American Heresies

How’s this for a sensitive, caring approach to Advent? Preach on the all-but-ignored Marine murder of unarmed Iraqi prisoners. Perhaps one could tie that together with the now all-but-forgotten scandal of prisoner abuse in Iraq! Nothing says, “Merry Christmas” like images of helpless prisoners shot or nude prisoners abused.
But no matter how much we may want to look at shepherds and angels and virgins kneeling beside a manger, if we are going to respond faithfully to the call to embody a vision of progressive Christian faith, if we are going to engage with the concerns of this world and bring faith to bear on what most troubles our time, then, no matter how much we may want to, we cannot turn away from such images.
For the video images, photographs and the official responses to the ongoing catastrophe reveal what amounts to heresies at the heart of American foreign policy, and at the root of some of the responses to it in the Arab world. The disaster in Iraq is political, strategic, cultural and moral, and it is also theological.
The pictures themselves, of course, are more than appalling. I can only begin to imagine the suffering they represent, and the suffering they will cause. While much of our inside-the-beltway mindset in the part of the country where I live focuses on the political fallout – which has been almost nil – my first thought looking at the images is of the families of those pictured – both Arab and American families, and what those images must mean to them.
What those pictures may come to mean in a broader sense, and what broad meanings are already being ascribed to them is significant because such meaning will certainly impact policies in the near term. But I’m not sure any broad meaning assigned to the images will be particularly accurate.
For what strikes me most in these images is, to recall Hannah Arendt’s classic phrase about Adolf Eichmann and Nazi atrocities: the banality of evil. These pictures remind me of the pictures of Saddam Hussein crawling out of his rat hole. Hussein – a man accused and no doubt guilty of authorizing the killings of tens of thousands of people and held up for the world as the monstrous representation of evil – turns out to be just a scared old man cowering in a hole – the picture of banality.
And now, American soldiers – held up for the world as the picture of a nation’s virtue, “an army of God raised up for such a time as this,” in the words of one American general[1] – are captured on film in a series of actions that look much like Nazi executions and the horrors of sadistic hazing rituals. American soldiers off-handedly saying, “now he’s dead,” or hamming it up next to the bound, nude bodies of prisoners – again, the picture of banality.
The official response to the evil portrayed in these pictures is one that Arendt would quickly recognize, full, as it is, of stock phrases about American values. As she said so clearly, “Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.”[2]
In addition to that function, they have the further effect of leading us deep into heresy, for denying reality, denying this world is a classic heresy.
Being something of a heretical thinker myself, heresy is not a word I toss around lightly. But, as these stories played out in the news, I have been struck again and again by the heresy at the heart of much of the response to these images.
It is not the job of the church to correct the state’s political and military strategies, but it is most certainly our job to correct errors of theology.
And there are fundamental theological errors – indeed, heresies from the perspective of orthodox Christian theology – at the foundation of the response to these images from both the American and Arab perspectives.
Some in the Arab world, perhaps to further enflame violence against Americans, would have people believe that the images give a complete picture of America. They would reduce us all to the hateful actions of a few of us, and then demand an eye-for-an-eye retribution aimed at all Americans.
Unfortunately, that strategy works all too well, as we can hear in responses such as the the Jordanian businessman who said, “exterminating the Americans is the best way to fight international terrorism,”[3] the Syrian woman who said, “Americans are showing their true image,” the Arab editor who said, “the liberators are worse than the dictator,” and the Egyptian writer who said, “[now] the whole world sees them as they really are.”[4]
How are we, really? Radical anti-Americanism blinds some in the Arab world to the fundamental theological truth that we are all beloved children of the same God – created good in the image of a loving God according to Genesis. This is true of both Arab and American; both prisoner and prison guard. To deny that reality to Americans – as radical Muslim fundamentalists do when they refer to America as the great Satan – is heretical.
On the other hand, in the face of these pictures, President Bush said that “what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know. The America I know is a compassionate country that believes in freedom.” Elsewhere, the President said, “our soldiers in uniform are honorable, decent, loving people.”
But just as some in the Arab world are wrong when they choose to believe only the very worst about America because of the actions of some Americans, the President is wrong when he paints a picture of this nation in such rosy terms. There is deep and profound danger in both of these errors, and both are flip sides of the same theological coin.
When President Bush takes the same broad brush used by those who hate America and dips it into rose-colored paint, he denies another fundamental theological truth that Paul expresses so clearly: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).
The truth is, as the Biblical image of humanity makes clear, that each of us is some strange and volatile mixture of the angels of our better natures and our own profound brokenness. Two of the pictures from last spring in particular captured this truth for me. They were a pair of pictures of the same young American woman in Iraq. In one of them she is smiling as she hugs a young Iraqi child. In the other she is smiling as she stands behind a pile of bound, nude Iraqi men.
