On Second Thought . . .

Gay Marriage and the Puritan Legacy on a Collision Course

I correspond regularly with a young single gay man about the ongoing legal and cultural battles over gay marriage in Minnesota, in California, and most recently in New York. My correspondent was understandably elated by the New York assembly’s legalization of gay marriage, but was at once dumbfounded and exasperated by the seemingly limitless energy (and money) that opponents of the bill—who style themselves as “defending marriage”—pour into the fight to make marriage impossible for some of their neighbors. Gay marriage “has nothing to do with them,” this young man protests; and I think I detect in his complaint the implicit question, why can’t they leave the rest of us alone?

Because I share his consternation, my first response to that question (and the variations that I’ve heard from others) is to want to be facetious. —It’s the same reaction that Rapture enthusiasts bring out in me. Every time some self-styled prophet announces that they’ve calculated the precise date of Christ’s return and we’d all better be ready, for Christ’s sake, I want to ask them: What makes you so sure the Rapture hasn’t already happened, years ago, and that you’re not one of those “left behind”? In the same way, when a conservative Christian declares that acceptance of homosexuality is an “attack” on marriage, I want to ask, with as much respect as I can muster: Just how far gone is your own marriage, and is there any hope it can be saved?

But the issue is too serious to be handled with a wisecrack. What those of us who support gay marriages (some of us, because we also live them) need to understand is that conservative Christians do experience a genuine sort of pain. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think their marriages are actually imperiled: to listen to the loudest of them, one would think they had discovered the secret to marital bliss somewhere in the pages of their Bibles. No, the pain I am talking about is relative. It’s the loss of a feeling of superiority that is very close to the heart of their faith.

Historians of American religion describe the “Puritan legacy” that has deep and pervasive roots in American culture. The Puritans brought to the North American continent a powerful Calvinist spirituality that set the individual in a precarious spiritual posture. Believing that God’s predestination of the elect (and, necessarily, of the damned) was final and irresistible, the Puritans were compelled to ward off absolute despair by conjuring undisputable evidence that they were among the elect, in both the austerity of their piety and the comforts of their (God-given) prosperity.

But the peculiar logic of Puritanism requires more than my own happiness: it requires that I appear evidently to be happier, and thus holier, than thou. The legacy of Puritanism requires its adherents to seek out ways in which they are superior to others, proving (at least to themselves) that they enjoy God’s final blessing. Here is, I think, the cultural root of much that is poisonous and vicious in American conservatism, from the sort of fiscal extremism that seeks to reward the rich and punish the poor to the social policies that similarly seek to brand whole classes of people as unworthy of respect and care. Much of the language of “merit” is, at bottom, the desire—the need—to identify and punish others who are unworthy.

(Listen for example to U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann explain to a television interviewer that she and her husband deserved federal subsidies—something she’s made a political career out of decrying when it involves actual poor people—because “I can be successful without government help.” That epitomizes the Puritan creed: God helps those who don’t need it, and the needy be damned.)

Gay and lesbian people are not the only targets of this punitive self-righteousness. The platform and rhetoric of the Republican Party is often rather explicit: the rich deserve what they have; the poor are by definition undeserving: why not structure society in such a way as to institutionalize the disparity as a permanent, earthly sign of God’s providential care for the “haves”? (The Democratic Party has not made this logic a matter of principle, but rarely dares to challenge it publicly any more. Alas.) Gays and lesbians just happen to be particularly attractive targets because, to the extent they make their flagrant offense against supposed biblical standards public—for example by seeking to have their marriages recognized publicly and officially—they are so easily ostracized and penalized, with the stroke of a pen or the clap of a gavel.

The Episcopal Church in the United States is vexed by the question of gay marriage, not just (or even primarily) because of debates over “biblical authority.” (With every new “study document” or “report” that agonizes over the proper exegesis of Romans 1 or Acts 10, I suspect that “we,” the Church, signal to our gay and lesbian members that “we” just don’t know what to do with “them” until “we” get our Bible passages lined up right. How demeaning that must sound in their ears!)

I think “we Episcopalians” continue to wrangle over the question—instead of deciding, simply and with a clear conscience, as other denominations have, that of course we recognize gay marriage, and then moving on to actually difficult questions like, say, how to challenge the austerity policies of the International Monetary Fund, to name the other pressing concern raised more than two decades ago at Lambeth 1988—because, like other Americans, we want to be able to look down on someone. We Episcopalians are genteel in our smugness, of course, and so we imagine that what sets us apart from other Christians is our refusal to descend into the sort of factionalism that tears lesser denominations apart. Of course, those denominational rifts often produce vital and committed new denominations with the freedom and vigor to get on with the work of mission. But never mind; that’s not for us: our pretense of unity in a fractious, abusive house is, we imagine, the symbol of our superiority.

None of these reflections will help my young gay correspondent feel encouraged. But perhaps they will shed light, for him and all of us, on just what we are facing in the months and years ahead, across the country and within the Episcopal Church as well. So long as we remain driven by the Puritanical need to look down on our neighbors for some perceived inferiority, gays and lesbians—but not only them—remain at risk.

 

The Case for Christian Incivility

Are We Suffering a Paucity of Civility, or of Outrage?

Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, has called for a "Covenant of Civility" in contemporary politics (see www.civilitycovenant.org). He's right to observe that the rhetoric of rage and ridicule on the right has degraded and debased what is left of the public square (or at least the considerable bandwidth under Rupert Murdoch's control). But the problem isn't a lack of manners. Rather, as Jonathan Schell wrote in The Nation during George W. Bush's administration, the public square is currently the operating theater for a direct assault on reason as such.

"If someone states to the world that he has a black dog when he does not, he is lying," Schell wrote. "But what do you call it if, in full sight of all, he says he has a black dog while pointing to a white dog?" (The parable was pointed at Bush's mendacious claim to know that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in the absence of any evidence--the cause for a long and disastrous war there.) What you call it, Schell answered, "is cognitive torture. Just as hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, a lie is the tribute that vice pays to truth: The element of concealment pays respect to the hearer's demand to be told what is true. But if the 'lie' is out in the open--if any fool can see that the dog is white--then truth itself is disrespected."

Contempt for rationality remains the order of the day over at Fox News (to pull a name from the airwaves), and under the circumstance, keeping a civil tongue is not the first priority for those who still care about truth. So Brian Terrell's plea over at www.JesusRadicals.com for a "covenant of outrage" has prima facie appeal.

With Jim Wallis, I agree that those who care about truth will necessarily be committed to the sort of discourse that respects the open-minded. But that doesn't mean we won't raise our voices, and it doesn't mean we'll smile and nod when we're being fed pathos-laced bullshit from highly paid wordmongers like Glenn Beck and say, "well, you're entitled to your opinion."

