Political Confessions (pt 2 of 4)

I want to thank brother Nic for his honest confession and compelling thoughts in our five-part conversation on politics and religion (has anyone heard of some election coming up soon??). While we’re being confessional here, I should probably go ahead and admit a few things of my own:

Confession #1:
I'm a realclearpolitics.com addict. I literally check the polls and the latest political editorials more often than I do my email theses days. In fact, I've checked the website three times in the process of writing this post. I could really use a support group to help me overcome this addiction! As a Christian, it really is embarrassing how much time I spend consuming the latest political news and ignoring the Christian story. I feel like I have more of a relationship with our presidential candidates than a relationship with Christ. I more publicly tout my identity within a certain political party than the fact that I am a Christian, and I certainly don't do much to live out some of the simplest of Christian acts like loving my neighbors, caring for the poor, etc… so I admit that in any conversation regarding the relationship between politics and religion (limited here to Christianity), it’s a lot easier for me to criticize and critique the political perspectives of certain Christians when I'm basically practicing a pseudo-Christianity. In other words, I feel like a hypocrite in even having this conversation, so I won't be offended if you don't take seriously a word I say…haha

Obviously, there is a tension here between politics and Christianity. In case any of my Rhetoric professors are reading this, I'm speaking of politics in the narrow sense of the operations, including the discourse and actions, of our local and national government and the participation of citizens in that government (in Rhetoric, we say that everything is political). It seems that Christianity is a totalizing system, a rhetorical lens through which to view all existence, and a model of being in this world. I wonder, if I was really living out my Christianity, if it would be possible, or desirable, to set aside my Christianity while participating in and thinking through political issues? Since it appears that Christianity is a system that works best from a position of powerlessness, why not advocate, as Nick hinted at, for complete non-political involvement? Christians didn't enjoy state power until the age of Constantine, so why not return to the pre-Constantinian, early church model?

While its easy to look at our government, that is often lead by self-proclaimed Christian men, and point out its glaring transgressions, hypocrisies, and policies that have anything but Christian effects, I'm not sure that exiting the political arena all together is the best course of action for Christians. I do think we need to reconcile what it means to preach a gospel of brokenness and powerlessness while aspiring to gain power, but more importantly, I think we should take the cue from Jim Wallis and consider a new question: How should religion/faith influence politics?

Confession #2:
I voted in 2004, my first eligible election, for Bush. Ashamedly, back then I never really cared or thought about politics, and I fell prey, like a wildebeest crossing the Masai Mara, to those predatory emails, warning me that the Bush/Kerry election was the most important election in the history of the world. Kerry, then, was the anti-Christ, and if I didn’t vote for Bush it was as good sticking my head inside the croc’s mouth!

It’s amazing how differently one’s perspective can change over four years, and at times I feel like I did stick my head inside the croc's mouth with my vote for Bush. Since '04, I’ve become much more politically informed as a result of seeing the disastrous, real life consequences of failed leadership in our government. Ironically, I’m getting the same emails again this year, but this time Obama is the ant-Christ and McCain is the only real Christian in the campaign. (If, indeed, being Christian means taking pro-life, pro-guns, anti-gay rights, and lower-tax positions)

As I’ve witnessed the voice and influence of the Christian community in this election year I’ve become rather ashamed of the lack of civil discourse exuded by many Christians. Why aren’t Christians the ones openly seeking to create a space where ideas can be rationally debated instead of spreading around false lies, presuming to know who’s Christian and who's not, whose preacher is more theologically sound than another’s, and conflating words they don’t understand (socialist, Marxist, communist) with “evil.” Sadly, the first person I read who made the strongest case for a new civil discourse was Sharon Crowley in Toward a Civil Discourse, and she's certainly no Christian.

Lately, I've been into simplifying things, and Jim Wallis, in The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America, offers up the simple notion that Christians should not seek to control the political arena, but to allow their Christian lens to serve as a moral center to the discussion. Such a moral center should focus on politics of the common good, with emphasis on the very larger issues of fighting poverty, hunger, disease, and environmental conservation. Christians should be motivated to tackle these issues because of their faith, but they can, and should make their arguments in ways that can be accepted by people of any faith or no faith.

In other words, I think Christians should be involved in politics if they can do so realizing that we do not live in a theocracy, we desperately need to find solutions to major problems, and so we should be the leaders in creating a space for civil discourse.

Can anyone say that our political culture is one of love and civility these days?

Confession #3:
While I’m being confessional, I might as well go ahead and tell you that I plan on voting for Obama.

I agree with Nick in that Obama will not be a Christian president if being a Christian president means enacting policies that align with Christianity. I can say that I am voting for him because I believe he would be a step in the right direction towards creating a new discourse of civility and rationality in our political culture. He's demonstrated an ability to work through difficult, controversial issues such as abortion and gay rights in fresh, respectful, thoughtful, non-irritative ways. In this sense, I do sing the praises of his nuance. I also think his civil temperament is exactly what we need in a culture stifled by Left v. Right ideology. I don't presume to know if Obama's Christianity is informing his belief in finding middle ground, but I do know the actions of our political leaders directly affect the lives of not only our own citizens, but people around the world, and so it is vital that our next president be able to create a civil space large issues can be honestly and urgently addressed. I look forward to a president who can be a voice of reason and leadership on key issues that all Christians should be concerned about. I hope that more Christians will become politically involved but in a way that respects the voices of non-Christians.

