Working with our own hypocrisies: a self-response to “The Battle Raging Within”

I don't think it's really possible not to be something of a hypocrite in the modern capitalist system. I have just finished reading Walter Wink's "The Powers That Be"[1] and I hear him on the power the Domination System holds over us - power so strong even God has trouble getting through to us at times.

I recently wrote a response to a colleague's short essay in which he discussed "the politics of contested formation", which was about how we are receiving discipleship formation in hyper-consumerism and violence and the same time as we receive formation in Christian discipleship. He suggested that most Christians are losing this spiritual war that they do not even realise they are engaged in.

To follow Wink's Powers trilogy, before we can engage the Powers we have to name and unmask them. This is no easy task, and without community (or preferably national society) support, we will fail. Even with community we will regularly fail.

At this point I take great comfort in the underlying pastoral message of Mark's gospel, in which the first disciples, whom we now know somehow figured out the meaning of the Cross and Resurrection, are shown to be constantly confused, dismayed, and simply stupid. A radical discipleship group I'm engaged with joked about making "dazed and confused" our by-line in this light!

In the nonviolence workshops I run (with Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service), one of the "starting points" is that nonviolence is NOT about perfection. So many people get stuck on this point: if I can't be perfectly nonviolent even in the face of my wife being raped, they say, then what's the point? We debilitate ourselves, and close off avenues of empowerment and healing, because we know we cannot attain perfection. In every workshop on nonviolence at least one person will get stuck on this point, which I see as one element of the Myth of Redemptive Violence. The best we facilitators can do is to suggest nonviolence is not about perfection. We quote Alain Richard, who helped set up Pace e Bene and Peace Brigades International, saying he won't be perfectly nonviolent until after he is dead. We quote Wink saying "I am a violent person trying to be nonviolent" (parallels to Alcoholics Anonymous here?). We encourage people to think of "violence reduction" if "nonviolence" sounds too unattainable.

There are saints* walking among us who are able to resist the Domination System. They show us the way. But the history of incredible social transformations is not a history of saints. It is a history of sinners who walked, even briefly, in the light. Most nonviolent revolutions have been led by people with no formal commitment to nonviolence as a way of life. How amazing is that? How powerful must the Divine Lure be for this to be possible?

And so I try to put my faith in the miraculous possibility that God can work with my hypocritical self. Like Bartimaeus, I cry to God "I believe, help me in my unbelief!" I take heart from Brother Roger of Taizé, seemingly so certain in his faith, proclaiming that "even the desire for faith is enough for God".

In so doing, may I become more self-forgiving even as I rage against the world and myself. May I offer my hypocrisies to God's grace rather than to the false comfort of the Domination System. And in the sustenance that comes from this eating this living bread, may I chisel away at those hypocrisies, one at a time.

Written 25 August 2006

* We should remember that even the saints were not "perfect": King was apparently not faithful to his wife, Gandhi disowned one of his own sons and decided to become celibate without even consulting his wife, St Francis was unable to even be at peace with is own order, Mandela came to nonviolence very late in the piece, etc. I take great comfort in all this - like Paul Loeb, in his article on The Real Rosa Parks, I think in venerating our saints we tend to do so in a way which makes them otherworldly, non-human, and ultimately this only serves to disempower us.

References
[1] Wink, W. 1999, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, New York: Doubleday

The Battle Raging Within

a Response to Damian Palmer for the Radical Discipleship Group meeting, 11 August 2006

“This ‘politics of contested formation’ is where (at least in part) the battle rages" – Damian Palmer

“Church leaders do not speak for all their members on this issue” – John Howard

Introduction
On Friday night I was telling my wife about Damian’s essay as we walked to a friend’s house in Paddington. When we arrived she admitted to our friend that as I was speaking about the curse of affluenza and the struggle of contested formation between Christ and Consumerism, she was looking at the houses we walked past, thinking “wow, wouldn’t it be great to live there!”

