Trimming the Hedges

Last week I read this piece by Chris Hedges, someone who has done some great investigative work in the past exposing the incestuous ties between Christianity and extreme right wing politics in the US (American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America is a particularly good one). It's really too bad to see a usually critical observer bump up against the wide flank of his own sacred cow, and that's just what's occurring here. Hedges thinks that as religion loses its (still very dominant) place in the world, we'll be left with a nihilistic, scientistic, deeply unequal and needless to say brutal culture. Despite all the social and political evils justified by religions even to this day, many of which Hedges himself has uncovered, he maintains

There remain, in spite of the leaders of these institutions, religiously motivated people toiling in the inner city and the slums of the developing world. They remain true to the core religious and moral values ignored by these institutions. The essential teachings of the monotheistic traditions are now lost in the muck of church dogma, hollow creeds and the banal bureaucracy of institutional religion.

His first sentence neatly sidesteps the question of how much of this trumpeted religious charity work really accomplishes versus the forcible conversions, encouragement of homophobic violence and perpetuation of sexual ignorance by missionaries worldwide. Leaving those aside, to think that the “true core” values of the monotheistic traditions are social justice concerns about the world's many vicious inequalities has to be a sick joke. It reminds me of a diehard Leninist who blames the horrors of the USSR's state capitalism solely on Stalin's authoritarian personality while trying desperately not to see the deeply anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary form of the Bolshevik party itself. If at the very core of these religious knowledge structures is a moral concern with alleviating suffering due to inequalities and injustice we should see that concern permeating their most fundamental texts- these are, after all, the founding documents without which any later interpretations wouldn't even exist. When the ancient Hebrews wrote out God's words concerning how much you can beat your slave, when Jesus stated that his apocalyptic Jewish cult was only for “the lost sheep of Israel”, when Mohammed ordered his minions to execute doubters....yes, that refined moral excellence is so wonderfully inclusive!!

The really funny thing is that Hedges, like all well-meaning progressive believers, thinks that somehow he can personally discern the "real" Christianity from the false. How does he propose to do this? If the nasty and intolerant pronouncements in the Bible are to be dismissed in favor of cherry-picking the ones which jibe with our modern sense of decency and human rights, why is anything in these texts to be believed at all?

I'm sure he feels “in his heart” that his loving, socially just Jesus couldn't have really meant to condemn much of the world's population to eternal torture simply for not aknowledging him as their dictator. The problem there is, of course, that the average functionary in the Nazi Shultzstaffen truly felt sure, “in their heart”, that they were making the right interpretation of German national and racial history. Let's not go by hearts, but rather by facts- and the historically accumulated facts of the “monotheistic traditions” show that Hedges' hopes of a (well-hidden) progressive core are baseless daydreams.

Armstrong, Accommodationism, Cake

An excellent light interview with Sam Harris ran recently on Southern California Public Radio here. Followed by the usual comments about his "simple and uninformed" view of religious faith....

It calls to mind Harris's recent exchange with vague hand-waver Karen Armstrong in the pages of Foreign Policy in which his fairly matter-of-fact questions and observations were ignored by Armstrong. Instead, she characteristically spent her time complaining about his "tone." This obsession with the civility of arguments instead of their content is something that accommodationists like Armstrong seem to share with the more liberal, "modern" theologians. It's no wonder she goes on to name check folks like Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, each of which have their own charming approach to denying history or, when forced to concede how hopelessly incoherent most historical religious claims are, attempting to drain history of all importance.

No surprise, then, that someone like Armstrong likes such approaches- it allows her free reign to redefine specific religions, or religion in general. This is almost always toward definitions that are vague enough avoid refutation and aligned closely enough to modern conceptions of human rights that all the historical abuses and savageries of religion are excluded as not being examples of "true faith."

What really fascinates me, however, is how this ahistoricism parallels the worst of the classical liberal narratives about "progress." The usual liberal line has always been that that modern capitalism and parliamentary "democracy" may have started out in an extremely barbaric form (no political participation for the majority of society, crushing exploitation of workers etc...) but that it progressively reformed itself to be more just and recognize rights in groups it had previously treated as industrial fodder. Rights were"granted" from on high, so to speak, and we must all be thankful and not cause too much of a fuss.

What this sort of storytelling tries to do, of course, is gloss-over the essential part played by radical social movements and marginalized groups in creating the last two century's advances in human rights. Recent work by Micheline Ishay (The History of Human Rights) is fairly good at showing that most of the limited political and social rights that are enjoyed today weren't the result of some inherent process internal to capitalism or the modern era. Instead, they had to be fought for step-by-step in a grinding process where rights were forced as a concession out of the state, usually by scaring political elites into throwing some sort of bone to the masses to preclude full-blown revolution. The right to limited workplace protections, the (nominal) end of child labor and slavery, even the extension of the vote to non-rich white males were all only won in the West because people spoke out vociferously and mobilized physically for them.

The point is that both the accommodationists/ultra-abstract theologians and the liberals like to have their cake and eat it too. Actually, it's more like they enjoy eating cakes that have been baked by others- claiming that the forces that tried at each step to hold back the tide of progress on these matters, religion and capitalism, actually just reformed themselves from within due to some miracle of their nature. This is why Armstrong can indulge in vague, polite deism and pretend it isn't simply a fall-back position to salvage religion in the face of withering criticism.