Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Bahrain: A Kingdom of Fear and Repression

By Emile Nakhleh

Bahrain, a small island country in the Persian Gulf used to be viewed by the international community as a relatively tolerant, inclusive, and liberal country. Once the “Arab Spring” erupted a few months ago in neighboring Arab countries, pro-reform demonstrations gathered steam in and around Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain demanding political and economic reform. The ruling Al-Khalifa family reacted with brutality and repression, including arrests and firing at protesters, detention of journalists, academics, parliamentarians, medical doctors and health providers, without regard for basic human rights. Within a few short months, Bahrain has become a Saudi satellite—politically and ideologically—and is no longer a shining beacon of tolerance in the Gulf.

Several reasons might explain why Bahrain’s uprising so far has not achieved the same results as in Tunisia and Egypt:

• A small population (barely over half a million)
• Pervasive Saudi influence
• The military and security leadership hails from the ruling family
• A tacit American and international support for al-Khalifa suppression of the uprising because of the stationing of the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, concern about Iran’s influence in the Gulf, and worries about the potential for instability in the oil region.

Amnesty International in a recent briefing paper describes Bahrain as a “human rights disaster” and suggests that the regime suppression of dissent through arbitrary arrests and torture has created an atmosphere of fear and sectarianism. The al-Khalifa family heads a Sunni minority with access to power, privilege, and wealth and rules over a Shia majority that is mostly poor and dispossessed, with minimal access to government jobs and lucrative economic opportunities. Many Shia live in villages and poorer sections of the capital Manama. A few prominent Shia families have cooperated with Al Khalifa and have been amply rewarded with access to wealth and high government positions, including cabinet posts.

Since March 15, 2011, King Hamad has imposed a state of emergency under the rubric of a “State of National Safety,” which has given the security forces “sweeping powers” to arrest and try protesters in special courts for “offences against the state” with no “explicit human rights safeguards.” Under SNS regulations, hundreds of people have been detained, tortured, and injured. At least 30 protesters have been killed, according to media and international human rights reports. Many others have “disappeared” by agents of the regime in the middle of the night without a word to their families or access to legal defense. More recently two al-Wefaq parliamentarians, Matar Ibrahim Matar and Jawad Fairuz, were arrested by masked armed agents of the regime and whisked away without minimal due process. Their families were not informed of their whereabouts.

Regime repression of protesters and human rights activists—Sunni and Shia—continues unabated. More doctors are being tried in special tribunals for alleged “crimes against the state.” In reality, they were arrested and tried for providing medical help to those injured and beaten by security agents.

Talk of possible dialogue with the opposition, which was first voiced by the Crown Prince and the King’s son Shaykh Salman, has all but evaporated with the advent of at least 1,000 Saudi troops into Bahrain. These troops, including a few from Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, came to Bahrain as part of the so-called Desert Shield. They crossed the causeway that connects Bahrain with Saudi Arabia under the Gulf Cooperation Council collective security agreement. The Saudi leadership was extremely distressed by the downfall of Tunisia’s Bin Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak and therefore decided not to spearhead a “counterrevolution” to safeguard the Bahraini and other Sunni Gulf ruling families. The Saudi action reflects Riyadh’s claim that the “Arab Spring” is a threat to internal stability and that Iran was stirring Shia opposition in Bahrain, and potentially in Saudi Arabia.

Three key points underpin the on-going crisis in Bahrain:

• The current protest movement calling for government accountability and reinstatement of the constitution is decades old; in fact, it goes back to 1975 when the ruling family dissolved the National Assembly and suspended the 1973 constitution.
• The movement is not driven by sectarianism. Because the majority of the population is Shia, large numbers of the protesters are therefore Shia. Sunni reformers, however, are also actively involved in opposing regime repression and have been at the forefront of the reform movement.
• The Shia community is diverse politically, socially, and economically and has not voted as a bloc. Nor is the Shia community beholden to Iran. Bahraini Shia over the years have turned to Iraqi and Lebanese Shia Grand Ayatollahs for emulation, and although several prominent Bahraini Shia leaders have studied in Iran, the Shia community does not view Iranian senior clerics as their sources of emulation or marja'.

Bahraini protesters, like their counterparts in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere, are as diverse as the wider Bahraini society. They are villagers, city dwellers, laborers, farmers, professionals, teachers, health providers, and government employees. They seek dignity, justice, respect, and the opportunity to live as free citizens. Many of their postings on the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter reflect their desire to have the freedom to dream for a better life and pursue their dreams without repression or restrictions on their freedoms to speak, to create, to travel, and to associate with others. They also aspire to join the rising Arab generation as a peaceful force of change in their societies.

Contrary to Saudi and Bahraini government claims, calls for reform are not a Shia thing or a recipe for sectarianism. Media reports indicate the sectarianism argument has been pushed by the Saudi and Bahraini leadership in order to justify their actions against Bahraini peaceful protesters. Many Bahrainis view the main goal of the Saudi presence in the country is to persecute the Shia community and silence all opposition voices.

The three key ingredients of the envisioned compromise involve a return to the 1973 constitution, a re-establishment of a popularly elected national Assembly, which the king’s father dissolved in 1975, and dissolving the current government, which has been headed by the king’s uncle, Shaykh Khalifa, since independence in 1971. The prime minister is perhaps the most disliked senior member of Al Khalifa because of perceived corruption, nepotism, and repression, according to academic analysis and media reports. Many Bahrainis also view him as a staunch opponent to reform within the ruling family. The opposition movement maintains that implementing these demands will lead to transparent and accountable government, a just distribution of wealth, recognition of freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press, and an independent judiciary.

