Religious Torture: A Hidden Story

You may already know that Pew Forum research published last week suggests that white U.S. evangelicals are more likely to support the use of torture on at least some occasions than the population in general.  It's worth noting that 49% of the general population agree; and 52% of white evangelicals (or 54% of weekly church attenders) versus 49% of the general population says as much about America as it does about Christians.  The country is divided in two.  (And the sample size for the research is regrettably too small for wider analysis of different populations.) The surprise that some are expressing at the statistics reminds me of the scene in 'Casablanca' when Captain Renard pronounces himself 'shocked, shocked' at the prevalance of gambling at Rick's Cafe  - for the dominant forms of U.S. evangelicalism over the past three decades would never have claimed to denounce torture - indeed, long-standing authority figures such as Hal Lindsey have often called for violent action to be taken against their perceived enemies.  (Right now, Lindsey is advocating a pre-emptive, and possibly nuclear, strike against Iran.)  A relevant question going forward might focus on how the civil religion of the United States vaccilates between the maintenance of 'Fortress America' on the one hand (even President Obama used the rhetoric of threatening enemies in his inaugural address) and the tradition of open-handed support for the vulnerable, and a mature public conversation about how to be engaged in an interdependent relationship with the rest of the world on the other (to quote the President again: 'It's time to put away childish things').  Just how can that conversation become the country's settled mind rather than vulnerable to the whims of whatever anger management issues talk radio hosts aren't dealing with on any given day?

The language of challenging Christian support for violence and empire has made a recent comeback in the work of Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne, Rita Brock and others, building on the immense contribution of thinkers like Rene Girard and Walter Wink.   Writers like these, and many like-minded communities, are offering a different kind of U.S. American Christian practice.  The paradox is that non-violent subversion of Empire doesn't lend itself easily to Huffington Post headlines.  But instead of the hand-wringing about how much of the Christian church is no different from the culture at large, perhaps the following might be worth some reflection:

There's a better story hidden within the statistics published last week - the 48% of white U.S. evangelicals who don't support the use of torture perhaps need to find better ways to tell it.

Some good further analysis over at Get Religion.

The Death of an Old Monk; the Birth of a New Monasticism

CNN tells the story here of Father Theodore Heck, who died earlier this week, just a month before the 80th anniversary of his ordination.  The death of an old man who has lived well (and Father Heck's friends speak highly of him) is, as Robert Altman's characters say in the film of  'A Prairie Home Companion', not a tragedy, but a cause for gratitude and reflection on the meaning of what makes us human. Father Heck has the face of a good man, like many who have weathered life in monasteries.  The image CNN uses evokes those in Philip Groning's astonishing documentary 'Into Great Silence', crinkled with age, centred with eyes that show no sign of stress.

Of course, I never met Father Heck, but I'm struck by something his Archabbot, John DuVall said:

"Every year, he would take up a subject and read about it," DuVall said. "When he was 99, he decided he should learn Spanish, and when he was 100, he took up the computer."

Some of us know that there's a resurgence of monastic practices in surprising places these days - from community houses in urban North Carolina, to the discipline of writing in solitude and sharing the work in community in New Zealand.  I'm inspired - and sometimes feel caught between - both.  Different perspectives on 'new monasticism' abound - some people are living in community and sharing their lives with each other, hoping to serve their neighborhood needs; this feels like a re-invention of the work of St Francis.  But there were other ways of being monastic in the past too - St Columba is only one of many monks whose work and life appeared to depend on whether or not there was a boat nearby so that he could get to the next stop on his 6th century version of the student backpacking 'I want to find myself' tour.  It seems to me that, when handled with intentionality, for wanderers like me, our contemporary forms of interaction (mostly virtual) and physical space-taking (often transient, for me at least) have the potential to be in the tradition of medieval monks as much as those of us who are staying rooted in one place.

I say 'handled with intentionality' because it's easy to let the world go by without noticing it; I have used internet tools for spiritual exploration as if they were chocolate bars - I consume them too quickly, unthinking; reading some 'religious' websites has become akin to glancing at the supermarket tabloid rack - gleaning gossip about embarrassing stories, or the sales ranks of books written by friends, or searching for the latest reason to get annoyed with people's spectacularly strange theology.  This is not good for me; some people might call it spiritual masturbation.  And they'd be right.

