The news cycle this week has been nuts. From the militarized police action and racialization in Ferguson to evangelical media theologian Vicky Beeching coming out as gay, from the mixed-up reports about the Islamic State to the unresolved crisis in Gaza, these ‘wars and rumors of wars’ have rung with apocalyptic tones.
The problem with even having a conversation about these things is that they are layered with assumptions.
My friend Sam Rocha over at Patheos Catholic has experienced this layering in quite a visceral way this week. After posting a rebuttal to conservative Catholics who accuse the Muslim ummah of not speaking out about the Islamic State, Rocha found himself in the midst of a maelstrom of misunderstanding. He had ended his post with a call to Patheos’s Muslim channel to cover the Islamic State news more, precisely as a way to disengage the channel from the atrocities in Iraq and beyond:
My question to my Abrahamic brothers and sisters at the Patheos Muslim channel is, why are you not reporting on — and joining — the predominant voices of your religious community (and your channel editor)?
Rocha found himself quickly rearticulated by some on his channel who saw this as their opportunity to insinuate that the Muslim channel had insidious ulterior motives for their silence. Thankfully, there were those on the Muslim channel who responded graciously and informatively. But in all of these testy exchanges, Rocha’s conciliatory attempt to invite both the Catholic and Muslim channels to a conversation were rearticulated through the assumption that a question like the one Rocha posed needs to be interpreted through the lens of a holy war that had to be de-escalated. This is far from the case, of course — Rocha calls the Muslim channel his ‘Abrahamic brothers and sisters’ and promises to practice more fully what Pope Francis calls a ‘culture of encounter.’ But it was difficult to be heard. That was because Rocha was speaking into fora layered with assumptions.
Or take the example of Vicky Beeching coming out. The Independent‘s report on the matter confirms that the trusted sources who knew about her sexuality were Katherine Welby, her father Justin Cantuar, and her parents, some of whom have different theological understandings of the sexuality debates than her strong, earlier-acknowledged stance on LGBT theology. In an interview with Channel 4 News, though, Beeching’s story was paired with longtime anti-gay activist Scott Lively, who dragged her over the coals for living a ‘lie’ that denied the ‘biblical’ teaching on sexuality in Genesis. When Beeching clarified that there were multiple possible readings of the biblical text — a point that even St. Augustine acknowledges in De Doctrina Christiana — Lively spoke over her to charge that she was not giving him the chance to speak and express his ‘biblical’ view. But therein lay the dilemma. He had been speaking, expressing, articulating, and when Beeching asked to deconstruct some of his assumptions about being ‘biblical’ — especially because she had studied the Bible and tradition at a graduate level — he wouldn’t hear it. His assumptions led to a train of accusations that here was a major Christian leader who had now fallen.
Or take the convoluted stories we are now hearing about both Ferguson and Gaza, which are apparently linked because the militarization of the police in Ferguson took direct cues from the Israeli Defence Forces. What is even more confusing now, though, is that for all of the talk of Ferguson appearing like a war zone, the death of Michael Brown was passed off today as a botched attempt to arrest him for a convenience store strong-arm robbery, only now to have to backtrack on that when the public learned that the robbery was not connected to the actual reason Brown was stopped, which is apparently now jaywalking. These twists and turns also reflect the confusion around the Gaza story — who kidnapped whom? who shot first? how many civilians are dying? who’s really committing atrocities? The result is that the public is left to our own assumptions about what is actually happening, which means that what is really being allowed to control these stories is not what is actually happening — it’s one’s own knowledge of good and evil on race, militarization, Israel/Palestine, and the police state.
All of this arrives at the doorstep of the church catholic today on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. I’m sure that jokes could be made about this Protestant author talking about how Catholics assume that Mary was assumed into heaven.
But to simply stop at that corny punchline would be to miss the point.
The Assumption matters, even for Protestants. If indeed Mary has been assumed ahead of the pilgrim church into her full risen life, then the apparitions that she has made — and that Protestants doubt actually happened — take on much more powerful significance, for it would mean that the Blessed Virgin is living out her risen life by preaching to a world wracked by the conflict around its ideological assumptions — its continual eating in the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, as Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer would say — instead of dealing with the concrete historical and ethnographic realities before us.
In this sense, Mary remains a political figure in modernity. From race relations at Guadalupe to her protest against secularization at Lourdes to her interpretation of twentieth-century geopolitcs at Fatima — among her other apparitions — Mary says to us that when we allow ideological fictions to rewrite history and rearticulate reality, we are not encountering each other as human persons. We may encounter each other as racial projects, states of exception, theological heretics, and agents of the police state, but to do that is to reduce the human person to a set of disembodied ideas. No, Mary says. I am here. I have physically appeared to you. I am the Lady who is speaking to you. She will not let us exist as ideas. Her Assumption forces us to encounter each other as bodily persons. This is what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, means when he calls on us to a graciousness in ‘deep disagreement’ where one assumes the best about one’s ideological opponents, precisely what he has shown toward Vicky Beeching in her journey. As a practitioner of Catholic social teaching, Welby knows that he is channeling Paul VI’s ‘civilization of love‘ from his 1970 Regina Coeli speech. And thus he would have no problem with me, a Chinglican, saying that the Assumption of Mary is the krisis of our assumptions.
Hail, star of the sea, Nurturing Mother of God, And ever Virgin Happy gate of heaven.