The pro-reform demands are in response to economic, political, and social grievances, which many Bahrainis have endured for decades. I have discussed many of these grievances in the first edition of my book, Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernizing Society, which Lexington Books published in 1976. These grievances, including the same prime minister, continue to exist in the country today.

Emile Nakhleh is the author of Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernizing Society (Lexington Books, 2011).

Godliness and Greed: How Effective is Christian Ethics in Curtailing Greed?

By Skip Worden

In the wake of the financial crisis that came to a head in September of 2008, people might have been wondering if sufficient normative constraints on Wall Street greed are available, even possible. The ability of traders to create complex derivative securities that are difficult for regulators to regulate, much less understand, may have people looking for ethical or even religious constraints. It would be only natural to ask if such “soft” restraint mechanisms really do have the puissance to do the trick. Here’s the rub: the tricksters are typically the last to avail themselves of ethical or religious systems, and they the wrongdoers are the ones in need of the restraint. Blankfein said of his bank, Goldman Sachs, that it had been doing God’s work. About a week after saying that, he had to walk his statement back and admit that the bankers had does some things that were morally wrong. Although divine omnipotence is by definition not limited by human ethical systems, it is hard to imagine a divine decree telling bankers to tell their clients one thing (buy sub prime mortgage derivatives) while taking the opposite position on the bank’s proprietary position (shorting the derivatives, beyond being a counterpart to clients). Divine duplicity seems to represent an oxymoron on a mega-scale rather than a justification for greed.

As the crisis erupted and was subsequently managed by public officials in government and new managers brought in to salvage AIG, I was researching the history of Christian thought on profit-seeking and wealth. I had found evidence of a gradual shift in the thought between Aquinas and the fifteenth-century Christian Humanists (mainly in what is now Italy). Whereas early Christian thought had tended to stress the negative attitude toward riches—the camel being in extreme pain in getting through the eye of the needle—in the Renaissance Christian theologians tended to argue that being wealth is necessary for a Christian to exercise the godly practical virtues of liberality and magnificence (particularly the latter, which alone permits gifts reflective of God’s majesty). Something had happened in the dominant Christian attitude on wealth that made the religion less of a buttress against greed because it had become possible for a Christian to be both rich and to go to heaven. Cosimo de Medici is a perfect example of a banker who was assured by the pope that a career based on usury would not necessarily bar a banker from entering heaven (assuming he gave financially to the Church). The various Reformers can be read as efforts to pull Christianity back from being so close to incorporating love of gain, or greed. I looked at the (Standard Oil) monopolist and devout Baptist, John D. Rockefeller, to get a sense of how efficacious the Reformation was in attempting to arrest and reverse the momentum of the pro-wealth Christian paradigm.

Having sketched the shift and subsequent reactions of the Reformers, I turned my attention to trying to explain both the shift itself and the efficacy of the Reformation. I believe the increasingly commercialized environment since the Commercial Revolution does not provide enough of an explanation; I contend that one must look at the religion itself to find the roots of the shift and the results of the Reformation as concerns the religion's theological attitudes toward wealth. In other words, Christianity itself must be examined. As you read through the book, you could do worse than ask yourself: is there something deeper in Christianity at work in the historical shift in thought? You will find my theory in the conclusion.

The question is perhaps whether religion itself, as a phenomenon touching the human domain of existence, can hold us back from ourselves. If so, then a religion operating in the human domain can operate as a wholly-other mechanism by which greed can be reduced or even finally extirpated. To expunge the sordid stuff from our banks and corporations, human nature itself would have to be radically changed. Perhaps the question is whether it is possible for religion as a phenomenon to accomplish this task when it cannot but interact with the world.

Skip Worden received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and M.Div. from Yale Divinity School. He is the author of Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit and Wealth.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Today’s Confessional Politics

By Brian T. Kaylor

Twenty-five years ago, the third Monday in January was designated a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. Born on January 15, the Baptist pastor led one of the most significant social movements in the history of the United States, transforming American politics, society, and religion. More than four decades after King’s assassination, the fruits of his work continue to reverberate throughout society. When Barack Obama placed his hand on the Bible two years ago and took the presidential oath of office, it symbolized a partial fulfillment of King’s dream.

However, King’s influence on American politics today extends far beyond opening doors for minorities to find political success. King and the civil rights movement also impacted the relationship between religion and politics. Few political figures invoked God and cited scripture as explicitly and eloquently as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In many respects, King’s civil rights movement—and to a lesser extent the anti-Vietnam War movement that he was also part of—brought religious rhetoric squarely into public policy debates and created a model for later religious activists seeking political influence. King built a movement that urged religious leaders and citizens to leave the church sanctuary and march into the streets. He directly served as a primary instigator for today’s liberal evangelical movement and an inspiration for today’s conservative evangelical movement—even among those who initially criticized his political mission.

Many politicians join religious leaders in pointing to King as justification for infusing God and scripture more heavily into their political discourse. While arguing the importance of connecting one’s faith to one’s policies during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama pointed to King and other religious-political activists: “Look, Martin Luther King, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, Dorothy Day—we have a long history of reform movements being grounded in that sense, often religiously expressed, that we have to extend beyond ourselves and our individual immediate self-interests to think about something larger.” As Obama correctly noted, King and his movement demonstrated how religious faith can inspire people to make the world a better place. To attempt to excise faith from the public square would be to isolate society from the influences of individuals like King.

