Information is Beautiful/David McCandless

One of the accounts I eagerly follow on Twitter is from Information Is Beautiful. David McCandless truly does make information beautiful, crafting elegantly simple graphics out of nearly incomprehensible data sets. Bravo to him. What, you may be asking, does that have to do with a blog about religion in the media?

It’s not just the subheading on the Guardian blog to which he contributes which states that “Facts Are Sacred”. Rather, there’s a recent post that examines visually some of the data around military spending. One of the mainstays of Christian Pacifism has long been the critique that the United States’ military spending is a runaway cost completely out of proportion with the threat (real or imagined) of any other nation. McCandless shows that this may not be completely true.

If we cannot make an argument rooted in the economically outrageous nature of U.S. military spending, and it seems we cannot from this data, then we need stronger but still riskier grounds to oppose this expenditure. The gross amount of military spending in the U.S. is unparalleled across the globe: that much is not in dispute. However, the appeals to fiscal conservatives don’t hold so well when we understand that U.S. military spending is only 4% of our GDP, ranking us 8th worldwide behind Kyrgyzstan, Burundi and Oman.

I am not sure that this poses an insurmountable ethical issue for the peace movement. We still have other grounds on which to oppose war and militarism in general. What it does do is change the nature of the conversation. Common wisdom in U.S. politics holds that you want to quote the most conservative support for your opinion that you can find. McCandless illustrates that we need to find some different kind of economic argument against war.

Of course, these numbers leave out the human and ecological costs of warfare. The psychological trauma of either participating in or surviving conflict is only beginning to be understood. Perhaps we need to factor the post-conflict costs into the calculus of war. Perhaps we just need to abandon economic justifications or refutations of military engagement all together. I’ll leave it to you to debate in the comments.

Jesus Christ, tough guy

On February 1, the New York Times reported on an apparently growing segment of the nondenominational Christian world: mixed martial arts bouts. This is not to say that they’ve noticed very muscly men with Christian tattoos climbing into the ring. Rather, this is the story of how some congregations are using mixed martial arts (MMA) fighting to bring 18-34 year old men back into the pews. According to the Times article, the embrace of MMA ranges from showing bouts and talking about combat and fighting as a metaphor for actually training fighters and hosting bloodsport matches. Where to begin?

First, I want to acknowledge that trying to carve out any specifically pacifist Christology is not simple. Those dedicated to finding a Biblical excuse for violence love to point to Matthew 10:34 and Luke 22:36 to state that even Jesus knew that sometimes push would come to shove and if you couldn’t push or shove, you were in trouble. I won’t belabor that argument here, except to say that those two quotes stack up poorly against the reported actions of Jesus in the Gospels and the first few centuries of Christian resistance to militarism.

What is particularly troubling in this new Bloodsport Ecclesiology is its notion of anthropology and specifically masculinity. Rather than expand the repertoire of acceptable “male” behaviors to include such things as charity, forgiveness and gentleness, these leaders are reinforcing the same notions of masculine aggression that have given us generations of homophobia, spousal abuse, child abuse, war and–tautologically enough–MMA itself.

We ought not point to Jesus as an exemplar of only HALF of humanity but of the completion of all of humanity. Yes, there is aggression and affection present in all of us. There was both aggression and affection shown in the Gospel accounts of Jesus. If we follow the Chalcedonian formulation that Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine both, we must allow for his having had the same aggressive drives as we have. That does not, however, mean that we are called to embrace those drives and pound the daylights out of one another.

Not too much further down the road of that embrace of aggression lies the notion that the victor in any physical confrontation had God on her or his side. Surely, if we believe in Christ crucified we cannot affirm that belief.

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Joel Gretsch portraying Father Jack Landry

As part of the ongoing project that is The Wheat and The Chaff, I want to look not only at the news media’s interaction with religion but also at the popular media’s interaction with religion and religious themes. I owe a shout-out and a hat-tip to the excellent and engaging work of Natalie and Kathryn over at The Moth Chase. Please give them a read.

One of my favorite childhood TV shows was the miniseries/series/reunion TV movie “V”. In it, one watched a post-“Beastmaster” Marc Singer and a pre-“Nightmare on Elm Street” Robert Englund fight to save the Earth from a race of masquerading reptilian conquerors-from-beyond. Seriously.

The show has been re-launched and updated. The main plot seems to be the same: aliens promising peace arrive unexpectedly, some people suspect shenanigans, aliens are shown to be literal monsters, etc. This time there’s an interesting twist: one of our main “freedom fighters” is a Catholic priest.

The title of this post comes from a decision laid at the feet of Father Jack Landry: “You need to decide whether you’re a soldier or a priest”. This line is delivered after it’s revealed that Father Jack knows how to throw a punch because he did two tours in Iraq as an Army chaplain. He’s been running around for four episodes blowing things up and occasionally reflecting on what it means to his faith in God that we homo sapiens are not the only creatures capable of building a spaceship, but finally someone points out to him that there’s a choice involved.

The Ontological Question, theology of violence, military and imperial complicity, explosions, motorcycles and space aliens. This is a show that has it all.

Levity aside, I do think that the presentation of this particular character brings up some issues worth pondering. Does it make any difference to our belief in God that there may be other intelligent life in the universe? When do you put down the crucifix and pick up a gun?

As someone who prefers to conceive of “priestly freedom fighters” in the mold more of Oscar Romero, Ammon Hennacy, Thich Nhat Hanh and Jesus, I am pretty uncomfortable with the idea that violence and ministry can play nicely together. I think that the choice alluded to here is a deep and existential one, and I think that it may be one that goes unasked far too often. Can Christianity be true to itself and still ordain ministers who serve in uniform in areas of military conflict? Is the decision between being a “priest” and a “soldier” strictly either/or or can it be both/and?

It turns out that the man in custody for these shootings is a United States Army psychiatrist named Nadal Hasan. He is a Muslim. That’s about where the media coverage flew off the rails of discourse, crash landing in a smoking heap of polemic. Some bloggers have posited this indisputably tragic event in terms evocative of Armageddon. Other opinion pieces point out the thorny nature of the question posed by Hasan’s actions: namely, can we talk about one extremist’s beliefs without maligning an entire tradition?

I confess that I do not have an answer. I have known too many Muslims in my life to think that Maj. Hasan’s beliefs are normative. I want to assign him to a category analogous to Fred Phelps: a fringe figure who speaks for no-one but himself. Even this lets me too much off the hook. I need to think about a bigger issue raised by Maj. Hasan’s actions.

I want to know about the chickens coming home to roost. I want to know why the possibility of his being traumatized by exposure to war through his patients is not being explored any longer. This came up briefly in early news coverage. As soon as there was a simpler–dare I say reductionist–answer at hand, the complex and human picture was discarded. The news networks are no longer interested in interrogating the relationship between war and violence on one hand and the traumatized human psyche on the other. Now we just have a boogeyman to fear. Now we can just be thankful that he isn’t like “us”.

Isn’t he?

Further reading:

• Faith or Trauma: Questioning the Motivation of the Fort Hood Shooter
• Spinning Ft. Hood
• On Faith: Religion In The Military
• On Faith: Islam and the Fort Hood shootings
• Dan Gilgoff on Obama’s response to the shootings (U.S. News & World Report)

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