But, of course, I've found that there are ways to experience spirituality in virtual space that really do enhance my life.  I'm connected to friends and fellow travellers; we don't see each other in the flesh a great deal, but we learn from each other by what we blog; I've discovered books and music that have guided me, and I hope to make a small contribution to the watching of lesser-known films by my own writing and shared podcast; Twitter has already apparently saved a life and helped start a revolution.

So, in short - if old monastics could be either cloistered in monasteries or active from them, or could find their way by travelling across the world, sharing with new and old communities as they went, then I hope there's space in the New Monastic movement for those of us who haven't yet found a space to be physically rooted, who can't negotiate their lives without a sense of open spaces, who know that they would be impoverished without the privilege of having travelled far.  I grew up as an unusual religious hybrid -I guess you could have called me a 'progressive fundamentalist'; by my mid-twenties I was burned out on puritanism and evangelical zeal.  I am not sure I would have kept asking questions about spirituality had I not found myself meeting people on the same journey in Aotearoa/New Zealand, or Jerusalem/Al-Quds, or Pretoria/Tshwane.

Itchy feet monasticism, perhaps, but a form of monasticism all the same.

And so, as this week ends, I'm drawn to brother Theodore, and his energy to keep expanding his horizons, even as his body, presumably, began to offer more challenges of its own.  I made a half-hearted attempt at learning Spanish last year, at 33, and gave up quickly; he learned the language when he was 99.  I'm inspired to make a declaration of intent: new monasticism should not only make space for those of us who find ourselves blowing in the wind of globalisation and virtual space, but if I want a place at this table, I should be prepared to, at the very least, try to make space for something entirely new, every year for the rest of my life.

So at the risk of inverting the spirit of inquiry I'm hoping to offer, entonces, con humilidad, disfruta el fin de semana.

A brief observation on 'Observe and Report'

This film is either a serious satire on the encroachment of violence into everyday American life, the absurd over-reactions of the authorities to any infraction of their vision of the American Dream, the push-pull anaesthetising and goading of a generation through the over-diagnosis of mental health problems and the transformation of community retail into malls-as-mildly-sanitised-police-states, or it's one of the most offensive, unempathetic, and irresponsible films ever made.

Colin Farrell's Theology

'I can't separate the word 'God' from the man with the white beard' - Colin Farrell, April 2009

RTE has a genuinely fascinating interview with a man who seems to think beyond the surface of life; is grateful for what he has; and knows who he is: 'just a man, nothing more and nothing less'.  Gay Byrne - the elder statesman of Irish television interviewers - has a knack for making subjects feel at ease, and in his new series 'The Meaning of Life' tries to go a little further into people's beliefs than we're used to seeing on TV.  Colin Farrell's the same age as me, and we're from the same island; that's where the similarity ends, I suppose - but, if his self-presentation in the interview is anything to go by,  it's easy to be impressed with how little he seems to care about fame, and how much he wants to be a decent man.

His comment about the image of the divine that we were almost all raised with also names something hugely important about our generation: we're convinced  that institutional religion has been found wanting, and we heavily suspect too that God cannot possibly be reducible to being a slightly nicer (but scarier) large version of Santa Claus.  Farrell suggests that a decade of fame nearly killed him, and that its trinkets are all ungraspable mist when placed alongside being a part of a family.  I never expected that I'd take a lesson in spiritual discipline from Colin Farrell (and that's, I guess, a form of spiritual elitism that could compare with the trap of celebrities thinking they're more important than the rest of us.  Please be patient with me; I'm sincerely trying to change.), but after watching this interview, here it is:

Today's challenge from a lapsed Irish Catholic, unsure of whether or not he believes in God, benefitting from being post-rehab,  climbing the twelve steps, and suggesting that he might have learned the secret of life:

to transcend the limitations of anthropomorphised visions of God without ignoring the inevitable personal dimensions of an Ultimate Being, stop chasing other people's dreams for your own life, and, at least once in a while, shrink the scope of your activity to the small community around you of people whom you actually know and who know you.  Thoughts?