"Each and every strategem of the principalities," William Stringfellow wrote (during the presidency of Richard Nixon), "seeks the death of the specific faculties of rational and moral comprehension that specially distinguish human beings from all other creatures. . . . Demonic aggression always aims at the immobilization or surrender or destruction of the mind and at the neutralization or abandonment or demoralization of the conscience" (An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land [Dallas: Word, 1973; Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2004], 97).

How should those who care about truth engage such demonic assault? "Civility" may be a tactical option, but it would not be one's first impulse on realizing one's neighbor's house was on fire. Eugene McCarraher, who teaches humanities at Villanova and writes for Commonweal, held out another option as the more appropriate response to the world order offered by George W. Bush's National Security Strategy of the United States  (2003): namely, "skepticism--unyielding, uncivil, and corrosive":

Wht a harsh and dreadful love, we must disparage the martial and pecuniary faith that animates history's richest, most well-arm3ed, and parochial superpower. . . . [Un]embedded intellectuals must assault the winter palaces of embedded ideology, revitalize and enlarge the political community called church, and rekindle the political imagination called theology. Against the totems and sacraments of empire we must hurl the most intolerable and virtuous of insults" ("'The Most Intolerable of Insults': Remarks to Christian Infidels in the American Empire," in Wes Avram, ed., Anxious about Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004],  104).

As Thomas Frank observes in Harpers, there have been times in U.S. history when reasonable people took to the streets in angry waves to call a halt to injustice and the plundering of the common good. Now we get wacko vigilantes who want more tax breaks for billionaires.

Each new presidential shrug--each preemptive sigh and slump of the shoulders telling us there's just nothing that can be done in Palestine or Iraq or Haiti or Detroit because, well, the people whose interests really matter wouldn't like it--is one more mark in the elaborate cartography of denial and obfuscation. It is also a dare to us to say loudly and clearly that we know better.

(Some of these thoughts appeared first in "A Famine of the Word: A Stringfellowian Reflection on the American Church Today," in The Bible in the Public Square: Reading the Signs of the Times, ed. C. B. Kittredge, E. B. Aitken, and J. A. Draper [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008], 185-96.)

What Does It Mean for Christians to Be "Just War People"?

Part 1 of a Review of Daniel M. Bell Jr., Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church Rather than the State (Brazos, 2009).

 

As soon as my eyes fell on Daniel Bell's new book at the Brazos exhibit at the SBL Annual Meeting, I decided to buy it. It's not just that I've been engaged in thinking, writing, and teaching about the so-called "just war" tradition (hereafter JWT) myself and thought this might be another useful resource. More than that: some of the lines used on the book cover sound themes that I've argued need to be front and center in the Church's life.

In this and succeeding posts I will engage the book as I read it. I make no pretense of being disengaged or "objective" about the topic.

Judging a Book by Its Cover

Bell's title certainly makes the point: If the JWT is part of "Christian discipleship," then it's not optional; it's not to be relegated to those individuals who want to ride their own pro-war or anti-war hobby-horse. Understanding and applying the tradition should be central to who we are as the Church.

Similarly, the subtitle seems to throw down the gauntlet. The JWT is a theological tradition and thus belongs to the Church and has its first and appropriate home in the Church's thinking about war. We--and when I use the first-person pronoun, I always mean "we the Church" (an issue to which I will return below)--should own the JWT. But one is more likely to find courses on JWT taught at military academies than at seminaries. As Bell knows (and as others have made the point before him), the JWT has largely been coopted today by military planners and the policymakers who want to "sell" their latest war by dressing it up as "just." The "most common way of dealing" with the JWT today is as "a list of criteria meant to guide public policy with regard to war" (p. 20). The cynical calculation behind such use of the JWT is that Christians can be encouraged to acquiesce in another war--if not positively to cheerlead from the pulpit and run interference against pacifists, both useful contributions to the warmaking aim--if they can be lulled into trusting the military planners to give the war a churchy-sounding stamp of approval.

So far so good; so far I'm on board with Bell's agenda. 

The cover also smacks the reader in the face with a very different prospect, however. The cover image appears to be a U.S. Naval battle map from the war in the Pacific (1944); the cover announces a Foreword by a military chaplain. I would like to think the good people at Brazos intended the jarring mixed message the cover sends: I would hate to think it passed, so to speak, beneath their radar. If this is a book about "recentering the tradition in the Church rather than the State," why does the argument depend in part on the approval of a military chaplain? It's that incongruity that provoked me to buy the book (perhaps the publisher's intention!) but that also set my theological Spidey sense tingling. Bell may occasionally set Church and state in opposition, but is this more than lip service? Will he actually sustain that tension in any theologically credible way?

A Rough Start

Asking a military chaplain to offer the Foreword (whether that was the author's idea or the publisher's) inevitably sets the tone for the book. (Immediate, arguably irrelevant disclaimers: I don't know Chaplain Lt. Col. Scott A. Sterling; I have counted military chaplains among my friends, including George Metcalf, the supervisor of military chaplains in Patton's army upon whom Patton called to pronounce a prayer for favorable weather for U.S. bombers against German troops hunkered down in the Ardennes in 1944.)

Though Bell seeks to achieve a moral high ground by promising not to pontificate about one war or another (because that would prove a "distraction," p. 15), Sterling's first sentence in the Foreword evokes the (second) Iraq War (depending, of course, on how one numbers wars: given the tremendous civilian death toll of President Clinton's economic sanctions against Iraq, I argue that there has been one single, long, unrelenting war in Iraq for twenty years, and counting).

Sterling is honest about his audience: they are "soldiers who wanted to talk about and resolve the moral and ethical dimensions of the war we were fighting in Iraq" (7). Sterling understands his responsibility (and those of other military chaplains in Iraq) to be "to assist our soldiers in coming to terms with the moral implications of their unique and terrible jobs." And what are those jobs? "As in every war, the soldiers' task was simple and horrifying: find and kill enemy warriors, which often resulted in the destruction of homes and infrastructure and taking the lives of innocents along with enemy soldiers" (ibid.)

The phrases I've italicized (not in original) speak volumes about the discipline of military training. The Christian soldier, if he or she is enlisted in the U.S. military, is not encouraged to ask, in every battlefield engagement, "why am I here?" or "am I justified in throwing this grenade" or "firing this M4?" The soldier's job, the chaplain says, is to find and kill. It happens--"often," says the chaplain--that doing their job means innocent people get killed, right away; the reference to destruction of homes and infrastructure, an incident of commendable honesty, points to the reality that other innocent people will die later as a "result" of what U.S. soldiers have done. (We need not assume that the commanding officer intended the deaths of innocent people; to fall back into the impersonal construction of Army-speak, it just "often happens.") 

One might stop, right here, and ask: "Should a Christian accept a job assignment that will reliably and often result in the deaths of innocent people?" In such stark terms most Christians would readily answer, "no." I submit--and this is my bias going into this book--that the tremendous effort the U.S. military spends in recruiting and training officers and enlisted men and women and the massive cultural representations of military service beamed into our heads daily have as their primary function to plant a different answer: "No, unless there's a military reason to do something else that has the inevitable, expected, but unintended consequence of killing innocent people. Then it's okay." 

