USAican RW Christians misunderstand "socialism"

 The other day on Mastodon, I came across an article about left-wing politics and Jesus. It appears to have been written from a Christian-nationalism sort of perspective and, well it seems so far off: it's a straw-man misunderstanding coupled with prejudice.  I feel it deserves comment at least for my own interest. The first para is odd, really, an 'argument' that needs unpacking to see that it is more a pretext for a prejudice, I think. 

"One of the most bizarre arguments for “Jesus was a socialist” comes from people who say, “Jesus healed and fed people for free; therefore, He was a socialist.” When governments can feed people for free by multiplying loaves and fishes, heal people by touch or a word from a government agency, or raise people from the dead, then I’ll become a socialist. The thing of it is, people who want free college and free healthcare and politicians who promise such things believe that government is god and can turn stones into bread. Our nation’s motto is “In God We Trust” which means in practice “In Government We Trust.” As often as they try, governments can’t perform miracles."

There are several things going on in this. First, though, I think that I've not really come across Jesus offering 'free healthcare' as an argument for socialism in the way laid out there. The argument doesn't get made that way; the author is mischaracterising the thinking for the sake of dismissing a label. I think that perhaps the author has seen some people taking issue with right-wing perspectives which seem to argue that there's a Christian moral imperative not to have government providing things like healthcare for free. 

Some rhetorical responses do indeed suggest that the Jesus that right-wingers purport to follow did actually give this away for free at the point of need. It's not an argument for socialised healthcare when used like that, it's a device to indicate that the right winger has a potential incompatibility hidden in their presuppositions. It is to suggest that there may be more discussion to be had and that perhaps the right-winger has missed something about how the values they espouse might actually need more consideration. 

The actual arguments for socialism from a Christian value base lie elsewhere and are more widely drawn. So to dismiss 'socialism' this way fails to deal with the main arguments of Christian Socialists and contributes to a straw man approach which may make supporters feel like they are 'owing the libs' or something, but really fails to convince people who actually do hold the position.

There's also a practical theological issue about the matter of miracles and healthcare (or other things that a government might do). I think my concern about the gesture towards a position outlined in that blog post could be illustrated as a big contribution to problematising the position as stated.

I have known several Christian medical doctors and health workers during my life. They believe the healthcare they offer and the health improvements they bring about by their service and efforts are God's work. They consider that in some way they are continuing the healing work of Jesus albeit by normally non-miraculous means. They are using their God-given talents to bring about a life which is more abundant for those they treat. Is that not God's work? Or does only 'miraculous' healing count? The lack of 'miracle' (and what is that exactly?) to accomplish something does not mean it's not something that God wants. I think that feeding hungry people using logistics  to transport and distribute food from places that have enough to share is godly. I don't dismiss it as a Christian simply because it doesn't involve miraculous multiplication. I don't dismiss God's provision because the money arrives in a bank account as a result of a contract rather than from the mouth of a fish.

Assuming that we are happy to acknowledge that a medic's work, in broad terms at least, is God's work, then the next matter to consider is this. Is it good or not for them to seek to work in such a way that the poorest of their patients are able to access their help? Is it a bad thing for their care to be free at the point of access? Or are we going to be comfortable with situations where only the relatively rich can benefit from good healthcare? As a Christian I can't be comfortable with that latter situation. 

-And by the way that's not, strictly speaking, 'socialism' -many who are not socialist in parts of the world that have systems of healthcare that are free at the point of use nevertheless consider that it is right and proper to have free healthcare, right wingers included. In my own country, even right wingers make arguments about healthcare provision explicitly reassuring their audiences that they think it should be free at the point of delivery. They have even framed it as helping people to participate in the (capitalist) economy.

Back to that article: it is simply not true that people who think that healthcare, education etc should be free at the point of access, believe that the government is God. Nope. Never happens. I know no-one, not one single person, who does. 

