Differences and Deadlines

It's that time of the year again, when a deadline for some research project I've committed myself to looms ever closer. This time it's a mega-conference on performance studies. I've done that thing--that trick I tell my PhDs to try when they need to discipline themselves into working, that trick that I've pulled on myself multiple times, that trick I inevitably kick myself for using: if you need to write a brand-new piece of research, just sign up for a conference where you'll be presenting the work before a group of influential critical scholars. You'll get it done.

It works like a charm--most of the time--but it comes at the cost of some heavy stress when said due date is near and said research product is, well, still in the subjunctive phase. Thus my heavy stress.

The project I've promised to complete involves a brief paper laying out some connections between evangelical proselytism and liberal--anti-capitalist, to be exact--activism. In my work on various modes of evangelical outreach, I've run across more than one present-day evangelist referencing some mid-century evangelicals who noted how committed communists (the Stalinist/Maoist/Castro-esque variety) were to spreading their Marxist gospel of anti-capitalism. Why, plead the evangelists (past and present) can't Christians be at least as committed as the godless commies?

My seed of a contention--as yet untested by the rigors of research and writing--is that the situation in US left-leaning activism has reversed itself. That is, I think the time has come for some on the left to ask if anti-capitalist progressives can't get a little old-time religious fervor for spreading their own gospel.

Yet a quick glance at national headlines suggests that we're currently undergoing one of the most polarized and polarizing times in--well, in my memory, at least. I just watched a clip about the Tea Party protests rallying support to overturn the health care reform bill, to return to a more pro-market system (though, as many journalists and pundits point out, the reform bill itself uses market tools, not socialism). Any religious fervor about anti-capitalism must encounter a similarly passionate set of beliefs from Tea Partiers. There's a fundamental difference here that renders the hopes for conversion to or from either side dim.

I've long been drawn to writers and theorists who deal with the problems of plurality, tolerance, and disagreement. To whit: how shall we disagree? and to what end? In a number of different works, literary critic Wayne C. Booth asks us to consider "the company we keep" in life and in fiction. How do we imagine and interact with the other who passionately holds beliefs at odds with our own?

Booth had some personal experience with this as a dean during the 1960s eras of protests and student-led sit-ins. There he found himself confronted by and engaged with activists who were asserting views--or at least methods--at odds with the stances he was obliged/convinced to take as dean. Such was the intensity of disagreement, he says, that at some points one side wouldn't really launch criticisms so much as merely repeat their opponent's views verbatim ("You believe X, Y, and Z!"), assuming that the restatement stood as an obvious rebuttal of the point itself.

I was caught by that image--the disbelieving repetition of another's thesis as (and instead of) an actual rebuttal. Examples from my own life spring to mind: "You believe that health care should be a right guaranteed by government!" To me, or to an audience of like-minded progressives, such a statement functions as a simple affirmation or a happy discovery. But to others, uttering such a statement would be a call for boos and hisses. It would be formally (though not in magnitude) similar to a let-me-get-this-straight-you-really-believe-this statement that, say, person X thinks that kittens should be ground up into dogfood.

The disbelieving repetition-as-argument (I'll have to see if Booth has a better term for it) depends utterly on shared conventions between audience and speaker (repeater, I should say). It's an anti-manifesto. Rather than stating affirmatively what one's side really does believe, you state your opponents' views so baldly as to throw your own side's views into sharp relief.

It's important to distinguish this rhetorical maneuver from a related but unfair variant--the straw man technique or willful falsification, where someone attributes to an opponent views that the opponent simply doesn't espouse. No, in the kind of speech scenario Booth describes, both sides are able to state the others' views fairly and without distortion. I know exactly what you believe, an activist in this situation says, and I disagree to such an extreme that the belief as such is anathema to me and mine.

Now this is fundamental difference. Many of the critics I draw on regularly--Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Ranciere in particular--insist on the value of this level of difference to the operation of democratic politics. Mouffe sees a great deal of danger in the will to mute or smooth over disagreements through the search for consensus or moderation. Honest antagonism--or as she would prefer agonism--is in her view the fuel for the democratic motor.

My problem? I agree intellectually with Mouffe that fundamental disagreements are inevitable and ought not be rationalized away as malfunctions to be repaired. But emotionally, such conflict--the kind of conflict Booth recalls--makes me queasy. I know it's odd for a scholar of theatre to say this, but I hate conflict.

I'm all the more impressed, then, by people such as Booth who make it their life's work to begin at the fundamental disagreement scenario ask "What now? What's the ethical thing to do?" Much of Mouffe's work (and I suspect much of Booth's) involves not so much advocating an exact, silver-bullet answer but warning against the will to give up, to dismiss the other totally and--on that pretext--pursue their destruction.

To restate--what attracts me to present-day evangelism as a subject is how it, too, very often begins from an assumption of fundamental difference--those who believe on the risen Christ and those for whom the gospel is foolishness--and refuses to give up. I'm intrigued especially by worldview evangelisms that enjoin Christians to educate themselves so fully in other (i.e., non-evangelical-Christian) beliefs so that the evangelists could in fact state those beliefs fairly and clearly.

I'm not yet convinced that the capitalist/anti-capitalist disagreements going on in this country (which for the most part are more like very-strict-capitalist versus slightly-less-strict-capitalists) have reached even the point at which either side can state the other's point of view clearly and fairly. I wonder, then, if there isn't the potential for anti-capitalist progressives like me to be the first to show empathy for the other's worldview as a first step to progressive evangelization...

Hm.