I suspect at the outset that Bell will exert his considerable erudition to get us, 240 pages later, to nod in agreement. It will of course be a sophisticated argument, but from the start the gravitational pull of this book is toward the battlefield, toward those sincere U.S. soldiers agonizing over the last mission or the next mission.

Why? Why does the U.S. soldier trump all other identifications, locations, sympathies in a book about Christian theology? In what way is Christian formation the presumption at the center of this book and in what way has the presumption of military necessity already inserted itself as a theological consideration?

Pronoun Trouble

Chaplain Sterling is "amazed" that Bell can speak so eloquently and directly to the concerns of enlisted U.S. soldiers without having served in the military himself (p. 8). For Lt. Col. Sterling, this is the great benefit of the book. He knows that "our military" will be involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, "and humanitarian crises throughout the world" (a characterization that he doesn't blush to use), for years to come. If the Church embraces Bell's book, he concludes, "we can all feel more confident that our nation will strive to maintain the moral high ground in its military endeavors and beyond."

This, in the foreword to a book presented as Christian theology. Sterling explicitly invokes an identity as U.S. citizens who identify with "our" troops and care above all that "our nation" maintain the alleged "moral high ground" in its military endeavors. In what way are these Christian theological concerns? Are these presumptions to remain unquestioned throughout an ostensibly Christian book? 

And who, at last, are "we" as we read? For Sterling, "we" are Americans who presumptively identify with our nation's righteous cause, the "moral high ground" (details be damned). One can't help wondering if this book might sound a bit different if written from Sandinista Nicaragua, where Christians perceived their nation to be under unwarranted and brutal military and economic attack from the United States. Is it even possible for Bell to disentangle his nationalism from his Christianity? Or will he plead that his "situation" as an American constitutes a dumb responsibility to give the most powerful and the most destructive military in world history presumed standing in matters of Christian theology? 

Paul Wasn't Talking about Homosexuality in Romans 1

(Or: What Rob Gagnon Doesn't Know Might Hurt You)

Years ago I presented, in my book Liberating Paul,[1] the argument that what Paul says in Romans 1:24-27 should not be read as a theological indictment of homosexuals or as a theological analysis of “the homosexual condition.” The argument didn’t get much attention from other scholars (in fact, I’ve never seen any discussion of that part of the book). I’ve now repeated much the same argument, with greater detail, in The Arrogance of Nations,[2] and have received enthusiastic words of approval from three different scholars (to quote them: “I think you’re right”; “you convinced everyone in my graduate seminar on Romans”; “you blew my socks off”). But no one has given sustained attention to the argument in either book.

Which means that Robert Gagnon’s online critique of my argument—or at least of the condensed, more popular version of the argument that I posted several years ago at The Witness online—remains the most attention my argument has received. That also means that anyone wanting to find out what my argument is (for example, if they’d seen it referred to in Newsweek) and Googling my name would reach Gagnon’s critique before they struck on my original argument.

That is, I think, unfortunate, mainly because Rob misrepresents my argument in several important ways. I don’t know whether that’s because he simply doesn’t understand it (which I doubt—Rob is a bright enough guy) or because given his own assumptions, my argument just doesn’t make sense to him (a possibility I explore below). I think his assumptions are wrong. Or, put another way, we disagree because I don’t know as much as Rob thinks he knows. But then, I don't think he does, either.

In what follows I won't repeat my larger argument; it's available in fuller form in the two books mentioned above (and summarized in the Witness piece). I do want to address Rob's criticisms, however, as fairly as I can.

Off to a Bad Start 

Rob begins by summarizing my argument--badly. He sees it as my attempt at reductionism: that I read what Paul says as applying "only" to Roman emperors. (He repeats this allegation in a number of rhetorical questions throughout his essay, but because he's misrepresented my argument, they're all off the mark.) So, he alleges, I contend that "Paul in Rom 1:18-32 was thinking only of the emperor Nero and a predecessor, Gaius 'Caligula' . . ." But I never wrote "only." My argument is that Nero and Caligula are splendid examples, "Exhibit A and B," of the arrogance, immorality, and injustice that Paul excoriates, but the whole point--I argue--is that they are examples of a larger immorality especially exemplified in the Roman imperial house. This has nothing to do with individuals, it has everything to do with the morally corrosive effect of power.

So I don't for a minute think that this is a question of just how extensive emperor worship was, or whether Caligula might have settled down and been acceptable to Paul if he'd just met the right guy. For their surface cleverness, those really are rather dumb objections that have nothing to do with my argument but do show that Rob is obsessed with this text being about homosexuality. 

Rob continues, "Elliott believes that his new reading makes sense of Paul’s argument [in Romans 1--3]—an argument that otherwise 'disintegrates' into the 'incoherence' of 'prejudiced exaggeration,' 'stereotype,' and 'caricature.'" That's right, I do contend that, but it's worth noting that I'm not making up those characterizations. Scholars wiser than me have pointed to the rhetorical and logical problems in Romans 1--3: E. P. Sanders, Ernst Käsemann, Heikki Räisänen, among others (full footnotes in my books). Rob may not want to deal with the problems they've identified--they are, after all, remarkably inconvenient to traditional Reformed theology's appropriation of Romans--but ignoring the problems doesn't make them go away, and it certainly doesn't make them figments of my imagination. For Rob to ignore the problems just reflects Rob's prior commitments.  

Rob believes he already knows something that I don't know. As he writes, "Neil creates a problem of his own making and then attempts to solve it with a proposal that does not speak to the concerns of Scripture." Well, as I've just suggested, the "problem" isn't of my own making; this is a set of problems widely recognized by Romans scholars--the sort of problem that theologically minded interpreters actually have to work hard to get around, as Rob ought to know if he's done his homework. But the larger point here is that Rob writes as though he already knows what "the concerns of Scripture" are, so mere details like the troublesome text of Romans needn't bother him.  

What I Don't Know about the Bible (and Rob Doesn't, Either)

What Rob thinks he knows, specifically (and this is the part that can hurt you if you happen to be the sort of person who loves another person of your own gender), is that "the critique of same-sex intercourse is not limited to Paul but extends to the whole canon of Scripture, to say nothing of the univocal perspective against all same-sex intercourse that existed in the Judaisms of the Second Temple and rabbinic periods."

Wow. That's a lot of ground to cover. It's the sort of sweeping generalization you might make if you believed that the Bible was a single, theologically coherent fabric, coming in effect from a single author, so that what appears in one place (say, Leviticus 19) applies to every other writing and to the "whole canon," whether other parts of the Bible (say, the Gospels) mention it or (as a matter of fact) don't.

