Rorschach

This morning I did an interview with WBAI at 6:30 AM.  I will not to that again.  I am not awfully bright about a lot of things at any time of the day; but I am pretty dim about most things at 6:30 AM.

The interview was about my book, Borderline, and I had some notes with which to summarize the book itself - a Good Thing - but when it came to answering questions, I was processing things pretty ... haltingly?

Upon reflection, however, I noticed something that has happened more than once since the book was released.  People read a bit of it (it is, admittedly, a very long book), or they read something about the book, then they find words that seem to express something of which they approve, but when they talk about it, they say things that I didn't say at all, or they say things that are contrary to what I actually argue in the book.

Once, someone presumed that my whole critique was of St. Paul, because he had decided for himself, based on some pretty common interpretations of things that were ostensibly said by Paul, that Paul was where Christianity went off the rails.  But I never said any such thing; and I am one who thinks that Paul was misrepresented by people using his name, misinterpreted by people with agendas, and mis-translated more than once.  I'm one of those people who are saying that Paul got a bad rap.  The more I study Theodore Jennings' book, Outlaw Justice, the more I become convinced that this is exactly the case.

My point is not about Paul, though.  During the interview today, one questioner went kind of pomo on me, asking about an ex-SEAL who had a sex-change (I was completely unfamiliar with the story); and the other wanted to know if Nepalese guerilla leaders who were women (which he rather obviously approved of) weren't analogous to Jesus as gender subversives.

I've turned my notes into some semblance of what I'd actually said before I got these questions from what seemed to be a postmodern progressive and a crypto-marxist.  Here is roughly what I said:

I was born in 1951. I'm a baby-boomer. Someone at Cascade called Borderline a “conceptual autobiography,” and it has some autobiography; but between these autobiographical snapshots, there are much longer passages on history, philosophy, theology, and cultural criticism.

I hesitate to call it a “conceptual” autobiography, though, because concepts are secondary. Persons aren't formed by concepts; they're formed by stories. Concepts are embedded in stories. We have stories our families tell about themselves, and we have the stories that the nation-state tells about itself, and so on. You're listening to a radio program or watching television, you're taking in stories. Even the ads are stories – the main character appears, and she's sad because she doesn't belong because she's inadequate because her smile is not bright enough. But then – the turning point – she encounters a special product that gives her a brighter smile, or smoother skin, or cures her constipation, and she's is transformed from a sad person who doesn't belong into a happy person who's dancing on the beach with her smiling, attractive friends. These are stories . . . manipulative ones to be sure, but the master manipulators of advertizing know that the story is the way in . . . they know we're formed by stories. They don't explain concepts. 

Well, Borderline's about the stories – past and present – that formed me; but from the perspective of my formation as a man, a biological male who internalized stories about what men are supposed to be. These were deeply political stories, because the stories we know about what “man” and “woman” are supposed to mean are stories about power, okay? are secondary. Persons aren't formed by concepts; they're formed by stories. Concepts are embedded in stories. We have stories our families tell about themselves, and we have the stories that the nation-state tells about itself, and so on. You're listening to a radio program or watching television, you're taking in stories. Even the ads are stories – the main character appears, and she's sad because she doesn't belong because she's inadequate because her smile is not bright enough. But then – the turning point – she encounters a special product that gives her a brighter smile, or smoother skin, or cures her constipation, and she's is transformed from a sad person who doesn't belong into a happy person who's dancing on the beach with her smiling, attractive friends. These are stories . . . manipulative ones to be sure, but the master manipulators of advertizing know that the story is the way in . . . they know we're formed by stories. They don't explain concepts.

But as a Christian, I'm trying to be formed by a story about love and nonviolence . . . and yet we see many, many people laying claim to this Jesus story that's supposed to be at the center of our faith, who are callous, hateful, unforgiving, and violent.

So this is a genealogy of the stories that told me what it means to be a man – me being one white American male who did a military career in the latter half of the twentieth century. But there's this terrible contradiction between the Christian story of compassion and vulnerability and these man-stories of redemptive violence and conquest; and I believe the church – the body of people claiming Jesus as God's incarnation – this church has been constantly pulled away from our story by very different stories that were and are hegemonic in surrounding cultures. Now these hegemonic stories changed form to fit different times and places, but there are two fairly transhistorical constants that are closely related. They are war and masculinity constructed as domination.

The book argues, first, that war and conquest-masculinity reproduce one another in a kind of reciprocal feedback loop.  Secondly, I'm claiming that the greatest sins of the church throughout its history can be traced to dominator masculinity trumping the gender-subversive story of compassion and vulnerability.  Finally, the book argues that conquest-masculinity has always included women as one of its key objects of conquest.  War, war culture, and militarism are always - and inevitably - misogynistic.  So the church keeps falling for this counter-narrative from the surrounding societies that love war and hate women.  So, when I indict my church in this book for going to war and devaluing women, that indictment extends to the cultures surrounding the church.

These guys both did exactly what that other guy did (all of the people dong this so far have been men ... hmmm); they read something about the book, or a bit or a piece of the book, then projected their own stuff onto it.

In fact, the book argued contrary to what both men were suggesting (I am familiar with both perspectives, having held them myself at one time or another) - one that gender is some personal phenomenon, and that the social regimes of gender can be broken up by transgressive performance; and one that gender as a system of power will equalize as women become more like men.

The book wasn't about sexual dysphoria; it was about the problems created by highly normative males!  The book was Christian and pacifist, in a very particular way, and I explicitly rejected the kind of anthropological universalization that is implicit in the idea that if Jesus = non-normative male, then female military commander = non-normative female ∴ female military commander accomplishes the same thing as Jesus.

Perhaps WBAI was confused by the fact that I am a former leftist (and I do still hold some analyses in common with the left), and the assumption was/is that I am trying to bring Christianity under the leftist banner.  Anyone who read the book would know that this is emphatically not the case.  Left constantinianism is still constantinian.

It seems that the existence of a book that says, on the cover, it is about sex and war, invites those who are not inclined to follow the whole argument of the book (it is pretty long) to treat it as kind of an ink blot.

C'est la vie.