Violence, Religion, and the State William Cavanaugh Draft only not for citation

The first chapter of Martin Martys book Politics, Religion, and the Common Good begins with a cautionary tale: In the 1940s, what could incite otherwise law-abiding white Christian Americans to treat a group of fellow white Christian citizens like this? In Nebraska, one member of this group was castrated. In Wyoming, another member was tarred and feathered. In Maine, six members were reportedly beaten. In Illinois, a caravan of group members was attacked. In other states, sheriffs looked the other way as people assaulted group members. The groups meeting places were also attacked. Members of the group were commonly arrested and then imprisoned without being charged.1 Marty continues on to reveal that the group in question was the Jehovahs Witnesses whose offense, in the eyes of their fellow citizens, was to circulate pamphlets such as one entitled Reasons Why a True Follower of Jesus Christ Cannot Salute a Flag. In1940 the Supreme Court had ruled that all American schoolchildren could be forced to salute the American flag. Marty comments that with war raging in Europe, The country had to stand together.2 The Jehovahs Witnesses refused to comply. So here we have a nation on the brink of war, enforcing reverence to its flag, and violently persecuting a non-violent group of people who believe that flag worship is idolatrous. Surely the lesson Marty will draw from this story will be a warning against the violence of zealous nationalism. Right? No. Astonishingly, the punch line of the story is a warning about the dangers of religion in public. Within three years the Supreme Court reversed itself. But, Marty says,
during the three years before that reversal, it became obvious that religion, which can pose us versus them or them versus what we think the state should be and do carries risks and can be perceived by others as dangerous. Religion can cause all kinds of trouble in the public arena. The world scene reveals many instances of terror and tragedy created by people acting in the name of religion.3

As Marty uses it in this case, the term religion refers not to extending ones arm in a ritual gesture and reciting a pledge of ones allegiance to a piece of cloth endowed with totemic powers. The term religion applies only to the Jehovahs Witnesses refusal to do so. And yet the violence against the Jehovahs Witnesses is exhibit A in Martys warning against the violent tendencies of religion. It is a bit like blaming lynching on the fact that blacks are not like whites. To be fair, Marty clearly disapproves of coercing people to salute the flag. And much of Martys book is dedicated to showing that allowing religion a voice in public affairs is -- as the title of the second chapter indicates -- Worth the Risk. Nevertheless, one senses that religion in public is to be treated like a paroled convict in the workplace: he should be given a second chance to be a productive citizen, but the letter openers should be kept in locked drawers. Marty is by no means alone; there has developed an entire genre of books on religion and violence, one conclusion of which is that religion should be allowed into the public realm only in its most chastened forms.4 In the first section of my paper, I will show how the myth of religious violence arbitrarily focuses on certain kinds of violence and ignores others, especially the

2
violence of the nation-state. In the second section, I will argue that this myth serves a crucial legitimating role for the nation-state, presenting the nation-state as that which rescues us from the strife of civil society by reconciling us into one. The effect, however, is the creation of a new and more violent religion, the civil religion of nationalism. In the third section, I suggest that the church should refuse this imagination of one public space bounded by the nation-state, and recover a sense of the church as a public in its own right. I. Religion and violence Religion-and-violence arguments tend to explain religions peculiar tendency towards violence in one or more of three interrelated ways: religion is irrational, religion is absolutist, and religion is divisive. Marty tends to appeal to the latter two, which are related. The absolutist nature of religion can result in exclusive loyalties that divide the body politic. Marty quotes Brian K. Smith on religions absolutism and adds his own commentary on religions divisiveness:
Violence is authorized by religion because religion is inherently absolutist in the type of authoritative claims it makes and in the all-encompassing nature of its demands on its followers, wrote Brian K. Smith. Once a particular group considers itself as divinely chosen and draws sharp boundaries between itself and others, the enemy has been clearly identified, and violence can become actual.5

