Jesus' Temptations in the Wilderness

Reading the news recently has inspired me to reflect on the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, as recounted in Matthew 4: 1-11. In this reflection, it isn't my purpose to explicitly draw out connections between the story of Jesus’ temptation and current events. My purpose, rather, is to lay out my understanding of the scriptural story. But I do think it can be instructive, especially in times of war, to consume the news and listen to what our leaders say in the light of the temptations that Jesus repudiated. I invite you to do this for yourself.

In the story, the devil tempts Jesus in three ways. The first temptation is to use His power to turn stones into bread to feed his hunger. The second is to prove His power and authority as the Son of God by flinging Himself from the highest point of the temple and calling down God’s angels to shield Him from harm. And the third is the temptation of authoritarian control: the chance to rule the world in the manner familiar to subjects of imperial Rome, the manner that the devil identifies with worshipping him.

The first temptation is interesting because it represents a use of power that, according to Scripture, Jesus was not shy to invoke. Turning one thing into another? Surely it is no worse to turn stones into bread than it is to turn water into wine. Miraculously meeting the needs of the body? That was a core element of the ministry Jesus pursued after leaving the wilderness.

Such uses of power are not inherently “of the devil.” Rather, the temptation represented here is a matter of using such power at the wrong time and place. Jesus retreated into the wilderness to focus not on His material comfort but on His connection to God, readying himself for the challenges to come—challenges that would call Him to face far worse than mortal hunger. 

What He was tempted to do here was forget that “man does not live by bread alone.” The needs of the body are not meaningless—and to value those needs by healing the sick or multiplying the loaves and fishes is not evil. But it is one thing to do these things in the service of love and grace, something else to prioritize them over such service.

There are times and places when we must be willing to go hungry, to pass through suffering and even to die, in the name of what is right and good, loving and holy. At those times, it is tempting to use our power to ease our hunger or to fend off threats to our lives and welfare. But in doing so, we forget what matters most. Physical health and security matter, but they are not the most important thing. Sometimes, the path of true courage lies not in using our power to overcome threats to our physical welfare but in enduring what threatens us because using our power to overcome it would be wrong.

But the other two temptations aren’t just a matter of the wrong time and place. These represent uses of power that are more intimately opposed to the divine. It is one thing to use power to heal when illness strikes or when malign human agents inflict harm, another to leap towards death solely to stage a display of one’s mightiness. That use of power is not about healing. It is not about restoring what has been broken. It is not about infusing divine grace into a world distorted by the forces of alienation. That use of power is about showing off. 

More egregiously, it is about showing off for the purpose of inspiring people to bow down before might. “See what I can do! See my might and be cowed!” 

What is the reaction of human observers who are confronted with someone who shows off his power in such a stunning display—and does so to dramatize what he is capable of? Put another way, what aspect of our humanity does such a display speak to? Our love? Our desire to be good? Our capacity for trust and gratitude?

Of course not. Such a display is meant to trigger our awe and terror of power for power’s sake. It triggers the fear of retaliation and the hunger for favors, the sorts of self-interested feelings that inspire sycophancy. “Look what he can do! What power! Maybe if we hitch our wagons to him and shout his praises, he’ll use that power to our benefit.” And also: “Maybe, if we don’t, he’ll make us pay.”

This is what Jesus repudiates. The transactional relationship with power, the sort that defines the relations between authoritarian leaders and their subjects, does not spring from God. And when it infects the relationship between humanity and God, it is arguably the worst expression of sin. The worst, because it displaces the relational dynamic of loving and being loved, of grace and gratitude. The worst, because it reinforces the distance between creature and creator, the distance that God is trying to close with relentless love.

The third temptation, to become a ruler in the manner of emperors, is an extension of these same considerations. What the devil is offering is a certain kind of earthly power—not the power of love but of control; not the power of healing and giving life but of harming and dealing death; not the power of creation but of destruction; not the agency and empowerment that spring from hope and trust but the coercion and domination that spring from hopelessness and fear.

To claim that kind of power and wield it with relish is to worship the devil rather than God.

(Let me note here that there is a big difference between claiming such power and wielding it with relish and reluctantly resorting to such power as the lesser evil in a broken world that forces tragic compromises. The Christian tradition has long debated the ethics of the latter, with Just War Theorists defending it and Christian pacifists rejecting it. But that debate is recognized by both sides as complex, and no one accuses sincere Just Warists of worshipping the devil. That charge is directed to the shameless embrace of such power, not the solemn and regretful employment of it as a tragic last resort in a broken world.) 

The full significance of what Jesus rejected and repudiated in the wilderness does not, of course, come into full focus apart from the path he took when He returned from the wilderness. It comes into full focus only in the light of His ministry of healing and hope, His message of love, His inversion of worldly conceptions of greatness, and His path through being bodily dominated by imperial power towards the radically different sort of triumph represented by the empty tomb. This will be the focus of my next post.

But with that context in mind, the following message of Matthew 4:1-11 comes clear: those who exult in the dealing of death, who take glory in displays of power for power’s sake, who crow over their ability to destroy and dominate—such persons have fallen prey to the devil’s temptations. In the divide between the imperial power to crucify and the divine power to endure crucifixion without flinching from the good, they have chosen the power to crucify.

Iran, Jesus' Third Way, and the Notion of a Christian Nation

Iran did exactly what they said they'd do. Notice that the US threat of strong reprisals should they do this did not deter them. And when they say that should we strike back they will feel compelled to strike again, that will not deter us. In a dynamic like this, each side from its own perspective sees each escalating act by the other as a new wrong that demands a violent response: an eye taken that demands an eye be taken, a tooth knocked out that demands the knocking out of a tooth. We never reach a point where things are "even" because each side has their own moral perspective from which the other side's act of getting even is seen as a new affront that demands that we get even. That's the engine that drives escalation to all-out war.

And the entire pattern of thinking and relating that creates this engine makes the world a far worse place than it would be if we could only cultivate a "third way" of response--an alternative both to "taking it" and to "striking back in kind."

