Obama on race

It's been a long time, I know...busy, busy, busy.

But here's the link to a transcript of Barack Obama's speech on race.

I know it's not timely, (it was deliveredMarch 18, 2008) but if you haven't read it, it is worth a look.

Compared with most political rhetoric we have heard over the last...generation, it seems, although I'm sure I'm forgetting someone...it is superlative: balanced and nuanced, it dares to speak truthfully about race in America while also allowing the fears and anxieties on all sides to portray all of us in our humanity - while also calling for us to move towards our best selves, which he places deeply in the American constitution. It is also deeply thoughtful and learned while being accessible and eminently readable/hearable, which is rare indeed.

It's not perfect. It doesn't say everything, perhaps, that needs saying. There are points at which bits of ideology surface which might be questioned. But hey - he's talking about race and racism; he's doing it honestly and clearly; he's not letting us think it is a 'non-issue' or something from the past; and he's calling us all to our 'better selves'. It's a great start.

My Kingdom for a Horse, or: Throwing Good Money After Bad

How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish.

Just mind boggling.

Naivete and ill-preparedness are just as culpable as cynicism and domination.

Or, as U.S. Representative Henry Waxman put it in the above-referenced article, "Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?"

Two interesting op-ed pieces from the Guardian

I don't have much time to comment, but I wanted to link to two op-ed pieces from today's Guardian:

The Brands have Turned Us into a Nation of Addicts by Jackie Ashley (it talks about the influence of marketing on children)

and

Labour has sped along the American highway but we would be happier taking Europe's gentler path by Larry Elliott. (It makes the case that the UK is following an American-style economic program, of accelerating growth without limits, and that this is profoundly flawed; in contrast, he holds up the continental model for serious consideration (although he is, wisely, not uncritical of it either.))

Central to both of these is the deep question of what humans are for: Are we fundamentally for being parts of an economic machine, cogs in consumerism, which is continually accelerating in producing and using up more and more? Or is there something else that we are for, which is able to contextualise the consumption machine, allowing for better environmental stewardship and a genuine humanity in which business and economics serves humans rather than vice-versa? Although these two op-eds only gesture in the direction of this genuine humanity, and in any event I would want to provide a robustly Christian view of this humanity (and I have no idea if the writers in question would or wouldn't), it still seems clear that the sorts of practices they highlight lead us in profoundly unhelpful and inhuman directions.

What the...?

What is going on in America with all of the gun violence in schools? Last week, a homeless man in Colorado barricaded himself in a classroom with several girl students and shot and killed one. Either Friday or Monday a student in Wisconsin shot and killed his principal (lead teacher) because of a reprimand. And yesterday a man in Pennsylvania barricaded himself with all of the girl students in a one-room schoolhouse and began killing them all, execution-style. In the event, four were killed, numerous others injured. Certainly all of the students -- in all three of these cases -- were deeply scarred.

Certainly I am quite concerned about our irrational attachment to guns, and their prevalence in America. And I imagine that many schools will respond with greater security, etc., as if gun-wielding maniacs themselves are okay, just so long as they don't enter school property.

But beyond this odd attachment to guns, and our deeply violent nature -- and if this last comment seems controversial, compare our rate of violent death with other Western nations', then get back to me -- I am concerned about (in two of these cases) the focus on underage girls, a constellation that represents, in the popular imagination if not in fact, the greatest vulnerability and even innocence.

Now, of course, these shootings aren't related in the sense that the shooters knew each other or worked together. They are no more related than someone in Chicago using a racial epithet and somone in Kansas City using a racial epithet; and they are also no less related than that. The similar behaviour masks similar social undercurrents.

And so it seems deeply pathological that these men would barricade themselves with girl students unknown to them, in one case even sexually abusing them, and then kill as many of them as possible before killing themselves. Of course, for anyone familiar with abuse, sexual or otherwise, this observation is quite banal (although the evil behind it, even if banal, is not finally, completely explicable).