That's a lot to know. Or rather, it's a lot to believe: it's a theological assumption Rob makes about the Bible. Fundamentalists (and I use the term to describe a way of interpreting the Bible, whether or not Rob chooses to use the term for himself) like to imagine that they're just recognizing "what the Bible says" about itself (in places like 2 Tim. 3:16) when they make this sort of claim. But the Bible is not a self-explaining text. The historical record is clear that this collection of books (ta biblia in Greek, plural) was assembled over time. Of course some people (like Rob) read it as if it all spoke with the single voice of God, and of course some people have read it that way for centuries, although I note that the effort requires a lot more hermeneutical acrobatics (allegorical method in the early church; nowadays, doctrines of verbal inspiration "in the original autographs," etc., etc.) than is required, for example, for Muslims to read the Qur'an as the voice of God (after all, the Qur'an has the prima facie advantages of having been written in a single language, over the course of a few decades, and wholly in the first-person voice of God).

But that's not the only way to read the Bible. It's not the most reasonable way to read the Bible. And it's not the only Christian way to read the Bible.

If it were, we'd have to work really hard (and I concede that Rob does work really, really hard, in his big book) to explain, for example, why all those biblical passages telling slaves to keep a stiff upper lip don't really represent the single authoritative voice of God justifying slavery for all time. I'm just astonished that people like Rob don't see the fundamental methodological inconsistency here. Some of them will actually admit that yes, okay, whatever the Bible says about slavery was culturally conditioned, but go on to insist that that's not the case with sex. What God said about sex (not the parts about stoning women to death or having sex with your slave, of course, you know, the other stuff about how Adam and Eve had an ideal marriage, just like Joseph and Mary did) is absolute, transcendent, eternally valid. So--it follows naturally, at least for them--the hard work other scholars do to pay close attention to cultural contexts and what words actually meant in those contexts is a lot of unnecessary bother.

What I Don't Know (and Rob Doesn't, Either) about Romans

Rob also knows what Romans 1--3 is there for. Again, I quote him:

The whole point of the discussion in 1:18-3:20 is to “charge” that “both Jews and Greeks—all—are under sin” (3:9), that “no one is righteous, not even one” (3:10 . . .), and that “the whole world” is “under God’s judgment” (3:19), “for all have sinned and are lacking in the glory of God” (3:23). A critique limited to a couple of emperors would not establish this point.

The last line is correct, though irrelevant, since I don't see Paul's critique as "limited to a couple of emperors." But "the whole point" of Romans 1:18--3:20 is not what Rob says it is. Sure, I know, he sure sounds authoritative (after all, he's quoting the text). And sure, what he says sure sounds familiar (after all, most commentaries on our shelves repeat this argument over and over again). But the problems I mentioned before inhere right here. This supposed "argument" doesn't work as advertised; it wouldn't have moved anyone to accept Paul's conclusion if they weren't already convinced of it. That's why scholars like Sanders describe Paul's argument as working "backward."

Even Rob admits Paul is writing to convinced Christians. He also thinks that "later in Romans 6:15-23, Paul looks back on the discussion in 1:18-32" and "reminds [the Roman Christians] about their own behavior at the time that they were unbelievers." I note, first, that Paul says no such thing. He doesn't refer back to chap. 1 in chap. 6, nor does anything in chap. 6 "remind" the Romans that they used to commit murder and rob temples (crimes mentioned in chap. 1).

To be fair, this isn't just Rob's problem. How we get from the indictment in chap. 1 of people against whom the wrath of God is "being revealed," people worthy of death, to the assurance in chap. 6 that Paul's readers have been justified in Christ though they used to serve sin, is one of the chief puzzles of the letter. It's important to bear in mind that there really is a puzzle here. The conventional answer--the stuff of all the evangelistic sermons we've ever heard and all the "four spiritual laws" tracts we've ever picked up on the bus seat--is that Paul is simply explaining just how lost everyone is before Christ comes along to save them. The puzzle at the heart of the letter is why Paul spends time rehearsing that argument in a letter to people who have already accepted Christ. The leading answer, still printed in commentaries in the twenty-first century, is that Paul is trying to gain respect and support from the Roman church by showing a sample of the kind of initial preaching he would normally present to other people. 

I find that answer maddeningly unsatisfying. Sure, it's comfortable and familiar for Evangelical Christians because it reassures them of what they already know--Jesus died for our sins, we're saved, hallelujah. But this answer implies that the Roman church was made up of people like modern Evangelical readers: that is, people who already know Paul's gospel so the first chapters aren't really meant to impress them, just to reassure them of their status. I think that's a gigantic misreading of Romans.

I've argued, at length, in two books now, for a different reading of Romans, based on the sort of rhetorical criticism that other scholars have found useful (I name Nils Dahl, Ben Witherington, and Stanley Stowers, from all of whom I've learned a great deal, though I don't want to imply that they would agree with me on all of my conclusions!). I think my reading of Romans 1 makes sense within the larger argument of those books; at least, it's meant to.

I wouldn't mind if Rob didn't find those arguments convincing; but he doesn't address them. He misrepresents, and then rejects one part of my reading of Romans--the part that really annoys him because it's opposed to his reading of Romans 1 and, more largely, of "the concerns of Scripture" regarding homosexuality--by insisting that I just don't understand what Romans is about.

It's more accurate to say that I don't accept the conventional reading of Romans that he assumes. That doesn't mean, automatically, that he's right and I'm wrong (or vice versa). It means, I suggest, that Romans still presents a puzzle (or set of puzzles) to be explored. I've tried to explore them in my work; that exploration has led me to a different understanding of Romans 1. Rob hasn't engaged those puzzles or that exploration because his concern has been to demonstrate that the whole Bible has just one view of homosexuality, from beginning to end. And that, again, is more than I know.

Notes

[1] Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994; Fortress Press edition, 2006), pp. 192-94.

[2] Neil Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 75-83.

 

 

Resisting the Cultural Undertow on Veterans Day

On this Veteran's Day, Minnesota Public Radio broadcast the story of Col. Jack Tueller's experience in World War II (Dick Gordon's The Story). Now in his 90s, Col. Tueller--who as a child took up the trumpet to salve his soul after being abandoned by his father--spoke movingly of the power of music to charm an enemy sniper into surrender, or to ease his wife--who suffers from dementia--into moments of relative lucidity.

Also today, the bishop of Minnesota called upon us to give thanks in prayer for those in the military who have made sacrifices for the greater good, and for their families. It is a good and worthy prayer; but it leaves out some categories of people who are also part of the greater landscape of war.

I know that veterans need all the prayer we can offer, and more: they require our strident advocacy. The Veterans Administration has only this year changed its standards for acknowledging combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder for troops in combat zones (rather than requiring PTSD sufferers to "prove" that a particular incident in combat caused the disorder); in part, some might like to believe, because a more sympathetic president occupies the Oval Office, but much more obviously because thousands of veterans' family members cried out for it.