Discount Atheism

Andrew O'Hehir has a characteristically smart and helpful review of Terry Eagleton's response to Dawkins and Hitchens (whom he delightedly re-christens 'Ditchkins'; images of an amusing roly-poly pretend intellectual in 'Alice in Wonderland' come to mind) at Salon.

When 'The God Delusion' and 'God is not Great' were first published it seemed strange how any thinking person of faith could not agree with the core of what Ditchkins could prove - (drum roll please):

SOMETIMES RELIGIOUS PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS

Anyone with a degree of exposure to the Catholic Worker, the progressive Christian movement, or to take an example from my own locale, the Church of Ireland's reflection on its own sectarianism, and countless other humble attempts to challenge religious imperialism in the terms that Jesus offered already knows that sometimes religious people do bad things; but, remarkably enough (though not enough for Ditchkins) sometimes they also do heroic things, because of their religion.

The fact that these and other books had such cultural impact was another surprise.  On the one hand, it was pretty clear that Dawkins knew a lot less about church history and intelligent theology than was necessary to write a credible book about them; on the other, Hitchens, a gutsy writer whose work is often the best take on any particular issue on which he chooses to throw the spotlight,  seemed to be more committed to finding the witticisms and aphorisms in religious denunciation than actually saying something we didn't already know.

Terry Eagleton's review of 'The God Delusion' in the New York Review of Books was one of the few pieces published in a 'secular' journal that dared to criticise Dawkins' approach.  This has been expanded to book length, and in 'Reason, Faith and Revolution' Eagleton presents the case that, while religion deserves to be critiqued, it's not best done from a place of ignorance.

I was annoyed by Dawkins and Hitchens because they seemed arrogant.  Bill Maher's 'Religulous' was even worse - in which a very smart and powerful man asks academic theology questions of people who haven't studied the discipline.  You might as well ask me to understand the Latin Mass...But then, well...here's what I wrote at the time:

" I have to pause here, for as I re-read this article I realize that I may have fallen into an ancient trap, and in the process perhaps have simply reinforced Maher’s legitimate concerns.  If religious people can be made so easily to look boring, it is partly because we have not articulated a better story.  If people of faith are held in low regard because we are seen to be primarily concerned with issues of private morality and Puritanical codes, it is partly because we have not paid enough attention to reason and human experience as guides to interpreting our faith.  If, in short, it is easy to portray religious believers as stupid, dangerous, and spineless, it is partly because we have failed to be loving, peaceable, and brave."

There might just be a third way between the twin ideological fundamentalism of Ditchkins and unthinking religion.  Terry Eagleton seems to be presenting it, as O'Hehir says,

"Having banished such embarrassing metaphysical matters as God and love to the private sector, and having put its faith in an economic system that seems much less eternal than it used to, Western civilization finds itself in quite a pickle. As Eagleton sees it, late-capitalist society believes in nothing except a limited marketplace vision of tolerance, which has spawned a surfeit of irrational belief systems, from fundamentalism to neoconservative imperialism to do-it-yourself New Age spirituality. He even agrees with the neocons and fundamentalists that we cannot successfully combat Islamist zealotry without any core beliefs of our own.

But the cures proposed by the fundies and neocons are worse than the disease, Eagleton makes clear, while the childish and arrogant idealism of the Ditchkins crowd bears no relationship to human history or contemporary social reality. He sees the potential for hope in a "tragic humanism," one informed by the likes of John Milton and Karl Marx but not necessarily religious or socialist in character, one that "shares liberal humanism's vision of the free flourishing of humanity," but believes "that this is possible only by confronting the very worst." We were sent a man who preached a message of love and we killed him; we were given a beautiful blue-green planet to live on and we killed it. What do we do now?"

One part of Eagelton's response, as O'Hehir has it, is that

"He seeks to reclaim the transformative and even revolutionary potential of Christian faith."

To which I can only say, in the words of one of religion's more recent public faces, who is now fading into post-Presidential twilight, bring it on.