Politics as an Art, Not a Science | Faith & Politics #6

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Speaker 1: Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian.

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Speaker 2: I'm Dr.

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Speaker 1: James Spencer. I'm joined by my co-host, Dr. Ashish Varma.

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Speaker 3: And today we're going to be talking about the discussion that we had with William Cavanaugh. William Cavanaugh is a theologian. He's at DePaul University. He's written a number of different books. As I mentioned on the episode, my favorite is sort of Torture and Eucharist, but I like a lot of his other stuff. And it was an interesting conversation about politics and how Christians might think about recapitulating politics. And so today we're going to just debrief on that conversation. And I think probably the first thing that comes to my mind when I talk to him was, you know, it's always hard, I think, when you talk to an author because their writing is so in-depth and thoughtful and clear. And when you talk to him, you know, it can feel a little bit more scattered. And I felt like some of the comments that he made regarding things like, you know, the church is not always in opposition to the.

00:01:04
Speaker 1: World or appropriate.

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Speaker 3: But then when you read his work, it seems very clear that part of what he's arguing for is that the church actually resists the tendencies of the economic world, the political world, the um, you know, the various operations that the world sort of tries to pull us into. And I don't think that's an exclusive act, you know, like he's just telling us to resist, just telling us to reject everything, but it certainly felt like a theme that carried through his work. And it felt a little bit softer when he talked about it. Did you get that sense as well? Or is that just me?

00:01:46
Speaker 2: I did. I got that sense. And I wonder if a little bit of that is, um, that we were working off of different ideas of world and different ideas of what it means to live within it. Because I think what we get, I mean, the very cover of his, I love the cover of his Migrations of the Holy, where you get this very strong sense that there are different programs at play. So he has, as I recall, the cross in the center of one and the American flag in the center of the other one. And I think the point he's trying to make in that book is that there are certain places that the state is going, right? The very idea of a nation state, it rules this whole first chapter. He's trying to say, we take for granted the idea of a nation state. A nation state is an ideological idea is an ideological thing is what he wants to say. It's not some neutral organization. And we talked a little bit with him. He didn't delve too much into it in our podcast, but we had asked him about, um, what does it look like to be, to be taking the idea of the nation state and to work off of it in a way in which you're not, you're obviously not going to be opposed to everything that it does, but you recognize it didn't have to be this way.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 2: And I think in the book he does, he pushes stronger to say, The reason we want to say that it doesn't have to be this way is that the nation state has certain ideals, goals, purposes. It has a way of being in the world that is meant to organize people as an exclusionary event, right? It creates an in and an out. And we see this in the frequent rhetoric. It honestly drives me nuts when I turn on the news and I hear, there was this attack at such and such a place and there were 42 casualties, three Americans died. And my immediate reaction is, let's dwell on the fact that there were 42 casualties. Why is there a special notation for three Americans dying? Well, it's because the news services know full well that the ways in which we've been formed in the ideology of nation-state is an in-out, us-them mentality, where there's something more significant about us. And I think that is what I really get a sense in the texts, that in his texts that he's trying to push against to say the church can't live in that space. And that to me is where it kind of the intersection is where his comments and in the conversation with us makes sense, right? Because I don't hear him saying overall, every moment is a battle. I think it'd be a mistake to read them that way, but I think his larger point in the book is ideologically there's a difference and to be subsumed under the one is, is to actually miss the goals of what the church is supposed to be.

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Speaker 3: And it does seem like that's why he drifts into idolatry. You do get a lot of Christian political writers who don't drift into idolatry.

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Speaker 1: And I think that that's.

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Speaker 3: An interesting sort of distinctive of some of his writing. He does tend to name that idolatry, that as we as you're saying, the ideology of the nation state, we are in essence embracing an idol. There is a glorification of something other than God that is happening in the ideology of a nation state that drives us toward different aims than glorifying God. It drives us toward a different pre-reflective, instinctual way of living in the world than conformity to Christ. And so these things are idolatrous. They are dehumanizing sort of at their very core, even though, as he mentioned on the podcast, it's not as if the nation state only ever does bad things.

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Speaker 1: I think biblically, we can't really say that.

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Speaker 3: You that the political authorities are set up to do the good thing, to pursue justice. It doesn't mean they always do that, but it assumes that they're capable of it. And so we can't just deny the fact that the nation state does good things. I think, honestly, and I appreciate your take on this, because I, you know, again, as sort of a fan of torture and Eucharist, you do see a much more resistance-oriented sort of take on what the church does in that book than maybe you see in theopolitical imagination or migrations of the holy. I would say the two I'm most familiar with, and I've read theopolitical imagination, migrations of the holy, but torture and Eucharist and being consumed really do seem like there is a an explicit call to the church for the church to resist these sort of mechanisms, these inconspicuous patterns, as I usually refer to them that are forming us into something different than we actually are.

