The Importance Of Not Being Scandalized

In my years BG (Before Girard) I understood scandal in a strictly moral way, i.e.a destruction of the spiritual good through public sin. Rene' Girard showed just how impoverished this idea is. The evolutionary anthropologist unpacked scandal not as a badge of shame, or just a paparazzi source of titillation. Rather it is a powerful structural relationship: a mutuality poisoned by violence. Most astonishing, Girard traces the structural concept to Jesus, who was the first clearly to articulate it.

Girard explains how Jesus conceived scandal as the "model-obstacle," a situation where someone shows another what to desire by means of a violent opposition. The case of Peter is the classic instance. He tries to stop Jesus going to Jerusalem to suffer and die: Jesus calls him a "skandalon," because Peter is trying to infect him with his violent desire in relation to Jerusalem and doing so through his own urgent opposition to Jesus' plan. Jesus says this is a temptation from Satan which can trip him (Jesus) up, for it seeks to turn his way of nonviolence back to the traditional anthropology of violence.

Jesus' ministry represented a concrete historical movement and so it was too easy for people around him, like Peter, to take it up with the standard anthropology of power and violence (see e.g. Mk. 10:37). Jesus had to insist again and again on the profoundly new structure of humanity that went with his breakthrough. He preached against the character of scandal itself, a relationship which insinuates violence into the heart of "little ones" causing them to stumble back into the violent world order. "Woe to the world because of scandals. For it is necessary that scandals come: but woe to that man by whom the scandal comes." (Matthew 18:6-7). This teaching is extraordinarily relevant to Christians in North America in these first decades of the 21st century.

We are scandalized by everything and everyone: Tea Partyers by Government, Liberals by Tea Partyers, Gays by Homophobes, Homophobes by Gays, Christians by Christians, Non-Christians by Christians, Spirituals by Religious, Religious by Spirituals, Secessionists by Obama, Progressives by Bush. The whole recent election was an exercise in acute scandal provoked by one side on the other, together with the constant zombie-like attempt to infuse everyone with the same outrage. Romney's 47% became a mantra of offense, and Obama was, of course, a closet Muslim Socialist. I recently came on a post-election political commentary imagining at length what it would be like if Romney had in fact won: almost as if were impossible to leave behind that endless satisfaction of scandal.

The gospel continues to lay bare the violence of culture. Because of it we are just like Peter. We are keen to take up the causes of Jesus but with the old anthropological structure intact inside us, and perhaps more virulent than ever. Because there has been a disclosure of violence but not a deep conversion to Jesus' new humanity of forgiveness and love we are susceptible to a tsunami of mediated hostility. And we shouldn't feel condemned in admitting this. The New Tesatament is keen to underline that the "greatest" figures are affected. John the Baptist is someone else who risked seeing Jesus in terms of violent opposition (probably because Jesus was not following through in the expected path of revolution, and was felt as opposing John's deeply religious desire). Jesus commented that John would be "blessed" if he could come to the point of not being "scandalized."

Scandal is now a normal structure of consciousness in the West, a seesawing back and forth of violent desire. Worse, it has become the self-justifying mind-set of those who take certain Christian values seriously, but do not go the whole yard in the new nonviolent humanity of Christ. In which case the Christian religion is caught as a self-tightening noose. It is falling tighter and tighter into a trap of its own making and which Jesus warned about a long time ago.

Jesus of course wasn't afraid to speak in opposition to the groups and institutions around him. But his opposition was not violent. He spoke from within a radical human newness, one that did not dwell in the dark caves of resentment and envy. He was prepared to give himself completely for the sake of forgiveness and love, and because he did he released this quality of relationship into the world for his followers.

The Holy Spirit is the peace he gives, "not as the world gives,'" but it is very much in the world, something that changes everything. Without a living sense of this new world we will only recycle the structures of violence when we speak.

