When the Group Becomes God

Over the edge

Extreme nationalism appears to be strutting back into the news. It is a bit like extreme sports, in that it usually involves a high level of danger, although cliff jumpers and other athletic extremists pose a danger mainly to themselves, unlike their political counterparts, who are inclined to take entire societies over the edge. Ultranationalists are conspiring in many places including Turkey, where fascists are once again threatening to massacre Armenians; India, where Hindu nationalists have been dragging worshipers out of Christian churches and thrashing them; and even in Holland, where anti-immigrant Dutch nationalists are stirring in one of the world’s most politically correct countries.

Some of the reporting has come by way of remembrance. Last month the world marked twenty years since old hatreds rematerialized in the former Yugoslavia, which was splitting apart as nationalism replaced Communism. Serbian forces bombarded Muslim neighborhoods in Sarajevo, launching the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and nearly a decade of extreme ethnicity throughout the Balkans. “Ethnic cleansing” became a grim catchphrase.

In a May 3 Op-Ed in the New York Times, a 31-year-old physical therapist in Queens told of how, as a seven-year-old “Bosniak” (a Muslim in Bosnia), he pledged with his classmates to spread unity in what was still Yugoslavia. He did so at a multiethnic school, in front of his favorite teacher, a Serb. Five years later, he bumped into that teacher, who had traded in his chalk and clipboard for a Serbian Army uniform:

“Hey, teacher,” I called. He knocked the grocery bag out of my hand, saying, “Balije don’t need bread.” (“Balije” was a slur for Bosniak.) Holding me by my hair, he rested his rifle against my head. “It’s jammed,” he complained. As I ran away, I caught him waving a three-finger salute, a gesture of Serbian nationalism based on the Orthodox sign of the cross.

Note the “sign of the cross.” There were many symbols of faith deployed in the ethnic crossfires, which led otherwise astute observers to a specious conclusion about the nature of that conflict in the former Yugoslavia. At the time, the redoubtable Henry Kissinger declared that it was a “religious war,” not an ethnic one, “since all the groups are of the same ethnic stock”—Slavs, namely. But of course, Yugoslavia had been Communist, and its population largely atheist or at least secular, for nearly a half-century before the Balkans exploded again. So, Kissinger and others left us chewing on the paradox of a religious war fought largely by irreligious people.

Ultimate Concern

In a way Kissinger was right, though not in the way he intended. In the throes of such fanaticism, one’s ethnicity or nationality takes on a kind of absolute significance. It becomes an “ultimate concern,” not merely a “preliminary concern.” It turns into a god.

Here I’m speaking the language of Paul Tillich (1886-1965). “The religious concern is ultimate; it excludes all other concerns from ultimate significance; it makes them preliminary,” the German-born Lutheran wrote in his classic Systematic Theology (Vol. 1). This ultimate concern is total, Tillich adds: “no part of ourselves is excluded from it; there is no place to flee from it.”

What happens when something less than the divine—or less than a transcendent value—is invested with ultimate concern? People begin bowing to false deities, Tillich says.

Idolatry is the elevation of a preliminary concern to ultimacy. Something essentially conditioned is taken as unconditional, something essentially partial is boosted into universality, and something essentially finite is given infinite significance …

More than nationalism comes to mind. National security or the market can become a creeping absolute, especially in a time of international crisis or extreme inequality. Tillich also italicizes—“Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being and non-being.” In the case of exaggerated nationalism, it is all too predictably a path to non-being—over the cliff. …read more

From a Reporter’s Notebook: Values and Votes in 2012

TheoPol has been out in fora land this week, attending two public forums and a few less-public discussions in Washington and Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. The public highlights were “Election 2012: The Values Behind the Issues,” a forum sponsored by Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center on Tuesday night; and “Is Religious Liberty Under Threat in America?” held one night later at Boston College under the auspices of BC’s Church in the 21st Century Center and Law School. Here are some noteworthy remarks by the notable speakers at those events.

Heard in Georgetown

E.J. Dionne of Brookings Institution and the Washington Post: The Catholic Church’s job in the political order is “to make us all feel guilty about something, to force liberals to think about the life issues and force conservatives to think about the poor. The Church now may be falling down on about half its job, making only half of us [the liberals] feel guilty…. I worry very much that the focus is on attempting to push Catholic social teaching and social justice to the back of the bus.”

