Talking Teaching: Beyond the "Same God" Question

In this post, I want to talk about how to teach comparative theology in light of recent events. I am continuing from my post about teaching about religion and terrorism in which I tried to distill complex and unhelpfully discussed issues for presentation in an introductory level class.

Recently, Larycia Hawkins, a political science professor at Wheaton College, said Muslims and Christians worship the same god and was forced to go on leave. Wheaton is an evangelical institution that requires affirmed faith from the college community. 

Under other circumstances, a professor saying this would probably pass unnoticed but as a liberal bromide in a fearful time. It is only that Wheaton's students attend carefully to doctrine. Its administrators, and especially alumni, are acutely interested that orthodoxy be represented.

Is this situation better than insensitivity and apathy of a secular academic classroom? I don't know. My wife went to Wheaton. It's a very interesting place.

I'm not writing to "correct" Hawkins's statement in any way. I hope she can overcome what looks to be a tendentious and invasive campaign against her. Rather, I'm writing to think about a different way to address the complicated question to undergraduates being introduced to our field specifically.

So, before getting into why differences matter to religionists even if they aren't interested in Christianity or Islam, let's try this for propadeutic:

To say that Christians and Muslims worship the same god is a theological claim, and religious studies is not theology. It does not evaluate theological claims as true or false.

What it can and should tell us is how Muslim and Christian theology are related and how they are different. They are different because they present contrasting claims to related concepts and genealogies.

If this sounds complicated, consider that it would be very different to contrast Islamic theology from accounts of the traditional Chinese deity the Queen Mother of the West (Xi Wang Mu 西王母). This contrast would be rather straightforward because the similarities would be few and relatively abstract and involve no arguments about "true" genealogy or authentic reception.

The difference between Muslim and Christian theologies has significance for both traditions. For the tradition of Greek-influenced Muslim theology (kalām) as well as for commonplace readings of the Qurʾān, trinitarian Christianity represents a confusing corruption of God's uniqueness. From the fourth century, nearly all Christian churches have affirmed the co-extensive divinity of the father-creator, Jesus Christ, and the holy spirit, and the Qurʾān explicitly rejects this position along with Jesus' status as God's son (eg Qurʾān 4:171). Therefore, from Muslim perspectives Christian theologies have a compromised connection to the one to whom Ibrāhīm submitted (yaslama eg 3:67).

Christians, for their part, have tended to see Islam as a heretical reception of the biblical tradition and its universal deity. Dante's consignment of Muḥammad and ʿAlī to hell for heresy signifies his medieval view that Muslims ought to be Christian but are not properly so. He does not condemn Socrates, among others, for heresy because classical Greek thinkers aren't errant members of his community as heretics might be understood.

Complicating both these claims are two facts of reception history. First, Aristotelian tradition broadly informed the speculative monotheism of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought.

This enterprise was concerned with divinity as such, and it involved topics like revelation, prophecy, psychology, politics, and metaphysics, all of which can be considered theology in some sense at the time. Divines of all three traditions affirmed similar positions in these fields, and more importantly, their work built from similar sources. In the early Middle Ages, theologies in all three traditions could come quite close to each other. 

Second, exegesis of the Qurʾān (tafsīr) has tended to incorporate biblical materials and Jewish and Christian traditions into explanations of the Muslim scripture. This is one of the aspects of the question, not taken up here, of whether the Qurʾān is a reception of the Bible and on what terms. In common understandings, these commentaries have affected a consensus on the content and meaning of Qurʾānic narratives not present in the text itself.

The effect has been that many ordinary Christians and Muslims, even those with strongly antithetical views of the other traditions, have difficulty saying what definitely comes from whose text, and it has probably always been so even though the texts have always been distinct.

The theological importance is this: claims about the exclusive authenticity of one tradition's understanding are often made up of very similar material to opposing exclusive claims.

Hence the formula Christians and Muslims have used: Muslims and Christians worship the same god, but their version of that god is importantly incorrect.

Hawkins left out the second part of the claim in a gesture of ecumenicalism. I do not know if she could have avoided trouble by including the qualifier. It seems there are forces arrayed against her. 

As a religious studies person, I have a different pedagogical interest in theology than presenting an evaluative formula. However, I do have a complaint with Hawkins' dictum as political allyship. 

While her statement is an admirable response to the "hard" hostility and paranoia of Western Islamophobia, the "soft" pressure of liberal assimilationism, which conditions toleration on presenting as the same, requires a different response than what she said. Muslims should not need to present the same god to Christians and Jews to warrant solidarity.

Their traditions do not deserve respect because they are like ours; they deserve it because they are great and complex and full of achievement. Moreover, no one with or without a relationship to a god or a tradition should be demonized and excluded the way Muslims are here today. 

I am not saying Hawkins is beholden to those, or any, liberal paternalisms, but they are present when people use her formula, and they require critical scrutiny for the forms of power they represent even if preferable to coercion and exclusion. Like other citizens, religionists need to realize that they often come linked together, and we need to be open to other ways of recognizing others.

F-Bombing the Donald

Lately I have been busier than I have been in some time. Hopefully, my writing will add up to something like a dissertation. Hopefully my intro to Islam class will have been a constructive pedagogical experience I will be able to move on from.

But the news from the past weeks has been horrible. And it's made me think we need to rethink the whole conversation of religion and political violence at least how academic religionists have been having it. 