I know I haven't necessarily made a theologically compelling argument here, but hopefully I've offered a simple idea of how Christians can and should be involved in politics in way that doesn't seek power, but the common good.

Sacred Texts on the Toilet

I mentioned in a response to Bryce’s excellent discussion on virtue-ethics last week that it would likely take an entire post to support my claim that Christianity has been, and is, yoked to a world-view grounded in semiotics. As it turns out, I’ve approached the subject in more roundabout manner than I originally intended—I hope the presentation does not detract from the promised explanation.

I saw Saint Augustine today, weeping under a fig tree as he watched me thumb through his Confessions on the toilet. In 4th century Hippo, most people probably shat communally as they sat atop stone privies designed to accommodate multiple participants. “Noli spectare. Perturbat me . . .”—this circumstance was perhaps not as convenient for light reading as is our current situation.


So, naturally, I could understand his confusion and disappointment as I skimmed over his conversion experience—the climactic triumph of his spirit over flesh—in such close proximity to excrement, which probably happens to be a good distance from the regenerate soul on the ladder of spiritual ascendance.

I know someone like Whitman wouldn't have minded and, in fact, would have likely welcomed this proximity; however, I had the distinct impression that Augustine was not pleased in the least. So I nodded, gently lay the book aside and began to think about the nature of sacred texts—particularly, whether or not they created or should be reserved for sacred spaces (unlike the one I currently occupied). Perhaps they demanded a more reverent physical and spiritual posture, a more solemn response.

For example, most patristic scholars contend that Augustine intended his Confessions to be read reflectively. He envisioned a connection between meditation, as a spiritual exercise, and reading. Thus, by tracing his own journey of self-discovery, which of course culminates in spiritual conversion, Augustine encouraged his readers to try out his method for themselves—uniting their own souls’ progress with the memory of their physical bodies’ passage through historical time just as he did. As Brian Stock suggests, “The individual life thereby became the setting for the reenactment of the biblical drama of alienation and return.” It is this speculation of Augustine’s authorial intent that consistently thwarts my attempts to shake the conviction that the bishop of Hippo did not imagine a toilet as the stage upon which my personal passion play, the death of my old self and resurrection of the new, would be reenacted. Ultimately, my disconcertedness emanates from the knowledge that the critical problem of Augustine’s Confessions is the translation of thought into action for both himself and his audience. And as I considered this problem with elbows upon knees, hands supporting head and bare feet pressed to cool linoleum, I couldn’t help but feel that my present action was not the most accurate physical translation of Augustine’s metaphysical message.

Perhaps when the saint gazed into the future to picture me reading his autobiography, I was seated beside a wooden prayer bench in a sunlit reading room as a single beam of light like a dove descended from heaven to anoint a particular passage before my eyes. Surely he did not suppose his most intimate work would be the subject of my powder-room perusal. To clarify, it’s not that I think Augustine is necessarily too stilted or sanctimonious to read on the toilet; it’s just that I don’t want to spoil his expectations. I don’t want to take lightly the ethical demands of his text—a text that is considered by many to be sacred.


This leads me to wonder whether secondary sources pertaining to Augustine are also off limits—perhaps, as long as I just skip over quoted passages? Only, this seems like a slippery slope because, as we all know, I’m not reading a first-hand account to begin with. I’m reading Henry Chadwick’s translation, which is only one translation in a long chain of translations and reinterpretations extending all the way back to the 4th century. And here in lies the problem—every new reading is new translation, meaning it must be the sense of the text that is sacred rather than the words on the page—and the sense seems inescapable.

Initially, I intended to suggest that bathroom reading might be a sort of litmus test for sacred texts—if you feel guilty reading it on the toilet, perhaps it’s sacred. However, for Augustine, all truth is God’s truth—all signs, natural and conventional, point to God. Thus, in the Augustinian semiotic explanation of the creation’s relationship to its creator, the sacred becomes inescapable--even on the toilet.

In light of this revelation, Augustine challenges us to assume vocations of “logobiography”— making it our lives’ objective to demonstrate the manner in which we are written into the text of God’s creation (here is where I begin to see obvious connections to our discussion of virtue-ethics). According to the saint, we should recognize our function as signs and producers of signs that point perpetually beyond our/themselves to the referent who subsumes the system of representation.

