, some of whom were themselves Southern Baptist. However, instead of apologizing, Lifeway made a few minor changes and issued the material as its 2004 VBS curriculum all the same, all to the chagrin of those who decried the material both within and without the denomination.

Unsuccessful as the attempt to derail Rickshaw Rally may have seemed, though, it served as the first of several similar challenges that have propelled the conversation about orientalization in American evangelicalism forward. In 2007, Soong-Chan Rah wrote to Zondervan’s Youth Specialties for its book, Skits That Teach, that featured a skit similar to Rickshaw Rally, this one titled ‘Mee Maw.’ which featured a Chinese delivery person with a very demeaning accent as part of a church skit book. As Rah recalls, Zondervan recalled (to its credit) all of the extant copies and did away with them, issuing an apology on its blog. In 2009, Zondervan found itself again in hot water, this time over the publication of a book titled Deadly Vipers, a book for men that portrayed sins that men faced as ninjas sneaking up on them. Leading the charge this time was Seattle pastor Eugene Cho, whose campaign convinced Zondervan to again pull the book, destroy the copies, and have the authors remove their website.

What we should find hard to believe is that Rick Warren has not seemed to have heard of these high-profile cases, one of which affected his own denomination (the Southern Baptist Convention) and his own publisher (Zondervan).

But even more dumbfounding should be Warren’s inability to participate in solidarity with Asian Americans, even while many Asian Americans participated in solidarity with him and his family when they lost their son, Matthew, to a suicide due to mental illness. Contrary to popular perceptions that Asian Americans are unfamiliar with mental illness, the legacy of political and cultural trauma in the Asia-Pacific–including the Cultural Revolution–should itself be a signal that Asians and Asian Americans are all too familiar with mental illness, which is likely why we felt ourselves in such solidarity with the Warrens in the first place. The authoritarian rule of emerging nation-states in the Asia-Pacific were not the natural results of an ‘Asian culture’ that promotes hard work and obedience to authority. They were attempts at state formation whose efforts to dislodge these emerging nation-states from their traumatic pasts of European colonialism exacerbated the cultural trauma and psychological damage that began in the nineteenth century. If it weren’t from the direct trauma of elite state initiatives at nation-building–such as China’s Cultural Revolution, among many other similar projects in other nation-states–then there was the overwhelming sense that these nation-states and their citizens needed to catch up with the modernity of the West, resulting in authoritarian ideologies that framed citizens as patriotic hard workers whose objective was to make the nation modern overnight. While these efforts at subjectification led to some economic successes, one of the prices that was paid was the spread of mental illness; indeed, anthropologist Aihwa Ong argues that the frequency of demon possession reported on the Malaysian shop floor that she studied can be attributed to these efforts at capitalist state subjectification. The same could be said of the Cultural Revolution; in fact, my grandfather, who saw the decimation of his family in Shanghai through the double trauma of the Japanese invasion of China during the Second World War and the Communist takeover of his family’s property (not to mention the news of his surviving family’s treatment through the Mao years right on into the Cultural Revolution), was plagued with manic depression for the remainder of his life. Indeed, the first time that I ever learned as a kid that there were pills that you could take that helped you with your moods was from seeing him take them.

That the rise of early Asian American studies at the San Francisco State College Strike in 1968 was done by Mao-jacket-wearing students from the Third World Liberation Front in solidarity with the Cultural Revolution does not blunt this point. For one thing, they were protesting the trauma of racism that ghettoized their communities in America; as Ling-chi Wang points out, Chinatowns were the result both of racist planning policies that kept Chinese people literally in their place and Chinatown elites who used this ghettoization to maintain their own power. The strikers protested both. However, to post a picture of a woman wearing a Mao jacket cannot be justified even by this fact, for though even members of mainline Protestant churches in Chinatown participated in these protests, migrants who had experienced the Asia-Pacific traumas transformed these churches after the strikes, bringing their trauma to bear on the real life experience of even the most liberal churches in these Chinatowns. By the 1970s and 1980s, then, counseling psychology became a field of great concern among Asian and Asian American Protestants themselves as they dealt with the traumas of colonization, state subjectification, racism, modern ideologies of Asians needing to ‘catch up’ with the West, and the resulting family dysfunction, and it has now become a commonly discussed stereotype that second-generation Asian American evangelicals seem to be disproportionately interested in psychology as a field of study because of how often these traumas are discussed in our churches and parachurch organizations.

In short, we as Asians and Asian Americans know mental illness intimately. That was why we really felt ourselves to be in solidarity with the Warrens when Matthew died.

If what I am saying is true, then, what is needed is not simply ‘cultural intelligence’ or ‘sensitivity training.’ It is an acknowledgement that just as we as Asian and Asian American evangelicals stood in solidarity with the Warrens when they confronted the abyss caused by mental illness in their family, so the Warrens stand in solidarity with us when we confront mental illness and the memory of trauma in ours. Indeed, it would not be funny if I called Rick Warren the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’ precisely because of this solidarity that we have with him. By the same token, the trigger for memories of cultural trauma should not be funny if indeed he acknowledges his solidarity with us. That he then complains that we do not find his joke funny is not only a failure of ‘cultural sensitivity.’ It is a failure of catholicity, a denial of his participation with the church catholic that is composed in no small part by Asians and Asian Americans. Indeed, that is what’s at stake in choosing to ignore the protests of Asian Americans who have challenged the orientalization that is latent in much of American evangelicalism: it is to deny that the Spirit is moving the people of God into greater oneness by shattering the ideologies that have long kept us apart. To reduce this to ‘political correctness’ on the one hand while calling for ‘sensitivity training’ on the other would fail to comprehend the movement of God in making his children one, even as he is one, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son. To fail to understand that such reconciled unity–such ecumenical catholicity!–lies at the heart of the evangelical mission is to miss the purpose for which the church exists, for she is a prophetic witness to a modern world traumatically divided by racializing ideologies (among many others) that Jesus Christ has come to reconcile all into one in his body.

To put it plainly, waving the trigger of our traumatic memories in our faces on Facebook is simply not funny. But even more curious is that Warren is neither a stranger to Asians and Asian Americans, and it is hard to believe that he hasn’t heard of the debacles like Rickshaw Rally, Mee Maw, and Deadly Vipers. The only conclusion that we can draw from this circumstantial evidence is thus that Warren is not ignorant, but is willfully ignoring Asians and Asian Americans in order to make a joke at our expense. And yet, hope against hope, we do not believe that in his heart, Warren is malicious enough to be that much of a schismatic; after all, to fail to have even a flicker of love for his Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters would jeopardize his own place in the church catholic, for he that does not love does not know God, for God is love. It is thus for the sake of the healing of the catholic union and continual solidarity that we share in Jesus Christ that we demand that Rick Warren issue an apology.

