So apparently we need "a return to the spirit of 9/12". I'm glad Hillary Clinton -- who made that observation in the days following the attack in Orlando -- has given us enough time to pause, pray and reflect. Because, as I remember 9/11, what Americans were in the days following that tragic Tuesday, was awkwardly confused. I was standing in an airport, waiting to get on a plane, that morning. I remember watching the flight boards change from "on time" to "delayed". I remember hearing someone cry out, "They just bombed the World Trade Center!" And I immediately flashed back to 1993. As we all stood there, trying to come to terms with the scenes playing out in horror on screens in front of us, we were all left asking, "Should we actually be watching this? Should we be doing this? I guess we already are?" We like to make fun of President Bush, now, in hindsight, for reading My Pet Goat while the attack was occurring, but if we're honest, that's what every American was doing.
For me, "the spirit of 9/12" was coming to the dark realization -- the horror of it all! -- not only of what had just happened, but of what was going to happen. Of how America was going to respond. We were going to take a collective revenge, and that revenge would spiral us into a cycle of violence from which I was pretty sure we wouldn't emerge for 50 or more years. Sadly, I think I was right.
I remember begging fellow clergy to say something on 9/14 (the national day of prayer) that wasn't cruel and that helped make sense of the violence in our world. I was one of but a few who kept insisting that 9/11, contrary to the American rhetoric, wasn't a day that changed everything. Instead, it was business as usual.
The thing with 9/11 is that it really did feel like it came out of nowhere. Yes, I know that the short-lived X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen virtually predicted 9/11 and, difficult as it is to believe, the iconic War on Terror show 24 actually started prior to 9/11. Maybe it was percolating in our collective unconscious, but it was genuinely shocking. And that's why this current tragedy can't and won't be a new 9/11 -- because it's all too common now. It's a theme and variation of the standard mass shooting, of which there have been hundreds. We all feel pain and anger and even shame about this, but not the shock of someone turning a plane into a suicide bomb. No one woke up on 9/11 and thought, "Oh God, this again?"
Everything America did in response to 9/11 was sinful, except two things: To attend to the wounds of those victims on that Tuesday and to protect American Muslims when they faced the sadly-inevitable backlash that was to ensue.
Nothing could more vividly display how those sins have come home to roost than to watch this presidential election cycle. Trump talks about "Making America Great Again" while Clinton insists "America is already great". Both are lying, because both have bought into the collective amnesia that makes the violence possible. The system is fine, we just need a competent and experienced manager to oversee it -- and Hillary is certainly competent and experienced at doing the kinds of things the US generally does, both domestically and abroad (which, again, is nearly always sinful).
From my perspective, Clinton's call to embrace "the spirit of 9/12" shows just how much the state of emergency in which the violence (and the violent response to it) of 9/11 has become the norm.
Under Obama, you could almost forget that the War on Terror was going on, but though he preferred drone strikes to ground troops, he was still pursuing the bipartisan foreign policy of restoring violent American chaos in the Middle East. But neoconservatism with a human face is apparently not good enough for Clinton. Plausible deniability is not good enough for her. She wants the fear, the panic, the uncertainty, the pliability of a public openly at war -- an endless war to no rational end. And Trump has no problem escalating that open war with his own rhetoric.
Am I going to vote for her or Trump? No! Because, let's be honest here, a vote for either is a vote for the violent system to perpetuate itself. There is no difference between and betwixt these two. The only thing I can say is that at least we Christians know what this status quo is going to look like. It's Roman military might with Roman peace at the screenshot of an American drone. That American status quo will continue to destroy lives, but destroy them predictably. (We just don't know which lives which candidate will end up destroying.)
This is the end-result of the current American trajectory of society: The lesser evil (whichever you think that may be) is still ... evil. The devil we know is clearly still the devil. And we choose it each time every four years in November because there is no hope, no alternative, no other option.
Which is to say that American Christians lack the moral imagination to connect Jesus and what we believe with a larger vision of society. Americans have forgotten how to do democracy. Anymore, it's simply democracy-by-blackmail: "Choose me or the even worse guy will get to do even worse things." And let's be clear here, meanwhile the guy who's supposed to be "the American savior" is devoting nearly all his energy to tinkering with the primary process.