Receiving that ‘Ave’ From the mouth of Gabriel Establish us in peace, Transforming the name of ‘Eve.’
Loosen the chains of the guilty, Send forth light to the blind Our evil do thou dispel, Entreat for us all good things.
Show thyself to be a Mother: Through thee may he receive prayer Who, being born for us, Undertook to be thine own.
O unique Virgin, Meek above all others, Make us, set free from our sins Meek and chaste.
Bestow a pure life, Prepare a safe way: That seeing Jesus, We may ever rejoice.
Praise be to God the Father, To the Most High Christ be glory To the Holy Spirit Be honour, to the Three equally. Amen.
Let me begin this post by congratulating Alastair Sterne for finding common ground with Douglas Todd on the question of government. In the previous posts, I have chided Sterne for not realizing how much common ground his articulation of ‘classical Christianity’ had with Todd’s version of ‘liberal Christianity,’ and in this most recent post, he seems to be celebrating in their commonalities, so much that Sterne has written a ‘much shorter response’ for which we are supposed to ‘breathe a sigh of relief.’ In Todd’s words, here is the statement with which Sterne establishes ‘common ground’:
Along with Obama, Trudeau and Layton, B.C. Premier Christy Clark and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne would fall into the liberal Christian camp. Their political differences suggest just how diverse liberal Christians can be. But it’s fair to say most liberal Christians, from Martin Luther King to Tony Blair, are not anti-government activists like those in the American Tea Party. Liberal Christians generally believe governments can be a force for good, including for upholding human rights, providing social services and reducing the gap between the rich and the rest.
What Sterne finds so appealing about this statement is that the title statement – governments as a potential force for good — is the word ‘potential.’ Also eschewing the extreme neoliberal politics of the American Tea Party in which, as Ronald Reagan once said, ‘government is the problem,’ Sterne claims that classically Christian doctrine would hold that governments can potentially act as a force for good, though they could potentially abuse their power as well. Explaining that Jesus’ alternate vision of power seen through the matrix of death and resurrection would eschew the abuse of power for the common good, Sterne holds up Dutch Calvinist theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper as the model for Christocentric politics, one in which the Lordship of Christ would ensure the goodness of the political system. In so doing, Christians may themselves be scattered across the political spectrum, but because they submit to a higher power that has redefined politics for the common good, they themselves work toward a common purpose of human flourishing through ‘the good functioning of government.’
Kuyper looking cheery.
In principle, Sterne’s simple political vision is relatively uncontestable in ‘classically Christian’ terms, although all the talk about the sovereignty and lordship of Jesus Christ over politics might have some, such as Globe and Mail journalist Marci McDonald, worried about a theocratic takeover of the Canadian government at various levels of governance. However, the question is whether Sterne’s simple vision of submitting to a higher power is workable in practice. That’s because — as both Todd and Sterne imply — the government in a democratic polity is not something that’s out there; it’s a governing force in which residents and citizens participate.
The word for that kind of participating polity is civil society.
The Pope Emeritus is there for added emphasis with regards to ‘classical Christianity.’
The classic text that’s used to understand civil society is critical theorist Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere. In fact, I highly recommend it. That’s because Habermas gives a historical account of why the ‘public sphere’ of civil society, that is, the gathering of citizens to converse and deliberate about the workings of the state, is actually really important to the actual workings of the state. Once upon a time, what the ‘public’ meant was the state and its court, located out there from the citizenry as something to watch, sort of like a play. But as democratic sentiments developed and citizens were increasingly commenting on the workings of the state, these democratic deliberations — or what was known as public opinion — needed to be taken into account by the state. In this way, the state could be held accountable by its citizens, that is to say, the citizens never really banked on Sterne’s argument by ‘potential’ as to whether the state could work for the common good or abuse its power. Instead, they were going to make the state work for the common good by discussing it, criticizing it, deliberating about it, and participating in its policymaking. A democratic government is basically when this public opinion in this public sphere of civil society in effect runs the state.
And Canada is democratic.
This means that the real question that we should be asking isn’t whether government is a potential force for good and how they might hypothetically be turned for good. Even with Sterne’s theological answer that turns our gaze upon Jesus and looks full on his wonderful face, that the things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of his glorious grace does not in fact somehow negate the way that governments are not simply out there, but are instead diffused among the citizenry, at least theoretically. (Practically, in Canada, this would mean that the citizenry needs to push back on the dismantling of the Canadian Broadcasting Company and in the United States, it means that they would need to work to overturn the Citizens United decision because, in the prophetic words of Elizabeth Warren, ‘No, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love and they die.) The question, then, is not whether governments are a potential force for good. It’s: how should the people of God participate in the civil society whose deliberations effectively run the state?
The great thing, though, is that there is a classically Christian approach to the civil society question. It’s called Catholic social teaching.
As I said in the very first post in this series, Catholic social teaching is a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century magisterial interpretation of how classical Christianity is to be lived in the politics of the contemporary world. It arguably dates back to Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum, or less commonly, ‘On Capital and Labor.’ Speaking of a ‘middle way’ in the course of our conversation between ‘liberal’ and ‘classical’ Christianity, Leo XIII proposes a middle way between two systems of governance that has dominated modern political imaginaries: capitalism and socialism. This means, of course, that much of what Catholic social teaching addresses is the state and its role in governing political economies.
