As the most existential book in the Bible, Ecclesiastes is an odd duck. Ecclesiastes is so odd it makes you wonder how it made it into the canon. 

And within in the canon, what is Ecclesiastes doing? How is Ecclesiastes supposed to be read? Because Ecclesiastes could be read very subversively, as undermining the whole of Scripture. In fact, some scholars have suggested that the final coda to Ecclesiastes was added to pull its overall message back into safer, more orthodox waters. 

Ecclesiastes is existential dynamite. How should we read it?

Here's my take on how Ecclesiastes fits into the larger concerns of the Old Testament. 

I think you can make a good argument that the primary concern of the Old Testament is idolatry. And for most of the Old Testament, idolatry is described as covenantal infidelity, lusting after false gods.

Ecclesiastes, by contrast, looks at idolatry from a very different perspective. Ecclesiastes uses hebel to attack idolatry. Idolatry in Ecclesiastes is less about fidelity to God than human vanity. Ecclesiastes uses existentialism to destroy the idols of human presumption and delusion.

Consequently, in its attack on idolatry, I think Ecclesiastes is very much within the mainstream of the Old Testament witness, just approaching those concerns from a radically different angle. Instead of raging like the prophets about Israel's infidelity, Ecclesiastes uses death as a universal acid, pouring it over every human idol.

And while I love the prophets, few of us have a shrine to Baal in the house or an Asherah pole in the backyard. So if you want to expose and indict the vanity and vacuousness of idolatry in modern life there is no better book than Ecclesiastes: The dollars in your bank account. Hebel. The degrees hanging on your wall. Hebel. Your big house. Hebel. That new iPhone. Hebel. Your buff body. Hebel. The American flag. Hebel.

We are people chasing the wind. And with that ground now cleared, we can turn to talk about right worship and build upon more secure foundations.

We now move into Chapter 5 of Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, a chapter devoted to, in Perry's words, "the predatory nature of the porn industry and its destructive effects on the people involved in it."

Perry starts the chapter by sharing the stories of two female icons of porn, Linda Lovelace (real name Linda Boreman), who starred in Deep Throat, the film that brought hard core porn into the mainstream, and Jenna Jameson, named "the Queen of Porn" for being one of the most successful porn stars in history. As Perry recounts, the stories of both Boreman and Jameson reveal how the narratives around porn can quickly switch. When working inside the industry, porn stars tell a story of sexual liberation and female empowerment. Both Boreman and Jameson fiercely defended their work from moral critics. And yet, once they left the industry, this narrative quickly changed, as both women became harsh critics of the porn industry. For example, Boreman has made the blunt statement that, "everyone that watches Deep Throat is watching me being raped." And, as Perry sharply notes, people are still watching.

After recounting the stories of women who have worked within the porn industry, Perry then turns her attention to Pornhub. Pornhub, as I expect you know, is the largest online purveyor of porn. Pornhub is run by the secretive tech company MindGeek, and both Pornhub and MindGeek have been under fire in recent years for knowingly hosting videos of sex trafficked children and non-consensual sex (otherwise known as rape) on their website. More, when asked to remove these videos by victims Pornhub regularly and systematically fails to remove them. And beyond Pornhub, many porn companies, like GirlsDoPorn, lure young girls wanting to be models or actors into hotel rooms were they are coerced into having sex on camera. These videos are then sold for a profit.

I don't think it is a surprise to anyone that the porn industry is evil. I don't see how anyone could look at the whole of the industry and claim that porn is good for women or advances female liberation. And yet, there is a pervasive ambivalence in our culture about crusading against porn. Any other industry that did this much damage to women and children would have long ago been canceled. Protestors daily in the streets. I recall the progressive outrage when the owner of Chick-fil-A merely expressed his personal opinion about traditional marriage. That was it, a personal opinion. I have progressive friends who have never eaten at a Chick-fil-A again. But ask these same people if they know anything about MindGeek, well, you'll get a blank stare. Mindwhat? Purveyors of child abuse and rape don't really demand progressive attention.

The hypocrisies here are telling. A man in a workplace setting can become a moral pariah for the slightest of microaggressions toward a woman in the office. (For example, I've seen men upbraided for addressing a classroom with "Ladies and Gentlemen." The word "ladies" being offensive.) And yet, girls can be raped and children trafficked on film with those outrages barely mentioned on progressive Twitter. And that asymmetry of outrage has everything to do with the sexual revolution. To be against porn is to be against sex, and that's the last place a progressive wants to be. To be an anti-porn crusader would be to join forces with despised religious groups, or give implicit support to things like evangelical purity culture. The imperatives of the sexual revolution are clear: You have to be, 100% of the time, pro-sex. No matter what. Even if that means you have to go quiet about the porn industry. Women the the workplace are vociferously protected from the slightest of insults, as they should be, but the oppressions and harms of the porn industry, where rape, abuse, and coercion occur to thousands of women every single day, well, that is passed over in silence.

