The Theology of the Hunt

I read this quote at least a dozen times this week and I still can't make up my mind whether it's funny or frightening. I'll let you be the judge. According to the New York Times, after signing a new $417 billion dollar military spending bill, President Bush said with his characteristic resolute tone and curl of the lip, "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and - darn it - neither do we!"

My therapy background taught me to label such statements Freudian slips. And as funny as Freudian slips can sometimes be, we are told to also take them very seriously because often they speak more truth than our regular words. And so today, I think it is important we talk about both harm and harming ourselves.

I want to begin by talking about tigers. Hunting tigers to be exact. The topic came up in another New York Times article, actually an op-ed piece by the columnist Thomas Friedman. A British friend recently told Friedman that many Brits have an informal test when voting for Prime Minister. They ask themselves: "Would I want to go on a tiger hunt with this person?" Friedman suggests that we've also taken up this test unconsciously and are applying it to each candidate a little bit differently. In terms of Kerry, Friedman says we are asking ourselves, "Will this man kill the tiger or try to reason with him?" We're wondering, Friedman says, if Kerry really has the will to pull the trigger? Our question for President Bush is different. In George's case, Friedman says, we have no doubt he'll pull the trigger, but we're worried about his aim; we're worried he's going to miss the tiger entirely and shoot himself, as well as us, in the foot."

Friedman wrote this article to help us better understand the candidates and their electoral challenges, but the reason this article has struck me so is that I think it says even more about us. Think about what it means for this to be our culture's communal test for president. "Will our president hunt the tiger down and kill it?" The obvious thing this means is that we as a culture have come to a consensus that a tiger is out to get us. We seem clearly to agree that we have an enemy. But the even more important thing to notice is that this question also suggests that we as a culture agree about the solution: a hunt that involves and ends with the pulling of a trigger.

But my question this morning is this: What if that equation is a bit off? What if our enemy isn't just the tiger? What if our enemy is both that tiger and our reliance on the hunt?! In other words, what if the thing threatening to destroy our country -- and the world, for that matter -- is not just the obvious and aggressive terrorists out to get us, but also our aggressive military solution to stop them?

And the frightening thing about asking this question is that I don't think this question even occurs to us as a country anymore. I think that, as a culture, we have not just lost interest in the question, but in a very real sense, also lost our ability to even conceive of this question. And in my mind, that is terribly scary.

Do you remember during the debates when John Kerry and President Bush were asked what they thought was the greatest threat facing America and the world today? They both cited nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists and dangerous rogue states. But I'm not so sure there's only one winner for that category. I think we have a tie. More and more I think the other greatest danger to America and the world is that the mightiest military power on earth has lost its ability to question the efficacy and wisdom of solving problems with military might. We've lost our ability to second-guess the hunt.

Indeed, and even more disturbing, the research I did for this sermon this week shows that this inability to second guess military solutions is not at all new to the scene. James Carroll is an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe and author of a recent book entitled Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War. It's important to note that he is a Catholic and student of theology as well as church history, especially the history of the Christian Crusades. In his writings, he documents how we have consistently and pervasively responded to the terrible consequences of our "hunts" with what can only be called passive resignation and acceptance. The most dramatic example he cites is the way we dealt with our decision to end World War II by dropping the atomic bomb. Afterward we became intimately aware of the millions of innocent lives that were incinerated in a matter of seconds. We saw the pictures of barely surviving children with arms and faces literally melted off. And for years after, we encountered stories of the untold grief and pain it inflicted on the families left behind. In other words, the facts clearly registered with us, but from the perspective of history, Carroll points out, these facts registered only as an incredibly unfortunate consequence rather than as a horrific reason to make sure such a thing never occurs again. In other words, those horrible consequences made us frightened of the power of the atomic bomb, but they didn't cause us to see the bomb as our enemy or even a threat to the world. As awful as it was, we - as a culture - integrated it into our collective consciousness, Carroll says, as a redemptive tool with "just" a horribly unfortunate downside.