What’s great about the argument in Rerum novarum is that the be-all-end-all isn’t the state, as much as the encyclical is about state governance. Leo XIII places a very high premium on civil society. Mirroring another argument that Todd has made about how ‘dignity’ is getting thrown around in public discourse with very vague definitions, Leo XIII defines the dignity of the human person as everyone’s right to flourish in a life filled with social relations marked by love, beginning with the family as the basic unit. While conservative Catholic debates of late have emphasized the family part of this whole thing, the point of Rerum novarum was that people made in the image and likeness of God have the right not to have their lives run completely by the state or the capitalist economy. That’s why Catholic social teaching ran a middle way between capitalism and socialism: it couldn’t be fully capitalist because treating workers with full human dignity is fundamentally incompatible with technocratic attempts to reduce everything to the profitable bottom line, and it couldn’t be fully socialist because the answer to the excesses of capitalist ownership could not be to transfer ownership of everything, including people, to the state. No, it was a bit of both. The people themselves have the right to an economic system that promotes human flourishing marked by love.
And when they don’t have that, they have the right to form labour unions and go on strike.
That’s why the British Columbian teachers’ strike is one of the perfect case studies for this kind of thing. Stretching the bounds of Rerum novarum, here we have a case of public sector employees — i.e. teachers who are employed by the government and who have formed a labour union called the BC Teachers’ Federation — who have gone on a full-fledged strike to publicly dispute their grievances with the BC Liberal government. For the sake of argument, we might ask, is there a classically Christian justification for this strike? Some might say that there isn’t. Given the New Testament injunctions to respect the governing authorities and for slaves to submit to masters, there is nothing justifiable about a strike that disrupts the educational system, places teachers’ interests at the front of the bargaining table, and subjects kids to hastily developed provincial exams and precarious uncertainty about their end-of-term marks.
But that’s just the thing: the teachers aren’t slaves. They are citizens in a deliberative democracy, and in classically Christian terms, they are made with the image and likeness of God and using that dignity to dispute the undignified conditions not only of stagnant wages, but classroom sizes that are unconducive to learning, a hopeless budget that doesn’t provide for basic classroom supplies, and a Liberal government that continues to ignore a Supreme Court case that grants the educational sector all of the dignified above. In this sense, the teachers, while secular and not Catholic, are putting the Catholic social teaching on civil society to work. That’s because in a deliberative democracy, citizens don’t submit to the government. They make the government work for the common good.
Or to take a transnational case, over 700,000 Hongkongers have now voted in a civil referendum on universal suffrage and civil nominations for Chief Executive elections, a move that has been condemned by Beijing’s central government. While seemingly unrelated to Vancouver, there is talk of Beijing’s imminent crackdown when these Hongkongers will make toward a movement called Occupy Central with Love and Peace to physically disrupt the Central district in Hong Kong with acts of civil disobedience. With such political nervousness, there is also talk of such activities triggering a new transnational migration wave to Vancouver. In other words, what is going on in a civil society across the Pacific is of deep public interest in Vancouver.
The question in Hong Kong is whether such ‘illegal’ acts of civil disobedience can be justified by classically Christian doctrine. After all, the major leaders of the Occupy Central movement are Christian academics and clergy, such as Professor Benny Tai Yiu-ting and the Rev. Chu Yiuming. Because of this, Christian theology has become central to the deliberations around Occupy Central. Just like with the BC teachers’ strike, these deliberations about the Christian praxis of civil society have been heavily contested. On the one hand stand megachurch pastors like the Rev. Daniel Ng Chung Man and the Anglican provincial secretary Rev. Peter Koon, who have disputed whether the planning of ‘illegal’ civil disobedience acts contradict a biblical injunction to submit to the governing authorities. But on the other hand are the Rev. Chu Yiuming, as well as the retired senior prelate Joseph Cardinal Zen, who argue that the people of Hong Kong have the human right to demand political agency from a state that is trying to tighten its authoritarian grip.
As Benny Tai has repeatedly emphasized, the point is not really whether all Hongkongers are on the same page with regards to civil disobedience, universal suffrage, and civil nominations. The point is that people in Hong Kong are talking, deliberating about precisely what the common good is. This is how a civil society ought to work. In a classically Christian sense, that’s because we all have the right to exercise our agency to build the common good together — and in so doing, to make the state work for the common good instead of passively hoping that it won’t abuse its power. In answer to that Douglas Todd piece on dignity, it’s that exercise of political agency that lies close to the heart of that vague word ‘dignity.’
This last point gets close to the real reason why these blog posts have been firing off the pages of St. Peter’s Fireside and my corner of this Thing. That’s because if indeed we do live in a deliberative democracy that is in turn deeply transnationally connected to another society that is having struggles with deliberative democracy, then what we are doing in this blog conversation is deliberation. That’s important because with Todd writing about liberal Christianity in the pages of the Vancouver Sun, as well as with news about Christians and Christian privilege circulating in Vancouver’s public sphere, one of the items for deliberation in our democratic civil society is the place of Christians — let’s be honest, as it’s not really about generic religion — in public life. As it is, these definitions and debates about ‘liberalism,’ ‘classical Christianity,’ and ‘catholicity’ are part of a wider public circulation about these items, which in turn has the potential to shape public discourse and government policy.
So while much of what we have seemingly done here is to provide public theological entertainment for a niche of readers, the consequences of all of our materials circulating may be beyond what any of us have intended. In this sense, I do have an answer to the cynical question of why we even bother to have this conversation, as if there were better things to do than this. It’s: did you forget that we live in a deliberative democracy?