This kind of third way was what Jesus was attempting to describe in the Sermon on the Mount. As theologian Walter Wink noted, turning the other cheek was not for Jesus a call to simply endure abuse but a call for a creative third way of response that neither strikes back in kind nor meekly submits. It matters, for understanding Jesus, that he specified that if someone strikes your right cheek you turn the left cheek to them. This matters because a blow to the right cheek was the kind of back-handed blow a master would use to strike a slave. A blow to the left cheek was a blow that one struck against a perceived equal. Turning the other cheek was thus an example of a creative way to assert one's equal dignity in the face of a demeaning attack, without striking back in kind. (Wink offers a similar analysis of walking the second mile and giving all of one's clothes to the one who demands your outer garment.)

Jesus did not here offer a specific solution to be used in every conflict but rather a way of thinking about conflict, a way of approaching conflict, distinct from the eye-for-eye approach that serves as an engine of escalation. This different approach, this third way, demands thought and planning and imagination. It cannot be carried out by rote but by bringing thoughtful people to the table who understand the enemy and how our actions will affect them. Massive symbolic gestures that startle and disarm, responses that make continuing to strike culturally costly or shameful, responses where the only face-saving move is not to escalate. Responses that aren't in the script, that leave everyone momentarily stunned.

Imagine if we as a nation devoted a fraction of what we devote to the military towards the cultivation of our capacity to launch such creative third-way responses. Imagine if we were as committed to developing and implementing such responses as we are to developing and implementing effective military ones. To imagine such a thing is to imagine a nation that as a matter of national policy takes seriously Jesus' strategy for responding to violence and injustice. To imagine such a thing is, in a real sense, to imagine a Christian nation.

In this sense, the world has never seen a truly Christian nation. Perhaps we never will.

It's About the Hate: Targeting Religious Worshipers

Christians targeted during worship by violent extremists in Sri Lanka.

Muslims targeted during worship by violent extremists in New Zealand.

Jews targeted during worship by violent extremists in the United States, in Pittsburgh this fall and today in San Diego.

In all cases the root evil is an us/them ideology of hate. The in-groups and out-groups that the ideology latches onto may be different, but that's ultimately incidental. What matters is the hate.

The agents of hate aren't made that way by some feature of the wider faith tradition, ethnicity, etc., with which they identify. Hate always has a cover story, but the hate comes first. If the hate springs from someone who wears Christianity as a label, you can be sure that the ugliest verses in the Bible are lifted up and the call to love explained away. If the hate springs from someone who wears Islam as a label, you can be sure that the ugliest verses of the Koran are lifted up and the calls for decency and respect across differences explained away.

Hate isn't motivated by anything about its target, but it needs a target. And it needs vindication, some "purpose" that the agents of hate can give themselves over to, so that they can see themselves as foot soldiers in a cause greater than themselves. They want to indulge in the most evil of human impulses, but want to do it with a clean conscience. They want to glory in violence and death while experiencing pureness of heart.

And so they make a class of people into monsters, and they conceive themselves to be noble warriors fighting for a chosen group--a group destined for greatness or happiness by virtue of their intrinsic worth, but kept down by the very existence of the monsters.

And so they tell themselves that every death and defeat of those they consider the Children of Darkness is a gain for the Children of Light. They indulge evil in the name of good, declaring themselves heroes, laboring to build some imagined Utopia out of the corpses of the innocent.

In my first book, Is God a Delusion?, I distinguish between religion and religionism. The former offers a way of thinking about the world and a way of living life, something around which communities can form. Religionism is about using religious differences in the same manner that racism uses racial distinctions and nationalism uses nationalities: as a way to divide the world and set us against them. It is about hate above all else.

In fact, it is hard to disentangle this species of hate from others. Is anti-Semitism about religion or ethnicity? Is Islamophobia targeting people because of their faith tradition or because of middle-eastern origins? The answer is that, for the person infected by an ideology of hate, it doesn't matter. Because the point is to have a group to hate, someone that is worthy of hate regardless of who they are and what they do or what kind of life they lead. Automatic, easy hate, hate that can latch on without needing to investigate the actual character or life of the person being hated.

Whether it's religion or ethnicity or race doesn't much matter, and typically an ideology of hate uses more than one thing. Ideologies of hate are vague and ecclectic in who they target, precisely because what matters is to be able to hate someone.

This is why Jews become afraid when Islamophobia is nurtured, why African Americans feel less safe in church when a Mosque has been recently targeted. Because it's about hate. And hate breeds hate.

Such ideological hate, described beautifully by Sartre in his short book, Anti-Semite and Jew, is a demon. It possesses human beings. It is a demon that thrives and spread best under a distinctive set of conditions: when empathy is restricted to people like ourselves, when building walls matters more than building bridges, when communities become insular and polarized, when fear displaces hope, and when security for "us" matters more than compassion.

Christianity is just one faith tradition that urges us to love. All over the world, in different ways and with different words, that call can be heard.

And yet, all over the world, people find ways to put limits on the scope of that call. The more we do the latter--the more we justify limits on love and the less we aspire to love every single other person (even when we fail, as we inevitably do)--the easier it becomes for ideologies of hate to take root.

And here's the thing: we can't control others' commitment to loving widely. We can only choose in our own case, and invite others to follow our example. And as hateful rhetoric becomes louder--as it finds its way into more prominent places--love has to become louder, too.

When hate spreads, we must look for ways to amplify the voice of extravagant love.

Homophobic Horror in Chechnya: An Open Letter to Vice President Pence

Dear Vice President Pence,

I haven't written you before, but recent reports of crimes against humanity in Chechnya motivate me to do so. I reach out to you as a fellow Christian, knowing that as Christians we are called to live out an ethic of love.

My concern centers around the purported detention and abuse of gay men in the Russian republic of Chechnya. According to a recent BBC report, "Gay men are fleeing brutal persecution in Chechnya, where police are holding more than 100 people and torturing some of them in an anti-gay crackdown, Russian activists say." While Chechen officials deny the reports, the US State Department has found them credible enough to issue an official statement on the matter:

We are increasingly concerned about the situation in the Republic of Chechnya, where there have been numerous credible reports indicating the detention of at least 100 men on the basis of their sexual orientation. Some reports indicate many of those arrested have been tortured, in some cases leading to death. We categorically condemn the persecution of individuals based on their sexual orientation or any other basis.