And the ironies abound. For who, do we think, benefits from the filming, uploading, and monetizing of rape and child abuse? As both the producers and the consumers? Men! It's yet another example of how many feminists are deeply supportive of the patriarchy, using the pro-sex message of the sexual revolution to satisfy the sexual appetites of men. 

In the last two posts I highlighted the translation of of hebel in the book of Ecclesiastes. Where most English translations translate hebel as "vanity" or "meaninglessness" hebel's literal meaning is vapor, breath or mist. Life, according to Ecclesiastes, isn't vain or meaningless, life is fleeting.

Consider other texts where this meaning of hebel is very clear:

Psalm 39.5
You have made my days a mere handbreadth;
the span of my years is as nothing before you.
Everyone is but a breath [hebel],
even those who seem secure.

Psalm 114.3-4
Lord, what are human beings that you care for them,
mere mortals that you think of them?
They are like a breath [hebel];
their days are like a fleeting shadow.

And while Psalm 90 doesn't mention hebel, it is very much a description of hebel and suggests that a proper understanding of hebel creates a "heart of wisdom":

Psalm 90.3-6, 10, 12
You turn people back to dust,
saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”
A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.

Our days may come to seventy years,
or eighty, if our strength endures;
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

Teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Life is hebel, our years "quickly pass, and then we fly away." So the encouragement in Psalm 90 is, in my estimation, the same encouragement in Ecclesiastes: "Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

In light of this, what about the great theme of vanity in the book of Ecclesiastes?

Again, I'd argue that hebel itself isn't "vanity" or "meaninglessness," those translations are second-order value judgments that reflect how hebel, given its transient nature, can create futility in human striving. This is less a commentary about the intrinsic nature of hebel than how we attempt to grasp at hebel, the "chasing after the wind" mentioned repeatedly in Ecclesiastes. What is vain is this grasping and chasing after hebel. It's the interaction of the two--hebel plus grasping--that creates the futility.

So what are we chasing? What are we grasping at?

A clue comes right at the start of the book, in 1.3:

What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?

The word translated as "gain" here is yithron. Yithron only occurs ten times in the OT, and all of those occurrences are in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Yithron is variously translated as "gain," "profit," or "advantage." The basic idea is that of accumulation, excess, and remainder--what is "left over." Basically, to use a financial metaphor, yithron is getting life "into the black" as it were.

Obviously, because life is hebel, efforts to "gain" are futile and vain. Thus the examples given in the first part of Ecclesiastes about how all sorts of efforts at gaining or acquiring--creating an "excess"--are futile. Death washes any sort of "profit"--the excess remainder of your life--away.

This acquisitive grasping--this chasing after the wind--is what is vain. It's the combination of hebel and yithron that makes for the vanity. Crudely:

hebel + yithron = vanity

wind + chasing = vanity

I highlight this interaction between hebel and yithron as, again, I don't think the fleeting nature of life is intrinsically meaningless or vain. Rather, it is how we stand in relation to hebel that creates the problems. The problem, to create a neologism, is a yithronic posture toward hebel--a grasping, profiting, acquiring, acquisitive, chasing attitude given life's fleeting, vaporous, misty, impermanent, and transitory nature. 

I mentioned yesterday that most Bible translations do not translate the Hebrew word hebel literally in the book of Ecclesiastes, as "mist" or "vapor." Such a translation would highlight the fleeting and transitory nature of life. Rather, most Bible translations translate hebel as "vanity" or "meaninglessness."

One translation that does attempt to stick to a more literal translation of hebel is The Voice. Throughout Ecclesiastes, The Voice consistently translates hebel as "fleeting." 

To get a feel for how that translation might change a reading of Ecclesiastes, years ago I made for my Bible class a table comparing the NIV with The Voice listing every passage containing hebel in Ecclesiastes. That table is below:

	The Voice	NIV
1:2	Teacher: Life is fleeting, like a passing mist. It is like trying to catch hold of a breath; All vanishes like a vapor; everything is a great vanity.	“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
1:14	I have witnessed all that is done under the sun, and indeed, all is fleeting, like trying to embrace the wind.	I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
2:1	I said to myself, “Let me dabble and test you in pleasure and see if there is any good in that.” But look, that, too, was fleeting.	I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.” But that also proved to be meaningless.
2:11	As I continued musing over all I had accomplished and the hard work it took, I concluded that all this, too, was fleeting, like trying to embrace the wind. Is there any real gain by all our hard work under the sun?	Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.
2:15	I said to myself, “Why do I try to be wise when my fate is the same as that of the fool? This pursuit is fleeting too.”	Then I said to myself, “The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise?” I said to myself, “This too is meaningless.”
2:17	So I began to hate life itself because all that is done under the sun is so harsh and difficult. Life—everything about it—is fleeting; it’s like trying to pursue the wind.	So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
2:19	And who knows whether my heir will be wise or foolish? Still he will inherit all the things for which I worked so hard here under the sun, the things for which I became wise. This, too, is fleeting like trying to catch hold of a breath.	And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless.
2:21	Although someone with wisdom, knowledge, and skill works hard, when he departs this life, he will leave all he has accomplished to another who has done nothing to deserve work’s reward. This, too, is fleeting, and it causes great misery.	For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune.
2:23	For every day is filled with pain and every job has its own problems, and there are nights when the mind doesn’t stop and rest. And once again, this is fleeting.	All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless.
2:26	To those who seek to please God, He gives wisdom and knowledge and joyfulness; but to those who are wicked, God keeps them busy harvesting and storing up for those in whom He delights. But even this is fleeting; it’s like trying to embrace the wind.	To the person who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
3:19	The fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same. As one dies, so does the other, for we have the same breath within us. In the end, we have no advantage over the animals. For as I have said, it’s all fleeting.	Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless.
4:4	Then I saw yet another thing: envy fuels achievement. All the work and skills people develop come from their desire to be better than their neighbors. Even this is fleeting, like trying to embrace the wind.	And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
4:7	Again I observed another example of how fleeting life is under the sun:	Again I saw something meaningless under the sun:
4:16	There seemed to be no limit to all the people who were under his authority. Yet those who will come later will not be happy with him and will refuse to follow him. Even this, you see, is fleeting—power and influence do not last—like trying to pursue the wind.	There was no end to all the people who were before them. But those who came later were not pleased with the successor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
5:7	Daydreaming and excessive talking are pointless and fleeting things to do, like trying to catch hold of a breath. What good comes from them? It is better to quietly reverence God.	Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore fear God.
5:10	As the saying goes: Those who love money will never be satisfied with money, and those who love riches will never be happy with what they have. This, too, is fleeting.	Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless.
6:2	Sometimes God gives money, possessions, and even honor, so that we have everything a person might desire; nothing is lacking. But then, for reasons God only knows, God does not allow him to enjoy the good gifts. Rather, a stranger ends up enjoying them. This, too, is fleeting; it’s a sickening evil.	God gives some people wealth, possessions and honor, so that they lack nothing their hearts desire, but God does not grant them the ability to enjoy them, and strangers enjoy them instead. This is meaningless, a grievous evil.
6:4	because the stillborn arrives in a fleeting breath and then goes nameless into the darkness mourned by no one and buried in an unmarked grave.	It comes without meaning, it departs in darkness, and in darkness its name is shrouded.
6:9	It is better to enjoy what our eyes see than to long for what our roving appetites desire. This, too, is fleeting, like trying to embrace the wind.	Better what the eye sees than the roving of the appetite. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
7:6	For the laughter of fools is like the hiss and crackle of burning thorns beneath a pot. This, too, is fleeting.	Like the crackling of thorns under the pot, so is the laughter of fools. This too is meaningless.
7:15	In the fleeting time I have lived on this earth, I have seen just about everything: the good dying in their goodness and the wicked living to a ripe old age.	In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these: the righteous perishing in their righteousness, and the wicked living long in their wickedness.
8:10	I have witnessed the wicked buried with honor because during their lifetimes they would go in and out of the temple, and soon their crimes were forgotten in the very city where they committed them. This, too, is fleeting.	Then too, I saw the wicked buried—those who used to come and go from the holy place and receive praise in the city where they did this. This too is meaningless.
8:14	Here is another example of the fleeting nature of our world: there are just people who get what the wicked deserve; there are wicked people who get what the just deserve. I say this, too, is fleeting.	There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless.
9:9	Enjoy life with the woman you love. Cherish every moment of the fleeting life which God has given you under the sun. For this is your lot in life, your great reward for all of your hard work under the sun.	Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun.
11:8	If a person lives many years, then he should learn to enjoy each and every one; but he should not forget the dark days ahead, for there will be plenty of them. All that is to come—whether bright days or dark—is fleeting.	However many years anyone may live, let them enjoy them all. But let them remember the days of darkness, for there will be many. Everything to come is meaningless.
11:10	When all is said and done, clear your mind of all its worries. Free your body of all its troubles while you can, for youth and the prime of life will soon vanish.	So then, banish anxiety from your heart and cast off the troubles of your body, for youth and vigor are meaningless.
12:8	Life is fleeting; it just slips through your fingers. All vanishes like mist.	“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Everything is meaningless!”

Last semester, in my PSYC 348 Psychology and Christianity class, we were in our unit on existential psychology. To get into that material, I had to get the class up to speed, sharing an introduction to existential philosophy and how that philosophy affected psychological theories and practice. 

We spend most of our time in this introduction discussing how existentialism places the issue of meaning at the heart of the human experience, how meaning is tenuous and fragile in the face of death. 

Some of the students find this a difficult discussion, feeling that it is depressing and dark. To help them, I point to the book of Ecclesiastes. "This stuff isn't new, or invented by brooding Europeans," I share with the class, "The Bible was existential way before existential philosophy existed." 

