Protecting People not Borders, or Vica Versa?

I had the opportunity recently to see the documentary “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” http://deepblueseafilm.com on its recent National Tour. I found viewing it a confronting experience, with its interviews with asylum seekers in Indonesia, because I had to watch the faces and listen to the voices of real people, whose fate I was to learn at the end of the documentary. At the end of the documentary I wandered out into the sunshine, wiping the moisture from my eyes reflecting on the meaning and moral significance of the term “border protection” in current political debate. Why aren’t we concerned with protecting people rather than borders? Why do “borders” need “protecting” anyway?

There is I know a verbal ambiguity in the phrase “border protection”. In current political rhetoric it carries the connotation that borders protect us, the citizens of Australia, though exactly what we are being protected from is never made explicit. The phrasing suggests that if borders are crossed by people without our prior permission, the border is therefore violated, and we as Australian citizens are vulnerable to some unspecified threat. What damage is done, or threatened by the crossing of the border is never clearly explained, merely hinted at.

This ambiguity in the usage of the term “border protection” has a whiff of the sacred surrounding the phrase. The “border” offers “protection” and at the same time must not be violated and therefore stands in need of protection. The ambiguity is consistent with the attachment of a sacral character. You can’t define the sacred or it will no longer be sacred and lose its power. How are then to ‘protect’ the “border’, and at the same time ourselves?

Lo we have solved the problem, and protected the sacredness of the border from profanation by redefining what counts as the border of Australia for certain categories of persons, specifically those seeking asylum. It has been decreed by the passing of a law that the borders for certain purposes cannot be crossed by asylum seekers, because the map has been drawn to exclude Australia from having a border that asylum seekers could cross, while at the same time the border for all other purposes remains in existence, and is therefore “protected”. Ye verily this is as great a magic as ever has been exercised by the wizards, the defenders of the sacred character of the state, known as lawyers. The border is protected and its sacred character is saved from profanation by those who might seek to cross it in search of asylum from persecution.

Borders are clearly of human invention, though attracting the character of the sacred in political rhetoric, and media commentary. They are without feelings, passions and bodies. Asylum seekers on the other hand are of flesh and blood, capable of being killed, tortured, starved, made to feel fear and pressed to act against conscience with respect to matters of political belief, faith commitment and practice.

Why do we wish to “protect” borders, or be protected by borders, which are when stripped of their sacral character simply legal creations set up to assist human flourishing and well being at the expense of causing suffering to actual human beings by not welcoming those in search of freedom from persecution?

Christians and church communities need to answer this question with reference to the life and teaching of Jesus if they wish to give substance to their identification as his followers.

Who or what would Jesus “protect”? A reading of the Gospels with an eye for this theme makes it abundantly clear that Jesus did not have much time for ‘borders’ whether they were of geographical, legal, or religious character where they were inimical to human well being and healing. Jesus had much to say, of a critical character about the privileging of laws at the expense of human beings under the cover of religion. The Sabbath he observed was made for humanity not humanity for the Sabbath. He commented pungently on the use of legal definitions by the well off to enable them to reinforce that privilege and he regularly transgressed the borders that that were used to keep society “safe” from “dangerous” and “different” people.

For Christians to take a stand on this issue will probably result in our coming put into conflict with a majority of Australians for whom the sacredness of borders overrides other moral claims that arise for Christians from their commitment to following Jesus. The call to discipleship means that we cannot get out of difficult situations by ignoring his teaching.

There is another consideration here that reinforces the point I am trying to make that can be expressed in terms of the primary identity for Christians that arises from their baptism. Baptism inducts us into a community broader than the nation state. The borders of the community into which we enter through baptism are not coterminous with those however legally defined and manipulated of the Australian state. Immigration and refugees admit of no policy package that will solve the problem. The issues are structural and rooted deeply in the dynamics of global capitalism and the exercise of neo-imperial power by a range of nations.

The Christian church has little choice, I would argue, as to what its priority should be if it is to take its transnational character and the expansion of its borders through baptism seriously. People need protection not borders. Baptism, properly understood is a subversion of the borders of the nation state. Christians should be prepared to live out that subversion in refusing to acknowledge the claim to the sacredness of borders at the cost of the lives and wellbeing of flesh and blood people. People need protection, not borders.