But I wonder if it masks a deeper social current in our society that also works its way out in things such as needing to have vastly overwhelming firepower in any given situation, of needing to do whatever necessary to ensure victory, on the battlefield or in the boardroom, of not being able to concede defeat, much less allow ourselves to lose graciously?

Or perhaps the two -- the killings and the wider societal practices -- aren't related. But I do know this: I certainly feel much safer sending my four year old daughter to school here in the United Kingdom than I would in America right now.

...and taking with the other

Recently I've said a few things about Baptists, like if you were to scratch an American, you'll find a Baptist underneath. To clarify, I am particularly talking about the habits of mind and soul that almost any American takes for granted as being true -- so much so that to suggest otherwise borders on socio-cultural heresy. And many of those habits parallel quite closely distinctive teachings and convictions of the Baptist tradition.

Actually, what they really approximate is the liberal tradition that came out of the Enlightenment, but when I call my Southern Baptist pastor friend a liberal compared to me (I'm an Episcopal priest) he just laughs. But it's true. The Congregational, Baptist, Unitarian, and most other free church traditions -- especially those that came early to America -- share these characteristics in common, and are properly called "liberal" traditions. I don't call them "liberal" because that would lead to more misunderstanding than calling them Baptist. (In fact, I try to avoid the term "liberal" altogether, because -- like "literalism" -- I think it can become a very grey catch-all term, with any number of a vast array of meanings. Some of the meanings even contradict the other meanings. So I try to leave it alone. If you do ever hear me use it, though, I am almost certainly talking about the sense of "liberal" I am outlining here.)

So here in a rough-and-ready outline are some characteristics of Americans, Baptists and other liberals:
1) privileging of the literal level of interpretation over any other.
2) distaste for the symbolic and abstract/preference for the literal and concrete.
3) utilitarian and pragmatic, seeing beauty and ornament as extras (which, when push comes to shove, are unnecessary).
4) stress on the individual (and her conscience) as the seat of authority, in interpretation especially; community is secondary or nonexistent.
5) stress on The Bible, and the Bible's perspicacity -- and hence a de-emphasis on interpretation, or a denial that it takes place.
6) stress on liberty of the individual, versus communal or tradition-based norms, with a corresponding de-emphasis on any historical memory.
7) emphasis on voluntary membership in church, a group whose authority is entirely congregational, and run by popular vote (or possible a board of elders). Suspicion of either a concrete, embodied church structure (whether full-blown episcopacy, or even a regional synod or classis), or of "high" doctrines of the church as anything other than a human, voluntary creation. The notion that one might be a Christian in isolation, without being a member of any church seems to be common sense.
8) strong emphasis on separation of church and state.
9) strong tendency to divide the world up into "spiritual" and "political", so that the two should not meet: that is to say, faith is "private" while politics is "public".
10) strong sense that salvation is other-worldly, i.e. it's about going to heaven, and that we should do as much as possible to help others make a decision that will help them "spiritually". This often entails a corresponding de-emphasis on this-worldly efforts by Christians, except, perhaps, as they lead to the spiritual.
11) often displays a sense of patriotism that goes beyond affection for one's country to an assurance that it is favored or chosen by God, perhaps an instrument of God in the world.

We are all Baptists to some extent: we all have to wrestle with these habits of mind and life, as they have simply been given to us and they are in the bedrock of our national culture -- moreso, I would argue, than the Puritans and their convictions. Of course, even if we define ourselves against this characterization we are still demonstrating the Baptist/ American influence. Naturally we don't need to accept these habits, even if they've so deeply shaped us. But if we have been formed by them, it will be difficult (and will seem anything but natural) to notice them, to doubt them, and to think and act differently.

I will, in time, try to make more observations about how these habits show themselves in our society. I think this conversation (if you make comments) is important, because this is not just our Baptist-liberal-American culture, but increasingly, as we assume the mantle of World Empire, and spread our way of life through global commerce (a parody of Christian mission), it is becoming the way of the world.