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Speaker 2: So, so I haven't read those ones, so I just have to lean on your expertise on them. The key word that I hear from you is formation.

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Speaker 3: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: And that's something that we've talked in various contexts about on this podcast that, formation, I think, is the distinguishing marker. What are you formed into? And within that, then, is a gloss on identity, because your formation says something about who you are. Who do you see yourself as? Why do you see yourself in this way? So my guess, just trying to read into it from his other works, and even the way that you and I talked about off-air, the way that he organizes and populates as Erdmann's reader for political theology, What was really refreshing to me in that, and I think it dovetails into this conversation, is that he recognizes that there are voices that are formed outside of our sense of normalcy. Yeah. against a kind of regime that had a different effect on them than it might have had here in the Western world, North America, especially in the United States, where in a real sense, we can speak of ourselves if we think of a global economic empire. We are in the middle of it. Now, there's certainly a battle in the middle for what's the middle, and that's its own conversation. But these other voices that he brings in are people who are decidedly not in the middle. They're the periphery. They're the ones who are on the outside. And what is it that they're contending for? How is it that they see things? And honestly, their locations are in some ways closer to the biblical milieu than ours, right? When you think about Jesus is on the periphery of empire as well. Paul's on the periphery of empire as well. And even to the degree that Paul has citizenship in that empire, apart from using it, occasionally for his purposes. He's not living in that space, making rules, dictating terms. He's reactive. And that's how some of these other voices are. They're reactive. So it becomes really interesting in our environment to think about that, that perhaps one of the big differences is audience. So if he's writing about the reactive posture in places where you're on the periphery, maybe he's trying to kind of knock on the head people who are in the center of global economic empire and say, hey, you know what? There's another way to view yourself and your formation is what's at stake here.

00:10:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's an interesting take. I think that... I agree with it.

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Speaker 3: I mean, I think that, you know, the liberation theologians among us do have a pretty unique perspective that they're trying to bring to the world and help everybody else understand. And it sort of connects into a statement that he made on the podcast. He mentioned something about, you know, I'd asked him about clear, what practical steps would you give to people as they're going into the midterms to vote? And, you know, he said something like, I'm not sure I can answer that without sounding partisan.

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Speaker 1: And I actually think he really meant that. Yeah.

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Speaker 3: Now, and here's how I think he meant that. Just having read his work and even just the tone of the conversation yesterday, he is not the sort of person who's saying the Republican Party is wrong and the Democratic Party is right or vice versa.

00:11:09
Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: He's the sort of person that's saying, I don't even think he's saying there's a third rail. What I think he's saying is almost what he led off saying, is that the gospel is inherently political. That the kingdom of God is a political entity that exists within the world. And that the way that we operate in the world speaks to and embodies Christ within public life. And so we can't just think in terms of the polarities. that we may be presented in political debate.

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Speaker 1: We've got to be thinking theologically about what our activities are.

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Speaker 3: And sometimes those theological activities are going to align with one side or the other.

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Speaker 1: We need to understand that not as partisan politics.

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Speaker 3: We need to understand that as a working out of our theological imagination within the world.

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Speaker 1: There's always going to be this sort of bleed over.

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Speaker 3: Where it can get confusing whether or not we're working as a particular political entity and political party, because we're going to be working alongside people who.

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Speaker 1: Maybe incidentally share this value with us.

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Speaker 3: But the reality is that a Christian who goes down to help, you know, do humanitarian work for a hurricane is doing something fundamentally different than just random, you know, Joe Public who goes down and does the same thing.

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Speaker 1: And it's often hard to understand that difference.

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Speaker 3: But that's what I heard him saying when he was saying, look, it's going to be hard for me to answer that without sounding partisan.

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Speaker 1: What I heard him.

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Speaker 3: Saying was a lot of this theology is going to overlap with one political party or the other. And that makes it sound partisan. Right. But the reality is that these are things that Christians should be thinking about, should be acting upon, and should be reflecting about beyond the political sphere and the political discourse that we have in society today.

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Speaker 1: Was that how you sort of took him or am I over-interpreting that?

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Speaker 2: No, that was how I took him as well. I think the key word you used is incidental.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:13:29
Speaker 2: That it's not him approaching the situation saying, I am fill-in-the-blank political party member. And therefore, I affirm the values of those political parties, this political party. Rather incidentally, it was, I am someone who's being attentive to what we should recognize as holy if we say that we are followers of Jesus.

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Speaker 1: That's right.

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Speaker 2: And insofar as Jesus actually says stuff and his followers say stuff, and we collectively have understood what they say recorded as scripture— I want to take these things seriously. I thought it was important that he said, you know, he sort of tongue in cheek said, of course, the Catholic church has never had problems in the past, which he knew full well that it did. And he was, you know, he certainly didn't mean that it hasn't. And for him, that was sort of, it was a tacit recognition of where the Catholic church and posture to it is now versus maybe when Luther was reacting to it, that he has the ability to, in the current climate to be able to say that the church was, has been wrong and stuff.