Correction update: the original version of this post read that the woman in the posted photo was from the People’s Liberation Army. This was an error because she was part of the Red Guard. We thank the readers of A Christian Thing for their vigilance. I am also thankful for the presence of Not a Dinner Party on this Thing, for she is a China scholar and a truly competent one at that. See for yourself.

Not a Dinner Party Is a Chinglican

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Anglican, Asian American, Catholic, Celia Allen, China, Chinatown, Chinglican, complementarian, Donaldina Cameron, egalitarian, feminist, feminist theology, liberation, Mao Zedong, missionary, neo-Reformed, Not a Dinner Party, orientalism, Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessey, white missionary women

Some time ago, I raised the issue on this Thing that we need a feminist theologian. You could say that we now have one, although I’m sure that Not a Dinner Party’s views are not quite as radical as Mary Daly’s, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s, Rosemary Radford Ruether’s, or Rita Nakashima Brock’s. (Or perhaps they are, which would be very interesting indeed). Instead, Not a Dinner Party’s rant ostensibly places her in the same camp as those who have been labeled ‘evangelical feminists.’ What is striking about this is that even as Not a Dinner Party admits that she too has moved from a sort of Reformed evangelical confession to high-church Anglo-Catholic practice, so have some evangelical feminist bloggers like Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey, to some extent for each, at least in their personal contemplative practices. If there are two sides of the same reactionary coin with regard to complementarian and patriarchal models of gender roles, there may be two sides of the same feminist coin as well.

Since Not a Dinner Party raised the possibility of the patriarchal reactionary coin, I will leave her to address this hypothesis of the feminist coin in her further reflections on this Thing.

My aim in this post is instead to celebrate the arrival of our second Chinglican on this blog. I regret to have not been able to proceed further with the ‘What’s So Good About Being Anglican?‘ series before writing this post, for I do plan to write an exposition of the Anglican charism in part 4 and of Chinglicanism in part 5. But if my post on Justin Cantuar and the Cursillo Movement was a preview of sorts into the nature of part 4, consider this appreciation of what Not a Dinner Party stands for as a preview of sorts into part 5’s more drawn out discussion of what it means to be a Chinglican.

I want to write about Not a Dinner Party’s admission that she is interested in all things China. To make such an admission may put her into the ranks of white missionary women who were very interested in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these women did not make it all the way to China; instead, some like Donaldina Cameron (Presbyterian Church in Chinatown, San Francisco) and Celia ‘Debbie’ Allen (First Chinese Baptist Church, San Francisco) mentored youth, alleviated poverty, and combated domestic violence in American Chinatowns.

Donaldina Cameron as a saint

Indeed, there is a fairly clear trajectory that runs from the work of these white missionary women in Chinatowns and the liberation movements of Chinese American youth combating racism and Chinese segregation since the 1930s Tahoe Conferences, efforts that eventually culminated in calls for social justice from the National Council of Churches’s National Conference of Chinese American Churches (CONFAB) and the joining of mainline Chinese churches with the War on Poverty and the ethnic studies strikes in the 1960s and 1970s, through which seminal organizations like Self-Help for the Elderly, the Chinese Hospital, and the Mei Lun Yuen Housing Project were started.  While some Asian American scholars are somewhat ambivalent about the sort of imposition of whiteness onto Chinese spaces by these missionary women, many Asian Americanists themselves often laud these white missionary women as prototypical anti-racist feminists in Chinatown (see, for example, Peggy Pascoe’s Relations of Rescue, Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet, and Derek Chang’s Citizens of a Christian Nation; for a critique, see Henry Yu’s Thinking Orientals). That I know Not a Dinner Party to have worked in Chinese immigrant services and anti-poverty work on both the West and East Coasts may well indicate that she is following in this long legacy.

Yet even that is not the subject of this particular post, though we may well come back to these themes in the future.

What I want to discuss here is the influence that white Anglicans who study China, including Not a Dinner Party, have had on my thinking on Anglicanism. This is thus not an introduction to Not a Dinner Party, as if she needed one and had to work off a complementarian model where she speaks only under authority on this Thing. I am not introducing her. I am appreciating her.

As you will see from her more formal introduction on her Tumblr, Not a Dinner Party takes her name from Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong’s quip that ‘a revolution is not a dinner party.’ For some, this explicit invocation of Maoist ideology may be alarming, as it may suggest that there are some of us whose radical critiques may stem from secular socialist sources.

Yet if there is anything that Anglicans who study China, including Not a Dinner Party, have taught me, it is that we must categorically refuse to see China as the ‘other’ to the West. Timothy Cheek is one of these Anglicans. A scholar of Chinese intellectual history both in the Republican and Communist periods, Cheek writes in his introduction to relations between China and the West, China since 1989: Living With Reform, that especially those who do America-China relations often fixate on China as the ‘other’ without realizing that this binary geopolitical framework feeds deeply into how an American national consciousness is conceptualized. If this is the case, Cheek argues, then we need to understand China rightly. Throughout his work, then, Cheek makes the case that we need to understand that saying that ‘Mao is a bad man’ is not enough; we actually have to unpack who Mao was, who the intellectuals both for and against Mao were, who the intellectuals and the political leaders of the Republican era were, who the intellectuals and the political leaders of the post-Mao Reform era were, etc. Moreover, Cheek emphasizes that there is a ‘historical Mao’ who actually did things that were good and bad, as well as an ahistorical ‘living Maoism’ that endures today that places Mao as a mythologically good and evil figure in modern China. Seen in this way, China isn’t this big totalitarian land mass over there. Instead, borrowing from the Yale historian of China, Jonathan Spence, it’s a concerted ‘search for modern China,’ examining what we know as ‘China’ as a complex, modern political and economic set of systems whose activities are integral to international politics.

Cheek is not the only one doing such things, especially at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver’s Institute of Asian Research, where much of this complex political economic analysis of Asia-Pacific nation-states takes place in its various centres under leading scholars (both emeriti and contemporary) like Terry McGee, David Edgington, Abidin Kusno, Michael Leaf, Alison Bailey, and Tsering Shakya. To be sure, not everyone here is an Anglican. But the China scholars, like Tim Cheek, disproportionately are, for other scholars, such as Pitman Potter (a China law professor who has recently been ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada) and Diana Lary (an emerita professor of modern Chinese history, with interests particularly in Hong Kong, and who is a latitudinarian Anglican laywoman) certain are Anglican as well as leading China scholars. These scholars also take a similar view of China, refusing to frame it as a backward geopolitical ‘other’ but as a complex, modern apparatus with thriving public and private spheres and vibrant intellectual activity both for and against the state.

It’s here that Not a Dinner Party fits, and the fact that both her partner and I were both students supervised by Tim Cheek for our undergraduate history theses makes this point all the more poignant. (Parallels aside, however, her partner is much more mature in a Christian sense than I am–evidenced by his conversations with me when we were in history together–and whose emphasis on actually doing poverty work and working for social justice puts me to shame.) As a white woman interested in all things China, Not a Dinner Party’s command of Mandarin Chinese, both spoken and written, routinely makes me defer to her for translation, and her knowledge of the Chinese state apparatus and civil society usually means that it’s usually I who consult her for my knowledge of China.

