Reevaluating John Thomas’ demands, we can see that his suggestions are not escapist but necessary. We cannot simply legislate more rights; we must regain our imagination and believe in the transformative power of words and rituals. It is not that Thomas is merely arguing that we should exercise private forgiveness and let the State commit its terror. That is what bad religion does: denies the connection between the personal and the political and asks its people to bandage the State’s wounded. No, the goal of religion is and should be radical: to defeat the State (and its crimes) by dissolving it into beauty, mercy and joy. True religion recognizes that there ought to be a separation between Church and State-since both are in fact, different kinds of States with the same limitations-but that any just State depends, in a sense, on religion.
I am sure I will be mistaken here by people who will think that I mean a Church or a specific religion or even a belief in a particular God. I do not. What I mean by ‘religion’ is that rupture, that impulse, that demands to be universalized but cannot be codified-that contains within it both the radical prescription for equality and the moment-to-moment-ness of mercy. And by religion I also mean the requirement that someone believe in something more than can be codified, something more than the infinitization of their preference. Because the desire to codify allegiance and infinitize preference is exactly the sinister impulse that produces a State. The opposite-the demand to universalize the subjective by extenuating its circumstances-is the impulse of religion. It is precisely by believing in something more than ourselves that we allow a demand that is larger than our own preferences to be placed on us. Just as the State functions to guard against a too-rapid assimilation of any preference, a God works against and finesses one’s belief in the self-evidence of his preferences.
But to return to the question of Jesus and its political relevance, I must say that it was not enough to simply admire him. One had to believe in him. And I think that still holds, if not in the particular (we do not have to believe in Jesus per se) than in the general sense: first, that we must be transformed rather than convinced by an idea to be powerful and second, that we must see a difference between the idea and ourselves. That gap between ourselves and our ideas is what is powerful about believing in something rather than respecting something. Respect can easily bend toward respecting anything that already accords with our preference. Believing in something other than ourselves requires us to reckon with the difference between what we would like to be true and what is stated as true. Sometimes the former truth will win out, sometimes the latter. That is not necessarily important. What was important-what was true-was the process of reckoning the gap, not the content of the conclusion. A State allows people to line up with ideas that they respect and creates partisanship, gulfs between people that are irreconcilable because they admit no gaps. Religion requires each person to radically examine both the alterity of another person and the possibility of radical similarity (that the same impulses, motives and trials that mold us mold others, too) that allows for union amidst difference. It also requires that we allow every person her archeology-that we try to discover the manifold reasons someone became the person that they are, with the opinions that they have.
And this is my final point-one that will chastise me more than anyone else. I believe that most of the time the political conversation is the wrong conversation, and disagreement-the battles in the so-called marketplace of ideas-is the wrong method. It is the wrong method because it does not ask for the other person’s archeology but argues, instead, against their most recent belief as if a flat sentence could accurately stand in for a complex human. It is the wrong conversation because it believes that facts and arguments change peoples’ minds, and it allows people to assume that their motives are somehow different than other people’s motives. I have thought of this often as I have listened to the fights over Prop 8, and felt that most of us were having the wrong conversation-not, mind you, that the conversations weren’t vital and emotionally necessary to the people making them, but that by pretending the issue was a political issue rather than a human issue both sides made arguments that were completely inaccessible and foreign to the other. I believe that the religious impulse is the desire to discover another person’s archeology so that you can speak in the language that their experiences happened in. I also believe that religion recognizes (and this is where I condemn myself) that history is psychological, not structural. The consequences of history might be structural: they might be bigoted, racist, sexist, imperialist. But religion says that the chances are high that the motives of history are psychological-that they arise from needs that are common to everyone that we distort with insecurities that are common to everyone. Religion requires that we see our own hypocrisy in every bad act, and that we forgive it-not because it is foreign and repulsive to us, but because it is so familiar, because we were there inside it somewhere. Religion requires that we see history as a thousand-million acts of human frailty and alienation that we try, sometimes horribly, to overcome. And so religion must speak differently about justice than politics because it knows that speaking in structural terms is to already misunderstand the human. That is why religion’s response to suffering is guttural: it grieves for the perpetrator and the victim in the same sorrowful sigh.
Religion must confront structural injustices. That was Bonhoeffer’s point. But it must also achieve real peace by wreaking a transformation in every single individual. And this transformation will produce a person who radical knowledge of her own capacity for sin allows her to forgive other sinners without leaving the side of their victims. That was John Thomas’ point.