00:14:39
Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 2: And then we could start to lay, we could, we could start to line up all these issues in which no one in their right mind would want to say the church is right about this.

00:14:49
Speaker 3: Right. Right.

00:14:50
Speaker 2: But the honesty there was able for, for him to be able to say, the reason I can say that it's wrong is because we have these recordings that What it is that shows closeness to the heart of Jesus. Or I think about when we were talking to Allison Barr, where she had mentioned that, look, at the end of the day, what do we look for? We look for fruit of the Spirit that tells you something about the truth. And that's sort of how I heard him. The fruit of the Spirit of those who are wanting to draw close to Jesus to recognize what is in fact the Holy. entails these different things, right? These postures that in our current world work themselves out to the way that he wanted to say, you know, like I've got solar panels because I think being attentive to energy is important and how we get it and whether it's helpful to the earth or not, you know, where I buy from matters, you know, what, where I have my investments for retirement are matter. These are material things. And incidentally, those happen to draw him closer to one political party. But to your point, I didn't hear him as saying, I am that political party member and I'm going to advocate for it. I heard him saying, I'm advocating for the things that I see Jesus and the apostles advocating for. And the way that works itself out today where I am means that I have a clear path for voting. Which I think it's worth saying, it's enriching to hear. It wasn't one issue. It was a conglomeration of issues, which isn't to say that there might be other things on the other side of the aisle that he doesn't agree with. Invariably, he probably does. But it was the overwhelming preponderance of this party more than the other one is accomplishing, or at least seeking to accomplish those tasks, is what I heard from him.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and what I found interesting about that is I didn't get the sense that he was saying.

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Speaker 1: Vote for one party over another. Right.

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Speaker 3: What I got the impression of saying was these things are important regardless of which party advocates for them and regardless of whether either party advocates for them. I think it's a stretch to look at, you know, Politicians from either Democratic or the Republican Party and suggest that any of them consistently would advocate and live out, you know, the sort of things that he's suggesting.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: And I think that that gets to that sort of incidental nature.

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Speaker 3: And so to me, what he's doing, which is a distinction we made early on in the podcast, is this distinction between the strictly political. which is the policy debates between our various representatives and senators and politicians and all that kind of stuff, that sort of political realm versus our public life, which is even a distinction that we talked to Michael Rhodes and he makes this distinction. I think it's actually a really helpful distinction. How we live life publicly matters. And all of those things he's talking about are ways that we can live life publicly. ways that we can allow our theology to sort of unwind itself into very practical, tangible moves in our lives that do not exhaust our theology in any way, shape, or form, but certainly express it in some at least minor ways as we're sort of on the path looking for additional alternatives to live as the Bible tells us to live. And I think that's a real important sort of distinction. I read him and listen to him as saying, look, this is the public life of Christians. When you start voting, it gets real complicated.

00:19:05
Speaker 1: He didn't say that.

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Speaker 3: I'm putting those words in his mouth, but it would get real complicated because you're looking at two sides of Generally, at two sides, I suppose we could count independents or whatever, libertarians in the voting parties.

00:19:22
Speaker 2: At least on the national level.

00:19:24
Speaker 1: Right.

00:19:25
Speaker 2: When you get to the local level, it's more than two sides, and that's significant.

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Speaker 3: But at the national level, what we normally see on the news and what we hear about, these feel to me like politicians who have various shades of difference that really don't make a whole lot of sense. they really don't distinguish them from one another that much. I think we're seeing that hard difference between like a Biden and a Trump because the things that they differ on have become much more visible publicly and they've been keyed on.

00:19:59
Speaker 1: By the news media.

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Speaker 3: But it's hard to envision really hard distinctions between some of the other politicians between Democratic and Republican senators, for instance, or what have you, except on very peculiar issues. They seem to all be operating within a very clear system, right, that is part lobby, right, part sort of virtue signaling, part maintaining your voting public, and part doing some really good stuff. And so, you know, you've got that sort of intermingling, but I didn't, when I was listening to him, I was hearing him say, look, these are the things that we could do theologically in public. These are some of the things we could do theologically in public, as opposed to this is the way politically we should move.

00:20:52
Speaker 1: Agreed.

00:20:53
Speaker 2: And he didn't come out and advocate for a political group, right? So again, it was his recognition that what he was going to say is going to tip his hat towards a certain group. that has certain priorities in the present that the other doesn't. But I think that's important that he didn't tip his hat because I think his larger point regarding the political, and we've made this point before, but I think it's worth bearing forth again, we've tended in our moment to conflate the idea of the political with the very specific machinations of how we see, especially the federal, but also to a certain degree the state, branches of government working and we see them in terms of cycles right the two-year cycles the four-year cycles the six-year cycles and i that's not how he was talking about political no it's not and it's not the older usage of the term right the older uses the term political has as its base polis from the greek word for city and And in that particular ancient setting, the city was the basic unit of administrative ordering of peoples. So we think of Greece, but there wasn't Greece. There were these different, what we think of now as Greek city-states.

