The Followers of Gandhi and Jesus

Geoffrey Ward begins his review of a new book on Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India By Joseph Lelyveld, with this telling observation:

Some years ago, the British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea in 1930. French was so appalled by the noisome state of the latrines that he asked the ashram secretary whose job it was to clean them.

A sweeper woman stopped by for an hour a day, the functionary explained, but afterward things inevitably became filthy again.

But wasn’t it a central tenet of the Mahatma’s teachings that his followers clean up after themselves?

“We all clean the toilets together, on Gandhiji’s birthday,” the secretary answered, “as a symbol to show that we understand his message.”

Reminds me a lot of the followers of Jesus.

When Liberation Movements Go Viral

One of the interesting scholarly and blog conversations that never ends is how much if any of the gospel accounts of Jesus life are based on things Jesus actually did or said. How much can we really know? There is one kind of this conversation that takes place on a level that debates whether Jesus even existed. You can read some of that conversation here and here if you are interested. I enjoy reading the posts but confess that even as a very liberal pastor who cares about historical accuracy I am hopelessly biased on this issue.

Recently, though, I have been reading Richard Horsley's book Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant, and the Hope of the Poor. and have been interested to see Horsley address Jesus' "fame". Our earliest gospel Mark states in the very first chapter that Jesus "fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee." Is this true? Is it possible? How popular was Jesus? How much of a "scene" did he make? How much of a movement did he have?

Here is Horsley:

Toward the beginning of Mark's story, Jesus' mission appears to be "headquartered" in the village of Capernaum, at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee, along the frontier with Herod Philip's territory from the east. From this base, the mission and communication spread into surrounding villages. Mark's Gospel thus paints a picture different from the normally limited communication from village to village in agrarian societies: the interaction among Jesus, the disciples, and the responsive people generated an expanding network of communication around the countryside.

...In these early accounts of the mission, Jesus delegates disciples to spread the proclamation and manifestation of the kingdom into other villages, where they are to work closely and stay with the people. Jesus' mission thus involved an intentional orchestration of communication across village lines. Though exaggerated, Mark's representations of rapidly expanding communication at least partly what was happening in Jesus' mission itself.

Horsley cites a book I haven't read, Domination and the Arts of Resistance by James C. Scott, as evidence of how "rumor" spreads among disparate communities and inflames hope and emboldens beaten down peasants to take action as they hear news of resistance and victory from other communities.

Horsley thinks that this is what was happening with the Jesus movement in peasant villages around Galilee. His kingdom movement reminded the people that the were (or could choose to live) under the direct rule of God not Rome or the temple aristocracy. It inspired hope and action in the form of sharing of goods and healing both physical and spiritual. The news about Jesus was going out through intentional mission and through the peasant rumor mill. The Jesus movement, Horsley suggests, was real; it was spreading; and hence it was quickly and correctly perceived to be a genuine threat by the religious and political authorities.

I find Horsley's explanation plausible. It could have happened this way. I certainly resonate with his description of Jesus' movement as being centered around spiritual/political/economic liberation.

I also can't help but make the connection between Horsley's description of the surprising and almost explosive spread of the Jesus movement and events in the middle east right now. If you wanted to see evidence of how a liberation movement can spread rapidly and seem to come out of nowhere we are watching it happen before our eyes. I keep asking 'why now'? What has changed between one year ago or five years ago and today? Certainly the technology that has fueled the spread of "rumor" has penetrated these societies enough to make it possible to keep the news flowing and to make it nearly impossible to suppress from above. But there also has to be an element of frustration and anger and hope reaching a certain critical mass where it just needs to find an outlet. The good news about this movement is that it has been mostly peaceful, making a mockery of those who equate Islam with violence. Even better some of the government response has been peaceful. Alas this is not true everywhere.

Still, to watch a movement go 'viral' in this manner is a reminder that it really does happen this way. It very well could have happened this way with Jesus.

Holy Foreskin

I am currently reading Christopher Tyerman's Gods' War, an account of the crusades and find myself wondering whatever happened to these holy relics:

As a cardinal in Rome after 1079, Urban (Pope of the first crusade) had been surrounded by relics of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, especially the collection housed at the Lateran, then the pope's habitual Roman residence. These included Christ's umbilical chord, foreskin and some of His blood, pieces of the cross, numerous objects associated with His ministry and Passion (such as a loaf and thirteen beans from the Last Supper), relics of Holy Land saints and numerous physical specimens, such as rocks from Bethlehem, the Mount of Olives, the river Jordan, Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre itself.

I wonder if they are still housed somewhere at the Vatican.

Our War Machine

The Cold War officially ended in 1989. Remember all that talk then about the peace dividend? We never saw it and, according to new book by Tom Englehardt reviewed by Brad Birzer at The American Conservative it doesn't matter who is President or in control of congress, we are now a nation perpetually at war:

The events of 1989 should have offered the West some breathing room, a time to rethink the purpose of our nation and reinvigorate republican ideals. Instead, the past two decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, have revealed America and the West as morally and spiritually bankrupt. Plunder and torture best symbolize the bloated American Empire of the last 20 years, a force that exists merely for the sake of self-perpetuation. Our standing in the world has declined precipitously. At home, many are angry and want to change, organize, and harangue. Despite their best intentions, they stand impotent, comprehending neither the past nor the present, looking at the future—when not navel-gazing—with understandable dread.