There's one term I can pick out in the voluminous noise reacting the to Islamic State-linked terrorism as typified by Donald Trump. It's the f-bomb: fascist.

Trump wants no Muslims coming to US and toyed with the idea of a database registering Muslims here now. He has open contempt for women, other minorities, and people with disabilities. And despite avowing love for "wonderful" Christianity, his ideas about religion are clearly condescending and manipulative.

And since real fascists are gaining significantly in France, middlebrow lefties are indulging their favorite vice of writing think-pieces saying we're going the way of the Volksgemeinschaft. They write these about every kind of leader from Bush to Bloomberg, but this time they're a little shriller.

So why add to the chatter? What is to be gained in this terminological exercise of what the Confucians would call the rectification of names (zheng ming 正名)?

I think the problem with debating fascism or some other alienating political label is that it obscures how natural and comfortable a part of democracies like ours prohibitive and violent xenophobia often is.

To call Trump a fascist puts him on the other side of the Atlantic, where fascism comes from and is becoming more popular. It could even put him on the other side of the Pacific, where exclusion of most immigrants is the norm, and migrant workers can't expect much legal recognition. It certainly puts him on the other side of the year 2000.

What we're saying with the "fascist" label is he's not of us; the problem with him isn't our problem. He doesn't obey the better angels of our country and so on. The White House and Paul Ryan said it. 

You don't have to be a fascist to be part of something wrong. You don't need a rigid totalitarian ideology or the idolization of a belle culture, which we have not had much of here. We can account for Trump as an organic, non-invasive part of our own political history: he's an instance of an endemic American problem. 

Inclusive democracies need a sense of outsiders. Ideas of citizenship for us over here require the non-citizenship of them over there.

The purview over women and slaves in ancient Attica or early America was a part of the idea of the citizen as a public man who could hold himself up among equals in so far as he kept order with what was his: this is nothing new to say.

However, I think democratic political rituals have a different kind of bonding power than those of political forms that demand less of regular people. Now, I realize our daily American ritual of reading bloggers who shout about common issues is not the same kind of bonding as ancient Athenians voting together to execute people or even modern Koreans doing mandatory military service.

Nevertheless societies like ours have a democratic sense of exclusionary propriety. There is a democratic, if unequal, right to say who doesn't belong. This is something citizens hold among each other even, or especially, in the absence of earlier legal privileges that defined belonging to republics like Rome or Venice.

Americans tend to forget about hanging signs that said "no Irish need apply" and Chinese exclusion, whereas European debates about migration evoke the battle of Tours and the siege of Vienna as if they happened last week. However don't memory and forgetting both reflect similar attitudes about what and who belongs to "us"?

As hokey and tired as it is, to call someone a fascist is to say that this person is exceptionally bad and aberrant, it is to raise the possibility of a political emergency situation, . Totalitarianism was an emergency the wealthy countries got themselves into and out of in the mid-20th century and have been congratulating themselves ever since. 

So rather than say the Donald is an unprecedented throwback to the bad old world, we need to understand the wholesomely, ecumenically democratizing forces of which his appeal is part. 

To paraphrase Talal Asad's interpretation of Churchill's dictum: I don't know of a way other than the democratic way. But though using common alarm at Donald Trump or Marine le Pen or Narendra Modi can be a meaningful basis to assert people's rights together, there are deeper and more serious problems than a paean of solidarity can confront.

Democracy how we do it isn't just an ideal with possible different meanings. It involves different ways political practices and forms of recognition build on each other. Confronting claims of exclusion that arise within these practices, and the demagogues who make the claims, involves thinking through what kinds of demands these processes make on us.

Whom to Debate about Gun Control

After another mass-casualty shooting, the responses have been predictable but for a stronger and more insightful comment from the White House than could have been expected. Overall, there is a resignation that because of how the country is run, no meaningful change in gun laws is possible for the foreseeable future.

Like most academics, I live in a relatively-cloistered social situation where I am assured of near-universal agreement on issues like gun control. Pauline Kael said she didn't know anyone who voted for Nixon because she lived in a similar kind of environment.

I know this isn't the case. And I know that I am not likely to change my mind because I understand myself as right, and most people rarely change their minds anyway. But listening to someone with a different perspective and addressing oneself to another with respect and recognition can be valuable even if there's nothing found of common ground.

What I want to know is what is the most different and the most intelligent support for absolute freedom of arms such as we have in the US today. 

I know about the second amendment. Whether or not it prohibits any restrictions on guns, the question is whether it should. 

I know the argument about a fundamental freedom of self-defense keeping a potential tyrant at bay, and I reject it. The US government has won 100% of armed conflicts with its own citizens, and with other countries' citizens, it can do quite a bit of damage.

I know the related argument that gun laws will only stop law-followers from owning them, and violence will remain, and I reject it. Like so much else of the postcolonial world, there are two kinds of experience with gun regulations. In Western Europe and East Asia, there are very wealthy free societies, and very few people die from guns. In the global South, on the other hand, where prohibitions are not effectively enforced because institutions do not function like they do here, guns are around and people use them.

America is of course a bit of a mix in colonial terms, historically and politically like South Africa and Brazil in some ways and unlike France and Japan. But the wealth and police power here suggest we could be like the settler-societies in Israel or Australia if institutionally committed. 

So what am I missing? This is a question I can answer looking around. Rarely do people who think differently from us fit neat intellectual caricatures. If they did, we'd all be wrong. It will take time, but we need to reach across this disagreement once we have all had time to think more.