Please excuse me. You see I just read a Gallop poll that suggests the more devout and pious one is, the more one attends church, the more one is likely to favour war. "In general, the more frequently an American attends church, the less likely he or she is to say the (Iraq) war was a mistake.”

So how does this work exactly? A friend sent me Gary Kohl’s recent article, What kind of Christianity is this? It may shed some light on this.

But before I head for the narthex, here’s something: A survey taken by Baylor, published a few months ago in Christianity Today, suggests that frequent bible reading will nudge one toward a more liberal world view. There are a bunch of caveats in the study but I found this possibility refreshing. And of course it makes sense, especially if, as is my position, that the bible must be read through the lens of the gospels. It was however disappointing to scan the 95 comments. Most disagreed with the conclusion; in some cases there was hostility.

I suspect we’re still some distance from Kohl’s contention that,

Jesus of the Gospels was an outspoken, nonviolent leftist who tried to reform his authoritarian conservative, dogmatic church but also refused to shut up with his call for justice for the down-trodden – even when his superiors threatened him with serious consequences if he didn’t.

But let me end with this: It’s lexicon we’re stuck with; but how weary liberal/conservative, right/left. Don’t we—on either side—drag our feet in our attempts at understanding? Don’t we scapegoat the scapegoaters?

We use our doctrine, our concept of God to shield us from undergoing necessary heartbreak, the very thing that could lead us into mercy and love and conversations without agenda, except for a desire to understand.

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social conditions….Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind the Marxists like to see—an opiate of the people.”

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, quality and freedom for their spirit. Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody.”

“All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America. In doing so, the affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that Eichmann chose to ignore: How responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows? To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.”

“Let us say it boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the law breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.”

“There is nothing that expressed massive civil disobedience any more than the Boston Tea Party, and yet we give this to our young people and our students as a part of the great tradition of our nation. So I think we are in good company when we break unjust laws, and I think those who are willing to do it and accept the penalty are those who are part of the saving of the nation.”

“The straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only Southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South.”

“Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato or Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermo-dynamics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

At the same time, that 99% of the clergy have been silent or quietly opposed, or even actively opposed, is for me a Jeremiah-sized lament. They have failed to recognize that this is more than a movement opposing corporate state bailouts and corporate controlled governments. It is a movement that challenges our very way of being in community. It challenges and condemns our celebrity culture and our atomistic consumerist culture; and for those of us who still name ourselves Christians, it is beginning to shame our spiritualized Christian culture.

We like to quote Dietrich Bonheoffer’s “Cost of Discipleship” as we are able to spiritualize and privatize it to where it has no bearing on how we live outwardly. We forget that Bonheoffer also said things like, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

Chris Hedges is one who is leading the “spoke driving”. On Sunday he gave a speech worthy of MLK at Trinity Church in New York. (I thank my friend Connie Howard for pointing me to it.) It was in fact a sermon that should be circulated, perhaps used as a template, in churches across the land. Holding up the Beatitudes—from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—on behalf of social justice and the Occupy movement will offend many including salvationist-Christians, but I have a notion that it won’t offend Jesus.

Penitence

This old monk, hermit, says to me,
go ahead and swallow
the camphor with your tea,
but don’t expect the glory of the Lord
to shine round about.
And I thought; what,
the itch to retch sin and shame
by rending will and flaying flesh—
a vestigial tail, a tumid tonsil?
The denial of bread and wine,
to gore my guilt—an appendix?
And I catch the glint of freedom
in those cowled eyes,
and feel a sudden pull
to move in those arms.
My stony world, its caste of blight
now in full relief—
I turn to that lavender light,
and feel within a gathering leap—
when I remember all those years
of mete remorse and mulled regret.
All my work to put ahead what lies behind.
My daily wail, my ashened face.
All that comfort of lasting Lent,
blessed by Sunday mourning chorales of praise.
Oh Ascesis, would thou waste me this late?  
My years of pious breast pounding a-wash?
No, sooner drink the brine of self-deceit.
Sooner hail the sour estate.
And serenely model
the righteous rigour of self-hate.

–

When dogma and doctrine come to define us, and the command to love your neighbour as yourself is always willed as an “ought”, but never consented to as a sweeping irresistible power, the ought finally twists itself into self-hate. That’s what I think.

With much love dear reader, Stephen

My friend Peter wrote to say, “I read your article in today’s journal, and as usual I am always intrigued by your thoughts…In terms of content, I found your views somewhat apocalyptic – something I have had cause to wonder about given my perception that there seems to be a lack of balanced perspective going on in today’s topics du jour. I recall as a young man returning from my military trips delivering aid through Africa and the Asian sub-content with a profound sense of how fortunate we are where we live, and how little many who live here appreciate or understand that good fortune. This has led me more recently to wonder why it is we have such good fortune, while others don’t, and I become more and more convinced it is due to the evolution of our politics. I know many disagree with that, and attribute our good fortune to exploitation of others, but I don’t believe that stands up to scrutiny when one looks at countries in the last 50 – 60 years that have moved towards a similar political system and those that have moved away – contrast North and South Korea for example, India and Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Ghana, and so on. I didn’t mean to get diverted onto this topic, but given the tone of your article, I thought you might find the attached article and book a refreshing antidote to the gloom visited on us 24 hours a day.”