The vital thing is to discover this space of the Spirit rising up in the world and its history, as an act of grace hand in hand with the increase of scandal. Eventually it must outstrip scandal. It has to be this way. because, paradoxically, it is the peace of Christ which helps provoke the scandal (as it did with John the Baptist), and every time there is an upsurge of scandal there is, deep in its undertow, the peace of a new creation. Our work is every time to find that true space behind the scandal.

For if a new humanity cannot be discovered existentially in the here, it would seem existentially impossible to find it in the hereafter.

Tony Bartlett, Contributing Theologian

Was the U.S. Election Legitimate?

The 2012 U.S. presidential election was the most expensive ever, coming in at over a billion dollars for Obama and Romney each. The cost for the whole election, including seats in the Senate and Congress, was six billion. Much of this money was spent on T.V. ads (a full million of them), blitzing Americans with a daily dose of manufactured opinion from both sides, most of it finger-pointing and destructive.

It was also by far the longest election, fought right from the get-go--the moment of Obama's 2009 inauguration--when Rush Limbaugh said he wanted the president to fail. From that point it was the declared purpose of the political right to de-elect Obama, and reciprocally by his supporters to forestall that outcome. The claim of the "Birthers" that Obama was not born in the U.S., and had not provided a valid birth certificate, further intensified the sense of an ever-open election season.

The endless election was indeed a denial of legitimacy for Obama, and the last four years have opened up the question of legitimacy in a general way. What in fact makes for a legitimate president? The notorious "Citizens United" decision by the Supreme Court, allowing "dark money" to pour into the election campaigns, has undermined the traditional piety of "government by the people for the people." Individuals or corporations are allowed to throw unlimited cash into the candidate's war chests and often without duty to disclose who they are. Such unaccountable money cannot possibly be democratic. Hundreds of millions of dollars are not spent to facilitate free exercise of judgment on the part of each citizen. They are intended to influence and buy the crowd.

An excoriating piece by Chris Hedges, the S&M Election, denounced the presidential election as an exercise in cruelty, abuse and violence. Hedges quotes Gustave Le Bon, writing on the phenomenon of the crowd: “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

The sociologist Le Bon is recognized to be a forerunner of Rene' Girard. According to Girard's thought crowds can never have legitimacy, because they mobilize as crowd against the single victim, blaming that figure for their own mimetic violence which they then unleash. The mob that turned against Jesus is the textbook example. Thus when a politician mobilizes the violence of the crowd against an individual or group, by a biblical definition he loses legitimacy.

The amazing thing is that the huge glut of private money funneled into the election did not seem entirely to work. Americans, to some degree, seem to have made their decisions despite, not because of the adverts. The biggest single donor in history, the casino billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, plunked down millions of dollars supporting eight candidates in Tuesday's election: none were victorious.

Which suggests there might be another source to democracy apart from the dynamics of the crowd, and there might also, therefore, be another, genuine source of legitimacy. Might it be possible there was actually a sense of common interest and even the common good which helped mobilize the electorate last Tuesday?

Before we get carried away, we must also remember that it was one of the constant boasts of the Obama side that he killed Osama Bin Laden. A couple of days before the election the organization "Obama For America" sent me an email listing the top twenty five reasons to re-elect their man. Number Four was: "Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive." As Adam Ericksen so well points out Obama has "fostered a culture of violence," continually using drones in Pakistan, terrorizing a whole population and the generation of its children. There is inescapably violence at the source of the favor in which the crowd holds him.

In this respect the Christian finds all presidential legitimacy a very ambiguous thing indeed. It was something foreseen by Augustine of Hippo. In The City of God Augustine describes how the Christian people are invested in the peace of the human community, including its political realization, sharing that goal with the political state. But Christians are not invested in the means by which the state achieves its ends. Augustine describes nations as consumed by "libido dominandi," a violent lust for power. In contrast the Christian community seeks to promote the political ends of peace by its own proper means, which are the non-violent means of Christ, the love of God and neighbor.

