Rempel's writing reflects important sustained and humble attentiveness to his experiences as well as intellectual engagement with significant cultural and theological writers. I was impressed with Rempel's self-awareness of his own limitations and the potential for abuse and misunderstanding that can come in addressing the issues he raises. The chapters in this book run the length and breadth of hot topics covered in churches, social media and politics.
It's his personal confessions that stand out as he wrestled with understanding indigenous/settler relations, liberal and religious uses of violence, sexual orientation and gender abuses, economics, terrorists, etc. Rempel hits all the talking points often with surprising freshness. If this were all, if Rempel offered these accounts as the fruit of extended introspection it would have much to commend it. However, Rempel doesn't frame these accounts in genre of introspection and personal confession but rather turns them outwards where they become projection with the influence of Rene Girard, Ivan Illich (and John Milbank to a lesser extent) and a guiding quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn which reads famously that "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being". These are Rempel's tools for constructing "a life beyond us and them".
And that's the ultimate temptation of Rempel's book that must be resisted. Any articulation of a "we" is necessarily exclusive. And Rempel's "we" -- even the Christian one -- too easily falls into the very trap that he is hoping to guide us away from. This temptation is no where more evident than in chapter 4, "Sex Fiends: Jian Ghomeshi, My Rooster and Me". In the wake of all the high profile revelations of sexual abuse and the #metoo movement, Rempel opts for sympathy for the devil considering these powerful men as "scapegoats" allowing us regular dudes the ability to disavow our own potentially harmful sexualities. It is not so much that Rempel is wrong about us all being complex and caught up in larger social forces; it is rather precisely his inability to read those larger forces. He frames his engagement with Ghomeshi as a bold vulnerability inserting all men (and women) into the equation of sexual abuse (or at least abusive impulses). For those working at the front lines of sexual abuse Rempel's approach is entirely predictable. Despite all the attention now given to sexual abuse the predictable response is still to assert this appeal to "nuance" too quickly include all of our seemingly tortured souls. This continues in Rempel's larger critique of contemporary gender issues noting the confusion and conflicts that surface among both men and women not ever accounting for the remaining internalized patriarchy that so many feminists are clear about. And so in the end many of his chapters are inevitably about his sexuality (which fair enough is his right as an author!) and not about centering other marginal approaches to gender and sexuality. Again, if he had made other claims about the book this would have been perfectly understandable (even if problematic). But this is the temptation of the models like Girard. They return time and again to a white male accounting for everything. And so rather than attending to entirely different models of life like the black scholarship that is emerging from a profound meditation on anti-blackness as the founding of the world (see Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson) slavery (with Girard) can be quickly is positioned as just another analogy in the logic of scapegoating. These theoretical models are dangerous because they continue to posit a sort of pure origin that can necessarily only ever be accessed by these privileged approaches and so necessarily turn to projection, determining and positioning those who encounter it.
I don't hate Life at the end of us versus them. I believe it must be read. But to use Rempel's method is to assume that we are in the best position to draw that line down our own hearts. That sort of subjectivity is so foreign to the Christian faith. I don't trust myself enough. But I do trust my brothers and sisters. That's the point of communion discipline in Matthew 18. This is the distinction, I fear, that Rempel has missed. And it's the biggest short-coming in the book.
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I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.
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