Here’s my far too lengthy response: (Besides being lengthy it also takes a theological turn; just wanted to warn you. Feel free to stop reading anytime.)

First of all, it’s gratifying to remember how our military was known for peace keeping and delivering aid. The last decade seems to have blotted out this memory.

Secondly, that even bad democracies are better than good totalitarian states, and that this has in part contributed to our good fortune, I think is accurate. However, that our fortune hasn’t on some level been due to exploitation, I think is inaccurate. I would only point to our own country’s historical expropriation of land and exploitation of First Nations people. There are more examples.

Most intriguing however was the essay (I’ve discovered more essays) and the book Peter referenced.

In "Our Better Angels,” author Steven Pinker has shown through some pretty exhaustive research and an accumulation of data that violence, contrary to our belief and intuition, has actually decreased over the centuries. We’ve taken it for granted that the 20 century has been the bloodiest ever, but according to Pinker, we may be living in the most peaceful time in human history.

Of course, there are several ways to interpret data. Mr. Pinker’s choice is to view data on violence in relative terms, and not in absolute terms. The principal behind this, as one blogger put it, is that 10 people killing 4 is less violent than 4 people killing 2—which for many of us without the data, is hard to accept since over 100 million people were killed in 20th century terrorist attacks, genocides and wars. Still as Pinker has shown, violent death per capita, has fallen.

However, there are those that say his research is hardly broad enough and dispute his findings. And there are some who dispute his interpretation.

Personally I find it impossible to draw hard conclusions when it comes to statistics on violence. Because violence is more than a body count. Consider the intensity of violence (Hiroshima, Holocaust), the new impersonal violence of drones, consider war’s injuries, physical and psychological, which apparently isn’t part of the data. And as well, forms of cultural and religious violence are still prevalent; gang violence is rising, and domestic violence, violence against women is only beginning to be addressed.

So concerning per capita death, our intuitions may be off. But considering violence on a broad scale, probably not. Here is a 2002 study by the World Health Organization on a more comprehensive view of violence; it doesn’t dispute Pinker’s findings, but would dispute his interpretation.

That Pinker may be ideologically driven to support a particular view of human progress may or may not be true, but to look for instances of light, as he does, is hardly a bad thing in this climate. An attempt at balance that my friend rightly pointed out.

Whatever the case, it’s important not to dismiss Pinker’s work. The last paragraph of the (forwarded) article by Steven Pinker is most intriguing to me:

“But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man’s inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” If our behavior has improved so much since the days of the Bible, we must be doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.”

Earlier, Pinker talks about the rise of empathy, the possibility that evolution could have even bequeathed us with an "empathy" gene.

I like Pinker’s reversal of the question. Because asking why there is peace—or if I can rephrase, why in our state of apparent perpetual war, are there outbreaks of peace—gets at the kernel of anthropologist Rene Girard’s theory of desire. A theory I’ve dropped into Grow Mercy since the outset of this blog. And a theory that casts new light on Christian revelation, or better; through it, Christian revelation is more fully revealed—and as such, it introduces ourselves to ourselves.

Here’s a story by Brian MacDonald that encapsulates Girard’s theory:

“Picture two young children playing happily on their porch, a pile of toys beside them. The older child pulls a G.I. Joe from the pile and immediately, his younger brother cries out, “No, my toy!”, pushes him out of the way, and grabs it. The older child, who was not very interested in the toy when he picked it up, now conceives a passionate need for it and attempts to wrest it back. Soon a full fight ensues, with the toy forgotten and the two boys busy pummelling each other.

As the fight intensifies, the overweight child next door wanders into their yard and comes up to them, looking for someone to play with. At that point, one of the two rivals looks up and says, “Oh, there’s old fat butt!” “Yeah,” says his brother. “Big fat butt!” The two, having forgotten the toy, now forget their fight and run the child back home. Harmony has been restored between the two brothers, though the neighbor is now indoors crying.”

With a bit of imagination we can easily see how this little story operates on communal and national levels. We form social groupings—often without even being aware of it—through scapegoating, through being over and against the Other—other groups, other nations etc. Think of junior high school, the office cliques, the Balkan wars and the sudden nationalistic fracturing of countries.

