Scott Stephens on Catholic sexual abuse

Scott Stephens' piece over at the ABC is one of the most important things I've read in some time. Scott discusses the findings of a major new empirical study on The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010 – a report that has been widely ignored by the media, since it doesn't fit with the media's favourite grand narrative about the sexual deviance of Catholic priests.

The study, Scott says, shows "a sudden and disturbing increase in instances of sexual abuse from 1960, reaching its hellish pinnacle in 1975, followed by a sharp and sustained decline from 1985 to the present". By 2001, there were 5 reported cases of sexual abuse per 100,000 children (compared to 134 cases of abuse for every 100,000 children in American society as a whole in the same year). By 2010, there were just 7 reported cases across the entire Catholic Church in the United States. The report thus describes "the 'crisis' of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests" as really a "historical problem."

Scott discusses many other aspects of the report's findings. Most interesting, I thought, is his suggestion that "the foetid cultural soil of the 60s and 70s proved uncommonly conducive to the commission of sexual abuse" – and that the Church's reinstatement of a "punitive approach" to sexual deviance (as opposed to its earlier adoption of fashionable "therapeutic" approaches – counselling, treatment, relocation), together with "John Paul II's radical reform of seminary life and the spiritual formation of priests".

Thus Scott offers his own blistering conclusion: "Those who incessantly call for an end to sexual abuse in the Church are effectively trying to break down an open door." The deepest problem, he thinks, was the cultural milieu of the 1960s, with its vociferous opposition to all taboos, and its sinister promotion of unchecked sexual experimentation. (Sinister if you happened to be a child at the time.)

Speaking of Scott – if you're in Sydney, don't forget to come and join us tonight for a lively wine-and-cheese discussion with Tomáš Halik.

Tomas Halik in Sydney

I've posted before on Tomáš Halík's remarkable book on atheism, Patience with God. And I'm very happy to say that Halík will be coming to Sydney next month for an evening of theological conversation. In a public interview with ABC's Scott Stephens, Halik will discuss faith, doubt, and atheism in today’s world. There'll also be wine and cheese – so come along and join us! Full details here.

TV series: Life's Big Questions

Speaking of irrepressible theologian-at-large Scott Stephens, his six-part Compass TV series, Life's Big Questions, is kicking off this Sunday night on ABC. Scott interviews a number of high-profile Australians and talks with them about their beliefs. The six episodes feature Matt Preston, Julian Morrow, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, Philip Nitschke, Clare Bowditch, and Rolf de Heer. You can see a preview here.

Scott has a terrific personality for television, and I've heard really good things about these interviews. It's great to see some genuine theological exploration finding its way onto the screen – so be sure to tune in to Compass on Sunday night, or download the episodes, or watch them streaming at ABC iView.

Oh, and speaking of the ABC, check out Martha Nussbaum's three posts on educating for profit versus educating for freedom:

• The education crisis and the depletion of democracy
• Education and the internal clash of civilisations
• Education and American exceptionalism

Call for reviewers: Conor Cunningham

Scott Stephens is looking for someone to review Conor Cunningham's big new book, Darwin's Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Eerdmans 2010). Please email Scott if you're interested in receiving a copy and writing a 1500-word piece for the ABC Religion & Ethics site.

Awesome new site: ABC religion and ethics

The ABC's new Religion and Ethics portal was launched earlier today. Edited by our friend Scott Stephens, the site provides a platform for intellectually rigorous public discussion of theology, religion, society and ethics.

In Scott's opening blog post, he writes that the site will "bring you original opinion and analysis by the most influential scholars, theologians, religious leaders and commentators from Australia and around the world. The goal is to inform and increase our shared capacity for public discussion and debate about matters that affect us all."

Opening pieces today include Rowan Williams on refugees, Stanley Hauerwas on greed, David Novak on Judaism and torture, Mohamad Abdalla on the Qur'an and domestic violence, and a great piece by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im on Islam and human rights. Perhaps best of all is Paul Griffiths' remarkable piece on death and dying – it raises some very pointed questions about medical ethics: "Catholics need to begin to think and teach again, in public, about the ars moriendi, the art of dying. One way in which this might be done is for the church to educate its wealthy ... that it might be good for them to die sooner than they do and with less care than they have come to think their right."

This is an exciting event for religious discussion on the web. The site will have new features daily, so be sure to visit often! Regular contributors will include Rowan Williams, Tariq Ramadan, Slavoj Zizek, Stanley Hauerwas, David Novak, John Milbank, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Peter Hitchens, Amy-Jill Levine, Abdullah Saeed – and many others.

Call for contributors: ABC religion and ethics

This month, the ABC will be launching its new Religion and Ethics online portal, headed up by our friend Scott Stephens. Not only will this site provide a single online destination for religion news and current affairs from around the world, it will host perhaps the most significant gathering of theologians, academics, specialists and critics on the web today. Regular contributors to the site include Stanley Hauerwas, Bill Cavanaugh, Michael Novak, Paul Griffiths, Slavoj Zizek, Tariq Ramadan, Abdullahi An-Na’im, Abdullah Saeed, and many others to be announced in due course.

The portal will also host op-eds and unsolicited contributions from theologians, academics and specialists from Australia and around the world, thus making original pieces accessible to the ABC’s extraordinarily large audience. You are invited to submit pieces on theology, religions, and their intersections with culture, literature, politics and economics to the editor for review and publication. Pieces should be around 800-1200 words in length.

There are a number of up-coming features on which Scott would love to receive original contributions, such as:

• The domestication of Jesus in Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and Peter Verhoeven’s Jesus of Nazareth
• Why blasphemy matters
• Stanley Hauerwas’s memoirs, Hannah’s Child, and the relationship of biography and friendship to the practice of theology and the formation of virtue
• Bill Cavanaugh’s important new book, The Myth of Religious Violence
• Luke Bretherton’s extraordinary proposal in Christianity and Contemporary Politics
• The moral problem of state subsidies given to religious/charitable institutions
• Tariq Ramadan’s Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, and the ongoing question of theology’s integrity apropos the conceits of liberal democracy
• Environmentalism, tokenism, and the production of conservationist virtues.

If you'd like to contribute to this exciting new venture, just get in touch with Scott Stephens.

Red Tory and the UK election

In an ABC piece, Scott Stephens discusses Philip Blond's Red Tory proposals in the context of the UK general election:

Blond's solution to the ever-deepening British malaise comes in the form of four imperatives: we must restore virtue to public life and discourse (calling for a new "high mass culture" in place of the inane mediocrity of the commercial media, and a recovery of John Reith's understanding of the BBC's vocation as providing "equal access to all things great"); we must re-moralise the market (placing capitalism at the service of the common good by embedding it in society); we must re-localise the economy (through such things as community land trusts and cooperatives); and we must re-capitalise the poor (through the provision, not simply of welfare, but of increasing scales of property ownership).

In response to Scott's post, several commenters worried that such ideas are an attempt to undermine the separation of church and state: Australians tend to be very sensitive on this point, especially when they have no idea what "the separation of church and state" actually means. So I offered a comment in reply:

The "separation of church and state" designates the state's monopoly on coercive violence. This is quite distinct from the question of the relation between theology and politics. Every coherent political philosophy already presupposes a theology, since it embodies a particular vision of what constitutes a good society. If these "theological" questions became explicit instead of covert – i.e., if we could actually have a debate about what a good society ought to look like – so much the better.