We are deeply disturbed by recent public statements by Chechen authorities that condone and incite violence against LGBTI persons. We urge Russian federal authorities to speak out against such practices, take steps to ensure the release of anyone wrongfully detained, conduct an independent and credible investigation into these, reports and hold any perpetrators responsible.

I commend the State Department for issuing this statement. Amidst everything that is happening in the world today, including the horrors in Syria, it may seem as if that statement is a sufficient American response. But I think there are reasons why you should speak out on this issue. One reason is that the voice of the Vice President carries more international weight than a State Department statement, and does more to convey the seriousness with which the United States views the matter. And this is the sort of issue that the United States and other countries should view very seriously indeed.

But there is a deeper reason. A more personal one.

It is no secret that you embrace the conservative Christian teaching that homosexual acts are always sinful (even when expressed in the context of lifelong monogamous fidelity and love). It is also no secret that I disagree with this traditional view--in fact, I have a book coming out in which I develop a Christian case, rooted in the love ethic, for embracing same-sex marriage. But Christians who hold to the traditional view, as you do, insist that there is no conflict between endorsing this stance and living out the love ethic with respect to their gay and lesbian neighbors. When it comes to same-sex intimacy, their position is summed up in the slogan, "Love the sinner, hate the sin."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that slogan captures your own position on the matter. In my experience, however, most gays and lesbians experience this slogan as at best insincere, and at worst an abuse of the language of love to cover unloving policies and practices. Too often, when LGBT persons cry out against Christian practices they experience as unloving, "Love the sinner, hate the sin" is thrown back at them as nothing but an all-purpose way to shut them up.

But there are Christians who use this slogan sincerely. They mean by it something like the following: "Even though I think that homosexual acts are morally wrong, I am committed to showing Christian love towards my gay and lesbian neighbors. I will strive to lift up and stand up for the dignity and humanity of LGBT persons, and to act towards them in a way that shows respect, compassion, and empathy for their struggles."

Whether this commitment can be successfully carried out while continuing to condemn every intimate expression of their sexuality is a matter I take up in my book--but let me set that aside for now. The point I want to make is this: current events in Chechnya provide you with a unique opportunity to model what it looks like for a Christian who thinks homosexuality is a sin to lift up and stand up for the dignity and humanity of LGBT persons, and to act towards them in a way that shows respect, compassion, and empathy for their struggles. It is a chance to show that "love the sinner" is not just a slogan to hide behind but a real human calling.

In other words, the situation in Chechnya offers you a distinctive opportunity in Christian leadership:  a chance to show what it looks like to be as committed to loving your gay and lesbian neighbors as you are to condemning their love.

Whatever we think about the morality of homosexuality, we should all agree on the moral egregiousness of a government targeting its gay population for systemic violence. Certainly all Christians who embrace Jesus' love ethic should agree. What is happening in Chechnya is an offense against the ethic of love. All Christians, whatever our views on the ethics of homosexuality, can and should stand together to repudiate the systemic marginalization and abuse of a class of people.

During Holy Week we remember the most central Christian model of what it means to love our neighbors. In the passion story we learn that Christ-like love is prepared to sacrifice even unto death for the neighbor's sake, even if the ones for whom we die are the ones nailing us to a cross. Speaking out against the abuse of our gay and lesbian neighbors in Chechnya is, by comparison, a small gesture of love.

But even token gestures matter. When the Vice President makes such a gesture, it has important symbolic resonance. And were you, Mr. Vice President, to make this gesture, your public commitments and stature among conservative Christians in America would transform your action into a model for something important.

If you are serious about loving your LGBT neighbors and not just about condemning them, this is a unique opportunity to show that love, and to invite others to do likewise. It is a chance to lead in an area where so many public Christian politicians lag; a chance to offer a public example of what it looks like to stand in loving solidarity with the LGBT victims of abuse, and thereby model for both conservative Christians and your LGBT neighbors what it looks like to actually love those who, within conservative Christian circles, often feel the most unloved of all.

Sincerely,
Eric Reitan

Us and Them and Murder: Islamophobic Terrorism

This morning I was greeted by two disturbing pieces of news. First, I read that a Muslim woman, dining at a TGI Friday's last week, found pieces of bacon shoved into the straw of her drink in what appeared to be a deliberate show of disrespect for her religiously-rooted dietary restrictions. The second piece of news was more extreme: Yesterday, three Muslim college students--two sisters and the husband of the elder sister--were murdered in North Carolina. The alleged perpetrator, Craig Hicks, described himself as an anti-theist who was openly hostile to religion.

Here is a brief glimpse at one of the victims, a dental student, who made this video to raise money for a missions project:



The motives for the shooting remain undisclosed, but if they prove to be bound up with Hicks' anti-religious stance, then I think we need to keep two things in mind: First, Hicks' atheism is no more the reason for his violent attack than Islam is the reason for 9/11. In both cases, the problem lies with a kind of ideological targeting of people based on group membership. While Islam can be and has been invoked to underwrite that sort of us/them ideology, other things can be and have been invoked as well--including Christianity and atheism. This fact never justifies sweeping generalizations about the group and its members. In fact, falling prey to such sweeping generalizations is the first step towards embracing the very us/them ideology that is the root problem.

Second, if Hicks targeted his victims because they were Muslim, then we ought to take very seriously the idea that what he did should be called an act of terrorism. Islamophobic terrorism. And even if it isn't terrorism, the ideological patterns of thinking that underwrite terrorism may have played a role: It is easier to kill people if you first ascribe to an ideology that dehumanizes them.

What is terrorism? In my academic work on the subject, I've argued that it has to do with how victims of violence are targeted. Terrorists operate from an us/them ideology that sees every member of an enemy group as a legitimate target. Terrorists may select targets based on strategic or symbolic considerations, but they don't discriminate based on their innocence--because all members of the enemy group are seen as guilty, simply because they belong to that group.

Hence, no one in the targeted group is safe. That's why terrorism terrorizes. Being an American is enough to make you a legitimate target in the eyes of Al Qaeda extremists.

This way of viewing terrorism connect the dots between ideas and violence: If you embrace an ideology that divides the world between "us" and "them," and you portray all of them as collectively guilty, then you are laying the groundwork for terrorist violence. And violence that is done because of this sort of ideological motive is different in kind from violence done for, say, personal gain or jealous rage.