MacDonald goes on:

“It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Girard builds his whole theory of human nature and human culture through a close analysis of the dynamics operating in this story. Most human desires are not “original” or spontaneous, he argues, but are created by imitating another whom he calls the “model.” When the model claims an object, that tells another that it is desirable—and that he must have it instead of him. Girard calls this “mimetic” (or imitative) desire. In the subsequent rivalry, the two parties will come to forget the object and will come to desire the conflict for itself. Harmony will only be restored if the conflicting parties can vent their anger on a common enemy or “scapegoat.

With the lucidity characteristic of French thought before the “deconstructionist” writers, and a consistency reminiscent of Calvin, Girard shows, throughout the body of his work, how his theory of “mimetic” desire can illuminate and unify an extraordinarily disparate set of human phenomena. It can explain everything from sacrifice to conflict, from mythology to Christianity.”

The theory of mimetic desire also explains Pinker’s findings, which of course are not original to Pinker. For example, it takes into account the anthropological and archaeological data that there probably wasn’t an idyllic era of tranquillity, but that ritualistic tribal and national violence, covered by mythical interpretations, was a near if not entirely a universal phenomenon.

But Girard’s hypothesis—his anthropological reading of the bible and the gospels—also takes into account what Pinker says about the seeming increase of empathy, while at the same time explaining the volatility of our world.

It may sound odd to say that gospel revelation is responsible for both the rise of consciousness of the victim, the ‘outbreaks of peace’, as well as the greater volatility of social violence. But the gospel story revealed the innocence of the victim, revealed the workings of the mechanism and so dealt it a death blow—because it only work effectively when undetected. The “peace” once gained through the surrogate victim, the mutual enemy, is now, in this stage of our evolution, entirely precarious, because we see through it.

Pinker of course is an atheist and would no doubt scoff at this suggestion. And yet, to honestly take in the arch of the past two millennia, we should see that in no other time has the victim been as visible in art and literature, in our judicial policies and politics. There has been an evolution of empathy. We no longer believe that it was the sins of parents that caused blindness in their child.

Victims for the most part are spared blame, we don’t believe they deserve their state. This evolution, the process of hominization, our calling into humanity, had its culmination in the gospel story. It was this that exposed our common culpability for scapegoating. This mechanism which is the founding principle of religion and culture, was exploded by Jesus, who gave himself to it, in order to forever expose it.

But in exposing it, it lost its power. Scapegoating no longer works, or at least, it no longer lasts. And this is both Good News and dangerous news—a precarious freedom requiring great responsibility.

Of course the richness of Girard’s research and mimetic theory goes far beyond what can be said here, except to say that Pinker’s research, like Girard’s, suggests humanity was founded on violence. Girard simply goes further and shows that the process of hominization, or the calling of humanity into freedom, is an evolution away from the generative principle of social grouping.

Along the way he offends human progress secularists through his realism and warnings, and by his adoption of the gospel as the key that demythologizes our justifications of sacrificial violence.

But as much or more, he offends Christians who hold to a traditional (since Anselm) propitiationary theory of atonement: The reversion to a sacrificial reading of scripture, that sees Jesus’ death as an appeasing sacrifice to a wrathful God. Our failure to see Jesus as a “sacrifice” that exploded the sacrificial systems, instead of another Aztec-like sacrifice, only on a grand scale, has been the tragedy of Christendom. And it is why Christians are still able to justify violence and war.

The life, death and resurrection of Jesus was the ultimate overthrowing of religion and sacrifice, the ultimate intrusion of mercy that should have resulted in the growth of mercy, because it revealed a God entirely free of wrath and violence and sacrificial hankering—and the possibility of true peace on earth.

Photograph by: Christina Ryan, Calgary Herald

Here’s a letter by Mark Maxwell, President of Prairie Bible Instituted, who first informed the RCMP.

This is a sad and tragic story—one that we’ve heard within the halls of Christian faith all too often. Of course abuse happens in other institutions; but as one who tries to still follow the faith, the question this specific allegation raises for me is this: Is there anything in the way the Bible is interpreted within conservative, fundamentalist, neo-Calvinist institutions that enables and harbours sexual predators? Beyond this, is there something about the way a literal interpretation of Scriptures fosters the injustice of patriarchy and so supports the ongoing “soft” abuse of gender inequality?

My wife Deb attended Prairie for one year. She says, "I can certainly agree about the unhealthy, unbiblical male dominance teaching that was taught. At the time when I was young it was harder to ‘think’ against it but even then I knew within me that something was not only unhealthy but wrong about their teaching."

We live in a violent world. That’s hardly a secret. We have been formed by a culture of war and violence, the nature of which we are mostly unconscious of, and from which we wilfully keep ourselves hidden. Violence is so embedded that it’s impossible to imagine a world without it. That we live in an incarnate world sustained by intrusions of grace, well, that’s a little less obvious—almost imperceptible.