Marty expands on these ideas in a section entitled Religion Divides. He writes Those called to be religious naturally form separate groups, movements, tribes, or nations.6 The sacred privilege with which these groups feel endowed leads to negativity toward others. He warns of the dangers in claiming special status for the United States, and cites Ronald Reagans vilification of the Soviet Union as the evil empire. Clearly, then, Martys sympathies are not with those ardent nationalists who would do violence to nonconformists. Indeed, the problem with religion seems not to be that it breaks up a desirable uniformity, but that it works against a healthy pluralism: Religion in its intense forms can grasp people who would otherwise have multiple commitments and exact complete and exclusive expressions of their loyalty, even unto death.7 Religion demands one overriding commitment, a potentially lethal subordination of the many to the one. Given this analysis, it is hard to see why the antagonists in the opening scenario end up where Marty puts them. The Jehovahs Witnesses are clearly guilty of religion because they have claimed an exclusive loyalty to Jesus Christ. They have provoked the violence, even though they suffered rather than committed it. What is not clear is why their persecutors are not also guilty of religion for demanding an equally exacting complete and exclusive expression of their loyalty, even unto death. Marty muddies the waters by including tribes and nations among those separate groups formed by religion. Is American nationalism of the kind evinced by Ronald Reagan a type of religion, or is the religious influence of Christianity to blame for turning an essentially secular reality like the nation-state toward a religious exclusivity? If we turn for help in answering this question to Martys own attempt to define religion, the waters only get muddier. In the introduction to the book, Marty attempts to set some parameters for his discussion of politics and religion. He begins his discussion of religion with seventeen different definitions of religion, then comments that since Scholars will never agree on the definition of religion,8 he will forgo a precise definition and instead to point to phenomena that help describe what were talking about.9 The result is a list of five features of religion that help point to and put boundaries around the term.10 The first feature (1) is that Religion focuses our ultimate concern. Ultimate concern answers such question as What do you most care about? For what would you be willing to die? If you would be willing to die for the swastika, says Marty, that points toward your ultimate concern. Interest in astrology, he says, could also qualify. Marty then shows how politics is involved with questions of ultimate concern. Politics asks many questions than can either further or hinder ones understanding of ultimate concern.11

3
Marty proceeds the same way through the rest of the list of five features of religion. (2) Religion builds community, and politics must be attentive to community-building issues such as justice, equity and the general welfare. (3) Religion appeals to myth and symbol, and Politics often mimics this appeal politicians and citizens alike respond to mythical stories, and government often evokes many kinds of symbols; Marty mentions war memorials and debates over flag burning. (4) Religion is enforced through rites and ceremonies, and Politics also depends on rites and ceremonies, [e]ven in avowedly secular nations, Marty adds. And finally (5) Religion demands certain behaviors from its adherents, and Politics and governments also demand certain behaviors. Citizens who transgress certain rules may be accused of treason the political form of heresy.12 So Marty has identified a peculiar tendency toward violence in religion, as opposed to other non-religious, or secular, phenomena. But when it comes to saying what religion is, he begs off giving a definition, lists five features that help identify religion, then shows how all five features also apply to politics. Politics, it turns out, has the same tendencies toward ultimacy, creating boundaries, and making demands on its adherents that were at the source of religions violence. Indeed, Marty has given us no way to distinguish politics from religion. As dean of American historians of religion and perhaps the most prominent commentator on religion in American life, Martin Marty is an appropriate test case, but he is by no means alone in his confusion. Sociologist Mark Juergensmeyers several books on religion and violence are devoid of any attempt to define religion. Timothy McVeigh appears on the cover of Juergensmeyers Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence despite the fact that McVeigh was a self-proclaimed agnostic. Richard Wentzs book Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion defines religion so broadly that it includes consumerism, secular humanism, faith in technology, and football fanaticism. Wentz is forced to conclude, rather lamely, Perhaps all of us do bad things in the name of (or as a representative of) religion.13 In his book When Religion Becomes Evil, Charles Kimball claims that more wars have been waged and more people killed in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history,14 but he begs off giving a definition of religion, claiming instead we all know it when we see it.15 When an academic says such a thing, we should react as we would when a used car salesman urges us to waive the warranty. We dont all know it when we see it. The inability to define religion has been called almost an article of methodological dogma in the field of religious studies.16 Jonathan Z. Smith writes Religion is solely the creation of the scholars study Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.17 Timothy Fitzgerald notes in his survey of religious studies scholarship that the term religion is used to refer to such diverse institutions as totems, the principle of hierarchy, Christmas cakes, witchcraft, unconditioned reality, the rights of man, the National Essence, Marxism and Freudianism, the tea ceremony, nature, ethics, and so on.18 When the term religion is used broadly, it includes so many different phenomena as to be unhelpful in making distinctions; when the term is used more narrowly, however, such distinctions as are made include some phenomena and exclude others arbitrarily. Daniel Dubuisson argues that religion is an entirely Western phenomenon that has been applied to non-Western practices, thus arbitrarily anointing what is Western as universally valid.19 We could excuse Marty and the others perhaps by claiming that just because religion is a concept with fuzzy edges, people still know how to use it in a meaningful way. Other concepts culture, for example are notoriously difficult to define, but remain useful nevertheless. The problem, however, is not simply that Martys use of religion is muddled. The problem is precisely the opposite. When it comes to accusing religion of a tendency toward violence, Marty and the other religion-and-violence theorists are unjustifiably clear about what counts as religion and what does not. The distinctions they make are arbitrary. Jehovahs Witnesses refuse to salute the American flag because of religion; those who beat them for refusing to salute the flag