Among other things, those who kill because of allegiance to an ideology of hate are harder to deter. If you see yourself as an agent of the Children of Light fighting a war against the Children of Darkness, you may be perfectly happy to sacrifice yourself for the cause. Threats of punishment won't hold you back.

And that's why the most chilling thing I read this morning wasn't the news report of the triple murder (although that surely chilled me deeply). Instead, it was a comment, posted on one of the websites recounting the TGI Friday's incident, that reads as follows:

We unfortunately MUST do to them that which they wish to do to us, all I wish to do is to work, provide a living for my family. worship how I wish, (or not) and enjoy life. THEY want CONTROL over my life and how I live. THEY want me to convert or die. THEY want to tell me what to wear, what to eat, and what to do everyday... They are like the current U.S. Government under Obama on Steroids. Lock and Load Real Americans.

Notice here the universal imputation of nefarious motives, the repeated invocation of THEM. And then the call to arms: Lock and load. THEY are a threat to US. WE have no choice but to load our guns and shoot them down.

And to think this diatribe was sparked by the story of a woman who wanted her dietary restrictions respected, and instead had the forbidden food all but shoved down her throat.

Adherents to this kind of ideology know that members of their own group aren't all the same: they're normal human beings who want to live normal human lives, with diverse values and interests. They worship in different ways (or not at all). Some want to stand on a soapbox and spread their faith; others just want to eat at TGI Friday's without having bacon shoved into their drinking straw. But instead of seeing the same humanity and diversity in the other group, those in the grip of divisive ideologies offer a sweeping portrait of what "they" want. And what THEY want is so bad for us that we have no choice but to treat them in ways we would never treat members of our own group.

The philosopher John Ladd, in an essay that has strongly influenced my thinking, finds in Nazism a kind of template for violent ideologies: Such ideologies begin with what he calls the doctrine of bifurcation: the world is divided between the chosen group and the "other" group. They then move onto a doctrine of moral disqualification. The others are in some way rendered less than human: they aren't like us, and so can be legitimately treated in ways that we couldn't otherwise justify. But that's not enough. Another key tenet of these ideologies is the notion of a group mission: Our welfare is threatened by THEM, and so we must, to bring good and right back into the world, knock THEM down--marginalize, oppress, or destroy. Lock and load.

This is the sort of pattern of thinking that enables terrorists to ignore questions of guilt or innocence, and so target civilians. It is the pattern of thinking that feeds cycles of ideological hatred and violence. And were it isolated to a rare comment on an occasional blog post, we could set aside acts of violence like the triple murder in North Carolina as just the actions of a lunatic.

But when the lunatic is acting out the implications of a worldview that is repeatedly endorsed in the public sphere--when there is a subculture that repeats and disseminates and encourages this kind of thinking--the lunatic becomes more than a lunatic. The lunatic is the agent of a cause, and terrorism is the means of pursuing it. This is why our public leaders and intellectuals need to be so very careful about what they say and how they say it--because even those who don't believe in bifurcating the world into the good and the bad, the light and the dark, sometimes find themselves falling into rhetorical patterns and arguments that play into dangerous ideologies of the sort Ladd describes (as Sam Harris has done more than once).

We can't and shouldn't stifle free speech and free expression. But we can model modes of expression that encourage cooperation rather than division, that resist the urge to absolutize any group. And when hateful and ideological speech proliferates, we can counteract it with speech of our own, speech that calls it out for what it is and highlights its dangers.

The vast majority of atheists are well-meaning, decent human beings who care about humanity and disavow us/them ideologies. But sometimes, us/them tropes are invoked by influential atheist figures (who themselves denounce extremism) in ways that fuel subcultures of extremism. People are drawn to the seductive simplicity of a world where enlightened atheists are locked in a (metaphorical) war with the benighted religious fools who threaten the welfare of us all. They indulge this simple worldview, usually just with heated words and self-righteous diatribes. But when enough people begin to say "lock and load," eventually someone does just that. When someone does, we must recognize the depths of the problem--but we should resist the urge to absolutize atheists or attribute to all atheists the ideological motives of the extremists.

And, just to be clear, let me repeat the preceding paragraph with one small change:  The vast majority of Muslims are well-meaning, decent human beings who care about humanity and disavow us/them ideologies. But sometimes, us/them tropes are invoked by influential Muslim figures (who themselves denounce extremism) in ways that fuel subcultures of extremism. People are drawn to the seductive simplicity of a world where enlightened Muslims are locked in a (metaphorical) war with the benighted unbelievers who threaten the welfare us all. They indulge this simple worldview, usually just with heated words and self-righteous diatribes. But when enough people begin to say "lock and load," eventually someone does just that. When someone does, we must recognize the depths of the problem--but we should resist the urge to absolutize Muslims or attribute to all Muslims the ideological motives of the extremists.

Or plug in "Christians," if you prefer.

We don't yet know what motivated the killings of three young Muslims in North Carolina the other day. We don't know why Craig Hicks gunned them down. But there is a pattern of thinking in place in this country--sometimes articulated by self-described atheists, sometimes by self-described Christians, sometimes by others--that treats all Muslims as a single unit, characterizing them as an enemy that threatens us all and against whom we must be prepared to take up arms. When someone follows that call and strikes out against innocent members of the group, it is terrorism. Islamophobic terrorism.

If Hicks isn't an Islamophobic terrorist in the sense described here--and he may well not be--then there are others out there who have been primed to be just that. Some use the mistreatment of a Muslim woman in a restaurant as the occasion for a call to arms against the "Muslim threat"--as if the fact that she was treated with disrespect is proof that her kind are poised to ruin our way of life.

We can't address the danger that such ideologically driven individuals pose by treating them as nothing but isolated lunatics. We need to pay attention to the way that the ideas we permit and nurture in the public square can fuel our potential for terrorist violence.  

Surgery, Swimming, and War: What Does Diana Nyad's historic achievement have to do with Syria?

Thanks to my wife, I watched Diana Nyad's historic achievement this weekend--swimming from Cuba to Florida--through a more engaged and passionate set of eyes than I might otherwise have done. Were it not for her I would have been fixated on the news about Syria. As reports came in of Diana's astonishing effort and ultimate achievement, the realization of her "Xtreme Dream," I would've distractedly thought, "That's cool," and then been sucked back into the prospect of missile strikes.