Amy Sullivan of Time magazine, referring to explanations by spokesmen for the bishops that they haven’t the time to address both social issues like abortion and matters like peace and justice: ”The bishops are certainly skilled enough to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

David Gibson of Religion News Service, adapting a witticism often heard in relation to American Jews: “Mormons really are like everyone else, but only more so…. They’re clean-cut, clean-living. They lead upstanding lives. They’re the perfect amalgam of the American dream and the Protestant ethic.”

Tom Roberts of the National Catholic Reporter, after citing an Illinois Catholic bishop who compared “extreme secularist” President Obama with Hitler and Stalin: “When you’re using the most extreme language, there’s no way to step back, no way to admit nuance or different ways to think about an issue…. Religion in the public realm is almost destroying itself, because it isn’t real religion. It’s politics.”

… in Chestnut Hill

The Rev. J. Bryan Hehir of Harvard Divinity School, speaking of the mandate for contraception coverage in President Obama’s healthcare reform law and efforts to reach a compromise with Catholic institutions that oppose the mandate: “You go for the [negotiated] common ground, but if you can’t get to common ground, you keep the law and allow a broad exemption” for all religious institutions.

Cathleen Kaveny of Notre Dame Law School, on that same point: “We’ve got to protect religious institutions, but I keep thinking of the people who work for them and who might not agree with them [about the alleged immorality of artificial contraception]. What do we owe to the people who disagree with them?”

John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, on the largely ignored question of religious liberty worldwide and the estimated 150,000 Christians who die in sectarian violence each year: “In the past hour, 17 Christians have been killed on this planet.”

Vincent Rougeau, dean of Boston College Law School: “We need to think about how we could engage [and support] Christians and other religious believers around the world,” in a genuine campaign for religious freedom. …read more

Last Rites for Capital Punishment?

Model of a late 19th century French guillotine

On September 10, 1977, France raised the 88-pound blade of its guillotine one last time and let it drop on a Tunisian immigrant who had sexually tortured and murdered a young French nanny, lopping off his head in just a fraction of a second. After that, a cry of “off with their heads” heard anywhere in the Western world would likely suggest little more than a taste for metaphor, not a thirst for blood. And soon, all manner of executions, not just the heads-roll variety, would be declared illegal throughout Western Europe. In due time scores of countries elsewhere—from Mexico and the Philippines to Cambodia and Rwanda—would put away their death penalty statutes. Only the rare developed nation would kill to show that killing is unacceptable.

The United States would be rare. Lethal injections, electrocutions, and other means of judicial death would offer an eye-popping display of American exceptionalism. The death penalty is still all too with us in America, and only eight other countries, with not a democracy among them, executed more than two or three people last year. That said, in recent years we have become less exceptional on this score.

The latest case in point is Connecticut, where lawmakers voted yesterday to abolish new death sentences. Governor Dannel Malloy, a Democrat, has vowed to sign the measure, which will make Connecticut the fifth state in the past five years to forsake punishment by death. (The others are New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Illinois; California voters will probably have their say at the ballot box in November.)

The biggest story, however, is not about the handful of states that are shuttering their death houses altogether. It’s about the slow death of capital punishment throughout the country, though I’d lay emphasis on slow. The numbers of executions as well as new death sentences have been falling steadily in recent years. In 2011, 43 people were executed nationwide, a 56-percent drop since 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

Even Texas has been less eager to administer the heart-stopping potassium chloride and other lethally injected drugs. Texas extended the death protocol to 13 inmates in 2011, compared to 24 two years earlier. That’s just one way of sizing it up, though. Another way is to note that if Texas were a country, it would rank eighth in reported executions worldwide, right behind North Korea and the rest of the United States, but way ahead of countries such as Somalia and Afghanistan.

