Another connection with regard to the value of accommodation for the stability of a society in which regular, serious ethical disagreement will (inevitably) occur (cf. Wong, Natural Moralities, p. 64).
I read this years ago online, and the sentence I've emphasized (in boldface) below has stuck in my head ever since: (This is from a Christian Century article on "Alternative Christian Communities" by Jason Byassee.
Something of a different animal from Reba is the
Church of the Servant King in Eugene, Oregon. Many of its members are
evangelicals who originally joined a parent congregation of the same
name in 1978 in Gardena, California. The Eugene congregation was planted
in 1987. Most of its key leaders have been living together in
intentional community since the ‘78 founding.
Servant King started as an evangelical effort to live out scripture’s
vision of the church. A commitment to nonviolence evolved slowly,
partly as members read the works of Stanley Hauerwas, partly as they
decided who would clean the bathrooms. Peace is not merely about a
position on the war in Iraq; it is about how one relates to one’s
neighbor, one’s spouse and one’s adversary in the community. Community
leader Jon Stock points out that most intentional Christian communities
that are not committed to nonviolence don’t survive, because when
arguments erupt, someone has to win -- and the community loses. The
Gardena congregation that planted Servant King has had such a rupture
and is now on strained terms with its ecclesial offspring in Eugene.
In section 2.12 of Natural Moralities, David Wong argues an important value for a moral society is "accommodation", which is "to be committed to supporting noncoercive and constructive relations with others although they have ethical beliefs that conflict with one's own."
This point made me recall this segment from a Krista Tippett interview (from her program On Being, distributed by American Public Media) that I heard this summer: (http://www.onbeing.org/program/transcript/4726)
Ms. Tippett: So what does that look like. Creating a highly pro-social environment, what are some of the components of that?
Dr. Wilson: OK. We have been
able to derive a list of designed features that cause just about any
group to function well, including a school group. This is based a lot on
the work of Elinor Ostrom who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.
Her contribution was to show how groups of people attempting to manage
their common resources, such as farmers or fishermen or forestry people
managing forests, how they're capable of managing their affairs pretty
well, but only if certain conditions are met. Those conditions are very
conciliant with what we know from an evolutionary perspective about
pro-sociality and cooperation.
So I'm going to reel off eight design features and then I'm going to
add a couple of extra things to show you how we created a school program
that works. Now as I'm listing these ingredients, ask yourself the
question, how well does the typical school satisfy these ingredients,
embody these design features, especially from the perspective of an
at-risk student? OK?
Ingredient number one: There has to be a strong group identity and a
sense of purpose for the group. So a person has to think that they're a
member of a group and that group has to be a purpose that's clear to
everyone. OK?
Number two: a proportional cost in benefits. It cannot be the case
that some people do all the work and some people get all the benefits.
There has to be some sense in which the benefits are scaled to what you
do for the group. OK?
Number three: consensus decision-making. People hate being bossed
around and told what to do, but they'll work hard to implement a
consensus decision. Right there, ask yourself what the average at-risk
kid thinks about whether they're being consulted about what they do in
school.
Number four: monitoring. Most people are cooperative, but some people
misbehave. Unless you can monitor that, then the group will not
function well.
Number five: graduated sanctions. If someone does misbehave, you
don't bring the hammer down immediately. You correct them in a nice
friendly fashion, but you also must be prepared to escalate.
Number six: fast, fair conflict resolution. If there is a conflict,
it must be resolved quickly and in a manner that's regarded as fair by
all parties.
Number seven: local autonomy. In order for the group to do the
previous things, they must have the ability to make their own decisions
and to organize their group their way in order to make those decisions.
There's another thing. If you look at the average school program, not
only are the students not allowed to alter the routine, but even the
teachers are not allowed even when they know it's not working.
Ms. Tippett: And the students are aware that the teachers are not allowed to alter their routine.
Dr. Wilson: Yeah. Finallynumber
eightis called polycentric governance. When groups are nested within
larger groups, then there must be coordination among groups which
mirrors the same principles. Now there's two more principles that we
added to this school group. The first was a safe and secure environment.
Fear is good for helping you escape from a fearful situation over the
short term. It's toxic over the long term. So therefore, if you don't
feel safe and secure, if you're not basically in a playful, relaxed
mood, you're not going to do the kind of learning that you need to do.