4
do so from some other motive. American nationalism does not qualify as a religion, even though it exhibits all five features of religion according to Martys own reckoning. As a result, the violence of American nationalism slips by unnoticed as Marty warns of the dangers of zealots like the Jehovahs Witnesses bringing religion into the public realm. The religious character of nationalism has been noted at least since Tocqueville wrote that American public opinion would become a sort of religion of which the majority would be the prophets.20 Durkheims thesis that religion is the collectivitys worship of itself has often been applied to the nation-state. In a chapter entitled State Fetishism, anthropologist Michael Taussig argues that Durkheims conclusions (if not his methodology) about the totemic character of the social order are readily applied to the nation-state, especially in the states deep investment in death.21 John T. Noonan observes, Empirically, the evidence suggests that Durkheim is right: for a nation the nations interests are sacred and supreme.22 From Carlton Hayes 1960 book Nationalism: A Religion to more recent work by Robert Bellah, Carolyn Marvin, Talal Asad, and Peter van der Veer23, nationalism has been treated as a form of religion. Charles Kimball himself acknowledges that blind religious zealotry is similar to unfettered nationalism24 while giving no indication as to how they are dissimilar. Nevertheless, he arbitrarily excludes nationalism from his indictment of religion. Political scientist David Rapoport attempts to distinguish between nationalism and religion in the following terms:
Perhaps circumstances and context frame the disposition towards violence. But some relevant element seems to be inherent in the nature of religion itself. One such element is the capacity of religion to inspire total loyalties or commitments, and in this respect, it is difficult to imagine anything which surpasses the religious community. Religion has often had formidable rivals; in the modern world the nation sometimes has surpassed religion as a focus of loyalties, though significantly there is increasing propensity for academics to speak of civic religion when discussing national symbols and rites. In any case, the ascendancy of the nation has occupied but a brief moment in history so far, and in a limited portion of the world all of which only more underscores the durability and special significance of religion.25

Here nationalism acts like a religion and is sometimes called a religion, but is not a religion. Nevertheless, the violence of nationalism counts as evidence against religion. Rapoport assumes that -- whereas the nation has a particular history -- religion is timeless and universal, even though, of course, he makes no attempt to prove this or define religion. The argument that religion causes violence is often invoked to commend limits on the role of Christianity, Islam, and other faiths in the public affairs of the nation. Christianity and Islam are put in the category religion, nationalism and other phenomena are excluded, and then we are warned about the absolutism inherent in religion. Of course secular phenomena such as nationalism can get out of hand, the argument goes, but religion is more inherently absolutist because it appeals to a God beyond mere human limitation. The problem with this argument is that what counts as absolute is determined a priori, and is immune to empirical testing. If we want to determine what people actually believe, we should take to heart Slavoj Zizeks observation that belief is radically exterior and is embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people.26 In actual practice people treat all sorts of things as absolutes. Suppose, for example, that we defined the absolute in its most relevant sense for this discussion as that for which one would be willing to kill. Then suppose that we applied an empirical test to determine whether American Christians would be more willing to kill for their Christianity or for their country. Whether we conducted this test by survey or by observing Christians behavior during wartime, the results would reveal far more absolutist fervor for the nation-state than for the Christian faith. Most American Christians would find the idea of killing for Christ repugnant, but would treat the possibility of killing for America as a necessary sacrifice. The point is not that people never do bad things in the name of Christianity, Islam, and other institutions commonly labeled religion. The point is that there is no reason to suppose a

