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Comment
Lynda Gould
From
the Director
David Porter
Christian
Citizenship and Northern Ireland
Drew Gibson
Church
and State in Conflict - Ambrose
Alwyn Thomson
Christian
Citizenship in the Republic of Ireland
Patrick Mitchel
Church
and State in Conflict - Hubmaier
Alwyn Thomson
Beautiful
Ministry
Graham Cheesman
The
Cost of Citizenship
William Storrar (Scotland)
Early
Days in the National Assembly for Wales
Aled Edwards
Church
and State in Conflict - Kasemann
Alwyn Thomson
A
Light to Enlighten the Nations
J A Sider (USA)
Church
and State in Conflict - Summary
Alwyn Thomson
A LIGHT TO
ENLIGHTEN THE NATIONS...
I am a member of a
small Anabaptist group known as the Brethren in Christ. Like so many Anabaptist
groups, the church has historically been committed to a peaceable way
of life. It is more than a little ironic then, to find that former U.S.
President and WWII General Dwight D. Eisenhower attended the Brethren
in Christ Sunday School in Abilene, Kansas as a boy. And it is much more
ironic to note the embarrassing correlation between Eisenhower’s
presidential candidacy in 1956 and the sharp increase in the number of
American Mennonites and Brethren in Christ who voted in that election.
That the United States’ president who claimed that American democracy
depended on “a deeply held religious faith, and I don't care what
it is” had an (admittedly dubious) Anabaptist pedigree proved to
be a decisive factor in the struggle for American Anabaptists to cast
off the millstone of ‘die Stillen im Lande’ that had hung around
their necks. Accordingly we took our place as another in the long list
of urbane, middle-class religious communities in America vying for a voice
in a pluralistic society. The animus to be Anabaptists ‘and good
Americans too’ proved too strong for most Brethren in Christ people
in the last four decades to stop and ask whether ‘Christian Citizenship’
is an oxymoronic notion. After all, Christians are not primarily citizens,
but members of the body of Christ.
This perhaps states the matter too easily. For it does not directly address the issue of how the church, as a body with its own mission and its own distinctive social processes, can or should be related to the interests and needs of the rest of society. Starting to answer that question is the goal of this inquiry. But first I want to say a word about why the notion of ‘citizenship’ is one that no longer serves the world well. We typically understand a citizen to be a person either born or naturalized into a nation to which she owes allegiance and by means of whose government she can expect the protection of certain of her interests under the law (in the United States we like to list these interests under the headings: ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’). But it is by no means clear that modern people can meaningfully owe allegiance to a nation. Why not? For two reasons.
The first and most obvious reason is our allegiances lie elsewhere. There are as many institutions vying for our primary loyalties as there are conceptions of in what those loyalties consist. But we must resist the temptation to embrace the homogenizing master narratives of theories like Marxism, because this only paralyzes us in the face of an irresistible force called ‘capitalism’ or ‘the market’. To argue that the consumer culture in which we live insures that our first loyalties are to Reebok, Ford, Anheuser-Busch, and Microsoft rather than to a nation, while true in certain important respects, is, when all is said and done, simply uninteresting. Such an ahistorical narrative is self-perpetuating in that it creates an atmosphere of helplessness and despair, since it saps its adherents’ enthusiasms and their anxieties, both of which are essential components to imaginative renderings of who and where we are.
Neither,
however, should we be particularly swayed by the various attempts to locate
our loyalties in a carefully cultivated cosmopolitanism. In one such attempt,
Martha Nussbaum has suggested that we learn to conceive of ourselves as
‘citizens of a world of human beings’. But, as Amy Gutmann has
rightly pointed out, it remains unclear whether the concept of citizenship
is coherent when abstracted from an embodied, institutional politics of
the kind which liberal democratic states purport to provide. Gutmann further
argues that, while our primary allegiance is moral, it ‘is to justice-to
doing what is right’, and ‘Doing what is right cannot be reduced
to loyalty to, or identification with, any existing group of human beings’,
loyalty to the virtue of justice is a central concern of ‘democratic
citizenship’.1
So, while Nussbaum, in good Stoic fashion, dissociates ‘citizenship’
from a correlative politics, Gutmann does her one better. She not only
extricates the notion of citizenship from ‘any existing group of
human beings’, but further abstracts the ‘morally salient’
virtue of justice from the (somehow still) politically salient concerns
of democratic citizenship. I know of no way to characterize such a position
except as an example of the Kantian legacy left over from the Enlightenment.
There can be no doubt that the kinds of Idealist gymnastics Nussbaum and Gutmann perform are ubiquitous, but that does not entail that they tell the stories of our allegiances well. Rather, they serve only to corroborate my second claim concerning the incoherences attendant upon the notion of citizenship in today’s world, namely that the character of the modern liberal state inexorably distorts the character of allegiance to the point of unrecognizability. This is so because of the particular way in which modernism shapes our desires.