Moral Principle, Political Reality

For decades many in the United States have opposed capital punishment on moral and religious grounds. Such a culturally conservative force as the American Catholic hierarchy has repeatedly denounced the practice as a violation of the sanctity of human life. To me, one of the most cogent moral arguments against the death penalty came from Pope John Paul II. He argued time and again that the only possible justification for capital punishment (or any use of deadly force) would be strict self-defense—which rules out the death penalty in almost every conceivable circumstance. That’s because, as John Paul noted, there are many other ways of protecting society against a killer, ways known collectively as the modern penal system.

As someone who dislikes capital punishment for more or less those reasons, I’d be happy to give the credit for its decline to the abolitionists and their excellent principles. But I’d be kidding myself.

It’s not moral revulsion against the whole idea of capital punishment that has thinned the execution ranks. It is the well-founded fear of executing the innocent, a real possibility brought to light not by moral arguments but by the evidentiary wonders of DNA, which has led to multiple exonerations in recent years. Polls show that most though a declining number of Americans still support capital punishment at least in theory, and the basic reason is that most inmates on death row are not innocent. They’re guilty as hell.

So, Americans haven’t yet had a moral conversion on this issue. And that’s okay. In a pluralistic society, citizens—even those on the same side of an issue—will bring diverse values and considerations to the table of public conversation. When it comes to the death penalty, some worry about faulty procedures that could lead to wrongful execution or simply about the costs of seemingly endless appeals. It’s the job of others including the theologically motivated to add moral principles to the mix, and to do so with humility and what the Declaration of Independence refers to as a “decent respect” for the opinions of humankind. It’s fair to say that many different opinions have coalesced to put the greatest pressure on capital punishment in decades.

Counting on Conservatives

What might eventually tip the scales toward abolition is not liberal outrage but conservative caution. True, many conservatives have taken the untenable view that government—which, in their minds, is incapable of adequately performing a simple task like creating a construction job or an affordable housing unit—is somehow so adept and infallible that it can be trusted to make ultimate decisions about life and death. This logic is no longer flying with increasing numbers of Americans, however. And they include many who lean right.

The last words here go to Richard Viguerie, a father of what used to be called the New Right, now known as the Tea Party.

Conservatives have every reason to believe the death penalty system is no different from any politicized, costly, inefficient, bureaucratic, government-run operation, which we conservatives know are rife with injustice. But here the end result is the end of someone’s life. In other words, it’s a government system that kills people (his emphasis)….

The death penalty system is flawed and untrustworthy because human institutions always are [my emphasis]. But even when guilt is certain, there are many downsides to the death penalty system. I’ve heard enough about the pain and suffering of families of victims caused by the long, drawn-out, and even intrusive legal process. Perhaps, then, it’s time for America to re-examine the death penalty system, whether it works, and whom it hurts. …read more

Penitence and Politics

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998

Some recent political volleys invite another go at the much-parodied line from Love Story that love means never having to say you’re sorry. The 2012 take might be that loving the United States of America means never saying we’re sorry for its misdeeds. Thus we have Mitt Romney’s campaign book No Apology: Believe in America, and the accusation by him and others that President Obama has flown off on “apology tours,” which is by and large a fantasy but involves a few instances in which Obama—like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton before him—has tendered apologies to people abroad for things done in America’s name. In February Rick Santorum chided the president for apologizing after the U.S. military inadvertently burned Qurans in Afghanistan. Weeks later, Santorum popped up on the apology circuit himself, telling interviewers that America owed one to the families of 16 Afghan civilians massacred by a U.S. soldier.

Contrition can be as dishonorable from a certain patriotic view as it is desirable from a theological perspective. But as the Christian season of Lent draws to a close, it’s worth noting the times when a spirit of penitence has helped transform relationships at various levels of fractious societies.

The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, which fashioned a peace there in 1998, was built in part on myriad acts of apology. Catholic and Protestant religious leaders helped set the tone by exchanging mutual apologies for atrocities committed historically by their communities. Paramilitary leaders on both sides followed with their own gestures of repentance, some more heartfelt than others.

In a number of strife-ridden countries, apology and its near twin, acknowledgment, have lighted paths to justice and social healing. In South Africa, those who committed human rights crimes during decades of white minority rule were given a choice: tell the truth for all to hear or face prosecution. In Rwanda, repentance became the signature piece of national reconciliation efforts following the tribal genocide in 1994.