00:22:13
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:22:14
Speaker 2: Rome was Rome. Rome wasn't Italy. Rome was Rome. And then it had conquered beyond those boundaries.

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Speaker 3: Correct.

00:22:22
Speaker 2: And we could say the same for all these other empires. But the idea here at play was that the whole reality of the city was itself an administrative district of public life. So it's people who are joined together and the political life was the public life of what it means to live together within these confines, right? This is what distinguishes people of this city versus that political unit over there. And with that huge caveat, I think if we bring that forth into the present and that broader sense that Kavanaugh was speaking out of and that we've tried to speak out of, The political life is bigger than two- and four- and six-year election cycles. It's bigger than legislative and executive and judicial processes. It entails the basic things that are involved in communal living. And by communal living, I mean here in Chicagoland, where I am, we have issues. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I just mean we have people here. And the people here are of the demographic distributions that they are and the economic distributions that they are. And that presents us with the challenges that what we want is our local governments to attend to those. But by no means does that mean that we're expecting the local government to do everything. The idea is that the local government makes it possible for us within our communities to do what we need to do.

00:23:55
Speaker 1: That's right.

00:23:57
Speaker 2: And I think the way that Kavanaugh was talking about was taking for granted that notion of the political. And that notion then led to him to be able to say, here are the things that my church does. Not perfectly, but it's been really important. Here are the things that I try to do, right? So there are these different circles, if you think of concentric circles, of spheres of influence. Here's what I can do, me and my family. Here's what me and my church community can do. And as you broaden that out, on a local level, here's what we can expect now of those that we seek to elect to represent us to do things that are beyond our scope. And in that sense, he could say, these are priorities that we see as theologically derived. And in that sense, again, the incidental. Once you telescope out, it became apparent where he would vote. But that wasn't the focus.

00:24:50
Speaker 3: That wasn't at all his focus. And I think it's important just to drive home your point I think about how I feel when I watch somebody throw trash on the ground. There's something really annoying about that and almost disrespectful. You see somebody just litter, just intentionally litter, not something flying out of their car because they're going fast and it just happens to fly out the window, but just throwing their trash on the ground. That is in some sense a political act in that old sense of the term. It's a pretty minor political act. But if you think about what that's doing, it's a way of interacting publicly and with your neighbors that basically says, my trash can go here and I don't really care what you think about it. It suggests a breach of decorum, a breach of almost collegiality between neighbors that is a very small, not insignificant act that says, here's what I think about this polis. And I think to your point, we want our, you know, maybe we want our local government to say, hey, we're going to have littering laws and we're going to find people who litter and we're going to try to use this as a deterrent. But if we look beyond that littering law, why is that done? It's because individuals aren't honoring the polis. And I think that's the sort of tension that we have to live in as Christians is, yes, there's going to be these moments where we want our local, state, federal governments to do things, right? Speed limits are probably a good idea. You know, the analogy I often use is, you know, defining which side of the road to drive on, probably a good idea. That should not be left up to my arbitrary judgment. Today, I'd like to drive on the left side of the road no matter what anybody.

00:26:57
Speaker 1: Else is doing.

00:26:58
Speaker 3: That's not a good thing for us to have in our society. There has to be a level of coordination and enforcement and orderliness that the government sort of applies to that. But the government is not the only thing that has to operate there because you can't enforce everything. You know, I don't, you know, it's always the joke, like who gets a ticket for jaywalking?

00:27:26
Speaker 1: No one. It's because.

00:27:29
Speaker 3: You can't enforce every single minutia law. What you're trying to do is say, hey, look, it's we're going to have a more orderly society if everybody just uses the crosswalks, even when it's inconvenient. Right. And so I think there's this sort of notion of polis that we need to recapture that Kavanaugh is writing about and that he gestured to in the podcast that is that.

00:27:52
Speaker 1: Broader public life.

00:27:54
Speaker 3: What can we do individually, locally, statewide, federally that are going to contribute to the broad polis that is the world, but also care for our local polis that is maybe our subdivisions, city, what have you. And it's all of those layers that sort of come together. As Christians, we could say we're resident aliens. I mean, that's a phrase that Howard Ross has used. But it also comes out of Philippians, right?

00:28:29
Speaker 1: We're a colony.

00:28:32
Speaker 3: We're sitting within an empire and we're waiting for our entry. We're actually citizens of heaven. We just have to live here. And so as citizens of heaven, what does it mean for us to represent our true citizenship within the context of different poli? I guess it would be the plural of polis, right? Within these different entities, what does.

00:28:58
Speaker 1: It look like?

00:29:00
Speaker 3: So how would we represent our citizenship in heaven as we live our lives within a given polis? And really demonstrate what it looks like to have our citizenship in heaven worked out within tangible ways within a given environment.