Ironically, of course, it can appear that the kind of nationalism espoused by RWers seems to raise questions about idolatry -of nation. (And it's not enough to claim that a nation and its government are enacting God's agenda -because that's a claim that can be made, and has been made, for other nations and forms of government. It's only the start of a discussion not an end).

So what does drive many Christians toward 'socialist' approaches to thinking about public life and government policy?

Well for most it's rooted in considering the outworking of loving others as oneself, loving neighbour. Let's recall that such love is about willing and working towards the best for our neighbours. To be a bit more explicit: loving others as ourselves? -Well, on the whole, I exercise a degree of care towards myself by going to a medical appointment when something is 'up'. I therefore think that loving my neighbour as myself means making sure that they can do the same. (I vote accordingly and I lobby politicians and involve myself in political debate to try to retain that situation and to have it improve if possible; I see that as part of the outworking of Christian discipleship in pursuit of Christian values.) 

I note that this is still not 'socialism' but socialism is one of the political options that it is compatible with. However, a further consideration is a critique of capitalism. Let's say to start with that for Christians on the left, capitalism looks a lot like 'Mammon' and the 'love of money' -which 1 Timother 6:10 reminds us is "a root of all kinds of evil". Left-leaning Christians, then, on the basis of Jesus' and apostolic teaching are decidedly skeptical about letting what appears to be the idolatry of wealth be in the societal driving seat. It's hard to read James 2 and not feel that supporting making the rich richer and further impoverishing the poor is a major incompatibility with Christian discipleship and constitutes giving a pass to the moral hazard wealth clearly is in Christian teaching -don't forget James is merely expounding Jesus's warnings about wealth, selfishness and the value of each person including the poor and marginalised. 

Note also that James 4:1-6 seems to suggest that wealth is, in effect, stealing from the poor. It is the result of power relations that enable the haves to further extract value from the have-nots to their detriment. That passage implies that God considers that even the humblest in society are due the means to live dignified lives. Jesus's teaching and ministry indicate that the poorest are at the heart of God's concern (and incidentally, this fulfills the teaching of the Hebrew scriptures). To maintain an argument for the Christian-ness of capitalism, it has to be be convincingly argued that it both places the poorest and improving their lot at the heart of policy and concern across society and that there are effective and present ways to mitigate the moral hazard relating to wealth accumulation.

Coming back to James ... "Ah but...!" "Well, actually ..." Yes, yes: there is more to be said to close the gap between then and now and the circumstances in view. But let's note that the RW Christian perspectives often need similar further investigation and more careful extrapolation too. I'll not do that here and now. But I have written about related matters and will continue to do so. Suffice to say, for now, that I think that the most natural politics to come away from Jesus' teaching with is a politics that places improving the lot of the poorest at the heart and which is very skeptical about allowing greed and wealth accumulation to be in the driving seat of society. It also adds weight to the observation that 'trickle-down' economics doesn't seem to happen in practice. This is not only an observation of the last 40 years of western governmental policies, it is an observation of several thousand years.

Review: Undoing Conquest

 I'm doing a good bit of thinking lately about decolonisation and also about the Hebrew scriptures -among which is how to understand and take as scripture some of the horrific genocidal and ostensibly settler-colonial narratives. So this book got my interest. The commending blurb said, among other things: 

Undoing Conquest offers ways to incorporate archeological research into the life of the church to repair the harms of settler-colonialism and genocide, creating a more just future. Undoing Conquest interprets this new archeological research from feminist and decolonial theological perspectives and designs a new liturgical season, the Season of Origins. This season integrates archeological histories and centers justice work at the heart of the church’s annual rhythms.

... and that seemed to address my interests as stated above. 

I liked that it starts with a consideration of how the Christian social imaginary (and that term is explained) has at different times developed and how new discoveries and challenges affect what can be imagined. Noting that there is a kind of Overton Window (not a term used in the book -that's my analogy) whereby what is imaginible and usable by Christian disciples and publics needs to move by increments referring to what is already known or believed and not by complete breaks with the past. This is a smart move when trying to present and evaluate what new understandings of biblical origins are and how they might be assimilated. It was intriguing to learn of how the book The Tribes of Yahweh had played a part in liberation movements of the late 20th century, so it seems important to understand what the scholarship behind that book might offer to the wider Christian movement.