Ecclesiastes is the most existential book in the Bible, and a key to interpreting the book is how you translate the Hebrew word hebel, which occurs 38 times in the book. Hebel is the grand theme of Ecclesiastes, but it is notoriously hard to translate.

In the major English translations there have been two schools of thought in how best to translate hebel.

The first is the King James-inspired school which translates hebel as "vanity." Hence the famous rendering in the KJV of the opening lines of the Preacher (1:2):

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. 

Following the KJV in translating hebel as "vanity" are the ASV, ESV, NKJV, RSV, and the NRSV.

The other, smaller camp translates hebel as "meaningless." The NIV and NLT go in this direction.

The trouble with these translations is that the literal meaning of hebel is breath, vapor, or mist. The existential refrain of Ecclesiastes is that existence is characterized by a fleeting, transient insubstantiality. Life is mist. Life is hebel. 

According to the Preacher, human effort is like building sandcastles on the beach. Sandcastles are hebel. Sandcastles are impermanent, they will not last. Consequently, it is "vain" and "meaningless" to existentially invest in sandcastles. 

That is how Ecclesiastes becomes the most existential book in the Bible. Ecclesiastes is a prolonged reflection on the transitory nature of existence, and how this creates a crisis of meaning for human effort, striving, goal-setting, and achievement rendering them vain and meaningless.

Having finished my series on the church and politics, I wanted to say just one more thing. An epilogue to the series to ask a simple question.

We can debate all sorts of things about political theology. Maybe you liked the way I connected the dots in this series, maybe you didn't. But reflecting back over the series, I think I can make my point more directly and simply by asking you a question.

Imagine, for the sake of the question, if Christians of all political persuasions stepped away from public political engagement for the next ten years. We just stopped, across the board, vocal and visible involvement and participation. Christians stopped talking about politics on social media. Pastors stopped preaching about political armageddon and boosting candidates. Christian think tanks, foundations, pundits, public intellectuals stopped talking about the culture wars. Complete radio silence from Christians, for ten years. We take a collective time out. And if you want to keep voting, great, but you keep radio silence about what you do in the voting booth.

But during this season we don't shut up about our faith. We keep talking about Jesus, the gospel, and the kingdom of God. Nor are we absent in our communities. We take all the energy we had previously devoted to politics and pour it to serving people in our cities and towns. So Christians remain vocal and visible for these ten years. We just don't ever say anything about candidates, elections, culture war issues, or the fate of the nation. 

I can now ask my question. Do you think this ten year season would improve the church? Would this season improve the church internally, helping us conform more fully to the image of Jesus and more deeply into the kingdom of God, and externally, in how the world might perceive us?

If your answer is yes, that the church would be helped and healed if it took a ten year political timeout, then you've arrived at the point I've been trying to make in this series. Simply, political engagement twists and distorts the church. In Augustinian terms, politics disorders the desires of the church. Political engagement is a type of spiritual formation that leads to spiritual malformation. Politics is addictive and the church needs to detox.   

This, then, is my overall point. I believe the church is healthier when it disengages from politics, and becomes increasingly diseased, deranged, and addicted the deeper its political engagement.  

Why am I, someone with progressive Christian and political beliefs, devoting so much time reflecting on Louise Perry's book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution? 

The main reason is that, as regular readers know, I've come to identify myself as "post-progressive." And one of the reasons I've moved into this new space, as I've shared, is a dissatisfaction with the progressive Christian conversation about sex. Sharply stated, progressive Christianity doesn't have anything to say about sex beyond sacralizing the reigning cultural consensus of guilt-free sex with the minimum ethical standard of mutual consent. 

Broadly speaking, progressive Christians have tried to minimize the guilt associated with sex by lowering the stakes of sex. If sex us just "fun," no big deal, then hooking up is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, you're encouraged to do this. 

As a post-progressive, I'm not interested in making anyone feel guilty for having sex. I think just about all of my college students are having sex, and I don't have a judgmental bone in my body about any of that. But as a post-progressive, I do think that sex is pretty high stakes, and that lowering its stakes is a recipe for a lot of hurt. So while I don't judge my students, I do worry about them. 

What do I mean by sex being "high stakes"? 

The progressive moral code is basically "do no harm." If no one is being hurt, then no one should have any moral objection. This includes sex. If everyone is consenting in the bedroom you can keep your nose out of my business. 

But here's my question: Does consent capture everything we mean by harm when it comes to sex? This is the question I think The Case Against the Sexual Revolution gets on our radar screen, a deeper consideration of what may or may not be harmful when it comes to sex. Simply put, more than guilt is at stake in sex, and yet guilt is just about the only thing progressive Christians seem interested in talking about (likely as a reactive posture toward evangelical purity culture). I'm not interested in making anyone feel guilty about sex, but I am concerned about harms that aren't captured by consent. I think #MeToo brought a lot of those harms into the light.