Ritualized Lamentation

At times theological resources have helped bring crucial acknowledgments to the surface. In one of the longest-running efforts at post-conflict reconciliation, people who took warring sides in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s have come together for ecumenical and interfaith seminars in church basements. These are mostly laypeople from the Croatian Catholic, Serbian Orthodox, and ethnic Albanian Muslim communities. With the help of third-party facilitators, they have dug deeply into the tradition of laments, the communal expressions of grief and distress in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Rev. David Steele, a United Church of Christ minister and an American conflict-resolution expert, led many of the original seminars in the wake of brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns in the Balkans. He explained to me recently that the purpose of ritualized lamentation in ancient Israel was to “offer up to God all injury and hurt so that God could heal the pain and bring justice.” Steele’s own purpose is not simply to help people voice their grievances against other communities. He also brings them to the verge of acknowledging wrongdoing by their own groups. This too is part of the lament motif. The prophet Jeremiah, for example, identifies the suffering of the Jews but also asks his people to critically examine themselves and their society.

In another conversation I had with Steele almost a decade ago, he related that during one Serb-Croat seminar, it was time for the Croats to acknowledge how they as a community have afflicted the Serbs. One Croat man reversed the dynamic, however. He began recalling a horrible atrocity committed by Serbs during the war, in which soldiers dragged patients out of a hospital in eastern Croatia and executed them en masse in a field nearby.

As he was talking about it, he was getting more and more agitated, more angry. Finally, one Serb who had been a soldier during the war, a layperson, simply spoke up and said: “That happened. I know it happened. And it was wrong.” And there was silence at that point. And what happened was, even though this Croat was turning the whole thing around, attacking the other group rather than his own group, this Serb man was sensitive and courageous enough to recognize that this needed an acknowledgment that it was a terrible crime. And that was enough, at least at that moment, to satisfy this Croat.

The process can be volatile, whether in a post-conflict setting or in the election-year partisan crossfire. Different groups may have drastically different perceptions of the reality surrounding their conflicts. And there’s always a chance of miscalculation: in the Balkans, people were constantly worried that a confession of terrible deeds done to their enemies would only serve to justify retaliation.

Still, a contrite word has often given people what they seem to need the most—not vengeance, not even procedural justice, but a painfully honest telling of injuries they have suffered. And that’s worth acknowledging. …read more

Writing High on War

In his unflinchingly honest book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges spoke of war as a drug—which he imbibed. He certainly looked happy in pictures of him taken during the wars in the former Yugoslavia that he covered for the Times, but that’s not the exact feeling he described. “I had a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning,” he explained to my friend and colleague Bob Abernethy in a June 2003 interview. “I had a sense of ennoblement. There is a rush in war. And it’s very hard, if not impossible, to re-create this feeling in anything else.”

War correspondents are well known for seeking that rush—although Anthony Shadid was wired differently. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist died a week ago after suffering an asthma attack while reporting on the conflict in Syria for the Times. (Yesterday two more journalists, an American working for The Sunday Times of London and a French photographer, died in shelling there by Syrian security forces.) Shadid did not like being called a “war” correspondent. “I don’t enjoy covering war,” he told an interviewer last year. But he did want to cover the Middle East, and he explained that when conflict becomes part of that story, “then I feel obligated to cover it.”

In one of the tributes following the tragedy, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post felt a need to point out that Shadid was “no adrenaline junkie.” The contrast with other battlefield scribes was implicit. Recounting times when Shadid (who died at 43) was shot and kidnapped while going after stories, Chandrasekaran added, “He did it because he wanted to know what was really happening. And that couldn’t be gleaned from a distance.”

Hedges’s book, on the other hand, is in part a chronicle of compulsion and exhilaration. His ultimate verdict on war has far less to do with glorification than with indictment, but as he described in the interview with Abernethy (adapted in a book that Bob and I did, The Life of Meaning):

In every conflict I’ve covered, you reach a point—and I think I reached this point certainly in El Salvador—where you feel that it’s better to live for one intoxicating, empowering moment than ever go back to the dull routine of ordinary life, and if your own death is the cost of that, then that’s a cost you’re willing to accept.

