How can we answer religious and racial bigotry? -- Johan Maurer

Johan writes his Quaker blog with jazz riffs Can you believe? from Elektrostal, Russia, where he teaches English. This Sep 2 reflection (see also his Aug 19 posting) finds echo in QEW discussions about seeking alternatives to disaster messaging and Tea Party lies. Its wider question is about whether and how to speak truth to power, when that power is the state or violent state-tolerated persecutors, to "turn the other cheek" into quietism, or to seek "that of God" in the persecutor -- a question that will always face peace churches. Note: illustrations below and their captions are ours, not his - Ed.

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"A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger." (Proverbs 15:1)

Yesterday morning, schools all over Russia celebrated the day of knowledge, reassembling after the summer and opening the new school year. The New Humanities Institute did the same. Several of the teachers spoke to their assembled students and colleagues; I was one of them. Here's what I said, more or less:

We've promised you hard work, but we've also promised fun times. And maybe I add to the fun when I speak Russian.

Like some of you, when I woke up this morning and opened my eyes, I just wanted to close them and go back to sleep. But I didn't.

After opening my eyes, the second thing I usually do is read the news. From years of news-reading, it seems to me that the basic sin of our era as that we too often objectify each other. We take human beings and treat them like objects. The answer to this evil begins with knowledge and mutual understanding.

I'm convinced that, as a result of your work, the world will be a better place. So, let's get to work together.

Is it just me, or is the drumbeat of objectification, polarization, mockery, somehow increasing? And what should our response be? I'm not the only one raising similar questions--see Liz Opp's "Silence on a stick" and Eileen Flanagan's "Finding my voice." A few months ago I reflected here on the dilemmas of Quaker corporate advocacy (first post; second post), and in view of the new Israeli/Palestinian negotiations, those thoughts might still be relevant, at least for the questions, "When do we take sides, and how?" But are there times when it's less an issue of "taking sides" and more an issue of simply confronting mean or outrageous conduct? Assuming we want to stay rooted in our faith (and believe me, there are times when I want to let 'er rip without any reference to those roots!), how do we participate in the public arena?

Withdrawal is always an option, and it's one that we Quakers often choose. Today I unsubscribed from an "experts" list on Russia because I finally got fed up with the participants' cynicism about the activists who march in favor of Russia's constitutional guarantee of free assembly. My feelings about Russian politics today are very complex, and I believe as a foreigner I need to be humble--Americans don't always have all the answers. (Even when we know we don't have all the answers, our constant willingness to jump in and "solve" other people's problems makes it appear that we think we do!) But this particular forum seems to specialize in bad-mouthing other experts not in the forum, and in polarizing every issue into false dichotomies. After composing several drafts of an exquisitely nuanced response to the nasty comments about demonstrators who love getting their heads bashed by the police in front of foreign journalists, I finally exited, said "life is too short," and unsubscribed. Did I perhaps betray lurkers who might have welcomed a more balanced contribution? Maybe. I can't fight every battle.

Back when Quaker e-mail lists and online forums were just getting started, I used to be very active on those lists. I was especially zealous to defend Friends United Meeting from unfair attacks, which were frequent and often ill-informed. Although Quaker forums are often unbelievably courteous compared to what's out there in the rest of the world, I learned the hard way how easy it is for one or two people to make online life very unpleasant for the rest. Since those forums were probably reaching something under 0.1% of the Quaker public, it seemed like a better stewardship of time simply to say goodbye--although sadly, because the conversations were often very worthwhile.

Glenn Beck, Time 14 Sep 09
"social justice is a code word for Communism" 2010

Back to the wider stage. Right now Glenn Beck is taking up a lot of U.S. media space. I can barely stand even to type his name, much less take time to comment on his repulsive but apparently profitable mix of religiosity and nationalism. But ...

(1) don't I have a valid point of view on our country's need for revival, and about who gets to say when this revival has started? What can I put out there in the public square that has even the slightest chance of connecting with someone I disagree with, rather than simply raising an amen with others sharing my opinions?

(2) Don't I actually agree with at least some of his followers that the government has slipped out of our (the people's) control? My evidence is NOT the same as "theirs"--I approve of taxation to "promote the general welfare" (to quote the U.S. Constitution). And I approve of regulation to restrain private greed and guarantee the equal protection of the law. I even believe in deficit spending if the effect is an investment in future revenue. But the national security apparatus and our state of permanent warfare threatens us with both moral and financial bankruptcy. In sum, there really are reasons for alienation--shouldn't we take steps to compare our analyses with all those who have arrived at this diagnosis?