So what do we do? Let's have a sit-in on the House floor. At least one of the measures they're fighting for fits in perfectly with the call to return to "the spirit of 9/12" in the wake of the Orlando attack. Liberals once would have protested against dystopian Bush-era measures like the no-fly list, and now they're nonviolently resisting in order to expand their scope. It may be over (for now?), but rest assured, its goals were predictable ...
This bill was the perfect distillation of the signature Bill Clinton (Clinton I now?) gesture: The "pivot". The term has become a cliche meaning "move on to the next topic", must as "deconstruction" means "close analysis" in popular usage. But the popular reception misses an important element -- maintaining a foothold in one issue in order to swing your policy-leg (or whatever) onto an adjacent one. In this case, Democrats are "pivoting" from anti-terrorism into the vicinity of something like gun control. The result is a centrist pre-compromise that concedes the terms of debate to the "guns don't kill people, people [specifically Muslim terrorists] kill people" crowd. A spoon full of racism makes the gun control go down.
Except it won't, and everyone knows it. They were fighting to have an on-the-record vote. And the only purpose behind that can be that they are then able to tar their opponents with that vote in campaign ads. It was a symbolic gesture to enable a symbolic gesture that they can use to show that they "fought for" a good policy (again, a symbolic gesture -- "fighting for" is a substitute for winning, the political equivalent of a participation trophy).
Thing is, that's not even good policy. Maybe with 20/20 hindsight it would have prevented this one individual massacre. Maybe he would have just found another way to get guns. I don't know. But in the hypothetical situation where it might have miraculously passed, they would have set themselves up for a big fall when the next attack happens -- because suddenly the debate wouldn't be about those mean Republicans in the NRA's pocket, it would be about how the Democrats made big promises about gun control legislation but it didn't work.
I'm all for talking about gun control. But trust me here: Until we talk about the violence -- national and international -- as well as the state-sanctioning tightened grip on human flourishing that have named the past 200-plus years in American history ... well, it's all for naught. This is business as usual. Nothing's changed, so there's nothing to see here.
We've all heard of 11-dimensional chess -- this is 11-dimensional idiocy.
We Americans -- and sadly, this is more an indictment of Christians in America than anything -- lack the moral vocabulary and imagination to envision a world where anything other than that idiocy is possible.
The first place we'll have to begin, I'm sure, is putting aside the polemics that name that American politic. I don't have a dog in the fight between who's president or not. Because, truth be told, the biggest vote that matters is the one we cast everyday, in how we spend our money, love our neighbors, serve others.
The next step is to realize that the resources for that imagination and vocabulary are already present in Christian theology. So let me sketch out some of what that looks like.
Fast revolution -- the overthrow of political power by societal will -- is the way of American politics. Slow revolution is the way of Jesus Christ. Christians practice the deep transformation of social institutions from within, as salt and leaven. The first occurs overnight, usually on January 20. The second takes a longer view, based on God's patient love, in transforming the world.
The Christian message has the capacity to transform a society through the gradual reform of human relationships and institutions over many successive generations. Anything other is most likely not even Christian.
And that's a good thing, because historically slow revolutions have lasting transformative effects. Where Christians have refused to participate in certain institutions, they have done so not in a spirit of rebellion but as a form of deeper social solidarity. Early hellenistic critics claimed that Christians posed a threat to the social order because of their refusal to serve in the army. Origen replied: "We help the emperor in his extremities by our prayers and intercessions more effectively than do the soldiers. In this way we overcome the real disturbers of the peace, the demons. Thus we fight for the emperor more than the others, though we do not fight with him, nor at his command" (Origen, Contra Celsum).
Thus throughout its history the Church has proved to be an "unreliable ally" in every social order (Karl Barth). As civilizations rise and grow old and eventually sink into ruin and decay, the Christian community renews itself continually through its Gospel of a transcendent order of righteousness and peace.