New ABC religion portal

A while back I mentioned a job advertisement for a new online religion editor at Australia's ABC. Apparently there was a huge number of applicants – but I'm delighted to say that the job has gone to our own friend Scott Stephens: regular F&T writer, political commentator, provocateur, preacher (the best I've ever heard), voracious cook and conversationalist, and all around nice guy.

Scott will be heading up the ABC's new religion portal – a unique site that will feature news, commentary, interviews, video, audio, opinion, and various aggregated content from around the web. (You can get a general idea by looking at the ABC's superb environment portal.) I expect this will be a major event not only for the public debate and discussion of religion in Australia, but also for the dissemination of high-quality religious/theological content on the global web. Scott has already lined up some fantastic writers and contributors, and he's happy to receive expressions of interest from potential freelance contributors.

Elsewhere in the ABC, you can also hear Scott, together with A. C. Grayling, P. Z. Myers and others, discussing contemporary atheism.

Good Friday in the media

For a special Good Friday broadcast, I was interviewed on ABC's Radio National – talking about Richard Dawkins, the death of Christ, and the meaning of atonement. You can listen to the programme here (my segment starts around 25:20). Alas, I can now add radio to the long list of things that I'm not very good at!

But elsewhere (and more eloquently) in the ABC, Scott Stephens offers a powerful critique of the recent Global Atheist Convention: Hillsong for the unbelievers.

The lowest common denomination: a lament

by Scott Stephens (Scott is a pastor and theological educator in the Uniting Church in Australia, one of the country’s largest mainline denominations. In this piece, Scott discusses the Church’s founding confessional document, the Basis of Union. A shorter version of this piece was published in the denominational magazine, Journey.)

Over thirty years ago, the Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) embarked on what could have been a remarkable journey, but it deviated from its original course with devastating consequences. It is now a shell of its former self, like so much Liberal Protestantism throughout the West, having gone whoring after the strange gods of impotent theology, liturgical gimmickry, inert bureaucracy and social respectability.

The past decade in particular has seen the UCA relinquish any prophetic vocation it might once have had — along with a considerable portion of its ecclesial and evangelistic vitality — and instead assume the inoffensive role of the religious division of a non-government provider of community and health services.

And so, in an extraordinary apostasy from its original calling, the UCA has decided to represent the ‘middle way’, the path of least resistance, a facile alternative to fundamentalism, evangelicalism and pentecostalism. In short, it has become the lowest common denomination. It doesn’t take much effort to imagine that, if God sees fit to grant it another thirty years, all that will be left of the Uniting Church itself is the logo on hospitals and Blue Care letterhead — and that for purely historical reasons.

But perhaps most troubling is that the fledgling church was warned against this very apostasy by Davis McCaughey, inaugural President of the Uniting Church. In his incendiary address to the 1979 Assembly of the UCA, McCaughey expressed his fear that the Church would be hijacked by bureaucrats and pedants, and that its clergy would be reduced to careerists and panderers:

“We no longer seem to expect our ministers to spend hours (literally hours) every week, thinking, reading, praying: so that when the hungry sheep look up they may be fed.... And I am not wholly convinced that our Constitution, Regulations and Procedures are sufficiently and rigorously controlled by [our eschatological hope]. I am not persuaded that they are not in danger ... of becoming ends in themselves.”

He warned just as passionately against the tendency he perceived to adopt a form of incestuous Church patriotism, which would obscure and ultimately destroy the Church’s vocation to carry on the mission of Christ:

“At all events the cry for a sense of identity in the Uniting Church cannot be answered by the offer of a new kind of Church patriotism. In an important sense, we in the Uniting Church in Australia have no identity, no distinctive marks — other than belonging with the people of God brought into being by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on their way to the consummation of all things in him.… We have embarked on a course in which we ask men and women to forget who they are, and chiefly to remember whose they are.”

Throughout his address, McCaughey pleaded for a return to the Basis of Union as a source of correction and renewal of the already deteriorating Church — a renewal, he emphasized, that must begin with the congregations themselves. Hence, for McCaughey, any suggestion that the Basis is merely an aspirational document or some transitional text that brought the uniting churches together (a ‘vanishing mediator’, as Max Weber would have put it) must be rejected out of hand.

The Basis is a liturgical document, shaped by the logic of Christian worship (“the rhythm of the gospel,” as McCaughey called it ); as such, it lends itself fully as much to communal prayer as it does to confession. Just notice the prominence and deliberate usage of prayer-language and doxology in the Basis.

In the opening paragraph, the uniting churches “pray that this act [of union] may be to the glory of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Having thus placed their past divisions under the sign of the strong name of the Trinity, they engage in a kind of corporate repentance for the disobedience of times past by pledging their “sole loyalty to Christ the living Head of the Church” and vowing “to remain open to constant reform under his Word.”

Following the proclamation of the gospel (paragraphs 2-8) and affirmation of the Faith of the Church (paragraph 9), the Basis “prays that she may be ready when occasion demands to confess her Lord in fresh words and deeds” (paragraph 11).

In paragraph 15, after describing the ordering of the church so shaped by the gospel, those already existing agencies within the uniting churches are invited to place themselves under the gracious judgment of God’s Word, and thereby “consider afresh their common commitment to the Church’s mission and demonstration of her unity.” The paragraph concludes with the prayer “that God will enable them to order their lives for these purposes.”

Finally, paragraph 18 gathers everything together into a concluding supplication: “She prays God that, through the gift of the Spirit, he will constantly correct that which is erroneous in her life, will bring her into deeper unity with other Churches, and will use her worship, witness and service to his eternal glory through Jesus Christ the Lord. Amen.”

This liturgical approach highlights those defining prayers which have been given to the Church, but which have been scorned and neglected to its peril: the prayer for continual repentance (that God “will constantly correct that which is erroneous in her life”) and for strident witness (that the Church would be ready “to confess her Lord in fresh words and deeds”).

At present, having traded its sacred birthright for a slop of quasi-pagan sentimentality and soft-left political correctness, the Uniting Church in Australia seems to have made up its mind to follow the rest of the Liberal Protestant herd in its head-long rush into oblivion. And yet, as I write this, I can’t help up think that there is another explanation for the UCA’s almost assured disappearance. What if God is killing the Uniting Church? Here is what Stanley Hauerwas told the congregation of Broadway United Methodist Church in South Bend, Indiana, in 1993:

“The plain truth is that Broadway survives as part of a larger church that is dying. Mainstream Protestantism in America is dying. Actually I prefer to put the matter in more positive terms: God is killing Protestantism and perhaps Christianity in America and we deserve it.”

Is God is killing the Uniting Church? Perhaps. Either way, its only alternatives are to continue indulging in the gratuitous “Church patriotism” that has blinded it to its plight thus far, and go on erecting stop-gap measures to stave off the inevitable; or it can embrace the fact that the Basis of Union has already placed the Church under the judgment of the Word of God with joyful repentance.

For is this not the hope that the prophets extended to those ‘pilgrim people’ in exile: repent, and return, for who knows what God may yet do?