I tell this story not to be lynched by Ann-Maree (nonviolently, of course), but because I believe Damian’s concluding observations about the ‘politics of contested formation’ are indeed the key issue for the church today. If I were braver I would have started with what happens when I walk past the NSW Lottery office two doors down from here or about how much I enjoyed driving a Falcon last year, or even some of the thoughts that come into my head when I see ‘the leader of the free world’ on television. I will go out on a limb and suggest these are the sorts of struggles all of us face. And as a church, we face the stark reality that even on issues such as recent industrial relations laws, inhumane refugee policy, and the invasion of Iraq that John Howard is absolutely correct in asserting we are a church divided.[1]

If so, it seems to me this points to two key conclusions that lie at the heart of any ‘radical discipleship’ project: first, that nothing less than a total effort at discipleship formation will save the church; and second that we cannot expect anyone, even ourselves, to be free from temptation. We need both zeal and humility.

From Contested Formation to Church Complicity
Before exploring these themes further, I believe we need to add an additional problem to the daunting list outlined by Damian. That is, that in some cases the church itself has been one of the very drivers of the mythologies that threaten the life of the world. The two examples of this I will briefly take up are wealth and violence.

Damian has already detailed much of the curse of affluenza on the world, including those of us who choose to follow Christ. I think it is also worth reminding ourselves that the institutional churches themselves have often promoted the hoarding of wealth in practice. While we no longer (one hopes) live in a time in which the corruption of the church is so rank as to include the selling of indulgences, it remains true that ‘church’ and ‘wealth’ are synonymous in many people’s minds.

This is most starkly visible in the type of schools we run. The cheapest Uniting Church school in New South Wales charges over $11,000 per year in tuition fees alone. Anglican and ‘independent’ Catholic schools are similarly unaffordable. Even systemic Catholic schools, despite very large government subsidies, charge more than the poorest third of their own members can afford to pay. What gospel is preached by the presence of these places? The gospel of radical inclusion of those whom society would exclude? Or the gospel of middle-class white flight from the great unwashed?

The preaching of a prosperity gospel is not condemned as heresy by any mainstream churches in Australia, as far as I can see. It is not clear if this is out of Christian ‘niceness’ or because we don’t really believe it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel fit through the eye of a needle. Unlike the rich young man who turns away in an honest admission of unwillingness to embrace such costly grace, our churches gloss over these inconvenient details or make up absurd archaeological fantasies in the hope nobody will pay too much attention. But the world has found us out. Ask any non-Christian in Australia why they are suspicious about the church and the word ‘hypocrisy’ will come back every time.

When it comes to violence our history is even worse. We don’t just act hypocritically, we have actively embraced the myth of redemptive violence, even if it means inventing wrathful atonement theologies to make it fit with the unfortunate reality of the Cross. It seems the myth was too strong even for Jesus’ death to overcome, because we do not even realise it for what it is:

Violence is so successful as a myth precisely because it does not seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It is what works. It is inevitable…[2]

Thus we have the ‘just war’ tradition, the Crusades, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (which found the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ suffering inadequate, such was its elevated blood lust), and a Catholic chaplain’s blessing of the Atomic Bomb that vaporised Hiroshima.

The Oklahoma Catholic Worker House recently published an open letter to the US Catholic Bishops Conference asking why, in a time of illegal war, they were spending all their energies on a more literal translation of the Latin Mass. They noticed that numerous Bishops had declared their refusal to serve communion to any politician who supported the right to an abortion, but none had done the same for supporting (or even involvement in) the war. In doing so, they exposed the anti-war messages of the Bishops as being completely devoid of real conviction. Australian churches of all denominations have similarly failed to take any real action against the most egregious international crime in recent history, despite passionate statements.

Our tacit support for both wealth and violence comes because we are addicted to the fruits of each. Before we can meaningfully call the people of this country to a conversion to Christ, we must confront the harsh reality that the churches themselves desperately need such a conversion. As Fr John Dear writes,

We need to recognize our addiction to violence, and the heresy and blasphemy of such complicity, and make a complete about face. Such a conversion will cost not only millions in contributions and dramatic declines in attendance of religious services, but possibly even some lives. But it will be the beginning of an authenticity that we all long for deep down. The recognition and rejection of our religious violence will, more than anything, bring all the religions of the world back to new and greater life.[3]

The Road to Recovery
If Christ is to win the struggle of contested formation, the church must first overcome the complacency it holds regarding matters such as consumerism and the myth of redemptive violence, which not only threaten the life of the world, but the soul of the church as well. The battle must rage within the church, as much as in the world.