00:29:20
Speaker 1: And I think that, as I reflect on what he said in the.

00:29:24
Speaker 3: Podcast and what he's written in his books, I think that's where Kavanaugh sort of pushes us and.

00:29:32
Speaker 1: Hopefully helps us to land.

00:29:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to set another anecdote next to your littering one. I think that was a good one because it gets down to the nitty gritty every day.

00:29:43
Speaker 1: Right.

00:29:43
Speaker 2: And to your point, it's really unenforceable to have littering laws with the kind of force that we have. Apparently some places like Singapore managed to enforce it really well.

00:29:55
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:29:55
Speaker 2: Um, maybe that's something worth looking into. Maybe it's not, I don't know. But to put next to that, I mean, I think about my own anecdote is that we're created to be carers of the rest of creation, right? It's clear that we don't see better. We're not faster. We don't hear better. We're not stronger than the other creatures of the earth. You know, we're better at some of those things than some of them, but there's, there are creatures that do all those things better than us. So it's clear that being, Being given this special status as image bearers in Genesis 1, carrying into what that looks like in Genesis 2, is not meant to mean some sort of physical superiority.

00:30:37
Speaker 1: That's right.

00:30:39
Speaker 2: And you and I have worked through that quite a bit, so there's no need to rehash it. But what's significant is that there is this distinct sense specifically of care, to work the ground up. to care for the animals, to name them, has a certain level of intimacy. To even recognize the emotional gap, I think, is ultimately what's at play in Genesis 2, between us and the animals, in that naming. And that we need others like us, is to put us all on this gigantic web, right? What Wurzba would talk about as enmeshing, entanglement. And now let's put that in contrast to our modern lives, and whatever steps it took to get here, As again, something maybe worth exploring at another time and place. Now we can go from point A to point B without any direct contact with the environment that we're in.

00:31:31
Speaker 1: That's right. Right.

00:31:35
Speaker 2: I remain forever just an embarrassment of myself of this day when I was a first year, just finished my first year of my PhD studies and we were doing this Labor Day picnic. And it was the first time in my life I had an attached garage to park in. And I managed to drive 15 miles and not realize that it was chilly out. And I show up in shorts and a t-shirt. How can we do that? That says something about our abstraction from our environments, from our places. But you think about the contrast between, and that's all set up for the anecdotes. Here we are as created to be caretakers of the rest of creation. And I want to keep saying rest of because we're part of it, not above it, not outside it. And yet we have the capacity to harm creation and to do so even to the point of not knowing we're doing it, right? You drive down the road and you see dead squirrel, dead rabbit. Of course, the dead deer, we can see that. That one we know happens, but it's entirely plausible.

00:32:38
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:32:39
Speaker 2: We didn't know that. And I remember this day I was walking home from the train after work and there was a squirrel and the squirrels get confused by the cars, right? They dart back and forth as soon as they see a car coming and they're quick, but because they're darting back and forth confusion, sometimes they'll get hit. And I watched one where the car clipped the squirrel's leg and I'm walking down the sidewalk and my hands immediately go up and I just, my mouth agape.

00:33:03
Speaker 3: Whoa.

00:33:03
Speaker 1: Whoa.

00:33:06
Speaker 2: And the squirrel's not dead. It's one leg clearly broken, and now it's gimping in the road. And here comes the next car because of where that squirrel is and can't move, and it finishes the job, puts it out of its misery. And I'm just... To me, I wouldn't call it traumatizing in the sense that it stayed with me in this deep emotional way, but it was upsetting, right? And I have no reason to think that the car is meant to do it. But they did it. And the fact that they could do it ignorantly... is a great travesty of what has happened to us as opposed to what we were made to be. But what was especially upsetting was the third car that came. And in that third car was someone that I knew. You know him too, but we'll leave names away. And that person realized what was happening because he saw me from a distance, saw my reaction differently. looked on the road, saw the squirrel, and then saw it finished off. And his reaction was, this is hilarious. And he starts dying laughing. And the next day at work, he brings it up, thinking it's hilarious, laughing. And that to me is the contrast, right?

00:34:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.

00:34:15
Speaker 2: To be political creatures is to be cognizant of and caring of your space and your place.

00:34:21
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:34:22
Speaker 2: And all that is entailed within that. And that means don't just throw the littering stuff on the ground. Be attentive to what we're doing to the environment with emissions. It doesn't mean there's simple answers. These lithium batteries are pretty damaging in their production processes to the environment. It's not clear that that's the ultimate solution. But be attentive to it. Be attentive to these machines that get us from point A to point B faster than humanity has ever before been able to do that abstract you from your place and make it so that you're accidentally killing the creatures we were supposed to take care of. Think about it in the way that we care for our lawns. These are the things that telescope out from the way that I'm hearing Kavanaugh that was really refreshing to larger political acts that we generally tend to think of. It's the micro-political acts of the polis that he was concerned about that generated the bigger. For him, that came from theological conviction.

