Barack Obama Will Not Be a Christian President (Politics Conversation, 1 of 4)

There is something I have been reluctant to confess publicly. I have tried to submit to the generally optimistic mood recently, the optimism concerning the prospect of electing such a dramatically different man from the Current Occupant—and not just a dramatically different man; a dramatically different, Christian man. Many Christian liberals and progressives are feeling the premonitions of a New Day coming, a day when a man will be put in office who understands and can give voice to the Christian concern for poverty, a man who demonstrates spellbinding, riveting philosophical acumen and theological sensitivity when discussing (heretofore) impenetrably difficult issues like homosexuality and abortion (The nuance, O the nuance! How we sing thy praise!), yes, a man who at one point was so impervious to cultural whims about noncommittal displays of patriotism that he even refused to wear a flag pin!

But I fear I cannot submit to this optimism any longer. True, I was even for a time a leader in the front lines of the troops of optimism, that veritable Army of Hope, only six months ago. But I can no longer wave that flag, the flag I waved when I phone banked for the Democrat during the Texas primaries (But Barack Obama could be that Christian President we’ve been praying for!...[click]). My confession is this: I fear Barack Obama will not in fact be a Christian President if he is elected next week.*

This is because the very epithet “Christian President” has already begun to collapse in on itself, even before Mr. Obama arrived on the scene. There are a couple of ways I could describe the incommensurability of the concepts “Christian” and “President”. I could take one route, the one William T. Cavanaugh takes, and trace the genealogy of the modern state back to its genesis in the 17th century as a struggle between an imperialistic, totalizing national State and the other social bodies that stood in its way (feudal hierarchies, trade guilds, the church). The invention of modern “human rights” was a brilliant act of thaumaturgy that guaranteed civilians something they already had under feudal arrangements, and the expanding liberal state sold the idea as a way to undercut the legitimacy of these other social bodies. Perhaps more importantly, the rise of “universal human rights” happened to coincide with the rise of the state’s monopoly on violence—human rights were merely a way for the state to cash in on its own prize to itself. In this line of thinking, the church and the modern state are therefore inherently at odds with one another, and Christians must chose sides, drive their boot heels into the ground and defend the integrity of the church against the state’s unceasing megalomania.

Or perhaps we do not have to go that far; perhaps we do not have to accuse Mr. Obama of being an unwitting actor in an unfolding drama that has already been scripted for him. Maybe we can instead take him at his own word. In a 2006 speech on faith and politics, Mr. Obama described the difficulty of carrying one’s faith commitments and political commitments simultaneously. Whereas politics is the art of the possible, marked by an appreciation for compromise and negotiation, religion is the art of the impossible, he said.

Abraham was righteous precisely because he threw himself at the feet of a call that made absolutely no sense. Jesus calls us to turn the other cheek, even though it is an open invitation for someone to come in and be a tyrant. But how much room is there for the impossible when you have already been sworn into an arena where the “possible” is played, and played exclusively? Is there much elbow room in a Senate packed with lobbyists’ money?

Christians must bear witness to the impossible by living according to radical hospitality and forgiveness in a world that takes victims that are not even hospitable or forgiving. Christians invite thieves into their homes even when their valuables are within easy reach. Christians give away money to causes even when it will empty their bank accounts. Christians do not even shoot back at the man who has just taken the lives of five of their little girls.

So what is so Christian about threatening to invade Pakistan because of reason to believe terrorists are hiding there? What is so Christian about sending billions in military aid instead of humanitarian and development aid to a country already as war-torn as Afghanistan? What is so Christian about throwing immigrants back across the border to countries we have helped keep in perpetual poverty? Is there any room for the impossible to budge—even just a little—in an Oval Office beset on every side by guns, dirty money and the ephemeral tides of populism? It would be nice to think that there is, but one can understand the pessimism of someone like myself who has seen the United States government act one way and one way only in his lifetime. If politicians will not bear witness to the impossible, then are we to leave them to their own devices so we can do a better job ourselves, so that the Amish are not the only ones still concerned with peace? I do not know.

*Do not read this confession as a suggestion that the integrity of Mr. Obama's faith should be doubted or that I will not vote for him. I will, gladly.

Moses Deconstructed (Prolegomenon)

The following is an act of outright plagiarism of CUNY professor emeritus of philosophy Edith Wyschogrod and her article, "Eating the Text, Defiling the Hands." The weblogger will move seamlessly in and out of Wyschogrod's text so as to create uncertainty regarding the authorship of ideas, effectively resulting in a boosting of credit in the weblogger's favor and at the expense of Wyschogrod's good name.