And finally, learning in any species does not take place when all of the
costs are in the present and all the benefits are in the future. So if
you tell someone you'll get a good job if you slog four years through
school …
Ms. Tippett: Right, or you'll get into college four years from now.
Dr. Wilson: Yeah. So there's a
wonderful study by the psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who's best
known for his work on "flow," peak psychological experience. In this
study, he and his team followed a group of gifted high school students
that were identified as gifted in the ninth grade, followed them through
their high school and asked how many of them remained gifted by the
12th grade. What he discovered was, only the kids that enjoyed what they
were doing on a day-to-day basis fulfilled their talents. So even the
gifted kids had to have this short-term reward for what they were doing
in order to realize the long-term reward. So if school isn't fun and
something you want to go to on a day-to-day basis, then forget about it.
I think these ingredients for a pro-social environment have relevance to local, conference, and denominational church polity, as well as to political philosophy applied to other sorts of groups.
One of the marks of Anabaptism, as I have come to understand it in recent years, is what I might call “secularism”, or the political doctrine of the separation of church and state. The members of the Radical Reformation in Europe came to be called “Anabaptists” (lit., “re-baptizers”) because they regarded the baptism of infants into a state church whose membership is determined by birth nationality as illegitimate and unbiblical, and they practiced instead the baptism of adult believers into a faith community whose membership is determined by voluntary association. For this, the Anabaptists were slandered and persecuted.
Note that the issue of baptism is really, for the Anabaptists, an issue of what defines or determines church membership, or religious identity. The Anabaptists broke with the (at that time normative in Christian Europe) State Christianity model, according to which the Church and the King work together to govern the spiritual and worldly affairs of the kingdom. In a Christian kingdom (or, nation-state) membership in the church (a particular Christian religious identity) is mandatory, for the good of the social order. In a secular nation (as some at least regard the U.S. today) membership in the society (i.e., citizenship) and membership in the church (i.e., one’s religious identity) must be kept separate. This secularism is good for the social order because it means all citizens are ruled by the same laws, regardless of their religious identity. And, this secularism is good for the Christian faith community because it means all are free to respond to the call of God in a genuine decision to follow Jesus, accepting baptism as his disciple, and becoming part of the faith community. The church is thus made up of voluntary disciples of Jesus, not of those who are compelled to join for other reasons (for example, in order to be eligible for employment). (See John 1:12-13)
I would argue that secularism and religious pluralism provides a more ideal context for mission than does a “Christian nation”.
If we Anabaptists are secularists, this raises questions about whether and, if so, how, we should involve ourselves in politics: that is, concerns of social and legal policy in the larger society of which we are citizens alongside our Buddhist, Muslim, Catholic, and Presbyterian (etc.) neighbors. At least some of the early Anabaptists seem to have rejected involvement in the affairs of the state: refusing to take public office, as well as refusing to bear arms on behalf of the state. And the most visible communities of Anabaptists to many Americans today are the Amish, whom Americans imagine as living separate from the rest of the world, refusing connection to the larger society whether by the electrical power grid or by access to Social Security.
Anabaptists are not the only Christians in North America who ask questions about the propriety of our involvement in politics. Until the birth of the “Religious Right” as the “Moral Majority” in the hey-day of Jerry Falwell and others, it was the most common position for American Protestants (at least white fundamentalists) to keep themselves uninvolved in American politics: many did not even vote. In black churches, too, at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, religious leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. faced some criticism for calling for the church to engage in direct political action (I need to verify this fact).
It seems today that there is a growing trend within the world of white, North American evangelical Christianity (including the Mennonite Church) that sees our faith and theology as having necessary political consequences. We argue and preach that good Christian theology means caring about ecological justice, international relations, human rights, hunger, AIDS, economic inequality, and other issues beyond the Religious Right’s bugbears of abortion and “the homosexual agenda”. We say that followers of Jesus cannot fail to care about political matters outside of the church. I have made a habit of reciting: “All theology is politics and all politics is theology.”
What is and ought to be the relationship between Christianity and politics, between church and state, now that the secularist vision of the Radical Reformers has taken its current form in “Western” nations?
How different could you be from the way you are, and still be yourself?
This is the sort of question that some students of philosophy find fascinating and that some other people find make them a little bit crazy! But think with me for a moment. List some of your identifying characteristics (from your driver’s license): hair color, eye color, height, weight. If these things about you changed, would you still be the same person? OK, what about your skin color, hair form, and other physical characteristics that we are trained to notice in order to sort the people we meet by race? Imagine yourself, but Black, Indian, Latina, White, Arab, Japanese. Is the person you are imagining still you?
