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[ by Charles Cameron — a follow up to Recommended Reading: the meat, discussing the word Christianist, also an intellectual foundation for the desire to fuse church and state ]
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In a comment on Daveed and Laurel’s post, Tim Mathews writes:

The views of a hypothetical “Christianist” yearning to fuse church and state are clearly ad hoc and usually incoherent, with little to no significant intellectual foundation. Thus, the Islamist versus Christianist dynamic seems, to me, to be an invented controversy. “Islamist” is a descriptive label applied to an agenda with an intellectual foundation. “Christianist” is a label in search of a description.

I’d like to make two comments here:

First, FWIW, the term “Christianist” already has a usage promoted by the essayist Michael Ventura, who writes in Shadow Dancing in the USA:

In following the lead of James Hillman’s work, I’m going to use “Christianism” in place of “Christianity” and “Christianist” in place of “Christian” whenever possible in an attempt to get around the enormous bias for the religion built into our very language.

This isn’t the same as using the term in parallel to “Islamist” – but it’s a usage worth noting.

As to there being “little to no significant intellectual foundation” for the desire to fuse church and state in Christianity, Rousas John Rushdoony opens his monumental Institutes of Biblical Law with the following observations:

When Wyclif wrote of his English Bible that “This Bible is for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” his statement attracted no attention insofar as his emphasis on the centrality of Biblical law was concerned. That law should be God’s law was held by all; Wyclif’s departure from accepted opinion was that the people themselves should not only read and know that law but also should in some sense govern as well as be governed by it. [ … ]

No less than Israel of old, Christendom believed itself to be God’s realm because it was governed by the law of God as set forth in Scripture. There were departures from that law, variations of it, and laxity in faithfulness to it, but Christendom saw itself as the new Israel of God and no less subject to His law.

When New England began its existence as a law-order, its adoption of Biblical law was both a return to Scripture and a return to Europe’s past. It was a new beginning in terms of old foundations….

You can read the complete Introduction here (.pdf).

Max Blumenthal‘s 2009 Republican Gomorrah opens with a chapter on Rushdoony, contrasting him with Billy Graham, who:

routinely urged his audiences to “create a culture with Christ at its center,” but his message was consistent with the evangelical tradition of effecting change through personal persuasion, not political imposition. … By contrast, Rushdoony’s concept of cleansing the land of sin by seizing the reins of government was genuinely revolutionary.

John Frame‘s much earlier review of the first volume (of three) of the Institutes appeared in the Westminster Theological Journal 38:2 (Winter, 1976), 195-217. It offers the uninitiated reader a decent overview of the book:

Rushdoony not only acknowledges biblical authority, knows the Bible, and knows our cultural situation; he is also able to apply biblical principles to our culture in creative and cogent ways. Rushdoony has grasped a hugely important point that theologians rarely acknowledge, namely, that theology must involve the application of the word of God to the whole world. Otherwise, theology is a “lie,” testifying that God himself is irrelevant (p. 597; cf. pp. 308, 652ff). The Institutes, therefore, presents a plan for the reformation of all aspects of human society in accord with biblical law. Rushdoony advocates this reformation in various ways:

(a) He sets forth eloquently the beauty of a society governed by biblical law: a society where the power of the state is strictly limited (pp. 429f, passim); where eminent domain belongs to God alone, not to the state (pp. 492f, 499ff); where there are no property taxes (pp. 56, 283), no expropriations beyond the tithes (pp. 846ff), but where welfare is effectively provided through covenantal institutions; where all citizens expose and prosecute criminals (pp. 271, 463ff); where criminals are responsible to make restitution to their victims (p. 272); where crime is rare because habitual and serious offenders are promptly executed and because others are caught and forced to make restitution, a society without prisons and the farce of pseudo-rehabilitation (pp. 228ff, 458ff, 514ff); where war is not permitted to take precedence over every other human activity (pp. 277ff); where the environment is protected by following the instructions of its Creator (pp. 141ff, 164ff).

(b) Where the biblical laws at first glance appear not to be so beautiful, but rather (to our humanist-indoctrinated minds) to be strange, trivial, or even cruel, Rushdoony effectively explains the divine logic underlying them. The denial of full citizenship to eunuchs (p. 100), the execution of blasphemers (pp. 106ff) and incorrigible juvenile delinquents (pp. 185ff, 48lff), the prohibition of taking a mother bird together with her young (pp. 169, 257, 267), the levirate (pp. 308f), the dowry legislation (pp. 185ff, 48lff) and other perplexing biblical statutes are cogently defended.