Sometime
ago, ‘modernity’ stopped referring to an era that began with
the rise of expansive money economies in the late fourteenth century and
started to denote the ethos of a set of societies at once in a state of
incoherent fragmentation and yet blandly homogeneous. As Nicholas Boyle
puts it in Who Are We Now?, “The great institutions that gave
… [our societies] depth and complexity fade away. Instead we have
on the one hand the undifferentiated mass of individual ‘consumers’,
and on the other hand the legislative and executive power of central government
organizing those same masses, but as workers, into employment and unemployment
and enforcing its will, in the last analysis, by the power of the police.”2
And, although Boyle refers to the increased role of the police in British
life since 1979, it is legitimate to take his reference in a much more
‘Orwellian’ sense. Modernism is a story that constantly polices
us. In narrating our lives as those of ‘individual consumers’,
it habituates us into a form of life in which our desires are characterized
as goods and services obtained ‘in exchange for payment at the market
rate’.3
We come to believe the way our desires are shaped is the way they have
to be. In consequence, the notions of allegiance and citizenship straight-jacket
behaviors that are meant to maximize our individual potential for acquisitiveness.
The stories we are told about the world today boil down to this: the good
citizen is the most voracious consumer.
The absence of any nuanced account of our desires explains appeals to non-institutional and abstract notions of citizenship like those of Nussbaum and Gutmann. This is neither surprising nor new because virtues like justice cannot but be disembodied ideals when the fabric of the society that touts them is actively hostile to the habits and dispositions that help us to cultivate just lives. All this remains hidden in discussions of the public good. I am convinced, moreover, this is not a conscious effort at concealment on the part of our elected officials. They have little to gain in continuing to use the rhetoric of citizenship as if it still functioned like it did fifty years ago. Indeed, by engaging in the perpetual filibuster exemplified in the current rhetoric of the United States’ Congress, Congresspersons make themselves the servants of corporate lobbies. This is true of even the best of them who are trying to be faithful civil servants. What they prove is that there is nothing we love better than self-deception. We simply thrive on taking refuge in illusions of our own design in order to mask our avarice. And this, by far, is the saddest aspect of the way we have been shaped to think about citizenship. Public values, human rights, the ‘brotherhood of man’: in the United States, in Western Europe, and across ever-growing expanses of the globe, these can be phrases and code-words for murderous greed.
All of this is overly pessimistic, cynical, and contrarian, I am sure. But at least such reflections ought to attune us to the danger entailed when we let the purportedly value-neutral rhetoric of citizenship to set the terms in which the church talks about its role in the wider society. For the notion of citizenship is but one of the most prevalent in a sea of competing devices that help us tell more or less well the stories of our lives. That citizenship is a popular trope, however, does not mean it is necessary. Nor does it mean we can innocently use the language of citizenship toward whatever ends we wish. That said, it remains the case that the inappropriateness of the rhetoric of citizenship is hardly the most urgent of our worries. Instead we need to discuss the issue that led the notion of Christian Citizenship to be framed in the first place.
The
church’s perennial question “How ought the church relate to
the world?” has often been poorly posed. At least, to ask the question
abstractly tempts us to drown how Christians before us have engaged the
debate. That many of the contemporary formulations of the question can
be linked to Ernst Troeltsch and H. Richard Niebuhr, skews, among other
things, the echoes we hear from Early American Constitutional debates,
17th Century German Pietism, Tridentine Catholicism, the Magisterial and
Radical Reformations, Augustine’s De Civitas Dei, and the
common life of the early church as recorded in the New Testament. But,
as John Howard Yoder has shown, the dilemma inherited from Troeltsch is
coherent only if we already presume that “[h]aving a particular identity
and making sense to one's neighbors, serving their well-being, are …
disjunctive alternatives”.4
The question “What is the role of Christian Citizenship in helping
to shape public policy and civic life?” is apt only when the church
is conceived as the guardian of esoteric knowledge that needs to be translated
or watered-down before it can be proclaimed intelligibly in the wider
world-if it is to be proclaimed at all. If and only if this is the story
the church wants to tell about itself does it need to ask how to ‘relate’
to the rest of the world.
We require a different story than the one Troeltsch and Niebuhr so powerfully represented. When we ask about the role of Christian Citizenship in shaping societal values and want an answer that seems immediately relevant, we can become beholden to exactly those economic modes of desire and lust which I have just criticized. We need to ask questions like: “What are the forms of life, the habits and the dispositions, embodied in the church throughout the ages, that train us in the virtues of patience and hope sufficient to reconfigure the ways in which we experience desire?” “How is it that we can hunger and thirst for what is good for God’s good creation, for righteousness and peace, without succumbing to myths of effectiveness, intelligibility, and responsibility-all, in our time, but different names for greed?” These questions require the church to reflect on its own, peculiar story in a way that cannot be abstracted from its distinctive and corporate politics or mission. Moreover, it is in so learning to be the church we have been called to be that we come to understand our social role, not as ‘citizens’, but as the Body of Christ.