We look forward to this debate getting extremely personal when Mike Chase blogs about theodicy next.
I am now deeply satisfied. After reading part 2, Churl is now wanting me to perform some sort of ‘theological magic’ to enact a ‘Houdini-like escape,’ as ‘digging one’s grave very deep makes rising from it that much more spectacular.’ Moreover, after the previous Wong Fu diversion, he is now commending my Anglican theological acumen:
“It’s kind of complicated. Let’s talk about something else for a while and maybe it will go away.” I gotta say, Chinglican certainly knows how to do Anglican theology – and I mean that of course in the most loving and Christian way possible.
He knows, after all, that I really can’t live up to the order of the Resurrection; after all, that declared a wandering rabbi the Son of God, produced what Karl Barth called a ‘krisis’ of the powers that styled themselves as godlike, and started a church whose complex history we have been exploring. Moreover, the question of whether Anglicanism can rise from the dead? is likely territory where even angels fear to tread. While the Lord Jesus promises us that we will do greater works than those he did (cf. John 16:12), I unfortunately do not wish to presume that I can give life to whomever I wish (cf. John 5:21).
So I won’t try.
My question is more modest: why do I stay Anglican? Picking up on Churl’s question about ‘theological magic,’ today’s answer comes to us first by way of Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest.
Because The Tempest was the obsession of my Catholic creative writing mentor in high school and the first thing I ever read in university, I’ve come up with a reading of The Tempest that will make all the people who think that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic very happy (apparently, this hangs on a reading of Hamlet, but that’s another post).
Here’s my read: Prospero is a Protestant Anglican. Of course, it might be tempting to read Prospero as a Catholic: he has control of the winds and the waves, the spirits on the island, the book of magic that perhaps the pope has.
But this reading doesn’t quite work if, at least as I was taught, The Tempest is at heart Shakespeare’s ultimate parable about modern science and political sovereignty, making apparent what has long lain hidden in his theatrical oeuvre. For cryin’ out loud, the guy’s on an island, controlling the spirits (like Ariel), kicking the monsters around (like Caliban; yes, I read Prospero as a racist colonizer and Caliban as a post-colonial cry for liberation; that’s another post too), and micromanaging his daughter (Miranda) worse than any stereotypical tiger parent (sorry, had to throw that in there; I am a Chinglican, after all). Prospero is no church controlling the world; he is the state subjectifying his citizens, including their spirituality.
Here’s the comedic twist, though. Spoiler alert: at the end of the play, Prince Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda, and the brothers who usurped Prospero’s throne back in Milan are reconciled with him. Once this happens, Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his book of magic. He’s done with the magical subjectification of everything on the island under his sovereignty. He lets go of the establishment he invented. He is ready for reconciliation.
I’m sure that Shakespeare never intended The Tempest to be taken as a parable for Anglicanism. But it certainly can be received that way. After all, on a cursory reading of the play, one might think that Shakespeare is pro-Prospero: Prospero’s brothers stole his throne, Miranda is over-protected and rebels with Ferdinand, Ariel complains too much, and Caliban is a deformed asshole (can I say that on A Christian Thing?). But that Shakespeare makes Prospero give up the new establishment at the end of the play signals that he might be critical of Prospero, that is, critical of establishmentarian politics, as he is in many of his plays.
Shakespeare is thus providing a re-reading of Anglicanism. A non-establishmentarian reading.
Which brings me to the central proposition of this post: blessedare the English majors, for theirs is the Anglican portion of the kingdom of heaven.
I say this completely without guile, because I was never an English major. I am in fact a social scientist.(I need to put that in bold in case anyone wants to challenge my reading of English literature: yes, I am ignorant, untrained, uncouth, and make pronouncements on things beyond my discipline. Deal with it.)
But I wanted to be an English major in high school, so much so that while my Catholic high school required us to take at least one English course per semester, my junior and senior years were filled with at least two per term, partly because I liked literature so much and partly because I didn’t want to do home economics (imagine my regret when they cooked rotisserie chicken, though). That all changed when I got to university. I’m frequently told that I took the smarter, more lucrative way out of things: rejecting my recruitment into an English honours program because the history honours program had no exams and lectures, I did my undergraduate degree in history, after which I defected in graduate school to the social sciences. We’ll talk more about the social sciences in part 5 (so stay tuned!), but while I suppose the stuff that i do in the social sciences is more ‘relevant,’ ‘scientific,’ and ‘secular’ (though the social sciences are also chafing under budget cuts), English majors and graduate students seem to have it the worst these days. They’re often told that they were fools to choose literature as a major or graduate specialization because of the putative death of the humanities in the academy. Become an English major, and throw away your entire career. After all, look at Anne Hathaway’s character in the often-panned Valentine’s Day (though my wife and I love this chick flick, partly because we quite uncritically love all chick flicks, and are proud of this ethic). Spoiler alert: we discover that Anne Hathaway’s character moonlights on the side as a phone sex escort because, as she explains, ‘how else is a poetry major going to pay back all her college loans?’ As the English graduate students on this Thing have also described it, the job market in literature is one that doesn’t value what they do, leading Lelbc43 to describe it even as a ‘theodicy.’ If English majors are indeed in such a state of poverty, it would be ‘very meet, right, and our bounden duty always and everywhere’ to acknowledge that they are poor not only in spirit, but in material means, and that their mourning will be comforted and that because of their meekness, they will inherit the earth, including the academy.