But these people’s deep knowledge of modern China is not the point of this post. It is that this approach to China–one that emphasizes complex alterity in contrast to Cold War ideologies–seeps into their practice of Anglicanism and has deeply influenced the way that I understand Chinglicanism.

If anything, these sorts of approaches to China are far from anything orientalist. While Churl complains in a previous post that Catholicism may be Anglicanism’s ‘Orient,’ I’d like to propose that the alternative to that lies somewhere in Not a Dinner Party’s approach to China. Indeed, Edward Said made it clear in Orientalism that what he was critiquing was not that the ‘orient’ was being studied by ‘occidentalist’ scholars, but instead that ‘occidentalist’ scholars’ methodologies tended to frame the ‘orient’ as a monolithic whole without bothering to actually engage the region of the world called the ‘Orient’ in all of its complexity. The answer to Said is not to stop studying ‘Asia’ or ‘China’; it is to represent it as complex. And this is what these Anglican scholars of China do: instead of seeing the ‘other’ as a fascinating, exotic, but backward monolithic wholes, they examine China as very much a part of who we are and as a complex state apparatus straddling a very complicated economy with multiple publics and counterpublics vying for their voice to be heard. This is China; this is also Catholicism, with its very complicated hierarchy, its fascinating financial exchanges, and its various factions duking it out. What the Anglicans who study China have taught me is that while it may be geopolitically convenient to posit the ‘other’ as ‘wholly other,’ such an approach is neither a fair representation of the other’s complexity, nor an accurate view of how the ‘other’ constitutes our very selves, nor a good way to advance conversation that will lead to the ever increasing collegiality, communion, brotherhood, and sisterhood to which all Christians led by the Spirit are called.

This is what makes Not a Dinner Party’s initial rant on this Thing so on point. What she is pointing out to us is that Catholicism is not one thing. However, the reduction of the neo-Reformed converts running to Catholicism belies what she facetiously calls ‘orientalist’ bells and smells: they reduce Catholicism to one thing. She might declare to us that she herself is a ‘single issue voter’ on the subject of women’s ordination, but she goes on to say that ‘I think the trend is particularly troubling, beyond the gender questions, because the gender questions bring up something larger, i.e. things that become problematic when you go in this direction.’ One may read her as repeating the same ‘slippery slope’ arguments presented by John Piper in the Gospel Coalition video on complementarianism that she posted, only running in the opposite direction.

The only trouble is, a ‘slippery slope’ is not what Not a Dinner Party is talking about.

Not a Dinner Party is saying that it is troubling that when neo-Reformed converts go over to Catholicism, they reduce Catholicism via their narrow view of gender complementarity that only represents one wing (albeit the dominant wing, including in the magisterium) of the Catholic conversation. One wonders, for example, whether their Catholicism is big enough to include the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) or other conferences of women religious, to whom, by the way, Pope Francis went out of his way to say that they should keep doing what they are doing even if they are investigated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the same CDF formerly headed by a certain Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who declared while still in office that whatever disagreements he had with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and her ‘radical feminist’ friends (which he unfortunately declared ‘another religion’), he considered her an important and thoughtful exegete. One wonders whether their Catholicism is big enough to recognize that liberation theology movements are now being vindicated by Pope Francis as part of the magisterium and that the Church has always had an ‘option for the poor,’ in which framework the free market advocates such as George Weigel, Michael Novak, Robert George, Richard John Neuhaus, and Paul Ryan with their subsidiarity arguments sound more neoliberal than Catholic. One wonders whether these people, instead of reading First Things, have been tempted by the free student subscription to Commonweal. If indeed there are single issue voters, Not a Dinner Party seems to be suggesting that it is these neo-Reformed converts.

And all of this can probably be traced back to Not a Dinner Party’s commitment to an Anglicanism that does not frame China as the monolithic other. In fact, one can only see that the neo-Reformed and conservative Catholic converts are two sides of the same reactionary coin from the vantage point of commitment to analyses that unpack modern complexity, for it is only from that perspective that one can point out reductionism in all of its insidious forms. Just as China should not be reduced to living Maoism (though that is certainly there), Catholicism should not be reduced to the magisterium (though it certainly has a place).

What do we call that vantage point in the Christian church? Well, Not a Dinner Party and I would call it ‘Anglicanism.’ Or better put, it’s called ‘Chinglicanism,’ because we realize that it’s a particular kind of Anglicanism that we are talking about here, one that is not interested in propping up the old colonial structures of the British Empire as it sets up racial hierarchies and segregated urban developments all over the world, but rather, one that realizes that the parish charism does not even allow for a strict spatial differentiation between the ‘church’ and the ‘world.’ It should, after all, be little surprise that the progenitors of ‘radical orthodoxy’ like John Milbank and some of their critical post-liberal allies like Rowan Williams and Stanley Hauerwas are also Anglicans who argue that that very spatial differentiation between the ‘church’ and the ‘world’ is itself a secular construct. As Milbank points out from the get-go in Theology and Social Theory, the saeculum as it has been traditionally conceptualized in Christian theology is not a place; it’s a time, a reference to the ordinary time between Christ’s first and second parousia. In this way, the spatial boundaries of the church are artificial, for the church is a display of an alternate but radically true ontology of radical communion, hospitality, and forgiveness in the midst of a violent world that erects and polices borders all over the place. It’s only in this context that Hauerwas’s mandate to make the church ‘the church’ and the world ‘the world’ makes sense: he is not talking about a physical spatial differentiation, but a radically ontological one in which the church and the world co-exist and where the church’s practices in the midst of the world threatens the world’s legitimacy as an ontological construct. That’s a deep articulation of the parish charism, that is to say, that the Anglican parish exists in the midst of a world that seeks to co-opt it because it doesn’t place those boundaries around itself, but where it ideally–and never completely successfully–displays an alternate mode of charitable social relations in the midst of a violent world.

Chinglicanism extends that parish charism and says that even imperial Anglicanism’s ultimate ‘other’–the ‘Orient,’ ‘Asia,’ or more precisely, ‘China,’ as well as ‘Catholicism’–must not be understood in the terms of colonial segregation or uncritical geopolitical posturing because that is a betrayal of the parish charism itself. It recognizes instead that a parish charism shows us what it means to be constituted by the ‘other,’ that our communion is deeper than we ever imagined, and that this communion is not easy and is in fact all too easily shattered by elitist political posturing. It requires us all to recognize that the ‘poor,’ the ‘Chinese,’ and the ‘Catholic’ are not others to be labeled and pushed away, but rather that we are all part of this parish together.