So what does this election teach us? Once again the surprise is really that so much of the negative mobilization against Obama did not work. So, despite the fact that Obama himself engages in the standard mobilization of the crowd against the enemy, is it also possible that the long soaking of West in the gospel of Jesus has resulted, at least to some degree, in another kind of legitimacy, one that comes from Christ. The willingness to care for each other, via some form of universal Health Care, the acceptance of difference, including in sexual orientation, as the necessary path to love, the rejection of money as the sole standard of human meaning, via progressive taxation, all this can justly claim to be an effect of the gospel. (And, yes, I know I have not mentioned abortion, the anti-Obama rallying cry of the Catholic bishops, but as Nicolas Cafardi argued Obama was more pro-life than Romney. The Affordable Health Care act will provide economic support to vulnerable pregnant women and so make abortion less likely.)

In sum this Christ-inspired legitimacy does not belong to Obama, or to any one party. Its fault lines go across the parties, right through communities, and down the middle of U.S, self-consciousness itself. It does not in fact identify itself with any one party or candidate. Its existence is a question much more of the Christian movement continuing to provide a new basis of legitimacy, within a secular world increasingly nervous of the dystopian power of violence. Its function is to be salt to the earth, telling the story over and over again, insisting in season and out on the apocalyptic (i.e. humanity transforming) principles of contemporary Christianity. It seeks to arrive at the point where Obama and presidents after him will regard killing people not as a claim of legitimacy but, according to the revelation of the Christian Messiah, a source of de-legitimation.

Tony Bartlett, Contributing Theologian

The Halloween Atonement Test

Marshall St., every Friday afternoon, in the Syracuse University student quarter, there's a man parading dressed in scripture-quote billboards and threatening hell to all those who don't take Jesus as their savior. His booming voice bounces off bar fronts and food joints, declaring doom to come. Everyone blocks him out, but that doesn't bother him. It simply confirms the structure of his universe. Each time his voice is ignored the ground opens up in front of the person who ignored him.

Hearing this man it's easy to feel the hard edge of violence in the inherited Christian message. It's something difficult to square with a Teacher who began his teaching with "Blessed are the peacemakers..." but quite easy to believe once you understand the story that has gone on between. The Teacher died a violent death, as part of his mission, and what simpler way to understand a violent episode than via the accepted mechanics of violence?

Once Christian thinkers looked around for ways to explain Jesus' death to the masses, they swiftly hit on notions of payment and punishment. You offend me, I'll take a chunk of you! Simple as that. All that was required was to put Jesus in the place of the rest of us who should be paying, and bingo, what have you got? You have the displaced payment of dues to a most unforgiving, grim and terrible god, by a passive, submissive victim who happens to be his son. This is the classic Christian doctrine of atonement.

Not hard then to imagine the second-order consequence of refusing to accept the ferocious pay-off made available through Jesus! Hell, yes!

My friend on Marshall St. is a typical child of two millennia of Christian misconstruction of Jesus' death.

The violence in his voice and soul was put there by Christian history. How much more difficult and challenging it would have been--given intellectual and institutional frameworks-- for Christian thinkers to explain Jesus' death as overcoming the mechanics of violence itself? If Jesus did pay anything it was of such an extravagant, limitless kind that it blew up the system of payment. It was as if he kept printing dollars on the cross, and no one could stop him, so all the dollars became completely worthless, and the only economy left was the one he had modeled, one of limitless giving.

As for violence, it is always itself a system of payment ("I'll get you back!") and Jesus of course exploded that too. By the excess of giving on the cross he shed light on our ancient structure of violent human reciprocity, one that works itself out in our bones and minds in an instant, before we even realize it, and in a flash there is blood on the ground. This revelation by the cross has become articulated in contemporary thought in the notions of "mimetic desire," "mirror neurons" and "the surrogate victim" powerfully laid out in the work of Rene Girard.

Institutional Christianity seems more or less stuck with the default meaning of Christ's death inherited from the centuries. Certainly there are numerous theologians and teachers working in this new direction, but the comfort of violence as a generative principle and its hold on human logic are so great that it adds up to an enormous ideological and religious obstacle. The man on Marshall St. is perhaps an extreme example, but his condition to one degree or another is endemic in all of Christianity.