Yet, the reverse problem can also develop—one where politicians attempt to become preachers and use the government to enforce their specific sectarian goals. King, the prophet calling out the powerful interests, demonstrated the healing power of faith. But those same aspirations could backfire if used instead by those in power to maintain their positions. In the age of confessional politics in which we live, too often religion is used to gain power and strip minority religious groups of their civil rights. What we need is not necessarily more or less religion in politics, but a different kind. We need the faith that King preached, the faith that shows love for all one’s neighbors, the faith that empowers the down trodden, the faith that fights for justice for all.

Dr. Brian T. Kaylor (www.BrianKaylor.com) is an assistant professor of communication studies at James Madison University. He is the author of Presidential Campaign Rhetoric in an Age of Confessional Politics.

Wounding and Grace: A Brief Appraisal of the Roman Catholic Ordinariate, Anglican Christianity, and Modern Ecumenism

By Jared C. Cramer

For several weeks now there have been stories and opinion in the media about the resignation of five Anglican bishops who intend to join the proposed Ordinariates in the Roman Catholic Church along with fifty Anglican priests who intend the same. Many on the right say the Anglican Communion will only see more of these defections, particularly if the Church of England continues to move forward with the consecration of women to the episcopate and the Episcopal Church continues to move forward with affirming the gifts of its gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) members. Many on the left rush to make clear that this is no large-scale defection, but that these bishops and priests existed on the edge of the Anglican Communion and their departure carries little significance.

What is lost in the midst of all the opinion and statements offered by various groups in the church is the ecumenical and ecclesiological implications of this movement. In particular, it may be helpful for a moment to consider this development in light of the approach to Anglicanism articulated by Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1973. Ramsey is not only well-respected by both liberals and conservatives within contemporary Anglicanism, he likely has had more significance than any other person on modern ecumenical relations between Anglicanism and other Christian traditions. It was Ramsey who oversaw the creation of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). It was Ramsey who had fought so mightily for the union of English Methodism with the Church of England. And it was to Ramsey that Pope Paul VI gave his own episcopal ring, back in days when relations between the two traditions were somewhat warmer.

The immediate ecumenical and ecclesiological disappointment with the Ordinariate is the way in which it was crafted. It could have been put together in conversation between the two traditions, acknowledging that Anglicanism has its own fair share of former Roman Catholic priests as well. The movement of the dissatisfied from one tradition to another rarely bears much ecumenical fruit. Ramsey himself, though cautious about matters like women’s ordination, strongly opposed the idea of leaving Anglicanism over it. He saw such a movement for what it is: a continuing fruit of the schism which wounds the body of Christ. Had the Ordinariate been crafted in conversation with authorities in the Anglican Communion, it could have been a mutual statement that recognized the gifts of the two traditions and was also honest about the disagreements. It could have clarified the path which exists both between Canterbury and Rome and vice versa while setting those paths in the context of growing unity between the two traditions.

Unfortunately, this is not how the Ordinariate came about. Instead, the Ordinariate represents the increasing tendency within modern Christianity to rest content with those who see things the same way as us. It is an approach that allows for some exceptions in Roman Catholic practice, but not in any actual development that acknowledges for the rest of the Roman Catholic Church that these Anglican practices may be a enriching to the whole. The Ordinariate merely winks at some Anglican peculiarities for the purpose of drawing together those who are like-minded on other things. It is not grounded in Christian ecclesiology, but rather is a path to draw together like minds. The Christian Gospel, of course, is about reconciling diverse minds and groups in a unified body.

This failure of ecclesiological grounding is perhaps because the Ordinariate does not take into account one of the greatest advances in ecumenism in the twentieth century: baptismal unity. Long before the monumental work Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (BEM) was published, Ramsey insisted that Christian unity was always first a fact to be recognized due to baptism and only after that a goal to be pursued. He insisted throughout his writings that until baptismal unity was recognized, policies and procedures would always come up short, “The outward recovery of unity comes not from improvised policies, but from faith in the treasure which is in the Church already.”(1) The approach to unity which organizes people in defense of a particular approach to Christianity revealed, for Ramsey, a spirit of propaganda. It substitutes “a Pelagian idea of unity in our possession of certain opinions for the right idea of unity in our common reception of the gifts of God.” (2)

The sort of ecumenism for which Ramsey fought was one that was full-bodied, one that saw the way in which the various voices of Christianity not only enriched the broader church, but were absolutely necessary for the fullness of the Christianity. For Ramsey, catholic teaching insisted upon the incompleteness of each Christian tradition unless it was united with the other. The Ordinariate does little to acknowledge the incompleteness of the Roman tradition. Rather, as is customary for Rome, it acts as though Roman Catholicism is complete and that the Ordinariate is a correcting only of the incompleteness of the Anglican Christians who enter therein.

In the end, though, I feel compelled to acknowledge that good may come out of this Ordinariate. In particular, perhaps the Ordinariate may serve as a catalyst to renewed exploration of actual full union with another Christian communion. Too many Christians, including ecumenists, believe that institutional union is passé, no longer necessary for Christianity to be full and faithful. Ramsey believed that the fullness of the church would only be possible when each divided part was united with the others. He believed strongly in real organic unity. This real unity, Ramsey believed, would enrich the orders, increase the efficacy of the Sacraments, and further the ability of the Christian church to reconcile humans to God and each other.