But poor as English majors are, the English majors will also inherit the Anglican portion of the kingdom of God because the English canon with which they wrestle stands as a crypto-theological critique of the modern Anglican establishment. Which leads to our second beatitude: blessed are those who ponder the English canon while hungering and thirsting for justice, for they will be filled.
St. John’s College. I wanted to go here once upon a time, but nobody would let me. Wah.
Of course, the moment I bring up the word ‘canon,’ I realize that I’m in very hot water. So even though I am a social scientist, let me say that I’m aware that I will be slowly boiled alive. I understand that what purports to be the ‘English canon’ is in fact the invention of American universities’ ‘Great Books’ programs from the University of Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame, and is now enshrined in the core curriculum at St. John’s College. I know full well that the canon has been used to construct a sort of ‘Western civilization’ approach to the world, one that is firmly pro-establishment and works against my post-colonial tendencies. I appreciate immensely the assaults on a fixed canon as a bastion of work written by dead white men (erm, Jane Austen? George Eliot? the Brontë sisters?) that is purportedly anti-feminist, pro-establishment, homophobic, exclusionary of subaltern voices, and discursively propping up an epistemic era in which (as Foucault would say) ‘man’ has become an object of intense scientific scrutiny. And so I fully take the point that in the English-American canon, it would seem that the ‘subaltern’ voices never seem to be heard, and everyone who’s worth reading are dead white men because those are the heroes of the establishment.
But allow me to protest by saying that this is a pro-Prospero reading of the canon. If we are trying to take apart modern Anglicanism from the inside-out, the canon is a remarkable gift. (I know that the One Ring of Power was too, but that’s different.) Because the function of the canon in elite universities has often been used to form a political class with critical civic faculties, you could say that the canon has often been used in the service of the state.
By canon, then, what I mean to refer to is that very loose collection of English-language books, many of which were written by British authors usually from Shakespeare onward to the nineteenth century (with some American inclusions for American state subjectification purposes and pre-modern works, usually of a Greco-Roman imperial nature, just to be well-rounded with the politics of pagan antiquity), that is often taught to us as ‘the classics.’ What I mean to say is this: if I start discussing a book that’s not in your canon, please don’t skewer me. Instead, it just proves my point that this is a ‘very loose collection of English-language books.’
I’d like to co-opt this (very loose) canon for our own purposes. Let’s move the canon back from its service to the state to the service of the church.
And thus, completely ignoring the canon debate because it really is a very state-centric conversation, let’s think about an alternate ecclesial way forward: let’s read the canon as Anglican theology.
In so doing, what we might find is that there is something in the canon that predates the modern Anglican establishment, something perhaps even akin to a Shakespearean critique of Prospero’s magical subjectification strategies. Indeed, let’s co-opt philosopher John Searle’s assertion that the reading of the canon inculcated a ‘critical attitude’ that ‘served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie’ and thus ‘once served an unmasking function.’ For us, the task of canon reading is not to be formed into an American political elite, although I’m sure that we’d all be better off as critics of American imperialism once we’ve read the canon. Instead, if we read English literature as Anglican theology, we might find that what has ended up in the canon isall the stuff with a tense relationship to the state establishment. In other words, the canon may well be the seeds that lead to the dismantling of Anglican church-state entanglement.
Here’s where some critical theory might actually be helpful. As a social scientist, I’ve found the notion of the ‘public sphere’ as a circulation of literary, artistic, and theatrical works particularly helpful. The go-to guy here is critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, who says that around the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there arose (particularly in England) a bourgeois public sphere, which was located between the authoritarian Enlightenment state (it behooves us always to remember that the first iteration of Enlightenment monarchy was the ‘divine sovereign,’ even in the British Isles…or did you forget to read Hobbes?) and the governed masses. The public sphere emerged as a conversation among a liberal, property-owning middle class about how the state represented itself. Starting out by portraying the state’s court, these comedies and dramas in art, theatre, and an increasing amount of literature became texts through which the bourgeois could critique the state. As people like Habermas as well as Michael Warner show, what we now call the ‘canon’ was instrumental in creating this buffer zone between the state and its citizens, between the establishment and the masses. And in time, of course, this public sphere became a vehicle for the state, what we now call modern democracy.
Hauerwas probably just laughed.
While theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and William Cavanaugh have often knocked democratic movements for being overly state-centric and otherwise nihilistic (and indeed, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the church functions as just another democratizing institution in the service of the democratic state), I’d like to join someone like Nicholas Wolterstorff in saying that the language of democracy, human rights, and justice predate modern democracy. Following that, I’d like to suggest that if the canon can be read as sowing the seeds for the relativization of state authoritarianism, all of this might imply a sort of Anglican impulse that predates the establishment of modern Anglicanism, one that finds itself constantly in tension with the state establishment, one that is ultimately concerned with the human person and his or her mystical communion with the living God as the critique of state subjectification. It’s that impulse that I am arguing is more properly called Anglican Christianity, one that functions constantly as an undercurrent of critique to the modern Anglican establishment that is so embedded with the powers of the state.