And consider this question that wasn't captured by #MeToo. Imagine a young man in a relationship with a young woman. She very much has a romantic crush on him, is falling in love with him. For his part, he likes this young woman, considers her a good friend. And being a young male, he does entertain thoughts of having sex with her. And she's willing. She'd give consent. But the young man doesn't love her. So, an ethical question: Should he have sex with her? How do you calculate the harm he'll do to her by having sex with her, knowing that, in the end, it's "just sex" for him but so much more for her? Having sex will cause her to fall more deeply in love, and he knows he's going to walk away. So, should he have sex with her? What choice causes more or less harm?

I think you could make a pretty good ethical case that the young man will do more harm if he has sex with the young woman. I'd argue that the ethical thing to do--Could we say the chivalrous and noble thing to do?--would be to not have sex with her. Refusing sex might be painful to her, but that pain would be much less than the harm he'd do to her emotionally if they started a "friends with benefits" relationship knowing that this sexual intimacy will make her fall ever more deeply in love with him. 

This is the sort of thing I mean by describing sex as "high stakes." Like it or not, sex is associated with love and intimacy. Which makes the "do no harm" calculus so much more weighty and complicated. And it raises the question: Where in our culture are we acquiring the virtues necessary to help us navigate this complexity? I just don't see it.

Listen, I appreciate the progressive concern about guilt. But progressive Christians need to start pushing beyond guilt to discuss other sorts of harm. Because those harms are real. Progressive Christians need to snap out of their obsessive orbiting of evangelical purity culture, always playing the reactive moon to the evangelical sun. And that's what I like about  Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, that even if you disagree with her, she spotlights harms that aren't typically talked about by liberals and progressives. Perry's book raises the stakes on sex in ways I think are worth considering. For example, from her chapter "Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering" Perry makes some observations and then asks some questions:

...Today's young women are typically unaware that men are, in general, much better suited to emotionless sex and find it much easier to regard their sexual partners as disposable. Ignorant of this fact, women can all too easily fail to recognise that being desired is not at all the same thing as being held in high esteem. It isn't nice to think of oneself as disposable or to acknowledge that other people view you that way. Often, it's easier to turn away from any acknowledgement of what is really going on, at least temporarily. I've spoken to a lot of women who participated in hook-up culture when they were young and only years later came to realise just how unhappy it made them. I've yet to meet anyone who has travelled the same emotional journey, but in the opposite direction.

If you're a woman who's had casual sexual relationships with men in the past, you might try answering the following questions as honestly as you can: 

1. Did you consider your virginity to be an embarrassing burden you wanted to be rid of? 
2. Do you ever feel disgusted when you think about consensual sexual experiences you've had in the past?
3. Have you ever become emotionally attached to a casual sexual partner and concealed this attachment from him? 
4. Have you ever done something sexually that you found painful or unpleasant and concealed this discomfort from your partner, either during sex or afterward? 

If you answer "no" to all of these questions, your high sociosexuality and good luck have allowed you to navigate successfully a treacherous sexual marketplace. But if you answer "yes" to any of them, you are entitled to feel angry at a sexual culture that set you up to fail.

I started this series to collect some thoughts about my friend and colleague Brad East's reflections and questions in response to a post of mine regarding Christian involvement in politics.

In my original post, I made the argument that Christians were focusing too much emotional energy on politics. Here's some of what I said in that original post:

[M]y worry concerns the cathexis of politics within the Christian psyche.

Coined by Freud, the word "cathexis" comes from the psychodynamic tradition in psychology. A cathexis is an unhealthy concentration of mental energy on a person, idea or object. The word "fixation" is a related concept, as we become "fixated," to an unhealthy degree, where there is a concentration of mental energy and investment. Along with "fixation," "obsession" is another word that points to a cathexis.

You can think of a cathexis as a "hot spot" in the psyche, a "gravity well" that creates a mental orbit, even a kind of "black hole" that sucks up available energy. And that's a key notion in psychodynamic thinking, how our mental energy is a finite resource. Our various cathexes, fixations and obsessions hurt us because they suck up mental energy, leaving us less energy to allocate, devote and invest in other areas of our lives. Like the pull of a large gravitational mass in space, a strong cathexis warps and distorts the psyche causing it to become twisted and imbalanced.

Given that, let me restate my concern. Politics has become a cathexis in the Christian psyche. Like a psychic black hole, the power of this cathexis is warping and distorting the Christian mind, heart and soul. Worse, the cathexis of politics is sucking up all the available mental and emotional energy, energy that needs to be directed toward other pressing endeavors and concerns...The Christian psyche is currently orbiting the nation state with an unhealthy, distorting, and morbid fixation.