Almost inseparable from the addictiveness, in Hedges’s treatment, is the sense of meaning and purpose. He’s not just talking about war correspondents. He refers to the kind of meaning that soldiers find when they’re tested in battle, and that the civilian Serbs of Sarajevo found when they paraded in the streets at the outbreak of war against their ancient enemies, the Croats. On both sides in the Balkans, “people were ecstatic,” he recalled in the interview.

 A kind of euphoria often grips a country in wartime. And war is, of course, the very opposite of that. It is a bit like the beautiful nymph in the fairy tale that seduces you, and when you kiss it, it inhales the vapors of the underworld.

Just War = Good War?

Here’s where meaning drifts toward madness. And that is the fate of deadly force as portrayed also by some of the most compelling theological figures of the past few generations. Pope John Paul II, for example, was not known to wax meaningful about the ecstasies of war. He sounded more like a French existentialist when he spoke of war as “an adventure with no return,” and as always a “defeat for humanity.” John Paul’s was quite nearly a pacifist pontificate.

How far have these sentiments traveled from the classical Christian just-war theory? Not as far as they might seem.

St. Augustine, the architect of that intellectual tradition, believed that war could be morally justified under exceptional circumstances, but that doesn’t mean he believed in such a thing as a “good war,” as World War II has been called. Phillip Cary, a philosophy professor at Eastern University in Pennsylvania and an astute interpreter of Augustine, has thrown light on this fine distinction in his lectures and writings. Cary told me a few years ago that the post-9/11 rallying cry might be, “Fight in good conscience. The terrorists are the bad guys.” But he added that Augustine would say differently, “Fight in bad conscience. The terrorists are human beings and sinners just like you.”

It is a tragic and paradoxical place that war inhabits, in such a theological view—morally inescapable at times, but scarcely virtuous. …read more

The Exceptional American

In the United States, we the people cling to the idea that cherished values such as freedom and opportunity are somehow distinctively American. The accidental philosopher Yogi Berra expressed this sentiment beautifully in the late 1950s when he heard that the mayor of Dublin (as in Ireland, not Ohio) was Jewish. “Only in America!” he declared.

In many ways the role that religious faith plays in American politics is exceptional too. Unlike their counterparts in most Western democracies, American presidents continue to routinely invoke the deity in their addresses to the nation. Of course leaders of theocracies do the same, but the U.S. presidential invokers of faith also preside over a government that is religiously neutral. That is a rare juxtaposition.

In the American tradition, though, there’s an exception within the exceptionalism on this count. If you look at religiously tinged oratory by presidents at key times in our history, you’ll see that nearly all of them have tried, subtly or unsubtly, to cast their causes in the singular light of divine favor. All except, notably, Abraham Lincoln.

Instead of assuming the God-is-on-our-side posture, Lincoln proclaims in his Second Inaugural Address near the end of the Civil War, “The Almighty has His own purposes.” Instead of presuming to know the whole truth about the crisis at hand, Lincoln lays claim only to the partial truth that “God gives us to see …”

Lincoln is different.

God Talkers in Chief

I recently had occasion to dig through a well-chosen collection of ten major presidential speeches projecting religious themes, courtesy of Boston College’s Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and Boston College Magazine (which asked me to report on a student-led “God Talk” seminar sponsored by the center). The Boisi staff, including associate director Erik Owens and doctoral candidate in political science Brenna Strauss, selected the items, which are available here.

One set of those texts relates to the theme of “National Crisis and War” and features oratory by FDR, Reagan, Eisenhower, and George W. Bush in addition to Lincoln.

In one entry, Roosevelt delivers a radio message from the White House to a nation still somewhat unalarmed by the Nazi threat. It’s May 1941, seven months before Pearl Harbor. He warns that the Nazis worship no god other than Hitler and that our freedom of worship is at stake: “What place has religion which preaches the dignity of the human being, of the majesty of the human soul, in a world where moral standards are measured by treachery and bribery and Fifth Columnists? Will our children, too, wander off, goose-stepping in search of new gods?”