But somehow a straightforward request to give thanks to God for members of the military gives me pause.

It isn't that I hold any brief against men and women in uniform. I think of a brave, endearing young man who came to me when I was serving as priest-chaplain on a university campus. He had interrupted his college and career plans to serve in Iraq and though he longed to “get on with life,” he spoke with the unswerving, clear loyalty that marks the best of military professionalism of his willingness to return if needed. But he was facing the prospect of being called up to Afghanistan, to a war he regarded as senseless and immoral. It quickly became clear that as far as he was concerned, “honoring our veterans” had no relation at all to a blanket endorsement of the nation’s military adventures.

It is nonetheless the overwhelming cultural tide in our society to bathe national war efforts in the purity of veterans’ “sacrifice.” To question warmaking is tantamount to dishonoring the dead. That is a peculiarly convenient rhetorical ploy, of course, since it is impossible to poll the deceased to ask them whether they would prefer us to honor them by perpetuating the wars that cost them their lives. Long before he was a U.S. Senator, Vietnam veteran John Kerry testified before Congress in 1971 that it was hard to ask a soldier to be “the last man to die for a mistake.” We have long since pressed beyond his moral scruple: our pundits invoke the dead to insist that war–any war–must be continued at all cost.

There was a time–for those in the military, it does not seem so long ago–when donning a military uniform was genuinely a matter of service, even sacrifice, to a greater good, a brighter future. That was a time when “just war” was a meaningful category; when soldiers could think they were fighting to defend the powerless. But the inevitable logic of military occupation is that the powerless become the intractable dull mass of civilians who refuse to yield up their hearts and minds in gratitude; eventually, they become the enemy. However the pundits may resist it, the logic is clear enough to many veterans.

The cultural tide–and its undertow now reaches into the churches–favors an unconditional adulation of veterans. The hard-headed analysis required of a conscientious citizenry would ask: What are the true goals of the latest invasion and occupation? What purposes are evidently served? How do the purported objects of our solicitude--acutely vulnerable men, women, and children--actually fare after years of warfare? –Those that survive, that is, in refugee camps or curfewed cities? But such analysis is washed away in the crashing surf of “honoring the sacrifice” of our military personnel as if they alone, uniquely, supremely merited our concern.

There is a relentless horde of flag-waving flacks, pundits, and politicos eager to require of us our silent assent in the war effort, for the wars du jour and the next war, and the next. If we protest, we are told we disrespect the dead; but have not the valiant died for something other than continual war? Cold-blooded “national security” hacks speak readily enough of endless war, but what soldier wants that, prays for that, gives his or her life for that?

And what Christian may give blanket assent to prayers that stop with thanksgiving for those in uniform? Do not these courageous men and women themselves ask us for more? If we fall silent without naming the suffering of the innocent, the courage of the dissenter, are we not limiting our imagination to the militarist vision of endless war for causes that must remain unspoken, unseen, unthought? But are we not commanded to lift our eyes to a broader horizon, a future free of war?  

Another prayer comes to mind. It was included in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer in the years following Vietnam, and it follows the prayer For Those in the Armed Forces of our Country (p. 823). It reads:

O God our Father, whose Son forgave his enemies while he was suffering shame and death: Strengthen those who suffer for the sake of conscience; when they are accused, save them from speaking in hate; when they are rejected, save them from bitterness; when they are imprisoned, save them from despair; and to us your servants, give grace to respect their witness and to discern the truth, that our society may be cleansed and strengthened. This we ask for the sake of Jesus Christ, our merciful and righteous Judge. Amen.

 

 

On Getting Over It (Gay Love and Marriage)

As the culture war over same-sex love and marriage intensifies, I marvel at the crowd who insist on “defending” one kind of marriage by legislating any other kind out of existence. What must their own marriages be like? Do self-righteousness and an obsession with finding fault with others make for sound and happy marriages?

Or is the point to enforce a rigid conformity to strict rules in order to please a punitive God? Somehow that doesn’t sound attractive. Wouldn’t they make better headway “defending marriage” by illegalizing divorce, requiring ten-year courtships supervised by parents and grandparents, and forbidding anyone in the 90210 zip code from going near a justice of the peace? If enforced righteousness is so important to them, why do they fret so (well, Newt Gingrich does) about the imminent imposition of “shariah law” in the United States? I mean, wouldn’t these folks be happier under a homegrown, “Christian” version of shariah?

I’m reposting here a column I wrote in 2004 because I think it still speaks to the issue of “defending marriage”; the Minneapolis Star Tribune published the column on January 2, 2004.

 

For Couples Like Stephen and Michael, Blessing and Hope

 My first official act after being ordained to the Episcopal clergy two years ago was to serve as deacon at what is customarily called a “same-sex blessing ceremony.”

Nothing particularly surprising there. Such ceremonies have been conducted in Minnesota for years—quietly at first, but at their 1999 convention the people of the diocese declared their resolve to “include, welcome, and embrace [their] gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender members” and “to continue to make available to them all of the blessings of Christ’s beloved church.”

I’d seen Michael and Stephen in church for weeks preceding the ceremony. They were obviously experienced in the complexities of Episcopal worship, standing and sitting at the  appropriate places and joining in the prayers without having to look at their prayer books. They also stood side by side with the ease and comfort that comes from an established affection.

Now as they stood before the priest, I had the opportunity to catch their eyes. Michael seemed about to burst into laughter or tears, or both, trembling slightly with a powerful blend of joy, solemn awe, and nerves. Outwardly more serene, Stephen beamed at his partner with a loving solicitude, as if to radiate calm with his gaze.

I scanned the congregation’s faces and found the usual mix of radiant smiles and joyful tears. I also saw one or two people looking rather apprehensive, as if they weren’t sure what would come next.

What came next was pretty familiar stuff, following the general outlines of a traditional church wedding. We listened to scripture, to specially chosen music, and to the priest’s homily exhorting and encouraging the couple to be gentle with each other. Then they pledged their lives to each other in love and mutual respect. We joined in prayer that their life together would be a source of blessing to them and to others.

Like a lot of people, I get choked up whenever I hear two people make outlandish public promises to love and honor each other. This day was different, however. I didn’t know what challenges either man had had to face to bring him to this moment, but it was safe to presume that neither had been able simply to coast with the cultural current, even in Minnesota. It took courage for each to stand before an assembly of the people who knew him best and declare undying love for another man.

Amid the controversy swirling in my own church and elsewhere, we hear cries of alarm that accepting homosexual relationships will somehow endanger “traditional” marriage. For the life of me, I don’t know what that means.

How could the example of committed love between two men cause me to defect emotionally from my wife, unless I were secretly gay myself? In that case, wouldn’t my marriage rest on a very fragile foundation already? Wouldn’t dissolving a marriage based on a false premise free two people for new, more fulfilling, emotionally secure, and lasting relationships, including, perhaps, a much stronger heterosexual marriage?