Why Tony Abbott should be leader of the opposition

by Scott Stephens (An abridged version of this piece was published yesterday in Eureka Street)

Politics in Australia bears all the Darwinian traits of having been chastened by a cruel and unforgiving country. It tends toward the visceral and agonistic. Moments of genuine inspiration are fleeting, and it rarely reaches above the level of the soporific and outright banal. It is hardly surprising, then, that belief — not in the narrowly religious sense, but in the sense of a clear conception of principles, of something beyond one’s own ambitions, of the telos or ultimate purpose of one’s involvement in politics in the first place — has never been a conspicuous quality among its politicians. This is not, of course, peculiar to Australian politics. In his recent book, Political Hypocrisy, David Runciman argues that democratic politics is in a way defined by the bracketing off of personal belief:

‘Modern politics is grounded on a set of institutional arrangements that can generate security in a situation in which one can never be certain what anyone really believes, though one can be certain that some people will place undue weight on their personal beliefs. To over-personalise politics, to collapse the distinction between the mask and the person behind the mask, is either culpable hypocrisy, or self-delusion.’

But in Australia, this ambivalence toward belief has taken on a distinctly antipodean flavour. While it is true that Australians have a pathological aversion to sanctimony and cant, they are nonetheless suspicious when politicians present as a little too earnest or believe too deeply: they are branded fanatical, doctrinaire or, worst of all, ideological. Australia has thus become a kind of politico-moral wasteland, in which the public expects the cynical instrumentalization of the political process from their elected representatives, who in turn deliver cautious, small-target performances that barely conceal wanton ambition. Mutual cynicism, as Mark Latham bitterly observed, is ‘the gold standard of modern politics’.

But the ubiquity of cynicism in Australian politics, while making democracy possible, has simultaneously bastardized the political process. Just consider the erosion of the categories of Left and Right, celebrated by many as an advance on the brutal partisanship of last century: isn’t this merely the consequence of the subtraction of belief from politics? And so, when the cynicism that pervades Australian politics is combined with our compulsory voting system, elections are reduced to the pendular swinging of public whimsy (the ‘It’s Time’ factor emptied of any consequence), and principled opposition becomes craven opportunism.

It is difficult not to see Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull as the archetypal expressions of this corruption of politics. They are, as it were, political doppelgängers, each engaging in the political process — to paraphrase Clausewitz’s memorable definition of war — as an extension of egocentrism by other means. And their colossal personae and fortunes in the polls have come to occupy the place once held by a Party’s platform, what Edmund Burke described as that ‘particular principle in which they are all agreed’. What results is the anomalous existence of political parties without political properties, which is to say, without binding narratives or ‘ideologies’. This was abundantly clear during the recent ALP National Conference, at which Rudd’s rallying call to the ‘true believers’ was little more than: Labor is for being in power and against being in opposition. For his part, Turnbull can offer no counter-narrative apart from a self-serving reiteration of Menzies’ liberal creed of entrepreneurial individualism and self-reliance: ‘We believe in the individual, in his freedom, in his ambition, in his dignity’.

While the emptying-out of the political domain is currently to the advantage of the incumbent government — particularly one that has raised prevarication, spin and avoidance to an art form — it is disastrous for the Opposition. Turnbull’s stubborn determination to fight Rudd on ground that Labor has completely, if disingenuously, dominated is having no effect on the electorate, apart from confirming their implicit distrust of Turnbull himself. In fact, after just two years, we have already witnessed the return of Liberal Party to the dire situation that confronted them after their defeat at the 1993 election. In March of that same year, B. A. Santamaria lamented to Malcolm Fraser: ‘The country desperately needs a credible alternative to Labor. For years the fact that the Liberal Party has lost its way has been apparent. Today many conservatives believe it stands for nothing — a belief reinforced by the knowledge that towards the end of his life Sir Robert Menzies ceased to give the Party his automatic support.’

But, as the 1996 election demonstrated, night is always darkest before the dawn. Opposition presents the Liberal Party with a rare opportunity to recover its conservative soul and thereby abandon Labor’s vapid brand of politics which has so bewitched the electorate for a time. No politician has made this case more powerfully than Tony Abbott. His new book, Battlelines (Melbourne University Press, 2009), ought to be read as a kind of response to Santamaria’s challenge to Menzies. Indeed, one often gets the impression that Abbott is picking a fight not so much with Labor as with the libertarian and individualist tendencies within his own Party. Abbott’s determination to restore charity, belief and courage to their rightful place as the greatest of political virtues — which I’ve elsewhere described as ‘a leader’s willingness to wage war against the people’s baser instincts, to expand the public’s moral imagination rather than simply pander to avarice, to stare electoral oblivion in the face by defying popular opinion, to be willing to sacrifice oneself for the sake of a larger cause’ — distinguishes him as the antitype of both Rudd and Turnbull.

Replacing Turnbull with Abbott as Leader of the Opposition is the only way forward for the Liberal Party, and yet it is an act which would itself require a great deal of courage. I contend that the electorate’s low regard for Abbott — demonstrated in successive opinion polls which place his support consistently around 10% — ought to be dismissed as unenlightened electoral bigotry, as an ignorant throwback to the anti-Catholic prejudice that bedeviled J.F. Kennedy in 1960s.

Political theology on the radio

ABC Radio National has a terrific new programme on political theology, featuring William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Gopal Balakrishnan, and our own Scott Stephens.

The programme focuses especially on the legacy of Carl Schmitt. It’s a very wide-ranging discussion that moves through Thomas Hobbes, liberal democracy, capitalism, multiculturalism, secularisation, and the modern university. It’s great stuff – on the Radio National website, the programme is available both in audio and as a transcript. Here are a couple of highlights:

William Cavanaugh: “All politics are theological I think in the sense that they marshal large transcendent visions of human origins and human destiny.”

Scott Stephens: “One of the effects of our current celebration of tolerance, of the value of multiculturalism, … is the image of all of these different cultures, all of these different religions … living side by side in a benign inclination towards one another…. But what we don’t recognise is that the only way for all of these cultures to exist side by side, the only way for people to be able to opt in and opt out, … is for all of these cultures to be completely flattened out, to be hollowed out of any zestiness, of any distinctive or specific qualities…. These cultures can only exist side by side when they have already been hollowed out and co-opted by liberal capitalism. In other words, these cultures can only exists side by side once they have been transformed into relatively meaningless commodities. So I think what we need to recover today – and what I think political theology gives us – is the opportunity to recover something like authentic, profound, meaningful disagreement.”

Is there life before death? On aged care and anxiety

A guest-post by Scott Stephens (an abridged version of this post was published in Eureka Street)

Sigmund Freud once wrote that the only feeling that doesn’t lie is anxiety. This is a hard thing for us to hear, because few feelings terrify us more than anxiety. Anxiety disrupts our carefully constructed and managed zones of comfort, and acts as a stubborn reminder of the world without. Anxiety, in other words, is the way are affected by the reality of the things we can’t change, the things that just won’t go away. Perhaps that’s why we try so hard to suppress it. We convince ourselves that, if we ignore it, if we sedate it, if we pretend it isn’t there, if we close our eyes, it will just go away. To be sure, one of the great luxuries of modern life is that we have so many ways of avoiding the things that make us feel anxious.

If we don’t like the traumatic images we are seeing on SBS World News, we change the channel and watch The Biggest Loser instead. If we don’t like what we are hearing on Radio National, there’s plenty of vulgar banality waiting on Triple M. If you don’t like all that talk you hear in church about sin, repentance and following Jesus, you can always stay home and watch Hillsong and feel much better about yourself. And that’s not even to mention our contemporary panoply of narcotics – from alcohol and prozac to retail therapy and comfort food.

But deep down, the anxiety never goes away. It’s always there, lurking just beneath the surface. As Freud explained, anxiety is immutable because, ultimately, it is the chill of death’s own inevitability. So what happens when we try to do to death what we do to our other, more contingent sources of anxiety, and just ‘change the channel’? How, in other words, do we try to forget our own mortality? The answer is devastatingly simple: nursing homes.

