June 2009 Archives

Alec Baldwin wants me to move on and not pay attention to the Mark Sanford fandango.  I basically agree.  But over the last couple of days I have been wondering why the Mark Sanford affair rankles me more than, say, the Elliot Spitzer affair.  And it is, of course, because of Sanford's hypocracy. 

Mark Sanford has made a career of moralizing against other people.  The (until soon) Governor voted to impeach then President Bill Clinton for his moral illegitimacy and claims that marriage among gays and lesbians undermines the institution.  On the other hand, Elliot Spitzer never threw stones against other adulterers knowing full well that the shards of glass of his own house might cut him.  He also was a staunch supporter of gay marriage, perhaps because he was inspired by the determination of the gay community to be married in the face of all obstacles, when he could and did take his marriage for granted.

It is the bald hypocrisy of Sanford that makes me gloat over his downfall.  But it begs the question of the font of his hypocrisy.  Unfortunately, I think it may be faith.  Sanford is constantly described as a man of deep faith.  Instead of his faith giving him insight into the deep fallible nature of humans and fueling his compassion for others; his faith has been used as a moralizing bludgeon for attack and condemnation. 

Now that it is his turn in the shame spotlight he will assuredly use his faith to promote a repentance and forgiveness scheme for himself like the Ted Haggards.  But the damage he has done and his systematic judgment of others he used as the faithful ladder of his career has lost its power to elevate. 

All that Sanford and the other hypocrites like him can hope for is that God will break them of their arrogance and make them new as people of compassion and acceptance.  

Two questions worth asking: What if the Green Revolution fails? And what if it succeeds?

If it fails, I argue that we still have to engage Iran, just like we continued to engage China after Tiananmen Square. Doing otherwise will guarantee more totalitarianism, not less - is there any evidence that sanctions and diplomatic isolation have ever had a positive effect on an autocratic regime?

It it succeeds, I argue that it's not going to be quite the nirvana that some imagine. Iran will still desire nuclear weapons (with good reason, IMHO). It still won't exactly be friendly to Israel, since both countries aree seeking regional hegemony in the same sphere (think China and the former USSR - never best of friends even with ostensibly identical government systems, unlike the two I's). And frankly the election of Moussavi still doesn't solve the constitutional obstacles to genuine reform and freedom in the Iranian society.

Fundamentally, Iran will be an Islamic Republic no matter the outcome. The question is, just how diverse is the space of possible Islamic Republics with respect to a free society? Reihan Salaam has a speculative piece about the best possible outcome, but the actual Iran v3.0 that ultimately emerges will depend a lot upon how we the United States engage Iran moving forward.

"The whole world is watching" is a chant that many of us shouted as we marched and protested in vain to stop the Iraq war before it began.   The phrase indicated both a belief that it was important for the outside world to see that there was resistance within the United States to President Bush's reckless policies, as well as a fact that through the power of phones and video cameras that there was no act of aggression by the police that would not be recorded and put on the internet for world consumption.

Now President Obama has used that community activist phrase on the government of Iran in hopes that it might give heart to those protesting as well as a reminder to the Iranian religous and political figures that as much as they try to suppress information about the murder and incarceration of protesters  it will still be seen by billions of people around the world. 

Our President used another phrase that is perhaps one of the most striking progressive statements of the 21^st century. Offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., the proclaimation reads: The Moral Arc of the Universe is long but it bends towards Justice.   As an African American, only our current President could have the moral authority and personal witness to proclaim this truth to the Iranian people and not have it sound false or self serving (imagine if Senator McCain or President Bush tried trotting out this line). 

After the Lebanese electon and before the Iranian one I wrote about the Obama effect on Middle Eastern elections.   Tobin Harshaw of the Opinionator at the NYTimes reported that some Bush officials are now claiming that it was the hard power of the Iraq war and subsequent "nascent democracy" in Iraq that caused these protest.    The fact that hardlner Ahmadinejad was was elected over a moderate candidate after the invasion of Iraq and that Iran's power in the region has increased since the invason doesn't seem to phase this neo-con fantasy of history.  

Instead it is clear that it is the election and leadership of our current president with his history of opposition to the Iraq war and the triumph of justice that his election represents to our own country, which is supplying the soft power of hope that America is able to provide to the pro-democracy forces in iran.

The whole world is watching, hoping, and believing that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.    America is now helping to bend the world in the right direction.

Chris Rock had a great riff in one of his early stand up comedy routines which basically said how he was scared to death of white teenage boys.  This was the time around the Columbine shootings and the joke was funny because it played off of a contradicting mainstream American fear of grown black males, a demographic of which Chris Rock is of course a member. 

For better or for worse (neither I guess) we have witnessed a leveling of the American fear field as predicted by Mr. Rock. The bread and butter American fears of people of color and of different faiths have been complicated by recent events. The Jewish community experienced violence threatened and actualized by extremists from across the rainbow of color and religion first at the Synagogue in the Bronx followed by the Holocaust Museum in DC. In between we have a Christian doctor gunned down in church by an anti-abortion Christian extremist.

There is a fearful current in America that is beginning to violently surface.  Fox News analyst Shep Smith spoke about his experience of this anger:

"...in the wake of today's shooting at the Holocaust Museum, Smith went on the air today to talk about the emails he's been receiving for "the past few months," and how they've been getting "more and more frightening."

SMITH: There are people now, who are way out there on a limb. And I think they're just out there on a limb with the email they send us. Because I read it, and they are out there. I mean, out there in a scary place...I could read a hundred of them like this...I mean from today. People who are so amped up and so angry for reasons that are absolutely wrong, ridiculous, preposterous."