It could be that the Ordinariate serves only to confirm the frustrations many have with any scheme for organic unity. It could be another example of top-down policies dictated in a one-sided manner that highlights schism rather than heals it. Or, perhaps the wounding of the Body of Christ which is made evident in the Ordinariate may also reveal a small healing for both Anglicans who enter into the Ordinariate and the broader Roman Catholic church. Indeed, both the difficulties of the Ordinariate and the possible graces may become a symbol to the broader church of a deeper unity that still remains possible. It could serve both to leaven the Roman Catholic church and also to renew dialogue about that which separates us and the triune God who is calling us together.

The Very Rev. Jared C. Cramer is the rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan. He is the author of the book Safeguarded by Glory: Michael Ramsey's Ecclesiology and the Struggles of Contemporary Anglicanism, published by Lexington Books. He blogs at http://www.stjohnsepiscopal.com/blog/

Endnotes

1. Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (2d. edition. London: Longmans, 1956), 175.
2. Ramsey, F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1951), 38.

Liu Xiaobo’s Sacrifice—Is It Worthwhile?

By Nathan Faries

Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese citizen, has won the Nobel Peace Prize. An active participant in the Tian’anmen Square demonstrations and author of a 2008 petition calling for radical reform in the People’s Republic, Liu sits now in a prison in northeast China.

Liu is a good choice, a man of principle fighting a lonely struggle in an increasingly apathetic political climate. This new attention should reenergize human rights advocates and shine light on groups which Liu himself has supported: the mothers of Tian’anmen victims, for example (http://www.tiananmenmother.org/).

But will the Peace Prize push forward Liu’s cause of reform? The dissident himself sounds pessimistic. Liu Xiaobo believes change will inevitably come to China because of a natural human bent toward freedom, but he is not sure that he will live to see the reforms. He has trouble imagining a Chinese Gorbachev, and he has said there will be no “timeline for political reform” offered by the government of his China. Liu Xiaobo is willing to give his life for this cause, though he expresses no confidence that his eyes will see the new China for which he hopes.

Reform must come to China by this individual path, his model teaches. The Olympic and Nobel Committees are somehow irrelevant to the process, as are the will and words of the Chinese Communist Party. Liu Xiaobo and his ilk are trying to live out a new kind of “Chineseness,” an identity that depends neither on the government to grant freedom, nor on international bodies to pressure the Party to expand liberties. Such dependence is to miss the point, even to work against the ultimate goal.

Does Liu even believe himself to be a good candidate for the Prize? He has opposed grand gestures made in the service of his cause before. As Tibet-sympathizers and other groups criticized the IOC, saying Beijing should be denied their Olympic Games, Liu claimed this kind of national sacrifice was unnecessary: “We want the Games and we want human rights to be respected.” Liu won’t ask his fellow Chinese to give up the honor and pleasure of the Olympic Games; instead he lives out a more powerful personal sacrifice.

What stands in the way of that goal? The Chinese government is good at redefining the terms of debate. The Tian’anmen “incident” in 1989 started off as a conversation between citizens and their government, but ended up as a divide between intellectual and soldier; a political debate was recast as class conflict. Ever since 1989, university students all over China have been sent off to mandatory “military training” to heal this divorce between the intelligentsia and the peasant People’s Liberation Army. The government has succeeded in changing the subject from politics to social class.

And from politics to economics. There is economic inequality in China, and there are frequent protests, but nothing seems likely to grow into a national movement. A life of sacrifice to an abstraction like political freedom grows ever more difficult in the face of concrete freedoms like the ability to travel where you want and when you want in your own car. Life in China today moves along smoothly enough for most people; Liu Xiaobo is a man to be admired, not imitated.

Perhaps to my shame, I understand the political apathy of those masses of Chinese who choose not to follow the way of Liu Xiaobo. In many respects, China is moving in the right direction, however slowly. The Soviet Union’s traumatic experience with overnight reform is constantly before the Chinese people’s eyes. I can’t help but wonder if Liu Xiaobo’s sacrifice—though certainly noble—is really necessary. If China is changing, and can only change, slowly, does Liu need to live and die in a prison cell? Is Liu Xiaobo himself preaching gradualism while living out revolution? Do a few individuals need to suffer voluntarily in today’s China to make life better for future generations?

Bad things have happened and continue to happen in China at the hands of a government that does not care enough about the suffering of individuals. Given the current state of global economies, pressure from outsiders to reform, be it from Scandinavia or the United States, holds little to no sway over the Chinese government. This loss of outsider influence stands in stark contrast to the ever-increasing international economic and political leverage wielded by the Chinese Communist Party. We need the Communists to negotiate with North Korea and to underwrite our own national debt. The Americans will to play hardball with the CCP, never an immense pool to begin with, is quickly draining away.

Giving Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize may do nothing material to advance the cause of reform in China, given today's lack of revolutionary energy within China and without; but for the sacrifice he has offered up for the vague hope of some future good for all the rest of us, Liu Xiaobo has earned his reward.

Nathan Faries is associate professor in the English Department at the University of Dubuque. He has taught for nearly 15 years in the United States, Bejing, and Hong Kong. He is the author of The Inscrutably Chinese Church: How Narratives and Nationalism Continue to Divide Christianity.

The Intellectual Legacy of Blessed John Henry Newman

By Jane Rupert

When Pope Benedict xvi beatified John Henry Newman on September 19, 2010, he recognized Newman not only as a pastor of souls but as leaving a rich intellectual legacy.