Perhaps the alarmists fear that if all of us were free to follow our own hearts, marriage as we know it would come to an end. But doesn’t that anxiety presume already that our hearts aren’t in our marriages?

Stephen and Michael’s vows did stir up strong feelings within me. I was inspired to return to my own marriage with renewed commitment, a clearer sense of what mattered most in my life. But that’s just what we ask of every wedding ceremony: “Grant that all married persons who have witnessed these vows may find their lives strengthened and their loyalties confirmed,” as the Book of Common Prayer puts it.

In our consumerist society, the commodification of sex and the infinite interchangeability of relationships are pervasive values. Any two people preparing to commit themselves to a shared life need all the support and encouragement a community can provide. In my own search for such a community, courageous lovers like Stephen and Michael have been important and powerful examples. I’d rather have them as allies and models than shut them out in fear, circling the emotional wagons around only the people who I presume think and feel just as I do.

I think the Episcopal Church is trying to build that kind of supportive community. When, this past August [2003], we approved the election of an openly gay priest as bishop, we were saying, first, that we recognized the gifts and calling that our New Hampshire neighbors had seen in this holy and gracious man. We were also saying that we recognize the beauty and godly worth of caring, self-denying love, and that we seek to bless, support, and defend it wherever we find it. Since our General Convention in 2000, that’s been the official teaching of our church. I pray we have the grace and good sense to practice what we preach.

Building an Islamic Center at Ground Zero? The Horror!

Some people think Muslims should never be accorded the right to freedom of religion guaranteed in the First Amendment. The Constitution and Bill of Rights were good for their own time, these people suppose, but this is post-9/11. While we're at it, here are some other things I think we should definitely criminalize FIRST:

• driving a car using oil from any OPEC country in the Middle East (this dishonors the sacred victims of 9/11)
• supporting any war to control oil reserves in Iraq or through Afghanistan (this trivializes and demeans the sacrifice of those who died on 9/11 and in wars in both those countries)
• allowing the continuation of the CIA, since in the 1980s the CIA gathered, trained, funded, and armed the violent extremists who would spawn Osama bin-Laden and his ilk. Also because the CIA continues to work closely with violent extremists in these and other countries
• reacting with paranoia to Muslims in general (since this clearly lets the terrorists win)

Frank talk about "God's Plan for Marriage"

Since the Hon. Vaughn Walker ruled that California's Prop. 8 was unconstitutional, the right-wing blogosphere has metastasized, convulsing with heated frothings about God's Plan for the One-Man, One-Woman Marriage. These are tired old platitudes but they deserve another serious kick in the head. 

Let's proceed as if facts mattered. That will require that those whose perspectives have been decidedly shaped by professional ranters on Fox News can check out whenever they like. (I've been impressed, the last few times I've been subjected to Fox in public spaces, how readily and candidly Fox commentators have distanced themselves, categorically, from "the media." That seems appropriate: Fox and actual journalism have precious little to do with each other.)

Let's consider what I submit as readily verifiable observations:

First, it isn't gay couples who turn heterosexual husbands' heads on the street/in the office/on the beach. For example, as I took the aisle seat on a recent airline flight, the guy at the window sneered, "all we need now is a cute blonde gal between us, right?" Then his cell phone rang and he assured his wife, in a much more circumspect voice, that he'd be home soon and asked her to tuck in the kids. Picking on gays is a huge deflection of attention. Statistically, the greatest threat to heterosexual marriage is heterosexuality.

As a priest, I can't perform the Episcopal marriage ceremony any more without observing, out loud, that the liturgy begins with a bit of a cockup (to borrow the British idiom). We're told God "ordained" heterosexual marriage; also, that Jesus--as flamingly and, for most moderns, incomprehensibly celibate as they come) "blessed" marriage by actually attending a wedding in Cana (John 2). Well, he showed up, but made no comment to the bride or groom or to anyone else about their marriage. By that criterion--showing up--I suppose one could argue that he "blessed" leprosy and demon possession as lifestyles.

Look: even a cursory reading of Genesis 1--3 (something I recommend to any Fundamentalist who can lay hands on a Bible) shows, first, that God didn't "ordain marriage." At least in my Prayerbook (and in the laws of every civilized state in the world), two people have to "take" each other in marriage, with free and explicit consent. In my church, the priest who isn't careful to ensure, verify, and explicitly confirm to the congregation that these two are giving willing consent is in very deep doo-doo morally and canonically. God, on the other hand--not being bound by canon law, of course--never asks Eve's consent before whiffing her together out of the rib of Adam (Gen. 2:18ff); and Adam himself is snoring too loudly to have heard the pertinent question even if it were asked, which it wasn't. So in what sense is this a "marriage"?

As far as God's sacred ordinance goes, what the biblical author draws from the episode ("therefore," 2:24--the only "moral" drawn from the story) is that "a man" leaves his parents' home to live with "his wife." (No room here, apparently, for unmarried men in the created order, but of course--for those who care at all about the actual meaning of words--the Hebrew doesn't say "his wife," it says "with his woman," be'ishshto.) If that's an explicit statement of God's will for all time, then I conclude that John-Boy Walton grew up in a house of sin: after all, his father did NOT leave his parents behind but lived right there under the same roof with Grandpa and Grandma. (Damn the creeping secularism of the late 1970s!)

But let's move on. It's clear, furthermore, that what we know as heterosexual desire comes subsequent to God's command to the human race to reproduce. That command comes in Gen. 1:27-28--before the narration of the creation of Eve. But God's declaration to the woman that "thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee"--a perfect description of what some Christians consider the ideal marriage--comes in Gen. 3:16, after what Christians like to call "the Fall." For those Christians who take the whole idea of "curse" and "punishment" in Genesis 3 with theological seriousness, it sure looks like God has punished the new couple by giving the woman a libido. 

Put that in your literalist pipe and smoke it. That sure isn't the way those saccharine popular Christian books on "God's gift of sexuality" would have it, but it's the Bible. The earliest Christian interpreters--meaning, anyone who commented on the passage for the first three hundred years--all took seriously the apparent sense that God meant the commands to marriage and reproduction to be separate from sexual desire. That makes no sense to us, but it was common sense to them--as carefully documented by Elaine Pagels in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. (Consider reading the book before trashing the argument.) 

It's probably necessary to insert a qualification here. I'm actually very pleased with heterosexual marriage, at least with mine. I do consider sexuality a gift from God, though I'm not sure how anyone would go about prooftexting that case biblically (except, of course, for quoting Ruth's words to Naomi, or David's to Jonathan. Oops). 

We could go on: nowhere in Genesis do we see happy consensual marriages like pastoral counseling is designed to promote. We see people tricking other people into (often polygamist) marriage and using slaves sexually without scruple. If God's eternal plan for marriage was clear in Genesis 2, the holy patriarchs seem not to have got the memo. 