More later,

JF

Precision-Engineered Evangelism? The Camel Method

For the most part, I restrict my research on evangelicalism's outreach techniques to the US context. But the question of proselytization--its propriety, its status as a human right, its place in a regime of pluralization and tolerance--has taken on a new charge in international venues.

Case in point: Robert Wright's "Opinionator" blog in this week's New York Times online, "Christian Soldiers." There Wright riffs on a Times article chronicling increased resistance to (US-based) Christian proselytizing by Islamic nations. In particular, some of these nations object especially to a tactic innovated by evangelist Kevin Greeson known as "the Camel Method." Aside from its cringe-inducing racist overtones (which appear to be unintended), the "camel" here functions as both an acronym (Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life) and as a reference to the proverb that once a camel gets its nose under or into a tent, the rest of the camel is sure to follow.

Geeson's technique is basically in line with the worldview apologetic approach I've written about previously. It involves getting to know the "Islamic worldview" and equipping Christians to engage Muslims on their own terms, in non-threatening ways. The key? Greeson recommends highlighting the commonalities between Christianity and Islam, primarily that, as Abrahamic faiths, they worship the same God. From there it's a matter of appealing to Muslims' reverence for Jesus ("Isa"--whose story the Qur'an relates and parallels the Christian gospel narratives in some respects) and suggesting that, if they really revere Isa/Jesus, then they should take a look at just how unique he was. Moreover--eventually--the evangelist will suggest that Muslims investigate the claims Jesus made about himself, i.e., that he wasn't merely God's prophet but God's son, the Messiah.

This isn't a unique approach, certainly not as unique as the Times pieces suggest. Greg Stier's Dare 2 Share program, for example, espouses a similar technique for talking to Muslims (as well as Hindus, Mormons, Wiccas, Atheists, and anyone else not Bible-believing evangelical). It's grounded in the worldview assumptions that traditional proclamation simply won't work for people living within whole other worldviews. Christians have to meet people where they are, resisting the urge to "close the deal" in the first five minutes by hitting people over the head with Hell-Sin-Salvation (contra Ray Comfort's Way of the Master). Additionally, the trans-worldview conversation techniques encouraged by the Camel Method direct Christians not to attack Islamic beliefs but rather to "raise up Jesus."

For many Muslims whose countries and populations the Camel Method targets, however, the Camel Method seems dishonest and exploitative. Many Muslims scoff at the idea that their Allah is at all the same as the Christian Godhead. Critics quoted in the Times article point to instances of evangelicals "going undercover," effectively pretending not to be Christian, so as to make having a theological conversation easier.

The article dwells especially on resistance by other Christians--other Baptists, to be specific--to this method. One prominent Baptist theologian, Ergun Caner, recently and publicly called out another, Jerry Rankin, for Rankin's support of the Camel Method. Caner is just as resistant as some Muslim critics to the suggestion of identity between the Christian God and Allah. Wright seizes upon this critique from Christians, lamenting that it stems not from a conviction that undercover proselytizing is wrong but from a proprietary shock that their God could be confused with another faith's deity.

Wright, in his opinion piece, warns that the Camel Method and other such Christian proselytizing techniques often get taken by Muslims in other countries as "cultural aggression." Muslims do not proselytize in the same way as evangelicals do, he argues, and they view leaving Islam as a very serious affair. Wright goes on to suggest that such proselytizing may contribute to heightened tension between Christians and Muslims in places like Nigeria, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. "[M]y guess," he writes, "is that [proselytizing] pretty consistently falls in the 'not helpful' category from the point of view of world peace and, ultimately, American security. And some of it — e.g., the 'Camel Method' — is particularly antagonistic."

As I've written on here before, while as a researcher I find proselytizing fascinating, as a Christian I'm turned off by it. But Wright's suggestion that proselytizing constitutes a form of cultural aggression seems, at least, tendentious. At what point does any focused (dare I say "precision-engineered") mode of persuasion that seeks to create converts from one worldview to another cross over into "aggression" towards the original worldview? If I devote focused energies to convincing you to change your mind about something, I do so because I disagree strongly with your original opinion or stance on that thing. But calling such an act "aggressive" in the absence of forced coercion seems unwarranted.

It's seems--again--that the "cultural aggression" argument holds different rules for how religious beliefs may operate versus how political or cultural convictions may operate. I wonder what Wright would think of a "precision-engineered" technique that aimed to get Muslims in certain countries thinking about, say, adopting Western-style attitudes towards women's rights? What about CIA operations to encourage Western-style liberal democracies in countries whose cultural and political traditions resist democracy? Or what about the US culture industries who actively seek to create interest in and markets for Western commodities and the lifestyles/values that go with them?

What renders these acts of attempted conversion allowable (invisible, necessary, or even laudable) while designating acts of attempted religious conversion verboten? I have no interest in apologizing for "the Camel Method"; I have considerable ethical and theological qualms with it.

But I dislike this growing sense that of all the various ways that people holding one set of values attempt to influence people who hold different values, religious modes of persuasion somehow cause unique or special harm. Bolstering such a belief is the present-day assumption that faith is ultimately a private affair, a feature of identity that can and should be compartmentalized away.

It's this assumption, I argue, that really promises to exacerbate Islam/Christian tensions. Because right behind the gripe Can't those Baptists just keep it to themselves? is the gripe Can't those Muslims just keep it to themselves? Do they have to pray in public five times a day? Do they have to insist on the exclusivity of their faith? Do they have to build those minarets?--and so forth. Misconstruing faith as an I-can-keep-it-to-myself affair hinders a clear-eyed understanding of how and why faith cultures produce fields of tension in the first place, and it certainly puts us at a disadvantage for suggesting ways to ameliorate that tension.

More later,

JF