5
priori that such faiths are any more inherently absolutist and violent than supposedly secular ideologies, such as nationalism, free-market capitalism, liberalism, and so on. Secularization theory is wrong not because religion has reappeared but because it has never gone away. Pace Weber, modernity is not at all disenchanted; state and commodity fetishism reign.27 In the West, the nation-state and the market have replaced the church as the primary organizers of sacred meaning, and the world is, to put it mildly, not a more peaceful place. Of course, there is no question that a particular strain of evangelical Christian messianism informs American nationalism. The Christian imagery of much American nationalism cannot be ignored or dismissed as being not really Christian. But what we also cannot do is to determine a priori that Christianity, as a religion, must be the root problem for turning an essentially secular and innocent institution like a liberal democratic state toward a virulent form of violence. I think empirical investigation of contemporary society reveals not that the church wields undue influence on the state, but that the church has been absorbed by the nation-state. It is to this problem that I turn next. II. E Pluribus Unum If there is no prima facie reason for separating Christianity, Islam, and other faiths from political expression, how should the Church view its public role? Many of those who advocate what Marty calls the public Church view the state/civil society distinction as the key. Chastened by the experience of Christendom, the Church seeks not to take over the coercive powers of the state once again, but to participate in the public political debate as one more free association of civil society. I will briefly discuss the approaches of Martin Marty and John Courtney Murray, one Protestant and one Catholic, to this question. As Marty states it, the problem with religion is its tendency to take people whose commitments are otherwise multiple and force them into exclusive and potentially lethal expressions of loyalty to their faith. And yet Marty has no desire to banish religious bodies from the public conversation. Indeed, Marty believes that the solution to the subordination of the many to the one in religion is to encourage religious people to take part in an open and civil conversation about the common good of the nation. As Marty says, a republic prospers when many voices speak,28 and he argues that religion is an important voice for the vitality of the public conversation. Martys solution to the dangers of religion is a tempering of an individuals particular religious commitment by his or her commitment to the nation, a more inclusive, universal reality of common life but diverse voices. John Courtney Murray is the most influential American Catholic theorist on the solution of the problem of the one and the many in the life of the nation. Like Marty, Murray advocates a robust pluralism of different religious voices in the public conversation. According to Murray, what distinguishes American liberalism from its Jacobin counterparts on the Continent is a commitment to a limited government that allows pluralism to flourish. The unity asserted in the American device E pluribus unum is a unity of limited order.29 For Murray, the state is not the keeper of the common good, but merely that agency that maintains public order. The locus of the common good is civil society, where a vigorous and civil conversation takes place amongst the various conspiracies, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and secularist.
The one civil society contains within its own unity the communities that are divided among themselves; but it does not seek to reduce to its own unity the differences that divide them. In a word, the pluralism remains as real as the unity. Neither may undertake to destroy the other. Each subsists in its own order. And the two orders, the religious and the civil, remain distinct, however much they are, and need to be, related.30

The religion clauses of the First Amendment are therefore not articles of faith but articles of peace, not imposing a unity on the plurality, but merely maintaining peace among the many.31

