Is Bad Organizing Biblical?
(Or: What Would Jesus Do With Democracy?
Or: Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers, Part 3.
Or: Review of Jesus for President, Part 4.)
May 16, 2008
Posted by Zack in Missouri | 2 comments
I’ve been watching this rising movement of Christian radicals for a few years with nothing but complete awe and admiration. But I’ve finally worked up the nerve to ask a few questions—to pose a challenge even.
I think the movement is making an idol out of smallness and slowness. Small and slow can be beautiful, but making an idol of them is wrong because big and fast can be just as beautiful and just as central to living as a follower of Jesus. By ruling out big, unified, global political organizing, the movement is tragically limiting the Christian imagination at a time of great opportunity. Jesus didn’t limit himself to the small or slow, and I can’t find anything in the Bible to make me think he’s calling us to limit ourselves now.
But maybe I’m missing something. So I’m going to ask you guys in the movement a bunch of questions here. I’ll treat Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw as the movement’s spokespeople on this small+slow+local dogma through their new book Jesus for President.
I’ll tell you where I’m going with this up front: I think what’s happened to the rising Christian radical movement is that we’ve applied deep-down, empire-bred instincts to our politics…and to the gospel. It’s the same kind of thing that happened so often to Roman citizens who converted to Christianity. It wasn’t long before they were ruling by the sword in Jesus’ name, because ruling by the sward was all they knew. Our empire doesn’t rule over (white, middle-class, Christian) people with violence. It rules over us with a different kind of idea. This idea shapes our every thought, but we are barely aware of it. It was the same for the Romans: if you asked them, “Does Rome rule by the sword?” they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.
Our empire enforces hopelessness by raising us to believe that humanity is unfit to work collectively, on a large scale, to redeem creation. It says the only way to change the world is through decentralized efforts by individuals and private groups. And then it does everything in its power to make sure those efforts never add up to anything that can threaten empire. That idea is vital for the survival of empire today because modern empire has been forced by centuries of resistance and subversion (mostly by Christians) to put down the sword in governing most citizens. We citizens of empire are now free to dismantle empire non-violently (I realize that’s a big case to make; I’ll try to make it below). That’s why so many young Christians who want to be martyrs have to go across the world to Iraq or Sudan. I don’t want to demean those efforts, but that is theater at the margins of the empire. Empire today has learned that, when it kills its “own” people as martyrs, they spring up one thousandfold. And so it won’t dare touch us. It will instead bog us down in absolutely unglamorous political machinations. Most of us mock that work as being futile, just as revolutionaries in Jesus’ day rejected his work on the cross as futile. But that is the cross that we have to bear in our time. We have to bear it like Jesus: not as a messy, self-serving compromise; but as a messy, beautiful, selfless triumph over death.
OK…so I’ve written about 50 pages in an attempt to get the rest of this post right over the last week…and then I realized that this is just a blog. So I’m just going to put it up in little, very imperfect pieces. Stay tuned.
Tags: Chris Haw, Shane Claiborne“The Hauerwasian Mafia” May 1, 2008
Posted by Zack in Minnesota | 3 commentsTim Keel (who was good enough not to get upset at me for grossly oversimplifying his point of view a couple posts ago) sent me this link, that has a lot to say regarding my current topic.
Here, Tony Jones locates the roots of the clean hands syndrome that plagues Christian radicals these days in a “Hauerwasian Mafia” of theologians that has grown up over the last half century.
Tags: stanley hauerwas, Tony JonesSo the question becomes, what relationship should a follower of Jesus have with public life? Should Christians be involved with politics?
The HM advocates an ecclesiological solution: the church should be a counter-polis, a self-enclosed system that can serve as a model to secular systems (governments, corporations, etc.). In reading the HM literature, you’ll run across many references to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, especially the part about being a “city on a hill.” The church, the HM claims, is just such a city, shining the light of its moral rectitude for all the degenerate world to see and emulate. And you’ll find HM book titles like, Resident Aliens and A Peculiar People, promulgating this tendency, a tendency that has been dissed by critics as “sectarianism” and “Christian enclave theory.”
…
Instead of watering down their distinctives to the point of meaninglessness, the church should close ranks and develop an internal coherency that would serve as an example to the world.
The Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers: Part 2 May 1, 2008
Posted by Zack in Missouri | 21 commentsI grew up an atheist, but recently I have fallen in love with a movement that seems to be the most dynamic element of Christianity in American today. It’s a movement based on radical idealism, a faith that “all of creation will be redeemed.” These people are working toward a world with no poverty, no violence, no hatred or racism. And they believe they can do it. Even some of the most conservative evangelical churches are beginning shift away from the narrow, exclusive theology of “personal salvation” to a holistic gospel that calls Christians to build the “Kingdom of Heaven” right here on Earth. My whole life, I’ve been searching for a movement that has the guts to try to truly save the world. The progressive movement in which I grew up has been in a downward spiral of lowered expectations. Meanwhile, Christians are charging forward with revolutionary zeal—and are even calling themselves “revolutionaries”!