Not a Dinner Party is thus a Chinglican, for we both refuse to understand the ‘other,’ be it China or Catholicism, in static terms or even as apart from the constitution of our own existence, for doing so would be a violation of Anglican Christian practice altogether. Indeed, to the extent that I have committed these errors, Not a Dinner Party has often corrected me. In this way, she reminds me always that I must be a better Chinglican, for in practicing my Chinglican charism, I am contributing my share to the church catholic that we may all be irreducibly one.

Is the Catholic Church Anglicanism’s Orient?

Tags

Anglican Communion, Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Edward Said, Literature, orientalism, Pope, Rome

I am thankful for friends who raise difficult questions, because it forces me to answer them. Then again, it is difficult. It is difficult precisely because, while I would like to simply agree with what Chinglican has said in defense of Anglicanism, the matter lies too close to the heart of the issue. If what he says is true, there would not be that much point in becoming Catholic – I would be Catholic already as an Anglican. And so, while I want to answer as irenically as possible, my response might be shocking and kind of offensive because the matter is too pressing a question to be dealt with sensitively. So I request the forgiveness of those I offend.

Basically, Chinglican argues that there are two churches in the Anglican church, the political and the literary. The political is not really very justifiable. But the literary has been there time and time again to raise the thorny theologies that imperialism would suppress. In many ways, this read on Anglican history seems about right, which is probably why I became an English major. Early on, I realized that some of the most profound theological things happening in the English milieux were works of literature. Literature, for Chinglican, plays for the Anglican church the function the pope is supposed to play for the Catholic church – to call kings to account.

I will not get into the history of this, as such would be tedious and could be reckoned in many and various ways. I could imagine an interpretation that sees literature as theological protest, as well as an interpretation that sees literature as a political flunky. But the one thing I would point out is that the capacity of literature to fulfill its critical function is directly dependent on its connection to real theology. Donne could be what he was because he was so deeply indebted to pre-Tridentine Catholicism. And the political split did not immediately destroy all theology. It did not take away the wealth of things that had gone before.

But I can’t help wondering how sustainable this might be. I would certainly agree that, in the Early Modern period, literature is a form of theological protest and critique, seen particularly in someone like Milton. But by the Victorian period or so, I’m not so sure. The Blakean romantics have run off with sola emotion, and the Enlightenment types have run off with reason (see Pope’s Essay on Man). Literature gets appropriated by various movements and finds itself left without a theology, and all we have left is poor Mr. Collins of Pride and Prejudice to defend us from the monarch. What I am getting at is that, if English literature has in the Early Modern period the protesting character Chinglican sees in it, this has significantly cooled by the time the Victorians come around with their state-embedded church. There are of course exceptions to this. But if Chinglican can truncate history, so can I. What I am getting at is that English literature can protest just to the degree that it has in its cultural memory a kind of faith that can protest against the state, the kind of faith seen in Thomas More and (dare I say) Guy Fawkes? But amnesia sets in, and the church is integrated nicely with the state.

And I suppose this is my difficulty. I imagine I would find it much easier to be an Anglican (actually, the term Anglican is anachronistic here) in the Early Modern period – that is, if I didn’t lose my head for some reason or other. But now, the church is so far removed from that root that I imagine to actually be the kind of Anglican that wants union with Rome – that weeps proportionate tears and longs for the radix, the root – would be emotionally devastating. I am all for mourning. But the level of mourning required here would kill me and make me unable to function. Put another way, it seems to me that far too many Anglicans claim to want unity, but in fact are quite happy going about their merry lives without a pope. And this leads me to the question of orientalism.

Because in a very real way, I think the thing that annoys me about many Anglo-Catholics is that they are Anglicans discovering a Saidean orient in the Catholic church. I have a friend working on the French as the “other” to English “normalcy” – the other both exotic and dangerous – and I kind of think that a similar thing occurs with Catholicism. It is the deeply dangerous thing we all have to fear – reading some of the English indictments of Catholicism are a little like reading some of the modern indictments of terrorism (though again, there was a Guy Fawkes, who seems to have been both). But the Catholic church is also fascinating in all its gaudy dangerousness. Shakespeare’s attractive “Catholic” fool Feste is counter-posed to the “Puritan” Malvolio. It is no surprise that Oscar Wilde, when he becomes increasingly interested in faith near the end of his life, is interested to Catholicism. Like good Englishmen, we are attracted with Charles Ryder of Brideshead to the many exotic sins of Catholicism. The Catholic church is the foreign woman that both threatens and mesmerizes England.

But I will go one further: we are all, whenever we encounter anyone or anything, orientalists, that is, original sinners. We all of us will always initially encounter the other like this. The real question is what we do with this encounter. Do we keep the exotic as a pet, to pleasure us and remind us of our own superiority by turns? Or do we in fact engage – try to get past this impression and encounter the other on terms other than our own? Because this for me is the real question. Am I appreciating Catholic theology as an ornament or pet of my own individuality, or am I in fact in the state of knowing what it means to be fully Catholic, that is submitting to the Magesterium? Many Anglo-Catholics critique the highly individualistic appropriation of Scripture in Evangelical circles, but isn’t Anglo-Catholicism just the flip-side of the coin, an individualistic interpretation of Christian tradition ultimately unguided and undisciplined by the authority of the Church?

I realize that what I am saying here will anger many, but I can’t help feeling this way. If I am going to preach Catholicism, I want to know the pain of being Catholic, rather than preach something that I can leave at the door when I go home at night. Because I am not content manipulating a Catholic orient. No, I want the Catholic church.

We Remember

Tags

Arab Spring, biopolitics, Catholic, Catholic social teaching, Centessimus annus, China, Chinese, dissent, geopolitics, human dignity, ideology, indigenous, John Paul II, Liu Xiaobo, orientalism, orientalization, redress, state, Tiananmen

June 4 is a day for remembering. This year is no different, for it is now the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident, the event in which students who had occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing for over a month were brutally suppressed–the official term of protest from its observers is massacred–as they demonstrated for a new democratic regime in China.

It is thus a day to remember.

We remember that the fight for redress is not yet over. When a state uses military force against its own citizens and then attempts to paste over these events by denying their historical validity and diverting focus from them onto market reform, it is incumbent on all of us to remember that justice has not yet been served, that the state’s murder of people within its own borders is never just wherever it happens, whether in China in 1989, in the present in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Israel/Palestine, Syria, or Turkey, or even in the history of the Americas in American and Canadian treatment of indigenous peoples. We remember because we are calling for the state to acknowledge its own crimes and to bring to justice those who maneuvered the state to commit these crimes.

But we remember also that our memory can be corrupted.  We also remember that the remembrance that these atrocities happened have also been used in the service of othering exclusion. We must remember then that when memory becomes corrupted, it can be used for the service of greater evil.