Two days ago our country intentionally remembered war. “Lest We Forget" was on billboards and on the front of buses. We remembered, so to honour the war dead, and we remembered so that we can in some way dispel war, so that at least violence of the scale once experienced, can be named and thwarted. And we hope that in the naming, in the remembering, something like grace and peace may appear.

Of course war cannot create peace and violence is never the cause of grace; but it can, in its gross distortions of social solidarity and communal life, reflect back to us our own propensity toward envy and rivalry, and in this uncovering, perhaps give us the unwelcome gift of seeing ourselves as we truly are—which if it happens is an occasion of mercy.

A personal and writerly goal I repeatedly come short of, which is never less a goal, is to stay awake to those intrusions of grace and occasions of mercy. And such was this past Friday where 30 or so people took the afternoon to study peace, and then took the evening to walk and pray, from City Hall to Canada Place, from the Gandhi Memorial to the War Memorial.

And we sang that old promise: to study war no more. But with the understanding that if we are blind to the nature of violence, and if we miss the intrusions of grace, then war, rivalry, ongoing reciprocal violence will remain our reality.

Once in our history the nature of violence was laid bare through a definitive intrusion of grace. And no one wanted to see. Once, the truth about human and social identity was spoken, and no one wanted to hear. Two thousand years later, through two global wars, the invention of a nuclear end, many genocides, and an imminent ecological disaster, and still we refuse to see and hear.

To take a day to remember and honour those who died fighting for our country is good. But it’s not, and never was, good enough. For if we stop short of trying to authentically identify with not merely our own, but all victims of war, and all the fallen, then we have already forgotten. Because failing to see ourselves as original combatants, failing to understand the (Good Samaritan) point about who our neighbour is simply leaves all the old mechanisms of sacrificial violence in place.

In effect, continuing to believe that war is occasionally necessary and normal, and that violence is in some way part grace, smothers every intrusion of grace; and it is this that even now is ushering in our apocalyptic era. That we Christians, above all, have failed to see and hear the living words of the one we purport to follow, and have even used the texts as justification for war and sacrificial violence—unconsciously giving the nod to Caiaphas over Christ—is perhaps our greatest shame.

Yet, despite our failure there are still intrusions of mercy. And if time is no longer one of them, perhaps violence’s own undoing is. For we are, as no other age has been, witnesses of violence’s growing excesses; and in this, we see its utter ineffectiveness to create or change anything—except, as Rene Girard says, to escalate to extremes. The choice is now plain. To not choose complete repudiation of violence is to choose annihilation. Seeing the truth behind the false reality of violence to the extent that these two alternatives are now clear, is not a prelude to despair, but of hope—a luminous intrusion.

“I read your recent article in the Edmonton Journal regarding the Church and Occupy Edmonton. (Novemeber 5, 2011)

I’m very, very pleased to tell you that the church is indeed at Occupy Edmonton. In fact, our church has been given the open door (by consensus) to be a Jesus-following presence at Occupy Edmonton, and to encourage other Christians to do so as well

You can read the proposal I made at two General Assemblies here: weprayforoccupy.blogspot.com.

Four from our church have stayed at the camp, and we intend to begin having a rotation of people who will stay there overnight in prayer and in solidarity.

Besides this, we have been welcomed as we have come and helped at the camp in lots of other practical ways.

I am hoping to begin taking further steps toward engaging the evangelical churches of Edmonton in the next week. My intention is to begin by asking them to pray. This we can do, no matter how much we do or do not agree with or even understand Occupy. I’m also cautious about asking churches to "support" Occupy. Though I am very much for Occupy, and support them far more than most other evangelical Christians I know, I am wary of any attempts to use the influence of the church toward political ends.

Anyway, if you are at all interested in putting some more action to your words regarding the church at Occupy, I’d very much like to help you do so. Would you help me get the word out to churches regarding praying for Occupy Edmonton?”

Thank you Shawn, the word is going out.

It’s a provocative piece that seemingly draws (at least from my sheltered Canadian vantage point) unlikely conclusions. What interested me however, was the exposition of Christian Reconstructionism, or Dominionism. A movement that I’d thought dead, a movement that was very much championed (less some of its more outrageous aspects) in a Baptist Church in rural Alberta, where I used to attend.

Reconstructionism, a neo-Calvinist, theonomist (the state is under God and is therefore commanded to enforce God’s Law, Old and New Testament) ideology is a contagious bit of storying for the zealous. Particularly if they are also among the throngs of dispossessed workers, angry libertarians, Tea Party types and so on. 

Curiously, or not, Rushdooney and Gary North are still reverberating through people like American presidential candidates Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, (Who credits Francis Schaeffer’s, How Shall we then Live, for her entering politics.)

Here then, as well, is a recent interview with ex-evangelical Frank Schaeffer on Democracy Now.