Refugees: Bretherton and Arendt

My local church has helped various asylum seekers over the last several years: acquiring furniture, buying supermarket cards from them so they can shop where they choose, driving them to hospital, writing to the local MP on their behalf, witnessing for them in court. We now work in conjunction with the Boaz Trust and several other local churches to provide a meal and a place to sleep for destitute asylum seekers during the cold months. According to Bretherton’s guidelines, the church should act locally first but also try to act structurally rather than just respond pastorally. Bretherton also suggests that churches should decide who is the particular neighbour to be loved in their context, and I think he gets it exactly right when he chooses refugees as the neighbour to be loved in the national context. From first hand experience I know that the government regularly violates the human rights of refugees. I’ve known single mothers of young children treated like violent criminals; young children and parents forcibly separated for long periods of time; children’s health jeopardized by ignoring the advice of doctors; not to mention uninterested state-provided lawyers failing to change cut-and-paste forms to reflect information accurately. Many of the asylum seekers I know have been kept in limbo for years waiting to hear if they are successful or if they will be sent back to danger; imagine the stress of that situation; nor can they work in the meantime. And this mistreatment is compounded by the government’s frequent scapegoating of refugees, and the way it arbitrarily fixes numbers of how many to accept (surely such numbers should partly be a response to events which drive people from their homes over which we have no control). Its approach to students from abroad is equally about pandering to votes and extremely unhelpful to universities.

All of this suggests a group of people that our politics and society fails and positively mistreats. That may be reason enough to regard them as the neighbour requiring our help. But reading Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism I was struck by her comments on the mob. ‘The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented.’ It is a caricature of the people but it is not the people and should not be mistaken as such, and yet sometimes it is and its demands given some due. I would submit that groups such as the English Defence League are Britain’s contemporary mob and their target is, of course, above all the refugee. ‘While it is a mistake to assume that the mob preys only on Jews, the Jews must be accorded first place among its favorite victims.’ And yet the ‘fickleness of the mob is proverbial.’ Arendt first uses the term ‘mob’ in her discussion of the Dreyfus affair, and it is this line that is really chilling: ‘Not only the mob but a considerable section of the French people declared itself, at best, quite uninterested in whether one group of the population was or was not to be excluded from the law.’ The plight of refugees is strangely absent from our media and public debate, from public consciousness, but this silence is in some sense a complicity with the mob. Bretherton points us to the Citizens for Sanctuary movement as a beginning for action.

More from Bretherton

The first chapter is called ‘Faith-Based Organizations and the Emerging Shape of Church-State Relations’ and looks at how FBO’s and the state related in the UK in practice at the moment. The next chapter draws on the work of community organizer Alinsky to draw out an Augustinian political theology for such local work. The basic message of chapter 1 is that FBOs should be wary of working with the state in its current form because the state tends to co-opt FBOs by making them work on the state’s terms and in the state’s way so that it loses they may lose their distinctive nature as faith groups. This is not to say FBOs should never work with the state, only that they must be wary of the following dangers.

Terms like ‘faith community’ or FBO (and ‘social capital’) gloss over real and important differences in practices and beliefs between, often resulting in making everything subservient to some social policy goal (e.g. social cohesion). This may not respect or reflect the self-understanding of those groups. But the market model of provision encourages groups to compete with one another for resources, and therefore see one another as rivals, which works against social cohesion.

There is also the problem of ‘institutional isomorphism’ – one institution becoming like another. This may be forced (e.g. forbidding proselytising as a condition of funding), or mimetic (attempting to be like everyone else), or normative (e.g. through professionalization – end up having to have the same qualifications and procedures as others).

Bretherton critques the Rawlsian liberal settlement that limits religion to the private sphere for three main reasons. It seeks to avoid conflict over ultimate meaning; we are inhibited from hearing about people’s motivations in the public sphere and thus cannot really understand their motivations and so cannot get to know them; it  excludes non-verbal communication and different styles of argumentation (especially ‘greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling’ and ‘embodied witness and symbolic action’).

There follows a review of the theological politics of Hauerwas, RC teaching and the O’Donovans, with which Bretherton is in sympathy. Churches should work with the state on an ad hoc basis but what the church really has to offer the stat is ‘its ability to open new horizons, provide new languages of description, and embody alternative practices. This contribution is sustained by the worship life of the church’. The O’Donovans ‘see the church as the paradigmatic social body or good society.’ Political order should take its clues from the church.

Chapters 3 and 4 are a discussion of refugees and the sanctuary movement, and political consumerism, respectively. Both are equally excellent. A summary of guidelines for action is presented in the conclusion.

1) listen to scripture and neighbours to work out who is the neighbour to be loved and what common need to pursue

2) act locally first: that’s the primary arena

3) create relationships and associations rather than rely first on bureaucracy or law

4) the church’s life is sustained by worship

5) take seriously the ordinary patterns of life ‘as occasions for neighbor love and part of the penumbra of worship.’

6) not just pastoral or humanitarian intervention but trying to be structural

7) embody a ‘generative contradiction’ rather than just saying yes or no to the status quo

8) look to self-organization and mutual support before looking to state or market

All this seems like good advice and I would largely agree with where Bretherton is coming from theoretically too. But I do have a few questions and concerns.

