To be quite honest, the previous blog about abortion is a conversation I don’t even really care to have. I’ve heard about abortion from the right, left and everything middle and extreme all my life. From friends who got arrested for protesting, to West Wing episodes that centered around “a woman’s right to choose.” All in all, I wrote it as a zip cord into a larger conversation about the way of Christianity, and the place/role of government.
As a quick primer in the discussion I’ve been having in my head/with my friends for a long while now, there are at least two competing views on ethics. The first rests quite squarely in the modernistic (I’m using that as a semi-technical term – see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity) view of pragmatism. Here, we find that the most honest way of governance is that which, in utilitarian terms, brings the most good to the most people most of the time. Contra this, there are “virtue” ethicists who, in the Christian world, wish to “story” the people of faith so as to live in a way that demonstrates their real, social, tangible “being” as people of the cross – this as a practice of faithfulness, without structured concern for the results. For instance: we love our enemies because this is a faithful practice of following Jesus; if that takes us to the point of death, that is vow we’ve taken at baptism. Of course, there are times when, by following “the grain of the universe” we expect the faithful action to result in God’s redemptive work, so that violence always breeds violence, and fails to redeem a hurting world, but enemy love can, and will redeem a broken world as our “better angels” have shown us time and time again: from Jesus to Ghandi, Corrie Ten Boom, to Dr. King.
The problem then follows, how does one choose, first simply to exercise the “right” to vote, and secondly, to navigate the muddied waters of political positioning to find a candidate for whom they can vote.
My current thought on the subject is that the answer lies somewhere within how one defines the “role” of government. Being raised, as I said last time, as a good Evangelical boy, brought up to think that Reagan was the best president (perhaps ever), the role of government was to stay small, and stay out of our business. While this is a view shared by millions, the problem is very, very simple. We need government. There has yet to be a society in which government did not exist. And, if we think that the Regan years (for example) were years where the government did a good job of “staying small and staying out,” we would do well to consider what that meant to fruit farmers, parents, and priests in the southern hemisphere of the Americas, not to mention the millions of poor on the streets of our own nation at the time. From this “preface” you might’ve guessed already, that I have a slightly different view of the “role” of government. Here it is.
Government exists, not to save the world or bring about the Kingdom of God. Quite contrarily, “the kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdoms of our God, and of his Christ…” As Christians our allegiance and hope is squarely, only, and always in God. Our story is caught up in God’s story, and our lives have meaning only as God gives meaning to history. Thus all kingdoms, all democracies, all thrones, powers, and competing stories, are idolatrous, and the promise at baptism, and the hope at the communion table, is simply, and robustly, a hope that all governments everywhere will be undone, and that God “will be all in all.” However, we live in the actual “stuff of earth,” and the government(s) we have should do as much good as they can while doing as little harm as they can. They exist to support transit, commerce (without harm), defense (from our own injustices and those of the “other”), and, in short, a common shared space in which life can continue.
Thus we vote, not as virtue people, but as people convinced that killing brown people for oil, refusing to talk to our enemies, stockpiling weapons that will take out the entire Asian continent, and ignoring our friends and family in poverty and on the street is cutting against the grain of the universe, endangering the world, and simply doesn’t do the simple utilitarian work of government well. As I see it, those who wish, perhaps quite rightly, to be faithful to their “virtue ethics” have no choice but to refrain from voting as an “eschatological” protest to the powers that be: powers that compete for allegiance, and that are a direct challenge to the Lordship of Christ. Those who can see their way clear to view the role of government as one that they can help shape for the neglected, to be a voice for the voiceless, to inspire and lead the better parts of our common humanity, are thus forced to reckon with the things that are best for our continued life together as deeply interwoven people. Foreign policy should be the number one issue that concerns us all. It’s not safe for the world for us to be imperialists. It’s not good for the continuing story of history and humanity for those who consume four times the amount as the rest of the world put together to be always strong and never humble. History’s mistakes, from Persia to Greece, from Rome to the British Empire, from the Spanish conquests to fascist Germany teach us that when our self-interests blind us to the hurt of those we’ve oppressed in the name of low cost, and “small” government, we’re only steps away from evils for which God will one day call us to account in the most dire of ways.