However, that is not the whole story, by any means. The gospel revelation of violence is not in fact happening essentially in the churches, but broadly in culture, and that is Girard's amazing insight. He found the evidence first in novels and plays, and to some degree in philosophy, and in my own work I have shown it in evidence in movies (and again in philosophy). What this means is that the crucial shift in Christianity is being prompted largely from outside its institutional forms. It's almost as if the Crucified struggles on his own with violence, bringing it to the surface, exposing it and slowly making possible the alternative. This leads me directly to Halloween and what I'd like to propose as the "Halloween Atonement Test." If popular culture can pass the Halloween Test it means that, one way or other, the mechanism and message of Christianity have been changed radically, from one of violence to one of peace and nonviolence.  

The ghosts, zombies, skeletons, witches, hanged men, chopped up limbs, crumbling graveyards, rats, bats, scorpions, spiders, cobwebs, and oh yes the pumpkins, those gaudy gourds with a color and shape uncannily reminiscent of a severed human head, what is all this, if not a revelation of generative violence? It is taking place chaotically and ambiguously but without a doubt it shows an enormous consciousness of violence. Why not then include a large crucifix in the front yard alongside the skulls and hanged men? Would it not perfectly belong there? 

The reaction at once is "No, this would be a kind of blasphemy! The cross is a sacred form of violence, all that other stuff is regular profane violence." But, really, the point of the cross is exactly that: it is regular human violence, to which Jesus replied with transcendent forgiveness and peace. Putting it among the ghouls and the gore would declare this definitively as its role. It would show a true recognition of the death of Jesus as a laying bare of generative violence, and with that the communication of generative peace.

The prehistory of Halloween is pretty clearly a pre-Christian cyclical feast, the Celtic Samhain (pronounced sawin) celebrated Oct. 31st/Nov. 1st. It was especially concerned with the dead and enemies lurking among them (very possibly the victims of murder). The victim gets his day in the sun so to speak and then is stuffed back in the ground. The church's attempt in the 9th century to upstage the "summer's end" ritual by placing a Feast of All Saints on November 1st (and All Souls the day after) proved unable to suppress it. Perhaps because "saints" go to some heavenly otherworld and leave this one still roiled in violence. Perhaps because the fact of the victim was already dimly sensed, despite the pagan trappings, as a Christian truth. But the North American Halloween, and its growing popularity throughout the world, are something else again. It is an intense semiotic display which looks and feels more and more like visual and dramatic "disclosure" of violence. It seems as if deep down the broad cultural effect of the Crucified has been added to the ancient ritualized event pushing all this cruelty into the open, implicitly asking us, begging us, to let go of it.

So why not then place a crucifix in the front yard, next to the skeletons and hanged men? Would that not state unarguably that the cross is an event of human violence, and at the same time and for that reason, communicate a transforming peace to the human scene?

If I ever get to see something like that I'll know Christianity has finally passed its Halloween Atonement Test!

Tony Bartlett, Contributing Theologian

Satanic Verses

Back in 1988, in London's East End, you couldn't get a copy of Salman Rushdie's book, The Satanic Verses. Rushdie had produced a fictional narrative of an early Islamic story telling of three verses removed from the Qu'ran after the Prophet saw them as a satanic temptation. A fatwa was issued against Rushdie's all-too-human retelling, making it an undesirable item to be held in our high-street book store. The satanic verses had become doubly satanic: first in their traditional sense; second as a modern deconstructive novel which appeared to challenge the purity of Islamic revelation.

My experience of the revised Roman Catholic mass (during a recent retreat weekend) suggested to me a reflective thought of "satanic verses," and in both senses. Here was a liturgical and theological reform responding to a previous form of words now rejected as deviant and deconstructive. Let me develop that thought.

The language of the mass changed initially, after many hundreds of years, as a result of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). It went from Latin to English, and from formal to conversational. This 20th-century-style speech is the only language of the mass any Catholic under forty has known. The recent revised version is an English translation of a third edition of the Latin Roman Missal published in 2002. In other words, the new English translation is of a brushed-up Latin edition of the mass. 