Stanley Hauerwas writes of the ‘conspiracy of cordiality’ that suffocates the prophetic witness of the church today, in which parishioners attend for personal gratification and become upset if either the sermon or liturgy suggest they look beyond themselves.[4] According to Dorothy McRae-McMahon, one of the reasons why the clergy have failed to pass on their theological education to lay members of the church is that they are afraid of the response.[5]

At the same time, even an armchair psychologist can tell you that berating a congregation for choosing ‘cheap grace’ is not a winning strategy for bringing them with you. Nor is much of the church interested in academic theological education. The church needs to be both theologically sophisticated and capable of reaching the minds and hearts of the humblest people, encouraging ‘a simple trust’[6] that the deeper we go into Christian discipleship, the more alive we will become. And we need to start by confessing our own complicity, our own hypocrisy, and our own joy in the Risen Christ. More than anything, we need to walk our talk.

Somehow we need to challenge the church and yet find language that is invitational. This is a struggle that faced all of the prophets, not least the One who goes before us on the Way. In that there is hope.

References
[1] A senior person in the Uniting Church Assembly recently suggested privately that half of the church membership would vote Liberal at the next election, despite the recent spate of anti-poor and anti-refugee legislation that the church has formally declared ‘totally immoral’.
[2] Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1992, p. 26
[3] John Dear, “Our God is a God of Nonviolence”, p3. Available from www.johndear.org
[4] Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens
[5] Dorothy McRae-McMahon, “Democracy in the Church”, speech to the New Pentecost Forum, Sydney, May 2005
[6] Br Roger of Taizé often referred to this phrase as the heart of the message he wanted to pass on to the church. At the same time, the brothers are not simplistic in the slightest about their theology, which is quietly radical.

Taking up peace, putting down arms

Guardian article: Taking up peace, putting down arms
Sistani won his peaceful protest in Najaf. But Gandhian methods in the Middle East must substitute rather than supplement violence, writes Brian Whitaker

A week ago in this column, Attack on Pax - August 23 amid the carnage of Najaf, I wrote about a few rarely-heard people in the Middle East who advocate Islamic non-violence, or "civil jihad", as some of them prefer to call it. I asked why the techniques used by Gandhi against the British in India had not been more widely adopted by Arabs and Muslims, and wondered what Gandhi would have done in Najaf...

...My question about Gandhi and Najaf was answered rather dramatically on Thursday when Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who had returned to Iraq from medical treatment in London, brought peace to the city by arriving in a motorcade accompanied by thousands of unarmed supporters.

Election junkie - just had my morning fix

I got this email this moring from a friend:

Subject: Election junkie - just had my morning fix

Hey Justin, Phew! Just read Margo's piece on web diary - not "Poor George" flagged on the main site page, but the longer piece "Labor's Costello wedge keeps Wentworth on the move". It's fascinating to watch the number of opposing trends that seem to be playing concurrently in this campaign - in particular the different interests of disaffected Liberals in safe Liberal seats (over issues like refugees and the war in Iraq) alongside the marginal mortgage belt's concerns about interest rates. Turnbull's comments to the Bondi voter in Margo's piece are amazing. Would be cool if Peter King runs in Wentworth.

I know, it's all happening!

I do doubt Margo's excitement about disaffected Liberals leaving in droves though. I think a more realistic assessment suggests they will do what disaffected Labor voters do, and put someone else at no.1 but then preference the Libs. Labor has already adjusted itself to this phenomenon and still takes us for granted because they know (a) not enough people will defect to the Greens, esp. if they think the Greens might actually win; and (b) ultimately, as Gerard Henderson said yesterday, you HAVE to vote for either the Coalition or Labor.

Peter King could make it interesting in the way that independent ex-National mayors (like Tony Windsor) are beating the pre-selected National Party candidates. But Howard is safe in Bennelong - it's not that small "l" liberal - and elsewhere. So probably only a seat or two max, and Peter King would quite possibly preference Turnbull anyway, so if he gets 3rd (likely) Turnbull wins after all. Besides which he probably won't run. It's not like he has an excuse, since he ousted the sitting MP Andrew Thompson himself....