(c) Besides showing the inherent logic of biblical law, Rushdoony shows how that biblical law has been used through history, how its observance has brought about justice and happiness in many societies, and how its abandonment has brought about cultural disaster. He is quite specific with regard to American culture, and advocates dramatic changes in our legal and institutional structure. His strongest and most frequent polemic is against “statism,” the view that the state has the right to tax, control, and disturb all areas of human life. In that regard, his rhetoric closely resembles that of political conservatism which, indeed, he acknowledges as resting on Christianity to an extent (p. 289). Yet he strongly opposes laissez faire capitalism (pp. 288ff, 432f, 472) as a deification of the abstract laws of economics. Rushdoony’s proposals really do not fit very well under any contemporary label, and that in itself is an index of his zeal to follow Scripture rather than to please men.

Finally, I’d suggest that Rushdoony has more influence than many would like to admit these days – hence Caleb Hayden‘s comment in his Amazon review:

Rushdoony influenced many prominent and visible leaders in Christian circles today, even though many of these men are afraid to identify with him for fear that their reputations will be tarnished. Most people do not want to be thought of as radical, but Rushdoony had a different mentality. That is why, love him or hate him, a student of theology, philosophy, history, and law can greatly benefit from Rushdoony’s distinctly Christian analysis and critique of society.

See also, Jeff Sharlet, The Family, pp. 347-351.

In a second follow up, I’ll present a case where similar governmental practices resulted from arguable similarities between particular Christian and Islamic worldviews, and offer a comment on the degree to which even jihadists may not be directly attempting world conquest in the name of Islam.

[ by Charles Cameron — a couple of courteous debates on topics of considerable interest ]
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I’d like to draw your attention to two recent conversations:

The first begins with Mark Jacobsen‘s Armed Forces Journal piece, How to teach about Islam, and continues with a guest post from Tim Mathews at Abu Muqawama, Insha’Allah they learn something useful. Mark then responds to Tim at his own blog, Building Peace.

Mark lays out the problem:

Much of the debate now hinges on which voices educators should trust. The question is no longer “What is Islam?” but “Who should teach about Islam?” Government agencies struggle to answer that question, because they often feel compelled to choose between two camps: those who believe extremism is intrinsic to Islam itself, and those who see no relationship whatsoever between Islamic doctrine and extremism. Although much thoughtful and scholarly discussion of Islam does exist, it is these two camps who now dominate the popular conversation.

Government agencies will never escape their dilemma if they continue searching for an authority who can speak for “true” Islam. Islam is a deeply contested religion, even among Muslims, and the arguments of both extremes are shot through with truth, falsehood, exaggerations, omissions and assumptions. Much of the debate about Islam in the United States is intellectually dishonest. Rival voices are less concerned with sincere discussion than with heavy-handed tactics to dominate the conversation, such as efforts to control government classrooms. The only way out of this dilemma is also the most intellectually honest one: to understand the battle for American perceptions of Islam, to map out the topography of the debate and to teach students to critically evaluate rival arguments.

Tim responds:

As should be clear, I agree with problems that the author identifies in the US. However, I fail to see what this has to do with the issue of educating our personnel. We are not training our personnel to be foot soldiers in a culture war fought on cable television and weblogs in the United States. We are training our personnel to conduct operations in foreign countries.

[ … ]

The problem that he identifies is not relevant to preparing our personnel for deployments to conduct, and provide support for, operations in majority-Muslim countries. What the author has advocated is a program to help our educators avoid being pulled into battles of a culture war on US soil and, along the way, educating our personnel. The primary focus should be educating and the secondary focus on mitigating public pressure from fringe organizations.

Mark’s response:

I’m very glad to see your thoughtful response to my article. More than anything, I had hoped to spark some discussion about how Islam is taught in various government agencies, so am glad to see you carrying the discussion forward.

