Well, this is probably going to be the final post I write on the series that spontaneously arose regarding what I perceive to be the bourgeois appropriation of marginality.  I wrote my initial thoughts here, and then posted some follow-up thoughts by Thom Stark, and would now like to make a few concluding comments.
In many ways, Thom’s response reminds me of Zizek’s remarks about America’s justification for invading Iraq.  Zizek writes:

We all remember the old joke about the borrowed kettle which Freud quotes in order to render the strange logic of dreams, namely, the enumeration of mutually exclusive answers to a reproach (that I returned to a friend a broken kettle): (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you.  For Freud, such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments of course confirms per negationem what it endeavors to deny – that I returned you a broken kettle.

I see Thom deploying equally mutually exclusive responses.  Allow me to provide one obvious example.  In a recent response to Doug Harink, he writes “we at RATM are not claiming to be marginalized” but then he also writes that:

many of us (though not all of us) aren’t as close to conservative Christian communities as we used to be, but again, we’re not whining about that. As the educated so-called “elite,” we recognize that we have privilege and power that others don’t. And that’s why we’re trying to exercise it by calling attention to the way that the power at the center (of various institutions and traditions) is often abused and/or misplaced.

Note how the word “elite” is placed in scare-quotes.  Essentially, Thom wants to claim to be marginalized and not-marginalized as the same time depending on how each claim serves his interests.  Thus, keeping Thom’s remark to Doug in mind, and remembering that Thom recently published a book that a good many Conservative Christians would describe at heretical, we are equipped to read the following:

While I obviously agree with Dan that socio-political marginalization is extremely important, I also think that other forms of marginalization deserve to be highlighted and deserve to be identified precisely as marginal. For instance, heretics are marginalized, and I want to call attention to the way that power from the theological center pushes them to the margins in various ways.

Rounding out our triumvirate, we have the following statement:

While some of us at RATM may be willing to call our own perspectives “marginal,” that does not imply we think we are marginalized people.

Therefore, we arrive at our threefold kettle analogy: (1) I didn’t borrow a kettle from you (we are not claiming to be marginalized); (2) I returned the kettle to you unbroken (we are marginalized in a significant way); and (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you (our views are marginal, even if we are not).  Unfortunately, this form of mutually exclusive argumentation carries through on Thom’s other points.  When he denies exhibiting a persecution-complex he asserts that I assume that he and others are “merely reacting to conservative Christianity” but then immediately follows that by asking, “Even if we were, so what?” In the end, I’ll side with Freud on this one.  I think that Thom’s response “confirms per negationem what it endeavors to deny” and makes apparent both a persecution-complex and the bourgeois appropriation of which I spoke (the couple of hundred of readers who read the email exchange between Thom and I, before I removed it from my blog, should easily understand that point by now).
Be that as it may, the original intention of my post was not to provoke a discussion about how awesome (or not awesome) Thom and RATM are.  I simply used that blog as a convenient example of the rhetorical power-play I was discussing.  While Thom does not address a number of the significant points I raise about this issue in my original post (he appears to be more interested in defending himself from what he perceives to be a personal assault), his response further illustrates the rhetorical power-play I criticize in two important ways, and also pushes back on what may be the central issue in this discussion.  I now want to turn to those things, before making one concluding remark.
Beginning with the ongoing power-play related, I want to highlight how Thom stresses that the word “margins is an appropriate term to describe the kinds of perspectives we want to explore and people we want to support, and it functions, due to its broad application in the English language, as a nice catch-all title”.  With this in mind, he emphasizes that “”there really are bourgeois Christians who are marginalized in important ways.”  Again, Thom is making two possibly exclusive arguments here.  On the one hand, he is saying that it is okay for the bourgeois to employ the language of marginality because that fits the dictionary definition of the word, while on the other hand he wants to associate the language of marginality with a significant experience of suffering and trauma — hence, he refers to the “scars” of those Christians (this goes beyond the dictionary definition in some ways, but fits well with a discursive power-play).  However, what really interests me is this appeal to a definition or to the notion that Thom et al. are simply being objectively descriptive, thereby avoiding the deployment of making any kind of power-play (this emphasis also came through quite strongly when I spoke with Thom on the phone).
In response, I want to remind us all of the ways in which definitions or objective descriptions are routinely employed as masks for the exercise of power.  Such things are often examples of ideology operating at its finest.  The argument that the use of a word is technically appropriate according to the rules of the English language in no way refutes the accusations that power is being wielded when that word is employed.  Far from it, such efforts tend to be made to both hide and strengthen the power that is being exercised.
The second way in which Thom’s response illustrates my point is by the way in which he refers to those who experience serious degrees of social, political, and economic marginalization throughout his response.  Thom wants to grant the point that their marginality is important, but he wants to grant that point so that we can not mention them in relation to what he is writing about!  Essentially, he is saying, of course people like sex workers and missing women are important, now can we stop talking about them?  This perfectly illustrates the concern I expressed in my original post: when the bourgeoisie appropriate the language of marginality, those whose very lives are in jeopardy end up being further marginalized and forgotten.  Therefore, when Thom writes that some bourgeois Christians “deserve to be identified as marginalized, even while it’s (very obviously) understood that they’re not in the same plight as disappeared Salvadorian women”  and then asks: “Do we really have to point that out?”  The answer is, yes we do.
This,  then, leads us into what I see as the crux of the matter.  Specifically, we arrive at the question of how we approach the various expressions of “marginality” that we encounter in our society.  Again, I quote from Thom:

I’m not interested in weighing the degrees of profundity of various forms of marginalization. Yes, some forms are banal, like being at the margins of the fast food industry. But a form of marginality doesn’t have to be the most morally profound form of marginality in order to command our attention, nor should it have to.

Here’s the thing: I am interested in trying to assess degrees of profundity of various forms of marginalization.  Yes, this is a tricky area, a complex matter (that’s why I brought it up!), but it is one that I feel we are morally obligated to engage, unless we want to simply capitulate to the culture of victimization I described in my original post.  Indeed, the refusal to assess “the degrees of profundity of the various forms of marginalization” is but another expression of the bourgeois appropriation of marginality, for it minimizes and ignores the significance of the death-dealing forms of marginalization that I have mentioned.  This is the case because it refuses to determine what kinds of marginalization are banal, what kinds of marginalization are extremely significant, and what kinds of marginalization fall at different places between those points.
However, having said that, I think I agree with Thom’s point that “a form of marginality doesn’t have to be the most morally profound form of marginality in order to command our attention”.  That is true to a certain extent, but we do need to be very aware of how much of our attention different forms of marginality command.  Now, in certain Christian circles the discourse of being “at the margins” of Christian “orthodoxy” or “at the margins” of more Conservative expressions of Christianity plays such a prominent role that all other forms of marginality are ignored (or appear as flashy blips on the radar every now and again when somebody wants to establish “street-cred” and advance that person’s “radical” brand-status).  There is so much talk of this, especially amongst “post-Evangelicals” (or others whom circumstance has driven into the circle of Evangelical influence) that I can’t help but wonder if any who wish to add to this conversation are simply contributing to a great wave that drowns out the voices of those who are marginalized unto death.  Certainly, if one wishes to add to that discourse, one should be highly conscious of this possibility and, in my opinion, needs to openly confront it and address it.
However, even with this in mind, I do want to return to my assertion that in most (but not all) cases the death-dealing forms of marginalization experienced by those who are homeless or street-involved, enslaved or sexually exploited, murdered or disappeared, is actually more important than the forms of marginalization experienced by members of the middle-class.  I understand that this might be a provocative statement but, if we are being honest, I fail to see how we can conclude otherwise.  I choose to emphasize it because I feel that us bourgeois Christians spend so much time focusing upon our own petty problems (i.e. at the end of the day, they almost never kill us and we still live a pretty damn good life), when really we should be throwing ourselves into solidarity with those who are far more genuinely crucified today while also throwing ourselves against all the structural, corporate, social and legal powers of Death that are encoded in our societies.  Therefore, until people actually start doing something, I will keep pressing this point (no matter how much they say, “I get it, can we move on?”).
Finally, here is my concluding comment (this thought was only half-formed in my mind until I received an email that nailed it).  Within the academy, people are constantly striving to make their mark within their respective fields, and so they attempt to do something creative, to exhibit some originality, and so on.  By doing so, academics are able to heighten their prestige, status, pay, and job security.  Today, embracing or exploring some form of “marginality” appears to be a particularly convenient way of accomplishing this (a part of what one might call the broader bourgeois appropriation of texts arising from the marginalized).  Thus, a good many academics like to speak about the margins, and claim to be in some sort of solidarity with those on the margins (or, perhaps they might claim to be an advocate or a voice or a saviour for those people), but the benefit of doing this is that one is moved even further away from the margins and ever more increasingly rooted in a central position of wealth and power.  I consider this to be an insidious and destructive process.  Therefore, I believe that any academic who wishes to speak to these things must attempt to move ever deeper into the lived experiences of poverty, shame, and weakness.  To do otherwise is, in my mind, almost always a betrayal.