Of course, the elephant in the room for Judaism and Christianity when reflecting on Joshua 1-11 is genocide and the challenge of that elephant is how to handle it while still acknowledging the writings as Scripture. It's a more general question, but that part of the Hebrew Bible perhaps is paradigmatic in this respect. There is an issue for many more conservative users of the bible about how to think about scripture if/when some results of archaeological and historical research seem to show that things that had been considered more-or-less reliable history begin to look like just-so stories or quasi-mythological tales of origins. Is this in principle different from re-reading Genesis 1 in the way that Richard Middleton presents in The Liberating Image ? The big question for me is how to hear or read these stories as scripture in our context with our understandings of the world? Does reading them as in some way divinely inspired mean that we can receive them as other than historically accurate?

In this case, we are reminded that the archaeology appears to contradict the idea of a Conquest as a first-sight reading might lead the reader to imagine. We are invited rather to consider that these stories recount things "in ways that aim to shape culture and contribute to a shared sense of identity".

I found it helpful to be able to read a really well written overview of the the results of archaeology and reflection on it over the last century or so -much of which I only had a vague inkling of (because until recently, I was not as interesting the Hebrew scriptures as I am now).

There is a sketch in the penultimate chapter of how we might story for ourselves an archaeologically fair narrative which also allows us to take hold of the Exodus story in scripture. This is worth reflecting on -along with the call to find ways to bring this into popular Christian imagination. I think that this will be a tough job with the so-called Christian Nationalist crowd! That said, I'd want to see a bit more scaffolding to help more conservative readers to be able to rethink their own a priori understandings of what scripture is and how it 'works' in devotional and theological reflection. There are some pointers here, but it is not a strong thread.

I enjoyed the idea of having a liturgical season of origins to engender a liturgical and thus whole-church pedagogy. There's a reasonably detailed proposal for a Season of Origins. I'm taking it seriously as something to incorporate into my own Our Common Prayer in Climate Emergency liturgical collection. I felt that the proposal, though, needs to pay more attention to how such perspectives are made liturgical. Do it badly and the questions and skepticisms of the congregation will actually be counter-productive. (I'm reminded of the putative Josianic story that the book outlines -which succeeds, humanly speaking, because of it's political backing and the moment of history in which it is introduced). I suspect the idea of trying to give what might be seen as official credence to 'rejected' or 'dispreferred' texts of the past (non-canonical gospels etc), is not going to fly widely in the Christian world. I'd love to see a wider conversation about the idea, though, of a season such as this.

I'm also concerned because at the moment a lot of Christians are trying to encourage churches to adopt a 'new' Season of Creation. Another new season might be a bit hard to add to the pile of innovation -even though I've kind of been doing it myself with a season of Transfiguration in Our Common Prayer liturgies. The proposal is to situate the Origins season after Creationtide, in effect. -Though the existence of Creationtide is clearly not known by the author. So I'd want to invite a longer and wider conversation about how we're shaping the autumn Kalendar -I'd also want to discuss whether we should reconsider Advent and November (Kingdomtide) in terms of the foci of these seasons. That said, 'Origintide' after Creationtide seems a good fit -and then a contrast with the themes of death and decay that comes prominently in early November (Kingdomtide). Certainly the shape proposed for Origintide invites it to have a pentitential thread running through it which would be suitable since that thread has become so hard to maintain in Advent because of the wider societal context in which it falls. This means that in the northern hemisphere, the lengthening nights of  encroaching winter would be mirrored in considering the darkness in the moral world and our complicity in it.