Carroll's list goes on:

The war in Viet Nam intended to keep democracy safe but which ended up causing hundreds of thousands of needless and shameful deaths and an animosity that continues today.
The arms race designed to scare the Soviet Tiger, but which now curses the world with hundreds of nuclear bombs and material lying around.
The arming and support of Central American death squads that murdered thousands of poor innocent peasants and irreparably established our government as a bold-faced, bloody and unapologetic liar.
The first gulf war that was intended to keep another tiger from swallowing Kuwait, but ended up also making countries like Iran and North Korea redouble their efforts to build nuclear weapons and inspiring thousands of recruits for Osama bin Laden's Jihad.

Each of these violent hunts - as well as numerous others - had horrible consequences and costs. And while Carroll admits that our culture has genuinely mourned the cost of our violence, he points out that, nevertheless, in the final assessment, the bloody, tragic and self-defeating consequences failed to lead us as a culture to genuinely doubt the redemptive power of the hunt, of the aggressive, violent solution.

But here's the thing, the thing that makes Carroll - in my mind - one of the most important thinkers today; he doesn't just document our culture's inability to question violent solutions. No, he goes on to suggest that the reason we lack that ability is that we worship war. If we really want to understand what's happened and what IS happening to us as a culture, he says, we can't simply understand our use of military might as a calculated military strategy. No, we've got to understand it as an "act of faith," as part of our deep commitment to what he calls "a theology of sacred and redemptive violence."

Now I have to be honest, the first time I read Carroll's argument I didn't really get it. He has a Catholic background both personally and educationally, so I just thought he was using religious language for literary effect, to spice up his writing, so to speak. But slowly it's hit me; he really means the words he's using. He really believes that somewhere along the line, our culture has begun to approach our political and military decisions much more like faithful believers than rationally calculating tacticians. And frankly I think he's right.

Take the riddle that virtually every political essayist and op-ed writer in the country has wrestled with for the past few months. How is it, they've been asking over and over again, that the Bush administration has gotten away with it?

1000 troops dead
Thousands more injured
Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead and injured
Baghdad and other cities car-bombed weekly
The war budget already tripling its pre-war estimate
Regular beheadings
The Abu Ghraib atrocity
Thousands of insurgents pouring in
Islamic jihadists and Iraqi nationalists joining forces against us
Our success story over in Afghanistan resting on an economy dominated by opium production
Allies pulling out
Iran and North Korea even more committed to nuclear bombs
And US soldiers feeling so scared and unsupported that they are willing to mutiny

All this, all of these devastating facts and still the majority of Americans back the warrior president and his military strategy in Iraq and around the world. It's simply baffling!

Well, not quite, Carroll would say. No, it's only baffling as long as you think of this as a confrontation between facts and strategy. Once you let that go and allow yourself to consider the possibility that it might instead be a confrontation between facts and "an act of faith" then the riddle pretty quickly dissolves.

Think about it, says Carroll. Look at human behavior. Facts, contradictory facts, unexpected facts, unaccounted-for facts, disappointing facts. Such negative facts change human strategies. When a strategy or a plan runs up against a troubling fact, we humans may resist and be a bit slow, but consistently we will let that strategy go and pick up or develop a new one. But what do contradictory, disappointing and troubling facts NOT change? In the rock, paper, scissors game of human decision-making, what do facts lose out to time and time again? Faith. That's what they lose out to. Faith and belief. Over and over again. Whether it's the faith that God created the world or the faith that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, facts alone just don't stand a chance. No one gives up their God or their world view just because of a few inconvenient facts.

And with that in mind, says Carroll, take a step back and ask yourself how things in today's culture feel to you? There's a lot of troubling facts flying around and stacking up and yet not a lot of changed minds seem to sprouting up in response. And so, it would seem, wouldn't it, - unless of course Americans are uniquely special human beings - that what is going on in American culture is a confrontation between facts and faith, not facts and political strategies! .

And this according to James Carroll is what liberals and those concerned about current government policy have flat out failed to comprehend. They think they are up against an obviously flawed geo-political military strategy, when in truth they are up against a powerful and historically rooted faith perspective, albeit one that has taken on both explicitly religious as well as more subtle secular forms. And because of this confusion, those liberals and other concerned citizens continue to lose! They continue to do little to alter the frightening trajectory the current administration is taking the world community.

But here's the hopeful part. FINALLY, RIGHT?! Once you realize that you're up against a faith perspective, not a simply political strategy, then it is much clearer what you need to do.