Similarly, primal religious emotions are painted on our struggles with foes in other commander-in-chief messages. These include Eisenhower’s First Inaugural Address in 1953 (he sees “the watchfulness of a Divine Providence” over America at the height of the Cold War), Reagan’s 1983 “Evil Empire” speech and Bush’s 2002 State of the Union, which introduced “Axis of Evil” into the lexicon.

Lincoln’s Ineffable God

And then there’s Lincoln, who was born 203 years ago on February 12. He’s the warrior-in-chief against the Confederacy, but there’s no Divine Providence watching preferentially over the Union, in his Second Inaugural (March 4, 1865), which is, as many have described, theologically intense. There’s no casting of political nets around God as Lincoln speaks of North and South:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

Lincoln holds out the possibility that North and South alike might continue to pay, and rightly so, for America’s original sin—slavery.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

He concludes:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Lincoln’s 703-word Second Inaugural is by far the oldest item in Boisi’s “National Crisis and War” packet, and yet, it’s the most modern in its outlook. Theologically, it is freighted with uncertainty, ambiguity, and a sense of moral tragedy (even our deepest convictions cannot capture the truth), but as he probes the divine nature with soberness and humility, Lincoln arrives at a clear-eyed affirmation of religious faith and American purpose. Yes, Lincoln is different. Lincoln is now. …read more

Amid the Carnage, a “Theology of Presence”

President Obama’s recent decision to send 100 armed military advisers to central Africa has turned a spotlight on the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel movement that crosses not only national borders but also the lines between savagery and spirituality. The advisers will be stationed primarily in Uganda and will not engage directly in battle with the guerrilla group, according to the Obama administration.

Though classified as a terrorist organization by the State Department, the LRA really isn’t a capital “T” terrorist operation like Al Qaeda with a clear and corrosive ideology. It’s more like a religious cult with a craving for crime and violence. The movement is a cross between the Sopranos and the sex cult Children of God, with the Manson Family tossed in for good measure.

Leading the force is the self-announced prophet Joseph Kony, who was raised a Roman Catholic. He began his career as a witch doctor and became the “spiritual adviser” to a previous incarnation of the LRA, a role that involved calling on the spirits to aid the rebels in battle. Not strikingly out of the ordinary for a fighting force in that region. 

But something happened. As Todd Whitmore, a Notre Dame theology professor who has spent time in Uganda as a religious peacemaker, told me recently: “At some point he jumped the tracks. The people there say he went over to the dark side.” Kony launched the LRA more than two decades ago and began racking up his elaborate record of massacres, mutilations, abductions, and child sexual slavery. 

Kony’s cult is a syncretistic mix of Christianity and traditional African tribal faiths. It roams the borderlands of murder and mysticism. Kony presides over cleansing rituals in which the soldiers, many of them children abducted by the LRA, are “purified” of their inhibitions against slaying the innocent. They are sent forth to do their deeds that also include rampant looting, which helps perpetuate the organization. Some observers, like Whitmore, believe the LRA is now a marauding criminal band as much as an anti-government insurgency. 

Enter the Peacebuilders

Where are the bonafide spiritual leaders in this grisly picture? They’re right there, in the thick of it. 

In a diary excerpted in a book compiled by Notre Dame’s Catholic Peacebuilding Network, Whitmore tells of a conversation he overheard among three Catholic priests in a northern Ugandan village a couple of years ago. Word had come that the LRA was surging toward the village. The priests hatched a plan to hop on their motorcycles and ride into the army’s onslaught, to give the villagers more time to flee. For unknown reasons, the attack didn’t materialize.

Whitmore also tells of going from hut to hut with “Sister Rose,” bathing and comforting people stricken by diseases and malnutrition as a result of warfare. His article, with the diary entries, is carried in the collection Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis, published late last year by Orbis Books.

On a larger scale, the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative has been working to transform conflicts since 1997. Bringing together Anglican, Catholic, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, Orthodox, and Muslim leaders, the interfaith group has dealt with land disputes and cross-border tensions, among other challenges. International faith-based agencies including Catholic Relief Services have stood with the local religious leaders, helping, for example, to reintegrate former LRA soldiers into the villages from where they came.