[ … ]

One reason you might disagree with aspects of my article is because you viewed it primarily through the lens of preparing deploying soldiers. That is an important part of what I’m writing about, but I actually intended the article to encompass a much broader range of government needs. Government employees have many different reasons they might need to understand something about Islam. Congressmen and their staffs are trying to make sense of the alleged “shariah threat” and calls for anti-shariah legislation; law enforcement agencies and the FBI need a way to understand and delineate between “moderates” and “extremists”, so they can hone in on real threats while respecting the civil liberties of ordinary Muslims; military commanders concerned with preventing the next Ft. Hood want to know how they can recognize extremist ideology; government agencies involved in any sort of outreach to Muslim communities struggle to find partners they can work with, because the largest American-Islamic organizations that claim to speak for American Muslims are tarnished by alleged links to extremism and terrorism.

All three pieces are worth reading in full — it was hard to pull quotes that did any of them justice, they’re all packed! And FWIW I do think Mark is right in ranging beyond the constraints of “preparing our personnel for deployments” — Tim’s more focused concern — because the war of ideas is won or lost as much in terms of how the US is perceived WRT Islam as it is by the behavior of troops, village by village, “in the field”.

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The second begins with a David Briggs piece in Huffington Post, Is It Time to Reconsider the Term Islamist?, which leads Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Lauren Morgan to respond at Gunpowder & Lead with Islamism in the Popular Imagination — which in turn generated Bernard Finel‘s post On Islamists and Rick Santorum. Daveed then comes back with Islamists and Rick Santorum: A Response to Bernard Finel.

I’m not going to quote Briggs, whose piece strikes me as light-weight, except to note that he introduces the question of comparisons between Obama and Rick Santorum (potential “Christianists”) with “Islamists”:

At this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama said his policies were grounded in his Christian beliefs. In a 2008 speech, former GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum said America was in the middle of a spiritual war in which “Satan has his sights on the United States of America.”

Are Obama and/or Santorum Christianists?

The answers to those questions would depend on how the term is defined. But it is unlikely you will hear any Christian politician or activist referred to in that way.

What American and western audiences are increasingly hearing, however, since the political and social upheaval that accompanied the Arab spring, is the term Islamist.

Daveed and Lauren:

You would be hard pressed to find anything beyond a few fringe commentators who are worried about Islamism because politicians representing this movement refer to Islamic principles in their rhetoric. Rather, it is the specific relationship between religion and state that worries observers. (I mean, really, does Briggs think that Obama will make canon law the law of the land if given a second term?)

Briggs bolsters his case by quoting Mansoor Moaddel, an Eastern Michigan University sociologist, as saying that in his interviews, he found that “‘in some respects, Mr. Santorum is more extremist’ than leading figures of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.” Nor is Briggs the only Western commentator to fatuously compare Santorum to Islamic extremists. To actually approach the claim being made by Briggs and others — that Islamist politicians possess an agenda that is less extreme than that of Rick Santorum — a better approach is to look at the practice in Middle Eastern states, as well as the policies advocated by Islamist politicians with significant audiences (as opposed to mere fringe players). That is what we do in this entry.

And do they indeed do — detailing with bullet points and commentary the practical behaviors of a variety of Islamic nations in respect to apostasy, blasphemy, the rights of women, and gay rights in the rest of their lengthy and instructive piece.

Enter Bernard Finel, who draws a fine distinction:

GR argues convincingly that policies put in place by Islamist parties throughout the Middle East are more extreme than Santorum. And indeed, on issues like religious freedom, women’s rights, and gay rights, GR is quite correct. Islamist regimes are worse than anything Santorum has proposed.

But I’d argue this is an apples to oranges comparison. Santorum’s limits are defined, I think, more by the limits imposed by American institutions rather his ideology per se. In other words, GR is comparing institutionally unconstrained ideological positions with those heavy constrained by institutions. It actually is not at all difficult to find actors on the right who would like to see religious freedom severely curtailed. Indeed, there is even a “Constitutional theory” out there among right wingers than Muslims should not receive First Amendment protections because either Islam is a “cult” or because it was not extant in any significant way in the United States when the Bill of Rights was ratified.

I’ll get into the issue of “actors on the right who would like to see religious freedom severely curtailed” in an follow up to this post — and touch on the usage “Christianist” there also — here, I’ll just say that Finel is articulating something I’ve “felt but not thought” or perhaps “thought but not articulated” myself quite a few times, and while I’m not entirely satisfied with his phrasing about “constraint by institutions” I think there’s a serious point in there, and I’m glad to see it surfaced.