6
In theory we have achieved a happy balance between unity and plurality, between the state and civil society. The problem is that pluralism remains a threat. Murray describes the structure of war that underlies the pluralistic society; it is a crisis that is new in history.32 Murrays entire project is to articulate a public consensus that can replace this structure of war with a peaceful pluralism of conspiracies locked in rational argument, not battle. Murray posits the urgent need for an American consensus based on natural law thinking that can provide a moral foundation for such a conversation to take place. Unfortunately, Murray ruefully admits, such a consensus once existed but is now dead. In response to Murrays call for rational debate on the moral limits of warfare, Julian Hartt countered that America is not a community capable of embodying the tradition of reasoned discourse on warfare. Murray responds
I am compelled regretfully to agree that he is right. Such is the fact. It may even be that the American community, especially in its clerks, who are the custodians of the public philosophy, is not the repository of the tradition of reason on any moral issue you would like to name. This ancient tradition lives, if you will, within the Catholic community; but this community fails to bring it into vital relation with the problems of foreign policy.33

Murray concludes, It would seem, therefore, that the moral footing has been eroded from beneath the political principle of consent, which has now come to designate nothing more than the technique of majority opinion as the guide of public action a technique as apt to produce fatuity in policy and tyranny of rule as to produce wisdom and justice.34 In the absence not only of agreed upon ends but of any rational basis for arguing about those ends, the unum dissolves into the structure of war that underlies the pluralistic society. Pluralism is the liberal states greatest threat. Murray tries to deal with the problem by appealing ever more strongly to a lost tradition of reason and the limited state. What Murray does not seem to realize is that the American nation-state has found its solution to the problem of pluralism in devotion to the nation itself. The nation-state is an imagined community founded on the great dramatic myth of salvation from pluralism and division, especially religious division. The state takes up and reconciles the antagonisms of civil society. The nation-state is made stronger by the absence of shared ends. In the absence of shared ends, devotion to the nation-state as the end in itself becomes ever more urgent. Pluralism will always be a crisis for the liberal state, and the solution to the crisis of pluralism is to rally around the nation-state, the locus of a mystical communion that rescues us from the conflicts of civil society. I think this explains why the myth of religious violence remains so prevalent, despite the fog that envelops it. We need the danger of religious violence kept before us in order to produce unity. The nation-state reads history, as Walter Benjamin says, as a perpetual state of emergency.35 The nation-state needs the constant crisis of pluralism in order to enact the unum. The myth of religious violence has a crucial legitimating function for the nation-state in the West. Religion in the West serves as a kind of enemy in the mirror36 for the liberal nation-state. Religion is feared for its binding effect, its subjugation of the many to the one, and yet this effect is mirrored in the nation-states own attempts to create e pluribus unum, to solve the problem of pluralism through the binding of the many to the sacred nation. The fundamental incoherence of the nation-state is sublimated by devotion to the nationstate itself, especially it is organization of killing energies. There is thus a necessary connection between the two seemingly contradictory faces of the nation-state that Alasdair MacIntyre identifies. On the one hand, the state is a clearinghouse for goods and services in which decisions are made between competing interests based on power, not rational deliberation about shared ends. MacIntyre goes beyond Murray in saying that the public discourse of the nation-state not only does not but cannot be conducted on the basis of common norms of rational inquiry in the Aristotelian-Thomist sense, in part because of the sheer size of the modern nation-state. Decisions are based on money and power, not reason, so conflict especially between classes -is endemic. On the other hand, the nation-state presents itself as a repository of sacred value that

7
requires its citizens to be ready to kill and die on its behalf. The intense practice of unity and singular commitment that nationalism requires and produces, is however, a dangerous sham. As MacIntyre writes
when the nation-state masquerades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcome is bound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both. For the counterpart to the nation-state thus misconceived as itself a community is a misconception of its citizens as constituting a Volk, a type of collectivity whose bonds are simultaneously to extend to the entire body of citizens and yet to be as binding as the ties of kinship and locality. In a modern, large-scale nation-state no such collectivity is possible and the pretense that it is is always an ideological disguise for sinister realities.37