Go along with me just a bit further; humor me, please. Imagine yourself with different sexual characteristics. I’m a boy (and I’ve always been identified as one), but for just a moment I’m going to imagine myself as a girl. I find myself, honestly, having difficulty thinking of the person I’m imagining as me. (Maybe your armchair-philosophical experience differs from mine; that’s OK).
Let’s try this experiment again, this time with something besides physical characteristics. I’m going to imagine what it would be like if I had chosen to major in Chemistry/Pre-Medicine instead of Philosophy when I was in college. Is the person of my imagining still recognizably me? I think so. I’m going to imagine, now, myself as a person who hates having philosophical conversations and loves playing American football. Hmm.
What conclusions can we draw from this shared thought experiment? It seems that we take some things about ourselves, compared to others, to be more basic to our identities.
Philosophers have, across history and in different civilizations, posed questions and proposed diverse answers to questions about personal identity and its persistence over time. The Indian thought represented by the Bhagavad Gita is that I am an eternal being that does not change. I was never born; I never came-to-be. I will never die or cease to exist. The parts of my experience, and of my body, that undergo change over time--growing and aging, for example--are not essential to who I am. This helps the Gita explain reincarnation. Just as my eight year-old self changed or “died”, becoming or “giving birth to” my twenty-eight year-old self, so at some point I (that is, this physical organism) will die and another physical organism will be born: my true self will survive this process, unchanged. (Many Christians believe something somewhat similar about the transition of the soul from life “within” their physical body to afterlife in Heaven, following physical death.)
Many philosophers, however—and not just in the last couple of centuries—have expressed skepticism of the existence of a soul or enduring self of this sort, and some have presented rather good arguments against this view (whether or not their arguments are ultimately persuasive I will not address here). If who I am is not an immaterial soul, some might suggest that everything about me constitutes who I am: from the name my parents gave me, to my sexual identity, right down to my decision to skip breakfast this morning, and my decision to take a walk in the park on Tuesday. But I rather think that had I eaten breakfast this morning, and even had my parents named me Jared, that I would still be me. And I don’t think this intuition demands an immaterial soul (although I might still have one).
Again, we take some things to be more basic—that is, to constitute the core of our personal identities—and other things to be more accidental (that is, less defining) to who we are. If we don’t have immortal souls, I think that means the lines we draw that separate the core of who we are from our accidental characteristics are at least for the most part artificially constructed. I may choose, or my society may choose, to regard my race, gender, or religion to be more important to defining who I am than my eye color or the second language I chose to study for my degree.
With all this in mind, let’s turn our attention to the identity of the Church: that is, of a religious community of Christians. I am a part of a community called Mennonite Church USA. And for a little while now there has been some talk within the community about what it means to be Mennonite (or Anabaptist, a word some of us also like to apply to ourselves). Perhaps there are certain things that constitute the core of our Mennonite identity, and some other things that are more accidental to our Mennonite identity. (I am talking here about the identity of the whole community, the whole Church, not of each of us, individually).
Can we engage in the same thought experiment about the Church that we did about our individual selves at the beginning of this essay? Imagine the Mennonite Church, only…we don’t read the New Testament anymore. Is this imagined Church still the same Church? Imagine the Mennonite Church, only…we’re twice as numerous. Imagine the Mennonite Church, only…we’ve been targeted by the government for persecution. Imagine the Mennonite Church only…the majority color and worship style is African-American. Perhaps this thought experiment can shed some light on what we take to be the core of our identity and what we take to be accidental. I am sure we will have different intuitions. Some of us will find it more difficult than others to recognize some of these imaginary Mennonite Churches.
I suspect that many of the things that identify us, and many of the things that we take as core vs. accidental to our identity are constructions: things that we choose, or history conspires with us to choose to make more or less essential to our sense of self. But I think there’s something important that we should keep in mind when we are philosophizing about the identity of the Church: The Church has an immaterial Spirit whose essence is our identity. (Indeed, this may be more true of the Church than it is of each of us individual human beings). The Spirit connects the disparate parts together into one Body. The Spirit animates the Body, making it alive.
Reflect with me on this for a while, please: If we take any characteristic of the Church to be essential to our identity, rather than the animating Spirit within us that connects us all together in mutual dependence, are we making a mistake?