While there are, no doubt, some wonderful examples of aged care facilities that provide both community and dignity for those who have entered their twilight years and are in need of additional care, this is certainly not the experience of the majority of our elderly. For, increasingly, the elderly have become the ritual sacrifices that we as a society offer to the most implacable of our modern gods: what Hervé Juvin has described (in his mordant masterpiece, L’avènement du corps) as a kind of provisional immortality, a deathless existence realized in unlimited consumption.

Precisely because they are painful reminders of our mortality and fragility, and thus disrupt our sacrosanct comfort, so many of our elderly are consigned to sub-standard, and often degrading, care as a way of classifying them as not really alive, but ‘not yet dead’. The cold reality of aged care is that institutionalization has become a mechanism of our desire to forget death and our wish to go on living unperturbed in our capitalist nirvana.

But it is now imperative that we recognize that our collective failure to care for – and indeed to honour – the lives of our elderly degrades us all. Further, the systemic forgetting of the elderly is one of the great causes of the weakness and moral impoverishment in our culture. Lives tempered by age and shaped by hard-earned virtue are gifts of God, and it is to our detriment that we ignore them.

Perhaps it is time to revive the long Christian tradition that regarded old age as a theatre of virtue and courage. Aging was imagined as a kind of final transaction, whereby the elderly show what the good life looks like, having finally reached the point where they can drop all pretense and start telling the story of their lives honestly – or, to put it in a more Augustinian fashion, to tell the story of their lives as an unbroken confession of sin enabled by God’s grace.

But the elderly, in this perspective, also bear witness to what the good death looks like, how to face the completion of one’s life with courage and faith. Aquinas, for instance, regarded the martyr as the archetype for Christian courage in the face of death. All the while, those gathered round in loving community express their humble gratitude for these lives well lived, and urge them not to waver in their faith as they sprint toward their final prize.

There is a rather surprising fictional counterpart to this Christian tradition in the final volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The children, Lyra and Will, have made their perilous journey to the world of the dead on the pretense that Lyra must apologise to a friend she inadvertently betrayed, and for whose death she was responsible. Once there, it becomes clear that their destiny is much grander than that: their destiny is to defeat death itself by, quite literally, cutting a hole in the other side of this cavernous Sheol and thereby allowing the atoms of the ghosts of the dead to disperse into the benign indifference of the universe.

When one of the harpies – whose role is to torment the dead by hissing and spitting their venomous reminders of the dead’s failed lives – objects that releasing the dead would negate their very reason for being, one of the children’s traveling companions makes a remarkable suggestion:

‘Then’, said Tialys, ‘let’s make a bargain with you. Instead of seeing only the wickedness and cruelty and greed of the ghosts that come down here, from now on you will have the right to ask every ghost to tell you the story of their lives, and they will have to tell the truth about what they’ve seen and touched and heard and loved and known in the world. Every one of these ghosts has a story; every single one that comes down in the future will have true things to tell you about the world. And you’ll have the right to hear them, and they will have to tell you.’

Could not this rather purgatorial vocation be a model of the community’s care of the elderly? To listen with humble gratitude to lives that have finally learned to tell the truth about themselves, that have stripped themselves of every last shred of pretense, and that now simply need a loving community to hear.

However much our death-defined culture may wish to deny it, there is life before death. It may be weak and frail, but so are the other gifts that God has given us in order to demonstrate his grace, and confound our supposed strength. As the apostle Paul put it, ‘the weakness of God is stronger than human strength’.

Alfred Hitchcock, the Church, and the silence of Jesus

A post by Scott Stephens (a longer version of a piece published this week in Eureka Street)

The films of Alfred Hitchcock are often regarded as a master class on the grotesqueries of Western society. To be sure, The Birds (1963), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960), not to mention the lesser known Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Rope (1948) and even Marnie (1964), all point to a kind of monstrous underbelly that disrupts the tranquility of everyday life. But it was with his first attempt at cinematic realism, in an attempt to depict the true story of a wrongfully accused man, that Hitchcock managed to create a horror far worse than any Norman Bates.

In The Wrong Man (1956), Manny Balestrero (played by Henry Fonda) is arrested in an unfortunate instance of mistaken identity, and, with little or no explanation, is quickly arraigned on charges of armed robbery. The central sequence of the film follows Manny as he is led through the opaque, impersonal legal apparatus that will determine his fate.

In a particularly poignant moment, Manny, his face still fixed in a look of terrified bewilderment, clutches a silver crucifix and silently prays. All the while, lawyers spew their jargon-laden bile at one another, as the disinterested jury talk among themselves. The entire courtroom scene appears to Manny as simultaneously all-powerful and completely impersonal. It is in control of his life, and it couldn’t care less. And that’s the obscenity of the entire ordeal. There is no slick dialogue or high courtroom drama in The Wrong Man – just the brutal enactment of an insane system that is convinced of its own rectitude.

While it might seem a little strange to invoke Hitchcock at Easter, I’d nevertheless suggest that we can see a similar horror at work in the trial of Jesus. The Gospel narratives depict Jesus as being paraded, like some freak at a carnival, before Pilate and then Herod, both of whom taunt and goad Jesus to accept their supposed power over him and thus to join in their insanity. They want Jesus to be part of their world, to quiver before them, or at least to rage against them. But instead, Jesus remains silent. And like Manny Balestrero’s bewildered innocence, Jesus’ silence has the effect of throwing the madness of his would-be judges into the sharpest relief. His refusal to join in their grotesque chirade creates the space, the possibility of a freedom that was unimaginable to all those freedom-fighters who tried to oppose violence with violence.

In his remarkable book, Christ on Trial, Rowan Williams suggests that what we mean when we speak of God’s transcendence ought thus to be refracted through what he calls the ‘obstinate uselessness’ of Jesus’ silence before his accusers.

‘If we are really to have our language about the transcendence – the sheer, unimaginable differentness – of God recreated, it must be by the emptying out of all we thought we knew about it, the emptying out of practically all we normally mean by greatness. No more about the lofty distance of God, the sovereignty that involves control over all circumstances: God’s “I am” can only be heard for what it really is when it has no trace of human power left to it.’

It is in this way that Jesus’ silence could begin shaping the practice of the Church. To participate in Jesus’ silence would mean to commit ourselves afresh to an alternative, non-instrumental mode of communal life. It would require that we abandon that perverse moral calculus that implicitly – and, at times, even explicitly – determines what is worthwhile and useful and constructive in Western society.

That is how I understand Stanley Hauerwas’ oft cited axiom: that the first task of the Church is not to make the world a better place, but to make the world the world. In other words, the sheer difference of the Church’s common life – what one might call our sacramentality – represents a kind of refusal to convey upon our given social, political and economic structures any moral legitimacy. It stands for the refusal to resign itself to the soulless Realpolitik that now structures and defines our societal sanity.

I doubt that there has ever been a more important time for the Church’s practice to be marked by a kind of sacred uselessness, or, to give it its more biblical designation, by charity. For charity, as the very ethical substance of the Church, would demand that the Church doesn’t ‘function’ in the way that the myriad of our state apparatuses ‘function’. Above all, it would prevent it from succumbing to the temptation to gain a place among the other state-sanctioned service providers, and thereby be required to sell its soul in exchange for recognition and federal funding. I’d contend that any such a Faustian pact with the state would constitute buying into the insanity, the pervasive nihilism that has progressively emptied our civil institutions of their capacity to act with compassion and to achieve the Good.