Our national myths of innocence mock us in the faces of Native Americans, Iraqis, interned Japanese, African slaves, and the homeless little girl around the corner. Our selfishness plays itself out in the desire to have one or two percent less taxes while thousands of children die without health care each year from preventable and treatable illnesses. Our outdated fear of distilled “Marxism” drives us to be “strong” in the face of our enemies, and weak in the face of our inner demons. To put it straight, both our virtue ethics and our enlightenment based utilitarianism demand that we care for the weak, the poor, the impoverished, the hurting, and the voiceless. This is why I will vote this year. I won’t look for a government to save the world. I have a God who has taken time to do that in a dying poor, subjugated, impoverished prophet from Nazareth 2000 years ago. I will look for a government that will make it more, instead of less, possible to continue our shared space as humans, appealing to “our better angels,” instead of our worst fears; calling us to care not just for our “common defense,” but for our common humanity.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Why I Will Not Be Voting "Pro-Life"
31 August 2008
“Why I Won’t Be Voting ‘Pro-Life”
The conflation of politics and Christian faithfulness has been vitriolic, persistent and death-dealing since the deliberate, power-motivated assassination of Jesus of Nazareth about 2000 years ago. Unfortunately, the followers of this non-violent zealot quickly adapted, and even commandeered the methods of the people who killed him, choosing to mesh the life of their messiah and the lifestyle of his killers, failing radically to follow the Messiah, and succeeding with the basest of human triumph in the imperialistic, patriotic, and bloody way of being in a world of hatred and injustice.
This being the case, and Constantinism (the action of “baptizing” the state to do the will of God) being among the first heresies, I would like to reflect on the place, if any, of voting in the life of the followers of Jesus. For an extended reflection the place of “conscientious abstention” see Electing Not to Vote: Christian Reflections for Not Voting, http://wipfandstock.com/store/Electing_Not_to_Vote_Christian_Reflections_on_Reasons_for_Not_Voting . Being almost completely convinced of this political stance of the church (see John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Church Before the Watching World), I could not in good conscience vote during the 2004 Presidential Election. I had, as a good Evangelical boy, voted for the first Presidential election that I could in 2000, obviously for George W. Bush, and remember watching with great anticipation the night of the election as the votes were tallied and re-tallied.
Having subsequently been exposed to the larger scope of the Christian tradition – perhaps most notably, the Anabaptists – I became more and more convinced that power in the gospel is not power held, power gained, or power seized, but is in the most robust of ways – the cross – power relinquished, power shunned, and loved given through the suffering of a “Crucified God.” This over against the most imperialistic foreign policy since the Reagan attempt to colonize space, and far more actualized than even that, more than convinced me that to vote again for the Bush administration was in stark contrast to the self-giving love of God, that in the person of Jesus called us to enemy love. In short, I had become a pacifist, not for the fun of it, not because it was popular, but because only in this practice could I hold onto the faith that had been the core of my self since birth. I could no longer believe in God, Jesus, the church, or anything without a real, lived and fleshly belief that the church was really called by God to speak prophetically to the powers that be by being something that the powers that be could not: a people so politically structured by and around the cross of Jesus that love of enemy was not only a way to death, but also a way of life, real life – for everyone, including real enemies.
This for me means that no one is pro-life who still holds to the “myth of redemptive violence,” including war, the death penalty, and any type of action that seeks to actively take the life another. Not only this, but the peacemaking that followers of Jesus are directly called to (Matthew 5.9), means that in a world of very real injustices, we are not allowed to sit and wait for the eschaton, but are to actively make peace between victims, the victimizers, the oppressed and oppressors, and to actively recognize where we are the victimizers and oppressors. Ours is a witness of repentance for violence and injustice everywhere, and a hope in a God who makes all things right. With this very real injustice, the deep divides between rich and poor, the inability for many millions of people to make a living wage, and a rising poverty level; a direct correlation between economic factors and the number of abortions, I became convinced that a politically powerful response to abortion in the United States, was not faithful to the life and teachings of Jesus, and that it was pragmatically a terrible answer to a large and systemic question.