Doug Hynd

PS. My thanks to Jessie Taylor, those responsible for the documentary particularly the asylum seekers who shared their stories and to Michael Budde for his collection of essays reflecting theologically on the Christian Church and globalisation, The Borders of Baptism: Identities, Allegiance and the Church (Cascade Books, 2011).

What is religion, really?

I have been sound off about the issue of 'generic religion' in some recent blogs. Here is a review of a recent book that takes up the same theme. This is a revised, extended and slightly more conversational version of a review that originally appeared in St Mark’s Review (No.217, August 2011). Word limits left the published version somewhat elliptical in style.

Let me start by pointing to the connection between religion and violence that has become a familiar theme in both media commentary and the public polemics of the “new” atheists. Peter Vardy, Vice-Principal of Heythrop College in the University of London, has written, Good & Bad Religion to try and redirect the whole debate. He wants to get away from the sort of purely defensive reaction on the part of religious people that he believes, quite rightly I think, is neither helpful, nor interesting. Instead he embarks on an attempt to establish that there is some common ground between believers and atheists.

The outcome of this worthy enterprise is Good & Bad Religion, (SCM Press, 2010) a brief paperback, relatively accessible in style and targeted at a thoughtful, but non-academic audience. Hopefully this sort of audience still exists. In a relatively non-defensive and consistently even-tempered manner Vardy moves to place the entire public polemics about “religion” and the contemporary warnings and assumptions of its dangers, and indeed its deep and consistent inhumanity, more clearly within the history of western philosophical and theological thought than has been the case in much of the debate to date.

While this is a helpful step in placing the debate into a wider context, I want to note that Terry Eagleton’s interventions on this issue by comparison have sought to remind us of the taken for granted political background to the contemporary emergence of this debate.

Vardy develops his argument in two distinct parts and at the end of each section, he provides a clear summary of the argument that he has developed and the conclusions that he draws.

In Part One, entitled The Challenge, Vardy sketches the critique of 'religion' provided by contemporary atheists.  Religion can be bad, Vardy concedes to the atheists, but supporters of “good” religion should be at one with them in resisting “bad” religion. It may be, Vardy asserts, that … in today’s world there is a more important distinction between atheist and theist, namely that between those who pursue bad religion and those who stand for truth and what is right, whether it be within, or without a religious framework (p14).

Vardy then takes us through a discussion of the nature of the truth and the good in the major philosophical traditions as an aid to assessing what “good” and “bad” religion are, He concludes with an account of Aristotle’s approach to the nature of human flourishing which he argues is the most helpful way of distinguishing between  ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion. This is an interesting philosophical move, given the role that engagement with Aristotl,e played in the early development of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity and the fact that he moved on to recover the thought of Thomas Aquinas because of Aristotle’s inadequacies in the restatement of a natural law approach to ethics.

Aristotelian philosophy, Vardy contends … offers a partial solution to the problem of devising standards against which to judge religion and religious practices. … the natural law approach is compatible with the major world religions and indeed has been used by them in the past to extend and enrich their philosophies of religion … Further the approach may be acceptable to atheist philosophers as well.  …most normative philosophical systems rely on defining good and bad in relation to what it means to be a fulfilled human being.(67)

In Part 2: A Way Forward Vardy covers a range of issues that arise in any attempt to undertake an assessment of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad religion’, starting with questions of authority and textual interpretation, and then moving on to the topics of science and religion, justice, equality and freedom. From the discussion in each of these chapters Vardy provides us in The Conclusion with a summary based on an Aristotelian, natural law framework, of six broad conclusions, and 26 more detailed criteria that we can use to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ religion.

Given the natural law basis of his argument, the conclusions that Vardy draws are coherent, admirable in their intent and largely predictable. The major problem that I have with the structure and argument that he develops lies not in his analysis, or his conclusions, but back in the underlying assumptions about the character of religion that were touched on briefly in the first chapter but not systematically developed, either then, or later.

The brief references to 'religion' that he provides in the early part of the book do not add up to a consistent, or coherent account of what religion is. Vardy starts out the discussion in a promising vein by noting that religion is the cord of ideas, beliefs and practices that hold communities together and that it is not a consistent monolithic phenomenon. However, he then goes on to affirm that religion can be used in damaging ways, but that it is important to the human psyche and cannot be eliminated. In taking the argument in this direction he is moving   inexorably towards an essentialist and non-historical account of religion. Religion becomes a generic category into which particular faiths or traditions can be shoehorned (or not).