For several years now, my Ironman wife has pushed her physical limits through swimming, biking, and running, but her greatest love is swimming. As I write these words I am sitting in a surgery waiting room while my wife undergoes surgery on both her feet. The surgery is cutting short her season, hopefully with the result that she will be better equipped to "do her impossible" into the future ("Do your impossible" are the words that frame her Ironman tattoo). But it means that she will not be participating in Oklahoma City's Redman triathlon later this month, as originally planned.

Want to Save the World? Build inclusive communities where people matter

...or so says Frances Moore Lappé in a recent article, "Could Our Deepest Fears Hold the Key to Ending Violence?" The essay beautifully synthesizes a range of related insights that have impressed themselves on me through the years--insights which have been vividly driven home for me through my work with the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), especially facilitating AVP workshops in prisons.

Everyone wants to matter. More importantly, we want to matter to a community. Pugnacious communities that encourage violence prey on those of us who feel marginalized, who for one reason or another feel as if we don't belong or as if our contributions go unnoticed. What these communities offer is seductive precisely because violence vividly affects the world. The impact of violence, though negative, is inescapable. A community built around the valorization of violence thus offers the promise of finding belonging through actions that undeniably matter.

Who can deny that the Boston bombers mattered, that their actions made a difference in human lives? The difference was an awful one, a shattering difference. But for those who hunger for relevance, those who doubt their own significance in the world, violence is an obvious answer. And when a shadow community frames such vivid destructive actions as heroic, and treats those who commit them as champions of the shadow community, the outcomes are as predictable as they are tragic.

If you are disaffected, afraid of irrelevance, alienated from those around you, it matters a whole lot who reaches out to you. If extremists defined by in-group/out-group ideologies reach out to you, you're likely to reach back if you're hungry enough. Much depends on where else you can go to get fed.

When Jesus said, "Feed my lambs," one can't deny that real food, the sort that fills actual human bellies, was intended. But maybe another kind of food was also on his mind--the kind of food that inclusive communities can provide, when they offer creative outlets for making a positive difference in the world and a sense of belonging built around such meaningful creativity. At its best, that is what the Church can be. At its worst, it becomes defined by in-group/out-group ideologies, marginalizing some members who become disaffected and angry, and feeding others the wrong kind of food.

So, what can we do, each of us, to help make our own communities places where the alienated can come to feel as if they've come home? Where can we help build communities of this sort? How can we make sure that our world is a banquet of opportunities for real inclusion and creative (rather than destructive) meaning, so that no one is tempted by the poisoned food?

An Adolescent Screams

Yesterday morning in a hallway of the Junior High School here in Stillwater, OK, a 13-year-old boy took out a handgun, turned it on himself and, in the presence of his stunned peers, ended his life.


The city is still reeling from the shock. Speculations about why he did it are rampant. Bullying was quickly blamed, but there is scant evidence of this. The truth is we don’t know why he did it, and we may never fully understand.

What we do know is that on this particular morning, of all the things this boy might have done, he chose to end his life in a very public and shockingly dramatic way.

He didn’t just choose to end his life. He chose to scream.

What I mean is this: When this boy killed himself in full view of his classmates, he was communicating something to his peers in a way that could not possibly be ignored. Like a scream, the act was ambiguous in its meaning. A scream can mean horror or despair, fear or outrage. What it lacks in clarity it makes up for in inescapability.

Screams are loud. So is killing yourself in a public hallway with a gun. Other forms of self-destruction are quieter. Consuming a lethal overdose of drugs communicates something, too; but the message and the delivery are different. The feelings and motives that would drive someone to do the former might not inspire them to do the latter.

And this boy was motivated, for reasons we may never fully comprehend, to do the former: to scream more loudly and inescapably than human vocal cords can scream. He wanted to express the depths of his negative feelings in a way that, however inarticulate, would seize hold of those around him and require them to pay attention, to take the scream as seriously as anything they’d ever heard.

And he had the means to do it. He had a loaded gun.

I don’t know where he found it, and I have no desire to place blame. In this country there are almost as many guns as there are people (9 guns for every 10 persons, the highest proportion of any country in the world), and that creates enormous opportunity to get your hands on a gun if you’re determined…even when there are no legitimate avenues (in Oklahoma, it's illegal for minors to purchase or possess handguns).

We don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t had access to a gun yesterday. Maybe he would have found some other way to scream, and maybe this other choice would have been just as lethal. Or maybe he would have closed inward, quietly longing for a way to express the depths of his feeling, and maybe someone would have noticed the darkness and reached out. Or maybe an opportunist would have preyed on that darkness in one of countless ways.

We can’t know what might have been. But actions are a stew of means and motives. So are human tragedies. Change the motives and tragedy may be averted. But the same is true of changing the available means.

There’s more than one way to do that. Not every kind of scream is as loud, as inescapable as a gunshot. But those quieter options are often more articulate, better suited to conveying meaning, to ensuring that the person crying out is not merely heard but understood. We need to find ways to increase access to those options and do our best to ensure that our young people appreciate their power. The more they trust in the transformative potential of written words, performance art, social activism—and the more they trust that there are those who will hear and understand—the less likely they are to turn to the modes of expression that are both more brutal and more irrevocable.

And yes--although this is the more politically charged piece of the puzzle--we also need to think about how we can make those darker options less accessible. Anyone who has been through adolescence knows it to be an impulsive and dramatic age. And although there are important differences of degree, everyone at some point in that stage of life has felt the urge to scream. When that urge hits, it would be better if there weren’t a gun at hand.

I won’t pretend there are easy answers. The issue of controlling access to guns faces, in this country, a culture in which guns are linked to traditions and hobbies and family heritage, not to mention convictions about personal liberty and self-defense. Regulating legitimate access to guns through careful screening and licensing of prospective gun owners might be crucial to keeping guns out of the hands of those who really ought not to be armed and dangerous—but such regulations will have limited effect unless the pathways to illegitimate access are relatively few. And with the guns already out there in such great numbers, achieving the latter may be difficult. We might propose trying to reduce the number of guns in circulation, but that would be no small challenge. I’d hate to be the police officers assigned the task of confiscating the weapons of those who believe the right to bear arms is synonymous with freedom from tyranny.