This has morphed into at least a threefold reasoning why I will not vote “pro-life” (as defined by the politically powerful, especially including those of the “religious right”):
1. Abortion is a systemic question from the start. Abortion can never be thought of rightly by the Christian until issues of poverty, inequality, continual racism, injustice, abuse, neglect, and the place of women have been thought of in line with the work of the Spirit of Jesus to remake the cosmos in the image of God have been addressed with boldness, honesty, humility and hope.
2. I do not know how to define “life,” much less when it begins. Psyche, nous, the real, physicality of “life” classically defined, understood differently in the modern, and post-modern worldviews, make the “self” a question addressed by scholars, seminarians, peasants, postmasters, union workers, and the unemployed. This being the case, it does not fall to the scientist or senator to define what life is and when it begins. If this baseline space of shared humanity is defined by the powerful then the hope that the church holds in the personhood of God, and in the continued work of God’s Spirit within the world is endangered. Ex Nihilo: “out of nothing,” God called the life of the cosmos. God’s good Spirit enlivens the whole world, and the life of humans is classically thought to be the crowning achievement of this good creation. Thus only God defines, makes, and has the enlivening grace to re-make the creation to be the “new creation.”
3. It won’t make any difference. Abortions have not decreased in eight years of what was the darling administration of the religious right. Instead the deaths of countless thousands of children worldwide, by destructive foreign policy, eerily reminiscent of “manifest destiny” has only been added to the mounting totals of abortions, both early and late term. This, combined with a an ecclesiology that is concessionary in that it concedes its method and manner of being – its ontology – to the empire by needing the validation of the state to do the work of the kingdom as it understands that work to be, draws the church away from its political witness and prophetic power by tying more and more closely with power held, power grasped, and humility abandoned for an imperialistic self-understanding of what is good, right, and salvific for the world, by imposing that will on it (a perfect fit for a foreign policy that believes that democracy can be enforced). This is what Brennan Manning rightly called “conversion by concussion.” (See, The Ragamuffin Gospel).
If these are the reasons I will not vote “pro-life,” I owe a conversation, at least, to the place of the military. For now I will table that conversation. If anyone is interested in this little piece of writing and cares to start a dialog around the topic, I’m of the deepest belief that my thoughts on the place and role of the military in the topic of voting will come up shortly.
These are far from my complete thoughts on the current election cycle, the theological construction of a world gone mad with selfishness, greed, and self-love. However, I’m stopping with this. Let me know what you think.
“Why I Won’t Be Voting ‘Pro-Life”
The conflation of politics and Christian faithfulness has been vitriolic, persistent and death-dealing since the deliberate, power-motivated assassination of Jesus of Nazareth about 2000 years ago. Unfortunately, the followers of this non-violent zealot quickly adapted, and even commandeered the methods of the people who killed him, choosing to mesh the life of their messiah and the lifestyle of his killers, failing radically to follow the Messiah, and succeeding with the basest of human triumph in the imperialistic, patriotic, and bloody way of being in a world of hatred and injustice.
This being the case, and Constantinism (the action of “baptizing” the state to do the will of God) being among the first heresies, I would like to reflect on the place, if any, of voting in the life of the followers of Jesus. For an extended reflection the place of “conscientious abstention” see Electing Not to Vote: Christian Reflections for Not Voting, http://wipfandstock.com/store/Electing_Not_to_Vote_Christian_Reflections_on_Reasons_for_Not_Voting . Being almost completely convinced of this political stance of the church (see John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Church Before the Watching World), I could not in good conscience vote during the 2004 Presidential Election. I had, as a good Evangelical boy, voted for the first Presidential election that I could in 2000, obviously for George W. Bush, and remember watching with great anticipation the night of the election as the votes were tallied and re-tallied.