So, which is she: “an honorable, decent, loving” young woman or a “great Satan”?
Not knowing this young woman, I would not pretend to offer an answer about her individual nature. But about all of us, we do well to recall the words of the psalmist, “I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight” (Psalm 51: 3-5). While in the very same moment we must remember also that the psalmist says, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).
The young American soldier in those two pictures, along with all of the rest of us, are both of these things: those who transgress, and those who are wonderfully made. And we live, all of us, somewhere east of Eden.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that we must develop the capacity to forgive, for without that we cannot claim the power to love. Forgiveness begins, he said, when we recognize that the evil actions of our enemies do not express all that our enemies are. This simply means, he said, “within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good.”[5]
King’s vision, which seeks as its goal forgiveness, reconciliation and restoration, stands in stark contrast with the notion, given voice by the leader of our nation, that we are engaged in a war to “rid the world of evil.”[6] This vision, which animates current American policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world, seeks as its goal the imposition of American notions of virtue by force of American arms in the belief that America can rid the world of evil.
Alas, as James Carroll said, “evil, whatever its primal source, resides, like a virus in its niche, in the human self. There is no ridding the world of evil for the simple fact that, shy of history’s end, there is no ridding the self of it.”[7]
Indeed, the notion that this nation, or any nation – no matter how nobly conceived or dedicated – could of its own actions rid the world of evil is perhaps the fundamental heresy upon which so much of our current foreign policy rests.
We cannot rid the world of evil when we so clearly participate in it ourselves. We cannot; any more than we can bring justice to the world by means of an unjust war; any more than we can bring democracy to the world by means of a war that the vast majority of the world’s people oppose; any more than we can bring liberation to the world by means of a war that increasingly leaves the people of Iraq imprisoned by violence and chaos. And the further into the morass of this war we go, the more we become like the very thing we hate.
Some 35 years ago, Dr. King said that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”[8]
Lost amidst the news of photos and videos from Iraq last spring, and then all but absent from the presidential campaign through to election day, was any discussion of the request for the additional $25 billion to cover costs of the war through the end of the fiscal year.
Now, it may not be the job of the church to correct the state’s political and military strategies, but just as it is our job to correct errors of theology, it is also quite clearly our role to warn of the approach of spiritual death.
In the present case, the two are so closely related. We lie and deceive ourselves at peril to our souls. We follow the false gods of power and security, and develop theologies of nationalism to honor them, and we wonder how it is that we become the very thing that we hate.
Theology matters. Show me your image of God, and I will show you your image of humanity. From those images of God and humanity grow the strategies of nations. And when those images are skewed by heresies, and those strategies perverted by false premises, from them develop the images that now dominate our news.
The church’s complacency in the midst of this is shattered – or should be – as we realize that amidst the howls of anguish and anger rising in response to the horrors still coming forth from Saddam Hussein’s notorious old prison, nowhere do we hear the voice of the one who said, “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). Nowhere do we hear the voice of the one who said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). Nowhere do we hear the voice of the one who said, “Be compassionate as your Father in heaven is compassionate” (Luke 6:36).
Much else lies shattered in these days of broken bodies and broken trust. Beyond pointing out the lies and deceptions of American heresies, let the church hear again its age-old calling to be repairers of the breach.
[1] The words are those of Army Lt. General William Boykin, President Bush’s deputy undersecretary for intelligence who said to a church group, “We are an army of God raised up for such a time as this.” That speech was quoted widely. I cite this from “Abuse Photos Undermine Bush’s Religious Rhetoric,” Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle, May 7, 2004.

[2] Hannah Arendt, The Life of Mind - Thinking - Willing (New York-London: Ed. Harvest/HJB Book, 1978), 4.
[3] See “Shooting of Injured Man Captures Arab Attention,” at http://www.click2houston.com/news/3926356/detail.html
[4] Quoted by Juan Cole, “Arab Reaction to Photos of Prison Abuse” juancole.com, May 1, 2004.
[5] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” a sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Nov. 17, 1957, posted as in the public domain on ipoet.com. As with many of Dr. King’s great phrases, he used this, or almost identical language in many speeches.Montgomery, Alabama, 17 November 1957. Strength to Love
[6] President Bush, speaking at prayer service at the National Cathedral on Sept. 13, 2001, said “Our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”
[7] James Carroll, “Bush’s War Against Evil,” Boston Globe, July 8, 2003.
[8] Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Time to Break Silence,” an address delivered at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, included in A Testament of Hope, ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper, 1986) 241.