Everyone knows Howard lied to parliament over the Children Overboard Affair. Robert Manne pointed out that there is a gap in the Westminster convention here if the PM decides to just ride out the wave of criticism, telling us accountability rests on events on polling day. He figures people won't care by the time the election comes around. And then when the election does arrive, he wants us to "focus on the future" as if accountability for the past is not a fundamental part of any election (remember 1996 anyone?). Watch the Letters pages - plenty of people are buying it.

This is an election in which the public is being asked to rank truth and accountability in government alongside mortgage interest rates and Medicare and the war on terrorism. Howard is actually appealing to voter apathy and cynicism, saying "you can trust me on the only thing you really care about: your mortgage."

The irony with all the "death of democracy" talk among the left is that the public may actually vote for their own disenfranchisement. Now there's the real shades of fascism.

Peace,
Justin

The prison built on fear

Guardian article: The prison built on fear
The US and UK governments use the war on terror to curtail our freedoms. Where does the greater threat lie?

"there are grave doubts about whether "democracies can control the
war-making powers of their executives". The faulty intelligence and deliberate
deception can only lead one to the conclusion that the "entire leadership of the
north Atlantic elite wilfully deluded themselves and then deceived the
people"."

The tiniest glimmer of hope

News in the Sydney Morning Herald today that the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi took the legendary Indian leader's doctrine of non-violent resistance to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict yesterday, pitching the pacifist creed to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

There have been a number of attempts to encourage the Palestinian people to use nonviolent action in the past (see nonviolence in Palestine, testing the power of nonviolence in Palestine, leading Palestinians call for nonviolence) but to my knowledge none have involved meetings with Yasser Arafat himself.

However unlikely, one can only hope it planted a seed in Mr Aarafat's mind. May it turn out to be a mustard seed that grows into a giant bush of love, discipline and courage among the Palestinian people - creating the opportunity for the Israeli peace movement to pressure the Knesset for a meaningful peace agreement.

Death of Democracy?

Are we witnessing the death of democracy in Australia?

This question is starting to get some airplay in the media these days. That in itself is something of a revelation - the idea that we are is clearly gaining some traction among the political commentators at least; raising such a question 10 years ago would likely have been met with confusion oustide the most fundamentalist right and left.

Margo Kingston certainly thinks we are heading down a slippery slope. Her excellent Webdiary features continual highlighting of the anti-democratic decisions being made by the federal government, and her just-released book "Not Happy John" details some of the key concerns, from the closing of the public galleries in Parliament House duing the visit of US President George W Bush to the casting aside of the Westminster tradition of (and reliance on) Ministerial responsibility. In a speech to the Sydney Institute, she said:

The current weakness of our democracy is clearly shown in its failure to
hold Howard to account for his misleading and deceptive conduct in taking
Australia to its first war of aggression in Iraq against the wishes of the
Australian people. The British and American parliaments and media have
comprehensively shown us up.

Yesterday, Robert Manne (professor of politics at La Trobe University) wrote an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald arguing that the current Prime Minister's contempt for the convention of Ministerial responsibility in the Westminster system of government demonstrates a weakness in the Constitution of Australia:

There is almost no Australian constitutional convention which goes deeper than
the one which says that when a minister deliberately misleads the parliament he
or she should resign. Indeed it is genuinely difficult to see how the
Westminster system of responsible government could survive in the absence of a
convention of such a kind.

In our system conventions cannot be enforced by courts. They rely on the acts of the prime minister. If a minister is shown to have misled the parliament, the prime minister must insist on resignation. But if it is the prime minister who has misled the parliament, who is to act? We encounter here a curious gap in the constitutional convention.

Professor Manne was citing the recent revelations concerning "Children Overboard Affair", in which it has become apparent to anyone with ears to hear that the Prime Minister deliberately misled parliament about whether children had been thrown from a sinking boat full of Iraqi asylum seekers during the election campaign in November 2001. Mr Howard has decided to ride out the controversy, relying on a combination of apathy and xenophobia to take him into the next election.

Given that election is coming up soon, maybe he's right. The people will be able to vote on his honesty directly, and in that respect will certainly get the prime minister they deserve. With Labor's list of 27 lies since 1996 likely to get plenty of airtime in the election campaign, people will be asked to determine how much they actually value honesty in politics, answering for a time at least the confusion amongst pollsters on where that issue sits in the league table of importance of the voting public.