Is the church really a paradigmatic society in practice? Maybe it is sometimes at the local level. Does it have a distinctive politics? Maybe sometimes if understood with a small ‘p’. But we should be wary of assuming any easy conversion from that to statecraft or social policy. Perhaps sometimes the church can suggest better practices than current policy (e.g. hospices, conflict resolution, restorative justice, Alinsky?), but one should accept that also the church is a moral force for bad too (contraception, homosexuality, patriarchy).

It’s not so much the positions here as the tone that concerns me. I know that Bretherton and the O’Donovans etc are fully aware the church is imperfect but I’m not sure that this always makes it through sufficiently into their theology. For instance, Andrew Shanks’ Civil Society, Civil Religion seems preferable on this point because he looks at how the church needs to change given its past failures and the current political culture (including civil society, propaganda, the ideals of freedom). Bretherton claims that ‘the link between Christianity and democracy is best understood as an exploratory and mutually disciplining partnership.’ This is a very interesting idea, but it is Shanks’ book that explores what that disciplining means for the church, not Bretherton. This is not a big criticism, it is merely a question of focus, but the two volumes are worth comparing in that respect. Shanks, for instance, thinks that new social movements are often morally superior groups to the church. It is hard to see the O’Donovans saying something like this, and I’m not sure Bretherton would either.

Another example: Bretherton suggests that the church is a ‘public constituted by its worship life but that as precisely this it is the free or truly public space in which civil society can be re-formed.’ Do we really want to say it is ‘the’ space for the renewal of civil society rather than ‘a’ space? To be fair, Bretherton does list a lot of examples of the church doing just that, but I’m just wary there’s a slight tinge of triumphalism here. But perhaps I’m being over-sensitive.

Bretherton on political theology.

I’ve been reading Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics (Oxford: Wily-Blackwell, 2010). A very admirable book: lucid, a comprehensive survey of the field, an impressive bibliography, making a significant contribution. I particularly like his attention to practice, to concrete cases, as inseparable from the theory. I hope to blog about it in the next few days. The introduction, to begin with, can be summarized as follows (but it really is worth reading fully).

Bretherton doesn’t want churches to be co-opted by state (e.g. contributing to democracy) or market projects or to present themselves in identity politics terms as just another civil society group. Because he wants to see them as unique, each as a polity in its own right. He is wary of external conceptualizations deforming belief and practice. Yet the church can and should contribute to the peace of the ‘earthly city’ or ‘Babylon’, which is a real, if limited, good; a good with which the church is bound up. He wishes to combine ‘investment in Babylon’s wellbeing with faithful particularity and obedience to God.’

He rejects private escapism or ‘daydreams of revolution’.

He assess recent theories of the contemporary situation. 1) liberalism and capitalism as diminishing the ability to pursue a just society (MacIntyre, Wolin). 2) decline of social capital (Putnam). 3) emergence of new forms of solidarity to complement the decline of old forms (Giddens, Beck, Castells). 4) postmaterialism. Bretherton’s own view is that the emerging patterns of ‘political association both feed off and renew’ existing forms.

He then discusses postsecularism as a ‘a period in which, for the first time, multiple modernities, each with their respective relationship to religious belief and practice, are overlapping and interacting within the same shared, predominantly urban spaces.’ And this tends to break down binary oppositions.

Key current debate: is the church just another member of civil society or dies it have ‘a distinctive politics’ as a ‘particular polity’? Maritain and Niebuhr as realists and liberals, Hauerwas, Cavanaugh, O’Donovans and Milbank as advocating a ‘theological politics’. Bretherton is in sympathy with the latter but is interested in how local church in practice actually negotiate with other groups a common life in relation to state and market. He wants to avoid specifying in advance how church and state relate and pay attention to the ‘ad hoc commensurability between Christian and non-Christian conceptions of the good.’

For churches this involves a trialogue between contextual theological reflection, traditional belief and practice, and non-theological studies. Although p.30 fn73, Bretherton advocates ‘the possibility of God’s agency, and thus the need for theology, in the description of what is the case rather than confining it to the analysis of data generated by supposedly neutral social scientific methods.’

 

I’m more subversive than you are

A lot of theology and philosophy likes to style itself as radical or subversive. Whether it’s subverting the bible (and thus orthodox Christianity) or using the bible from an orthodox perspective to subvert societal norms, no-one wants to be seen as going with the crowd. I’m sure there are various reasons for this: pressure to produce new research, being ‘cool’, but I’m not interested in that at the moment. What sometimes, often, results is ever more complex attempts at theory, but a lack of common sense. This is understandable. What’s the point of writing what everyone knows? And getting your head around theory is fun for a lot of academics. It was quite refreshing, however, to read Luke Bretherton talking about political consumerism in his new book Christianity and Contemporary Politics. He makes what I think is a solid case for political consumerism, if and only if it is embedded in other practices and traditioned communities, as being one way in which ordinary people who have little to no political power can try to bring change in economic, political and social areas. Bretherton gives us something to do. I wonder if academics sometimes fear to suggest courses of action because it would seem both an anti-climax after all the theory and as if it makes the theory redundant (‘so, after those five chapters on ideology and the psychoanalysis, you’re telling me to help the homeless and buy Fair Trade?’) But if reflection doesn’t issue in praxis (at least in some fields) then it’s impotent. (Of course, not all theory has immediate application, etc, etc). Bretherton has dared to write about our  mundane lives and to suggest that small, ordinary, ambiguous actions can be the site of divine working. He does it with intelligence and experience. He deserves to be widely read.