To be clear, I think it's perfectly appropriate for Christians to be involved in democratic politics. Feel free to vote and be politically engaged. The issue involves the cathexis of politics in the Christian psyche, the unhealthy concentration of psychic energy being devoted to the state and electoral politics. Psychic energy is a precious and limited resource, and every bit of energy sucked up by the cathexis of politics is energy that could be devoted to your family, your friendships, your church, your creativity, your spiritual formation, and your works of mercy in the local community.

As I noted in Part 1, Brad's response to this argument was to question if such emotional detachment is possible. If you believe that some political outcome makes a real difference in the lives of others, for good or ill, your political engagement related to that issue is going to come with some feelings. You care, and in that caring you're emotionally invested. 

This series was a slow burn to return to this issue and the question Brad raised about our emotional relationship to politics. 

To start, I agree with Brad that if a person is invested in effecting some political change, a change they think profoundly affects the lives of others (the American Civil Rights movement is an example here), there will be emotional engagement and strong passions. That said, as I described in the last post, there is a form of Christian political disengagement, following Yoder and Hauerwas, where a correlated emotional disengagement is expected and possible. Brad admits this possibility, but felt that I was unclear on this point. Brad's observation was that what I was describing, political engagement with emotional disengagement, might not be possible. And I see that point. If you're engaged, you'll likely care.

But that said, I hope this series makes more clear my views regarding the shape of this emotional engagement. We should care, but our caring is of a distinctive sort. 

First, as I've argued, the primary political witness of the church is prophetic criticism of the state, no matter who is in office. States are not evil, but they are fallen. Christians are called to draw attention to that fallenness, toward those locations where the kingdom of God has not been realized. 

Relatedly, Christian political and emotional engagement should be characterized by a profound sense of pessimism. Political engagement participates in "a long defeat." In my estimation, this recognition would cool many of our political passions. I'm calling for a lowering of our expectations, the Biblical refrain that we do not put our trust in princes. I think this would be good medicine for many Christians. 

There should be no nostalgia for Christendom, nor any hope of establishing (or re-establishing) a "Christian nation." That isn't to say we shouldn't get our hands dirty with the messiness of political engagement, but we do so with eyes wide open and with a ready confession that Christian political engagement within history will eclipse the witness of the church. Which is why the church has to maintain all the while its steady drumbeat of prophetic critique. In the midst of our political engagement the church has to keep drawing and redrawing the line between the Kingdom of God and the state. A faithful Christian witness will not allow that line to blur.

Now it might be argued that this vision remains emotionally impossible. Perhaps. As I've described in this series, we're in an unprecedented situation, trying to bridge the gap between the political context of the New Testament and the modern realities and opportunities of liberal democracy. Can we be politically engaged in effecting political change while at the same time possessing deep pessimism with that project and its eventual outcome? Maybe not. And is not a better government to be preferred over a worse? And if so, should we not fight for that better tomorrow? Yes, of course. But I feel convicted that Christians should, in light of our pessimism, approach this work with a healthy degree of realism, skepticism, and cynicism. 

Having said all that, I can still see the emotional difficulties. If I'm trying to say anything, it is this. Christians have become "over-politicized." Our hearts--our passions and emotional attachments--have become disordered and malformed, tipping away from the church and toward the outcomes of elections. If Christian affectivity is any indication, our hope is pined upon Election Day. In view of that, I'm calling for some emotional recalibration. Given the political hysteria now observed among Christians, among both conservatives and progressives, I think this emotional recalibration is both necessary and urgent. 

Is such a recalibration possible? 

I don't know. But I hope so.

Back during the Bush administration, from 2001-2009, there was a whole lot of writing on Christian blogs about "Constantinianism." 

Constantinianism refers to the time in church history when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under the rule of Constantine. The political theologians John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas have described this moment as the beginning of a long, dark history for the Christian church. Sometimes this moment is called the "Constantinian heresy." According to this view, the witness of the early church in its first three centuries of existence, which was essentially pacifistic, was lost and obscured. After Constantine, the church became conflated with Imperial power. Everything since Constantine, what we call "Christendom," is contaminated by the marriage of church to Empire.

Constantinianism was all the rage during the Bush administration because it was a theological tool to protest the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. During those years, Christian blogs and books would routinely describe the United States as an "Empire," drawing a historical equivalence with Rome. That comparison, however, hasn't held up all that well. Mainly because the US isn't an Imperial power. America is a democracy. We don't have a monarch, but a president we can vote out of office. The political issue isn't Constantine, but July 4th, 1776.

Simply put, Americans have the power of the vote, a power that gives us some say in our political future. Christians, however, have disagreed about how to use that power. A related issue is Christian participation in the state, especially as police and soldiers. The earliest Christians quit the Roman army upon their conversion, considering it impossible to be a solider and obey Jesus' commands in the Sermon on the Mount. After Constantine, that bright ethical line became blurred. When the Empire became formally Christian it was unseemly for Christians to push the killing required by the state onto pagans and infidels. If Christians wanted to lead the state they were going to have to get their hands dirty. And so Christians, for the first time in history, picked up the sword as a necessary evil.