And thus, walking onto territory that is definitely more properly Churl’s and Lelbc43’s than mine, I’d like to suggest that what is needed is a reading of the English literature prior to the Anglican establishment that remains in continuity with what comes afterward. In other words, let’s read the canon as Anglican theology. Put another way, let’s read Shakespeare’s critique of Prospero as a continuous thread through the canon. (Just so you know, I’m going to be very selective here. As in, you may come away from this survey very dissatisfied that your favourite author didn’t get covered. I apologize for two reasons. First, I am running out of room. Second, I’m a social scientist and thus incompetent to discuss everybody competently. In fact, if you see any incompetence in what follows, please feel free to laugh.)
And let’s start precisely where I should not, that is, by colonizing Churl’s territory and saying that something like Sing Me Hwaethwugu is what I am calling a ‘crypto-Anglican blog.’ Let’s re-read Beowulf and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples. Of course, by including these in the Anglican canon (heh, see what I did there), I’m saying that the ‘Anglican canon’ doesn’t need to start with the old pagan Near Eastern and Greco-Roman imperial ‘classics’ (as most canons go), as if those were really necessary for full catholicity (Augustine basically says that they’re nice to critique in The City of God, that is, except for Plato; Augustine kinda likes Plato). Let’s start instead with the Anglo-Saxons.
Heh. Just something to tick Churl off.
If we read Beowulf and Bede with an Anglican eye, we might find that much of what has been construed as ‘Celtic Christianity’ in our popular Christian parlance is more properly described as ‘early Anglican Christianity.’ After all, this was the point of the Gregorian missions: to evangelize the Angles, a job that St. Augustine of Canterbury discovered was much harder than Gregory imagined because the British isles were the site of all kinds of tribal warfare as well as already-existing monasteries that had to be brought into full catholicity with Rome (hence the need for the Synod of Whitby). This evangelization brings out a central theological point that arguably runs throughout medieval Christendom: the state can really only do so much against the forces of evil. From Ambrose excommunicating Theodosius to Gregory VII excommunicating Henry, the point is that the church always relativizes the powers of the king. Beowulf recognizes this limit. As the hero of the Danish court, Beowulf goes out to fight with Grendel and Grendel’s mother and wins a great victory for the Danes. But he’s outclassed by the dragon, whom he does slay, but he ends up getting killed himself. So too, the whole point of Bede’s book is that the Gregorian missionaries came to the British Isles, and, finding the tribes at war, they relativized the powers of the tribal leaders (sometimes even calling down curses upon them), and as peace came to the Isles, they relativized the independence of the Isles altogether by making the church there conform to an Easter date. In short, the church always says to the state and its proto-state ancestors, Your powers are limited. When they get too big, they cause all sorts of violence. Recognize your relative power. (This point is arguably also in the Arthurian legends, especially when we compare Galahad to Lancelot. But I’m running out of room!)
Forgive me the next anachronistic move (I’m going to combine a few centuries that I know that I shouldn’t; this blog post would never get past a peer review, which is why it’s a blog post!): this is why I think we should read Anselm and Chaucer together. After all, Anselm was an Archbishop of Canterbury in tension with the state: trying to bend William and Henry to submission to the pope (and arguably to Canterbury) even while those two kings were trying to consolidate their state power, Anselm got the the boot twice from England. In turn, Chaucer was writing about Canterbury pilgrims grappling with the murder of another Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, arguably by the state (and by another Henry) because he tried to resist Henry II’s consolidation of state power. After his assassination, Henry went and prayed at his tomb in penance, which is nice because that relativizes the state too.
Here we see that when the church tells the state that its powers are relative, the state sometimes wants to exclude the church, often to its own detriment. Read this way, and Anselm’s ‘debt’ atonement theology makes a lot of sense: after all, as he’s writing Cur Deus Homo in exile (well, he started it at Canterbury, and then got the boot), he’s probably thinking that William and Henry have a lot of debts to pay and a lot of divine wrath to satisfy for their actions. So too, as Chaucer concocts The Canterbury Tales, everyone–especially clergymen and monks out for their own power and pleasure–gets wickedly skewered in bawdy comedy, which suggests that in the tension between the church and the state, the struggle of the powers produces plenty of fodder for hilarity. Indeed, we learn something new from Chaucer: as the church vies for power with the state, as if the church should engage the state on its own terms of power, the church becomes no better than the state and should thus also be subjected to comedic critique. Struggle for power, Chaucer says, and the joke’s on you.
Match point.
It’s that hilariously critical hermeneutic that becomes veiled from Shakespeare onward. By the time that one gets to early modern English literature, especially after the Elizabethan settlement, it becomes easy to read the canon as pro-establishment, trying to subjectify citizens with moral virtues that are conducive to their participation as agents of the state. After all, Henry VIII was somewhat successful: in Henry, you could say, the struggle of church against state in the British Isles culminated with the state eating the church.
Marianne: Is he done yet? Elinor: No, but my Edward always preaches short sermons.
And so, it’s now really easy to read British literature through a sort of Anglophilic, pro-establishment way. In fact, this is how I grew up. I was told that because I read Dickens, Austen, Trollope, etc. in late elementary, junior high, and high school, that I was a nice conservative child. To some extent, I believed it. I read ‘classical literature’ (Austen and Dickens as classical? Hm.), listened to ‘classical music’ (you mean to tell me that Bach and Elgar were classical?), and watched period movies and ‘classical’ plays (Shakespeare as classical?) because I was that kid. Not just the nerdy Chinese kid (as you may recall, the stereotype usually has more to do with math and science than with English), but the kid with character, the kid with virtue, the kid who was superior to all of his Chinese church and Christian school pleb friends because he was classical.