This is followed by the observation that religion has often been taken over for political purposes. A key question arises here. If religion is as he acknowledges, the cord that holds communities together, how could religion not be political in character, and can we then distinguish in any meaningful way between religion and politics? Augustine in his critique of Rome seems to have found himself up to his neck in political theology when discussing “religious” issues. This phenomenon has reappeared min modern guise in the form of civil religions, of which the cult of Anzac Day has emerged in Australia as a recent local variant.

The working assumption that I draw from Vardy’s references to ‘religion’ seems to be that we all know what religion is, and that it can therefore be treated as a timeless generic category that can be evaluated in its specific manifestations as either ‘good’ or “’bad’. Who indeed would be in favour of “bad” “religion”?

The problem with a generic account of religion becomes clear when Vardy refers to the early Christians as having taken a stand against “bad or debased religion”. This really will not do. The early Christians affirmed that they were followers of Jesus whom they affirmed as “Lord”, a term in with both political and the religious connotations and implications. What they took a stand against was not “bad” religion, the Romans called them “atheists”, but the specific political religion of the Roman Empire. Roman officials sought a commitment to the Emperor that would overrode their primary and basic loyalty to Christ. That after all is the whole point of the book of Revelation.

I would, therefore, argue against overall thrust of Vardy’s project to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion, that people are not committed to ‘religion’ in general. People are committed rather to living lives from within specific traditions, traditions that embody differing accounts of the world, and differing accounts of what it is to be human and how one should appropriately live and shape one’s life in that. Indeed they may have very differing understandings of what the "world" is.

As my friend William Cavanaugh argues in his important work, The Myth of Religious Violence, religion has a history … and what counts as a religion and what does not in any given context depends up different configurations of power and authority … the attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena, is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern secular state as it developed in the West. In this context religion is constructed as transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distinct from public secular rationality. (59)

Entirely in its favour is that, in an era of loud shouting, and rhetorically excessive, and factually limited ambit claims passing as argument from protagonists on both sides of the debate, Vardy’s apologetic is overall an eirenic, even tempered and thoughtful response to the new atheists that tries to reframe some of the terms of the debate. He seems willing to share with them an account of religion as a transhistorical and trans-cultural phenomenon and hopes that something can be built on that common ground.

If, however, we do not accept Vardy's implicit account of religion as generic, as I do not, the task before Christians and members of other faith traditions and communities will take us down a different path from the one that he maps out in this book. Our task will be to interrogate the history of our own traditions, their specific beliefs and practices, both for their implication in encouraging violence at the individual, family and communal levels, and for their resources for witnessing to, and embodying shalom. This seems to me to be a more promising, and interesting, though more difficult project than the one that Vardy has undertaken and one that will require churches as communities committed to peacemaking to get involved.

Messianic Americanism - where did it start?

Harry Stout in Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (Penguin, 2007) set out to under take an assessment of the war using just war criteria. I don't think he succeeds all that well in that particular task, not helped by the fact that he doesn't deal with the complexity and ambiguity of the history of the criteria.

That relative failure may not matter all that much because he has done something that is much more interesting and relevant for Australians. He has presented an interesting argument as to why and how the theological arguments developed on both sides of the conflict to underpin a new sense American messianism that emerged as one result of the war.

Stout's account of the dynamic interaction of the progress of the war with the arguments that were developed by the churches and clergy on both sides to justify their support for their respective governments looks plausible or at least arguable and is underpinned by a wealth of documentary evidence from sermons, printed and unprinted by which he tracks the trajectories of the argument as they developed in response to the ebb and flow of the war.

The Civil War was the crucible of modern US identity. If you want to understand how that sense of nationality acquired its deeply religious, messianic character then a reading of Upon the Altar of the Nation will repay a thoughtful reading.

It also provides a reminder of how much the language of religion has now become taken over by the state to justify its use of violence. The "holy" has well and truly "migrated" as William Cavanaugh has recently reminded us. Indeed I am inclined to argue that Stout's work stands as a helpful case study of that migration in the American context.

Different take on Non-violence

William Cavanaugh provides a different take on the theoloogical rationale for non-violence.

Christians who embrace non-violence are often accused of unrealistically trying to impose a perfectionist ethic on mere sinful human beings. I find it remarkable that travelling to the other side of the world to shoot people is considered somehow everyday and mundane, while refraining is considered impossibly heroic.