He went on to read an email, filled with the usual paranoid "birther" nonsense, which included an admonishment to Smith. "This is, I promise, a representative sample of the kind of things that we get here," Smith said.

Much of the anger that Smith is talking about is coming from those who feel disempowered and fearful under the Obama administration.  Fears about his supposed racisim and socialism are fueled on the internet and by some unfortunate pundits and politicians.  Where there is frustration and a sense of powerlessness there is also a tendency towards violence. 

America's new awareness of the truth that violence can and has come from any group at any time demands our response.  No single group can look at another and say the problem is them, because every demographic has its own extremists  It forces each of us to take responsibility for maintaining and lifting others to a higher ground within whatever racial or religious identity we hold.  When we encounter extremists within our own community we have the duty to disabuse them of their disturbed fantasies, and when they are threatening violence we should contact the police.

Being equal in fear is not a religious or American goal, instead it is to be equal in justice and respect.  Its up to us.  

With yesterday's shooting at the Holocaust museum, I was reminded of a story told to me several years ago by a professor of when he had been a doctoral student. 

An eminent post-modern theologian had come to his university to deliver a lecture on morality.  The guest insisted that morality was completely embedded in culture, "and that there was nothing that was universally wrong from one culture to another.  "Nothing," he insisted, "there is nothing that has been wrong in all places, all times, and to all people."  Then he added, "I dare you.  I dare you to tell me one thing--one thing--that is always wrong!"

My friend, whom I knew to be a liberal Democrat and was also a serious Methodist, rather sheepishly raised his hand.  "You there," the famous lecturer called on him, "can you tell me something that is always morally wrong?"  The young student responded shakily, "I think so.  One shouldn't burn Jews in ovens?"

The post-modern theologian stopped, and he looked as Paul might have on the road to Damascus.  "That's right," he thundered.  "One shouldn't burn Jews in ovens.  That is one, universally true moral principle." 

Well, there it is.  A universal moral principle--along with a corresponding principle, "One shouldn't walk into the Holocaust museum and start shooting people."

Yesterday, all of the news commentators agreed that James W. Von Brunn's action was morally wrong.  And, whenever a criminal breaks violates the communal moral conscience, everybody asks, "Why?"  What was the source of his evil?  Where did he go wrong?  What triggered this episode?

As pundits discuss these questions on the airwaves, their answers will fall into two predictable camps.  Conservatives will emphasize that Von Brunn was a "lone wolf," a deeply troubled man, who, acted on a bad belief (hatred of Jews) and made a bad choice (to pick up a gun and shoot people).   Liberals will analyze anti-Semitism, placing Von Brunn's actions within a larger framework of structural sin involving racism.  Some may also comment on institutional sins--gun control laws, the current economic crisis, and the "climate" created by talk radio for example--as sources of Von Brunn's actions. 

This is, of course, an old argument.  For almost a century, conservatives and liberals have been arguing the same point about sin.  Conservative theologians believed that sin is a personal matter, a choice made to break a moral code, usually based in some flawed belief system; liberal theologians believed that sin resulted from structural evils, whereby people act out of subservience to some form of institutionalized sin.  Hence, conservative sought to reform individuals while liberals sought to reform systems.  What made someone sin?  The soul or structure?  The individual or institution?  And this theological division made its way into political life--and it has shaped the way we argue about moral events in our public discourse.

In the 1990s, biblical scholar Walter Wink wrote a series of books arguing a new progressive understanding of sin.  He suggested that Christian theologians needed to re-engage the ancient biblical idea of the "principalities and powers,"

In the biblical view the Powers are at one and the same time visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly, spiritual and institutional . . . the Powers are simultaneously an outer, visible structure and an inner, spiritual reality. (Wink, The Powers That Be)

In other words, sin--the "powers" are both.  They exist in the malformed soul and are intrinsically tied up in the ways in which the world and culture are structured.  Everything--and everybody--has both good and evil within. 

This integrated understanding of sin goes a long way to help understand Von Brunn, where inner and outer "powers" combined to push him toward a form of racial idolatry and personal wickedness that resulted in killing another person.  But an integrated understanding of sin also begs the question:  Where was I in this story?  What do I do to resist these dehumanizing powers?  What systems and structures that I am part of perpetuate the evil from which Von Brunn acted?  (Talk radio hosts, take note....)

To say that Von Brunn was a lone gunman in a lone incident misses the point.  However, to say that D.C. has weak control laws (which were recently weakened by the NRA) also misses the point.  Von Brunn lived--as all of us do--in a complex, connected web of unredeemed powers that act as a cancer in the world. 

Walter Wink proposed that:

Redemption means actually being liberated from the oppression of the Powers, being forgiven for one's own sin and for complicity with the Powers, and setting about liberating the Powers themselves from their bondage to idolatry.  The good news is nothing less than a cosmic salvation, a restitution of all things, when God will "gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth". . . The gospel, then, is not a message about the salvation of individuals from the world, but news about a world transfigured, right down to its basic structures. (Wink, Powers That Be)

Progressive Christianity is in no way a morally relativistic vision; instead, it is emerging as a morally integrated theology.  We need to examine all the powers-at-play in Von Brunn's reprehensive moral act--to name and resist the Powers is one way to transformation.   It is wrong--in every case, everywhere, for everyone, and every institution--to target people and deny them basic human dignity because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual identity.  And equally wrong to let the "little" sins that contribute to the bigger evils to pass unchallenged.