When I discovered that I was in Selina Kyle Anglicanism, I realized that it was precisely the canon–the same canon that I had read as a sort of pro-establishment conservative child–that in fact undermined the modern Anglican establishment. In other words, while the canon can be used for the purposes of state subjectification through the academy and the church, the works in the canon actually posit a tension between what the establishment is trying to do and what it means to be truly human as a critique of the establishment. (I suppose this is true of the biblical canon as well.)
In other words, read as Anglican theology, the English canon works to dislodge the church from state ideology. I don’t have time to now go back and re-read Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (a non-Anglican who wrote an awful lot about Anglicans), among others, with you. But I trust that with this hermeneutic, you’ll find out why despite the best-laid plans, the Austen characters working through their comedy of manners always wind up with the least-expected guy. You’ll re-think the whole plot of Jane Eyre as a not-so-subtle critique of Anglican colonizing missions and its impulse to subjectification, ironically finding in the ‘establishment’ of Mr. Rochester the seeds of the colonial state’s relativization. You’ll get your aha moment when reading Middlemarch and finding out that Eliot’s critique of the Anglican establishment is in fact a relativization of the powers of the church co-opted by the state for the sake of political gain. And you will laugh incessantly (as I do) every time a beadle shows up in Dickens’s novels.
As I read the canon as Anglican theology, then, I have great hope that the oppressive modern establishment that styles itself as the face of Anglican Christianity can be dismantled, and the true Anglicanism that predates modern Anglicanism can once again be known as Anglican Christianity. In fact, I know it must be dismantled because of the conclusions of yet another literary scholar, René Girard.
If we were to read the founding of modern Anglicanism through a Girardian lens, we would find that much of what modern Anglicanism purports to be was founded on a series of original murders, namely the long consolidation of Tudor England as a culmination to the War of the Roses. But what if we take those founding myths and posit them not as foundational, but as merely an episode in the ongoing tension between church and state in English Christianity? What if we take the long view and see that since the Gregorian missions, and arguably before that, the church has always been in tension with the state? What if we see in English Christianity that the church co-opting the state and the state co-opting the church, and both of them being subjected to literary ridicule, is business as usual? What if we say that Henry VIII founded nothing, that Elizabeth I settled nothing, and that Anglican Christianity does not actually hinge on the state’s actions because of the long ecclesial literary tradition that predates it? In other words, what if we stop thinking that the state won its battle against Canterbury in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that we still remain in an ever-unfolding story of Anglican church-state relations?
OK, that was the best tabloid I could find. For the record, Islamophobia sucks. But that’s another post.
This is precisely what’s so fascinating about the very people who should be the face of modern Anglican Protestantism over the last fifty or so years. Since Michael Ramsey, there has been an increasing recognition on the parts of Archbishops of Canterbury, especially Rowan Williams and Justin Welby, that the church should not be tied to the crown, or indeed, to a construction of what British identity(courtesy of the state) should mean. This, I submit to you, was the point of the whole poobah when Rowan Williams came out and said that shari’a law should be recognized in the United Kingdom. Williams was taking apart the whole notion of an established British identity, saying that the United Kingdom needs to understand that the Isles have always been a complex space with many different groups and that it’s pointless to impose one law on all people, especially if there are fellow Muslim citizens. The response to Williams was outrage: how can an Archbishop of Canterbury say such a thing about British identity? Here’s how: by not believing that the founding myths of British sovereignty are true and by disentangling the church from its modern role as the arm of the state, returning it to its original, pre-modern tension with the powers. (Ditto Welby’s comments on the banking system. Ditto the weird game that Welby and the English bishops are playing on the same-sex marriage bill.)
Sorry, Newman, this probably annoys the hell out of you.
I recognize that this argument for a pre-modern/post-modern Anglicanism sounds dangerously close to some of the arguments in the Oxford Movement, and particularly that of John Henry Newman. If there’s something that predates the schism and thus de-legitimizes it, then shouldn’t we all hop over to Rome? Maybe, and so, people like Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins did.
The only thing, though, is that Newman and Hopkins lived during the height of the British Empire. We live in the wake of its collapse, a crisis that affords us Anglicans who do not believe that Henry VIII’s state-eats-church move was legitimate an opportunity to do something unheard of: work for Anglican-Catholic home reunion from the Anglican side of things.
Michael Ramsey and Paul VI. Good times.
Indeed, you could say that the reason there have been so many good and interesting Archbishops of Canterbury since William Temple forward (yeah, actually, Ramsey can’t take all the credit) is that they were all too clear that with the dissolution of the Empire, it made the church’s entanglement with the state look increasingly like nonsense and madness. With the advent of Vatican II, this disentanglement has been coupled with serious dialogue with Rome and the Orthodox Church, particularly in the conversation that Michael Ramsey started with Paul VI that has led to the very interesting work done by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), who have released statements that basically say that despite different theological language being used for the sticky theological issues between the two communions, Anglican theologians basically concur with their Catholic counterparts on the primacy of Rome and the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There is the sticky issue of women’s ordinations and consecrations, as well as the status of LGBTQ+ populations in the communions, but I look forward to what ARCIC will do on this in years to come.