Like Jesus’ silence, the Church’s refusal to participate in the state’s normalized madness would go a long way toward removing the quasi-moral veneer, the unquestioned confidence in its own rectitude, whereby the state confers upon itself and its functionaries the power to pronounce any alternative as ‘mad’, abusive, extreme, impractical, or (worst of all) not conforming to ‘best practice’. Thus confronted by the sheer difference, the ‘obstinate uselessness’ of the Church’s charity, the monstrous character of our state and civil institutions might finally become clear: from the institutionalized ennui and decrepitude of federally funded disability services, to the sterile self-righteousness of the Family Law Court; from the banal instrumentalization of higher education, to the cynical politicization of indigenous affairs.

And all this in the hope that the God who vindicated Jesus’ silence, who raised the Crucified from death, would breath fresh life into a world obsessed with its own nullification.

'Can't you see my Church is in ruins?' The witness of L'Arche and the Barnabas Community

A post by Scott Stephens

The most venerated of all the saints of the holy Catholic Church is Francis from the Italian village of Assisi. The sheer force of his Christ-like devotion has inspired millions of Christians to ‘go and do likewise’. Equally, his transparent humility has rattled Church structures at their very foundations. Francis, more than any other single figure in the history of the Church, is a saint for all times, and a challenge for each generation.

But there is conundrum that goes to the heart of Francis’ identity. At what point did Francesco Bernadone, the lecherous and lazy son of a wealthy cloth merchant, turn his back on that life and become ‘Saint Francis’? What was his ‘Damascus Road’? Was it when the young Francis, still despairing after his dreams of chivalry evaporated, knelt before a crucifix amid the ruins of the Church of St. Damian, and a voice said to him, ‘Francesco, do you not see that my house is in ruins? Go and rebuild it for me!’ Francis obviously took these words seriously—he went and sold most of his father’s stock of fine fabrics and used the proceeds to rebuild the aging shrine.

Or was it when Francis abandoned the familiarity of human society and made his home in a leper commune? According to Francis himself, this event was decisive. He reflects in his Testament, written shortly before his death: ‘for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me even to look upon the leprous. But the Lord himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body. And afterwards, I delayed a little and then left the world.’

We tend to forget the place lepers occupied in the early Middle Ages. In the 12th century, those with ‘leprosy’—a designation that covered a range of deformities and communicable diseases—were restricted to decrepit communes outside city walls. By decree of the Church, they had to cover themselves entirely to prevent contact with others; they had to use clappers to warn whenever people came near; they were banned from speaking to children; they were even consigned to their own churches, their own sacraments, their own cemeteries.

Doesn’t this cast the command that Francis heard in St. Damian’s in a whole new light? The Church which had fallen into ruins was not the dilapidated, crumbling shrine, as Francis believed, but rather the very Church that had forsaken its Lord by segregating and abandoning the leprous. Thus Francis’ act of rebuilding the Church wasn’t his repair of St. Damian’s, but rather his establishment of a community with the lepers themselves.

So who today are ‘the lepers’, into whose company the Church should follow its Lord? As Michel Foucault chronicled in History of Madness, the sad story of the Church’s treatment of the leprous took a truly horrific turn in the 15th century. The Church liquidated the leper communes, and used those now vacant hovels to house the mentally disabled—out of sight and away from human society.

There are communities today who, like Francis, have set about rebuilding the Church. Such communities are nothing less than sacraments, testimonies of grace, which bear witness to a Church that similarly finds itself in ruins. The Barnabas Community in Durack, Queensland, was founded in 1995 as an act of obedience to Jesus, and in solidarity with L’Arche, the network of communal homes established by Jean Vanier in 1964.

Barnabas House is a suburban home in which residents with a disability are enveloped by a loving community of people who live and eat with them, who share life with them, who celebrate the beauty of God in them. As Vanier has often said, it is the presence of such communities in which the able and those with a disability live side-by-side, eating together and celebrating the holiness of one another, that comprises our best picture of what the Kingdom of God looks like.

The infectious joy and warmth of the Barnabas Community is not just in stark contrast to the sterility and institutionalized ennui to which people with a mental disability are subjected in Australian society. This community is also a living protest against the suppressed resentment that our society feels concerning the very existence of the mentally disabled. Stanley Hauerwas is surely correct when he claims that the mentally disabled embody the ethical limitation of our liberal humanism. ‘Our humanism entails we care for them once they are among us, once we are stuck with them; but the same humanism cannot help but think that, all things considered, it would be better if they did not exist.’

In our time, not only is the Barnabas Community an unforgettable protest against the institutionalized death and decrepitude of federally funded disability services; it is a powerful witness to a Church that has abandoned its Lord by placing its confidence in its buildings and in the idols of investment and in the immoral practice of usury—all the while outsourcing its care of the mentally disabled.

And so our Lord addresses us with the same summons that haunted St. Francis: ‘Do you not see that my house is in ruins? Go and rebuild it for me!’

If you would like to find out more about the Barnabas Community, or how you and your church can support its communal life, you can contact Glenda Hall or Scott Stephens.

Have yourselves a conservative Christmas!

A guest-post by Scott Stephens (originally written for an Australian newspaper)

Conservative politics is now everywhere in retreat. Or rather, it has been routed. Across the Western world, conservative parties are in disarray after suffering a catastrophic series of electoral defeats. Just think of the fate of the Liberal Party after Howard, or the Republicans after Bush, or New Labor in these final, dying gasps of the Blair-Brown regime (which has been overtly Thatcherite in its approach to economic policy).

Conservatism’s now dismal outlook is due, in large part, to the rather fickle affections of the free-market economy to which it has wedded itself. Even during the bad times, it finds itself in a position where it has to keep talking up the benefits of capitalism for fear of losing its political pedigree – that of being the best at managing the economy and generating massive surpluses.

But while political conservatism is everywhere being rolled back, many commentators and even economists find themselves looking to the likes of President-elect Obama for a different kind of conservatism: domestic or economic (in the traditional Greek sense of oikonomia, or ‘household management’) conservatism. Take Chris Patten, former Tory and now Chancellor of Oxford University, who has recently written that ‘the new president’s first task will be … to restore the real family values of saving, thrift, responsibility, and fair reward.’ Fareed Zakaria has expressed the same sentiment. ‘This crisis – dramatically, vengefully – forced the United States to confront the bad habits it has developed over the past few decades. If we can kick those habits, today’s pain will translate into gains in the long run.’

In other words, the new conservative hope is that the current credit contraction will force people to begin living within reasonable means once again, and thus will begin rectifying nearly three decades of fiscal insanity. The figures that measure the extent of our madness over this period are truly terrifying. In the United States, the ratio of private debt to income is 290%. In Australia, it is 165%. Admittedly, these ratios include people’s mortgages. But far from ameliorating these figures, it is the mortgages themselves that prove to be the problem.

One of the most notable trends over the past decade – on the back of the dramatic escalation in home equity due to the housing bubble – is people’s willingness to convert their mortgages into yet another line of credit for spending on luxury items and retail. And so, while under relatively normal economic conditions, the escalating prices of certain staples like food and fuel and clothing would cause a downturn in domestic economic growth, and thus a slowing in the retail sector, in the United States and Australia ‘consumer confidence’ and retail spending has gone through the roof!