The primary sinister reality that must be disguised is the violence inherent in the nationstate itself. Carolyn Marvin argues that nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States,38 and it is a religion that produces unity through blood sacrifice in war. It has been pointed out many times that the country is most unified in times of war; in Randolph Bournes memorable dictum, War is the health of the State.39 According to Marvin, this fact points to the inherently religious nature of American nationalism, for religion as she defines it following, in different ways, Durkheim and Girard -- is bound up with blood sacrifice to defuse crises of group identity. It is crucial, however, that we deny the religious nature of nationalism. Why?
Because what is obligatory for group members must be separated, as holy things are, from what is contestable. To concede that nationalism is a religion is to expose it to challenge, to make it just the same as sectarian religion. By explicitly denying that our national symbols and duties are sacred, we shield them from competition with sectarian symbols. In so doing, we embrace the ancient command not to speak the sacred, ineffable name of god. The god is inexpressible, unsayable, unknowable, beyond language. But that god may not be refused when it calls for sacrifice.40

The argument that religion lends itself to violence enacts a religious Other from which the liberal nation-state offers protection. It does so by a putative contrast between the tolerance of liberal pluralism and the exclusive commitments demanded by religion. Far from a merely internal group dynamic, this type of argument currently frames much of American foreign policy: Muslims have not learned, as we in the West have, to free politics from the violence of religion. Their religious commitments impose uniformity in the public sphere. Regrettably, we must bomb them into a peaceful pluralism. As we have seen, pluralism is a crisis for the liberal nation-state, a crisis that is solved by absorbing the many into the one, by making of nationalism a new religion. But as Marvin points out, nationalism only works as a religion because we deny that it is one. III. From one city to two As attractive as it is, the Marty/Murray vision of a robust civil society informing a limited state is empirically false. State and civil society have been largely fused into one mutually reinforcing set of institutions and symbols. Figures as diverse as Francis Fukuyama on the right and Cornel West on the left have banded together into the Council on Civil Society to try to address what Michael Hardt calls the withering of civil society, that is, the absorption of the associations of civil society into the unity of the nation-state project. In the Churchs case, one symptom of this absorption is the transferal of loyalty from the Church to state authority. In the recent run up to the Iraq War, most American Christians were content to support President Bushs determination to invade Iraq, despite the emphatic and repeated opposition to the war by the Pope and the governing bodies of virtually every major Christian denomination. When the Church is viewed as particular as one of many in civil society and the nation-state is viewed as universal -- as the larger unifying reality then it is inevitable that the one will absorb the many, in the putative interests of harmony and peace. Indeed, war becomes a means of furthering the

8
integration of the many into the one; we must all stand together when faced with an enemy. The issue here is not whether or not advocates of public theology would support the Iraq War: some did, some didnt. The point is whether or not their conceptualization of the Churchs public role is adequate to enable the Church to enact viable alternatives to the violence of the nation-state. The central problem, I believe, is the reduction of politics to one city, with the Church playing a contributing role. The problem goes back as far as Gelasius at the end of the fifth century. The Gelasian doctrine of one city with two powers though still far from the modern unitary state -- was already a significant departure from Augustines image of two cities with two loves. The image of one city means that the Church must either rule or be ruled. Lost is the eschatological complexity that the ekklesia introduces. Here, amidst the earthly city, is the opening up of a heavenly city that is neither polis nor oikos, neither state nor merely one more voluntary association of civil society. In Augustine there is no merely spatial carving up of a given city into spheres of influence. The city of God is not so much a space as a performance, a set of practices. It is not simply identifiable with the visible Church, although as Christs body, the Church is ontologically related to the City of God.41 Likewise, the earthly city is not identified with the empire or the nation or the government but is a particular tragic performance of lust for domination. Both cities make use of the same temporal goods, but use them for different ends.42 The city of God has to do with ordering matters that are considered public. The city of God is not part of a larger whole, but is a public in its own right. Indeed, the city of God is the only true public thing according to Augustine, as pagan Roman rule had failed to be a res publica by refusing to enact justice and serve God.43 There is also no sense in Augustine that the earth is divided up by nature into different earthly cities or nations, each with its own government. As Augustine reads the story of Babel, the world was divided into separate peoples as a consequence of sin, and coercive government is the result of the Fall.44 For Augustine, both the division of people into nations and coercive government are essentially tragic realities, not part of Gods original intention for creation but a means of keeping sin in check by sin. As such, the earthly city is a temporary reality; because Christ has triumphed over sin, the earthly city is passing away, receding into the city of God. Christ is the one who gathers the many into himself.45 The city of God, then, is the universal reality, while the earthly city is partial and particular. The city of God, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages,46 thus reversing the effects of the Fall. In doing so, far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities it even preserves and adapts them.47 It is not my present intention to critique Augustines comments on the use that the city of God makes of the coercive powers of the earthly city.48 What is important for my present purpose is the way that Augustines image of the two cities breaks the modern monolithic conception of a single public space, bounded by the nation-state, in which the Church must somehow find a place. For Augustine, neither city is a space with clearly defined boundaries, but both are sets of practices or dramatic performances, one tragic, the other comic, broadly speaking. I offer the image of performance in the spirit of Oliver ODonovans emphasis that political authority is primarily about acts, not institutions.49 The Church is not faced with one city, one public sphere which it must rule, flee, or offer suggestions to. The task of the Church is to interrupt the violent tragedy of the earthly city with the comedy of redemption, to build the city of God, beside which the earthly city appears to be not a city at all. Let me illustrate this idea with Richard Strauss opera Ariadne auf Naxos. The action is set in the house of the richest man in Vienna, who is busy throwing a feast for numerous guests. The host is a man of indiscriminate taste. He has scheduled dinner to be followed by two performances, one a tragic opera seria based on the Ariadne legend, and the other a comedy featuring harlequins, nymphs, and buffoons. The pompous composer of the opera is outraged when he discovers that his masterwork is to be followed by such a frivolous offering.

