New Quaker Notebook

While Iraqi Bloggers Central laments the loss of voice of bloggers in Iraq, the 25-year-old dentist, Dr. Mohammed, is still blogging from Baghdad at Last-of-Iraqis. It's still an ugly American presence there, despite the pleasant-scent of news reports about the "surge." This report from last week is appalling:

Today I heard about something that I couldn't find a reason for till this moment, and I believe I won't.

One of my relatives who lives in Saidia and who had to leave their home (which is a very luxurious and rich house) for 6 months now because of the violence and the impossible to live-in conditions of Saidia and who used to visit their home every week or two to check it and be sure that every thing is alright, yesterday they received a call from the only neighbor who still lives in their block, he told them that the US troops with the National guards had broken their house to enter it, he also told them that they should come tomorrow because it's very important that they come, they didn't think anything serious had happened, they though that they have just broken the lock pads or the doors and they should come to re-lock it.

Today's morning they went, they went first to that only neighbor and took him with them, they reached the house and they were shocked, in fact they went crazy, the door was broken, all the windows were broken, when I say all I mean all, every single window was broken, they entered the house and they saw the unbelievable, every single thing in the house was broken, everything, the antiques (so many in their house), the crystal vases and cups, the expensive luxurious furniture ; every thing is broken and destroyed, the closets were completely wrecked, even the kitchen counters were pulled from the wall and thrown on the floor and everything in it is destroyed, even the door handles were twisted and broken although everything inside the house is not locked!!

They were crying and screaming, it's a disaster, I have seen their house before and if I want to estimate the value of their furniture and antiques I would say at least half million dollars at the minimum, they asked the neighbor about what had happened, he told them that yesterday the US troops and the National guards had broken the door and entered the house when they found that there is no one home they started breaking the windows and the furniture for no reason, the neighbor was watching but he couldn't do anything, they destroyed every thing and left the house to search the rest of the houses in the block, the did the same with every empty house, they destroyed the furniture of every empty house.

I don't know why did they do that? I was thinking and looking for a reason why did they do that? But till now I couldn't find any. If they wanted to search, then they could without destroying anything, there was nothing locked!! I don't know why.

I asked them about the conditions there, and about the awakening and their role, they told me that the conditions are miserable, the streets are empty and all the shops are closed, it looks more like an army barracks than a neighborhood. The awakening in Saidia had failed, majority of them were killed and the rest had resigned and escaped, their checkpoints are just empty destroyed spots now as they said, they said that as they were going out of Saidia and they saw a convoy of US tanks moving very fast and destroy everything in front of them, they saw the tanks crushes the cars and destroy the fences of houses for no reason!!!!???

Surely the loss of households in Iraq has skewed the casualty numbers of the recent Iraq Family Health Survey, which is reporting 151,000 violent Iraqi deaths since the 2003 coalition invasion, despite the report's use of the growth balance method in order to avoid underreporting deaths through this survey of a genuinely nonstable population. Just Foreign Policy keeps a current estimate of Iraqi deaths, now at over a million people. Antiwar.com maintains a daily casualty report.

What Would Jesus Blah Blah?

During the most recent Yuletide season, still another What Would Jesus Do (WWJD) plea appeared in print, this time as a Christmas story about the 2008 presidential candidates and where they stand on illegal immigration. The author of the piece doesn't directly answer the WWJD question, but gets to it in this way:

Unlike President Bush and many others, I cannot claim to be in direct conversation with God. Nonetheless, I find it unimaginable that Jesus would attack anyone for supporting in-state tuition for "illegals" (as Romney has recently done to Huckabee), or castigate someone for employing workers who crossed a national territorial divide without government sanction (as Giuliani has recently done to Romney). Nor would Jesus pat any candidate's back for trying to repel "aliens" with walls and fences along the US-Mexico boundary and ever-more border and immigration agents (which all major candidates support to varying degrees)—practices that have resulted in thousands of migrant deaths over the last decade, and a huge increase in deportations—and with it, divided families. Indeed, I can't even envision Jesus accepting "illegal" or "alien" as terms for classifying human beings.

The parable of Christmas—as it recounts Mary's and Joseph's search for shelter—concerns itself with, among other matters, how we treat uninvited guests who arrive on our proverbial doorsteps. And the parable's message is clear as to what to do. As ordained Baptist minister Mike Huckabee—whose new campaign commercial says "no" to sanctuary cities and amnesty, and calls for building a border fence—said in St Petersburg, the Bible teaches us (as do the best traditions of all major religions and humanist ethical codes) to "Love your neighbor as yourself."