And this brings us to perhaps the most obscene political decision made by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in his first year in office. Rudd inherited a $17.3 billion budget surplus from the Howard-Costello decade, a surplus that already had been amassed by paying down public debt (and thus ignoring social infrastructure) and by converting public debt into private or household debt, which now exceeds $150 billion.

In order to bolster his credentials as an ‘economic conservative’, Rudd-Swan then presented the Australian public with $21.7 billion budget surplus for the 2008-2009 financial year – again, money that could have been invested toward the future in the form of infrastructure, schools, universities, clean energy, and research and development, or money that could even have been used to honour our commitment to the UN’s Millenium Goals!

But instead, at the first sign of a drop in consumer confidence and a slackening off of retail-mania in September, the Federal Government promised to pump $10.4 billion into the pockets of the Australian public at a time of the year when they are guaranteed to spend up big and not pay down debt. Merry Christmas, indeed!

But before you spend it up and thus deepen our present addiction to an unsustainable and self-centred way of life, try reflecting on how we got here. Think, just for a moment, about having yourselves a conservative Christmas, in which we decide that we probably have spent more than enough on tat and trinkets, on leisure and gadgets, most often to the neglect of the common good and our moral obligation to care for one another. And think about what it says about our government, that at the very time when we should begin reshaping our habits and practices, orienting them toward others and toward the future, we are given just what we need to deepen our addiction to unrestrained spending.

Wendell Berry put it beautifully when he lamented that, in the United States, ‘the most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.’

The last President to do that was Jimmy Carter, just before he was voted out of office in a landslide. His replacement? Ronald Reagan. And there began our present malaise.

Dishonest money: what the financial crisis tells us about ourselves

A guest-post by Scott Stephens (originally written for an Australian church newspaper)

Credit is the lifeblood of the modern economy. It saturates our lives – from the personal credit we each use to purchase household items or to buy our homes, to the shadier, more mysterious world of credit default swaps (CDSs) and other derivatives that commercial banks now trade like a currency.

But it’s the very ubiquity of credit that prevents us from seeing its true nature, like being unable to see the wood for the trees. Credit is, in essence, the promise of limitless, indefinite, unfathomable wealth. And we need credit is because of the kind of lives that we have become accustomed to living, or the size of the profit margins your investors demand. Credit is, like most facets of our economy, an invention, a form of technology for generating more money. But the real innovation of the last two decades has been the willingness of banks to trade debt and risk itself, and thereby to make the economy both more profitable and more volatile.

Likewise, on the personal front, it has been the availability of “cheap money” in the form of low interest mortgages, the subsequent housing bubble, and the conversion of home equity into another line of credit that has pumped billions of dollars into national economies. What we have witnessed, in other words, is a natural extension of the very logic of money, which has aimed from its very beginning at generating more and more of itself, seemingly out of nothing.

This surprisingly modern idea – money generating more money – was actually first put forward by Aristotle in the fourth century BC. He observed the introduction of markets into the first great metropolises of Asia Minor, and even described trade as “the salvation of the states.” But Aristotle was then shocked to observe that the efficiency and simplicity of the market seemed to unleash something monstrous in the human heart. As people saw how much money there was to be made, they began lusting after “profit without limit.” They traded “the good life” (namely, a life organized around virtue and the common good) for lives of excess. Aristotle concluded that, whereas trade had the potential to be “the salvation of the states,” the seemingly limitless flow of money trade introduced into the life of the city brought along with it vices or moral impairments that would be the destruction of the city.

The vices he named were: greed, an inability to be satisfied, a lack of sobriety or self-control, and the willingness to profit through usury. The great tragedy, of course, is that the very vices that Aristotle identified as most corrosive to the common good have become the celebrated virtues upon which the modern economy is built. Capitalism thrives only through these vices.

While we hope and pray that those in positions of influence will find a just and effective response to the current credit contraction, should we not also reflect on our own indulgence in the greed and uncontrolled lifestyles that have brought us to this point? Shouldn’t we hope that out of this comes a rediscovery of a keen sense of the common good, and of new forms of community that nurture the virtues that have long since seemed to disappear from our society?

The onus, then, is on the church – not merely to pray in some benign way that God would mollify the effects of this financial crisis, but really to constitute that alternate form of community. To give the formation of Christian virtue and Christlike generosity priority over misguided “stewardship” (which so often is ecclesiastical code for white-knuckled miserliness). To have the courage to tell our congregations that participation in the Body of Christ means wanting less, using less, wasting less, so that we can distribute more. To embrace those sacramental resources that have been entrusted to us to keep us faithful to our calling, and which themselves enact a radically different kind of economics to that of corpulent capitalism.

The end of the world: re-framing the Milbank-Žižek dialogue

A guest-post by Scott Stephens [This is an excerpt from Scott’s paper in Rome, which critiqued the concept of excess/plentitude in the work of Žižek and Milbank.]

Although it is most certainly out of fashion to refer to him, much less refer to him favourably, let me confess that I always found Jean Baudrillard most interesting when he was being most conservative. For instance, in the course of a debate with Francesco Bonami at the University of Venice in 2003, Baudrillard reiterated his disdain for the ‘aesthetic banality’ of modern art, whose farcical nihilism is best expressed in the very pathetic attempt to ‘strive for nullity when it is already null and void’. (Not a bad description for those solipsistic, and in the end masturbatory, disciplines that today are commonly grouped under the name ‘cultural studies’, or even ‘theory’ – striving for nullity when they are already null and void.)

The very desire to produce art according to a certain intellectual or affective fashion had transposed nihilism into kitsch. The problem, Baudrillard said, is that there is too much art: ‘But this is not only true for art: there is too much of too much.… Francesco Bonami … didn’t agree.… “How can there be too much?” said Bonami. “You can never have enough of a good thing.” And I countered, “And obesity? You don’t think there’s a pathology in there, do you?”’

What enables this judgment of too-muchness, of a kind of cultural and pseudo-aesthetic obesity, is Baudrillard’s altogether novel recovery of the Aristotelian analytic of ‘form’ – the idea that things exist within their appropriate dimensions, that proper limits inhere to things as such. But, as with all genuine philosophical recoveries, this one comes with a couple of amendments. First, Baudrillard insists that these formal limits are never known in advance, but only become apparent once those limits are obscured or exceeded. Second (and this is his great contribution to the rigorous thinking of this cultural moment), that this very excess, the production of ‘too-much’ which spills over its designated space, thereby obtains a peculiar, even autonomous, ontological status.

The obese here becomes the monstrous: capitalism as a ‘system of objects’, a resistant, adaptive domain which elicits consumption and renders humanity, at best, entranced spectators on a world that was formerly theirs, or, at worst, utterly servile. Having come into being precisely by casting off the Aristotelian teleology inherent to form, and thus existing entirely free from any causal logic or cultural necessity, Baudrillard repeatedly demonstrates the way that capitalism qua excess obeys its own laws and protects itself against contradiction. It is a system devoid of negativity, a ‘banalized, technized, upholstered way of life, carefully shielded from self-questioning’. There is, after all, no way of opposing a system that is already a complexio oppositorum.

This absence of negativity or contradiction has thus led, not merely to the cultural de-formation of form, but, under the conditions of capitalism, to the ontological normalization of obesity itself. And we shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which the sheer girth of the corpulent capitalist body has been the decisive factor in its survival. Size makes criticism and negation impossible because it already enfolds within itself the false processes of reversal, accommodation and neutralization.