The reason we should reject violence is not from a prideful conviction that we are the pure in a world full of evil. The gospel call to non-violence comes from the realization that we are not good enough to use violence, not pure enough to direct history through violent means. Peacemaking requires not extreme heroism, but a humble restraint in identifying enemies, and an everyday commitment to caring for members of one's body in mundane ways: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, all of whom, Jesus says, are Jesus himself.

Christian non-violence imitates Jesus' nonviolence, but it also participates in Jesus' self-emptying into sinful humanity, his sharing in the brokenness of the world. It is this peacemaking that we enact in sharing the broken bread of the Eucharist.

Breaking Bread, Making Peace

Remembering Marcellus of Tangiers

The need to demystify the nation state is on an ongoing task for Christians. William Cavanaugh makes this point forcefully:

The nation-state is neither community writ large nor the protector of smaller communal spaces, but rather originates and grows over against truly common forms of life. This is not necessarily to say that the nation-state cannot and does not promote and protect some goods, or that any nation- state is entirely devoid of civic virtue, or that some forms of ad hoc co- operation with the government cannot be useful. It is to suggest that the nation-state is simply not in the common good business. At its most benign, the nation-state is most realistically likened, as in MacIntyre’s apt metaphor, to the telephone company, a large bureaucratic provider of goods and ser- vices that never quite provides value for money.

The problem, as MacIntyre notes, is that the nation-state presents itself as so much more; namely, as the keeper of the common good and repository of sacred values that demands sacrifice on its behalf. The longing for genuine communion that Christians recognize at the heart of any truly common life is transferred onto the nation-state. Civic virtue and the goods of common life do not simply disappear; as Augustine saw, the earthly city flourishes by producing a distorted image of the heavenly city. The nation-state is a simulacrum of common life, where false order is parasitical on true order. In a bureaucratic order whose main function is to adjudicate struggles for power between various factions, a sense of unity is produced by the only means possible: sacrifice to false gods in war. The nation-state may be understood theologically as a kind of parody of the Church, meant to save us from division.

The urgent task of the Church, then, is to demystify the nation-state and to treat it like the telephone company ("Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is not the Keeper of the Common Good" Modern Theology 20:2, April 2004)

It was worth keeping in mind that this task is not new. Today is the saints day for Marcellus of Tangiers. In the task of reshaping our understanding of the respective claims of God and the state the story of Marcellus is worth remembering.

In the year A.D. 298, enemies threatened the Roman Empire on several fronts. For reasons of state security, the government increased pressure on soldiers and others to demonstrate allegiance to the “divine” emperor. Protocol required the centurion Marcellus to lead his troops in giving allegiance to Rome on the emperor’s birthday.

An ancient account states that “Marcellus rejected these pagan festivities.” He threw down his soldier’s belt (which carried his weapons) in front of the legionary standards (the Roman eagle and images of the emperor). Then he spoke in a loud voice in front of his troops: “I am a soldier of Jesus Christ, the eternal king. From now I cease to serve your emperors and I despise the worship of your gods of wood and stone, for they are deaf and dumb images.”

The record says the soldiers under the command of Marcellus were “amazed,” and promptly arrested him. An account of his trial in October 298 records the following exchange between the judge Agricolanus and Marcellus:

Agricolanus: “Did you say the things that are recorded in the prefect’s report?”

Marcellus: “Yes, I did.”

Agricolanus: “You held the military rank of centurion, first class?”

Marcellus: “Yes,”

Agricolanus: “What madness possessed you to throw down the symbols of your military oath and to say the things you did?”

Marcellus: “No madness possesses those who fear the Lord.”

Agricolanus: “Then you did say all those things that are set down in the prefect’s report?”

Marcellus: “Yes, I said them.”

Agricolanus: “You threw down your weapons?”

Marcellus: “Yes, I did. For it is not fitting that a Christian, who fights for Christ his Lord, should fight for the armies of this world.”

Agricolanus: “What Marcellus has done merits punishment according to military rules. And so, whereas Marcellus, who held the rank of centurion, first class, has confessed that he has disgraced himself by publicly renouncing his military oath, … I hereby sentence him to death by the sword.”

Marcellus (being led out to execution): “Agricolanus, may God reward you.”