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:

 

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.

[I have been thinking about the subject of this post for quite some time.  I’ve tried to sit down and write it more than once but am having difficulty expressing myself in this regard.  In fact, it has been sitting near completion in my Drafts file for over a month.
The only way I can think of communicating this thought is through the telling of a story, parts of which I’ve already written here, so I apologize for the repetition and I apologize for the length of time it may take me to get to the point.  This is the story of how I have moved beyond the life of the beloved.]
In my life, I have gone through roughly three major stages of self-identification.  The first stage spanned from my early childhood until my late teens.  The second stage spanned from my late teens until my late twenties.  I am currently in the third stage.
Stage One: Fear, Guilt, and Shame
When I was young, I was deeply impacted by the bourgeois, conservative morality of North American Evangelicalism and the (concomitant) presence of violence, or the threat of violence, within my family home.  I lived in constant fear — fear of not being good enough, fear of not being “man enough”, fear of being punished for things I knew I had done wrong, and fear of being punished for reasons I did not understand.  When I was around twelve years of age, the doctor thought I might actually be developing stomach ulcers from laying awake at night and worrying about the next day.  The only way I could still my mind was bouncing my head of the pillow and counting (1, *bounce*, 2, *bounce*, three, *bounce*, up over one thousand… although I learned to turn my head every one hundred bounces so that my neck didn’t lock up).
In such an environment, it is difficult to develop any strong sense of identity or self-worth.  It was, to be blunt, traumatic.  Now, the thing about trauma is that it profoundly disorients us — it shatters our understanding of the world (what was safe is no longer safe, what we believed no longer makes sense, and so on).  However, when one is born into a traumatic situation, then one has not had the opportunity to develop an understanding of the world or a sense of what to believe or not believe and so the world appears to be inherently tumultuous, chaotic, nonsensical, and dangerous.
Growing up in this world, I came to believe that I was a bad person.  If I was abused, I was to blame.  If things didn’t go well, it was because I had done something wrong.  All of this culminated, then, in the events that occurred when I was seventeen when my father kicking me out of my family home (“You’ve got an hour, get your stuff and go.”  “Should I phone?”  “No, get out of my life.”).
The hardest thing about that experience was seeing my mother — a gentle and loving person who, alas, allowed my father to abuse her and his family because of her understanding of her role as a “Christian woman” — sobbing submissively as I packed and left.  I thought I was the son who broke his mother’s heart.  I thought it was my fault for getting kicked out.  I thought I was a piece of shit and sometimes, at night, I would walk around looking for guys who wanted to start trouble because I thought I deserved to get shit-kicked.
Stage Two: The Life of the Beloved
However, shortly after being kicked out, I had an experience that completely changed my life, my understanding of myself, of God, and of others, and this experience has actually dictated the course of my life from that point onwards.  To make a long story short, I had what could be could be called a “mystical religious experience” (a “road to Damascus” sort of “Event”) that functioned as a major trauma for me.  However, this trauma was a good one — the trauma of unexpected beauty, joy, wonder and love invaded my life and completely changed the world in which I found myself.  Instead of viewing myself as a a source of shame, I now believed myself to be source of delight, instead of feeling worthless, I felt valuable, instead of being an outcast, I felt beloved.  To me, this was the experience of new life rising out of the context of death.  It felt like new creation, resurrection, that sort of thing.
This, then, marked everything about my life from that point on.  I wanted to throw myself into loving and being loved.  I wanted others to know this abundant life.  I wanted others to know their own overwhelming goodness and breath-taking beauty.