Back to Daveed:

In comparing the relative extremes of Santorum versus those of Islamist parties, we were not trying to offer a moral judgment on the relative righteousness of those two actors (to be clear: we use “actor” in the loosest possible sense here, since Islamist politicians are by no means a unified actor). Rather, we were comparing exactly what we have just specified: the policies Santorum has advocated or implemented versus those that Islamist parties have advocated or implemented. It is true that institutional constraints play a role in defining said policies, but our goal was illuminating policies that are likely to have an impact on anyone’s life, and not judging Santorum’s “heart of hearts.” Hence, it is a direct apples to apples comparison of what policies are advocated by these two different actors. It would only be an apples to oranges comparison if our goal were moral judgment.

Fair enough: then there are at least two kinds of comparisons to be made… one between policies advocated by the respective parties, and one between the political realities constraining those whose ideals may be comparable.

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Again, with such rich material it is difficult if not impossible to pick quotes without cherry-picking them — and I must repeat that my intention here has not been to summarize these debates so much as to lead you into them…

Finel actually has a further post today in which he characterizes Daveed (and Laurel) as making “an ill-conceived and pointless attempt to haul Rick Santorum into the mix” on the way to another discussion. For the record, it was Briggs, not Daveed and Laurel, who introduced Santorum into the discussion.

I’ll have two follow-ups to this post, one adding a couple of points to the Gunpowder & Leaf / Finel discussion in regard to “Christianism” and the theological underpinnings of a contemporary movement for church-state fusion, the other adding a couple of other intriguing details to the mix.

I have been under the weather the past few days, but I decided to lumber off my sickbed and tend to the blog.

The American Conservative (Kelly Vlahos) – Carl Prine’s Line of Departure 

Vlahos pens a touching tribute to Carl Prine, whose heath is suffering from the effects of his service in combat. All of us here at zenpundit.com wish Carl a speedy recovery and return.

A few days after military writer and critic Carl Prine — whom I did not know at the time — decided to skewer me on his popular new blog, “Line of Departure,” I got a call from an Army friend stationed in Germany. He saw it, and asked “are you alright?” It was that bad.

A little over a year later, I find myself emailing Prine, several times in the last few weeks, writing, “are you alright?”

It’s pretty bad.

….I don’t think I ever told him this, but Prine’s single broadside at my work helped to sharpen my writing. I was pretty stung at the time, mostly because he couldn’t be dismissed as a fool. To my mind, he was a self-serving heel, but it was clear he was well-read and a good writer, which made it worse.

I never responded online, but over the course of the next several months we came to a friendly reckoning and rather smooth path towards mutual respect and encouragement.He’s apologized too many times, and given my column at Antiwar.com a lot of props that I don’t think I necessarily deserve but secretly love because LoD is not the typical Antiwar.com audience and it’s nice when we feel we’re getting something across to the people we write about.

Plus, it feels good to be defended by someone who shows no quarter to the hucksters and court scribes who helped deliver us into these wars and continue to this day to downplay the failed counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and the pathetically tepid, mostly wrongheaded state of U.S. foreign policy everywhere else. Our burgeoning collegiality aside, Prine became over the course of his time at LoD one of the good guys, a veteran who obviously loves the military for what it could be and loathes it for what it has been used for, and ultimately for what it has become….

American Security Project (Ashley Boyle) –The US and its UAVs: Addressing Legality and Overblown Scenarios 

This piece was endorsed by the killer of egregious drone-nonsense, Dan Trombly. I have to agree. Boyle, unlike about 99% of the folks writing internet hysterics about drones, manages to get international law right before starting her analysis.

While the international community has the right to demand that the US provide a legal foundation for drone strikes, it should be understood that the US has a strategic interest in not providing any such justification. Similarly, the argument that US drone strikes are establishing a dangerous precedent is reasonable. However, extrapolating this assertion to a scenario of global drone warfare is not only alarmist and distracting, but has no factual basis at present.

The matter of legal justification for US drone strikes is straightforward. Critics have long claimed that US drone strikes violate laws on interstate force and sovereignty in that strikes are conducted extraterritorially in non-combat zones.

