The Sinfulness of Abundance

Here is a fascinating passage from Eugene McCarraher’s recent review in Books and Culture, “Break on Through to the Other Side.”

The Confession of Sin makes no sense unless the world is a place of abundance. A world of scarcity—the ontological template of capitalist economics—mandates a “balancing” of virtues, a mealy allocation of limited resources in virtue, especially charity. (“Balance” is one of the more noble-sounding buzzwords in the lexicon of compassionate stinginess. Like bourgeois bleating about “wanted” children, it conceals a parsimonious and resentful reluctance to share the fruits of the earth.)

We can make no sense of Christ’s injunction to heavenly perfection if we accept this ontology of penury and violence. The God who calls us to be like Him is a lavish and spendthrift Creator, a prodigal Father who will never cut production of material and spiritual provision. (So much for the corporation as “the mirror of God’s creativity.”) As Augustine realized, the imperfection of sin consists in privation, our lack of trust in God’s plenitude, our mean and shameful holding back in a fearful desire for power. If the world were a place of scarcity, sin would become necessity—in other words, not sin. Capitalist economics is the theology of scarcity, or a narrative in which the expulsion from Eden is the opening chapter of Genesis. To see the world as unending bounty is not to deny the consequences of the Fall; it’s to recognize the nature and magnitude of the tragedy, and the difficulty of living well.

I have never understood sin on these terms before, but it makes good sense to me. I am very curious, what do you systematic and metaphysical types out there think of McCarraher’s conception of sin? What holes or problems do you see?

Getting to the Bottom

I want to offer a quotation sandwich. When I read these quotes Barak Obama came to mind as he appears to be running on the Jim Wallis “Religious Values Matter” campaign (check out Obama’s speech “Call to Renewal”). I have to be honest, I am very intrigued by Obama, but for all his talk of a change, I’m not at all convinced he is really proposing something that Christian radicals can sink their teeth into.

So in light of the upcoming elections and the buzz that is mounting about Obama, particularly from Christians, I wanted to offer some choice quotes from McCarraher and McCabe:

But as we look at a country frenzied and fatigued by the race for riches, armored and overextended in its expansive rage and fear, we will need, for lack of a better term, a new New Left, a movement of people who combine, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s wonderful couplet, “Trotsky and St. Benedict”; and I suspect that many of us, knowing in our marrow that business as usual cannot be allowed to continue, are more than ready for a militant renewal of the urge to make all things new (Eugene McCarraher, “The Revolution Begins in the Pews: Trotsky and St. Benedict” Books and Culture ).”

[The revolutionary] proposes to change not merely this or that detail within society, but the structure, and hence the values of the society itself. The revolutionary does not propose something that in terms of this society is better; he wants to change [t]he terms. He wants history to advance not [s]imply further along the established lines, but along new lines (Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language, p. 28).”

At a minimum, that means a metamorphosis in the ethos and curricula of business and professional schools at Christian colleges and universities. Christians should be pioneering a whole new economics, not just tacking “values” onto capitalism. They should be affirming abundance, not scarcity, as the primary ontological fact of economics. They should be offering courses, not in management, but in how to do without management as a distinct class. They should be offering courses and training in union organization, or in dispossessing those useless people otherwise known as stockholders and putting firms into the hands of people who actually work in them (Eugene McCarraher, “Britney Spears and the Downward Arc of Empire” in The Other Journal).”

Both McCabe and McCarraher use the word ‘values’, but they use it differently. I see the way McCabe is using it to denote a paradigm or ideological shift. McCarraher, on the other hand, is talking about the invertebrate Christian “values” we tack onto our inherently un-Christian political economy. In this regard, both McCabe and McCarraher would argue the the radical or revolutionary Christian will not settle for surface sentiments that we infuse our system with. Rather, what we need is to change our system from the bottom up.

Obama, on the other hand, is comfortable with tacking values onto the American political economy. And while I think Obama (and Wallis) are to be applauded for getting Christians who do not identify with the Religious Right to care about the relationship between religion and politics, my question remains:

For the radical Christian, is tacking Christian values onto our current system enough?

Beyond the Narrative? Part 1: The Problem of Joining Hands

When I was in seminary I began a thesis that I never finished. It was going to be on the nature of the socio-linguistic boundary(ies) between the Church and the World specifically within the theology of Stanley Hauerwas. The central question of the thesis was how it was that we communicate the gospel with people outside of our tradition. Put simply, the thesis was on a Haurwasian understanding of evangelism. The problem goes like this: If communication of Christian truth claims requires participation the socio-linguistic tradition of the church (which, among other things, would include significant epistemic assumptions about the reality of God, sin, and redemption) — and if the gospel is something radically different from the ways of the world (meaning, it would seem like foolishness to those who do not share the aforementioned assumptions) — then how can it be communicated? Here is the issue put in Hauerwas’ own words:

Rather than disavowing politics, the pacifist must be the most political of animals exactly because politics understood as the process of discovering the goods we have in common is the only alternative to violence (Against the Nations, p. 7).

