Advent 2

My reflection today may not seem to have much to do with Advent, but I'll get to what I see as the connection.

A couple days ago, I was working through some literature on the Christian Right as part of my dissertation project. One of the books I was looking at was Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right by Mark Lewis Taylor. Despite the promising title, it actually turned out to be only peripherally useful for my project, since the primary purpose of the book is to lay out an agenda for the building up of a Christian Left. And for that reason, I ended up reading more closely than I'd expected.

As is often the case when I encounter left-leaning Christian literature, I'm ambivalent about this book. He calls for reconstructing liberalism in the name of a "prophetic spirit" oriented toward liberation and revolutionary expectation. He's interested in religious hybridity as a source of new ways to imagine liberation when a way forward seems impossible. In practical terms, he calls for Christians to join in solidarity with the liberatory projects developed by marginalized people: anti-war veterans, families of people in prison, advocates of slavery reparations, immigrants, indigenous peoples, environmental activists, sexual minorities, socialists. He envisions the creation of what he calls "paragovernmental councils" which will function the way white citizens' councils used to function back during the segregation era, i.e., organizing outside official government to orchestrate a certain vision of society, except (unlike the white citizens' councils) this would be an orchestration for good.

I warm to this vision—there's no question of that. With a couple exceptions, my politics and Taylor's flow in the same general direction. He's articulating a kind of liberation theology—a preferential option for the marginalized, which is something I profess to believe in, a fundamental dimension of the gospel. He's envisioning a way of going about doing what I would call building the kingdom or establishing Zion.

I was about to segue from what I just said above to explaining the Advent connection to all this, but I feel that first I should explain my ambivalence. It's the same problem whenever I encounter a politics that inspires me. I encountered this problem when I was reading for my doctoral exams. I encountered the work of a UNC anthropologist named Arturo Escobar, who works with other Latin Americanists on what's called the Modernity/Coloniality Research Program. I don't want to get bogged down here in explaining this program in detail, but the gist is that these are scholars who want to develop alternatives to globalizing modernity by thinking with intellectual-activists on the margins. When I discovered this work, it struck strong chords, and I ended up entirely revising one of the lists for my exams so I could explore it. I hoped that engaging with this project would help me recover a sense of mission in my scholarship. But that didn't happen in the end, because as I engaged with the project—and engaged with it critically—it inevitably lost its romance (or rather, I become skeptically conscious of its romance). I started to problematize it, to historicize it, to deconstruct it, etc.

The same thing happened as I was reading Taylor, and it happens when I revisit works of liberation theology that I found so inspiring ten years ago. I'm trained, as an academic, to problematize intellectual projects: to notice what they exclude, how they try to naturalize what's actually constructed, how they set up certain relations of power and privilege. So I start to wince; my stance becomes aloof, cool, detached, skeptical; it becomes hard for me to rally behind the project as a true believer. In the case of Taylor's book, I note with a grimace and a little eye-rolling that his "prophetic spirit" just happens to correspond to the thinking of someone who's been reading a lot of contemporary critical theory. I shift uncomfortably when he talks about trusting the agency of marginalized peoples—first, because I sense a kind of reification going on, as often happens in leftist literature the moment they start talking about "the marginalized" or "the oppressed," as if it's a given who's entitled to those labels and as if the people we're talking about weren't internally divided and pursuing various internal power ploys; and second, because as an academic I believe in a kind of intellectual elitism which makes me reluctant to throw my faith behind the ideas and projects of people who lack specialized training.

This is getting cerebral—I need to clarify what's at stake for me here, spiritually. The point is this: when I read scholarship that is actively committed to leftist agendas, part of me feels that I should be doing the same. Okay, maybe I'm not ready to put my faith in "intellectual-activists" among poor black Colombians, or rural Maya in Chiapas, or homeless people in New York City trying to organize themselves into an economic human rights campaign. But if I really see my scholarship as a stewardship, shouldn't I be using my specialized know-how to help those kinds of causes? Shouldn't helping those kinds of causes be my primary research and teaching agenda? Because—here's the Advent connection—Matthew 25 tells me that Christ is present in those who are "the least of these": those who are most marginalized, most disadvantaged, most vulnerable. If I'm serious about serving Christ, then I need to be serious about serving those people. To cast this in more clearly Advent-oriented terms: There's a sense in which we're still waiting for Christ to come, and there's a sense in which he's already come and has been among us all along. In calling us to walk in solidarity with the least of these, he calls us to walk with him.

But then I see people who do committed scholarship, and I think: No. They're not living up to certain duties of the scholarly vocation. Our job is to problematize everything. That's how we make new knowledge. In religious terms, it's how we serve as instruments of continuing, progressive revelation—bringing to light things that have "not been revealed since the world was until now" (D&C 121:26). That includes deconstructing our own commitments. But people who use their scholarship to advance their political commitments aren't engaging in that deconstructive work. And they make me nervous, frankly. People who can't convince me that they realize that their own most deeply held ideas are historical and social constructs, and that the projects they're pursuing involve establishing power relations with consequences that are not benign—those people frighten me because they seem set up to practice unrighteous dominion while remaining blissfully blinded to the injustices and suffering they perpetrate.

Then again, I suspect that my penchant for self-deconstruction makes me hopelessly useless politically. There comes a point where you have to take a stand. And when I read a book like Taylor's, I wonder—is God calling me to take a stand here? Is this the moment when Christ says to me: Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and follow me? Let go of whatever academic kudos you think you gain by your stance of critical detachment and irony, and commit?

I don't know. I didn't achieve the clarity or insight I was hoping I might as I wrote this. In fact, I'm embarrassed at how arcane this reflection will probably seem to readers. I'm probably not communicating it well, but these issues are fundamental for me, because they strike at the heart of my identity as an intellectual and as a scholar. I'm investing a lot of time and energy into becoming an academic; and as a matter of my spiritual commitments, I want to use that professional identity to serve, to make a difference. How best do I do that? I don't want to come to the judgment bar in the end, wondering if I spent my career and my life pursuing intellectual projects that didn't really represent the best expenditure of my time and talents.