The irony of people potentially voting for the end of democratic accountability of government appears somewhat lost on Gerard Henderson, who seems to have little understanding of the all-too-willing cooperation of the German people in their own disenfranchisement in the early 1930s. In a response to Prof Manne, Henderson today warns against people jumping on the "pre-fascist" bandwagon. While he is right to remind people of the weight of the words involved and the caution that needs to be exercised in using it, he seems to be confused or careless about the difference between "pre-fascist" and "fascist", interchanging these terms in his article as if they are the same thing.

Margo Kingston et al are not arguing that Australia in 2004 is like Germany in 1936. They are warning that meaningful accountability has disappeared in politics, that anti-terror laws are being used to stifle dissent, that wars of aggression are being waged on the basis of lies, and that the majority of Australians are willing to let all that happen because they are worried about their mortgages.

That sounds a lot like Germany in 1933.

Alliances and the American election

I came across this fascinating, long (6 A4 pages) but worth it essay by Gabriel Kolko in the Sydney Morning Herald today (published on Aug 24). Scarily, it suggests a John Kerry victory could lead to a MORE dangerous world precisely because he will restore the international coalitions Bush is undermining...highly recommended:

"...style can be important and inadvertently the Bush Administration's falsehoods, rudeness, and preemptory demands have begun to destroy an alliance system that for the world's peace should have been abolished long ago. In this context, it is far more likely that the nations allied with the U.S. in the past will be compelled to stress their own interests and go their own ways. The Democrats are far less likely to continue that exceedingly desirable process, a process ultimately much more conducive to peace in the world. They will perpetuate the same adventurism and opportunism that began generations ago and that Bush has merely built upon, the same dependence on military means to solve political crises, the same interference with every corner of the globe as if America has a Divinely ordained mission to muck around with all the world's problems. The Democrats' greater finesse in justifying these policies is therefore more dangerous because they will be made to seem more credible and keep alive alliances that only reinforce the U.S.' refusal to acknowledge the limits of its power. In the longer run, Kerry's pursuit of these aggressive goals will lead eventually to a renewal of the dissolution of alliances, but in the short-run he will attempt to rebuild them and European leaders will find it considerably more difficult to refuse his demands than if Bush stays in power - and that is to be deplored."

Just getting started

"Everyone else is doing it, so we can't we"

Well, here goes ... welcome to my blog. I aim to use this space to write down thoughts, ideas, rants, and mini-essays on topics of politics, religion, and life in general. Mostly I want to use this site to get back into writing because I feel totally out of it these days, 7 years after leaving university with an Honours degree in environmental politics and walking into a career in ... IT. As you do.

As I write there are a few positive movements that come as a pleasant surprise in the general swirl of diminishing democracy:

1. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez easily won the recall election called against him when the country's poor stood for up to 12 hours to cast their ballots and be heard. Just as they did when they came down from the hills into Caracas to defeat a US-supported coup in 2002, the poor of Venezuela stood up for their rights and for the legitimacy of a rare politician - one who actually uses his country's wealth to provide basic things like education and health care for all citizens. Coming from an increasingly cynical Australia, this upsurge of citizenship and democratic action is indeed refreshing.

2. Closer to home, the Australian Prime Minister is FINALLY under serious pressure over the Children Overboard Affair (or as it is known amongst the left, the Truth Overboard Affair). Despite the fact that not knowing things for which you are responsible should never have been an available excuse (try it out in the corporate world, Mr Howard), "Teflon John" has evaded any liability for the appalling behaviour in the lead up to the last federal election, when he used the lives of desperate people fleeing despotic regimes we would soon be invading 'on their behalf' as fodder for his xenophobic political ends. No, it wasn't the only thing determining the outcome of that election. But it sure helped swing the marginal seats.

Now, at long last, someone in the public service has said he told John Howard directly, on the phone, that the video was inconclusive, the photos were of a different event. Now another former public servant is backing his story. Mr Howard is looking shaky for the first time in a while on honesty and credibility. It will be interesting to see how the media plays this, and how the public responds in turn. Australians are already pretty cynical about politicians so we don't react too badly to news they lied to us. But if Mark Latham can work the "if you don't trust him, our national security itself is at risk" line successfully, he will romp home. Fun times for the pundits.