There are no easy answers. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t wrestle with the questions. And we shouldn't focus on one set of questions to the exclusion of the others. We need to wrestle with the question of motives in an attempt to better understand what drives adolescents to such extremes. We need to grope for better policies to prevent or mitigate the forces that inflame and dehumanize—such things as verbal and physical abuse by peers ("bullying"), such things as systemic social exclusion and deep loneliness. None of these things may be what lay behind yesterday's tragedy in Stillwater. But every such tragedy should move us to think on forces that drive people to the brink, and to renew our commitment to diminish their power in the world.

But every effort of this kind will be imperfect. There will always be adolescent screams. And so we need to think about our collective commitment to fashioning constructive outlets, offering a diversity of avenues for self-expression—even for the expression of those feelings that frighten us, for those extremities of outrage and anguish we would like to pretend our young people never feel.

And we need to wrestle with how more effectively to protect adolescents from themselves, how to minimize their access to the most destructive ways of screaming.

In relation to these questions, I believe there are many things that Stillwater, as a community, is already doing well. This is not about blame or recrimination, but about trying to come to terms with tragedy in part by learning what we can from it and changing where it makes sense to change. And to wrestle seriously with any of these questions, we have to set aside partisan polarization and pat slogans in favor of substantive conversations in which diverse perspectives are heard and weighted thoughtfully, critically, and respectfully. To engage in such conversations is a way of honoring the victims of tragedy. But we do not honor them unless we really listen and honestly share, unless we strive to find solidarity amidst differences in the shared goal of making our community a safer and healthier place for all.

How do we do this?

Today, this day, it is Stillwater’s turn to ask that question. Today, this day, it is Stillwater’s turn to decide not only how we will grieve, but how we will come together to draw lessons from this tragedy, to honor its victims by trying, however imperfectly, to make its like less likely to happen again.

A Simple Principle

I think it may help, in the effort to avoid a lot of confusion, misrepresentation, and polarizing conflict, if we just keep one simple principle in mind:

Moral responsibility can be shared.

The other day an attack on the U.S Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, killed the US Ambassador J Christopher Stevens and three others, including security officer and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty, and Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith.

The perpetrators of the attack remain unknown, and tracking them down may prove difficult--but everyone agrees, of course, that they bear the primary and most immediate responsibility for the tragic deaths. But if you're inclined to look more broadly, beyond the attacks themselves to events that helped generate an outraged protest that either spiraled our of control or (as seems now to be the more likely story) was opportunistically fueled and used as part of a broader plot--if you're inclined to ask how all of us might have helped avert this tragedy, you face the risk of being dubbed an apologist for the perpetrators.

It happens a lot. Someone points to broader social forces that helped motivate violence, and it's as if they've said that the perpetrators of violence were nothing more than blameless robots programmed by these social forces. You note how others were needlessly provocative or inflammatory, and it's as if you've said that the perpetrators were puppets wholly controlled by those who provoked them. But this way of thinking assumes that responsibility has to fall in just one place. It doesn't.

To put things bluntly: Some of the biggest #@*!-ups happen because lots of people behave like idiots. To point out the idiocy of one of the contributors does not amount to absolving the idiocy of the others. Nor does it imply that those most immediately responsible for the gravest harms of a tragedy aren't worthy of special condemnation and punishment in a way that the others who contributed are not.

More importantly, to acknowledge your own role--or your own community's role--in creating a problem is just plain human decency. So is apologizing for it. You shouldn't resist doing the decent thing because you're afraid that somehow it lets others off the hook or implies that others more intimately involved in the problem aren't to blame. But we are afraid to do this, far too often, because we are caught up at least implicitly by this misguided idea that moral responsibility can't be shared. Sometimes pundits and politicians play off this misguided propensity to score political points.

But when we think about it explicitly, of course we all know better.

If I sleep with your wife and you attempt to murder me in a fit of rage, I am not responsible for the attempt on my life. But I am responsible for what I did. I am responsible for having the affair. I am responsible for the provocation. If I concede that I provoked you, I am not implying that there's nothing wrong with the sort of character that sends someone over the edge in the face of infidelity. While people should be angry when their spouses break their vows and others are complicit in that, no one should become murderously angry. If you're like that, then you've got a serious character flaw. If you acted on the urgings of that character flaw, you've done something seriously wrong.

And so the fact that I was able to provoke you to murderous intent speaks poorly of your character. But that I provoked you in this particular way speaks poorly of mine.

But now suppose I knew this about you in advance. And suppose I knew not only that you're easily provoked to murderous rage by infidelity, but that your wife (my would-be lover) would also be at risk should you be triggered. Suppose I went ahead and slept with your wife knowing that her life was also thereby put at risk. But suppose I didn't care. I took no steps to protect her. I didn't help her get to a domestic violence shelter or anything like that before indulging myself in ways I knew could trigger you to kill her. I just ignite the spark in pursuit of my pleasure and walk away.

If you then murder your wife, do I bear any responsibility? I'm not talking about legal responsibility here. I mean moral responsibility.

Of course I do. Admitting this doesn't reduce the gravity of what you did, the depths of your moral failings, the reality of the danger that letting you roam free in the world poses to us all, especially those you come to possessively "love" as if they were things that belong to you. It's possible for all these serious moral failings and wrongs to fall squarely on your shoulders, even if there are a bunch of serious moral failings and wrongs that fall squarely on mine. Even if both your moral failings and mine helped push circumstances forward to the tragic outcome.

But when it comes to the failings I have the best hope of correcting, I need to look inward. While that doesn't mean we should ignore the wrongs of others or not seek to apprehend those who pose the most imminent threat to human safety, it does mean that when we or our communities play a role in a complex chain of events that culminates in tragedy, we should ask ourselves what changes we can make closer to home, so that we aren't implicated in future tragedies. And when we do so, it doesn't follow that the gravity of what others have done is mitigated or erased.

Because moral responsibility can be shared.