For me, "the spirit of 9/12" was coming to the dark realization -- the horror of it all! -- not only of what had just happened, but of what was going to happen. Of how America was going to respond. We were going to take a collective revenge, and that revenge would spiral us into a cycle of violence from which I was pretty sure we wouldn't emerge for 50 or more years. Sadly, I think I was right.
I remember begging fellow clergy to say something on 9/14 (the national day of prayer) that wasn't cruel and that helped make sense of the violence in our world. I was one of but a few who kept insisting that 9/11, contrary to the American rhetoric, wasn't a day that changed everything. Instead, it was business as usual.
The thing with 9/11 is that it really did feel like it came out of nowhere. Yes, I know that the short-lived X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen virtually predicted 9/11 and, difficult as it is to believe, the iconic War on Terror show 24 actually started prior to 9/11. Maybe it was percolating in our collective unconscious, but it was genuinely shocking. And that's why this current tragedy can't and won't be a new 9/11 -- because it's all too common now. It's a theme and variation of the standard mass shooting, of which there have been hundreds. We all feel pain and anger and even shame about this, but not the shock of someone turning a plane into a suicide bomb. No one woke up on 9/11 and thought, "Oh God, this again?"
Everything America did in response to 9/11 was sinful, except two things: To attend to the wounds of those victims on that Tuesday and to protect American Muslims when they faced the sadly-inevitable backlash that was to ensue.
Nothing could more vividly display how those sins have come home to roost than to watch this presidential election cycle. Trump talks about "Making America Great Again" while Clinton insists "America is already great". Both are lying, because both have bought into the collective amnesia that makes the violence possible. The system is fine, we just need a competent and experienced manager to oversee it -- and Hillary is certainly competent and experienced at doing the kinds of things the US generally does, both domestically and abroad (which, again, is nearly always sinful).
From my perspective, Clinton's call to embrace "the spirit of 9/12" shows just how much the state of emergency in which the violence (and the violent response to it) of 9/11 has become the norm.
Under Obama, you could almost forget that the War on Terror was going on, but though he preferred drone strikes to ground troops, he was still pursuing the bipartisan foreign policy of restoring violent American chaos in the Middle East. But neoconservatism with a human face is apparently not good enough for Clinton. Plausible deniability is not good enough for her. She wants the fear, the panic, the uncertainty, the pliability of a public openly at war -- an endless war to no rational end. And Trump has no problem escalating that open war with his own rhetoric.
Am I going to vote for her or Trump? No! Because, let's be honest here, a vote for either is a vote for the violent system to perpetuate itself. There is no difference between and betwixt these two. The only thing I can say is that at least we Christians know what this status quo is going to look like. It's Roman military might with Roman peace at the screenshot of an American drone. That American status quo will continue to destroy lives, but destroy them predictably. (We just don't know which lives which candidate will end up destroying.)
This is the end-result of the current American trajectory of society: The lesser evil (whichever you think that may be) is still ... evil. The devil we know is clearly still the devil. And we choose it each time every four years in November because there is no hope, no alternative, no other option.
Which is to say that American Christians lack the moral imagination to connect Jesus and what we believe with a larger vision of society. Americans have forgotten how to do democracy. Anymore, it's simply democracy-by-blackmail: "Choose me or the even worse guy will get to do even worse things." And let's be clear here, meanwhile the guy who's supposed to be "the American savior" is devoting nearly all his energy to tinkering with the primary process.
So what do we do? Let's have a sit-in on the House floor. At least one of the measures they're fighting for fits in perfectly with the call to return to "the spirit of 9/12" in the wake of the Orlando attack. Liberals once would have protested against dystopian Bush-era measures like the no-fly list, and now they're nonviolently resisting in order to expand their scope. It may be over (for now?), but rest assured, its goals were predictable ...
This bill was the perfect distillation of the signature Bill Clinton (Clinton I now?) gesture: The "pivot". The term has become a cliche meaning "move on to the next topic", must as "deconstruction" means "close analysis" in popular usage. But the popular reception misses an important element -- maintaining a foothold in one issue in order to swing your policy-leg (or whatever) onto an adjacent one. In this case, Democrats are "pivoting" from anti-terrorism into the vicinity of something like gun control. The result is a centrist pre-compromise that concedes the terms of debate to the "guns don't kill people, people [specifically Muslim terrorists] kill people" crowd. A spoon full of racism makes the gun control go down.