Language, as we all know, is the world. Language is pictures, stories, ideas, all strung together and held in front of us by the amazing phenomenon of words. The history of the original satanic verses is disputed, lost in the mists of traditions about the Prophet. In contrast, the past forty years of language of the mass is vivid living memory, and for it to be revised in this way amounts to a deliberate exercise in rewriting religious experience.

Arguments in favor of the new ritual claim it is richer, less chatty, more mysterious and spiritual. Attending the new mass for the first time I had a somewhat different reaction. Everything I heard was an uncanny repetition of verbal and mental themes I had last experienced as a boy, and they came across loud and clear: as hierarchical, scholastic, metaphysical and dualist.

These three examples stuck in my head. First, the famous "And with your spirit" is repeated in various places. It is an evident translation of Et cum spiritu tuo, the words I used to parrot as an altar boy when the priest spun around from mysteriously facing the altar and let out a doctrinally dense, hierarchically awesome Dominus vobiscum, "The Lord be with you." The new English is plainly a reversal to the traditional Latin and carries with it all the old privileging of a separate "spiritual" part within us destined for an immaterial heaven.

The introduction to the Lord's prayer was this: "At the Savior's command and formed by divine teaching, we dare to say," followed by the beginning words "Our Father.." Again this awoke from dim caves of memory the ghost of forgotten words, in this case Audemus dicere, "we dare to say." It is the Latin I used to hear a half century ago, and which even then filled me with a feeling of the remoteness and dangerous character of a God who otherwise--in the narrow ritual space of the church's mediation--could be considered the Abba/Daddy taught by Jesus. The reversion to this very Latin Roman formula--from the previous much simpler "Let us pray in the words Christ taught us"--had the clang of iron about it, the cruel reconstruction of an old imperial heaven.

And then there was the one that caught me fully in the throat. It was in the words of institution, "Take this...and drink from it...the blood of the new and eternal covenant...," replacing "new and everlasting covenant." The priest who was celebrating, himself stumbled on the word "eternal," his brain clearly wanting to say "everlasting." As Freud said, a slip of the tongue will often be the sign of something repressed trying to come to the surface. In this case it was the time-filled sense of "everlasting," the meaning of a history-produced and history-producing relationship with God, rather than the other-worldly, metaphysical, Platonic "eternal." With this one word the revisionists played the minds and souls of Catholic Christians back into a two-tier, power-brokered universe, with the amazing human intervention of the cross carried off to a motionless, dead beyond. The game was essentially up (pun intended).

The other form of words, now abandoned, is relegated to the status of satanic verses. The 2nd Vatican Council which inspired these words and the theological energy which produced them are now frequently called an aberration, a mistake. All the so-called leveling out, the loss of majesty and awe, the engagement with history and social activism, all this is a massive humanizing temptation to be cast in the dustbin of bad verses, along with the actual council of bishops which instigated it. An emerging sense of a Jesus Messiah who fills his disciples, and the world, with a transforming meaning both of God and humanity, this is in there too.

But history does not disappear that easily. The repressed returns. True satanic verses are those which accuse the human, which put humanity under judgment of violence. Meanwhile what is accused may well remain the source of life and hope.

Tony Bartlett, Contributing Theologian

Islam or Christianity? Wrong Question?

The firestorm of protest which swept the world in response to the pathetic yet gross-insult movie, The Innocence of Muslims, opened afresh a dramatic fault-line between Western and Islamic cultures. The violent reaction included the killing of the US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, along with three other embassy staff. Continuing unrest has claimed the lives of more than fifty people in Muslim nations across the world.

In these fraught circumstances it is very easy for Westerners in general, and those citing a Girardian analysis in particular, to feel a distinct superiority to Muslim criteria of judgment and response.