Recently, a juvenile, amateurish filmmaker made a horrible movie. It wasn't just bad art--although from what I can tell it was really, really lousy on that score. But it was also deliberately offensive and slanderous--and its target was Muslims, a large and diverse group of people. In the film, not only is Mohammed depicted (something that by itself is known to be deeply offensive to Muslims), but he is depicted as being a murderer and adulterer who approved of pedophilic sex abuse.

A hate-filled religious ideologue, the Koran-burning Terry Jones, then went ahead and championed this amateurish, offensive, slanderous move, helping to bring what was otherwise a dead-in-the-water film (it showed once, apparently to a mostly empty theater) to the attention of the large and diverse religious community being slandered. The filmmaker and its champion did this knowing full well that some of those in the targeted religious group have a history of ideology-fueled violence.

To say that these people--the filmmaker and the crazy Islamophobic preacher--bear some moral responsibility for what happened next does not mitigate the gravity of extremist violence. Because moral responsibility isn't this limited resource with only so much to go around.

And if one looks more broadly at our American culture; if one asks whether the incendiary hatred of Muslims on display in this film is a distillation or amplification of broader social attitudes that we should be working on changing, one does not thereby mitigate the gravity of what the film-makers and those who championed them did. Because moral responsibility can be shared. 

Here is a fact: Sometimes I know how others are likely to respond to my actions because I know something about their character. Sometimes crazy extremist behavior is a predictable outcome of certain broad social patterns and ideas. This is not to say that people who behave as predicted bear no responsibility for their actions. People can and do take responsibility for themselves and their choices, rising above their conditioning...at least if they're encouraged, challenged, and supported in the right way.

But, more often than not, people don't defy predictions. They don't take responsibility, but instead simply act out their conditioning. And sometimes that conditioning leads them to respond to certain triggers with violent umbrage.

Knowing that they're there, what do we do? We shouldn't be held hostage by them, of course. We shouldn't do something wrong, say or do things we don't believe, just to appease them. I don't think, for example, that we ought to abandon our national commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of expression and begin suppressing inflammatory filmmakers and crazy preachers, just because there are extremists out there who will begin targeting decent, caring human beings just for sharing a national identity with a hateful bigot or two.

But it's one thing to say we shouldn't be held hostage to the poor character or ideological conditioning of others. It's something else to say we shouldn't pay attention to how our own character flaws, our own unreflective ideologies, help to fuel violent feedback loops with the harmful conditioning of others. 

Far too often, pointless tragedies happen because too many people, in diverse ways, mistake the humiliation and dehumanization of others for something worth doing. Too many allow themselves to be guided by these deeply divisive ideologies that spring from ancient tribal instincts and are vindicated by appeal to a tribal god (and then, predictably enough, insist that this tribal god is the God of all people, the creator Who sustains in being every Hindu, every Muslim, every Christian, every Jew, the God whose sustaining love supposedly encompasses the whole creation).

How can such tribalism swamp our better natures? It rears its head most powerfully when it is embraced by people on both sides of an ideological divide, when there are those who identify themselves against one another, who target one another, who universalize and absolutize their dehumanizing depictions of one another.

If you have a few tribal voices within a community of tolerant, compassionate human beings, and if, in the community anathematized by those tribal voices, you have nothing but tolerant, compassionate human beings who reach out in fellowship...well, the tribal voices won't be a good thing even then, but they lose much of their power. They face a kind of persistent challenge that can motivate many of them to take responsibility for their own ideological conditioning, reflect on it, discuss it, and eventually transform it.

Sometimes, however, there are broad unspoken social sentiments that, while not themselves overtly hostile and vitriolic, provide the stew out of which a few extreme voices emerge to spew overt hate. Two such communities, perched on opposite sides of an ideological divide, can progressively feed off the extreme messages coming from the vocal minority on the other side. The voices react to each other, enrage each other, and in targeting each other end up reinforcing their respective dehumanizing views of the other side. And as innocents on both sides become the targets of the extreme acts of the few, more members of each community start to listen to those hate-filled tribal voices, the voices that universalize and absolutize the dehumanizing depictions of one another. More and more of us stop taking responsibility for our own complicity, instead blaming the other side and vindicating our own attacks--physical attacks or rhetorical, with movies or with guns--by unreflective invocation of an ideology of hate.

Casting all the blame at the doorstep of a few individuals or at the doorstep of the other community, refusing to recognize that responsibility can be shared, that it should be shared, that we all must take responsibility for ourselves and each other...these are habits that only play into the tragic feedback loop through which tribalism comes to swamp our better natures.

Moral responsibility can be shared. And it must be shared, especially in the face of tragedies. Or we're all in trouble.

On the Occasion of Tragedy: Symbols of the Sikh Faith

Today's news about the mass shooting at the Sikh temple in Milwaukee immediately evoked for me the memories of the Sikh friends I made in India years ago. My heart aches for the victims, for the Sikh community which has been targeted for reasons yet unknown, and for all of us who have to live in a world in which such senseless and unexpected violence takes place.

It occurs to me that few Americans know very much about the Sikh religion. Absurdly, Sikhs are often confused with Muslims--I suspect mainly just because Sikh men wear turbans in public as a matter of religious observance, and some Muslims wear turbans (albeit in a very different style). This is a bit like confusing the Amish with Hasidic Jews because they sometimes wear old-fashioned-looking hats (except that there is a much closer relationship between the Amish and Hasidic Jews than there is between Sikhism and Islam).

It is not my place to give Americans a lesson on the Sikh faith. There are better resources than me. But one of the fears I have, when a tragedy like this strikes in our country, is that we won't experience the tragedy as our own. We'll think of it as someone else's tragedy. Of course, in a sense, for most of us it is: No one we know and love has died. But that didn't stop most of us from taking ownership of the Aurora, CO, tragedy of a couple of weeks ago--in the sense of identifying with the victims and their families, of feeling an ache, of imagining that it could have been us or those we love.

But sometimes it's harder to identify with those we know little or nothing about. And so, for what it's worth, on the occasion of this tragedy I want to share a portion of an essay that originally appeared on this blog back in February 2009. That essay was sparked by the controversial termination of a Sikh IRS agent, fired for refusing to remove her kirpan--one of the symbols of her faith.

The portion of the essay I'm reprinting here has to do with a moment of friendship that I'll never forget--a moment in which I not only learned more about the Sikh religion than I had before, but in which this faith came alive for me in a very personal way.