A remarkably precise formulation of this quality can be found in James Wood’s review of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (perhaps the last great novel of the twentieth century and, along with Martin Amis’ Money, one of the most gruesome – which is to say accurate – portrayals of the obscene affective structure of late-capitalism). ‘The book is so large’, Woods writes, ‘so serious, so ambitious … that it produces its own antibodies and makes criticism a small germ.… It is easy, and rightly so, for big books to flush away criticism.’

I begin this paper with a slightly extended treatment of the ontology of ‘size’ for two reasons. As I will demonstrate, the ontological status of an irreducible excess in/of/over ‘natural life’ is at the core of the disputation between John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek (and forms the basis of my disagreement with both of them). But beyond that, and this is my second reason, it is also worth pointing out that size is an essential theoretical and rhetorical cum pugilistic strategy for Milbank and Žižek. And while it is tempting to regard the magnitude of their engagements rather cynically – as preemptive or even obsessive attempts to overwhelm their hapless detractors (although I suspect that’s part of it), and thereby to make criticism ‘a small germ’ – I’d suggest that there is something else, something more serious happening here.

In our time, so-called radical philosophy, or leftist thought in general, has resigned itself to the production of ‘minority reports’, occasional invectives which assume their failure in advance (all under the pathetic justification of ‘speaking the truth to power’); the same trend is visible in the field of theology, which has become disgustingly self-congratulatory over its currently impoverished state, a fact signaled by the almost total disappearance of the grave discipline of dogmatics and the concomitant ascendency of the ‘essay’ (whether on its own or as a collection of incidental pieces).

In this sort of intellectual ferment, the size, ambition and sheer pugnacity of Milbank’s and Žižek’s oeuvres function in a manner similar to Fredric Jameson’s description of the role played by violence in the revolutionary process, that is, as a kind of authentication of the seriousness of the process itself. Their work embodies a heedless commitment to the theologico-philosophical task proper: that is, simply to go on, regardless of the proclivities, fashions and false urgencies of the present – as Karl Barth put it, theology ought to be ‘something like the chanting of the hours by the Benedictines ... which goes on undoubtedly without break or interruption’. And it is fidelity to the renewed theologico-philosophical vision (whose contours one can now also discern in the work of, say, Alain Badiou and Cathérine Malabou), as well as their conviction that only this antique vision can effectively oppose the well-nigh unassailable reign of capitalism, that unite Milbank and Žižek in their refusal of the demands of leftist pseudo-moralism, and in their outright disdain for so much contemporary theology (especially of the liberal Protestant variety).

To quote Milbank: ‘What is ironic in Žižek’s project is that he insists that Christianity alone articulates a universal logic, but does so in an atheistic mode. This renders him, of course, far nearer to “orthodoxy” (as he acknowledges) than all those craven, weak, sentimental theologians, doused in multiple tinctures of mauvaise foi, who claim to believe in some sort of remote, abstract, transcendent deity and who yet compromise the universal claims of Christianity in favour of mystical relativism, glorification of hypostasised uncertainty and practical indulgence in the malignly infinite air-shuttle of mindless “dialogue”.’

After Žižek offended so many on the left with his full-throated espousal of Zac Snyder’s film 300, praising the Spartan culture of discipline over against the decadence of Athenian liberal democracy, is it too much privately to indulge in the image of Milbank and Žižek occupying the breach at Thermopilae, standing ‘against the reign of mystique and tyranny’ in the form of Levinasian alterity, liberal Protestantism, leftist masochism and the panoply of Eastern mysticisms, courageously insisting on the universality of the European intellectual tradition and the primacy of Reason?

The dangers of Obamania: why Barack Obama is bringing out the worst in the American public

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

‘This country is without hope’. Such was Jean Baudrillard’s pronouncement after months of driving across the surreal wastelands and oases of debauchery that litter the American southwest—a journey he catalogued in his astonishing book, Amérique. But this judgment wasn’t intended as an expression of typically smug European disdain for the eccentricities of American life. It was rather a purely empirical observation that Americans await nothing. There is nothing better out there or to come. As Baudrillard observes, the paradox of America is that ‘it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved’.

This utopian dimension is what allows for the immodesty that foreigners directly associate with American life: it is not the product of arrogance so much as it is of solipsism, a fundamental aloneness in the world, a sense of the incomparability of American culture with any other. The perverse twist, however, is that America is a kind of reflexive utopia that depends on the rapt fascination of the rest of the world to sustain its self-image. And it is this combination of solipsism and exhibitionism in American life that gives one the inescapable feeling that watching the gyrations of its culture and its political posturing is rather like watching somebody shamelessly self-pleasuring.

And this, I contend, begins to explain the very peculiar place that hope occupies within the quotidian life of Americans themselves, and what makes hope such a significant factor in political discourse. Hope is fundamentally the way that Americans relate to the ideal of their utopian ‘freedom’, and yet not as an emotional attachment to some future possibility. Rather, hope is the palliative that soothes the inevitable disaffection that people experience with ‘actually existing America’ by dismissing their failure to realise the American ideal as a mere misalignment of image and reality. Nothing needs to be changed in reality; it is only the image, ‘the look’, that needs adjusting. This quality was grasped with uncommon precision by Don Watson, whose American Journeys joins Baudrillard’s Amérique as the most incisive analyses of the banality of American life since Tocqueville’s Démocratie. (As an American who has long since left the homeland, I’ve developed a real affection for such travelogues due to their remarkable capacity to observe what was always right in front of our faces, and thus better to document the bizarre proclivities of American life.)

‘Sometimes in America, when you are watching television, or a scene on the street, or someone “creating herself” in a café or train, you wonder if in their minds many Americans imagine they live on just the wrong of a kind of theatrical scrim, a thin floating membrane whose opening is almost impossible to find. Almost impossible: but it exists, and if you keep your hope alive and apply yourself hard enough, who can say if one day you won’t walk through it and find yourself in the magical kingdom of celebrity—and soon after you will tell a television host how, like revealed religion, it was all just meant to be.’

This is why hope is the essential currency of American politics. In so dysfunctional and narcissistic a democracy as the United States, the role of the president is, of necessity, to repair and consolidate America’s self-image. And no other proved so effective in fulfilling his presidential role than Ronald Reagan. Here, again, Baudrillard grasped perfectly the importance of Reagan’s ‘look’: ‘Ex-actor and ex-governor of California that he is, he has worked up his euphoric, cinematic, extraverted, advertising vision of the artificial paradises of the West to all-American dimensions’. After the humiliation of the Vietnam War and the grotesqueries of Nixonian politics, it was Reagan who finally brought healing to America’s battered and brittle self-perception—as he used to say, ‘America is back again’.

But what Reagan in fact did was to enable Americans to resume their national slumber, to lose themselves once more in the utopian delusions of a providential existence. Vietnam and the Nixon presidency were thus not some long national nightmare (as Gerald Ford described the period), but one of the few times in its recent history when America was awake and painfully aware of the ugliness of its national life.

And it is here, finally, that we can begin to see the dangers of Obamania: like Reagan before him, Barack Obama is having a narcotic effect on the American psyche, dulling their lived awareness of the Iraq débâcle and reducing the Bush presidency to a mere aberration. His strident opposition to the war efforts in Iraq coupled with the deliberately pandering message of utopian immediacy—‘We are the change we seek’ and ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for’—are invitations to the American people to enclose themselves once again in their solipsistic cocoon, and to resume their idiotic obsession with the drama of their national life. Also like Reagan, Obama has a certain ‘star power’ that can resolve America’s PR problems with the international community, a sheer force of attraction that will restore the former glory of the American brand-name.