Some commentators have cast the LRA as yet another example of religious violence, which may be technically true but is barely descriptive. It’s clear who the real religious people are, in this unholy mess. They’re the ones forging what Whitmore describes as a “theology of presence” among the victims of war.

…read more

Evil Acts, Sacred Places

Auschwitz, Pearl Harbor, the World Trade Center, the Murrah Federal Building of Oklahoma City—each one marks out a distinct space in the timeless realm of evil. And yet, in the eyes of traumatized communities, these and other killing grounds also become sacred. They demand a collective response that is scaled to their sacredness, to their transcendent claims on human memory, meaning, and ritual.

This is one way of sizing up the contention surrounding the 9/11 Memorial and Museum that opens this Sunday at the World Trade Center site.

Nearly 3,000 people perished as the Twin Towers crumbled on September 11, 2001, and the remains of more than 40 percent of them have not been identified. Many families of those victims have pushed for a common burial place at Ground Zero, a monument not unlike the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery.

They thought such a tomb, there for all to see, could serve as a dignified final resting place for their loved ones. Instead, the remains will be stored in a room behind a wall in the underground 9/11 museum that will open together with the above-ground memorial. The words of Virgil will be inscribed on the wall: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”

Some 9/11 relatives say they’ll never go there. In essence, they argue that the remains repository—seven stories below ground in a museum that is considering charging for admission—has not been scaled to the sacredness of Ground Zero. They believe the storage plan is a desecration of the whole site.

Designers of the memorial, as well as other 9/11 families, disagree.

They point out that inside the concealed room, medical personnel will continue the task of identifying remains—a meaningful activity. And they say the above-ground memorial, including a plaza with waterfalls and two reflecting pools, will constitute hallowed ground. Bronze panels around the pools will bear the names of all 9/11 victims.

Translating the Sacred

What stirs little contention is the understanding behind the misunderstanding, the theology behind the politics. By and large, the dissenting families and the memorial’s creators agree that this tract of unspeakable evil is in fact sacred ground and ought to be handled as such. They clash only on the particulars of how to flesh out the sacredness.

For instance, on its web site the 9/11 Memorial and Museum acknowledges the volatility of questions about how to return the unidentified remains to “the sacred ground of the World Trade Center site.”

From one perspective, this is not the most intuitive theology. In a traditional formulation, a place becomes sacred when God intervenes to demonstrate his wondrous ways; it becomes a point of entry into the divine world. This would be a dicey reading of the horrific events that transpired ten years ago. It would also be a strictly religious one.

There is, however, another way of parsing this theology.

Simply put, sacred space is fraught with special meaning. It opens the way to a transcendent truth and reality that is qualitatively different from the surrounding ordinary space. This is more or less the approach taken by the Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade in his 1957 classic, The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion.

In Danger of Defilement

In addition, such a space is easily desecrated. The insightful religious studies scholar Edward Linenthal underscored this in an interview conducted by Kim Lawton of the PBS television program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, aired on the first anniversary of 9/11.

My definition of a sacred place is a simple one. Any place that’s capable of being defiled is by definition sacred. You can’t defile ordinary space. Any place that for a group of people is so special that a certain way of being there would be an act of disrespect means that that place is charged with a particular kind of meaning.

A belief in the sacred appears to be part of the common theological sense of most Americans. That a single space could encompass both evil and the holy is also not perplexing to them.

This perspective brings together people ranging from relatives of firemen who fell on 9/11 to architects of the new memorial. It could also pull them furiously apart when some interpret “a certain way of being there” as a desecration of that holy ground. …read more

Ten Years After

Filipino General Raymundo Ferrer: In the midst of a U.S.-backed war against Islamic extremists, he wields the soft power of forgiveness and reconciliation.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was working on—of all things—a book about forgiveness and international politics.

I was at my desk at home, and spoke briefly by phone with a Georgetown University colleague who said she had just overheard something about a plane crash in Lower Manhattan. Oblivious to the scale of the catastrophe and the cascading irony of my theme, I kept my head down and dug into case studies of political forgiveness around the world.

That I might be onto an idea whose time had passed almost as soon as it arrived did not set in until the next day when I heard from friends who had seen or been close to the horror in my hometown. They were, as they had every right to be, unforgiving.