And thus we must also remember that China is not a geographical foil for the politics of life. We have heard over and over of the issues of life in various sites in China–a little girl run over by a truck, the countless road accidents, the melamine lacing of baby powder, the unethical production of under-regulated automobile parts, the human rights abuses against ethnic minorities. Recently, we heard of a baby boy flushed down a toilet by a desperate mother, and we heard of school principals sexually preying on their own students in collusion with government officials. As we hear of these issues, we are tempted to frame China as the space of the other, a space where life is devalued, a space inhabited by barbarians and country bumpkins and industrial crooks and political Fu Manchu masterminds, a space where everything should point to the events of Tiananmen being just business as usual.

Even as we remember for the sake of Tiananmen redress, we also remember that we must not give in to the temptation to see China as a unified geopolitical bloc. We remember instead that China is vast, that its political system is complex, and that its vastness and complexity belies many avenues of dissent. We remember that dissent is not always on the side of justice simply because it is dissent, that people we hold up as democracy heroes like Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo supported the Bush Administration’s Iraq War with the anti-democratic, neoconservative rationale of pre-emptive warfare in the hope of forcibly enacting democracy in the Middle East for American imperialist interests. We remember that China is not the unitary other, that people and politics as complex as our own go on there as well, and that our pleas for redress are coupled with the complexities of human sociality.

We thus do not remember in order to frame China as the geopolitical other. We remember instead that history is littered with spectacles of violence as various individuals, parties, regimes, and imperial rulers have attempted to exert their sovereign power to make the meaning of ‘Chineseness’ uniform. We remember that these efforts at racial, ethnic, and national subjectification are themselves born of unjust impulses. For what, after all, was the point of the crackdown at Tiananmen, if not to exert the sovereign power of the state to make an international example of those who dared to dissent against an ideology of Chineseness?

So yes, we protest as we remember. But how we protest can never be done with the methods of exclusion. As John Paul II reminded us in Centesimus annus, our protest is not waged by deploying alternate ideologies as foils to injustice. Instead, a constant focus on the dignity of the human person is a protest against ideology itself, grounding our critique in the reality that we are not primarily cogs in a state or market regime, but embodied persons who live and eat and sleep and feel and play and work and laugh and weep and love. Yes, we remember, but our memory grapples with the will to power inherent in something as banal as saying that all ‘Chinese’ people should be a certain way. Those of us who are Christians who join in this protest are thus uninterested in developing a new ideology of what it means to be Chinese. We are looking forward instead to the day when our human community will be constituted by the recognition that we are all made in the image of God.

No, You Cannot Fence the Table with Orientalism

Tags

Asia-Pacific, Asian American, Asian American theology, capitalism, Douglas Wilson, Edward Said, feminist theology, Foucault, geopolitics, heterotopia, mystical theology, oriental monk, orientalism, postcolonial theology, Rachel Held Evans, Reformed

This morning, Reformed pastor Doug Wilson posted a response to a question from a friend about a recent tweet by Rachel Held Evans about how she would take communion with John Piper in a heartbeat. See for yourself:

I would break the bread of communion with @johnpiper in a heartbeat. We disagree, but he is my brother, and always will be.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) May 27, 2013

Wilson’s interlocutor didn’t have the same ontological understanding of communion as Evans, though. His query to Wilson apparently focused on how because Evans taught feminist ideas both on her blog and in her new book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, she should be excluded from the communion table. To pull a Catholic parallel case, this was like taking Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s statements in The Ratzinger Report about ‘radical feminism’ being a ‘different religion’ from Christianity to its logical conclusion. Indeed, this is no mere parallel with Bishop Allen Vigneron’s comments that Catholics should abstain from communion if they believe that abortion and gender-neutral marriage should be legal. No, Wilson’s interlocutor goes for the jugular, pressing him to articulate a theology of excommunication on the basis that Evans taught feminist ideas and was thus a false teacher.

Characteristically, Wilson’s classically informed Reformed theology leads to a thoughtful response, though one that in fact justifies schism instead of leading to its healing. Abstracting the question from Rachel Held Evans, Wilson holds forth more generally on excommunication. Wilson argues that there are two parts to this question. The first is: who is doing the disciplining? Were it an official ecclesial excommunication, then Wilson says that the church should withhold communion from the offender, but if it is simply Diotrephes from 3 John shouting down competition, the claim to discipline should be ignored. This leads to a second issue: the state of schism in the church, in which withholding communion from someone from another Christian branch of communion can be justified as disciplining that entire branch. If feminism were such a communion branch (to my knowledge, it is not), then one might have to start weighing whether ideological non-adherence is justification for church discipline.

The complications that arise from this thought process leads Wilson to wax orientalist. Calling these practices of withholding communion from anyone who does not subscribe exactly to one’s beliefs as the making of a practical ‘ecclesiastical North Korea,’ Wilson goes on to delineate the interweaving of ‘grace’ and ‘discipline.’ Acknowledging that his readers might find his explanation arcane, he jokingly apologizes that he may have ‘veered into some kind of Zen Presbyterianism here,’ and clarifies the ultimate point of this backhanded swipe at Evans: Wilson would not excommunicate Evans, but would intentionally show her grace in order to deliver her from her feminism.

While I take issue with this flippant characterization of feminism as a unitary movement (it is not, and thus, I’d argue that you can’t brand the whole thing as ‘false teaching,’ but of course, he might come back at me with how Gnosticism was a complex movement, and we’d go on and on and on), there will be bloggers joining A Christian Thing in the not-too-distant future who will be addressing the question of feminist theologies and will be more competent to speak on this than me. So I shan’t.

Instead, as I’ve taken others to task for their orientalizing statements, I’d like to take Wilson to task for his flippant usage of orientalist terms. By ‘taking Wilson to task,’ however, I’m afraid that I’ll have to provide a bit of a prolegomena. You see, I suspect that Wilson–as well as many Euro-American Christians of a variety of theological persuasions, Protestant or Catholic–may be intellectually allergic to the critique of ‘white (male) privilege’ that I am about to perform. This, after all, may lie behind why some, likely including Wilson, are allergic to feminist theologies; after all, they might reason, it’s just a bunch of women unaware of their own will to power trying to shout down an invented bogeyman called ‘white male privilege’ to be able to join the institutional ranks and redefine entire organizations with their own pet agendas. In turn, these people who imagine themselves to be victimized should be subjected to ridicule–not exactly exclusion, mind you–but enough teasing to show that they do not have a sense of humour and that this lack of joy can be attributed to them wanting power. The same may go for African American, Chicano American, and Asian American theologies, in which ‘women’ might be substituted with ‘racialized minorities’ who allegedly talk a grand talk about liberation, desegregating the church, diversifying seminary faculty, and discovering indigenous ways of doing theology. Because of this, the logic may go, these people are always on high alert for the racist remarks of white privileged men, failing to see that the occasional remark about ‘race’ is just an off-hand funny remark that maybe they could have done without if they weren’t writing off-the-cuff on a blog or speaking extemporaneously in a sermon, but that is really just harmless and funny. The joke’s on the racialized minorities, then, for being offended at everything and looking for things at which to get offended. They should instead (the reasoning might go) get off welfare and get a job.