Meanwhile, the mood on the streets of Peshawar, Kano, Benghazi and Cairo sees the arrogant West giving itself permission to disregard the religious sensitivities of Islamic peoples, failing to accord them the right to pursue their faith undisturbed. Alongside, of course, there is the continually roiled resentment at the "long war" directed at Muslim countries, and the feeling of double standards applied to their countries and Israel in regard to human rights

In respect of Rene Girard, he has commented that the Koran "has no real awareness of collective murder" (Battling To The End, p.216). In other words it lacks the revelation of the scapegoat, manifestly present in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Because of this Islam represents a return to archaic religion. From an anthropological point of view these are incredibly potent charges.

They mean, among other things, there is no built-in room for laxity or tolerance in Islam. Religion consists in an untouchable, razor-sharp purity. There is nothing messy, human or bloody on its surface or at its core, only the unqualified, pristine divine.

The gospel is entirely the inverse. The bloodied corpse of Jesus hangs at the center of its consciousness. There is no insult that can ever do more to disgrace Christ than has already been perpetrated and accepted. Which is entirely the point. By raising up the Crucified, so that Jesus' nonretaliation becomes a boundless historical truth, all insults and violations are forgiven, if only the perpetrator can accept this amazing grace.

I once taught a religion course in which I used the notorious example of the "Piss-Christ" as evidence of the cultural phenomenon of Christ as nonretaliating, forgiving victim.There was a young Muslim woman in my class: while the Christian students hardly batted an eyelid (at the most a quick "eeww!") she was completely disgusted and angry. She took the artifact as clear evidence of Christianity's weakness and failure.

However, from a Girard perspective it would be precisely the gospel revelation of the victim-- demonstrated provocatively in this piece of pop art--which constitutes the gospel's immense historical vigor. It is this demonstration which has turned the world upside down, slowly liberating the cultures under its influence from sacred order, undermining rigid hierarchy and validating the victim, so she becomes the most compelling cultural principle of all time.

But is there room here for Christian smugness? Absolutely not. The theological consciousness of Christ as revelation of the victim can hardly be said to be Christian S.O.P, let alone that it grabs public attention in the vicious culture wars fought around Christian morality. Again and again Girardian commentators are forced to reflect that the revelation of the victim takes place first in a broad secular framework, rather than in the church. Girard's own first discoveries on the trail of mimetic theory came from reading the secular works of novelists, not theology.

In truth, this revelation of deep Christianity remains by and large hidden to the official West. Girard sees the West as continuing blindly on a course of confrontation with Islam, marching in a mirror opposition, so that it too reverts to an archaic religiosity, tinged with superficial rationalism: "two forms of fundamentalism," as he has called it (ibid. 211).

All of which suggests to me that the West is just as much challenged by the revelatory crudeness of the cross as is Islam. The whole history of institutional Christianity, from Augustine through to the Protestant Reformation, has been a way of integrating this deconstructive core back into traditional violent transcendence.

Which suggests in turn there are more and more only two religions on offer in the world. The religion which drives ferociously toward a new sacrificial order, indifferent to whatever "side" ends up winning; and the one which responds from its soul to the deconstructive power of the cross in the world. This second religion runs across all borders and boundaries. It has no dividing line so it can be recognized as "us" against "them," although I am sure you can know it when you see it. It is just as likely to be expressed by Muslim scholars (as in the "Common Word" written in response to Pope Benedicts's Regensberg address, and eliciting from him the conciliatory gesture of visiting a mosque in Jordan), or indeed anybody, as it is by Christians.

It does not belong institutionally to Christianity. In fact it does not even belong to religion. It is the messianic principle of the cross let loose in the world and carrying the hearts of humanity forward on its irresistible wave of transformation.

So what is the response of the Christian who embraces this in her heart and finds herself in the world of mirror fundamentalisms? No different from that of early Christianity, uninvested in the fight between the Caesars. That's the point, to call attention to the massive crisis, but in the meantime live the new way of life which is the true way out.

Tony Bartlett, T&P Contributing Theologian

Man Bits & Lady Parts. Or, The Nones Have It.