I did this because it simply made sense to pursue this trajectory.  After coming to know myself as beloved — despite everything, and at my lowest point (to date) — this was simply how I saw others.  I suppose this was the realization of what Christian theologians refer to as “grace.”  I did not believe that I had earned my experience or done something to merit the title “beloved.”  Rather, it came to me as a gift.
However, the experience of this “grace” wasn’t quite in accord with many theological formulations related to it.  Having come to know myself in this way, notions of being “sinners” or “wretches deserving of hell and damnation” no longer made sense to me as I thought about myself or others.  Rather, having experienced this gift, I came to believe that I was beloved simply because I was.  Thus, I came to view others not as sinners in need of grace or as depraved folks in need of salvation, but as people who already were good, beautiful and lovely, simply because they were people.  The experience of grace made the status of the beloved an ontological category for me (and, I should note, having a son now has only confirmed this way of thinking to me — we are born good, beautiful, lovely, and pure — albeit vulnerable — and we only later learn to break ourselves and others).
Thus, I began to love exuberantly.  And I began to see the transforming power of love in the lives of others.  I saw a close friend discover new life after having undergone some unspeakably violent traumas.  I saw two other friends overcome the most severe crack addictions I have ever encountered.  I saw people who were consigned to death on the streets — by even the most admirable social workers — come into new life as they also came to know themselves as beloved.  That was a wonderful time in my life.
Stage Three: The Lives of Others
However, over the last few years, another major shift has occurred.  I find it difficult to articulate this well, so you’ll have to bear with me.  Basically, I have moved from being centred in an awareness of myself as beloved to being centred in an awareness of the lives of others — specifically, the suffering and dying of those who are marginalized and godforsaken, both in my own city and around the world.  As a result of this shift in focus, it has mattered less and less to me how I identify myself “in and of myself.”  Therefore, although I would still consider myself to be beloved, the point is that I don’t really care about myself all that much anymore.  My happiness or sense of peace, no longer hinges upon me but hinges upon the experience of others.
Indeed, the experience of the form of grace I described above, leads naturally to a focus upon others.  Grace being both a gift and a simple recognition of who we are, is something that is fundamentally outwardly focused.  The God of grace is a God that is not absorbed in herself, but is defined by a reaching out or drawing near to others.  Thus, to live in grace is to have one’s life oriented in the same way.
The catch is this: there are many who are longing to encounter this experience of themselves as beloved but who never have this desire satisfied.  I have known so many longing to love and and be loved, but others death-dealing powers have dominated their lives instead.  Those who have cried out to God but who only received silence in return.  Those who have sought love from others, only to be rejected.  Those who have tried to make good but whose identities were far too shattered by abuse and violence to be able to recover.  Those for whom the love I and others have tried to offer has not been enough.
Reflecting upon this in light of my own experiences, it is difficult to understand how this can be the case.  Grace does not always rupture the fabric of our world.  Love is not always enough.  Time runs out.  Other things are stronger.  Often, the nightmares win.  For me, the great mystery of my life is why I would have this experience and why others would not (after all, it’s not as though merit or effort on my part produced the experience).  Thus, the trauma that shatters me is not one that I experience directly in and of myself.  Rather, I am increasingly shattered by the traumas encountered by others.  I feel godforsakenness because, fuck, we’re all in this together and for any of us to be godforsaken means that we all are.  I am reminded of a famous quotation from Eugene V. Debs:

