The Bourgeois Appropriation of Marginality

The “persecution complex” maintained by Conservative Christians in North America is a widely noted and rightly criticized phenomenon. By employing this method those with power — and those who wield that power in a way that is oppressive and death-dealing — attempt to paint themselves as embattled victims or martyrs serving the cause of goodness and truth. By attempting to establish a certain framework around our sociopolitical discourse, they seek to claim the high ground and make their position unassailable.
Of course, Conservative Christians are not the only ones acting this way. Within North America, they provide but one (glaring) example of the ways in which a “culture of victimization” has spread so that everybody lays claim to the moral authority and the lack of accountability, not to mention the sympathy and assistance, that is supposedly (or supposedly supposed to be) the domain of “victims.”
It is interesting to note this feature of our culture given that we are actually the most death-dealing, violent, and oppressive gathering of people that has existed to date in history. No other culture comes close to equaling the amount of damage that we are doing not only to other human beings but to our plant and to life itself. However, people with guilty consciences have been playing the victim card in order to avoid taking responsibility for their actions since at least the beginning of the biblical stories — Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the Serpent (and God blames all three of them!) — so I guess this shouldn’t surprise us.
Be that as it may, the particular element of this that set my wheels spinning is the way in which those who criticize Conservative American Christians for their persecution-complex, usually end up reworking that same complex to their own advantage. The obvious twist is that these people — who often come from a background of some sort of close relationship to Conservative Christianity — claim that they are the ones persecuted… by the Conservative Christians. You see this a lot in the “Christian Radical” or “new monastic” or “Emergent” circles. Essentially, you have a group of predominantly middle-class, well educated, white males claiming that they (and not the other middle-class, well educated white males) are actually the ones who can occupy the high ground.
Take, for example, the blog Religion At the Margins (NB: I have nothing against those who post there, but chose this blog as an apt example of this phenomenon). Here you have eight contributors (six white males, one white female, one non-white male, all well educated) laying claim to the discourse of marginality. Thus, they define their blog in this way:

Religion at the Margins is a space dedicated to the exploration of marginalized perspectives in religion, politics, and culture. “At the margins” might refer to a class or group of people, or a heterodox theological perspective, or to those who find themselves on the margins of a faith that was once central to their lives. In any case, the theme here is marginality—however we feel like interpreting that at any given moment.

As far as I can tell, this means that we have a bunch of bourgeois writers who, despite their ongoing intimacy with privilege and power, lay claim to “the margins” because they aren’t as close as they used to be to Conservative Christian doctrines or communities (I’m open to being wrong about this, but the authors’ bios certainly suggest this conclusion).
Now, as the passage quoted above makes clear, the notion of marginality is somewhat vague. Really any person at any time and any place could lay claim to being on the margins of something. For example, I could claim to be “on the margins” of the fast-food industry (although I long ago gave up on places like McDonald’s, I still buy the occasional sub from a chain store down the street from my work), or I could claim to be “on the margins” of working with female survivors of sexual violence (since I do work with some survivors but do not work, and am not permitted to work, at the sort of female-staffed space that does the best work in this area). However, it should be apparent that, while technically true, these are pretty banal statements that don’t carry a lot of weight. Generally, people easily recognize that some spaces of marginality and some experiences of marginalization are more significant than others (in fact, it is this recognition that is at work in those who criticize the persecution complex of some Conservative Christians — while it may be true that they are more marginal than they used to be to the functioning of the American Empire, the assumption is that this relative marginality doesn’t carry any moral force). Therefore, when people do employ the language of marginality it is usually done as a discursive power-play in order to gain the benefits I mentioned above (claiming the high ground and all that).
Unfortunately — and here I’m going to make my discursive power-play — the people who genuinely suffer debilitating forms of marginalisation are the ones who end up being forgotten and neglected in all of this. When one group of bourgeois Christians lays claim to marginality over against another group of bourgeois Christians, then the significance of the death, dying and exploitation of other people groups is minimalised or completely forgotten (this despite the fact that one group of bourgeois Christians may like to read and write about those people groups). Therefore, I think that is time that we all reconsidered the ways in which we deploy the language of marginality, why we employ that language, and what the repercussions of that deployment may be.
This poster has made its rounds through the theology blogs:

But we may want to consider something like the following images.
Marginalised:

Marginalised:

Not Marginalised:

An Interview with Roland Boer (On Marxism and Theology)

[As I stated in a prior post, I recently completed reading Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology which the author, Roland Boer, very kindly sent to me as a gift. I very much enjoyed the book and have also enjoyed his blog, so I was very pleased when he consented to be interviewed for this blog. I started with a handful of questions more or less related to what he had written and then sent a number of follow-up questions to him. As you can see, things got a little out of hand and we ended up having a rather lengthy exchange but I hope that the reader will find it as interesting as I did. Thanks again, Roland, I very much appreciate your willingness to share. In what follows, my “questions” are in bold and Roland’s responses are in the regular font.]

People on both sides tend to treat Marxism and Christian theology as opposing and contradictory ideologies. I’m curious to hear about your personal journey and what has lead you to be interested in (and critically sympathetic towards) both of these areas of study. Care to share?

The connection first arose explicitly in a course I took on liberation and political theologies in about 1986 at the University of Sydney, while studying for a Bachelor of Divinity degree – which eventually led to ordination in the Presbyterian Church of Australia. One question with which I ended the course was: instead of reading these theologians on Marx, why not read Marx himself. Which I did, after an honours thesis on the riveting topic of Melchizedek in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Nag Hammadi and Qumran. So, for my Masters degree in theology I wrote a long thesis on Marx, Hegel and theology. Ever since then, I have been interested at a scholarly level in both areas. The idea for the Criticism of Heaven and Earth series first arose in 1992, so the completion of the fifth volume of that series a year ago was the fulfillment of that idea almost two decades ago.

But that is to focus on the intellectual history and you asked about the personal side. I came from a very religious family of (Dutch) reformed persuasions and I shared those convictions, although not without a continual critical spirit that annoyed my father to no end. At high school I used to joke about how things would be far better under communism, mostly to those in authority as they desperately tried to tell me how communism was another form of totalitarianism and how good capitalist parliamentary democracy really was. Even then, I was politically convinced that the centre-left was the best option (my parents voted consistently for Christian democrat or conservative parties while [I] opted for our social democrats, the Labor Party). Since then I have become more radical, on the far left, as they call it. As that happened, it became clear to me that within Christianity there is a strong tradition of political and theological radicalism, which I continued to explore personally. Reformed or Calvinist theology did not seem to sit easily with that interest, so I spent many a long year rejecting that tradition, only to realise later that Calvin himself was torn between the radical potential of elements in the Bible and his own conservative preferences (I eventually wrote a book about it, dedicated to my father, which he was able to read weeks before he died in 2009).

It also became clear, slowly, that not all the Bible or the various theological traditions are at their core or overwhelmingly radical, since they have sat and continue to sit comfortably with some of the most oppressive forms of power. It’s that basic ambivalence that continues to fascinate me, for which Marxism provides some unique insights. Add to that the fact that Marxists since Engels have been perpetually intrigued by the Bible and theology, often writing extensively on it in a way that has profound implications for their thought.

Continue reading →

Book Giveaway… Or Trade

Okay, it has been awhile since I’ve done one of these and so I thought I would, once again, give away some books.
Here are the books I’m offering:
1. Christian Theology (Second Edition) by Millard J. Erickson.
2. Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart.
3. In the Ruins of the Church by R. R. Reno.
4. From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya by Ruth A. Tucker.
5. Community That is Christian by Julie A. Gorman.
However, I’m going to change the rules a bit. There is a book I want — Documents and Images for the Study of Paul by Elliott and Reasoner — so I’m going to also offer a trade. Basically, it goes like this. Anybody is eligible to receive the free books. Anybody who expresses interest gets their names put into a hat for a random draw to determine the winner.
If, however, you have a copy of the Elliott and Reasoner book that you would be willing to trade, or if you simply want to buy me the Elliott and Reasoner book in exchange for the ones I’m offering, then only those who make this offer will have their names put into the hat. If only one person makes the offer, then that person gets the books. If nobody makes the offer, than everybody goes into the draw.
The draw will be held in about a week and I will notify the winner.