The BBC webpage--which acts as my default news service, perhaps because it shows a quaint old-world desire for objectivity--recently published two articles back-to-back which put US churches in a no-win (Why is faith falling in the US?). The first, from a conservative voice, argues that erasure of boundaries and an accompanying loss of vigorous language make everything so mushy that, in the end, why should anyone bother? The second gives the inverse: the broad evangelical church condemnation of homosexuality has had, and continues to have, a disproportionate alienating effect on young people.

On the one hand members of a church like the Episcopalians, in their efforts to welcome the LGBT community, come consciously to celebrate an indeterminate language which leaves neutral observers feeling they just drank dishwater. On the other, exclusion of homosexuals, at whatever level, has produced a geometrical growth in the "Nones," those who refuse all religious affiliation. Among young adults aged eighteen to twenty-nine, thirty per cent are Nones, and their numbers continue to rise.

All this fuss and confusion over man bits and lady parts, and how they are employed! Of course, we all recognize how much passion and desire swirl around these bits and parts. But according to Rene' Girard there is really nothing intrinsic about why we desire them: after the simple sex instinct is granted it is because everyone else desires them that they really becomes desirable. The fact that people talk about them all the time and that they are used continually in advertizing to sell billions of dollars of merchandise are ample confirmation of this constant modeling. More to the point, in Things Hidden Girard argues that heterosexual desire always has something homoerotic in it, because the same-sex rival for the love of the romantic other-sex beloved is him/herself secretly desired! Otherwise s/he would not be a rival. (Yes, a little mind-twisting, but think about it.)

In which case romantic love is in pretty tricky waters from the get-go.

But what happens when the churches confronted by a gathering confusion of difference between the sexes begin to feel the pressure? Certainly they can opt for the evident gospel example of Jesus ignoring the legal boundaries, and turn to celebrate the loss of difference. Thus the first article reports on the decision at the recent General Convention of the Episcopal church voting to approve transgendered clergy and a liturgy for same-sex marriage. At a special communion service after the votes a bishop made an offering prayer thanking the non-gender-specific "Spirit of Life" for "disordering our boundaries."

But, then, what happens to the beautifully insistent, resonant language used by that great subverter of all boundaries in whose name all this is done? What happens to the cultural coding that makes everyone sit up and know immediately that something real is going down? What happens to "Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand"? Or to "Call no one on earth your father, you have but one Father in heaven"?

Jesus' open table fellowship in which he broke the boundaries between pure and impure is connected by a main artery to the cross. By a leap of divine imagination Jesus was able to see how the temple in Jerusalem was the engine for all divisions and he would eventually have to go there to confront it. The temple did not simply represent the ritual holiness of priests and their offerings. Its zealous commitment to the Davidic lineage and its military Messiah was pitched in immediate and direct rivalry with the Roman citadel built right above it. Here was the violent heart of human culture in Judea and all the cultic and national dividers expanded in a shock wave from its sacred center. When Jesus sat down with the publicans and prostitutes, the lepers and Samaritans, his itinerary to Jerusalem and his date with the explosive temple-praetorium axis were already decided. That's why he had the freedom to throw a party for all these outcasts.

In light of this any melting down and disordering of language that does not pursue its argument to the abolition of our contemporary temple, the military-industrial-media complex, is little more than one more instance of joy-riding the gospel. The bits and parts that we should be concerned with are the weapons of war that male and female, and every shade either side and in between, all equally carry. (And these include the weapons on the streets of Chicago, New York, Aurora, Milwuakee...). Here is a language that can be clear and arresting for humanity of the 21st century. Let's hope that the worthy subverters of difference carry their program all the way to the violent heart of the problem.

Tony Bartlett, Contributing Theologian

Note to Paul Ryan

The recent addition of Paul Ryan to the Romney Presidential ticket focuses attention on philosophical principles at stake in U.S. politics. The Roman Catholic Ryan has more than once credited Ayn Rand as a key inspiration for his life and thought. But lately he also tried to distance himself a little from the high priestess of individualism, saying when it came to "epistemology....give me Thomas Aquinas. Don't give me Ayn Rand." 