While laws governing the use of interstate force bar the use of force in another nation’s territory at times of peace, under Article 51of the United Nations Charter, a nation has “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence [sic]” until the UN Security Council takes action. Article 51 applies if either the targeted state agrees to the use of force in its territory by another nation or the targeted state, or a group operating within its territory, was responsible for an act of aggression against the targeting state.

These conditions are mutually exclusive; only one must be satisfied to justify a unilateral extraterritorial use of force by a UN Member. In the cases of Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, both conditions are satisfied: all three countries have consented, explicitly or otherwise, to the US operating drones within their territories, and all three are “safe havens” for groups that have launched violent attacks against the US and US interests.

If the US is well within its right to conduct drone strikes within these nations, why, then, does it not simply invoke Article 51 as a means of justification and end the legality debate?

David Brooks –Why Our Elites Stink 

Brooks gets some of this wrong and drastically underestimates active vice passive corruption eating away at the system bit he gets one critical point right:

….As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role. 

That’s exactly correct. An elite with no ethical guidance system are not merely prone to personal vice and policy disaster, they are dangerous to democracy.

ADDENDUM:

Peter J. Munson, USMC Major, SWJ editor and…author!

Advanced Praise for War, Welfare, and Democracy

War, Welfare & Democracy: Rethinking America’s quest for the End of History by Peter J. Munson

[ by Charles Cameron — burqas and veiled threats, Martha Nussbaum, virtual reality ]
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I believe the photo is from Dubai, the cartoon is by New Zealand’s Malcolm Evans, and all sorts of things are going on when we put the two of them together, thus:

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For a start, the photographer presumably saw the same thing with his eyes and through his lens that the cartoonist saw in the mind’s eye, and then on paper. Who knows, one of them may have seen the other’s work, and that could have been what triggered their interest in capturing the same effect.

Call that the problem of simultaneous, independent vs sequential, causally connected origination. It’s a fascinating issue in archetypal psychology and cultural anthropology…

Then there’s the juxtaposition of the two images, and the fact of their close similarities and differences. Apart from the obvious difference of media, there’s the neat difference that the women in the photo reality might be thinking roughly the thoughts attributed to them in the cartoon, we’ll never know because thoughts are private — but the cartoon reality adds a “virtual” layer of text to the image, so the women’s “thoughts” and their parallelisms and oppositions are no longer tacit.

But then — hey, those two sets of thought are juxtaposed, just as the two styles of clothing are — so each of the two images I’ve juxtaposed is itself a carefully-executed juxtaposition, artfully conceived, and revealing by comparing and contrasting.

Each of those two images is a Sembl move.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about the issue of burqas and veils — or bikinis and short short skirts — yet.

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But this post is really my oblique way of introducing Martha Nussbaum‘s book, The New Religious Intolerance, which grew out of her column on veils and burqas — and tummy tucks and breast implants — Veiled threats, on the NY Times Opinionator blog.

I’d love to review it. Will I ever even find time to read it?

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Veils worn by nuns, Muslims, ninjas — and everybody in the Windy City in December. Circumcision in Islam and Judaism, metzitzah b’peh — and various forms of female genital mutilation around the world. Prayer in schools, other people’s prayers in school. Peyote and wine as taboos, as sacraments. Pork and beef, pigs and cows. Kosher, halal, voodoo — and Socrates sacrificing a cock to Asclepius…

This business of religion and society is a subtle, multi-faceted business.

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My sympathies tend to go with whoever wants to wear whatever. But then I tell myself, I have different body parts, and they have different preferences.

Perhaps more accurately — and certainly more metaphorically — I might say that I am part-angel, part-beast.

Either way, I too contain multitudes.

[ by Charles Cameron — Marisa Urgo on Zawahiri ]
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I have long been familiar with the second quote in this pair, the one by Anais Nin, and regard it as one of the touchstones of my understanding of the creative process. Anais Nin is exactly right in thinking that in terms of the arts, it is the deeply felt personal detail that profoundly touches the artist’s audience, and thus becomes universal.

It was therefore with quite a shock of recognition that I read Marisa Urgo‘s latest post in her series on Zawahiri‘s Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet. If Zawahiri’s spiritual autobiography draws this sort of response from an analyst giving it a close reading, it’s likely something we should be paying attention to.

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Marisa’s series thus far can be read in reverse order here.