9
The situation becomes much worse for the composer and his Prima Donna when the master of the house announces that, in order to leave time for the fireworks display, both the tragedy and the comedy will have to be performed simultaneously, on the same stage.50 As the curtain rises on the second act of Strauss opera, Ariadne is at the grotto grieving her abandonment by her lover Theseus. Ariadne resolves to await Hermes, the messenger of death, to take her away to the underworld, the realm of death. However, Zerbinetta and her troupe of comedians interrupts Ariadnes tragedy and alters the direction of the opera. Zerbinetta hooks Ariadne up with a new lover, the young god Bacchus, who carries her off to the heavens in a comic resolution of the drama. Zerbinetta has the final word: When a new god comes along, were dumbstruck. In this metaphor, the Church interrupts the tragedy of the human drama by enacting the comedy of redemption in Christ. The Church is neither forced to shun the stage nor to seek a minor supporting role in civil society, for the earthly city is a performance, not the stage itself. The city of God does not allow the earthly city to define one public space, but constantly redefines what is truly public. Church and nation-state are not primarily institutions but actors in the public drama of human history. History is the one public stage on which God is telling the story of redemption. Both cities are concerned with the same questions of ultimate concern: What is the purpose of human life? How should human life be ordered to achieve that purpose? The difference is that the city of God tells the story that we believe to be true, that God in Christ through the Spirit has saved us from the tragedy of inevitable violence. The Church in this metaphor is not a separate institution or enclave, but works with other actors to enact the drama of redemption. I will conclude by returning to the example of the Iraq War and see how this vision of the Church can play out in practice. Before and during the Iraq War, the majority of American Christians were content to see themselves as Americans first, and Christians second, ignoring their churches opposition to the war. Several prominent American Catholic commentators made the public argument that the Church was welcome to give its opinion on the war, but judgment of this matter belonged to the President.51 The assumption is that the Church is one of many contributors to the one public debate on the war; when the nation makes up its mind, the Church in America should loyally support the war effort. Suppose, however, that the Church saw itself as a public in its own right, and as a more universal public than America, one capable of thinking in broader terms than American foreign policy interests. (This is one of the wonderful things about having a Polish pope). The Churchs public role would be to enact a different drama, one of reconciliation not war. The Church could do this by first refusing to participate in an unjust war, and second by supporting the ongoing efforts of groups like Voices in the Wilderness, who have been bringing medicine, toys, and food to Iraq since 1991, in violation of US law. Such efforts enact a different drama by dismissing national borders as ultimately unreal. Nothing in my paper should suggest that Christians are somehow innocent of complicity in violence throughout the centuries. It is to suggest, on the contrary, that repentance for our complicity in violence must not take the form of meekly accepting the myth of religious violence and shrinking the church down to fit more comfortably into the nation-states monopoly on political space and violence. Our repentance should take the form of resisting the violence of the state, fostering an eschatological sense that the earthly city is passing away, and that the church is called to witness in its own public life to the new order of peace and reconciliation.