(3) What does my description of Glenn Beck, and my use of the adjective "repulsive," say about my own spiritual maturity, my own capacity to sustain a civil dialogue? To whom am I accountable, as a disciple, for the language I use? Does anger excuse intemperate language in public? But does "moderation" always serve the cause of honesty?

Anti-Islamic (Park 51 mosque)
hate-blogger Pam Geller of
Atlas Shrugs, SIOA and Fox News

Sometimes I don't even know where to start. Take the Park 51 project in Manhattan, for example. If the Cordoba House organizers have accurately described their plans and those plans meet zoning laws, that to me is the end of the discussion. Build it or don't build it--why should I care? I don't even live in the neighborhood. But can I pretend not to have noticed the flood of venom emitted by the project's opponents? And is there any doubt that this venom is specifically linked to the project's Muslim identity? So what then is my responsibility, belonging as I do to a Christian community whose evangelists were once executed for refusing to stay out of Massachusetts? But how do I express my passionate belief that this discussion shouldn't even be happening!? Does my stirring the pot serve justice, or perversely add credibility to an absurd and artificial controversy?

Back to the Proverbs 15 quotation. What might a biblical "gentle answer" consist of? Maybe "gentle" doesn't mean meek and mild, but instead meets a different standard, refusing to objectify Glenn Beck into a cardboard caricature, refusing to minimize his supporters as if their alienation had no objective basis, even while taking strenuous issue with their (alleged) civil religion. Maybe it means being persistent, delivering our own positive assertions in season and out of season, and being less obsessed with refuting others.

Many thanks to Liz Opp and Eileen Flanagan for helping me think through these questions. What do you think?
[Note: see his original post and leave a comment. More about Maurer and other Quakers in Marshall Massey's Earthwitness Journal]

Fear and "security" -- by Johan Maurer

Johan Maurer is an evangelical Friend who has travelled to many parts of the Quaker world: USA, UK, Canada, parts of Eastern Europe and Africa. He is currently living in Elektrostal, Russia, visiting Lithuania and Latvia. This 24 Aug 2006 Can you believe? post is reprinted with his permission.

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For many years my Lenten season reading has included The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love by Emmanuel Charles McCarthy (photo, left).

When George Bush responded to the court decision declaring his war-on-terrorism wiretapping unconstitutional by saying, "Those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live," I thought about the spiritual implications of Bush's words, and that reminded me of McCarthy's booklet. [Canadians may wish to reflect on our government's similar refusal to obey our Charter of Rights and Supreme Court. - Ed.]

On a political level, it's easy to see the weakness in Bush's logic. If our courts begin making decisions based on trying to interpret "the nature of the world in which we live," rather than trying to interpret the Constitution, we're heading for anarchy, or more likely, a dictatorship of the politically cleverest. But Bush's warning may be much more effective at a deeper level. Over and over again in history, we've seen people being persuaded that safety requires compromising our ostensible values.

Many years ago, James Prothro and Charles Grigg (I'm reaching back into my distant memories of studying political science at Carleton University!) found a distinct difference between people's support of political tolerance in the abstract and their considerably lower tolerance in concrete situations. Every once in a while, political scientists tweak the rest of us by showing that Americans claim to cherish the Declaration of Independence, but when shown actual unlabeled text from that declaration, they declare it dangerous, communist, and the like. So it's not surprising that today's politicians try out yet again that old argument that during a "war" we cannot afford the luxury of our values. Or, rather, they propose another value, safety, that supposedly trumps civil liberties and due process.

However, to remain politically useful, "safety" as a value must remain abstract as well! When we begin studying safety in concrete terms, problems arise:

• Somehow, the politicians must convince us, their audiences, that we will remain safe, while hoping that we don't think too much about the safety of others. For example, many innocent people have been severely inconvenienced or worse by being put on terrorist watch lists, arrested as material witnesses, or in a few (how many?) cases, kidnapped by U.S. or allied forces for interrogation and even torture. But we must believe that this won't happen to us, even though our protections are being compromised in the service of the war on terrorism, and the government argues that judicial due process would reveal too many secrets. Above all, we must not question the proposition that humans who are not U.S. citizens are to be completely disregarded in any offer of safety.
• We must believe that the threat of terrorism is of a completely different order than the threat of natural disaster, crime, or any other danger whose probability increases as government resources are sucked away into this mislabeled "war." The government's unbelievably screwed-up response to Hurricane Katrina shows what the all-encompassing we-know-best claims of this war's leaders did for the actual safety of Gulf states' citizens.
• We must believe in several lies at once: terrorism is a monolithic phenomenon, a new phenomenon, a manifestation of very clever subhumans who cannot be communicated with, an intractable and implacable reality that only our leaders can understand and manage, despite their disastrous record to date. We must want safety so badly that we overlook our leaders' actual performance in favor of their stern claims of authority and expertise.