Newman is of singular importance to us at once in both capacities. He is a pastor to the mind, a modern physician to the intellect, a radical thinker (radix, root) who goes to the root of the dilemma of an age driven by the physical sciences and its specific habit of mind.

In a reversal of the plight of Galileo in the seventeenth century, when the speculative reasoning of theology was applied to the physical domain of science, in our era the empirical reasoning of physical science has become the universal key to knowledge in all domains. One of Newman’s contemporaries, Charles Darwin, gives a personal account in his autobiography of the erosion through disuse of other avenues to knowledge outside empirical reasoning. Darwin refers to the atrophy of the part of his brain that had once delighted in poetry, music, and art. He says that he perceived this loss not only as a loss of happiness but also as an enfeebling of the emotional and the moral part of his nature, and as possibly injurious to the intellect.

Throughout his lifetime (1801-1889), Newman ministered to this specifically modern problem of the diminishment of the mind that resulted from the hegemony of empirical science and from the influence of the narrow epistemology of empirical philosophers like Hobbes, Hume, and Bentham. He was the great advocate of those other pathways of the mind that lead to the inner contemplative world of thought, both in the liberal arts and in the soul’s relation to God.

In The Idea of a University, he defended the two kinds of reasoning—suspect in the modern age—which are cultivated in the liberal arts. First, he explained the important function of speculative thought which contemplates the ideas of things, such as the idea of a university. Second, he represented the rationality of literature whose nuanced language discloses the personal sources of literary thought.

This pastor to the intellect also spent a lifetime articulating how the mind functions in the inwardness of religious belief. In his sermons in the University Church at Oxford, in letters to The Times, in his final book, The Grammar of Assent, Newman describes the magisterial role of the imagination in our mental image of God where thought is harbored implicitly within the image. He argued the legitimacy of this implicit reason in religion when thought converges from various quarters in a manner common to all areas of both implicit and explicit deliberation, including the development of hypotheses in the physical sciences. As doctor of the mind, Newman also preached on the theocentric conscience and on the integrity of mind realized when our disordered faculties find unity through centering on the Personality of God.

Today, when unbelief prevails and the humanities are further marginalized, Blessed John Henry Newman’s defense of reason speaks with ever greater cogency.

Jane Rupert is an independent scholar living in Madoc, Ontario. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto. She is the author of John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind: Reason in Religion, Science, and the Humanities.

Barack, Glenn, and God: Religious Talk in the 2010 Political Sphere

by David Weiss

“I’m a Christian by choice...I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead...Understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings that we’re sinful and we’re flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God...My public service is part of that effort to express my Christian faith.”

Do you recognize those words? They weren’t uttered by a pastor, a nun, the director of a “faith-based initiative,” or any other sort of religious leader, nor were they the text of a Sunday morning service, a televangelist’s broadcast, or even a Washington, D.C., rally. But if you’ve been closely following the political news during this 2010 midterm election season, you might be able identify the speaker: President Barack Obama. During a September 28th discussion with neighborhood families in the backyard of an Albuquerque home, the president was asked by a voter, “Why are you a Christian?” His response, parts of which appear above, made headlines nationwide.

Why would a president’s public confession of faith be deemed newsworthy? Cynics might claim that Mr. Obama’s remarks were simply part of his ongoing efforts to rebut the rumor that he’s a Muslim. I suspect, however, that if doing so had been Obama’s only motivation, his Albuquerque confession wouldn’t have gotten the media attention that it did. After all, Obama has been countering false claims about his faith since well before he took office, as illustrated by www.fightthesmears.com, a page originally linked to his 2008 campaign web site. And since August 2010, when the Pew Research Center released poll results showing that roughly one in five Americans believe Obama is a Muslim, the Administration has gone into overdrive attempting to bat the rumor away. Within days of the Pew publication, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs described the president as a “committed, mainstream Christian.” Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton went even further, telling reporters that Obama’s faith “is an important part of his daily life. He prays every day. He seeks a small circle of Christian pastors to give him spiritual advice and counseling. He even receives a daily devotional that he uses each morning. The President’s Christian faith is a part of who he is, but not a part of what the public or the media is focused on every day.”

Whether Obama’s Albuquerque testimony was merely an impromptu, if eloquent, response to a voter’s question or part of a larger, more orchestrated image-rebuilding campaign, his words can also be evaluated within a much broader context: the religious communication of presidents and politicians throughout more than two centuries of American history. As my contributors and I demonstrate in my new edited collection What Democrats Talk About When They Talk About God, candidates and office-holders in both major parties have been talking about God—in their personal correspondence, on the campaign trail, and in the White House—since the founding of the Republic.

For most of the first 200 years of the American presidency, aspirants to and occupiers of the Oval Office spoke about God in ways firmly in keeping with the tradition of civil religion: acknowledging the existence of a creator that guided and blessed the United States (and possibly its “mission” on the world stage) and asking for the continuation of such guidance and blessing—but assiduously avoiding any mention of their own religious beliefs. Typical of this early approach were George Washington who, in his first inaugural address, praised the “Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of man,” and James Madison, who spoke of the “Almighty Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations.” But that civil-religious tradition was broken in 1975, when presidential candidate Jimmy Carter told the world that he was “born again”—a phrase not often heard at that time outside of evangelical churches—and publicly described a moment during which he had felt “closest to Christ and first experienced in a personal and intense way the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life.”