This history brings us to two different views concerning Christian political engagement. 

There are some Christians, like some within the Anabaptist tradition (and even within my Church of Christ tradition), who follow Yoder and Hauerwas in arguing that the church has to extract itself from involvement with the state and return to its pre-Constantine purity. Christians shouldn't pledge allegiance to the flag, serve in the military, or vote. 

Other Christians follow thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr argued that after 1776 Christians have to assume their share of political responsibility. You have a responsibility to vote. And Christians have to do their fair share of the police work and soldiering. We can't pass the buck to non-Christians in an effort to keep our hands clean. Sure, Christians carrying guns will taint the "purity" of the early Christian witness, but history has called us to assume our political responsibilities. 

Niebuhr's view of politics is often called "Christian realism," as it rejects the view that a "pure" Christian witness in regards to violence is morally responsible. Further, Christian realism admits the pessimism I expressed in earlier posts by recognizing that the kingdom of God cannot be fully realized on earth due to the fallenness of persons and institutions. We must be "realistic" and accept that we'll have to reconcile ourselves to political approximations of the moral goods we aspire to as Christians. As I've described in this series, a nation state can't embody the sacrificial love of Jesus in its policies. Christian moral ideals are not politically realizable for a nation state. But a state can be more just, inclusive, and fair. Justice, for example, is our best political approximation to Christian love of neighbor. In this view, given that we can make things better through our political involvement, Christians are called to this work, even if they get their hands dirty.

I've rehashed the Yoderian versus Niebuhrian views to finally bring us in this series to the question of Christian political involvement. 

My position about Christian political involvement is easily stated: I think both the Yoderian and the Niebuhrian positions are viable options for Christians. 

Personally, my sensibilities lean toward Yoder, but I can't argue with Niebuhrian involvement. Mainly because, pace Yoder, I don't think we're dealing with Constantinianism. We're dealing with 1776. We're not dealing with Empire but with liberal democracy. I think you can make a good argument for why Christians should vote for change and serve alongside non-Christians in policing and going to war. True, Christian involvement with killing will muddy the purity of the Christian witness. Christians will be visibly acting within history in ways that are contrary to the Sermon on the Mount. But I'll admit that a good argument can be made that Christians shouldn't push the work of killing onto non-Christians in order to keep our hands clean. We have to shoulder our moral responsibilities.

As a historical example of some of these tensions, I think a lot about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, how he seemed to be pulled in two different directions. I'm not a Bonhoeffer scholar, but (I think) you can see a tension between the purity of his pacifistic moral vision in The Cost of Discipleship (a reflection on the Sermon on the Mount) with his later Ethics and involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Purity of moral witness versus taking responsibility for history and shouldering the subsequent guilt. Perhaps moral purity is not possible within history. We will always be guilty of something, for acting or not acting. In the framework of Bonhoeffer's Ethics, the ethics of the ultimate (heaven) break down here in the penultimate (history). Facing these choices, I think Bonhoeffer was conflicted. I share that feeling, as I think we all should.

Beyond issues of violence, there's also the the possibility of effecting change through political engagement and activism. I think a lot about the tensions between a quietistic approach toward politics and the great social goods that can be gained through political engagement and activism, like we experienced during the American Civil Rights movement. My Yoderian instincts are to stay out of the political mud, which, while a principled stand, is also very convenient given my social location as a white male. Standing on the sidelines while John Lewis marches into tear gas and beatings on Bloody Sunday in Selma isn't a good look for a Christian either.

So, what should be the shape of Christian political involvement? 

As frustrating as this will sound, I think it could look a lot of different ways, all of them compromised in some critical way. It all goes back to my argument for political pessimism and our embrace of "the long defeat." No matter what we choose, guilt will be our destiny. I think of Dorothy Day who, because of her pacifism, protested World War II. As you can imagine, that was a very unpopular decision. Can you escape guilt by being a pacifist during the Holocaust? At the same time, can we avoid guilt when we look at the dead bodies of the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What, exactly, is the "Christian" play here? 

If you feel "stuck" pondering all this, that is exactly where I want us. Stuck. Conflicted. Torn between bad choices and searching for "lesser evils." That's the shape of political engagement in the Fall, searching for lesser evils. How do we apply the ethics of heaven here in history?

Here's the conclusion I want to draw from all this: Christian involvement in the state, given the fallenness of the state, inevitably eclipses the Christian witness. That this involvement is a moral duty, I'll grant you. But this involvement, while a responsible and "realistic" choice, never closes the gap between current political arrangements and the "kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven." As Bonhoeffer saw, if we shoulder the responsibilities of history we will incur guilt. There is no clean place to stand.