His point is that "those who profess to love God and embrace Jesus and the Bible as their ethical sources" should "stop invoking them or ... live up to the principles you claim" begin "seeing and treating so-called illegals as our brothers, sisters, neighbors, and members of our various communities," not as people to be excluded from our social system.

There are a number of things wrong with this, including Christmas as a parable, the Golden Rule as a governmental policy test, and whether imagining what Jesus would do is really a sufficient test for answering the WWJD question. But I want to focus on the more important issue here: Why we shouldn't rely on the WWJD as an accurate moral measure.

One would think already that the imitation of Christ is our proper ethical standard, but emulating Christ is not the same as realizing WWJD dicta. As detailed in Thomas à Kempis' important 1418 devotional work, The Imitation of Christ is less an ethics than a guide to the virtue of practical wisdom (or phronesis in classical Greek). Peter recommended the imitation of Christ as a means toward becoming holy:

Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: "Be holy, because I am holy." [1 Peter 1:13-16]

Paul too said as much: "Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God" [Ephesians 5:1-2]. The author of Hebrews [6:12] advises us also "to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised." Imitating (or following) Christ is not the same as asking WWJD.

"Christian America! Is it a reproach on the form of our discipleship that the exhibition of actual suffering for Jesus on the part of those who walk in His steps always provokes astonishment as at the sight of something very unusual?" So declares the narrator near the end of Charles M. Sheldon's In His Steps, which is the real inspiration for the bracelet-wearing "WWJD" proponents of our contemporary What Would Jesus Do movements. He wrote the book in 1896, read it in weekly installments on Sunday evenings at his Central Congregational Church in Topeka, Kansas, and at the same time arranged for its printing in serial form in the religious weekly "Chicago Advance." Due to incorrect copyright filing, however, the inspirational fiction went immediately into the public domain, so the pastor rarely benefited financially from its popular national and international printings.¹

Among the things I find striking about In His Steps is its weird timelessness—its message seems as relevant today as it was when he wrote it a century ago. And, too, is the relevance of the story's setting: a wealthy American church whose description could match any worship setting in any mainstream denomination in the US today. I expected, after 100 years, that his account of church life in the US would be dated and foreign. I think I was more shocked than disappointed. So much in America changes; so little in America changes. But in his fictional account of life in Christian America, Sheldon has his characters commit to "pledge themselves, earnestly and honestly for an entire year, not to do anything without first asking the question, 'What would Jesus do?' And after asking that question, each one will follow Jesus as exactly as he knows how, no matter what the result may be." In doing this, however, the fiction eventually became an abused and abusive factual method for distinguishing proper Christian behavior—abused because it permits the pretense that anyone can set the moral standard for Christian behavior by simply asking WWJD and abusive because even the atheist can ask the WWJD question and the push the Christian's nose into the undesirable response.

We tend to call the doctrine of the WWJD clan a type of virtue ethics, but this is probably inaccurate. Just as we can ask "What Would Jesus Do?" we can also ask "What Would Buddha Do?" or "What Would Gandhi Do?" or Muhammed, or Moses, or Socrates, Nietzsche, Thoreau, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ronald Reagan.... Here we look to individuals we respect and admire, but then we glance off of them (and far away from the excellences of character we seem to admire so much) with a misleading question about the traits themselves. These excellences, or virtues, become themselves things that we are supposed to be able to imitate by imagining what we might do, within differing social contexts, if we ourselves had those traits. Ah, yes, if only we had those traits. It's probably more accurate to call this "pretext ethics."

Ancient moralists meant by virtue personal excellence, but these virtues were not mere "means" between "extremes," as courage is the mean (or virtue) between cowardice and foolhardiness, or monogamy as a mean/virtue between the extremes of celibacy and promiscuity, or friendliness as the mean/virtue between standoffishness and obsequiousness. These were inseparable from the other qualities to be found in persons of worth, who are self-controlled and rational. This is what Kempis meant by emulation, and what Peter and Paul also meant by emulation. We are not to pretend that we are following (emulating) Christ by imagining what we might do, within differing social contexts, if we ourselves had his traits: we are to inculcate those traits within ourselves. We are to be holy, because God is holy.

1. My print version is a paperback by Barbour Publishing, Inc., 1984, which I picked up for 50 cents at the annual book sale in Hamilton, NY, on a sunny summer day in 2003.

Iraqi Extinction

What Would Jesus Blah Blah?