Carter’s remarks about his own relationship with God, a deity with rather different attributes from Washington’s providential “Invisible Hand” and Madison’s destiny-regulating “Almighty Being,” opened a door for contemporary politicians from across the ideological spectrum to bring their personal religious experiences into the public sphere. While not every president who followed Carter to the White House followed in his confessional footsteps—George H. W. Bush was noticeably reticent in this regard—Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and the current president have been remarkably forthcoming about their private beliefs, as have presidential and vice-presidential hopefuls Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush, who famously declared in a 1999 presidential primary debate that his favorite “philosopher” was Jesus Christ because a relationship with Christ “changes your heart.”

In this year’s midterm election races, God hasn’t been as big an issue as He was in, say, the 2000 or 2004 presidential contests; jobs and the economy are the priorities for most candidates for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. But this isn’t to say that religion has been completely absent from the campaign trail. Catholic bishops in Minnesota have mailed “educational packages” featuring DVDs to citizens in their state, urging them to vote against same-sex marriage and candidates who would support it. Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senate from Nevada, has said she believes that “God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations.” Arizona U.S. House candidate Pamela Gorman, also a Republican, brags in her TV commercials that she’s a “conservative Christian and a pretty fair shot.” Not to be outdone in the God-and-guns competition, Democratic U.S. House candidate and recent war veteran Tommy Sowers of Missouri is airing a commercial in which he talks to camera while holding a rifle and a steel-encased book, claiming that “when I served in Iraq, I wasn’t alone: I had my fellow soldiers and this combat Bible.” Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck of Colorado has voiced his “opposition to the principle of separating church and state,” a sentiment that Sharron Angle has publicly shared. Meanwhile, Democrat Ben Lowe of Illinois, a candidate for the U.S. House, is running on the slogan “Restoring Our Moral Compass”; central to his pro-environment policy positions is his stated belief that Christians “are called to be good stewards” of God’s creation. Still, in this year’s midterm races, these are the exceptions, not the rule.

At the same time, religious communication and church-state issues have been front and center elsewhere in the 2010 public sphere. As media coverage of the “Obama’s a Muslim” rumors was at its peak, a Florida pastor threatened to burn Qu’rans on September 11th and garnered media coverage—and condemnations—from around the globe. The controversy about the appropriateness of building an Islamic Center several blocks from the ruins of the World Trade Center continues to rage, affecting political races within and outside of New York State. (Renee Ellmers, a candidate for the U.S. House from North Carolina, has run commercials denouncing what she calls a “victory mosque.”) The Texas state school board instructed textbook publishers to make sure their world-history books are “more favorable to Christianity and less positive toward Islam.”

And, perhaps most prominently, Fox News host Glenn Beck hosted a “Rally to Restore Honor” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, an event he described as having “nothing to do with this city or politics [but] everything to do with God Almighty . . . turning our faith back to the values and principles that made us great.” Addressing the foundational American belief that the political and religious realms should be kept separate, Beck acknowledged that “we cannot mix those two—but we must give voice to what God says we can do.” Not all the people sharing the stage with Beck were as moderate, however. Pastor David Barton, author of the book The Myth of Separation, told the assembled crowd that “we don’t want our country to become secular.” Similarly, John Hagee, who some may remember from the 2008 presidential race as “John McCain’s pastor,” prayed for America to overcome its current “politically correct fog” and its “idolatry of pluralism.”

Set against this backdrop, Barack Obama’s “I’m a Christian by choice” remarks in that Albuquerque backyard seem rather tame, in keeping with the Jimmy Carter/George W. Bush tradition of personal confession if not the George Washington/James Madison mode of acknowledging the providence of a “watchmaker” God that guides our nation’s destiny. Coming as they did on September 28th—the same day that the Pew Research Center published another study, this one showing that most Americans are distressingly deficient in religious knowledge—the president’s profession of faith may have even offered an anodyne for our fractious political moment.

David Weiss is assistant professor at Montana State University, Billings, and the editor of What Democrats Talk about When They Talk about God: Religious Communication in Democratic Party Politics.

Sites of Dispute

By Brian Elliott

In recent weeks growing controversy over a planned Muslim cultural center to be situated two blocks from Ground Zero in New York has reverberated throughout the US media. Sarah Palin has called plans for the center an “unnecessary provocation” and Newt Gingrich has spoken of the prospective community center as “an aggressive act that is offensive.” But another Republican, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has been the center’s staunchest defender, appealing to the First Amendment’s proscription of laws affecting the establishment of religion. Beyond political and media circles those who lost people close to them in the September 11 attack have adopted different stances to the proposed development.

Much attention has been given to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Together with his wife, Daisy Kahn, Imam Feisal has been seeking a site for an Islamic cultural center in Manhattan for over a decade. Whereas a 2004 Times profile portrayed Imam Feisal as an ecumenical, peace-loving convert to Sufism whose central desire is to explain the culture of Islam to the west, recent articles and interviews have claimed links to various factions of Islamic radicalism. On a more secular plane, a further article from the Times takes those behind the center to task for naively underestimating a predictably high level of popular protest and not hiring a public relations firm early on in the process.