I’d like to assure Wilson from the outset of this critique, then, that I was not looking to be offended (nor, I might note, do most feminist, postcolonial, and racialized minority scholars actually go looking to be offended). In fact, I hope that my comments will have some substantive value for his discussion of communion and excommunication, and indeed, I’d like to propose to Wilson that feminist, post-colonial, and minority theologies have an awful lot to contribute to the ongoing work of making the Body of Christ one, even as the Father and the Son are one, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son. Finally, I’d like to note that if you title your post ‘Some Kind of Zen Presbyterianism’ (emphasis mine), regardless of how much orientalist substance your post actually has (there are after all, only two, if we were to really exegete it), then you are asking for a response of this kind.

Indeed, following the advice of feminist theorist Saba Mahmood to not (as St. Paul would have it) despise all statements wrought by white male privilege but to examine fully ‘the force that a discourse commands,’ let me begin by congratulating Wilson on what must feel like a significant departure from the usual fare of classical Western education and his devotion to a unitary Eurocentric canon in his educational advocacy. In fact, this departure is quite courageous because he picks up on a post-structural tactic at the end of the piece described by Michel Foucault as ‘the heterotopia,’ that is, if you want to know what the norms are in any given place, interface it with a radically different space that can act as a mirror, and ‘the order of things’ in any given site will be clearly revealed. That heterotopia, you might say, is the geopolitical alignment of the contemporary Asia-Pacific region: churches that only take communion with people who believe exactly as they do are like an ‘ecclesiastical North Korea,’ which in contrast makes all the churches conducted by grace non-isolationist and thus connected to the global capitalist political economy like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and (to some extent) post-reform China. While these strict ideologically-driven churches are like North Korea, in other words, the rest of us in the evangelical world are more or less like the other capitalist Asia-Pacific regimes. I leave it up to your imagination to figure out who’s who on this geopolitical map.

However, to describe the state of theological malaise in this Asia-Pacific geopolitical map that stands in for the fragmentation of American evangelicalism, those interested in fine theological distinctions (as Wilson presumably is) have wandered into a sort of ‘Zen Presbyterianism,’ that is, if you are a Presbyterian (as a proud Chinglican, perhaps I might be configured as a ‘Zen Anglican’). As Jane Iwamura puts it in her startlingly incisive book Virtual Orientalism, Wilson is invoking the figure of the ‘oriental monk,’ a wandering contemplative sage who says wise things about nature and social relations that simultaneously confronts the excesses of Western capitalism while being lodged in capitalist processes as the monk has to be marketed to people as the new, hip thing in which to be interested. This is, after all, #2 on the list of Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like: ‘religions their parents don’t belong to.’ Appropriating the identity of the oriental monk for careful theological thinkers like himself, Wilson wants to tell us two things. Following the East Asian capitalist geopolitics playbook, he’d like to tell us that like South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, parts of Indonesia, and parts of China, the evangelical world has capitulated to the shallowing influence of capitalism, at times deploying, as anthropologist Aihwa Ong notes, ‘Asian values’ (or in the evangelical world, ‘Christian values’) as bumper-sticker justifications for capitalist lifestyles and flexible families. Not so Wilson, though: keeping to the ancient traditions, Wilson the oriental sage is still interested in fine theological intricacies where true wisdom is to be sought. That’s where he flips the primacy of discipline over grace to grace over discipline, arguing that if that’s the case, he and Rachel Held Evans (my goodness, a feminist) could still take communion. This grace is profound, mysterious, almost impenetrable, almost like Zen.

As Edward Said noted long ago in his classic Orientalism, the space of the ‘Orient’ has long served as a heterotopic space to the occident (here, Said also thanks Foucault for the insight, though he then follows to take issue with Foucault’s anti-humanism), which in turn suggests that my earlier congratulations to Wilson might need to be qualified. After all, perhaps Wilson is simply doing what his Western canon would tell him to do, that is, when stuff gets difficult to explain, use a heterotopia, and all will become clear. The most convenient heterotopic space is the Orient, and Wilson deploys it skillfully.

Now, of course, all this is not so much offensive as much as it ultimately undermines Wilson’s case for communion where grace takes primacy over discipline. Here, Foucault might actually be more right than Said: these orientalist off-hand remarks don’t originate from Wilson, but are part of a longer epistemic movement within what can be called ‘Western Christianity.’ In two church history classes I’ve taken (I suspect this might be a common experience), for example, we were taught that arcane figures like Pseudo-Dionysius with his ‘Mystical Theology’ and via negativa were uniquely products of the ‘East’ and that the controversies between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church over the filioque clause, the primacy of Rome, and the value of negative theology were ‘cultural’ as the ‘East’ went more contemplative and the ‘West’ went more propositional. In his devastating critique of this sort of logic, J. Kameron Carter retorts that this goes all the way back to the earliest times of distinguishing Jesus from the Jews so that ‘Jesus’ became ‘Occidental’ while the ‘Jews’ became ‘oriental’ or ‘semitic,’ forcing a wedge between Christianity and the East from the get-go. The framing of Eastern Orthodoxy as ‘Eastern’ in turn is a justification of schism precisely on the grounds that the ‘East’ is heterotopic to Western Christianity.

These problems haven’t gone away in the contemporary period. Jesuit theologian Peter Phan, for example, was investigated by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith because it was alleged that he taught an ‘Asian negative theology’ contrary to the received teachings of the Church. This investigation’s orientalist claims still have yet to be decisively addressed by Asian American theologians who should be appalled that ‘Asian’ and ‘negative theology’ were unproblematically lumped together by Phan’s ‘occidental’ accusers, chief of whom has been the Archbishop of Baltimore, William Lori, whose Fortnight for Freedom deserves to be examined side-by-side to his inquisitorial stance toward Phan’s work. Or take another recent example in the evangelical world: the Deadly Vipers Case, a situation that surrounded a blog-based book published by Zondervan that framed sins as ‘deadly vipers’ to be attacked by the mixed-marital arts of the mortification of sin. Evangelical pastor Eugene Cho successfully launched a campaign to oppose the book’s continuation on the shelves of Christian bookstores, clarifying that this was not a vendetta against its authors, but that framing Asian Americans as the sinful ‘other’ would exacerbate racialized tensions in evangelical churches. So too, the discussion within Asian American evangelical circles around loving one’s parents without dishonouring Jesus continues to frame the conversation around orientalizing one’s Asian parents while occidentalizing the Christian faith, a premise that Baylor theologian Jonathan Tran pointed out is ultimately untenable if Asian American Christianity is to develop its own catholic expression of the faith.