Having subsequently been exposed to the larger scope of the Christian tradition – perhaps most notably, the Anabaptists – I became more and more convinced that power in the gospel is not power held, power gained, or power seized, but is in the most robust of ways – the cross – power relinquished, power shunned, and loved given through the suffering of a “Crucified God.” This over against the most imperialistic foreign policy since the Reagan attempt to colonize space, and far more actualized than even that, more than convinced me that to vote again for the Bush administration was in stark contrast to the self-giving love of God, that in the person of Jesus called us to enemy love. In short, I had become a pacifist, not for the fun of it, not because it was popular, but because only in this practice could I hold onto the faith that had been the core of my self since birth. I could no longer believe in God, Jesus, the church, or anything without a real, lived and fleshly belief that the church was really called by God to speak prophetically to the powers that be by being something that the powers that be could not: a people so politically structured by and around the cross of Jesus that love of enemy was not only a way to death, but also a way of life, real life – for everyone, including real enemies.
This for me means that no one is pro-life who still holds to the “myth of redemptive violence,” including war, the death penalty, and any type of action that seeks to actively take the life another. Not only this, but the peacemaking that followers of Jesus are directly called to (Matthew 5.9), means that in a world of very real injustices, we are not allowed to sit and wait for the eschaton, but are to actively make peace between victims, the victimizers, the oppressed and oppressors, and to actively recognize where we are the victimizers and oppressors. Ours is a witness of repentance for violence and injustice everywhere, and a hope in a God who makes all things right. With this very real injustice, the deep divides between rich and poor, the inability for many millions of people to make a living wage, and a rising poverty level; a direct correlation between economic factors and the number of abortions, I became convinced that a politically powerful response to abortion in the United States, was not faithful to the life and teachings of Jesus, and that it was pragmatically a terrible answer to a large and systemic question.
This has morphed into at least a threefold reasoning why I will not vote “pro-life” (as defined by the politically powerful, especially including those of the “religious right”):
1. Abortion is a systemic question from the start. Abortion can never be thought of rightly by the Christian until issues of poverty, inequality, continual racism, injustice, abuse, neglect, and the place of women have been thought of in line with the work of the Spirit of Jesus to remake the cosmos in the image of God have been addressed with boldness, honesty, humility and hope.
2. I do not know how to define “life,” much less when it begins. Psyche, nous, the real, physicality of “life” classically defined, understood differently in the modern, and post-modern worldviews, make the “self” a question addressed by scholars, seminarians, peasants, postmasters, union workers, and the unemployed. This being the case, it does not fall to the scientist or senator to define what life is and when it begins. If this baseline space of shared humanity is defined by the powerful then the hope that the church holds in the personhood of God, and in the continued work of God’s Spirit within the world is endangered. Ex Nihilo: “out of nothing,” God called the life of the cosmos. God’s good Spirit enlivens the whole world, and the life of humans is classically thought to be the crowning achievement of this good creation. Thus only God defines, makes, and has the enlivening grace to re-make the creation to be the “new creation.”
3. It won’t make any difference. Abortions have not decreased in eight years of what was the darling administration of the religious right. Instead the deaths of countless thousands of children worldwide, by destructive foreign policy, eerily reminiscent of “manifest destiny” has only been added to the mounting totals of abortions, both early and late term. This, combined with a an ecclesiology that is concessionary in that it concedes its method and manner of being – its ontology – to the empire by needing the validation of the state to do the work of the kingdom as it understands that work to be, draws the church away from its political witness and prophetic power by tying more and more closely with power held, power grasped, and humility abandoned for an imperialistic self-understanding of what is good, right, and salvific for the world, by imposing that will on it (a perfect fit for a foreign policy that believes that democracy can be enforced). This is what Brennan Manning rightly called “conversion by concussion.” (See, The Ragamuffin Gospel).
If these are the reasons I will not vote “pro-life,” I owe a conversation, at least, to the place of the military. For now I will table that conversation. If anyone is interested in this little piece of writing and cares to start a dialog around the topic, I’m of the deepest belief that my thoughts on the place and role of the military in the topic of voting will come up shortly.