00:35:23
Speaker 3: I keep going back to the conversation we had with Norman Worspa, which will be after this podcast. So people won't be able to listen to it unless they've got the membership that allows them to listen to all of our stuff.

00:35:38
Speaker 2: We're time traveling.

00:35:39
Speaker 1: That's right. We're talking about the future. Yes.

00:35:42
Speaker 3: But one of the things he brought up was this notion of like source, right? Looking beyond, like if you're sitting down to eat, think about all that went into getting that food on your plate.

00:35:56
Speaker 1: Like recognize the effort. And I think more frequently what I've.

00:36:02
Speaker 3: Been finding is that I do that with the technology that I'm using, right? Technology can feel very distant, like you're just interacting with, you know, zeros and ones or whatever, you know, circuitry and digital mind you're trying to engage. But the reality is there are embodied and fleshed humans that are coding these things in. There are natural resources being used to do something as mundane as cooling a data center. There are actual processes and resources going into everything that seems so easy for us to use. I don't think that should mean that we stop using it, but I do think that it needs to become a bigger part of our conversations. It's something that we need to be cognizant of and understanding how much is actually going into this before we buy in a hundred percent. You know, he, um, Kavanaugh talked a lot about, you know, Amazon. He mentioned Amazon. He doesn't buy off Amazon and those kinds of things. I do buy off Amazon.

00:37:11
Speaker 1: Right. Um, and so I will freely admit that.

00:37:14
Speaker 3: Um, but I get why he doesn't, I understand it. Uh, I just don't know that, um, I can remember when the whole target kerfuffle came up a few years ago and there were these podcasters that were calling for target.

00:37:32
Speaker 1: To be sort of banned. I think it was around LGBTQ issues or something like that. Right. And my big question when I was listening to it was, so where do you shop? Right.

00:37:44
Speaker 2: You can't get away from it. There is a problem with every corporate company. That's what we're going to do. Right.

00:37:52
Speaker 3: And so there's, There's a sense in which I think we, and I don't say this flippantly, I think we have to move from our convictions and sort of pick our poison.

00:38:03
Speaker 1: Right.

00:38:04
Speaker 3: I mean, much respect to the people who are going to go out in their backyards and grow their gardens and raise their chickens and live a fairly sustainable lifestyle apart from having to go to a big chain grocery store or something like that. I don't live like that. You know, my sense is that you don't live like that. A lot of people don't live like that. And I think that cultivating a cognizance of the implications of how we're living and allowing that to sort of sink into us so that we begin to change our behavior is probably the more reasonable reaction than living off the grid. And I think that was... part of his point, like you don't have to live in a tent. I remember him saying that at one point or live in a mansion, right?

00:38:58
Speaker 1: Tree house. That's right.

00:39:00
Speaker 3: And, and I think that was really helpful, you know, um, because we're, we have to sort of realize that all of these things that are happening around us in the world are in some ways going to be problematic. And even if we pulled completely off the grid, We're never going to get to a point where we are living with the land as we used to live with it in the Garden of Eden.

00:39:26
Speaker 1: We don't get there. And so it. just isn't possible. That's what fallenness is, right? And so....

00:39:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's just part of me that really appreciated his comments on that. And I think that we need to leave that up to individual discernment for Christians. And when I say that, I really do mean that we need individual discernment on it. It shouldn't just be our default. It should be something we come to. It should be something we question. It should be something we think about. It doesn't have to be our obsession necessarily. But it does need to be something that we are truly, deeply cognizant about and, on some level, thankful for.

00:40:13
Speaker 2: Tell me what you think about this. I don't want to put words in Kavanaugh's mouth, so I'm not at all saying that he was saying what I'm about to say. But this was the sense that I got. Okay, background to the sense that I got. We have a tendency in our modern world— and again, by modern, I mean— epoch of way of the ways in which we envision shaping reality right um in our modern world we're very much geared towards helping us have some level of control how do i know that i know controlling knowledge having objectivity being able to separate the things that are subjective from the things that are objective gather things that are universal that are neutral ostensibly I have my doubts about that project.

00:41:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:41:04
Speaker 2: But that's at least the ways in which we tend to default. I'll never forget the day that I, in the morning, I was listening to the news radio, and every morning it would be, here's the latest study. And one of them was, researchers have discerned that kids who go to bed earlier tend to be more energetic the next day. Exactly my reaction.

00:41:29
Speaker 1: Shocker.

00:41:30
Speaker 2: We needed to spend how much money on that one? I think every parent in the history of humanity has been saying that.

00:41:39
Speaker 1: Hey, guess what? The parents are more energetic than the next D2. Amazing, right?

00:41:47
Speaker 2: It makes sense. If we get full rest, then we are more energetic.

00:41:52
Speaker 1: Great.