It is true that I do not think there is in principle any way to ensure that the Gospel can be made intelligible to someone who is not a Christian, but that does not mean that there is nothing we have to say to each other (Wilderness Wanderings, p. 6).

So my question was simply this: How? If we must work together with those outside of our narrative tradition to find the goods we have in common, and if there is no way in principle to intelligibly communicate the truth of the gospel with such a person, and if we further presuppose that the gospel is integral to our conception of the good, then how do we do find these goods we have in common? If Hauerwas is right, how can we work to build a better world with people who are not Christians?

In the end, and for several good reasons, I abandoned the thesis, but I am again visiting the question due to my reading of Eugene McCarraher. In a couple of different places (here and here) McCarraher argues that “we shouldn’t be chary about joining hands with the disembedded of other traditions.” While I appreciate and want to be enthusiastic about what McCarraher is calling us to here, my Hauerwasian tendencies trigger misgivings about jumping on board. In Resident Aliens Hauerwas (and Will Willimon) assert that,

Big words like “peace” and “justice,” slogans the church adopts under the presumption that, even if people do not know what “Jesus Christ is Lord” means, they will know what peace and justice means, are words awaiting content. The church really does not know what these words mean apart from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

So the question is, if when taking McCarraher’s cue we begin to join hands with those of other traditions who also want to build a world not made in the image of mammon, how do “we” provide content to our use of words like labor, economy, and justice?

In Defense of Young Boys

A rather cheeky post has recently appeared on Danny Jenkins’ “Musing on the Theo-Political,” entitled “What Stanley Hauerwas Does to Young Boys.” The post consisted entirely of a quote from Halden’s post about why he isn’t going to vote, wherein he argues that voting is merely a choice between two terrible options that have been bequeathed to us by our benevolent corporate behemoths. Of course, Halden never mentions Hauerwas in this post, but I can see the point “Paul” was trying to make. A cursory read of Haurewas’ work could certainly lead one to believe that our best hope as Christians in America is to foresake politics and retreat into our sectarian enclaves. This is an argument that some make (you can check out critiques of this non-approach to politics by John Stackhouse and Slovoj Zizek) but I think it naive to attribute this passive sectarianism to Hauerwas. If any one were to spend actual time reading Hauerwas they would discover that his maxim, “The primary task of the church is to be the church,” is not a call for withdrawal, but a call for us to attend carefully to our own identity in order that we may serve the world on the terms of Christianity rather than on the world’s own terms. Hauerwas’ politics is not a politics of weakness or withdrawal, it is a politics carefully and intentionally Christian. Even Jeffrey Stout would agree.

This, of course, does not dismiss that fact that some people who read Hauerwas find themselves in a position where they reject the idea of voting (even if Hauerwas himself does not. Check out the comment on Halden’s post by Melissa Florer-Bixler). But what are the reasons for such non-participation. I think Halden’s point was manifold: He doesn’t vote because 1) the choice is either between a giant douche or a turd-sandwich (thanks South Park), 2) elections are ultimately determined by corporate plutocrats, and 3) voting functions as a legitimating ideology that serves the purposes of plutocracy under the guise of democracy. I think, to a degree, each of these points has merit, especially the latter two.

Religious, Not Spiritual

“I think of myself as religious but not spiritual. Partial to the sensuous, communal, and cerebral forms of ritual and text, I’ve always considered ‘spirituality’ too ethereal and invertebrate a way of being.”

Lately I’ve been reading as many articles and book reviews by Eugene McCarraher as possible. I find his work to offer a fresh and pugnacious perspective on theology. Fresh because, as a Catholic Historian of American political economy, his work crosses the disciplines of politics, economics, theology, philosophy, and social theory in exciting and often illuminating ways. Pugnacious because his writing treats academia as a street fight; those who find themselves on the receiving end of his ire are often treated to high-brow beat-down.

As the quote above suggests, though, McCarraher offers a vision beyond our stale infatuation with “spirituality” and its concomitant appeals to tolerance and openness. McCarraher points to a religious life that is both political and economic (a true polis and oikos) and in this regard invites us to envision what a truly Christian world might look like as a radical sacramental participation in the divine.