Did it make sense to continue talking about forgiveness as a geopolitical option, as I and many others did? A decade into the war on terrorism, is forgiveness a useful way to think about international relations and conflict resolution?

A Political Theology of Forgiveness

The answer depends on your concept or theology of forgiveness.

There is the pietistic view that assigns forgiveness to the realm of personal faith. In this spiritual milieu, forgiveness is an unconditional act. It happens when one person musters the inner strength to say to another, “You’re forgiven,” or otherwise buries the hatchet, once and for all.

This concept of forgiveness does not travel well from faith to politics. No one should hold her breath waiting for such a sweeping, unilateral act of mercy involving extremely fractious groups. And it’s easy to miss the real story, when forgiveness is understood in that literal fashion.

Then there is a political theology of forgiveness articulated by such thinkers as Donald W. Shriver, Jr., in his 1995 book, An Ethic for Enemies. In his rendering, forgiveness is not a single act; it is a process with a range of transactions that look to a new political future together.

Truth—the acknowledgment of wrongdoing or misguided thinking—is one such transaction. Another is the decision to steer away from revenge and retribution.

There should also be clear signals of a desire to eventually repair the fractured social relationship. In the years leading up to 9/11, such strategies helped transform conflicts in places ranging from South Africa and Rwanda to Northern Ireland and South Korea.

Conditionality is a must, in the politics of forgiveness.

For instance, at the end of white minority rule in 1994, South Africa’s black leadership offered amnesty to human-rights violators—with one stipulation. Those perpetrators had to publicly divulge the truth about atrocities committed under the apartheid system. Without conditionality, forgiveness loses a vital link to justice and restitution.

Enter Islam

What has altered this picture distinctly since 9/11 is the challenge of Islamic extremism. Is forgiveness an improbable way to conceive of a response to such a worldwide threat? Perhaps, but some practitioners of conflict resolution have found ways to begin reconciling locally with radical Islamic movements.

Among the most unlikely of them is General Raymundo Ferrer of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, whose command covers most of Mindanao, the nation’s second-largest island. The Filipino military has waged counterinsurgency campaigns against Islamic rebels in the southern islands since the 1970s, working hand in glove with the United States military since 9/11. During this past decade, however, Ferrer began to realize that an absolute reliance on hard power was foolish and misguided.

In his rethinking, the notion of a final military victory by the Armed Forces became far-fetched. He began repairing ties with long-aggrieved Muslims in little ways. For example, Ferrer ordered his troops to point their guns down and smile at Muslims when passing them on the street, as political scientist Maryann Cusimano Love describes in a case study published earlier this year by Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.

Ferrer himself began striking up conversations on the sidewalks near his post in Basilian, Mindanao, meeting the locals, among them a Catholic social worker who wasted no time linking him up with interfaith peace activists. These are Christians and Muslims who had begun holding grassroots interreligious dialogues between members of their communities years earlier.

They, in turn, encouraged him to sign up for “peacebuilding” training conducted jointly by Catholic Relief Services, the American-based international aid organization, and the Mindanao Peace Institute, a Mennonite-Catholic collaboration. Ferrer did so in 2005, in the face of resistance from both fellow generals and church human-rights activists who distrusted the military.

Soft Power

Since then the general has sent his colonels to classes in “nonviolent communications,” mediation, religion and culture, reconciliation, and other peaceable subjects.

Love’s case study throws light on the possible utility of forgiveness—understood as a way of reconstructing social relationships, piece by piece. Stemming from his acknowledgment of misguided thinking, Ferrer’s overtures were  essentially signals of his commitment to rebuild relations with Muslim populations. Those are transactions of political forgiveness.

Together, the Filipino government and Islamic rebel movements have made strides toward reconciliation, but this story continues, partly due to the splintered nature of those insurgencies.

Approaches involving truth telling, forbearance from revenge, and empathy have entered into the toolkits of many religious and secular peacemakers around the world. Whether these initiatives multiply will depend in part on leaders like a Filipino general who is not afraid to wield the soft power of forgiveness and reconciliation. …read more