There is one big problem, though: These revolutionary Christians have adopted a theory of social change that is just as narrow and unimaginative as the old theology they just left behind.
Revolutionary Christians are throwing themselves into direct, person-to-person anti-poverty projects at home and around the world—sometimes with reckless abandon, sometimes with careful planning, but always with passion and love. And it’s a beautiful thing. It’s helping a lot of people, and it’s teaching wealthy Americans a lot about the world. (In this context, middle class Americans are wealthy.)
Even the Christians who are doing the most see that what they’re currently doing is not enough to really fix this broken world. And so they feel God’s call to do more. But most think that means only more of the same: dig more wells, fund more micro loans, build more schools and orphanages, etc… And for sure, God is calling us to do as much of that as we possibly can.
But a certain dogma regarding social change has taken hold of the Christian imagination, and limited it to only projects that are small, local, “relational” and that they can personally witness themselves. Those who have been bitten by this dogma go on the faith that, if we all just live as followers of Christ in our neighborhoods, churches and workplaces, then God will work out the rest. They believe it’s wrong to work for social change at the level of the whole society because that requires political power, and therefore leads to all kinds of messy compromises, unintended consequences and, ultimately, corruption.
For me, this selective limitation of imagination is heartbreaking because these are the only people I can find with an otherwise boundless imagination and faith that we can make the impossible possible. And it’s totally unnecessary.
This dogma, which is strangling the radical Christian imagination, has nothing to do with the Bible or any Christian tradition, but is actually just old-fashioned laissez-faire economic doctrine recast in a new role. We’ve been fed this doctrine all our lives in many forms, so it’s understandable that it should shape our instincts, usually without us even knowing it. (Those of us who went to college have been especially dumbed down by this doctrine.)
Radical Christians are dreaming of big, deep social transformations—such as reshaping a whole economy to make sure everyone has the means of making a living, and cleaning up the environment while we’re at it. Laissez-faire says that only families, small communities or individual companies can plan collectively, inside themselves, for goals like that. If you want any higher-level organization, then what you can do is form a “community of communities,” a trade association, or something like that, where no one member can be coerced by the larger body. The minute you try to plan on a social level, let alone a global level, then your on the road to serfdom with Stalin, Mao or…Caesar.
If you’ve read radical Christian writers like Shane Claiborne or Greg Boyd, that all sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? How did it happen that the global capitalists who party at Davos share the same fundamental ideology about society’s role in economics as the people camping out at Christian anarchist festivals?
Well, the doctrine of Laissez-fair is so alluring because it is so beautiful in its simplicity: Every individual, family, community and company only needs to take care of itself and act responsibly towards others*; if we would all just do that, then the big picture would take care of itself. It all goes back to Adam Smith (and a bunch of other classical economists) who created these ideas when feudalism was breaking down in order to justify the rising economic system that would eventually be called Capitalism. Nowadays, laissez-faire economists (also called neo-liberal, neo-classical and conservative) have math equations and charts to show how it works. But Smith said the “invisible hand” of God was the driver. In a way, laissez-faire is the big brother in economics of biology’s theory of “Intelligent Design.”
But is it biblical? Obviously, my answer is no. But before I get into that, let’s dig a little deeper into what exactly we’re talking about here.
Laissez-faire doctrine says that whenever society tries to organize and plan big solutions, it always fails. But for clarity’s sake, it’s important to understand that laissez-faire is OK with some types of organizing and planning. Most liberals and progressives believe in strong use of regulation and tax incentives to coax the economy in the right direction. And they believe in heavy investment in infrastructure (roads, research, etc…) and public services (schools, healthcare, etc…). All that is perfectly consistent with the laissez-faire doctrine, at least in it’s most honest form. If that sounds odd, just go to Frederick Hayek. He was the 20th century’s Godfather of laissez-faire who inspired and popularized the revival of the dogma after it had almost died out forever. Check out his book The Road to Serfdom in which he supports strong regulation, taxation for social services, socialized medicine, universal public education and more.
So, because of our upbringing/brainwashing in the laissez-faire ideology, we are OK with the society doing public services, regulation and tax incentives. But also because of that upbringing, we are terrified of the idea of we, as society, intentionally retooling our for-profit industries to make their impact on the environment sustainable, or to reduce the work week to give people more time with their families, or for any other non-accidental (a.k.a. “market-driven”) purpose.
The only way to do that kind of big transformation is with political power. And the rising generation of radical Christians are against anything that has to do with political power.
But, once again, is that biblical? I’ll have to get into that in the next installment.
Tags: anarchism, capitalism, economics, frederick hayek, greg boyd, Shane Claiborne