Martin E. Marty, with Jonathan Moore, Politics, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation About Religions Role in Our Shared Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), 23. 2 Ibid., 24. 3 Ibid.

10

For example, R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000);Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002); Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World (London: Frank Cass, 1992); Charles Selengut, Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence (Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); and Richard E. Wentz, Why People do Bad Things in the Name of Religion (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1993). 5 Marty, 27-8. 6 Ibid., 25. 7 Ibid., 29. 8 Ibid., 10. 9 Ibid., 14. 10 Ibid., 10. 11 Ibid., 11. 12 Ibid., 11-14. 13 Richard E. Wentz, Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion (Atlanta: Mercer University Press, 1993), 37; cf. 13-21. 14 Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), 1. 15 Ibid., 15. 16 Brian C. Wilson, From the Lexical to the Polythetic: A Brief History of the Definition of Religion, in What is Relligion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998), 17 Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi. 18 Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17. 19 Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 10-11. Dubuisson writes, We should also avoid describing as universal values that the West alone has invented. Since their domain is always fundamentally one of conflict, these values would effectively become universal only when all the others had been destroyed and eliminated by us; ibid., 21. 20 Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in John T. Noonan, Jr., The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 216. 21 Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 138. 22 Noonan, 233. 23 Carlton Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960); Robert N. Bellah, The American Civil Religion, Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967); Peter van der Veer, The Moral State: Religion, Nation, and Empire in Victorian Britain and British India, Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 39; Talal Asad, Religion, Nation-state, Secularism, Nation and Religion, 17891; Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 24 Kimball, 38. 25 David C. Rapoport, Some General Observations on Religion and Violence in Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 120. 26 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 23-35. 27 See Eugene McCarraher, The Enchanted Earthly City: The State and the Market in Modern Theology, forthcoming 28 Marty, 162. 29 John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1960), 45. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 49. 32 Ibid., 24. 33 Ibid., 291. See Michael J. Baxters essay John Courtney Murray in Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 150-64. 34 Ibid., 293. 35 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257. The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. 36 I take this phrase from Roxanne Eubens book Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 37 Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1999), 132. 38 Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXIV, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 768.

11

39

Randolph Bourne, The State in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 71. 40 Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice, 770. 41 At one point in the City of God, Augustine does appear to make the straightforward identification of the Church with the city of God; in XVI.2, he refers in passing to Old Testament figures that are to be referred only to Christ and His church, which is the city of God. Later Augustine says, the Church even now is the kingdom of Christ, and the kingdom of heaven because it contains the righteous within it; St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), XX.9 42 Ibid., XVIII.54. 43 Ibid., XIX.21-5. 44 Ibid., XVI.4. On political authority as a result of sin in Augustine, see R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 197-210. 45 See Augustine, The Trinity, IV.11. 46 Augustine, The City of God, XIX.17. 47 Ibid. 48 I tend to agree with John Milbank that Augustines curbing of sin by sin is problematic, for the earthly city tends toward more serious sin in its prideful claims of self-sufficiency; see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 406-08, 417-22. 49 Oliver ODonovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20-1. 50 Richard Strauss, Ariadne auf Naxos (New York: Dover Books, 1993). I am grateful to Doug Asbury, a student at Seabury-Western Seminary, for calling my attention to this opera during a class discussion of my book Torture and Eucharist. Strauss opera is based on Molieres 1670 play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. 51 George Weigel, The Just War Case for the War, America 188, no. 11 (March 31, 2003): 7-10 and Michael Novak, War to Topple Saddam is a Moral Obligation, The Times (London), February 12, 2003.