But lest this seem like a shallow, and perhaps even cynical, description of international diplomacy, it is interesting that Andrew Sullivan (Obama’s most amorous supporter, whose dewy-eyed devotion at times borders on homoeroticism) concedes this very point without so much as a blush of embarrassment. In his cover story for the December 2007 issue of The Atlantic, Sullivan writes: ‘What does [Obama] have to offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan.’

And notice the way Obama expresses himself in the closing paragraph of his speech on the night of the last Democratic primary (3 June 2008): ‘I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment ... when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.’

Doesn’t this demonstrate that, far from representing a seismic shift in the political landscape, Obama’s campaign is little more than a vulgar repetition of Reagan’s political narcissism? And to this extent, isn’t Obama’s message of change simply an appeal to latent antiestablishment sentiment among the public, and thus a craven affirmation of the status quo? No one has framed these concerns with more precision than Shelby Steele, who insists that Obama is ‘neither a revolutionary nor even a reformist’, but rather a gifted politician who is ‘simply infatuated with the possibilities of his own skin color within the world as it is’, and whose genius ‘is to know his currency within the status quo’. One can’t blame Obama for being such a politician; but neither should we confuse his campaign language with the kind of change that America so desperately needs.

Not peace but the sword: reflections on peace, Hauerwas and the trivial

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

Peace is one of the most deceptive terms in public discourse. Consequently, it is not at all clear to me that people know what they are referring to when they talk about peace. Take the current political climate: peace most commonly refers to not having been part of the invasion of Iraq in the first place, or now getting the hell out of Iraq and thus bringing an end to our part in this bloody war. When it comes to Iraq itself, the West’s dreams of peace are for an end to sectarian violence and the emergence of some kind of nascent democratic society. And yet even at this point things are not what they seem.

Notice, for instance, that the recommendations coming out of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) have increasingly stressed the importance of the creation of low-wage employment for Iraqi youths (who comprise over sixty percent of the population). The rationale is: get them spending all their time working and saving for clothes, leisure activities or a new iPod and they won’t have either the energy or the motivation to kill other Iraqis. What I find remarkable about this is not just that the grand American rhetoric of ‘bringing freedom to Iraq’ is reduced to the more banal image of adolescent Iraqis flipping falafels at some street vendor in Baghdad. It is the way that this image reflects back to Western democratic societies its fantasies of what peaceful existence looks like. Let me explain what I mean.

The fundamental delusion that rationalised America’s invasion of Iraq was the belief that, once set free from the grasp of a maniacal tyrant, Iraqis would spontaneously adopt recognisably democratic forms of social life. In other words, they believed that beneath the skin we are all American, and that the longing for freedom, peace and the advantages of the free market run deep in the human soul. The reality of the situation, however, was that deposing Saddam Hussein opened the gates of hell. As George Packer wrote in The Assassins’ Gate, ‘Iraq without the lid of totalitarianism clamped down has become a place of roiling and contending ethnic claims’.

This state of affairs should have come as no surprise, for the chaos to which the nation reverted post-Saddam was anticipated in King Faisal’s chilling description of his own people in 1933: they are, he said, ‘unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever’. Far from releasing Iraqis from the terror of the Ba’athist régime so that some repressed longing for peace could bloom, the American invasion exposed the inherent violence and sheer bloodlust that had been held in check for four decades.

My point here is not to try to exaggerate the violent nature of the Iraqi people, but rather to call into question the widespread belief that peaceableness is a quality that underlies the human condition, which is allowed to surface whenever the external determinants of tyranny or extremism are removed. Is it not rather that human beings partake in a violence so profound that it dwarfs even the most aggressive mammalian behaviour? And are humans not remarkable for their natural incapacity to organize themselves peacefully? These were the observations that troubled Thomas Hobbes, whose immense political theology stemmed from the conviction ‘that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.’ War, for Hobbes, is not an exceptional state of mass violence that interrupts a more fundamental tranquillity. War is the human condition itself.

(I have to admit that I like Stephen King’s variation on this same theme. In one of his more gruesome novels, Cell, there is a kind of electromagnetic ‘Pulse’ that is transmitted through mobile phones, which seemingly produces uncontrollable aggression in its recipients. As the book progresses, though, it is revealed that the Pulse didn’t introduce or generate this bloodthirsty animalism; it simply wiped away the veneer of human civility, exposing – to use Carl Jung’s phrase – our more fundamental ‘blood-consciousness’. Here’s how one character explains it to his companions: ‘At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.’)

What then of the so-called ‘peace’ enjoyed and promoted by democratic societies? Isn’t it apparent from the Pax Americana that now holds sway – whether at home or abroad – that such peace has become little more than an obsession with the trivial, a benevolent boredom, or worst of all, the inalienable right to excess? It acts, in other words, like a palliative, a form of cultural sedation aimed at distracting us from our violent predisposition, all the while satisfying our bloodlust through vicarious means (television, movies, sport, etc.).

I think it is important at this point to register the extent of my disagreement with Stanley Hauerwas, someone I otherwise greatly respect, on just this question of the substance and character of peace. For all his notorious anti-American rhetoric, it seems to me that on this very point he remains an unreconstructed ‘good ol’ boy’, and his ethical program is perfectly at home within the greater Pax Americana.

I have already suggested that the conception of peace as a deeper (ontological) reality than violence – a concept that is fundamental for Hauerwas, John Milbank and David Bentley Hart – is theologically problematic and ethically impotent. But it is the way that Hauerwas characterises a life narrated by nonviolence as one of profound boredom, marked by the willingness to enjoy the trivial (he often likens the life committed to nonviolence to watching baseball) that I find deeply problematic. For he seems thereby to have accepted in advance the price to be paid for becoming a beneficiary of this idolatrous peace: that we abandon any kind of moral seriousness, renounce every ‘higher’ cause – such a subordination of one’s life to the state, party or cause, Hauerwas says, ‘is the character of totalitarian regimes’.

At this point, isn’t Hauerwas pandering directly to the American obsession with leisure? And further, is this depiction of the ethical life as one which ‘takes time for the trivial’ not an uncanny reiteration of George W. Bush’s urging of people to fight terrorism by continuing to indulge in the excesses of the American way of life? Hauerwas thus unwittingly confirms the accuracy of Slavoj Žižek’s recent observation, that ‘the split between the First and Third World runs increasingly along the lines of an opposition between leading a long, satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent cause. We in the West are immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything.’

Perhaps now, more than ever, it is important to be reminded of Jesus’ words, which war against this pseudo-peace – whether the bloody peace-through-submission of the Pax Romana, or the indolent peace-through-sedation of our current Pax Americana: ‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!’ The intense conflict introduced by Jesus and radicalised in his resurrection, cuts through every organic or ethnic tie (family, nation, gender), leaving those who follow him alone and unprotected in a world determined by self-interest. The apostle Paul goes even further, locating this conflict at the level of the Dawkinsian ‘selfish genes’ themselves – his term for which is ‘flesh’. If there is any peace recognized by Christianity, it is this experience of being profoundly disconnected within a world that knows only violence.

But today, the Church has traded peace for leisure, whoring after the trinkets of our pleasure economy and abandoning its calling to risk everything for the sake of Christ’s kingdom. Our Easter declaration that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is a manifesto for the only peace that really counts. Will we have ears to hear?