Again Carroll would say, all you need to do is step back and look at the sweep of human history and when you do you will notice a peculiar, but consistent pattern among us slightly evolved apes: We only let go of our gods and world-views when another world-view or god is offered us. In other words, hand us human beings facts that contradict our belief system and the vast majority of us won't budge an inch. But hand us contradictory facts and an alternative belief system, well that's an entirely different story -many and even most of us will trade that old one in a lot sooner and a lot more easily than you'd think.

Another way to put this is to say that James Carroll is trying to remind politicians as well as all of us of one of religion's most basic insights: people live by stories, not by facts. Indeed it is people's stories that not only shape the facts they encounter but determine which facts they are able to see, or not see.

This is where as much as I'm not a supporter of President Bush, I am greatly impressed by him. If nothing else, President Bush understands the power of story. Think back to the days immediately following 9/11. What was President Bush's response? He didn't present a plan right away. He didn't explain or reassure people by telling us what policies he was going to enact. No, the first thing he did was inform us of our story. He told us we were now in a crusade. Of course his political handlers immediately went into damage control and tried to tell the press that the President was only speaking metaphorically; he was simply trying to say we were in a serious struggle, they said. But that's a bunch of baloney. Bush knew exactly what he was doing and he meant exactly what he said - our story, our guiding mental script and belief system is that of the Crusades.

And here's the even more important part: millions of Americans understood exactly what Bush meant and they were glad to hear he had correctly identified the story they felt they were in; and they were even more glad he was determined to make sure the country lived that story out, not, mind you, because they necessarily had examined all the alternatives, but mostly because - like all human beings - they were just more comfortable living in a story they were familiar with.

I don't know how many of us are familiar with the Christian Crusades and the theology that drove it. But we all need to get familiar with it because, friends, it is without question the story we are living in and by right now. The religious words may not always echo with our current secular telling of it, but the essences are clearly the same. For instance, the theology of the Crusades held that the saving power of the world - God's agent in the world if you will - was characterized by dominance, might and destruction of that which is different. The God of the Crusades called his people to make the world over into their own image, to fix the conflict caused by diversity by spreading the dominance of a singular system of belief. The part of the Christian story that towered over and inspired people's imaginations during this time was the crucifixion, the bloody crucifixion, an event that was understood as affirming the idea that violence not only can be redemptive, but also indeed is the only thing that is ultimately redemptive. It was a bloody time supported by a bloody theology that told people to expect disaster and innocent death as a necessary part of the great journey to a better world completely purified of evil.

Not exactly a bedtime story for your kids is it?! But neither, I would argue, is it a story that should be forced on the struggling, diverse and inherently worthy peoples of this earth.

And so let me end today by telling you a different story.

It is a story ironically rooted in the theology that dominated Christianity before the Crusades. It's a story inspired by a theology that emphasizes not the crucifixion but the incarnation. The God of this story decides to freely relinquish his almighty power which he had previously asserted from on high and used to dominate the earth and eliminate competing gods. The God of this story chooses instead to enter the world as a humble and vulnerable child who grows up and uses his power not to lead an army against oppressors but to address the ills of the poor and the sick. And while he is born into a particular religion he challenges those in his faith to widen their loyalties to include faiths and races that are different from their own. He says crazy things like "To follow the spirit of life you have to hate your mother and your brother, you have to instead see everyone as your mother, as your brother." In short he declares that the greatest power in the universe, the true redeeming power, is found not in domination and control, but in humility and sacrifice for the sake of others.

Now don't get me wrong. Don't start worrying you've hired a "stealth" Christian who's come to show you Unitarians the errors of your ways. No, I simply tell this story because, while it is Christian, its essence is also universal, found not only in other religious stories and world-views but also secular ones as well. Indeed you could argue that the secular story and guiding belief-system of the United Nations mirror this incarnate story and its values almost exactly. Just think back to the reading we said out loud together this morning. That reading makes a pretty good story, I think, and a powerful alternative to the Crusader story we're living with now.

The only question that remains is who will be this story's prophets and who will be its peoples?

Scott Tayler, Parish Co-Minister
October 24, 2004