A Different Kind of Loyalist

It has often been request of me, and I have long desired, to write up a more comprehensive statement of my view of the relationship between Christians and civil governments. Unfortunately, this is not such a statement. Instead, I recently encountered a quote in an unrelated context which seemed to me to capture, if not the totality, then at least the spirit of what I understand to be a correct stance of Christians toward civil government. In an article about the Sandemanians and their politics during the American Revolutionary War, Jean Hankins summarizes their position thus: "Sounding like activists, but acting like pacifists, New England's Sandemanians emerge as a different kind of loyalist." In this brief statement can be found three critical principles for a Christian relationship to government:

Submission: The term "loyalist," while an accurate term historically for supporters of the rights of the English crown to rule the colonies, would not describe appropriately a Christian disposition toward human government (i.e. I would not describe myself as "loyal" to America or her interests). The error is, however, semantic. What the quote describes is the basic framework for the relationship to Christian government, which is one of obligatory respect and submission. It is the same raw context for civic ethics that Paul enjoins in Romans 13:1 or Peter commands in 1 Peter 2:17. Whatever instances of so-called civil disobedience may be permitted, they are permitted as exceptions to the rule of submission not as a rule which allows for incidental or occasional submission. (Incidentally, since the American Revolution is the context of the quote, I wonder what contemporary Christians who idolize--and that word is deliberately chosen--the Revolution and its architects do with verses like these.)

Pacifism: I realize this will be the most contentious suggestion, particularly in an era in which American Christianity has so steeped itself in militarism that it has embraced a spiritual baptism in the blood of national imperial martyrs instead of the blood of a peaceful savior. Yet in our modern world of mass-produced warfare and ever more coercive governments, pacifism provides the primary means for suspending our obligation to submit to civil government. Gone are the days when "We must serve God rather than men" functioned primarily to oppose religious censorship. Now our governments require a full participation of the citizen in all the tainted mechanisms of government, and that participation is always and completely a moral activity, a tacit endorsement of the necessary means of human structures of power. Without enumerating what I believe are the many applications of this antagonism between a Christian vision of peace and civil government, let it suffice to say that as often as being a peacemaker stands contrary to the mechanisms of civil government--and those occasions will certainly be frequent--it is our ethical commitment to peace which takes precedence.

Activism: The most frequent critique of pacifism confuses a rejection of unrighteous means with a rejection of righteous ends. I cannot count the number of times I have seen arguments which boil down to this: if you don't support opposing injustice with violence, then you are supporting injustice by implication. It simply isn't true. Pacifism simply makes the claim--one which I obviously find convincing--that it is logically inconsistent to pretend to oppose injustice with violence, an unjust tool. Instead, pacifists make an effort to oppose injustice with just means. Pacifism is not quietism. It is absolutely the Christian's duty to "sound like an activist," which is to say we should be active through every ethically available means to promote peace, justice, and mercy in a world which thirsts for them. There is no virtue in pursuing justice at any cost, especially when the cost is the peace and mercy which we ought to be promoting with and through justice.

Admittedly, it is something of a contrivance to use Hankins's quote as a the framework for cutting to the heart of the question of a Christian relationship. Nevertheless, the broad categories it outlines demonstrate the main areas of discussion necessary: in what sense are Christians "loyalists," in what sense are we "pacifists," and in what sense are we "activists." I think the image presented to describe the Sandemanians (who, I admit, I know very little about) captures very nearly a picture of Christian civic virtue that grows naturally out of the Gospel.

Sherlock Holmes: Parental Discretion Advised

A school in Jefferson's home county in Virginia is removing a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle work from its sixth grade curriculum, citing the book's religious intolerance as the motive:

The Victorian-era book, A Study In Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was deemed inappropriate for the age group, but it will be available for older students.

The school board of Albermarle county, where Thomas Jefferson's Monticello home is located, took the action in response to a challenge from the parent of a middle school student...

"This is our young students' first inaccurate introduction to an American religion," Stevenson told the board, according to the newspaper.