November 21st, 2008 at 6:16 am
Interesting views on the nature of the State. How did you come up with them?
November 21st, 2008 at 6:20 am
I really could have used these posts a week ago when I started an online discussion with a few people about Prop 8. It ended, for me, in a nervous break-down, crying. Thanks Ash, for always articulating what I wish I could say.
AND I started to worry you had disappeared off the face of the earth…you were silent for so many days in so many ways. I hope you had some time for yourself that was much needed.
Loves.
November 21st, 2008 at 8:33 pm
this is my favorite essay you’ve ever posted, ash. it’s incredibly a propos to the “development” discussion, which is inherently trapped in a rhetoric of alterity… it’s a trap we so easily fall into, begging for more leg room for chickens about to be slaughtered. brilliant.
November 21st, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Just a few notes here in answer to your questions:
First is Revelation 19:20 to answer the question about a more broad definition of prophecy. It is quite broadly defined here and has been expanded by modern prophets to include past written record (words of Jesus), and most importantly, the testimony given by Jesus in present day through his own mouth, by the mouth of his prophets, and particularly as one is instructed by the Holy Ghost. All of the above made Joseph Smith able to respond confidently, ‘Yes, I’m a prophet, because I bear the testimony of Jesus.’
Second; this idea that religion is a state is a very very old idea. Even perfect religion is a state. e.g. Jesus prays “Thy kingdom come.”
November 22nd, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Ashley -
There’s much that’s important and profound here, a few things that I find confusing, and a couple of points I wish to make.
Firstly (as you might have expected) I applaud your argument that Christian faith (as distinct from religion) imposes upon us a different understanding of history, what Niebuhr called the Biblical or revelatory understanding. While the humanistic or rational notions of history, which modernity has given us, expect that history will inevitably progress as more and more human beings are sufficiently educated or trained or brought into the light of rationality, Christianity teaches us that, rather, we are beings too limited for that. Humanism argues, “If only all people understood what I understand, all would be well.” Biblical theology answers that history is tragic.
You use the term ‘hypocrisy;’ the Biblical metaphor is original sin. While original sin does not exist per se, it is a poetically accurate term for our weaknesses. Human beings are capable of imagining the transcendent (this, I would argue with Katy, is the theological distinction between ourselves and animals, but of course both our stances are inherently assumptions), but we live within the confinement of the particular. Thus all we do, all we make, all we imagine or seek to build is limited in some way, and our sins come when we ignore that fact and proclaim our particular understandings or politics or agenda are in fact universal and absolute, a perfect image of justice or righteousness or charity. But that is idolatry, for perfection is impossible.
This is not to say that reform is futile; to acknowledge that sin is ever-present in the world is to ensure that we must ever be vigilent against it. Acknowledging that suffering cannot be eliminated does not release us from the scriptural command to try. Indeed, accepting the radical impossibility of the commandments of Christ primes us to realize that they are in fact radical, and that sin is present even in the comfortable world that we mistake for righteousness. This, I think, is what Thomas means when he borrows these notions of imagination and transformative language from Walter Bruggemann. The first task of religion is to upend the world rhetorically, to equip us with a language capable of describing those sins that we normally do not even recognize, and to make us conscious of how profoundly different the Kingdom of God is from the world around us.
That is prophecy; it comes from outside the institutions of the world.
Finally, the distinction between religions and states. This is where I am somewhat confused; particularly in your first paragraph on this page, I don’t quite grasp what the difference or relation between the two should be, in your opinion. Bonhoeffer argued - and I think you’re following him to some degree - that ‘religion’ (that is, organized worship, distinct from faith) was useless; that rather, the demands that the existence of Christ placed upon each of us was to act in emulation of him in daily life rather than in abstract ritual. That I am not so sure I agree with; I believe that the stories that liturgy tells and the particularity of the rituals of churchgoing provide a space in which the rest of the world can be metaphorically upended. This is to say that I don’t think religion is as personal and private a thing as you seem to be following Bonhoeffer in arguing.
Rather, I believe in the Body of Christ, the spiritual unity of the believers. This communion, I think, is imperfectly mirrored in both religion and the state, but ultimately transcends either.
July 21st, 2010 at 3:01 am
Buy:Human Growth Hormone.Actos.Zyban.Prednisolone.Petcam (Metacam) Oral Suspension.Retin-A.100% Pure Okinawan Coral Calcium.Accutane.Valtrex.Synthroid.Nexium.Lumigan.Mega Hoodia.Arimidex.Prevacid.Zovirax….