This
I take to be the force of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas’s
dictum that “The first social-ethical task of the church is not to
make the world more just, but to be the church in order that the world
may know it is the world.” This dictum is not a summons to ‘sectarian’
insularity though it has been so interpreted. But this can only be the
case from a perspective that does not understand our desires ‘to
be ordered to God as to their … source and final goal’.5 In worshiping this
God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit as the object of our desire, the church
is drawn into nothing less than the divine life itself, such that it alone
is the created social body capable of practising God’s patience.
That patience, moreover, reconfigures the way we are desirous.
We
can expect that the way the church hungers and thirsts for righteousness
and peace should look peculiar to the world. But peculiarity does not
mean insularity and unintelligibility. Yoder makes this point with respect
to the Jews in Babylon who were instructed to ‘seek the welfare of
the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its
behalf’. But they were also promised that they would find in Babylon’s
welfare their own shalom.6 So they became
conspicuous people. “The life of diaspora Jewry …. was characterized
more than we usually remember by its public visibility; synagogue life
was observable. … Jewish life had no secrets. God-fearing Gentiles
could observe and understand what was going on when Jews gathered around
their Torah, and many Gentiles were in fact attracted by it.”7 They were attracted
precisely by the peculiarity of Jewish life, by Israel's odd way of seeking
peace. In this sense, Yoder and Hauerwas maintain, Israel provides a paradigm
for the church today.
The
practices and habits of Christ’s ecclesial body that demonstrate
the patient way we desire peace and righteousness ought to be ‘so
concrete, so accessible, so “lay”, that … [they are] also
a model for how any society, not excluding the surrounding public society,
can also form its common life more humanely.’8 Unfortunately disconfirmations
of this vision seem ubiquitous today. From church growth marketing techniques
to obscurantist celebrations of the sacraments, the church compromises
its unique and yet imitable social role, handing over its mission and
its ministry to the clerics of our age, the bureaucrats and experts. But
at least there is hope that we may learn to live toward God's vision for
the church. In one local congregation’s ‘prison ministry’,
for instance, we already discern the inbreaking of the Kingdom, for here
the imaginative resources of the church are fully arrayed against the
myths of citizenship and rights. Barbara is an inmate in Raleigh, North
Carolina. As a prisoner in the United States she was understood upon conviction
to have yielded up her rights to the state. She was stripped of all the
freedoms and obligations that are attendant upon citizenship, and was
incarcerated at least in part to demonstrate that her very body was now
nothing other than the property of the state. Functionally, at least,
she is no longer a citizen.
But, since the beginning of her imprisonment, Barbara has also become a member of Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, NC. And while she remains separated from that congregation by twenty-five miles, concrete walls, and razor wire, while her citizenship in the nation remains in suspension, she has also become, precisely as a prisoner, an active participant in that church’s life. In the cell in Raleigh she lives daily her baptism into Christ’s body. For Barbara helps to model patience and hope to the other members of Aldersgate, and they in turn show her the constancy a life of hopeful patience can sustain. Of course, Barbara’s relationship with the other members of Aldersgate primarily takes the form of friendships, which neither have nor require the level of theoretical sophistication attendant upon notions of citizenship in the modern world. But these friendships help the people of Aldersgate to tell the story of their lives as more richly dependent upon one another than would be possible if they understood themselves as other than one body. Still, brief visits, prayers, and tears shed together may appear a poor substitute for the abundant life Christ came to give his people. They are, however, also more than impotent protests in the face of the violence that can so easily overwhelm us. Rather the people of Aldersgate exhibit an alternative social structure to that which organizes most of the world in which we live. Such acts and gestures as Barbara’s presence among them as an active group member make that congregation incandescant to the Spirit’s grace, in which they shine before the world as the very embodiment of our Christ, who is at the Father’s side and has made him known.
The presence of persons like Barbara in our midst teaches us how to desire the beatific vision in hopeful patience, which is not the same thing as quiescence, but is exhibited in a life of forgiveness and peace. Living this life, the life of holiness, is not just an application of the church’s social policy. It is the church’s way of being relevant in the world. It is the role of the church in shaping public policy. Modeling the civic life of Christ’s body is how Christians become ‘a light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of thy people, Israel’.
J A Sider - lectures at Duke University, North Carolina.
Footnotes
1
“Democratic Citizenship” in For
Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press,
1996), 68-69.
2 Boyle, Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism
and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 21.
3 Boyle, Who Are We Now?, 21.
4 “The New Humanity as Pulpit and Paradigm”
in For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1998), 41.
5 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia.1.8.
6 See Jer.
29:7
, RSV, quoted in Yoder, “See How They Go with
Their Faces to the Sun” in For the Nations, 53.
7 Yoder, “The New Humanity”, 41-42.
8 Yoder, “The New Humanity”, 46.
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