It is interesting what we have decided is inappropriate for children. A federal court recently ruled in favor of the First Amendment rights of teenage girls to upload sexual images of themselves with total impunity. So, while Sherlock Holmes is too intolerant for sixth graders, this is appropriate behavior for 10th graders:

Prior to the first sleepover, the girls bought phallic-shaped rainbow colored lollipops. During the first sleepover, the girls took a number of photographs of themselves sucking on the lollipops. In one, three girls are pictured and M.K. added the caption "Wanna suck on my c**k." In another photograph, a fully-clothed M.K. is sucking on one lollipop while another lollipop is positioned between her legs and a fully-clothed T.V. is pretending to suck on it.

During another sleepover, T.V. took a picture of M.K. and another girl pretending to kiss each other. At a final slumber party, more pictures were taken with M.K. wearing lingerie and the other girls in pajamas. One of these pictures shows M.K. standing talking on the phone while another girl holds one of her legs up in the air, with T.V. holding a toy trident as if protruding from her crotch and pointing between M.K.'s legs. In another, T.V. is shown bent over with M.K. poking the trident between her buttocks. A third picture shows T.V. positioned behind another kneeling girl as if engaging in anal sex. In another picture, M.K. poses with money stuck into her lingerie -- stripper-style.

The pendulum is now officially swinging the other direction. At one point censorship was being driven by too conservative, too Puritanical values. Sexuality, atheism, social dissonance, and the like were inappropriate for our children. Now, our censorship is beginning to be driven by progressive values. It is the absences of pluralism or the perception of intolerance that are the issue. Surely there are others who realize that this is just two sides of the same coin; two equal and opposite ideologies embracing censorship to promote healthy development of "right-minded" people. At some point, it seems, all ideological systems will attempt to perpetuate themselves through the controlled flow of information to children. That is fine, perhaps entirely natural, but I do not want to hear a single progressive getting on my case about the religious "indoctrination" of children through Sunday school.

Cow News

In yet another daring act of bravery being ignored by the mainstream media in America,

An animal charity has rescued a bullock in South Ayrshire which got its head stuck in a ladder.

Members of the public called the Scottish SPCA after spotting the bewildered beast in a field beside the Troon to Barassie road last month.

An inspector contacted the farmer who owned the Belgian Blue bullock and helped return it to the herd unharmed.

Am I really the only one who cares more about this than the question of whether or not Rick Perry eats a corn dog like a homosexual, which is of such crucial importance as to be pushed to the forefront our national conciousness?

In Other News

The Associated Press has made a startling revelation: text critics exist! The faith of every Jew, Christian, and Muslim is in peril.

As if that weren't enough, the Pew Research Center has found that the rate of religious intolerance and persecution has increased over the last five years for more than one third of the world's population. I wonder if that includes the newly free and democratic Egypt or the freshly liberated Iraq. Is it any wonder that Christians in Syria aren't taking up arms for the kind of peace and freedom that the Arab Spring offers?

The Absurd and Ignorance

This final exploration of the interaction of absurdism with Christianity proposes to look at a passage of Camus which is both true and antithetical to proper faith. Camus writes:

I want everything to be explained to me or nothing.

It is immediately striking to me how surigically this sentiment cuts to the heart of humanity's relationship with its own incomplete knowledge. We lament our own ignorance but only because we know that we are ignorant. The constant quest for knowledge by humanity is a product of the incompleteness of its understanding. The moment we unify two thoughts in our comprehension, there are four more born that are in total disharmony. The very fact of partial understanding exacerbates our ignorance and torments us. To understand nothing at all, including one's own ignorance, is perhaps the only desirable alternative to comprehensive understanding, at least from an existential standpoint. It is not for nothing that our culture has embraced the proverb, "Ignorance is bliss."

And yet, for Christians, partial knowledge is a necessary part of our faith. We can speak practically of the formal incompleteness of God's revelation as recorded in Scripture (even if we want to doctrinally assert its functional completeness), but there is an even more important gap in our knowledge. We do not yet understand even basic facts which are logically prior to Scripture: what is man, what is his purpose, why is the world so beautiful and terrible? Even as we begin to formulate responses--good, true responses so far as they go--to these questions, our self-perpetuating ignorance proves that the very ability to formulate the questions is itself a kind of curse. Consider, for example, how the problem of evil arises from such questions.

At the same time, we must embrace what partial knowledge we have with all the burdens it includes, because it is in this incomplete knowledge that we have the promise of total knowledge. Consider Paul in 1 Corinthians 13: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." It is only in our lamentable state, steeped as we are in the torturous knowledge of our own ignorance, that we become aware of the prospect of full knowledge. The kind of comprehensive knowledge that Camus assumes to be inaccessible and therefore to validate the absurd, we have a secure hope of because we have been allowed to know in part.