Except it won't, and everyone knows it. They were fighting to have an on-the-record vote. And the only purpose behind that can be that they are then able to tar their opponents with that vote in campaign ads. It was a symbolic gesture to enable a symbolic gesture that they can use to show that they "fought for" a good policy (again, a symbolic gesture -- "fighting for" is a substitute for winning, the political equivalent of a participation trophy).
Thing is, that's not even good policy. Maybe with 20/20 hindsight it would have prevented this one individual massacre. Maybe he would have just found another way to get guns. I don't know. But in the hypothetical situation where it might have miraculously passed, they would have set themselves up for a big fall when the next attack happens -- because suddenly the debate wouldn't be about those mean Republicans in the NRA's pocket, it would be about how the Democrats made big promises about gun control legislation but it didn't work.
I'm all for talking about gun control. But trust me here: Until we talk about the violence -- national and international -- as well as the state-sanctioning tightened grip on human flourishing that have named the past 200-plus years in American history ... well, it's all for naught. This is business as usual. Nothing's changed, so there's nothing to see here.
We've all heard of 11-dimensional chess -- this is 11-dimensional idiocy.
We Americans -- and sadly, this is more an indictment of Christians in America than anything -- lack the moral vocabulary and imagination to envision a world where anything other than that idiocy is possible.
The first place we'll have to begin, I'm sure, is putting aside the polemics that name that American politic. I don't have a dog in the fight between who's president or not. Because, truth be told, the biggest vote that matters is the one we cast everyday, in how we spend our money, love our neighbors, serve others.
The next step is to realize that the resources for that imagination and vocabulary are already present in Christian theology. So let me sketch out some of what that looks like.
Creation: The human person is created in the image and likeness of God after the pattern of Christ, the human prototype (Genesis 1/Colossians 1). By nature the human being stretches beyond itself in love towards God and the neighbor. Human nature was created not yet in perfection but with the capacity to attain the eschatological perfection of a society ordered wholly by love.
Fall: Only the height of our createdness can measure of the depth of our fall. Created with a capacity to love God, the fallen human being projects transcendent longing on to worldly objects (Romans 1). When this is done individually it leads to spiritual enslavement (Romans 2). When it is done collectively -- when a whole social order projects transcendent longing on to some common object (such as Americans have done at least since the Declaration of Independence) -- then the monsters of idolatry appear on the stage of world history, and uncontrollable enslaving powers are unleashed (Romans 3).
Sin: The essential form of sin, therefore, is idolatry; and the fruit of idolatry is slavery. The first is a perversion of our capacity to love God; the second is a perversion of our capacity to love the neighbor. Any account of a theological politic has to include Jeremiah 2-4.
Society: In every social order, one can glimpse something of the majestic createdness and abysmal fallenness of human nature. The problem of any given social order lies not in specific structural and institutional arrangements. The problem lies in the inscrutable depths of the disordered human heart (Psalm 2). That is why the noblest revolutionary turns overnight into the bloodiest tyrant -- witness American "manifest destiny". It's why the most equitable social and economic arrangements are so quickly exploited by a mysterious and insatiable greed -- witness American capitalism. It's why social orders prove mysteriously insusceptible to rational planning and management -- witness American presidential elections.
Politics: The sole rationale for politics is original sin. The principal aim of political order is not to produce justice but to restrain injustice (Romans 13); not to cultivate the spirit of the law but to enforce the rule of law; not to create love but to set limits to self-interest (Revelation 13); not to bring peace but to constrain the inevitable tendencies of the human heart towards violence and war (Romans 12). Politics cannot bring Christ to earth -- his Kingdom is not of this world and cannot be brought about by any worldly kingdom's means. It's enough if it succeeds in holding Antichrist at bay -- though, if we're honest with American history, it's done a lousy job of even that. (Read 1 John 4.) But while the rationale for politics is original sin, the measure of politics is eschatology. The perfect eschatological society stands as a criterion and criticism of every social order, stripping it of its pretensions to transcendence and thereby freeing it to be simply what it is: A tragic necessity for a fallen world. It isn't until the New Jerusalem descends that there's a chance in hell for the Old Jerusalem to become the habitation of God with humans (Revelation 21-22).