The Continuing Saga of America: a ________ Nation

Some time back, I explored the proposition put to me by a friend and maintained tenaciously by many others that America is a Christian nation. More recently, I have been analyzing Baptist theology as directly influencing and reflecting American habits of mind and life.

Now here comes Caleb McDaniel, writing with his usual verve and insight on a related topic, the shape of Thomas Jefferson's faith. I recommend you read his entire entry, but I found the following excerpts particularly telling:

Whatever one thinks about the "Christian nation" question, it is undeniable that Americans of all stripes have been obsessed throughout our history with Jesus. What [this author] proposes to show, in fact, is that Americans have frequently used their various interpretations of Jesus, whether historical or theological, as critical tools against "Christianity."

...and further...

But what is clear even from this start is that Jefferson's ideas about Jesus were "Christian" only in a highly qualified sense. What is even clearer is that Jefferson intended his Jesus to stand in judgment against Christianity. It is important that he underlined his status as a "real" Christian. He was not claiming Christian faith in such statements, but was (as many Americans subsequently have) attempting to evacuate the term and fill it with new meaning. And, again like many subsequent Americans, he wanted to claim that this new meaning of Christian was the original, unadulterated one.

I find these observations fascinating not in what they reveal about Jefferson himself, as what they reveal (by analogy) about Americans in general. The practice of using Jesus as a critical tool against Christianity -- not to say the church -- seems to me to be a sort of characteristic move of Americans (and perhaps the Enlightenment in general). To do this, one needs to prise Jesus away from any sort of embodied tradition and assert that he is actually free-floating and abstract, universally and immediately available (how else would one "have" the "real" Jesus with which to judge the Christian faith?). One would need not only skepticism towards tradition(s), but also a conviction that oneself (or one's conscience) is the final authority on such issues as reading and interpreting the Scriptures (editing them, in Jefferson's case). Finally, one would need to maintain the tried-and-true (and dubious) distinction of "wheat" and "chaff". Harnack was a prominent later proponent of this notion of getting rid of the chaff of Christianity to maintain the pure wheat, not unlike what Jefferson was up to. I raise these issues not to offer thorough critique here, but to observe some of the signs of what I elsewhere call the "Baptist nature" of much American tradition.

Europe Rising

I have recently run across a couple of books and a newspaper column that have intrigued me and helped me to synthesize some thoughts about America and our culture. (hyperlinks to the New York Times require free registration at NYTimes.com - sorry!)

The two books are The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream By Jeremy Rifkin (reviewed in the New York Times, 9/1/04), and The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by T.R. Reid (reviewed in the New York Times, 12/16/04). There was an op-ed piece in the Times along similar lines on December 17th, 2004. I will make the most use of Rifkin, as I heard an interview with him on Milt Rosenberg's talk show, Extension 720, on October 1, 2004.

The upshot of these writings is that there is another viable way to be modern and Western, and this can be seen in Europe, which is rising in economic and political power to become a rival to America. Ultimately a trans-national entity such as the European Union will trump one nation's (even a super-power's) maverick, go-it-alone actions.

Continue reading Europe Rising

Jeremy Rifkin claims that the European Union has set itself the goal to become the largest economic power on the planet by 2010. They won't make this goal, he says, but will certainly achieve it by 2015. As further evidence of Europe's rising economic power, Rifkin points out that of the world's 150 largest companies, 50 are headquartered in the United States, and 60 are based in the European Union. Couple this with the observation from the Op-Ed piece that the EU, unlike the United States, is growing as countries such as Poland and Turkey join, and this starts to become a case that needs to be taken seriously.

In the Op-Ed piece, Timothy Garton Ash elaborates, saying: (next four paragraphs are pulled quotes.)