November Books

Well, November was a heavy writing month, so not a lot of reading was done. Here’s what I got:
1. Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology by Roland Boer.
Roland was kind enough to send me a copy of this book after this post prompted this exchange over on his blog. He has also continued to extend that kindness and has agreed to be interviewed about this book on my blog, so hopefully that will be posted in the (near-ish) future.
In this book — the first in a series of five — Boer looks at the ways in which theological themes or biblical reflections impact the writings of eight prominent “Marxist” scholars: Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, and Theodor Adorno. The first two he refers to as “biblical Marxists,” the next four as “catholic Marxists” and the final two as Marxists who exhibit a “Protestant turn.”
As with any book exhibiting this kind of scope, some chapters are better or more exciting than others. With some (notably Althusser and Lefebvre) it seems as though Boer is digging pretty hard to meet the demands of his project. With others, however (notably the chapters on Bloch and Gramsci), the writing really is quite captivating. I also found the chapter on Zizek to be of quite a bit of interest. I’ve read a lot of Zizek but not a lot of what has been written about him, and so it is interesting to read what others are saying who have stepped back and taken the time to study his entire project. Boer is also quite critical, probably more so of this author than any of the others mentioned, to it is interesting to see Zizek’s praise for Boer’s work on the back cover.
All in all, quite a good read. I would like to pick up the other volumes in the series (or maybe Roland could mail them to me, along with that case of beer and carton of smokes he still owes me…), and would recommend them to others who are interested in this sort of thing.
2. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
This is the first volume of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy and it is fantastic–right up there with my other McCarthy favourites (Blood Meridian, The Road and Suttree, although it feels deceptively gentler than each of those novels). It is something like a coming of age story, something like a love story, and something like Scripture. Recommended reading (if you want a detailed plot overview, see here, but I would suggest just jumping in blind).
3. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy.
This is the second volume of the Border Trilogy. It is not as good as the first — it lags for about the first 100pp, but then it gets back up to McCarthy’s standard for story-telling (the first part of the book has been compared to Moby-Dick so that may be why I found it slow!). Oddly enough, it was in this book that I encountered one of the better possible descriptions of my own “apocalyptic” life experiences that led me to the faith I live. Here’s the quote, with some context thrown in to make sense of it:

He carried within himself a great reverence for the world, this priest. He heard the voice of the Deity in the murmur of the wind in the trees. Even the stones were sacred. He was a reasonable man and he believed that there was love in his heart.
There was not. Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay in his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair.

That, I reckon, sums up a lot of my journey. Also recommended reading. (Aside: there are a lot of quotable passages in this book. As I was looking back through it to write this, I came across several that could inspire posts of their own.)
4. As I crossed a Bridge of Dreams by Lady Sarashina.
Since I was having a lot of fun reading the Norse and Icelandic sagas, I thought I would try something different and so I decided to read this book, which was written by a woman who lived in Japan during the 11th century (which means it dates to around the same time as the sagas). I have concluded that it is far, far more exciting to read about Vikings than ancient Japanese women who write poems to each other, or to trees, or who get excited to go on a trip to nowhere to do nothing. So, while this book is interested just for the glimpse it provides into a world that is dead and gone, the woman who lived in that world sure lived one helluva boring life.
5. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) by Ann-Marie MacDonald.
I grabbed this play out of a free book bin and read it at the bar one night after I got too tipsy to read anything heavier. It is a pretty clever feminist reading of Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Lots of wordplay, lots of innuendo, mimicking the bard and all that. However, I was never a big Shakespeare fan (although I did once send my wife to a sketchy hotel to buy a $10 leather-bound complete works of Shakespeare from a big sketchy dude… sorry, wife!), and I never was really able to get into reading plays, so I feel pretty ho-hum about all this.