While I was reading I found myself cross- referencing with the tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur -the former is briefly mentioned towards the end of the book. But it is worth considering how these stories originated (in as far as we know or suppose) and how they have at various points been picked up and reworked or elucidated with various ideological spins in them. This could help us to think about the stories of Exodus and Joshua before they become crystallised as scripture. -So that's another bit of further research for me!

In short, I have found this very intriguing and enlightening. What's more it is not a lengthy tome and while there are very thorough footnotes, it is not an especially academic dense text. I'd be pretty confident to put it into the hands of a reasonably educated non-specialist. There were some things being said which were repeated at times -but I guess that helps make for secure cross-referencing of materials in the book for some readers.

One of the things that this has done for me is make me want to dig into (pun intended) the archaeological findings and reflection on them. It's also got me wondering how this can inform and how it affects my own research on the way that The Powers and Principalities show up in Hebrew scriptures -given that I've been developing, in effect, a kind of corporisations narrative.

Kate Common’s Website
Undoing Conquest on Bookshop #UndoingConquest

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/i7u2ix4en0xb2l6kxrr93/ANcouHIrfzj7Ky6D7ucIsIw?rlkey=6l38lsatqxnv8iwp48kmkbyt0&e=1&dl=0

Screens change how we read scripture

I considered putting a question mark at the end of the title of this post. It's substantially the title of the CT article I'm about to comment on. However, I don't want to question the proposition of the title. I do want to question an implication and a supposed remedy of the article.

The suggested remedy seems to be to encourage Christian readers to return to using paper Bibles. The implication of the article is that Christians have always read the written word on paper and so we should return to that. I'm more interested in the matter of returning to supposedly ancient practice and so would then go on to question the reading on paper issue.

What concerned me was the unnoticed and materially poor consumer of God's word before rag-paper and moveable type kicked in to make a bible in every home or hand a possibility. You see, the remedy mentioned above elides most Christian interaction with the bible before then. I think we need to properly reckon with the preliterate experience before assessing the effects of the digital revolution. But before I say more about that, let me interject another concern.

There's a concern I have about the research that this is all based on. Basically, I'm unsure how much stock we should place in it at the moment. We are in a process of cultural reception and there are a number of variables that we don't yet know how to assess, so are we testing the right things, the right people and in any case what will things look like in 20 or 30 years (assuming that civilisation still supports such things) when/if people have evolved strategies of reading around screen use? I'm not sure how far this is an issue for digiborigines and how far for non-native digital tech-users. Which kinds of users have we been testing and how does a long background in different ways of reading affect the particular experimental packages of the studies? I'm not doubting that effects have been found, I'm just not sure whether other factors have been properly controlled for and whether what we are seeing are, in a sense, transitional effects of cultural change on particular groups as they adjust. It's not just about cognitive processing as the article seems to imply, it's also about cultural reception. We should also bring to the table the actual reading practices of recent and contemporary Christians with access to printed bibles. I think that the writer may be comparing the actual digital experience with an idealised analogue experience; not comparing like with like in significant parameters. I worry that this is a kind of sophisticated, low-key, moral panic.

So what about the longer-historical point? It's not new, but the writer of the referenced article hasn't weighed it heavily enough, I think. I was, frankly, a bit surprised that it wasn't considered more when the mention of icons was made. There, we were told, many icons have figures with open books and their fingers rest on open pages pointing to particular scriptures. (I found intriguing the link with Thomas with the resurrected Christ, btw, but that's another matter). That should have been the cue, in my opinion, to consider the reception of scripture within those kinds of cultural milieus (indeed, why icons and not written texts?), but instead the writer switches in short order to the post-Caxton era situations.