In other words, when I say that I’m staying in the Anglican Communion and when Churl says that he’s leaving for the Roman Catholic Church, we are saying pretty much the same thing. Churl is following Newman: having realized that the entire modern Anglican enterprise is basically a secular one, he is ready to jump ship into a Church where (as Charles Taylor points out) a real, full-bodied sacramental ontology is to be found. This is good and fair. But having read Newman, I’m not convinced that every Anglican who becomes convinced of what Churl has been convinced of must jump ship to Rome. If that were the case, I might ask: then how would the Anglican Communion keep being able to produce figures like Michael Ramsey, Rowan Williams, and Justin Welby? What we see is that in the English canon, Anglicanism has its own internal resources for undermining its own establishmentarianism. As this becomes undermined, the central question behind the Anglican-Roman Catholic schism will sound increasingly more ridiculous, and that is: can a state’s sovereign exert his rule over the church and her claim to channel one into mystical participation in the life of Christ? Of course not!
Francis: Hey, he’s giving away our secret. Justin: Don’t worry. The place I’ve reserved for him is secret too.
Then OK, if that’s so, then why continue the schism? Put another way: why can’t the Archbishop of Canterbury finally come home to Gregory? (Let me note that this is precisely what Justin Cantuar said to Pope Francis last week.) And put a final way: Churl and I are doing the same thing: we are working for the undermining of schism in different ways to which the Lord has called us. He will likely be going over to Rome; bless him. I will stay here in the Anglican Church. We both protest the notion that what is known as Anglicanism is founded on schism because, as the literary tradition suggests, this simply is not true. It is a state ideology. It should be disentangled from the work of the Body of Christ.
And thus, as we work for the truth on both sides of the Anglican-Roman Catholic conversation, who knows what will happen? I do not dare to predict the future. But know this: I’m an Anglican because I refuse to believe in schism. And since Anglicanism has its own resources for undermining schism, I’ll side with the long tradition of the Archbishops of Canterbury from Augustine to Justin who undermined the powers of the state (I forgot to say this earlier, but Cranmer also met a pretty ugly end when he finally ended up opposing the state). As a social scientist who loves his literature, I’ll also keep reading the canon that pokes fun at Anglican power wherever it rears its ugly head. I’ll stay right where I am and milk those traditions to the full, all in the hope against hope that one day, Anglicanism will cease to be a schismatic, self-referential modern identity and recognize its unique and vital contributions to the church catholic and the life of the world. Indeed, as I have suggested, this is already happening. It’s incumbent on me to join in.
So shouldn’t you go up for ordained Anglican ministry,then? Absolutely not. I’ll explain in Part 4. I might do some magic there too.
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.
By way of beginning this post, I want to clarify what I am and what I am not doing. I am not claiming that Suzanne Collins is a Christian or has a Christian message, though this may well be true. Nor am I offering “the gospel according to the Hunger Games” – I am satisfied enough with the gospel according to the gospels, and it strikes me as wrongheaded and potentially heterodox to claim that other stories are the gospel; we must let the gospel be the gospel and stories be stories. What I am claiming though is that the works of good authors reflect something true in creation, and what is true in creation reflects (albeit elliptically) truth about God. Indeed, we should not be surprised if we find in creation and the stories that arise therefrom what Stanley Hauerwas describes as a Christological “grain of the universe.” Therefore, through interpretive scansion of the Hunger Games series and the universe it describes, I am looking for what Hopkins called the inscape that points back to the instress on creation caused by God.
First of all, I want to clear something up about the series. If you read it and thought “this could happen in (insert favorite dictatorship) or a galaxy far, far away,” you have missed the point. Do not let this minor detail interrupt important affairs such as eating and drinking, marrying and being married. Considering such details will only put out your day.
For the rest, one of the latent questions will have to do with the brutal violence, some of which leads in the story to the deformation of identity (I here think of Peeta). Should Christians think about such things? To tell the truth, I was impressed that they were included. There are kinds of unspeakable suffering that will not fit in brown paper packages tied up in string. And some of these experiences we will not understand this side of heaven. Generically, the entire scope of the cosmos is comic. But this does not mean that every story in between is comic, and it does not mean we should work as hard as possible to make every story comic. Horror is horror, and sometimes we just have to let it be without pretending we can redeem it on our own terms by making up stories that we intend as consolations but that only end up making God look evil or like a fool. God does not insult Job by offering him a narrative of “how everything worked out for best in the end,” and we might do well to follow His example.
But to get to the heart of my argument, the book is primarily an exploration of what constitutes salvation. In the series, we encounter a world very much in need of salvation, and it offers two different messianic models, the rebel warrior and “the boy with the bread.” This strikes me as particularly resonant of the Christian story, for these two figures embody the messianic crisis encountered at the advent of Christ. Many were hoping for the rebel warrior, who would in fact overthrow the government and establish political salvation. Instead, they got a Christ who revealed himself in the Eucharistic breaking of bread. Moreover, I would suggest that Christians still face this temptation. We are perennially tempted to take charge and “change the world” in ways that conflate sociopolitical power and Christianity – and we are perennially called back gently to “the breaking of bread and to prayer.” Because I don’t want to ruin the series for anyone who hasn’t read, I will not spoil it by giving away the ending, but I will say that, given this typology, the conclusion thoroughly accords with Christian faith. Whether Suzanne Collins intended this or not, I don’t know – what I do know is that her story taps into the innate human longing for salvation not by power but by the Bread of Life.