Jesus, for his part, preaches a stricter code of marital fidelity (no divorce, period, at least in Mark) than most mega-churches today can stomach. That helps to explain how they get to be mega-churches. But let's be fair: any pastorally sensitive church has to be more responsive to divorced people than Jesus managed to be in his very brief and very un-pastoral career. Not that he was ever approached by a divorcee with the question. Neither was he asked about homosexuality, ever, nor did he ever offer an opinion on it.

Paul, of course, had clear opinions: better to be celibate. He had nothing good to say about marital sex: just a grudging recommendation of it as a prophylactic against "immoral acts" (read 1 Corinthians 7). He must have been a source of genuine agony for married coworkers like Prisca and Aquila, declaring that married people just can't be as devoted to "the Lord" as he was (and, I suspect, burning the midnight oil to dash off screeds like 1 Corinthians while they tried to cuddle on the other side of the curtain). 

There are important debates about the passages where previous generations were accustomed to read Paul blasting away at homosexuals, namely Rom 1:24-27 and 1 Cor. 6:9-10. "Debates" because the Greek words simply don't fit what we call homosexual love. By "debates" I mean whole books, bibliographies of important peered-journal essays, sessions of the Society of Biblical Literature devoted to the questions--not that any of that matters to people who know "what the Bible" says without having to open it. I've been part of those debates, but this isn't the place to rehearse all the arguments.

This is where Americans tend to turn off all their brain cells at once. It's weird: we listen all the time to some men insult each other with "cocksucker" and tell each other, "bite me!" and "eat me!" without thinking, "ah, those men must be gay." We listen to PG-rated late-night comics make jokes about how you should never bend over to pick up the soap in a prison shower--jokes, that is, about homosexual rape--without thinking, "wow, there must be a lot of gay men in prison." We know perfectly well that references to homosexual aggression have nothing to do with homosexual love, in just about every other aspect of culture, until we meet two men at the dinner table who are so full of love for each other that their eyes glow. Then we're suddenly overwhelmed with a biblical assurance that all the hellfire in God's sweet heaven (?!) is reserved especially for them.

I know none of this will convince those people who have their minds made up already: for them the Bible can only say what they know it says. For them, I simply don't understand what sense it makes to pretend that they "listen" to the Bible--they don't: they can simply presume what it tells them. Scholarship, ambiguity, the semantic range of Hebrew and Greek words, the difference between cultures--none of this makes a whit of difference. They live in a warm cocoon of self-assurance, built over the years from twigs and thread. 

I mean only to say to them, please realize your self-assurance is not an argument; it's not compelling, it's not persuasive, it's so fragile that it only appears to others as a delicate web of anxious self-delusion--until you try to insist that it's the only, obvious, and self-evident truth revealed from heaven. Then you simply appear bigoted.

But to others--who have escaped the dreary, burdensome weight of such self-intoxicating ignorance--I want to say: there is a world of people waiting to embrace you, to welcome you, to build another civilization with you. We stand even within churches (some more comfortable than others . . .) and we speak of God as the deep love that underlies our life together; we speak, knowing that we are speaking metaphorically and not literally, of God calling us, urgently, to build that civilization rather than descend into hatred, viciousness, and fear. For some of us, that call is the bright fire at the heart of Christianity.

Making Peace by Making Better War? A Response to President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

President Obama’s landmark speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize has been widely hailed as a sober ethical reflection on the perennial quandary facing heads of state, “the relationship between war and peace.” Despite its eloquence and idealism, his speech never strayed far from those core doctrines of American exceptionalism that constitute major impediments to peace in our day. To the contrary, the president’s failure to describe accurately the role of the United States in recent history shows the powerful gravitational force of that Manichean ideology that poses the U.S. as the savior of a benighted world. Again and again the speech presents American warmaking as the only sufficient response to the moral incapacity of others.

 To give credit where it is due: President Obama did strike idealistic notes reminiscent of the best of John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric. He did invoke the centuries-long Western tradition of thinking about “just war.” He rightly declared, “no Holy War can ever be a just war; for if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint” in warmaking—a moral distinction, crucial to the just-war tradition, that eluded his predecessor, whether for reasons of intellectual laziness or moral disinclination. 

But the president evacuated these stated principles by failing to apply them honestly or analytically to the real world. The result is that his speech, stripped of its rhetorical finery, is yet one more assertion of American unilateralism. The occasion, and the president’s virtuoso display of moral gravitas as the world’s most reluctant warrior, simply offered a more impressive performance of an old theme than President Obama’s relatively tone-deaf predecessor could have made.

The Myth of Permanent War

    For all of his stated respect for Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King Jr, President Obama’s explicit rejection of their teaching sounded the clearer theme. “As a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation,” he declared, “I cannot be guided by their examples alone.” Indeed, he is not guided by them at all; rather, he proceeds immediately to explain their irrelevance. Presenting himself as more realistic than either of those moony-eyed idealists, he condescended to his audience: “I face the world as it is. . . . For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.” To package that moral banality as a gritty insight that somehow escaped Gandhi, who faced down the brutality of British imperial rule in India, or King, who confronted the grinding interlocking machinery of racism, militarism, and capitalism in the United States, seems both narrow-minded and self-indulgent. 

 Instead of thoughtful engagement with their teachings, strategies, and achievements, we get the hackneyed old repudiation, “a nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.” In fact, we will never know what might have been achieved if the German churches had simply refused to hoist swastikas over their altars; if pastors had refused to march in Nazi parades; if clear denunciations of anti-Semitic rhetoric and of the violence of Kristallnacht had rung out of German pulpits; if the communion rail had been forbidden to Nazis; if Christians had been organized to lock arms to protect synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses from attack. We’ll never know because those simple nonviolent tactics weren’t tried; instead the vast majority of Christian pastors simply acquiesced in the tidal wave of Nazism. 

Despite his call for “the continued expansion of our moral imagination,” the president’s speech shows little interest in historical imagination. He appeals rather to the rhetoric of myth: “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned.” No archaeological evidence is presented to defend that proposition (nor could it be: altruism and aggression have equal claims to antiquity in our species). The assertion might plausibly find a basis in the mythology of ancient Babylon, where warfare was one of the first sciences taught human beings by the gods, but it flies in the face of the more relevant text in Western culture, Genesis, where (in a stark repudiation of the Babylonian combat myth) “the first man” and woman are planted in a paradisal garden with neither a king’s throne or a city’s fortified walls in sight. Those innovations—and the invention of warfare—are stipulated as later developments, after the fateful expulsion from the Garden. The president’s ruminations on the warmaking proclivities of “the first man” depend neither on archaeological science nor on biblical text, but echo the naked assertion of neocon policymakers that “war, not peace, is the norm” of international affairs (Ronald Reagan’s advisers in the Santa Fe Document, 1980). In contrast, the premise of Christian just-war thinking has always been that a different order is both attainable and “natural” to human beings and that the assumption that peace can be achieved only through force is “error” (Pacem in Terris, Introduction, 6). 