My teacher was a Sikh my own age, a young man named Raju who I met when I was invited to attend a Sikh service at the Gurdwara (a Sikh place of worship). All of this happened back when I was a college sophomore spending a semester in India with the rest of my family--mostly in the city of Dhanbad, in Bihar, where my father had a Fulbright lectureship at the Indian School of Mines. Here is the passage I want to share:


Raju became my best friend while I was India. He was a frequent visitor at the guest house where we stayed, and I was at his home a number of times (a modest place with two main rooms, a kitchen area, and a larger courtyard where many in the extended family slept). The family ran a small kiosk where you could buy everyday items such as soap and packaged cheese. I saw much of Dhanbad riding on the back of Raju’s light blue scooter, which he was expert at steering through streets crowded with rickshaws and cows, pedestrians and black Ambassador cars.

Somewhere there’s a photo of me wearing a turban wrapped in Sikh style. Raju put it on me after he unraveled it from his own head. This was something he did in order to show me the comb that he wore in his hair as well as the hair itself, a long coil that had never been cut. The unshorn hair and the comb are two of the five articles of faith, or kakars, that "baptized" Sikhs (that is, Sikhs who’ve been through the commitment ceremony of Amrit) are required to maintain on their person at all times. The other three are loose-fitting undergarments, a steel bracelet, and the kirpan.

Each of these items has symbolic significance for Sikhs, and Raju was patient enough to explain each to me while we sat in my little room at the guest house. The unshorn hair, or kesh, represents a commitment to respect God’s creation as God created it—that is, not to tamper with God’s intentions for the world. It also represents a guard against one of the five vices that Sikhs are committed to resisting in their lives: the vice of “ego.” Ego encompasses vanity. Vanity, an excessive interest in one’s own appearance, is really one manifestation of a broader fixation on self. As I understand it, kesh pretty much blocks any impulse you might have to fuss over your hair, and thus reminds the Sikh of the broader obligation to set aside any sort of undue fixation on oneself, and instead to give oneself over to God.

The comb, or kanga, is used to untangle the hair and maintain it, and as such is a reminder not only to maintain cleanliness but more broadly to preserve the hygiene and health of the body one has been given—that is, to take care of what God has given you. Also, as one combs through the length of one’s hair (usually twice a day) dead hairs fall away. This can serve as a reminder that this mortal life is a passing thing, and so can help to guard against another of the five vices: a false attachment to the impermanent things of this world.

The undergarments, or kacchera, are a symbol of modesty, but more broadly of the commitment to resist unseemly desires, especially the vice of lust, and to exhibit self-control.

The steel bracelet, or kara, is the symbolic item that the Sikh is most likely to see most often through the day. Worn on the right wrist, it is a sign of the unbreakable bond between oneself and God, and among one another, and to the Guru (which today is actually a sacred text--a collection of hymns and teachings called the Guru Granth Sahib, since the tenth and last human Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, declared that it should be his successor). The kara also serves as a visible reminder that one’s hands should be put to good purpose. Since one steals with one’s hand, it is a broad symbol to resist the vice of greed.

And finally, there’s the kirpan, the ceremonial sword that’s usually today little more than a blunted knife kept in a sheath. A typical pair of scissors would be a more dangerous weapon than your typical kirpan. It symbolizes the Sikh’s commitment to stand up for justice, to defend the weak, and more metaphorically to struggle for what is right and good and to resist vice. The kirpan is never to be drawn in anger, and is in fact intended to symbolize the need to resist the vice of anger. We are, after all, dangerous when we’re angry. The blade stays in the sheath just as our anger stays under control. If the kirpan is drawn at all, it is in defense of oneself or another (although I doubt the symbolic kirpan would be much help in either case).

These are the five symbols of faith that Raju showed to me. I don’t remember the exact words that he used to describe them. My own descriptions above draw not only on what Raju told me that first time, but also on my own reading about Sikhism in the decades since. As such, whatever misrepresentation of Sikhism my descriptions express are my own—an attempt by a non-Sikh to explain the significance of these holy symbols.

As Raju led me through the five kakars, what I remember more clearly than his words was the reverence in his tone. He became very solemn as he spoke of them, and the earnest expression in his eyes was a testament to how deeply meaningful they were. They were an integral part of his identity, symbolic tokens of what he aspired to be, of his connection to a broader community and to God. Wearing them was not just an act of obedience, a response to the mandate of Guru Gobind Singh who called upon all baptized Sikhs to wear each article of faith. For Raju, wearing them was a matter of honor and a gesture of daily devotion.

There is little in my life that I can compare the five kakars to. The closest I can come is the Advent wreath, with its four candles for each Sunday in Advent (Norwegian Advents wreaths have only the four; although the more common Advent wreath has five). Each candle symbolically represents an important Christian virtue (peace, hope, love, joy), and it has always meant a lot to me to take time every Sunday in Advent to light the candles, and to recite the Norwegian poem that names each of the virtues in turn (in that poem, “lengsel” or yearning takes the place of love, but I have always understood it to refer to the yearning of the soul for God, the questing love that reaches out to the God who is love).

That weekly Advent ritual may be the most deeply religious and personally affecting ritual I participate in. It moves me. The act of lighting each candle, one more every week, and speaking the words of the poem (one additional verse every week), puts me in touch with my best self, that part of me that stands in an existential relation with God.

But that ritual and its symbolism are isolated to one month every year. It isn’t a daily ritual. The symbols are not ever-present, every day of one’s life, on one’s very person. I can only imagine the kind of power such symbolism has, the power to penetrate one’s deepest sense of who one is.

I saw it, however fleetingly, in Raju’s eyes as he showed me each symbol in turn, and explained to me what it meant. And then, in typical Raju fashion, he turned to me, saw his unraveled turban—and then laughed as he began wrapping it around my head. And then we went in to show my parents, who ran off to get the camera.

New RD Piece on Responding to Terrorism

For those interested, I have a new featured essay in today's Religion Dispatches, in which I reflect on our persistent reliance on forceful interdiction as our solution to problems such as terrorism, and I ask what it might be like if we started taking seriously that quiet, prophetic religious voice which calls us to respond to evils such as terrorism with greater compassion and empathy, rather than more force and fear.