Moses descended from Mount Sinai with two stone tablets in hand, and happened upon the scene of the greatest act of blasphemy in human history. The Israelites had given up their finest jewelry for Aaron to melt down and fashion into a golden calf. It was a beautiful calf, the people were pleased, and they said, "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." It looked exactly like this:

Moses, who, as we all know, wrote the book of Exodus in real time, as it was happening (this is how he managed to write his own epitaph - he wrote it as he was dying), had only to scroll back to Chapter 20, verses 2-3, to perceive that something was awry: "I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Moses did an on-the-fly synchronic textual analysis of this commandment and the Israelites' above-quoted pronouncement, and identified the polar opposition between the two. Aaron and the Israelites almost seemed to have gone out of their way to invert the First Commandment word for word. Moses was indignant, and he looked exactly like this:

We tend to have either of two reactions to this. Aaron and the Israelites either had a terrible memory, and simply couldn't remember the First Commandment, or Aaron was a great blasphemer who wanted to Stick It To The Man for making them wait so long in the desert.

Then we read a bit more carefully and see that Aaron was a righteous man, and he evidently had the makings of a good pastor. Right after the erection of the calf, Scripture reads, "And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD." The golden calf was raised up in the name of the Lord. The people, weary of merely hearing of God's promises, needed a concrete way to see and experience their God, who was distant from them. Aaron gave them the calf as a visual and imaginative aid to their conception of YHWH, as a sign of hope that their God was real and would fulfill his covenant with them. While this was a good move pastorally for Aaron, he was out of step theologically: In Egypt the Israelites would have been accustomed to seeing grand idols in the Egyptian gods' honor, so showing the grandness of Israel's God through a golden idol would have, in some sense, legitimized YHWH in their eyes. However, YHWH was the imageless God, the God beyond all materiality and all understanding, and Moses knew this. YHWH could not be contained in any human categories, could not be emulated visually, indeed, could not even be named.

We've all heard this before. But here is where I think it gets interesting. (This is an explicitly theological-philosophical reading, not an attempt to capture the "original intent" of the text, pace trained biblical exegetes.) Moses descended Mount Sinai with the two stone tablets - the Very Word of God - in hand, and suddenly realized he was complicit in their sin. The tablets he carried were in effect authoritative representations of God's own will, God's own intentionality. He understood this, and had to act:

And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

Moses and Aaron represent the twin modes of understanding God: Aaron embodies the power of the image, of the phenomenal manifestation of the divine in the physical world; Moses stands for the ideality of God, the law, the words that create understanding of an invisible and unimaginable God. Both men are in the business of bearing and communicating the divine in human categories so that their people may believe. Moses recognized the people's proclivity for idolatry and understood that, if the golden calf had to be dismantled and burned, the tablets must be broken also. The idea of an original set of tablets, an original inscription of God's very words, simply carried too much potential for idolatry. So he smashed them against the rocks and wrote a second copy, so that all would know that the best we can lay claim to is a copy, which is really a copy of a copy.

Which is really a copy of a copy of a copy, right? Moses' breaking of the stones was a symbolic act, the function of which was to underscore the unattainableness of any kind of original foundation that we can confidently seize and claim as our own. Umberto Eco supposedly said somewhere that the universe is like an onion, and an onion is all peel. You peel back layers trying to find a core, but what you get are more layers. We try to peel back the layers of church history to find the "true Christian community" in the primitive church, and then we see that the early church was riddled with problems, and probably didn't have the kind of robust theology we'd like to credit them with. Then we try to peel back layers of Paul's letters to find the manuscripts that contain the best representation of the Apostle's "original intent", and then we realize that he's reflecting on his experience of seeing Christ. So we take it to the gospels. But after enough layer-peeling we realize that it is impossible to access the man of Jesus independent of a shroud of texts - texts layered over texts layered over texts. Matthew and Luke are layered over Mark, Mark's account was layered over Peter's testimony, Peter's testimony is layered with his cultural and historical assumptions (an "archi-text", if you will).

This is not to say that theology is ultimately meaningless since there's no escape from the endless layer-peeling. It is to say, however, that theology is to be found in the layers, in the shifting sands of our finite knowledge. It is the discomfort with layers that results in all our incessant calf-building - materialism, nationalism, humanism, fundamentalism, scientism, individualism, and, the most difficult golden calf to dismantle, our understanding. The orgiastic Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai suddenly look much different when we identify ourselves in them. We are uncomfortable with the uncertainty, the wandering in the desert, the waiting for Moses to descend from the mountain and deliver the goods. Moses will arrive, eventually, and when he does we might be disappointed to find that all he carries are broken tablets, tablets that only defer to what is beyond and behind them, that is, the One who is beyond all names.

...

And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.

Exodus 34:6-7