American Exceptionalism

A different theology informs the president’s speech: the myth of the innocence of U.S. power. It is for him simply a truism that “the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades . . .  We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest—because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.”

This declaration of humble altruism might come as a surprise to the peoples of nations laid waste by United States military power or its local proxies, nations where “freedom and prosperity” remain the privilege of a small minority (if they exist at all). “America has never fought a war against a democracy,” President Obama exclaims, apparently not finding relevant the proxy wars and coups d’état in which the U.S. overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran (Mossadegh), Guatemala (Arbenz), Indonesia (Sukarno), Chile (Allende), Nicaragua (Ortega), or Haiti (Aristide), to name but a few. The standard imperial pretext has always been that of protecting the natives from their own bad choices, but distinguishing anti-democratic displays of force from “imposing our will” requires a powerful rhetorical alchemy indeed. 

Military Unilateralism

That a case can nevertheless be made for justifiably going to war and justly conducting warfare is of course the burden of the just-war tradition. That tradition, usually credited (as by the president) to “philosophers, clerics, and statesmen,” belongs more properly to Christian theology with its clear premises that war is neither desirable nor inevitable. (“Philosophers” and “statesmen” have more usually dissolved those premises in the acid of expedience and “military necessity.”) That tradition has nevertheless informed the Western understanding of “civilization” and is enshrined, most significantly, in Article 51 of the United Nations charter, of which the U.S. is a founding signatory. It is all the more remarkable therefore that President Obama found no occasion to mention that Article and that his discussion of its principles is most notable for his claims to exemption from them. 

“There will be times,” he declared, “when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.” But the Charter allows no such latitude to individual nations to determine whether war is justified. “I believe that all nations—strong and weak alike—must adhere to standards that govern the use of force,” the president declared, but he immediately continued, “I—like any head of state—reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.” The imagined equality is only pretended: no weak nation would dream of the sort of unilateralism that the U.S. practices as a matter of course. At any rate, any weaker nation would swiftly earn the condemnation of the world body for violation of the Charter, a censure that other nations could not sustain (as the Reagan administration did in its defiance of the World Court when it condemned the mining of Managua’s harbor). 

 The president tried to present U.S. unilateralism as a matter of consensus, claiming that “the world” united behind the U.S. adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this elides both the massive anti-war demonstrations around the world and the coercive measures by which the U.S. has regularly secured the acquiescence of other governments in the General Assembly (on which see Phyllis Bennis, Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN, 2000). His repeated assertion of the right to “self-defense” means that commitment to international law will be selective at best, and always carried out on the basis of perceived self-interest. 

What is explicitly at stake for the president is not a solemnly binding obligation (as the U.S. Constitution refers to international treaties, alongside itself, as the “supreme law of the land”), but expediency. In the face of an international crisis of legitimacy (“a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower”), he declares, “America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don’t, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention—no matter how justified.” But the emphasis seems to be upon the appearance either of legitimacy or arbitrariness, not its substance; else the president would quickly join the international community by signing and urging the Senate to ratify participation in the International Criminal Court and the international treaty banning landmines. These are only two of many instances in which U.S. intransigence justifies the “reflexive suspicion” of the world’s peoples.

The Things That Make for Peace

Whether or not the United States has ever appeared “a standard bearer in the conduct of war” to any nation other than itself, President Obama is certainly to be commended for expressing commitment to closing Guantanamo Bay, prohibiting torture, observing the protocols of the Geneva Conventions, and working for nuclear disarmament (an ironic goal, surely, given that the United States both holds the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and is the only nation to have used them against civilian populations in war).  

But more than these commitments—more than determined action to bring them about—is necessary. The “reflexive suspicion” of the United States has as much to do with its economic policies in concert with the G-7 nations and, with them, its defiance of the world community regarding climate change. Economic relationships—especially as these determine control over vital resources like air, water, food, land, medicines—are at the root of many of the world’s conflicts. It appears disingenuous, then, to refer only to “ethnic” and “religious” motives for warfare, as the president and his predecessors repeatedly have done. 

President Obama is quite right to speak of “freedom from want” as an inalienable human right. In this way he diverges markedly from many of his predecessors, for whom the pairing of political and economic rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (and, not coincidentally, in Catholic social teaching) was a dangerous threat to the “freedom” of the powerful to grasp ever more of the earth’s resources for themselves. But taking this right seriously will mean costly change. Given his administration’s record to date—regarding climate change; regarding what was once a campaign promise of “universal” health care; regarding a “preferential option” for the financial industry—we have seen little evidence that “freedom from want” is much more than a slogan. Securing greater economic equality is foremost among “the things that make for peace”—and the last thing those in positions of greatest power will tolerate.  President Obama’s closing exhortation rings true: striving for justice, for dignity, for peace remain our most important work and—for heirs of the biblical legacy—our most important vocation. The false doctrine of American exceptionalism is at the least a terrible distraction from that vocation; at worst, one of its greatest obstacles.

Hats off to the popular democratic movement in Haiti

Chapo a ba a pep Ayitien-la!

  Jan. 1, 2010, marks the 206th anniversary of Haitian independence--an event of breathtaking significance in world history: the first successful slave revolt that established the first free black republic in the Western hemisphere. It was also an event that enraged the United States, which has threatened Haiti's independence ever since through economic, political, and military pressure. This date also marks the sixth anniversary of the brazen coup d'etat that removed the popular elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from power. (On the ignominious role of George Bush's administration--which orchestrated the "Cannibal Army" and other terrorist groups and then arranged Arisitide's kidnapping to "protect" him--see Randall Robinson's An Unbroken Agony; and my columns at The Witness, calling attention to the U.S. role in the coup; marveling at the ease with which U.S. media and churches subsequently accepted the government line and proceeded to "move on"; and insisting that until and unless the U.S. reverses its anti-democratic course, the vaunted rhetoric of bringing freedom to the world rings hollow.)

Since the coup d'etat, Haiti has been occupied by a UN "peacekeeping force" that has operated largely to keep the teeming population of Site Soley inside a fortified ghetto and to punish them--by infamous massacres--for massive demonstrations of support for their banished president. Those demonstrations show the unwavering political will of the vast majority of Haiti's people, which gives the lie to sham elections (in which the U.S.-supported government has simply outlawed the majority party) and the official narrative of progress. The "progress" supported by the Bush and now Obama administrations--and by the U.N., where Haiti's former colonial masters hold sway in the Security Council--is the maquiladorization of the country, most recently evangelized by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from the floor of an infamous sweatshop. (Her husband is now the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, putting a happy face on the policy of economic reduction.)

For current information and analysis:

Haiti Support Group (based in England)

Haiti Action Net (based in the Bay Area)

Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti

Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network