At present, there is a growing consensus among opponents that a reasonable compromise would be to move the cultural center to a site further away from Ground Zero. That way everyone would win. The center could be built, possibly with municipal assistance, and the sense of outrage allayed. So far the backers of the center have refused this option. I think they are right to do so. In my book, Constructing Community, I argue for the right of local communities to determine their own built environment. New York is above all a city of global finance capital. But amid the global framework an amazing diversity of local communities exists on the ground. Given this diversity it is striking that in May of this year a Manhattan community board reached a non-binding 29-to-1 decision to approve the building of the cultural center.

Opponents, many of whom live hundreds if not thousands of miles from Manhattan, insist that building a mosque so close to Ground Zero represents Islamic triumphalism. It would mark the crowning victory of those who attacked the city almost nine years ago. But to argue in this way is to suppose that a fifth of the global population is dedicated to the destruction of the west through terrorist violence. Those who press for “compromise” endorse an out of sight out of mind approach: let there be mosques, just keep them away from highly visible sites. This is simply moral cowardice. As the pioneering urban theorist Henri Lefebvre said, the city is the place of contestation. Whatever the eventual outcome, we should have the moral maturity to keep our sites of urban disputes out in the open.

Brian Elliott teaches in the philosophy department at Oregon State University and is author of Constructing Community: Configurations of the Social in Contemporary Philosophy and Urbanism.

The Second Installment of the Marquette “Debate”: Putting Liberalism in Question

By Thaddeus J. Kozinski

Introduction

In spite of the good things modern liberalism has given to the West, such as individual rights and freedom of speech, the problematic character of the public debate surrounding Marquette University’s decision to rescind its offer of an academic dean position to a Seattle University sociology professor, Jodi O’Brien, a publicly lesbian scholar, gives us good reason to put liberalism in question. The irreconcilability of the interlocutors in this controversy illustrates the fundamental problem of our secular, pluralistic, liberal social order—the privatization of the good—as well as the irrationality, force, and fraud that are its political concomitants.

Part II: Force and fraud: Our stalking-horse rulers

Notwithstanding the importance of such issues as unjust discrimination, academic freedom, and institutional jurisdiction, I would argue that the two most fundamental issues involved in the Marquette debate are 1) the nature and purpose of human sexuality and its relation to the human good, and 2) the relation of conceptions of the human good to social institutions and their practices. But it is precisely these two issues that are nowhere to be found in the Marquette debate. The Roman Catholic Church officially rejects any characterization of human sexuality as mere private preference with no intrinsic and teleological relation to individual and common goods. Moreover, because it believes in a publicly knowable and authoritative human good, it rejects the liberal view that, all things being equal, the right to the exercise of individual autonomy automatically trumps the right of institutional integrity whenever there is a conflict between them. In other words, the Church’s “conception of the good” regarding sexuality necessarily and logically “involves reshaping the life of the rest of the community in accordance with it.” Indeed, with regard to those communities that purport to adhere to Catholic teaching and promote its mission, such as Jesuit universities, such reshaping is morally required. This amounts to the Church being in fundamental disagreement with the privatization of the good and the rules of belief and practice that flow from it—and this disagreement cannot be tolerated as long as liberalism is not put in question.

If, according to liberalism’s dogmatic priority of individual autonomy, Jodi O’Brien has the individual right not to be discriminated against by any institution with regard to her preferred sexual lifestyle, then it would stand to reason that Marquette University also has the institutional right of autonomy, meaning the right of the individuals who govern and oversee Marquette to govern it in a way that conforms to their preferences, even if that means discriminating in hiring criteria. It also means the right of the individual students to a curriculum and educational ethos corresponding to their preferences, in this case, the preference to preserve the Catholic mission and integrity of the university. Therefore, according to the logic of liberalism itself, the individual students and administrators at Marquette should have the right to reject for a leadership position a person who, as demonstrated by her scholarship, does not believe in a determinate, knowable—let alone divinely revealed—human good, one who believes that human sexuality is “socially constructed,” and who practices a sexual lifestyle not in accord with the mission of the institution.

But if Marquette does not have this right to discriminate to preserve its institutional integrity for the sake of the individuals who prefer it, then why does Jodi O’Brien retain her right not to be discriminated against for the sake of her socially constructed personal preference? It would seem that for this issue to be resolved one preference must be valued higher than the other, but this would contradict liberalism’s purportedly preference-neutral foundation. When the issue is eventually resolved and one preference is weighed heavier than the other, we can be sure that those who settled the issue used some authoritative value-scale involving an authoritative judgment regarding the good, a judgment entailing much more than merely private and idiosyncratic significance. This would, of course, contradict liberalism’s purported neutrality with respect to the good.

And now we can see precisely why liberalism must be put in question. If the Marquette controversy is to be settled without putting liberalism in question, it will be settled in liberal terms and thus settled irrationally, which, in political terms, means through force, fraud, or both. The irrationality is inevitable because of the theoretical and practical impossibility of adjudicating among competing rights to the exercise of individual autonomy without conscious and explicit recourse to a publicly intelligible and authoritative conception of the good.

Since public debate in America, as long as liberalism polices it, is bound either to be interminable or settled by arbitrary decisions in which, contra liberalism’s own rules, some private preferences are placed above others, we have good reason to put liberalism in question. I do not mean, of course, that there is good reason to put in question those values of liberalism that comport with the values of people of good will, such as tolerance, personal rights, equality before the law, fairness, and compassion. What needs to be questioned, and questioned in an open debate, is the unstated liberal dogma that the privatization of the good is the only fair and civilized way of resolving moral disputes in a pluralist society. As the Marquette “debate” reveals, however, the privatization of the good renders rational debate impossible, and since exclusivist political decisions are, in fact, made, liberalism ensures that under the disguise of such stalking-horses as reasonableness, diversity, and tolerance, we are left with unreasonableness, homogeneity, and intolerance. It would seem that it is liberalism itself that puts liberalism in question.