The power of government to claim a monopoly on defining safety is ultimately a spiritual issue, and requires a spiritual confrontation, because in one sense, the politicians are right: we are not safe. Safety is not guaranteed, neither in terms of protection from physical harm, nor in terms of quality and scope of life.

Each of us, at this moment, faces multiple dangers, ranging at varying degrees of probability or absurdity from disease and accident, to violent crime, to a direct impact from a meteor. In an interesting paradox given George Bush's rhetoric of freedom, perhaps the more we actually claim and use freedom publicly and effectively in this world, the more we expose ourselves to danger. (Effective dissidents must count on the possibility that their activities will draw the attention of our "security" agencies.) This brings me to Charles McCarthy's main points on safety in The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love. Addressing the pro-family claims of the Powers that Be in Station IV, he asks, "Can Christian family love and relationship find any lasting security in any source other than unconditional obedience to God’s will as revealed by Jesus Christ?" Addressing the hypnotic pseudo-security of our culture, he says, in Station VI,

It is easy to find hope, security and a future in the G.N.P., a national anthem, a football team, military technology, Disneyland, drugs, fashion and alcohol. It is nearly impossible in a capitalist society to find hope in the patient, secret commitment to the omnipotence of Christic love. Such a use of life is incontestable folly by all standards except one—Jesus’ teaching that the cross of nonviolent love is the power and the wisdom and the will of The Source of all Reality.

At a Friends World Committee regional conference shortly after the first Gulf War, T. Canby Jones warned us bluntly: We cannot understand Christian pacifism until we have confronted our own mortality. My corollary, in light of Bush's warning about the "world in which we live": The way we live in this world must not be dictated by fear. Otherwise, whatever safety we think we have, our death will come much too soon. If Jesus is our partner in shaping the way we live, and we have good friends listening and shaping and sharing our doubts and discoveries alongside us, fear and death will recede to their proper places—they're certainly not out of the picture, but whatever life we have, we don't live in their shadow.

One more excerpt from Charles McCarthy:

To those who do not believe in Christ’s cross of nonviolent love, its truth is folly, a scandal, an unrealistic waste of life’s time. To those who believe, it is nails, thorns, spears and suffering for others until the blind can see, until the lame can walk, until the imprisoned are freed, until the hungry are fed, until the oppressed are liberated, until the naked are clothed, until the sick are healed, until the rich are saved, until the homeless are at home, until the unlovable are loved, until all sins are forgiven. The believer in Christ’s nonviolent cross breathes in deeply the sufferings of humanity and breathes out freely his or her happiness in order to spread the healing power of nonviolent love as Divine Yeast in the dough of humanity.

If we advocate focusing on quality of life as a crucial dimension of safety, "nails, thorns, spears, and suffering for others" may seem to be unpromising lifestyle components. How can we breathe in "the sufferings of humanity" and breathe out "happiness"? For me, the crucial factor is the desire to have my eyes open, to be exposed to reality. I don't want happiness at the expense of ignorance, and it's too late to pretend not to know what I know. My mother survived Hiroshima, one of my sisters was murdered ... the Beast has come too close to my home.

My own experience is that, before my conversion, I never thought I'd be happy again, or able to trust. Jesus restored both joy and trust to me, but did not promise to keep me "safe" from reality. From my vantage point, reality includes both love and evil. My moment-by-moment task is to breathe love, and devote whatever power I have to its service, and let my God-given mind (and my faithful friends) help me stay alert to evil's attempts to divert my energy. That's why I want to deny politicians the right to put evil at the center of their definition of "the nature of the world in which we live." I can't live that way anymore.

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Bill Samuel brought to my attention this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, on the difficulties of leadership in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Quaker culture. He and I have both commented on the article in the related post on Martin Kelley's weblog.

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Here's another writer, Pete Greig of Chichester, England and the 24-7 Prayer community, who recognizes the spiritual dimension of war and war language. It is so heartening to see a new generation of evangelical leaders grappling openly with the place of politics in their piety.

It is blatant to many of us (though few politicians will ever dare voice this particular truth) that the theatre of war is first and foremost a spiritual reality which requires a spiritual solution. You cannot bomb for peace. We all know that negotiation is better (and lets pray for Kofi Annan ... and the UN at this time) [how many American evangelicals say that?!], but even negotiation misses the root cause of contention. Here we have a series of conflicts that are deeply and ultimately spiritual, secondly ideological and thirdly territorial. You can bomb for territory. You can negotiate between ideologies. But the primary spiritual reality can only be engaged on earth as it is in heaven. This is why we intercede in prayer.