Of course, I’m not advocating that we return to a medieval world-view in which every mundane occurrence becomes a “sign” from God—I’m merely attempting to suggest that Christianity’s past and present rootedness in semiotics may be conceived of as a contiguous process. For example, I do not believe Augustine’s conception necessarily negates postmodernism’s notion that meaning is linguistically and thus socially constructed, but might rather suggest that the materials with which society constructs have their immutable origins in an original word. Therefore, while incorporeal conceptions such as love, justice and truth might ultimately originate in the logos, the corporeal and thus temporal and malleable manifestations of these conceptions are contingent upon the imbricated vocabularies we employ to communicate them. As reader-response critics Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs suggest, our “language enables the ‘word of God’ to ‘speak.’”

Thus, in the reciprocal relationship between creator and created, the word first spoken by God is incarnated in and perpetuated by the thought and action of humanity. And if—as I suggested in my response to Daniel’s recent post—the divine logos pervades and is perpetuated by manifold discourses, contact and negotiation between multiple and divergent perspectives can be conceived of as an essential element in a process of revelation, which Ricoeur describes as “opening something that is closed, of making manifest something that was hidden.”

Ricoeur’s conception of revelation as process also serves as a reminder of what Augustine refers to as our status viatoris—our perpetual state of being on the way, which provides a valuable caution against attempts to reconcile discordant discourses for the achievement of hegemonic consensus. As Bakhitn asserts, “Christ’s truth is real, but its authority cannot be known as dogma or proposition. Genuine truth always involves more work and more risk than dogma or propositions require of us.”

Intersections of Rhetoric and Theology--A Social Ethic of Love

Let me begin by confessing, up front, that I am no theologian. My training is in rhetoric. However, any sweeping survey of rhetorical studies, both ancient and contemporary, would be incomplete without addressing the vast connections between both fields. Rhetoric informs theology and, if you agree with Kenneth Burke, theology informs rhetoric -- they are both mutually dependent (i.e. Burke would argue God is a function of language, so when language dies God dies). For my inaugural post, I thought it would be good, mainly for my sake in being a theological novice, to start with what I'm familiar -- namely, the rhetorical -- and point out one way in which I see the two fields overlapping. And in case you're wondering, I am including a large selection of a recent paper I completed on rhetorical discourse and religious fundamentalism. In this post I will argue that Christian theology offers a rhetorical framework, in God's ethic of love, which dictates the performance of the social. As you read, please view this as jumping off point, and not an all-encompassing, fully thought-out exercise. I simply want to begin the larger pursuit of seeing the intersections of rhetoric and theology (I'd recommend reading Burke's landmark study The Rhetoric of Religion for a more comprehensive analysis)

The Christian story begins with God setting the world in motion, establishing order, and yet also endowing humans with the ability to choose. If order is established by command, such as when God commands Adam to not eat the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2.17), then "the word-using animal not only understands a thou-shalt-not; it can carry the principle of the negative a step further, and answer the thou-shalt-not with a disobedient No" (Burke qtd. in Biesecker 69). With Adam's choice to disobey God's command we see that action contains an ethical element, to act rightly or wrongly, which is made possible by the principle of the negative, or the idea of no. While it may seem, then, that the source of ethics lies in the individual subject, we must remember that Adam's decision not only affects him, but also his relationship to God, to nature, and to Eve. Therefore, God reveals his ethic of love through Christ, who Alan Jacobs reminds us, is "the one identified by the Christian Church as the incarnate love" (9). Christ famously declares, in Matthew 22.37-39: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind'. . . . And . . . 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" These two commandments, central to the Christian message, set the standard for the ethical relationship between the self and other that constitute the social.

If language predicates the existence of the social then rhetoric gives us a means of navigating the difference made possible by the principle of the negative, and God's ethic of love limits the possibilities of movement within the paradox of the always and already fractured relationship between "I," "You," and "We." Thus, Burke famously says:

If men [and women] were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorican to proclaim their unity. If men [and women] were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man's [and woman's] very essence. (qtd. in Biesecker 100).

So we can see, now, that language itself is proof of our incompleteness. Absolute communication, or unity, should never be a goal of an individual or community, because we know it is not possible. But what is possible, and what should be a goal, is the pursuit of love and love in the pursuit of the "other." As Biesecker concludes, "For Burke, that is to say, it is precisely the impossibility of closing the gap between self and other that keeps us engaged with one another, talking to one another, courting one another; that forever keeps us 'promot[ing]' social cohesion by acting rhetorically upon [our]selves and one another'" (100). The principle of the negative may be the motivation that keeps us "acting rhetorically upon ourselves," but God's ethic of love powerfully dictates how we are to act rhetorically. If the central message of the bible, and indeed the central message of Christianity, is the love of God and others, we can see why a Christian might be so well-equipped to engage in discourse that never forecloses difference, and act not only of responsibility but love.

Ultimately, this is why I want to contribute to this communal theology blog--not because I think that I, or any other writer, can reach some determinable end of knowledge or spiritual assent, but because I am spiritually convicted to act rhetorically with/upon others, not to mention the great pleasure I find in the process. So please, feel free to respond, critique, rebuke, or condemn anything you read on this blog. It's all part of the rhetorical process to which we are all committed.