years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

The only thing to add to that is this: as long as there are those who are abandoned by God, I am forsaken.
Therefore, while knowing myself as beloved became a crucial element in my journey, it is not the end-point that I once thought it was.  Instead, I now believe that it is but one stage along the way.  Knowing myself as beloved has, for me, been that which has given me an understanding of myself that now permits me to move beyond myself.  I am content in myself now.  My conscience is not tortured.  Although I know the deeds I have committed and continue to commit, I am not particularly concerned about  them, good or bad.  At least, I am not concerned about them in relation to myself.  I am, however, very concerned about these deeds in relation to others.  Simply stated: I have found life.  Now, what matters, is sharing life with others, especially those who have had it taken away from them.  I’m not what matters.
Perhaps I am having trouble articulating this and am repeating myself because this is a relatively new stage for me.  I’m not sure what will follow (good or bad or, more probably, both in different ways).  However, I am very curious to see how things go.  I am happy to move beyond the life of the beloved.  Happy to move into the lives of others.  Although, again, the language of happiness is deceptive here.  A better way to express that may be to say I have made my peace with sharing the godforsakenness of others — even though I cannot make my peace with the godforsakenness of others.  For others, I will cry out to God.  For myself, I am content.

So, some folks I know are running an “Eight Letter” conference in Toronto at the start of next month.  Taking the letters to the seven churches in John’s Apocalypse as the point of departure, they have extended an invitation and asked people to pen an “eighth letter” to the contemporary church in North America.  Of course, certain high-status people — Shane Claiborne, Pete Rollins, etc. — were contacted as well and will end up dominating the presentations (because, hey, whose going to pay to attend a conference where a bunch of nobodies share their thoughts?  However, if you take a few nobodies and then mix them up with a group of somebodies, then you’ll make a profit and look like you’re doing something radical… which will sell more tickets!).
I’ve been thinking about what an eighth letter might look like, and have resisted writing anything because it seems presumptuous to write to “the Church in North America” in the same way that Jesus is said to have dictated letters to the churches in Asia Minor.
Additionally, I find myself at a loss when it comes to recognizing “the Church” in North America.  What is this Church?  Is it all those who gather together — in part — because they confess Jesus as Lord and participate in the sacraments?  How can this be the case when various factions exist within this Church, and many of those factions are excommunicating, damning, or refusing to be in fellowship with various other factions (or, as in the recent case of one parish in Vancouver, are actually taking each other to court in order to try and possess properties valued around $20,000,000)?
Is it simply those who gather together in a way that I think more truly reflects what it means to follow Jesus (“new monastic” communities and so forth)?  Wouldn’t that simply be me engaging in a similar action of excommunication and refusal of fellowship? I refuse to think that I can determine what is or is not the proper form of Christianity.  Sure, I have my own beliefs about Christianity, and I openly espouse them and argue them (in part, because I’m willing to be converted), but that doesn’t mean that I think those who believe different things are not members of the people of God.
Is it, instead, the “Church of the poor” whose members apocalypse the crucified body of Christ in our day and age?  If that is the case, then who am I — a person neither poor nor crucified — to pen such a letter?  Wouldn’t one want to be a member of this Church before presuming to write to it?
Or is it simply the sum total of individuals in our context who are living a life empowered by the Spirit of Jesus?  But if that is the case, does it make sense to talk of a “church” — an assembly of people gathered together? Furthermore, how are members of this group even identifiable to us?  We can’t know them with any certainty, and the result would be a letter written to a non-existent theoretical audience rather than a letter written to any concrete persons.
Finally, perhaps “the Church” is some combination of all of the above?  Would it be better to address a letter “to all those in North America who believe they are members of the body of Christ, as well as all those Scripture identifies as members of the people of God”?  However, how can a person hope to write a single letter addressing this massive, disparate body?
At the conference in Toronto, I expect people will simply assume that everybody knows who or what “the Church” is and then will use that to push agendas for which they have already been fighting.  There is nothing particularly wrong with that — I expect people like Wendy will speak about sexuality because she believes that “the Church” in North America really does need to address this issue, people like Shane will speak about Empire because he believes that “the Church” really needs to respond to this, and so on and so forth.  However, I’m at a complete loss as to what I would say because I don’t know where or what “the Church” in North America actually is.
A little help here?