"Why is it that Americans do not understand the power of the European Union? Is it because they are simply not well informed by reports from Brussels and other European capitals? Or is it because, as citizens of the world's last truly sovereign nation-state, Americans - and especially American conservatives - find it difficult to acknowledge the contribution of a transnational organization based on supranational law? It's as if they can conceive of power only in the old-fashioned terms of a classical nation-state.

"Robert Kagan describes the difference between America and Europe as the difference between power and weakness - American power, that is, and European weakness. This description is sustainable only if power is measured in terms of military strength. In the way that some American conservatives talk about the European Union, I hear an echo of Stalin's famous question about the Vatican's power: how many divisions does the pope have? But the pope defeated Stalin in the end. This attitude overlooks the dimensions of European power that are not to be found on the battlefield.

"In economic power, the European Union is the equal of the United States: the combined gross domestic product of the union's 25 member states is some $11 trillion at current exchange rates, about the same as the G.D.P. of the United States. American business has long recognized the importance of the European market, and it is also beginning to understand the influence of its regulators. Three years ago the union blocked the merger of two American companies, General Electric and Honeywell - after American regulators had already approved the deal.

"The European Union is also strong in a less tangible kind of power - what is known as "soft power." The European way of life, its culture and societies, are enormously appealing to many of its neighbors. Meanwhile, the policies of the Bush administration have prompted a wave of hostility toward America around the world, while its security measures have made it more difficult for foreigners to study or work in the United States. So Europe may currently have a comparative advantage in the exercise of soft power, if only temporarily."


It seems, if Ash and the other authors are correct, that Europe is not only rising, but that we might potentially find ourselves quite surprised if/when it eclipses us.

Now I should note that Richard Bernstein and Roger Cohen do not give wholehearted approval to these books and their theses. Bernstein in particular, in reviewing Rifkin, takes issue with some of the author's facts, presentations, and interpretations. So the jury is certainly still out as far as the predictions of Europe's imminent dominance go.

But here is what most struck me about these accounts: not that Europe might eclipse America economically or politically, but that they hold rather different values than we do, which give rise to very different "dreams". Rifkin takes particular pains to show this, theorizing that (in part) many of our differences arise from such different geography. I would agree, adding that they also arise from our very different stories, including our history.

Because geographically, Europe has been settled for so long with no discernable frontier, they are much more likely to want to negotiate and resolve problems among people, rather than simply move on, unreconciled, as here in America. They are also more likely to stay in one place for their lives, rather than moving over great distances and from one region to another (say, for a job). This gives a greater sense of rootedness; it also contributes to their being less socio-economic mobile. But this latter point is not so much of a problem for them because they do not define success in terms of accumulating wealth without limitation in order to rise as high as they can, but in terms of living well within their class. It is more static, yet less stressful. Further, America tends to define freedom as freedom from limitations, and as having sufficient opportunity to flourish. Europe, on Rifkin's account, sees freedom as the freedom to live at peace with one's neighbors, and the freedom to live well. The upshot of the European dream is a society that favors sustainable living (in environmental and social terms).

Now, I have admitted that I am an unrepentent Anglophile. I am also, derivatively, something of a Europhile. But I raise these points here not simply to belittle the U.S. and say that we need to be more like Europe to get things right. Europe certainly hasn't gotten everything right: they seem not to value children, for example, in their surprisingly low birth rate; they are struggling against racist impulses as needed foreign workers enter their countries; and I am quite put off by their secularism, which seems especially prominent on the continent, but is not unknown in England. They also seem to have drunk more deeply at the well of the French and German Enlightenment than America (and England) has, which may explain some of the hostility to the church.

But I do have some real questions about American notions of freedom and individualism and the way that we have shaped our American Dream, and the European Dream may provide something of a tonic to this. Moreover, it calls into question the idea that the way America has risen to power and now leads politically and economically is the only way that that could happen -- for example, that having viable welfare programs only stands in the way of national flourishing, or that to have an worthwhile life people need to be willing to uproot and become corporate nomads, or (this is especially close to my heart) to have a livable society, everyone must have an individual (tract) house, a plot of land, as many cars as adults residing in the house, and demonstrate that they posess all the top consumer items for their socioeconomic status.