00:41:54
Speaker 2: But why do we need that kind of study is the real question. Because of the ways in which we've got a stranglehold on the production of knowledge, the bases from which we determine knowledge counts as knowledge, and then how we can then use that to create a fuller society, a polis. What I heard Kavanaugh saying, and it at the very least is the way that I want to think of things like the theological enterprise, is that We need to spend less time thinking about public life, political life, theological life, church life as a science, and more time thinking of it as an art.

00:42:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:42:39
Speaker 2: Now, art is hard to control, and art will have interpretations, and art will have more obvious disagreements, though it's worth noting scientific discourses have tons of disagreements.

00:42:49
Speaker 3: Right.

00:42:49
Speaker 2: That's where we get these monographs and these peer-reviewed journals. There's no settling of issues.

00:42:56
Speaker 3: Right.

00:42:59
Speaker 2: Or if there is a settling, it creates new issues. But in the artistic realm, there is an attentiveness to recognizing what is beautiful. But what is beautiful, ostensibly, right? I realize that in the arts, people would say, we're not trying to make what's beautiful. But ostensibly, what is beautiful is related to what is good and what is related to what is true. Mm-hmm. And if we spend less time thinking about the political as a science to control with our studies and with our carefully formulated ecosystems in which we have our news channel that tells us what we want to hear and reports on our issues from our angle, and we think of more as life together as an art that's imprecise, that can be beautiful, then we can start to arrive at the sorts of things that I think we're driving Kavanaugh's conclusions uh the ways that he sought to to live out the political life on on these telescopic or concentric ways right moving from the personal to the communal and the ecclesial and ultimately the way that he saw his involvement in the state without the control mechanisms what do you think about.

00:44:15
Speaker 1: That I agree.

00:44:16
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that we didn't talk a ton about the true, the good, and the beautiful, but I think that that factors in a good bit to what we need to be thinking about. You know, for Christians to recognize what God has already set forth as good, true, and beautiful is important. We need to recognize that aspect of reality wherever it's found. And then we need to lean into it, play into it. Our posture needs to be toward it, not against it. And I think that sometimes we get a little too analytical, to your point, a little too, there's a great line in one of the, it's a book on the matter with things. It's written by, boy, I'm going to blank on the guy's name, but the matter with things is the book title. And the author writes something like, we tend to think that we can control the world by pulling levers and pushing buttons. But every time we try to control the world, we end up messing more things up because we don't really understand the world. In other words, our manipulations of the world tend to create more problems because as we try to manipulate it, we're doing so from such a deficit in understanding that that we can't see how pulling this lever and pushing this button only solves some sort of a near-term problem for us, but they create these long-term problems for us. And I think that there's something to that, right? And so this understanding of the world, I don't think can be encapsulated in the sort of analytics that science tends to focus on. It can include it, but it can't encompass it. it has to also include these sort of art forms that you're talking about. This notion of when I look out and I look at a beautiful blue sky, I can legitimately call it beautiful and recognize it as such. And I don't need any other sort of, I don't need to know why the sky is blue. I don't need to understand the science behind clouds. I don't need to understand how the physics work. I don't need to know any of those other things. I can just simply recognize that the world that God has given us is beautiful, that there is an order to it, and that I need to live into that order. And so I think that there is definitely something to that. And when I hear Kavanaugh talk, I don't think he's trying to, and maybe this is an aspect of the point that you're not emphasizing as much, but it's one that I've thought about a good bit, so I'll throw it in there. I don't think he was saying, look, everybody, here's how we fix the world. I think what he's saying is aligned with something more like our responsibility is not to fix the world. It's to live faithfully in a world so broken only God can fix it. And so when we try to manipulate to fix, when we try to manipulate to make our situation better, when we try to manipulate to assert our self-sufficiency or feel more secure or We're inevitably doing something to the world that may not actually be helping the world. It's only helping us. And we are not particularly good at long suffering within the broken relationship that is our fallen condition and saying, these are the consequences that we must live with because of our sins. We're more inclined to say, I don't see why I should live with these consequences if I could overcome them technologically.

00:48:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, he mentioned, to your point, that pretty provocative tagline of the fall is a hopeful or a … It's optimistic. I can't remember the exact word, but it was an optimistic. That's what it was, an optimistic doctrine, which on the face of it seems utterly bizarre.

00:48:35
Speaker 1: What do you mean?

00:48:36
Speaker 2: But his point, his defense of it was, I thought, quite compelling. And that's to say that the reality of fallenness and the reality of the fall actually points to the possibility of something better. And to your point, the question is, what is that better? Is it something that we create that better, or is it something that we witness to?

00:48:55
Speaker 1: That's right.

00:48:57
Speaker 2: And I think that larger point is it's something we witness to, such that, here we go, ready for this? As Gandalf says, we have a fool's hope.

00:49:05
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:49:07
Speaker 2: There's a fool's hope, right? And what I think he means by the fool's hope is that it's not our strivings that accomplish this new thing, but that doesn't mean don't strive.