Apart from the hoary old trick of citing Aquinas to burnish orthodox credentials one wonders if Ryan has actually read the Angelic Doctor's political thought. But just before we get to that, here's a little historical memory.

In England back in the Middle Ages there used to be common land, an area of agricultural fields set aside for the villagers on which they could grow crops. Part of the massive social engineering that took place at the beginning of the 19th century were the "enclosures" of the common food-producing space. A local lord or landowner took the land into private control and this was one of the major factors forcing a migration to the new industrial cities and creating the English working class.

Aquinas in all likelihood would have been horrified. His famous definition of the ends of human existence is "to live in community and know God." He also said: "Laws are said to be just from their end, when they are ordered to the common good; and from their author, when a law does not exceed the power of the one who declared it; and from their form, when they impose burdens upon their subjects in order to the common good according to an equality of proportion. Since one man is a part of the many, each man, what he is and what he has, belongs to the many, just as any part being what it is belongs to the whole (Summa Theologica II-II, q. 25, 6 ad 2).

But, really, it is just as useless for me to quote Aquinas as it is for Ryan to cite him. Part of the point of the 19th century history is to show that a whole lot of things have changed since the high Middle Ages. Our concrete conditions are unrecognizably different, and the thought world in which we exist has also been shifted irreversibly, by people like Descartes, Hume, Kant, Freud, Nietzsche...

The idea of a common world still has direct appeal, of course, but it has to start somewhere else than Aquinas' Aristotelian-categories-plus-scripture framework. Aquinas also spoke from a deep human sense of solidarity based in standard sacrificial practice, as well as the simple need to hang together to survive the multiple threats of the environment. The huge changes in our material and intellectual circumstances which gathered pace in the 19th century, involve enormous imbalances between classes of people and regions of the world. But they have conclusively changed the global cultural perspective in which we understand ourselves. Everyone is a little individualist and capitalist now, even if only in their heads. And that's why Rand remains Ryan's essential political inspiration.

At the same time, however, at a deeper level, it is also possible to understand Rand's thought very easily as a reaction to the ever increasing mimetism of human history. To see it this way changes the thing dramatically.

What happens when the work of the gospel strips away the solidarity of an intact sacrificial system ("I am a member of the in-group and have no other way of thinking and want no other.")? In these circumstances it is no longer possible to look at the world and not see victims, and, in the absence of a genuine conversion to love and compassion, that must produce an ever-increasing resentment and rivalry. In these conditions "the other" becomes an intolerable threat. What better way, then, of dealing with the crisis than inventing a literary-romantic mythology of the nonrelational individual? This is just what Rand did, depending on Nietzsche before her, who did somewhat the same thing, but with infinitely more finesse. Like Nietzsche she also understood that Christianity was the real problem. She called it "the best kindergarten for communism possible."

But just because you invent a romance of the godlike individual does not mean mimesis goes away. It's still there, and more than ever, precisely as the individual pitted against the crowd. And this in fact is the ideology of Paul Ryan and the forces he represents, relentlessly mimicking the very thing they hate, in all its power and danger. In fact, very quickly they gather a crowd to combat the crowd, each element imagining in its mind that it is acting the sovereign part of the individual. Moreover, they intend to become the only crowd, single and united, overturning in an orgy of self-contradiction, the myth of the individual from which they started.

The discovery of both mimesis and compassion as neurally based human responses is the obvious thinking path out of the crisis. We are wired into each other whether we like it or not. This wiring is no longer connected to the public grid of sacrifice and as such can very quickly fuse into a violent melt-down of catastrophic proportions. But not if we consciously and deliberately--as relational beings--opt for a connection to the other that is nonviolent and giving. The metaphysics of an Aquinas really make no sense in a Randian world (note to Paul Ryan!), but a post-individualist anthropology of compassion does. Oh, for the politician with the clarity and courage to preach it!

Tony Bartlett, T&P Contributing Theologian