These are far from my complete thoughts on the current election cycle, the theological construction of a world gone mad with selfishness, greed, and self-love. However, I’m stopping with this. Let me know what you think.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Biden, Obama and Kerri...What I Have to Say
In response to my friend's Biden blog:
I haven't said the pledge in like 4 or 5 years. But, I disagree on Obama. I think that Biden is obviously smart, and would've been a great choice, but just because Obama's track record doesn't stand up the same way isn't an instant disqualification. The fervor surrounding Obama has been in a large part based on grassroots excitement involving people who have (like myself) been disillusioned with politics as long as we can sanely remember. I think this is not too unlike JFK, who was a young upstart with problems a-plenty, but worked through that whole "Cuban Missile Crisis" thing so well that Kevin Costner decided it was worth his extreme acting abilities to immortalize it in B&W (okay so maybe the Costner argument isn't the most fool-proof).
I don't think that I'm being naive here. I listened to his DNC speech a few years ago. I listened to his speech at the Sojourners conference (which is one of the best speeches I've ever heard, by the way), and yet I don't think that everything he's saying now is exactly the same as it was then. But, then again, I think that's the very nature of American politics: eventually you have to talk like you're campaigning so that people know that, well, you're campaigning. He has been consistent on his campaign finance stances. He's connected well at the local level (my friend in Iowa said that Obama was the only visible political presence in his hometown -- Clinton had an office outside of the town) and he had been there personally like three times. He was against the war in Iraq from the beginning and still has a nuanced plan to work through the cluster-fuck it has become. His stance on health-care is as leading as any candidate (unless you want Kucinich's wack-job stances). All in all, I would say that Obama and Biden were the two closest candidates to each other.
And, if one of the detractors regarding Obama is that he sounds too much like Dr. King, then I guess I just have different ideas of what detracts. I personally think that all the presidents I've listened to over my brief 27 years (for one more month), listened far too little, and quoted that much less of what people like Dr. King have had to say.
So, I think that Obama is not only the best candidate by far, now that Biden is out of the race, but the most logical one for a supporter of Biden to move towards. And if Obama could actually talk Biden into running as V.P. I think that would be the strongest running ticket in decades.
I haven't said the pledge in like 4 or 5 years. But, I disagree on Obama. I think that Biden is obviously smart, and would've been a great choice, but just because Obama's track record doesn't stand up the same way isn't an instant disqualification. The fervor surrounding Obama has been in a large part based on grassroots excitement involving people who have (like myself) been disillusioned with politics as long as we can sanely remember. I think this is not too unlike JFK, who was a young upstart with problems a-plenty, but worked through that whole "Cuban Missile Crisis" thing so well that Kevin Costner decided it was worth his extreme acting abilities to immortalize it in B&W (okay so maybe the Costner argument isn't the most fool-proof).
I don't think that I'm being naive here. I listened to his DNC speech a few years ago. I listened to his speech at the Sojourners conference (which is one of the best speeches I've ever heard, by the way), and yet I don't think that everything he's saying now is exactly the same as it was then. But, then again, I think that's the very nature of American politics: eventually you have to talk like you're campaigning so that people know that, well, you're campaigning. He has been consistent on his campaign finance stances. He's connected well at the local level (my friend in Iowa said that Obama was the only visible political presence in his hometown -- Clinton had an office outside of the town) and he had been there personally like three times. He was against the war in Iraq from the beginning and still has a nuanced plan to work through the cluster-fuck it has become. His stance on health-care is as leading as any candidate (unless you want Kucinich's wack-job stances). All in all, I would say that Obama and Biden were the two closest candidates to each other.
And, if one of the detractors regarding Obama is that he sounds too much like Dr. King, then I guess I just have different ideas of what detracts. I personally think that all the presidents I've listened to over my brief 27 years (for one more month), listened far too little, and quoted that much less of what people like Dr. King have had to say.
So, I think that Obama is not only the best candidate by far, now that Biden is out of the race, but the most logical one for a supporter of Biden to move towards. And if Obama could actually talk Biden into running as V.P. I think that would be the strongest running ticket in decades.
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