(One way in which we have never even dared to approach Europe, much less surpass it, is in the beauty and livability of the built environment. Areas in New York and Boston border on this kind of salutary construction of space, but all recent trends (think Big Box retailers, for example) give ample cause for discouragement.)

It might be objected that there are an awful lot of people banging on our doors to get into our nation, to become Americans, or at least take their share of the American Dream. But my response to that is that success in marketing a product is rarely related to the inherent value, beauty or goodness of that product. There are reasons to believe that our Dream may not be entirely healthy or realistic; just because it is in demand does not mean that it is beyond reflection or reconsideration.

So I am not saying that we need to mimic Europe. But I think we do need a good dose of self-reflection as Americans on just what our dream is and why, and how we might recast that in more globally responsible, humanly livable terms for the 21st century.

America is a ________ Nation

I have a friend who is fond of saying that America is a Christian nation; I have to confess that I don't know what he means.That's not just a rhetorical ploy: I think that the phrase is so overused, so general, and so thoughtlessly invoked to support one cause or another, that it is in fact unclear to me just what people mean they use it. It could mean:
Continue reading America is a ________ Nation

1) The majority of American citizens are actually Christian. This is the most straightforward meaning, and also has the virtue of being (more or less) verifiable. One could do a poll and discover that (say) 85% of Americans can recite the Apostles' Creed without flinching. But while this meaning is verifiable, it also has the disadvantage of being useless: what, precisely, follows from the fact that most American citizens are Christian? It is also verifiable that a majority of American citizens are female. Does that mean that all true Americans are actually female, or at least willing to allow females to set the national agenda, and get out of their way when they seek to make policy that affects all of us? If it is not true for females, why do we Christians feel differently? I suspect it is because we (or at least some of us) subscribe to a different sense of America being Christian than this one. Maybe it is:

2) Historically, the institutions of America were set up by Christians and were based on (Judeo-?) Christian principles. Again, we seem to be on relatively safe ground (although not as safe as #1). We can easily do a historical survey and find that a large number of the major figures in the founding of our nation were Christians of one stripe or another, mostly either evangelicals or unitarians. Of course, if we want to be really precise, we should say that America is a Protestant (and then either evangelical and rationalist) nation, for Roman Catholicism was seen as an unwelcome outside influence. Roman Catholics have struggled mightily for quite some time to show that they are true-blue Americans, think of the suspicions surrounding John F. Kennedy. They have come quite a ways, though, as the criticism by many of John F. Kerry was not that he was too closely aligned with the pope, but that he wasn't close enough. I also think it is significant that the Protestants who were most influential in the founding of America (evangelical, rationalist) had almost no sense of the church as a visible embodiment of the Kingdom. American evangelicals of either the reformed or pietist varieties have typically seen the church as a voluntary collection of believers. Rationalists were usually concerned with doing one's duty and living a good life; the church for them was more about making decent, respectable citizens than making saints. The Transcendentalists who inherited a good bit of the rationalist establishment had even less use for the church, seeing it as primarily an unwelcome accretion of hoary tradition which should be stripped away to find the "true religion of man". (I admit, the foregoing was an oversimplification; but this is a blog, not a monograph, and I will stand by them as substantially correct) All of which is to say that the institutions of America were set up by certain kinds of Christians, who were themselves products of certain historically specific conflicts. So at any rate, those who hold to this second version need to 'fess up that it is not a Christian nation, broadly construed, but a certain kind of Christian nation, and there might be certain other Christians who would not be at home here (much less Muslims, Buddhists, or atheists). But in the end we shouldn't be distracted into qualifying the claim in this way, because it is really a problem of description versus prescription: just because thus and such was (descriptively) the case at the founding of the nation, it does not lead to thus and such needing to be the case here and now. For example, the founders of the nation were also propertied white males, and yet today we extend the franchise to the poor, to people of other races and ethnicities, and to women without a thought. (Granted it took awhile, but we eventually made those changes and found that we were still Americans afterward.) It could, of course, be the case that America is by definition Christian, as perhaps one might suggest it is by definition egalitarian. In that sense, a prescription (America should be Christian) might follow from a description (America was founded by Christians). But that is not meaning number 2, it's meaning numbers 3 and 4:

3) It was the intention of the founders of America that we be a Christian nation. This is rather more difficult to establish, and even if one could establish it, it still isn't clear what follows from it. For example, it could be shown that the founders also intended that only propertied white males be able to vote -- but again, we have extended the franchise (and confounded the founders' intentions) with little or no problem. The same would hold true of their intentions vis-a-vis religion.

So far, we have looked at the following justifications for America being called a Christian nation: Most Americans are Christians, The nation was founded by Christians, The nation was founded by Christians who intended it to be a Christian nation. None of these seem persuasive, but there is one more meaning of the phrase "America is a Christian nation" which I suspect many actually hold, perhaps with some measure of bad conscience:

4) America is a Christian nation because it is God's elect nation. In this version, America has been given by God a role analogous to Israel in the Old Testament, as God's chosen instrument. America bestows and spreads God's gifts throughout the world: freedom, liberty, consumer goods, true religion. This very sense of America as elect nation has crept into our president's rhetoric about war, but he is only the most recent proponent of a longstanding American tradition. (It is also a longstanding British tradition: they did it before us, and, frankly, they did it better, though no more convincingly. They also have the benefit of having ceased this rhetoric for the most part.) The Puritans' sense of the nation being a "shining beacon on a hill" has often been enlisted in this cause, although I think it is usually misunderstood by those who so use it. Quite often, this sense of America as an elect nation owes much more to civil religion than to anything demonstrably Christian, and there's a reason for that: no such claim can be supported from the Bible, tradition, or theological reason. It is, perhaps, gnostic, a claim to a secret revelation, a secret knowledge about God's call, God's plan for the world, and the nature of this nation. Such a claim usurps the role of the actual political body which is analogous (if not quite superseding) to Israel in the Old Testament: the church, the chosen saints of God salted throughout the nations of the world. Because of this, such a claim is damnable idolatry and should be renounced by any self-respecting Christian.

America is none of these. America is not a Christian nation. America is a nation, pure and simple. It is one of the nations (the Greek word can also be translated Gentiles) that Israel and the Church are to live among, to which Jesus sent us to make disciples.

I realize that this opens up as many questions as it answers, probably more. For example, what is the proper role of the Church in America? If the Church is the primary political body for Christians, then to what extent should Christians be involved in the political doings of the nation-state? As Christians, we may have ceded to the nation-state some of our own responsibilities (caring for the poor, the elderly, the sick), as my friend Pamela suggests in a comment earlier, but does that mean we should discourage the nation-state from doing that? I don't know the answers to these questions, even for myself, much less to persuade others. I know that it is quite complex, and any response will reflect that. But I am quite dissatisfied with the present syntheses on offer, which seem to boil down like this:

1) Make the state the church, outlawing (say) the teaching of evolution, mandating prayer in schools, and so forth. As I said to a dear friend last week in an e-mail, this version seems to think that if we just overturn Roe v. Wade then the Kingdom of God will come in its fullness, which is palpable nonsense. or:

2) Check your faith at the door, leaving your convictions about that which informs (ideally) the whole of your life to one side as unimportant.

I could and no doubt will say more about this in future, although perhaps to trumpet my perplexity and ignorance as much as anything else. Maybe one of my three (!) gentle readers will add his or her comments.

But for now, this much I am sure of: America is a nation, full stop.