In other words, Doug Wilson is not alone in using these orientalist frameworks to frame his argument; it is instead a problem that plagues much of Euro-American Christianity even within Asian American Christian circles, and its roots lie far back in the history of the church. The question one may pose, then, is this: is labeling ‘Asia,’ the ‘Orient,’ or whatever ‘other’ you might have to Western Christianity as a heterotopic space ultimately helpful for Christian communion?

My answer is no. And this, if those in positions like Doug Wilson’s have ears to hear, might be the way forward in answering the schisms that have plagued our churches. Instead of hearing the complaints of women, post-colonial peoples, and racialized minorities as emanating from a will to power and born of an unsanctified lust for immanent liberation, perhaps our cries for justice are in fact cries for communion, complaints that this table where the sacraments impart the grace of God to us remains a space of division and exclusion. If Wilson is reading this, the answer following the reading of this post is not to debate internally whether you owe Asian Americans an apology for colonizing our space to make your point, though if you were to issue this apology, we’d be happy to hear it. The proper response, however, is to critically and contemplatively reflect on our shared Christian tradition, to examine if this thread of orientalization actually has any proper place in our discourse, and to begin the long overdue process of healing schism, that the world may know the Father has sent the Son.

**Correction: an earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Wilson was a ‘homeschooling advocate.’ This error has been corrected to ‘educational advocate,’ as Wilson’s primary task has been to advocate for classical Western education in a school setting. We are grateful to our careful readers for pointing this out.

Academic Love and the Critical Space of Academia

Tags

academia, Avery Dulles, Constantinianism, crisis, critique, fieldwork, governance, Jesuit, John Henry Newman, Judith Butler, medievalism, orientalism, PhD, public good, public sphere, radical, research

I want to write a quick response to Churl’s post yesterday on love in academia.  Like Churl, I too am a doctoral student. Like all doctoral students, my topic is fairly narrow: I study how Chinese Christians engage the public sphere. Like most topics, its narrowness is fairly expansive, encompassing fields I thought I’d never study.

Churl thinks that, unlike other people who seem to be doing more public service than him, academic work comes down to love. This is in the face of a shrinking academic job market, where tenure track jobs seem to be disappearing. Responding to only the latest apocalyptic statements in the higher education journalistic buzz, Churl argues that his job is to love his research subjects, to listen to them, and to stay in this metaphorical marriage though it really is doing him very little economic good.

I admit that I love my Chinese Christians too, more than they will ever know. I’d like to think that I listen to them closely. But God forbid, I hope I’m not married to them, or else my shifting postdoctoral research will be framed as a divorce. Moreover, as I once told my wife, “You are my love, not academia. That’s because while you love me back, academia will never love me back.”

Why do I stay, then?

To answer that question, we need to go back to what academia was originally for. John Henry Newman argues in The Idea of a University that the purpose of the university is to teach universal knowledge, including theology. I think Newman takes this a little bit too far, admittedly, to the point where he thinks that universities do not primarily produce research, but rather function as teaching centres. In his McGinley lectures on the relationship of church and state, Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ, has a more convincing answer. For Dulles, university theology is a gift to the Church because it isn’t produced under ecclesial governance, per se. As much as Stanley Hauerwas fulminates against the powers of the state over modern academia, neither is it governed by the state (or at least it’s not supposed to be). Teach-ins at the University of California, Berkeley, particularly by professors like Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown, have also railed against a market takeover of the university with attempts to privatize the institution, which means that the market isn’t supposed to govern academia either. Instead, the university, while cognizant of the competing governing structures of church, state, and market, is supposed to govern itself as an independent space producing knowledge that is critical of each of these structures. Pace Newman, the university is supposed to teach universal knowledge, and pace Dulles, the university is supposed to produce universal knowledge, and all this not for knowledge’s sake, but to contribute that knowledge to a critique of where knowledge gets bent by governing structures to legitimize their claims to power.

That the university doesn’t actually operate that way right now is not cause for cynicism; it is cause for thoughtful public action. This isn’t the first crisis of the university–imagine, for example, if you told the student strikers of the 1960s, faculty operating under totalitarian regimes, or even Galileo himself that they weren’t going through a crisis of the university–and it is not going to be the last crisis. The university is arguably always in crisis because its critical independent space of contested, contingent, and challenging knowledges isn’t always conducive to the governing power of church, state, and market. Because of this, the powers will always try to co-opt the university. Oftentimes, the university allows itself to be co-opted. But this isn’t a case to be cynical about the university; it’s a call to liberate it. To the extent that we can’t liberate it from within, we might need to take jobs outside of the university, but this doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in academia anymore. It’s that we will fight for its liberation from other vantage points because the existence of that critical independent space is crucial for the public good. After all, it makes sure that neither church nor state nor market has total domination over our knowledge production, but that their powers are relativized by constant independent, prophetic critique. (This, by the way, is why democracies must publicly fund universities. To the extent that they do not, their democracies themselves fall into crisis. To the extent that democracies fund projects only based on their supposed “relevance,” they undercut the university’s ability to produce the truly critical knowledges that make a democratic relativization of power work.)

To drive the point home that the university is an independent space that produces critical knowledge, let me suggest that Churl is himself deeply invested in this task. Referencing his studies in Old English, Churl often suggests that people think that his work is irrelevant to contemporary conversations. I beg to differ. Perhaps this is because I have spoken a lot with Churl, but in my understanding, one of Churl’s biggest pet peeves is something called medievalism. Just as racism is when you make stereotyping remarks that are often (but not always) derogatory about a race–and ditto for orientalism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, etc.–medievalism, as far as I can understand from Churl, is when you do that sort of thing to medievals. It’s when you call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages, or when you use the word medieval to mean backward and retrogressive, or when you posit that everyone who ever lived between the third and sixteenth centuries thought, lived, and acted the same way. Just like racism, sexism, orientalism, heterosexism, ageism, etc., medievalism is a modern construct, designed to legitimize modern power structures, underwrite policies ostensibly designed as egalitarian reversals of the Dark Ages, and undercut any appeal to tradition (despite the fact that anyone who has ever done an academic literature, legal, scientific, policy, etc. review is doing tradition).

So yes, of course, Churl loves his Old English research subjects by listening to them. But that love is not apolitical. By listening deeply to his Old English research subjects, Churl is challenging how our contemporary society is thoroughly underwritten by medievalism. Making that challenge in turn is a critical contribution of independent knowledge that not only isn’t governed by church, state, and market, but challenges some of the legs on which they stand. In other words, Churl is saying that medievalism is not a valid justification for any policy, political statement, public discourse, or poetic output. He knows better. It’s because his knowledge was produced in the independent critical space of the university.