Institutions: The ordering of society through institutions reflects a real though limited good. Judged by the measure of the perfect eschatological society (the New Jerusalem), institutions can be relieved of their pretensions to transcendence and can aspire to better (though always limited) approximations of truth, goodness, beauty, love, and peace -- though these subtle approximations are ordinarily possible only where a society has first been adequately restrained by political authority and the rule of law. Anyone who wants to take institutions seriously had better read Revelation 17. They're a mixed bag.
Church: The Church is not one social institution alongside others, even though the Church inevitably expresses its spiritual life through institutional structures. The Church is the society of Christ's followers dispersed throughout the world, permeating every institution and every stratum of social order. Christ's followers participate fully in the social and institutional life of a society, but they do so in the mode of repentance and hope. They repent as representatives of the whole social order; and their hope is likewise a representative act on behalf of the whole society. In this way the Church functions not as one of the world's institutions but as a leavening of all institutions within a given social order. By pursuing the imitation of Christ through the twofold discipline of love of God and love of neighbor, Christ's followers give persistent witness not to any alternative or improved political order but to something before and beyond all political order: Human sociality ordered by love. The existence of such a witness leads in some circumstances to martyrdom, in other circumstances to reforms or modest improvements within a social order. The consequences differ but the witness is the same. America can never be a "Christian nation" because it belongs to the Church to be the Body of Christ in the world. Only someone who wants to embody the spirit of the Antichrist will insist otherwise.
Eschatology: Christian hope is directed not towards a catastrophic end of social life, but towards the revelation of a perfect sociality ordered by love. The infinite beauty of God allows for unceasing growth in love. In the life of the world to come, our growth in love will continue unceasingly, and human society will flourish under the order of love. On that day -- but not till then! -- the necessity of social ordering through politics, law, and institutions will be lifted.
God: The secret of human history is the patience of God (read 2 Peter). All God's dealings with humankind are marked by a patient love of growth and life and time. Not coercively but with supreme courtesy, God draws the human partner out beyond itself into loving union with God. This is an eschatological relationship, since the depths of divine love are without limit; but it is eschatology adapted to the capacities of human nature. Our nature is not violently altered from the outside but is, in Christ, creatively healed, renewed, and glorified from within. Strictly speaking, it's our love that is reordered, not our nature. The glorified human being -- the human being lovingly united to God and to the neighbor -- gives rise to a glorified (because fully human) sociality. A fully human society is the glory of God.What all this means, of course, is that injustice is always bad (even when it's American injustice). But, anarchy is worse. Only when we humans are rightly ordered can there be human flourishing. Read 1 Samuel 8 in light of America's presidential election cycle and you'll see what I mean.
Fast revolution -- the overthrow of political power by societal will -- is the way of American politics. Slow revolution is the way of Jesus Christ. Christians practice the deep transformation of social institutions from within, as salt and leaven. The first occurs overnight, usually on January 20. The second takes a longer view, based on God's patient love, in transforming the world.
The Christian message has the capacity to transform a society through the gradual reform of human relationships and institutions over many successive generations. Anything other is most likely not even Christian.
And that's a good thing, because historically slow revolutions have lasting transformative effects. Where Christians have refused to participate in certain institutions, they have done so not in a spirit of rebellion but as a form of deeper social solidarity. Early hellenistic critics claimed that Christians posed a threat to the social order because of their refusal to serve in the army. Origen replied: "We help the emperor in his extremities by our prayers and intercessions more effectively than do the soldiers. In this way we overcome the real disturbers of the peace, the demons. Thus we fight for the emperor more than the others, though we do not fight with him, nor at his command" (Origen, Contra Celsum).
Thus throughout its history the Church has proved to be an "unreliable ally" in every social order (Karl Barth). As civilizations rise and grow old and eventually sink into ruin and decay, the Christian community renews itself continually through its Gospel of a transcendent order of righteousness and peace.