[T]he American combat mission in Iraq has ended.  Operation Iraqi Freedom is over and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country…
Our combat mission in ending but our commitment to Iraq’s future is not.  Going forward, a transitional force of U.S. troops will remain…
We have met our responsibilities.  Now it’s time to turn the page.  As we do so, I’m mindful that the Iraqi war has been a contentious issue at home.  Here too, it’s time to turn the page.

~Barack Obama in a speech delivered August 31, 2010.

This war [in Iraq] was unwise, which is why I opposed it… that is why I will bring it to an end… I will bring this war to an end.

~Barack Obama in a speech delivered March 7, 2008.
Yesterday evening, Barack Obama and the American government formally ended Operation Iraqi Freedom and have claimed that Obama faithfully followed through on his campaign pledge to end the war in Iraq.  You might have missed this — it didn’t attract a lot of media attention and it was presented in a fairly low-key manner (compare both points to the attention and production work that went into George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech delivered May 1, 2003, and you’ll see what I’m talking about).  However, as far as I can tell, this lack of attention an interest is fine with Obama.  It’s all a part of putting these things behind us and looking ahead to the future.
This forgetting and moving on is important because we might remember that the Iraq war is nowhere near to be over.  This is why Obama is careful to never declare an end to the war.  Instead, he repeatedly states that the “combat mission” is over, “combat brigades” have been removed and Operation Iraqi Freedom is now ended.  What he did not say is that Operation New Dawn has now started and that 50,000 of the troops still in Iraq have simply been reclassified — instead of being called “combat troops” that are now called “advise-and-assist brigades” (clever, right?).  Thus, although Obama wants us to “turn the page” on American combat in Iraq, the truth is that nothing is really being changed — as he also stated: “violence will not end with [the end of] our combat mission” (of course, he was referring to the violence of foreign “extremists” and “terrorists” but the statement applies just as much to what we can expect from Operation New Dawn).
This is also why Obama reframed his campaign pledges in his speech last night.  When campaigning for the presidency he spoke of “ending the war,” but as president he speaks of “ending combat missions” and claims that this is a fulfillment of his original commitment.  Thus, he studiously avoids making any sort of “the war is over, mission accomplished” statement.  The one and only time he uses that sort of language in the speech last night is in an open-ended statement: “Ending this war is not only in Iraq’s interest–it’s in our own”.  Here, Obama is actually making it known that the war is still happening, despite the alleged fulfillment of his promises.
However, what I find interesting about all this is the observation that no one really seems to give a shit about this anyway.  Unlike the outcry that came in response to Bush’s “Mission Accomplished,” there is no rush to explore if what Obama is saying is true or to test him in the same way Bush was tested (same applies to Obama’s equally false declaration of the end of the oil spill crisis in the Gulf this year, especially when compared to how reporting on Katrina impacted the Bush administration).*  As far as I can tell, this lack of interest could be motivated by a few things.  First, there’s a good chance that most people don’t really care about the war in Iraq in any sort of meaningful way.  Second, there’s the possibility that nobody actually believes what Obama is saying (including Obama himself).  Instead, everybody has resigned themselves to the belief that the war will continue endlessly, regardless of what anybody says.  Third, there’s also the chance that people are now so confused by the ever-changing rhetoric employed over the last ten years that they don’t know if they are or are not “at war,” let alone knowing what being “at war” does and does not mean.
Regardless, members of all three of these possible parties are likely more than happy to obey Obama and turn the page and, while doing so, carefully rewrite that which came before.
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*Lest this makes me sound like a Bush sympathizer, I should clarify that I am not.  I just think Obama and Bush are two sides of the same coin.

