On Second Thought . . .

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? 

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.

 

 

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.