I imagine, then and finally, that some readers of A Christian Thing may be aghast that I have lumped the church in with state and market governance. As Christians who believe in the holy catholic church and the communion of saints, wouldn’t we love nothing more than to be governed by the church? Yes, if only the ‘church’ were simply equivalent to the communion of saints at all times and in all places. With some degree of consensus, scholars of the late medieval period, especially those aligned with the theological school of radical orthodoxy, argue that the church began to consolidate its power as a bureaucratic institution, centralizing its hierarchy as a chain of top-down organizational command. To some extent, the rise of universities were a response to this new power consolidation, producing knowledges that were independent of this church governance and often in tension with it.

In other words, I’m suggesting that just as many have noted that monasteries were established as independent critical spaces after the advent of Constantinianism, universities became independent critical spaces after the church’s bureaucratic consolidation of power. Universities thus engage with these structures by producing truth independent of these systems of governance so that truth can’t be bent by power. Instead, scholars speak unvarnished truth to power. To the extent that the university has become complicit with the powers, then, we must work both within and without the university to return it to its prophetic character.

In short, it’s because we believe in the public good of prophetic critique that we are economically stupid enough to be doctoral students.

The Liberty of “China Wine”

Tags

accountability, Barack Obama, Catholic sex abuse, celebrity, China Wine, Chuck Grassley, church-state, City Harvest Church, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, evangelism, Fortnight for Freedom, HHS mandate, Hong Kong, Kong Hee, Ms K, Obamacare, orientalism, prosperity theology, public, public good, religious freedom, secular, Singapore, Sun Ho, Thomas Jefferson, Timothy Dolan, USCCB, Wyclif Jean

The recent uproar over investigations over the misuse of funds at City Harvest Church in Singapore has taken the media by storm. Not only has it been plastered all over Singaporean media at Channel NewsAsia, the Straits Times, and Yahoo! Singapore, but it has been recently picked up by blogs at Time Magazine and Christianity Today as well.

The reactions have been typical:

• I knew it; this is another prosperity gospel preacher who’s getting his dues like his counterparts in the States.  You know, there’s the whole thing about Creflo Dollar and his alleged domestic abuse, not to mention Senator Chuck Grassley’s probe of the tax wheelings-and-dealings of six prominent televangelists.

• We at City Harvest trust this guy because we donate our funds to God, and our leaders do what they want with it.

• LOOK AT HIS WIFE BEHAVING LIKE A POLE DANCER IN THIS ORIENTALIZING VIDEO! (Notice, of course, that by collaborating with Wyclif Jean, the pastor’s wife has teamed up with “The Preacher’s Son.” That said, I don’t think this is what Vijay Prashad was calling for in terms of Afro-Asian relations in Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting.)

To be sure, scandal can whet our appetites, and a scandal like this takes us in all sorts of critical directions: orientalism, prosperity gospel, the need for church transparency and accountability to the public, the place of Christian celebrities, Bill Bright’s “seven mountains” vis-a-vis James Davison Hunter‘s To Change the World, etc.

The problem is, all of that elides what I think is the central issue here: church-state relations.

I think what’s interesting about this case is that it can easily be juxtaposed to something that looks completely irrelevant on the surface: the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Fortnight for Freedom.

The Fortnight, of course, seems to have far less bearing on church scandal, than, say, the 2002 Boston Globe revelations of the Catholic sex abuse scandals and the efforts that followed that made the Church more compliant with public investigation of pedophilia among priests through the June 2002 release of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People and its 2011 renewal.

As it is, on the face of it, the Fortnight is irrelevant to Kong Hee because it seems to have more bearing on the passage of universal health care in the United States. But it is relevant, I argue, because the opposition by the bishops to most of Obama’s health care policies is least rhetorically based on what it perceives as the Obama administration’s curbing of religious liberties by removing the right to conscientious objection to abortion, contraception, and welcoming undocumented migrants, all in relation to health care policy. (The evangelical response, it seems to me, is based more on libertarian principles than right-to-life activism.)  Not only were the bishops disappointed in the Roberts Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, but they began the Fortnight for Freedom prior to the ruling to oppose Kathleen Sebelius’s Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate that all employers must provide contraceptives, including allegedly abortifacient ones, to all of their employees.

When the administration compromised by exempting religious organizations, the bishops weren’t satisfied: the exemption only applied to organizations where the membership is Catholic, not to, say, schools, hospitals, and non-profit organizations that are under the jurisdiction of Catholic bishops but mostly serve and employ non-Catholics.

psst…there’s a Canadian one too

The bishops argue that the state has no business telling the Church what is and is not religion.  The Church’s services do not only serve other confessional Catholics; the slogan goes: we don’t serve people because they’re Catholic; we serve because we’re Catholic. Part of the Catholic thing, the bishops argue, is that they should be able to abide by their rule of conscience on right-to-life issues when they run even these “secular” organizations, and for the state to police that is to violate the Church’s freedom of religion.

Let’s bring this back to Kong Hee and Sun Ho.

The allegations at City Harvest Church are that five members of the board misappropriated church funds to finance Sun Ho’s music career and lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles. More technically, it is that the usage of $23 million that were supposed to be for charity were found to be irregular as they were allegedly used for the secular purposes of financing music as non-religious as “China Wine.”

Bear with me, but if you think about it, you could make the same argument for the board members at City Harvest as the American bishops are making during the Fortnight for Freedom.  You could say: what business does the state have in determining what is and is not religious activity? After all, the point of Sun Ho’s Crossover Project is to use secular music to evangelize non-Christians.

That’s a pretty religious motivation for a non-religious activity. It could even be construed as charitable if your theology is that evangelizing non-Christians at all costs is the most loving service you can do for your neighbour. Just as the Catholic bishops would argue that schools, hospitals, and non-profits that serve non-Catholics still remain Catholic because they serve out of a Catholic spirit, so Kong Hee, Sun Ho, and the leadership at City Harvest could maintain that Sun Ho’s Crossover Project is religious, if not charitable, activity not because it is targeted to Christians but because the intention remains Christian evangelism.

Of course, especially on blogs like A Christian Thing, we could open discussion on whether we agree with this theology or not. We could talk about the fundamental theological differences between Catholic bishops and prosperity gospel preachers, and we certainly could do a series on how to write about Christian scandals that are exploding left, right, and centre at the moment, from Kong Hee to Creflo Dollar to Korean property tax scandals regarding church cafes to allegations of sexual harassment by a Ms K in Hong Kong when she went on a short-term missions trip to Taiwan with a Pastor/Mr. X. The Asian American in me also wants to rant about how orientalizing “China Wine” is. We could–and should–talk about all those things, and yes, of course, bring on the critique.

But like it or not, we cannot deny that Kong Hee, Sun Ho, and the board at City Harvest Church in Singapore have a theology. Much as some progressive Catholics think the bishops have gone too far, they can’t deny them their theological reasoning either. Critique, yes, but a full critique of these things would have to be a theological critique.

However, to acknowledge such theologies as theologies in their own right would also change the conversation from scandal to a more intricate theological question: what is the power of the state to regulate what constitutes theological activity in a religious organization?