So, what I think we need to recall in this is the experience of an ordinary non-literate or barely-literate Christian in late antiquity or early medieval Mediterranean society or similar societies beyond and after. 'Similar', I mean, in the sense of the technologies relating to reading and their cultural embedding. In such societies, books and scrolls are expensive both in the materials they are made of and in the time that it takes to produce them. Partly as a result literacy levels are low. Most Christians and Jews would experience Scripture as oral/aural, not as something legible; ie not as something that they read themselves. They wouldn't be able to afford to have written copies of scriptures in their own possession. So, for them, interacting with scripture involved hearing someone else reading it, probably at a local house where they would meet for worship and fellowship. That might be once a week, perhaps more often in some situations. It probably wouldn't involve access to the whole of what we think of as the Bible but only whatever books their community had managed to save for and collect. In such a situation, what you do is hear passages read -probably a whole book at a time. You might also request to hear some parts again and you would commit to memory some passages. There would be likely some discussion, question and answer which would help recall as well as living out the message.

That's in many respects very different to how we experience scriptures nowadays. We read passages on our own, silently. We might journal about them. On our own. We rarely hear the words spoken except in church and even there often in paragraph-sized chunks but with a pew bible to hand if we want to check things out. And if we are honest, so many contemporary western Christians read small, decontextualised, chunks with a 'devotional' gloss which often does not really expound the passage or put it in context but rather reinforces popular spiritual tropes giving the impression of biblical engagement without it actually happening. So, I wonder whether some of what the digital research is picking up is in fact mirroring that and therefore it's not the digital reading that's the problem but a cultural habitus reinforced by certain bible reading artefacts which is also reflected in popular Christian culture. To be clear, Every Day with Jesus has long offered paper-readers decontextualised devotional nuggets and I think that what may be being tested is this way of using scripture transferred to screen. But it may not be inherent to screen reading.

All of which makes me wonder whether the suggested remedy is right. If earlier Christians 'fed' on God's word by aural means and oral exploration, is it so concerning that contemporary Christians may be retrieving some characteristics of pre-pan-literate culture? Does not the history encourage us to think that the new technologies may open up new opportunities (and re-open up old ones) as well as new dangers in bible-encounter? In spirituality? I'm concerned that the apparent remedy is about doubling down on what we have just been doing and not engaging with the new situation. This reminds me of the 600 year old laments about the printing press changing the way people read, think and write, implicitly calling people to eschew the mass printed book and retain the habits of listening and memorising.

Surely our task should be to understand well what is happening and to begin to craft spiritual habits that work with and through the emerging screen cultures? -Not simply resisting and damning them? The question of the article's title remains, "How will we process the Bible differently?" -and we need to discover the opportunities as well as name a few concerns.

I do think also we should not let the idea that reading the Bible should always be "deep reading" become too fixed in view. To be sure sometimes it should. But what I think the history of Christian interaction with the Bible tells us is that often the kind of deep reading seemingly in mind in the article has not been the main strategy. Rather, reflective reading, Christological reading, communal reading, prayerful reading has been predominant but I'm not sure that these add up to or compose the deep reading in view in the article. And I'm not sure that any of the research or interpretations of it make those sorts of reading less possible or intrinsically harder. In fact, I wonder whether they may be helped by screen presentation of texts.

The article tells us,

that the habit of superficial comprehension developed in digital reading transfers to all reading such that “the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards ‘non-linear’ reading—a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page" 

I think we should consider things behind and around that. I think I want to see more longitudinal studies on that assertion. I think I would want to see that correlated with the difficulties of many readers of conventional paper-based texts not least various forms of dyslexia. I would also note that many speed-reading courses attempt to wrestle with and train the phenomena mentioned in that quote. Would it be too much to ask for us to go back to Walter Ong's seminal book 'Orality and Literacy' before we try to discuss this more?

The article also reinforces the assertion that,

the physical layout of the biblical text is important for comprehension, memory, and “correct interpretation.”

That is my experience, but then I should remind us that this is not something necessarily to panic about. Recall, again, the experience of most Christians for over a thousand years. They would not have built a visual memory of the text or relied on printed text for comprehension or correct interpretation. Let's learn from them some tricks for the post-paper culture we may be heading into.

Screens Are Changing the Way We Read Scripture | CT Pastors | Christianity Today: As digital reading habits rewire our brains, how will we process the Bible differently?