When voters elected Barack Obama in 2008, his supporters acclaimed him higher than a prophet; he was messianic. As one fine and intelligent person—an expert in high tech as well as a farmer—wrote to me in immediate post-election euphoria, “Brad, why are you so upset, don’t you realize that we finally have a chance to end war and poverty, permanently?”

What the Obama administration has delivered, of course, is not only the continuation of the policies of the previous three administrations but a profound exaggeration of them. If anything, we suffer more violations of our privacy and civil liberties now than at any time during the Bush administration, all in the name of a national-security state that keeps the populace in its place while perpetuating war abroad.

In his soul-searching, illuminating, and often depressing look at the unholy ménage of Demos, Leviathan, and Mars, Tom Englehardt probes deeply into the war culture of Washington, D.C. He notes that only two positions have any real voice in contemporary public-policy debate: those who want more of this and those who want more of that. The key word is “more.” As Englehardt writes, when it comes to conflict overseas “however contentious the disputes in Washington, however dismally the public viewed the war, however much the president’s war coalition might threaten to crack open, the only choices were between more and more.” More drones, more troops, more nation-building.

So much for campaign promises and the new messiah who would end war and poverty permanently. The first military budget Obama submitted, Engelhardt notes, was larger than the last one tendered by the Bush administration. “Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it’s hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere (usually, in fact, many places) at any moment.”

While I remain an Obama supporter and in many ways this about-to-end congressional session is going to go down in history as a historic one for progressives, Obama has deeply disappointed on the war front.

Religion in American Life

I haven't yet read American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, but Peter Steinfels summarizes some of its key points in the recent American Prospect:

The evangelical wave has been ebbing for some time now and it is being replaced by the "nones":

The book's story is one of a religious earthquake and two aftershocks. The earthquake was the disaffection from religion occurring in "the long Sixties." Church attendance plummeted. So did the percentage of Americans saying that religion was "very important" in their life. At every stage of their life, boomers would always lag behind their parents by 25 percent to 30 percent in regular churchgoing. The authors know well that these were the years of the civil-rights, anti-war, and women's liberation movements, of pot, acid, the pill, Roe v. Wade, and Watergate. But with a refreshing directness and only a bit of embarrassment, they emphasize sex. Between 1969 and 1973, the fraction of Americans stating that premarital sex was "only sometimes wrong" or "not wrong at all" doubled, from 24 percent to 47 percent, a startling change in four years -- and then drifted up, never to decline. Attitudes toward premarital sex turn out to be one of the strongest predictors of a host of other political and religious changes, including that of the first great aftershock, the evangelical upsurge of the 1970s and 1980s.

That reaction to "the long Sixties" has been extensively analyzed. Less so the second great aftershock, the rise of the "nones" after 1990 when young people, in particular, began rejecting identification with any religion, though not necessarily with a variety of religious beliefs and practices. More and more young Americans, according to polls, came to view religion as "judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical, and too political," overly focused on rules rather than spirituality. "The Richter rating of this second aftershock is greater than that of the first aftershock and rivals that of the powerful original quake of the Sixties," Putnam and Campbell write.

People who go to church contribute more money and time to both religious and secular charities and tend to be more civically engaged:

Churchgoing Americans, it turns out, are twice as likely as their demographically matched secular neighbors to volunteer to help the needy and to be civically active. Not only do those in the most religious fifth of Americans give four times as high a proportion of their annual income to charity as those in the least religious fifth, but they give a higher proportion even to specifically secular causes. Neither this generosity nor this activism has to do with ideology. Cross-checking with other surveys, Putnam and Campbell conclude that on measures of generosity and civic engagement, religious liberals rank as high or higher than religious conservatives and higher than secular liberals.

It is not unusual for Americans to change their religious affiliation. Putnam offers himself as an example:

He and his sister were raised as Methodists. At marriage, he converted to Judaism. His children were raised as Jews; one married a Catholic who is now secular, and the other's spouse was secular but converted to Judaism. Putnam's sister married a Catholic and converted to Catholicism. Her three children became evangelicals! No wonder that so many Americans refuse to believe, regardless of the tenets of their religion, that those of differing conviction are bereft either of spiritual truth or hope of salvation.

Although the jury is still out on whether this will be true as we increasing have interactions with Muslims in America.

My Kind of Book

Whatever happened to Thomas Covenant? I read and enjoyed all Stephen R. Donaldson's chronicles of the unbeliever and white-gold wielder Thomas Covenant as he found himself transported into another world where his leprosy was healed and he suddenly found himself with power and feelings and that he didn't want, and faced with the reality that choosing to not use his power or come to grips with his feelings was even more dangerous than claiming his new reality.

And then Covenant disappeared. The last book, the second in what was to be another trilogy, came out in 2007. Today via a blog post by Loren Rosson III I discovered that Covenant was finally back for one last time. So I went out on Amazon to download the book to my Kindle - done - and also took a moment to read the published reviews. This was the last sentence of the Publisher's Weekly review:

While an introductory plot summary does yeoman service bringing new readers up to speed, it may be hard for them to keep so many characters straight--or care about them--when most of their development took place in previous volumes published decades ago. The focus is on Linden rather than Covenant, whose passive and distracted presence mostly gives others something to react to, but that won't matter to Covenant's large and loyal following, for whom Donaldson delivers all the self-loathing, despair, guilt, pain, and stubborn determination they could ask for.

Self-loathing, despair, guilt, pain, and stubborn determination. Now that's my kind of book.