Thaddeus J. Kozinski is assistant professor of humanities and philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College and the author of The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can't Solve It.

First Installment of the Marquette “Debate”: Putting Liberalism in Question

By Thaddeus J. Kozinski

Introduction

In spite of the good things modern liberalism has given to the West, such as individual rights and freedom of speech, the problematic character of the public debate surrounding Marquette University’s decision to rescind its offer of an academic dean position to a Seattle University sociology professor, Jodi O’Brien, a publicly lesbian scholar, gives us good reason to put liberalism in question. The irreconcilability of the interlocutors in this controversy illustrates the fundamental problem of our secular, pluralistic, liberal social order—the privatization of the good—as well as the irrationality, force, and fraud that are its political concomitants.

Part I: Are some preferences more equal than others?

Decrying the problematic state of public debate in America, the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

Liberalism is often successful in preempting the debate . . . so that [objections to it] appear to have become debates within liberalism. . . . So-called conservatism and so-called radicalism in these contemporary guises are in general mere stalking-horses for liberalism: the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question.

“Putting liberalism in question.” Should this be done? And what would it entail? Do we really want neo-Nazis and proponents of human sacrifice to have a public, influential voice in our deliberations? Do we want to bring back inquisitions and crusades? What good reason is there to question liberalism?

I think that MacIntyre’s characterization of contemporary public debate in America as surreptitiously restrictive and intellectually homogenous is quite accurate, and, in spite of the good things liberalism has given us, such as individual rights and freedom of speech, there is a good reason to put liberalism in question. An exemplary illustration of this reason is revealed in the debate surrounding Marquette University’s decision to rescind its offer to Seattle University sociology professor, Jodi O’Brien, a publicly lesbian scholar, for the position of academic dean.

To see why liberalism itself, and not just its accidental “conservative” and “liberal” stalking-horses, as MacIntyre describes them, merits serious skeptical interrogation, we must first examine what liberalism means. Though it is a notoriously slippery word with a complicated historical and conceptual genealogy, I think what liberalism boils down to is this: the privatization of the good. In political practice, this privatization entails the unimpeachable and unexceptionable priority, theoretically and practically, privately and publicly, of individual autonomy. In liberalism, as MacIntyre explains it:

Every individual is to be equally free to propose and to live by whatever conception of the good he or she pleases, derived from whatever theory or tradition he or she may adhere to, unless that conception of the good involves reshaping the life of the rest of the community in accordance with it.

And thus the “good” becomes a private matter:

We are presented, that is to say, with agents as if detached altogether from any conception of or perception of the good or goods. . . . All preferences of all individuals are to be weighed in the same balance and accorded the same respect, no matter whose they are or what their grounding.

Since liberalism is predicated on the privatization of the good, it must function to render unintelligible, irrational, and impolitic any public discussions suggesting that there might be an objective and non-private human good to which human nature is teleologically or intrinsically oriented, that this good might have a definite, knowable nature transcending idiosyncratic preference, and that it thus might have public and even political relevance. Consequently, any public interlocutor in a debate who holds that human sexuality as an integral aspect of human nature bears some determinate relationship to this human good, and that since religious educational institutions are charged with attempting to express and embody this human good in a communal way, they should be permitted to discriminate in their hiring practices according to the exigencies of this human good is destined to lose any public debate before it even begins—or even be debarred from participation.

Moreover, due to the emotivist cast of all moral discourse in liberal society, where assertions of moral truth are immediately translated into expressions of private preference—akin to one’s favorite color—moral opinion can never have public, legal, or political relevance. Thus, in public debate, sexuality must be considered nothing more than an expression of arbitrary preference, impervious to moral evaluation, and with no determinate, objective relation to the human good—whatever that might be; in short, all goods or values must be seen as freely determined by autonomous, individual choice, and thus action in accordance with chosen goods or values—as long as it doesn’t interfere with another’s action—must be permitted; no communal or institutional restraints or pressures on individual free choice should exist, in the ideal liberal community. So, since all preferences are a priori equal in value because purely idiosyncratic, for an institution to deny a candidate a position due to her particular sexual preference must be seen, with the public eye, as akin to denying a candidate a position due to her particular favorite color.

Now, though it might seem unfortunate that morally robust, truth-oriented, good-relevant debates do not occur publicly in liberal societies, should this lead us to put liberalism in question? After all, since there is no public consensus in liberal societies on the good-for-man, let alone on a normative and determinative understanding of the nature and purpose of human sexuality, what else can a liberal political order do but remain neutral on such questions to ensure fairness to all sides?

The truth, however, is that such neutrality and fairness is illusory. It is liberalism’s opinion, and liberalism’s alone, that the non-existence and/or non-knowability of the human good renders it a private matter, and thus that all individual opinions about the human good are a priori equal and politically non-authoritative, that is politically privileged above all other opinions and given public authority. In other words, it is liberalism’s quite debatable opinion that has somehow become the unimpeachable, self-evident truth presupposed in public debate. Of course, this kind of privileging of one human opinion above all others is, in a word, illiberal.

Thaddeus J. Kozinski is assistant professor of humanities and philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College and the author of The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can't Solve It.