In short, a "Christian" nation, even if it could exist, will stand guilty before the Judge of History. Like all nations, a "Christian nation" stands in the dock with bloody hands. Knowing this, Christian political engagement boils down to minimizing this guilt as much as possible. And we each, in principled ways, weigh this guilt differently. Who was more guilty during World War II, Dorothy Day or Dietrich Bonhoeffer? I can't say. It seems that their choices were both agonizing and haunted. And for me, that's the whole point. Specifically, while I cannot claim to know the exact shape of Christian political engagement, the point of this series is to share that I do feel convicted that I know the emotional tone of Christian political engagement: Haunted. 

For me, that is the main task of Christian political theology: 

The haunting. 

Before pushing on to talk about Christian political engagement, a post today to describe why no nation state can ever be described as "Christian." 

The issue is two-fold: Scarcity and the sword.

Let's start with scarcity. As I describe in my book the Slavery of Death, human life is governed by a survival ethic in a world of perceived and actual scarcity. This plays out both personally and institutionally. We have to survive. And to survive we have to secure resources and defend against threat.

At the level of the nation state, the realities of scarcity demand that the state act in ways to secure and protect its survival. Thus, nations must place their political and economic interests above the interests of other nations and peoples. Nations create, secure and regulate borders. Nations engage in monitoring, policing and eliminating "threats at home and abroad." Nations do so through ethically dubious activities like mass surveillance; black ops; torture; enhanced interrogation; spy craft; sabotage; dealings with evil agents, power brokers and rouge nations; drone strikes; and other sorts of lethal force, both inside and outside its borders. Lastly, nations make war.

The list can be expanded upon, but everything on such a list is driven by a nation's survival instinct. And within history I don't see how any nation can escape this destiny. True, there is a continuum of darkness here, but any entity that places its own survival over the survival of others cannot ever be described as "Christian." At the heart of Christianity is the kenotic, cruciform life of Jesus. And no nation state within history can emulate this example. This is not to deny that nation states can do many good things to provide space and structure for human flourishing, but those spaces and structures are ultimately dependent upon the ultimate telos of any nation state: survival at any cost. Place that survival at risk and spaces and structures of flourishing will rapidly shrink or evaporate. And if they don't, another nation will invade and wipe them out. Nations can't be pacifists. Every space and structure within a nation that we might be tempted to label "Christian"--because that space and structure is just and fair--is wholly dependent upon patrolled borders, policing, mass surveillance, standing armies, vast spy networks, weapons of mass destruction, and on and on and on. Don't miss the forest for the trees. No nation state can operate in a "Christianly" way. 

Relatedly, the sword. What is a nation or state exactly? Many political theorists boil it down to this: a monopoly on lethal violence. Citizens can't kill each other. But the police, acting on behalf of the state, can shoot you. The state can also execute you. And well before guns or electric chairs show up, there are all the coercive uses of power, from legal fines to locking you up in a jail or prison. All of it backed up by the state's monopoly on violence.

This casts a long and dark shadow over any aspirations to create or establish a "Christian nation." Sure, you might pass bills or get Supreme Court decisions in your favor which align with a particular Christian "value." But what we're not talking about his how that value is being backed up by coercive power and lethal violence. Simply stated, we're "winning back the nation for Christ" at the point of a gun. But threatening people with police force isn't how Jesus goes about his business. 

That is what is often missed by Christians wanting to restore "Christian values" to America. Sure, on any given issue we might be able to discern a position that is more or less "Christian," and work to get that value enshrined in law. I'll grant you that. The notion is that, if this culture war battle is won, the nation becomes more "Christian." Trouble is, that value, if enshrined, is now being backed up and enforced with coercive power. And that's a problem. Politics is a fight to see who gets to control the monopoly on violence. If you win your culture war battle, you're effectively pointing a gun at every non-Christian in the nation and forcing them to comply. So while the value you're wanting to protect or defend might be admirable, and even "Christian," the enforcement of that value by a state calls the whole thing into question.

The other option here is classic liberalism, which many Christians endorse (David French is an example). In this view, the state uses it coercive power to create a "public space" where diverse views and life choices can be expressed. Thus, a Christian might defend the right to gay marriage. Not because they agreed with it, but because they don't think the lethal violence of the state should be used to police what people do in their bedrooms. People have the right to live their lives as they see best, even if that goes against God. In this view, the state's job isn't to adjudicate between Christian and non-Christian values, but to create a public space for people to live their own lives however they'd like. Trouble is, if this is how the state uses its power, the resultant public space won't be "Christian."

So you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. If the state creates a neutral public sphere, the nation won't be "Christian." But if the state chooses to enforce Christian values at the point of a gun, that's not "Christian" either. Either way, there is no "Christian nation" on the political horizon. 

To sum up, again, I'm not saying states can't be better or worse. Nor am I saying Christians shouldn't involve themselves in democratic politics to make states better. What I'm trying to describe is how the label "Christian" is simply impossible for any nation state. States are governed by the imperatives of self-preservation. And states enforce their way of life at the point of the gun. Those things preclude any application of the adjective "Christian" to any nation state.