[This is an excerpt from something else I’ve been working on.  Sorry if it seems abrupt.  I’m curious to hear what others might make of this approach to truth and lying.]
So it goes. 
That’s something Vonnegut used to say before he died.
Vonnegut, by the way, had things pretty well figured out.  He was able to negotiate a dialectic that most people cannot sustain.  That is to say, he was able to remain both appalled and horrified by the multitude of death-dealing ways in which people treat other people, and he was still able to prevent this full-on confrontation with death from crushing the life, love and laughter within him.  Most of the rest of us aren’t able to do this.  We either face the death-dealing elements of life and burn-out or blow-up in that confrontation, or (more often) we refuse to face this part of our existence and so the life, love, and laughter we pursue is often tinged with desperation, superficiality, and dishonesty.
Speaking of dishonesty, the reader should know this: I am not a particularly honest person.  However, I should clarify what I mean by that: I believe that I am quite honest with myself, I just don’t think that I need to be nearly as honest with others.  I have found that lying, more than truth-telling, is often the only way to pursue ends that I believe are good and moral.  In contradistinction to the kind of lying I just mentioned, I lie not in order to avoid a confrontation with death, but in order to win that confrontation.
So, I’m not particularly bothered by observing this about myself.  All of us are liars or, to reframe that discussion, all of us are daily engaging in the creation of fictions.  In a world bereft of certitude, wherein “truth” and “lies” are simply the products of language games created by people (wherein all truths are tautological), I’m not entirely sure of the value of continuing to employ this terminology.  In many ways, we are quite literally creating the worlds in which we live.  We all create or buy-in to systems of value, meaning, and significance that we ultimately have no way of knowing are actually true.  Thus, living life meaningfully is an ongoing process of creative fiction writing. 
Further, like all good fiction, it isn’t very useful to refer to this as something that is either “true” or “false”.  When I read Dostoevsky (or any other talented author), I don’t think, “man, what a liar, this guy is making all this shit up.”  That would be an exercise in missing the point.  The Brothers Karamazov is no less true than any work of non-fiction – any historical narrative or any “true story”.  Further, “true” stories, histories, biographies, or whatever else, are just as “made up” as The Brothers Karamazov, in that people choose to highlight certain things, leave other things out, connect certain events to other events, ascribe value to some things and not to others, and so on and so forth. 
All stories are fictions and anyone who imposes a narrative structure on his or her own life, or onto the world, is a liar.
So, with that in mind, I am not interested in telling stories in order to capture some “truth.”  Rather, I tell stories in order to pursue that which is life-giving.  If lying is more life-giving than truth-telling (and it often is), then I will lie.  These lies then actually alter the world – by creating life, they become “truer” than that which we perceive of as “factual.”  Like I said before, we are all in the process of creating the worlds in which we live.  Some lies – the real good ones – are “false” before they are spoken, and “true” afterwards.
For example, I may work with a homeless man who others have described as “worthless,” “bad,” or a “piece of shit,” and that person may have internalized these markers into his own self-identification.  Indeed, the evidence offered for this description might be compelling: maybe this guy sexually abused his sister, maybe he is selling crack to kids and single mothers, maybe he beats people up for money.  Whatever, you get the idea. 
However, when I go on to describe this person as “valuable,” “good” and “beloved,” and when I treat this man as such, my description often ends up becoming more definitive of who he becomes.  Thus, while others might be inclined to call me a liar for describing the fellow they knew in that way, all I’m doing is speaking a truth that has not yet become true.  I am engaged in the process of world-creation, which involves participating in the creation of the characters around us.
However, I  do not engage in this process alone.  Everybody is creating the world in which they live, and most people are trying to impose their world onto the worlds that others are trying to create.  Those with wealth, status, power and control of the means of communication are particularly successful in having others accept the world that they want to create.  The problem here is that these people tend not to be concerned about the lives of others.  They treat others as pieces of shit and ensure that those others actually (factually, truthfully) turn into pieces of shit.  This is a death-dealing way of creating the world. 
I say fuck that world.