00:49:18
Speaker 1: That's right.

00:49:20
Speaker 2: Because what our strivings do is they testify to the hope of something that can't be fulfilled from within our structures and systems that can only come from the outside that's right right so to me personally i was doing this the other day when i was playing some basketball in the park at night I looked up and I realized Venus was shining bright in the sky and utterly glorious. And the way that Tolkien tries to draw this out, this fool's hope is to remind us, he, he, he says more academically, he says without Thor lightning and thunder are just lightning and thunder.

00:49:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:49:56
Speaker 2: But when Thor enters into the mix, we now have a story around it that enriches our imagination, allows us to think that there's more at play than just, the physics of it which by the way the physics of all that in the blue sky is actually a beautiful thing so that's not a generation of that it's quite awe-inspiring but the larger point is it's an enchanting it's a recognizing there's more than just this and so he does this when he when we see venus he wants us to see the light of arendelle and we won't go into that right now but for him the light of arendelle is a point of saying there is hope but that hope comes from outside the the structures that rule our enclosures of the world That's right. And for me to be able to look up and see Venus and to have all that rich narrative behind it is beautiful. It's really hopeful to me. And that's the fool's hope. But the point again is don't stop striving. Don't seek to make pictures of what is to come. But it's just that, right? Don't lose sight of the fact that it's also pictures of what is to come. And what comes, comes from outside the structures. And that's the work of God in Christ by his holy breath.

00:51:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting.

00:51:06
Speaker 3: And maybe we close with this because we're getting toward the end of time here. But I would say I've been teaching through Hebrews. And one of the things that Hebrews emphasizes is you have these sacrifices that had to be performed year over year over year over year, daily, weekly, ongoing by a priest who is incapable even of forgiving his own sins. He's got to make sacrifice even for himself. And then he's got to make sacrifices for the people. And that these sacrifices were not bad or evil in some way. And they could not be set aside. They had to be practiced. But in the practice of them, there's a gesturing forward. there's this notion that even though you have to continue putting the effort in, and even though you know that this effort is never ending, it can actually accomplish what you're hoping it will accomplish. It can't go beyond its own capabilities. We could say it like that. It has an efficaciousness, but it's a limited efficaciousness. And you're always looking for something more. And so you're grateful that, for the effort that you're able to put in. You're grateful that these things have been provided to you. You're grateful that you get to participate in these things at the same time that you're lamenting the fact that you have to.

00:52:29
Speaker 1: And you're looking forward to a time when you don't.

00:52:33
Speaker 3: It's sort of this weird mix of emotions that we have as we read the book of Hebrews, I think, which is saying, you know, not everything that was pre-Christ was horrible. But it's saying everything that was pre-Christ was pointing to Jesus, and now we have him. And life has now changed. The things that people were looking forward to, part of those have come. And so we're not living in this world where we have to continue doing these sort of actions that we were.

00:53:04
Speaker 1: Doing ad nauseum.

00:53:05
Speaker 3: We now have a certain degree of difference within our lives. where that sort of effort doesn't need to be put in, but other sorts of effort do, because we still haven't achieved what Christ has achieved. We're now looking forward in a slightly different manner to what has gone on. We have a clearer picture of what these things were pointing to. And that changes now even more how we live in this, not a torturous world, but a world where we.

00:53:35
Speaker 1: Definitely feel the effects.

00:53:38
Speaker 3: Of the sins that we have committed. And I think that that is sort of that biblical way of saying fool's hope, right? It's this notion of the effort is put in without ever thinking the effort is going to achieve or even maybe knowing that the effort is not going to achieve what you're hoping for long term. But the effort is not meaningless. It just can't be ultimate. And those are two very different things. So, um, so yeah, I mean, I think, and I think that's instructive for the way we think about polis and politics and political engagement. And I really do think that Kavanaugh is, um, especially in his work, but also in the podcast has, and was pointing towards some of those aspects. And so I very much appreciate that about him and his work and, and that conversation.

00:54:34
Speaker 2: So, Great.

00:54:35
Speaker 1: I thought it was, it was an honor having him on. I was glad he agreed to come on. You know, we were both a little bit.

00:54:41
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:54:41
Speaker 1: I mean, I was fanboying out a little bit. I tried not to let it show, but.

00:54:46
Speaker 2: Oh, it should.

00:54:47
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:54:47
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, listen, you know, if we ever get Stanley Harawas on the podcast, you'll see a little more, it's going to be more inappropriate. So anyway, well, that's our debrief on Kavanaugh. And so if you haven't listened to that episode, check it out. If you have, hopefully this was helpful to reframe some things. And keep coming back. We're doing the series on faith and politics. So next episode, we're going to have somebody else on talking about faith and politics.

00:55:16
Speaker 1: From different angles.

00:55:18
Speaker 3: We've got some great guests that have been on the show thus far and some more good ones coming. So stick around. Come back for the next episode of Thinking Christian and take care until then.