In this is the substantial difference between a Christian absurdism and that of Camus. Understood as Camus did, the collision of man and an alien world could result only in futility and despair. Understood in Christ, the collision of man and an alien world gives content to a hope of true unification which includes and exceeds simple comprehensive understanding. Even the recognition of the ultimate futility of human efforts and the despair which inevitably results from that are transfigured in Christ; the very awareness of these weaknesses is a call to the promise of God. I can accept readily most of what Camus has to say as a genuine and unusually brilliant expression of the existential turmoil I see as intrinsic to this world. But as I cry out in his voice, I admit that there is an unknown and perhaps nonexistent interlocutor who calls back not with answers but with an invitation: "Come to me, and I will give you rest."

The Absurd and Science

Perhaps the most beautiful and compelling of all the passages I have encountered in Camus is his critique of the insufficiency of science to resolve the problem of the absurd. It is the ultimate aim of secluarist scientists to reduce the world to a mathematical series of formulas, and they assume that such a reduction is more or less inevitable. They treat the comprehensibility of the world and their materialist philosophy as so self-evident as to defy criticism. Camus, and of course others, have rightly observed that by all objective standards, science always ultimately dissolves not into scientific formulas but into romantic verse:

And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes -how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.

It is intriguing how Camus' despair at the inability of science to resolve the absurd is also vividly poetic. It mirrors the sentiments of Petru Dumitriu as he laments the simultaneously mathematical and incomprehensible universe. But while Camus stops with the lament that he cannot find assurance that the world is his, Dumitriu so embraces the foreignness of the world that, so far from being his, he insists that it must belong to someone else:

For nothing is simple, and the universe is mathematicable, but incomprehensible -- really incomprehensible, and really constructed according to a plan that is not a human one.

The most perfect parallel to Camus' critique of science (at least that I have found) is actually in the work of G. K. Chesterton. Writing well before the birth of absurdism, Chesterton anticipated Camus' observations about science and its inability to adequately give answers to the truly pressing questions of the world. Just as it completely failed to resolve the problem of the absurd, science was totally impotent in the face of the ultimate question: why?

In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. As IDEAS, the egg and the chicken are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears...It is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who is the mystic.

Chesterton goes on with astonishing parallels to Camus and his complaint that science inevitably collapses into poetry:

Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.

Just as with Camus, Chesterton himself slips easily into his own rhetorical poetry when speaking about the world. They admit that awed ignorance is the appropriate response to reality and recognize that even science (in its own cold, self-deluded way) will always end at the same place as everyone else: wide-eyed wonder. It certainly raises questions about the whether or not apophatic thinkers have had it right all along; the end of human knowledge is silence before God. More to the point though, this realization should work to resolve the lingering fear that has been created by the false triumphalism of science with reference to religion. Faith has nothing to fear in science because science ultimately has nothing to say to faith. It is itself just a gelid, mechanical mysticism which has had the unfortunate fate of being so convinced by its own facade that it thinks it is somehow above and apart. In truth, science offers only transient answers to transient problems. It crumbles in the face of the absurd, like all human effort.

Taking a break from the absurd...sort of.

We interrupt this series on Christianity and the Absurd to bring you the response of Archbiship Rowan Williams, functional head of the Church of England, to the riots that recently took place in England. Specifially, I found this quote about education reform and its impact on society interesting:

Over the last two decades, our educational philosophy at every level has been more and more dominated by an instrumentalist model; less and less concerned with a building of virtue, character and citizenship – 'civic excellence' as we might say. And a good educational system in a healthy society is one that builds character, that builds virtue.

I find myself compelled to object that character formation is not the province of public schools but of homes. I submit that if we allow public institutions to teach our children virtue, we will find ourselves with children who only have institutional virtues. As a Christian, I consider "civic excellence" to be a secondary virtue to be understood in a radically different context than the government would. I certainly do not want to hand over the task of training up a virtuous society to world governments who have shown themselves incapable even of training up virtuous governments.

No thank you archbishop. Of all the things public education is doing wrong, I can assure you that it is not inappropriatley neglecting character formation.