Unmasking the differences: Nonviolence and social control.

Stanley Hauerwas's emphasis on the social construction of character within a community of particular stories and practices resonates with feminists who also reject the liberal concept of self However, for feminists a next step becomes critical. What is the character of those communities that form our character? Whose stories are being told? Whose perspectives are embodied in these practices? These questions are especially pertinent for Christian communities characterized, typically, by hierarchical male leadership and divided by race and class. In her feminist critique of Hauerwas's approach to Christian community, The Character of Our Communities, Albrecht argues that until a plurality of voices shape Christian community, especially the voices of the marginalized, these communities betray their calling to be truly redemptive and prophetically liberating.

Oneness and the Will to Power

As we have seen, Hauerwas's ethics revolves around a core theme: a universal human fear of finitude leads to fragmenting, false loyalties and to a violent defense of those loyalties. For Hauerwas, the problem of contemporary life is its moral fragmentation and the loss of identity that can only be sustained in a community of shared values. Furthermore, this problem must be resolved in the one community that bears a true story empowering people to live nonviolently in this fallen world. Thus, salvation, for Hauerwas, ultimately involves the unity of all people within the Christian narrative. Aware of Christianity's past use of violence to accomplish this end, Hauerwas emphasizes that the core characteristic of the Christian community is nonviolence. However, it is my contention that violence is intrinsic to his proposal.

Kwok Pui-lan, a Chinese Christian, describes the Asian experience of Christian missionary expansion into China in which the "Word of God" was brought to the "heathens" who lived in a deficient culture characterized by "idolatry and superstition." (1) From this position of marginality Asian Christians were confronted with a gospel of Western presuppositions and modes of thinking. For example, the very notion of a scripture that contains all of Truth in one closed (Western) canon is a characteristic, Kwok warns, of Western religious traditions. There is within the western metaphysical tradition a "logocentrism"; that is, a hope and desire to reach a fully positive meaning that does not also carry within it its dependence upon difference. (2) Christianity exhibits this in its assumption of a transcendent presence located in a sacred text that leads Westerners to search for the voice of absolute truth. Kwok argues, "if other people can only define truth according to the Western perspective, then Christianization really means westernization." (3) Her recognition of the cultural embeddedness of the truth claims of the Western Christian gospel, and her experience of how these claims have been imposed upon her culture with an imperialistic assumption of acultural, universal applicability, has led her to appreciate Foucault's exploration of the relationship between truth and power. Asian Christians, she says, must ask who owns the truth, who interprets the truth, and what constitutes the truth? Her conclusion, with specific reference to the Christian scriptures, is that truth cannot be "prepackaged" but is found in the "actual interaction between text and context in the concrete historical situation." (4) "The whole biblical text represents one form of human construction to talk about God," she writes. (5) Speaking from the context of being a Christian in the mostly other-than-Christian two-thirds world (in which most people live, affected by the exploitation of the mostly Christian one-third world), Kwok argues that this focus on the oneness of truth produces the crusading spirit in which absolute truth provides not only the answers for all people but deigns to define for them the questions as well. (6) It is this hierarchical model of truth, she warns, that leads to the coercion of all others into one sameness and homogeneity; the universalizing of the One. (7)

This identification of power with oneness lies deep within the traditional Christian image of God. Trinitarian theologies, theologies that could also have led to an emphasis on diversity and relationality as the central characteristic of divinity, were shaped in the early centuries of Christianity by an increasing emphasis upon the unity of the substance of the Godhead. From the time of Tertullian, Christian theology increasingly emphasized the power and authority of God the Father in order to counter (while copying) the claims of Rome's absolute, divine monarchy. God, the Father of Christians, the maker of heaven and earth, rules over all and rules especially over all secular rulers. (8) For Christians of the first four centuries, according to Elaine Pagels, this image of God served as a source of power for those made in "the image of God" and straining under the burden of the authority of the Roman state. These early Christians identified human equality in the human capacity to exercise the moral freedom an d responsibility necessary to choose and to do good in resistance to the imperial cult. (9) However, a radical change in thought occurred that Pagels attributes to Augustine and to the theology he developed within a totally different political context. By the end of the fourth century, the emperors were Christian and Christians had come into imperial favor, wealth, and power. From this context of participation in secular power, Augustine reads the same texts from Genesis and concludes the opposite from his predecessors: the human race is incapable of ruling itself. (10) The will to rebellion lies within each human and leads to a lust for power that now distorts all human relationships. (11) The primary virtue for fallen human nature is no longer the exercise of moral freedom and responsibility, but the virtue of obedience: "our true good is free slavery." (12) Thus, as I interpret Pagels, in the age of Constantine, some Christian men gained political and economic power and yet also experienced the ambiguity a nd limits of their individual power. In this context of relative power, Augustine chose a theology emphasizing human guilt rather than face the possibility that human control over events, and even over the consequences of our best intentions, is limited. (13)

It is a theology, Pagels argues, that appeals to a need to imagine oneself in control even at the cost of accepting oneself as a participant in the universal human condition of sinfulness. As Christians began to participate in social power, the image of absolute power residing in the absolute oneness of God the Father was joined to a theology of human fallenness. In Augustinian theology, divine domination and human guiltiness legitimate human relationships of domination: the Righteous One stands against all others. For Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, this theology led to an increasing use of coercion both inside and outside the church and to alliances with imperial power on behalf of his orthodoxy. (14) Thistlethwaite concludes:

God conceived as supreme ruler over all from whom other authorities take their cue is a theology of violence. Hierarchy introduces hierarchy:

The absolute power of God legitimates the power of the father priest, the father of the country, the father in the family, and so on. Monotheistic monarchism has been a powerful weapon for both church and state in their efforts to legitimate the ultimate power of some over others. (15)

Hauerwas seems to accept an essentially Augustinian view of human fallenness. (16) He views all humans a priori as seeking to avoid the truth of their finitude by asserting control over their lives and resorting to coercion and violence against others. His remedy for this condition of chaos and violence ostensively recoils from Augustine's resort to coercion. After all, Hauerwas argues that "we Christians" must recognize our powerlessness and do the one thing we can: participate in the one community, the Christian church, that knows the one truth of human finitude and divine, nonviolent love. Ironically, however, while purporting to eschew violence, Hauerwas legitimates the cause of the violent experiences related by Kwok Pui-lan and other non-Western Christians, the violent imposition of the one absolute truth. As Hauerwas insists: "outside the church there is no saving knowledge of God." (17)

Hauerwas is aware of the "polemical, if not violent, character of my essays"; a violence he defends as necessary to expose the sentimentalities of liberal culture. (18) The Christian church, the community of the reconciled, exists in the world as both the means and the goal of the world's salvation. While God is in control of history, the proof of that, for Hauerwas, is the existence of this faithful, nonviolent community. In his introduction to The Peaceable Kingdom, Hauerwas acknowledges that what he is presenting is a Christian ethic. Yet, he goes on to say that he also intends "to argue that the position I develop should be any Christian's" (emphasis added). (10) Therefore, the problem for Christians, writes Hauerwas, is how "we" are to survive "as disciplined communities in democratic societies" where the very values of liberty and individualism undermine the social formation necessary for Christian character. (20) In this context, the church must learn to become a disciplined and disciplining community in order to maintain its distinct identity. It is in this sense that Hauerwas sees an attractive model for Christian community in the Aristotelian polis; both are "equally antidemocratic." (21) According to Hauerwas, the church that is faithful to Jesus is not a democracy. To make a person into a Christian requires training, apprenticeship to a master, learning the "epistemological bias" of this craft. (22) Kwok Pui-lan would remind Hauerwas that "we" Christians do not all live in democratic societies, that not all Christians are being tainted by liberty and individualism, and, most important, that a theological ethics shaped by (and in response to) liberal Western society cannot be for "all" Christians.

Unaware of the imperialism of his claims, Hauerwas identifies his challenge as how to make his absolute truth (which can be known only through the witness of those persons formed by the discipline of the church) compelling to the whole world without this task itself becoming an ideology that supports patterns of domination and violence. (23) In my terms, can Hauerwas appropriate a Western, imperialistic view of God and truth and an Augustinian view of fallen humanity without resorting to Augustinian coercion? It is his contention that an absolutist, but nonviolent witness is possible because its central conviction is the nonviolence of a loving God; that is, the one nonnegotiable truth is the necessity of a nonviolent community. It is my contention that every theology and theological ethics is affected by the loyalties of one's chosen social location. Therefore, Hauerwas's claim of universality, even within the Western world, functions to mask the social origins of his ethics as well as its social consequence s. It is my contention that an analysis of the social location of Hauerwas's Western, liberal "Christian" reveals a fundamental flaw in his description of the social power of his "Christians"; his contention that "we" live "after Christendom" is not accurate. Therefore, it is also my contention that his theology of a loving and nonviolent, yet all-powerful God, worshiped in an authoritative church by obedient and nonresistant Christians, is produced by the concerns of a particular social location. Specifically, it is produced by the dilemma of relative power that continues to discomfort white middle- and upper-class Christians in the U.S. who are located by virtue of race and class in positions of relative social privilege. (24) The resolution of this dilemma requires the willingness to (re)impose ecclesial institutional violence. I assert that by placing his gospel in its social location, Hauerwas's version of Christian nonviolence and nonresistance is revealed as a defense of social privilege, power, and co ntrol -- especially the control of women.

Nonviolence and the Control of Class and Race

How can a Christian theologian who argues for the utter uniqueness of Christian discourse, claiming its incomprehensibility to those who are not a part of this discourse, be understood by the wider audience he addresses? Hauerwas admits that this is a question for which his own theological assumptions can only lead to "a particularly awkward position," in which the more successful his communication the more he contradicts his own theology. (25) How can he be heard by others who do not participate in his linguistic-cultural community? If he is, as he claims, a resident alien speaking to resident aliens, would his books sell? Would he be asked to lecture? Would he teach in prestigious universities? His own presuppositions about the singularity of the Christian language-community raise the suspicion that aspects of his discourse are participating in the discourses of American culture. As Foucault points out, society does not suddenly discover, or rediscover, newly recognized greater truth. Rather, a change in po litics governs the formation of what can be received as a truth statement. That is, something has shifted in the relations of power. (26) Changes in the social context prepare ears to hear a voice, such as Hauerwas's, into speaking.

With a hermeneutics of suspicion, I ask the following questions of Hauerwas's ethics of character: For whom is "fragmentation" the fundamental problem of modern society? Who experiences sin as "the overreaching" of one's power? Who benefits from labeling attempts to create social justice as masked "desire for power"? Who benefits from the assertion that doing what is "trivial" is the most faithful thing one can do? Who benefits from highlighting the procreative family as the church's most prophetic and powerful witness to the world? Who wants to be told that working for a more just society results in an unacceptable loss of Christian particularity? Who wants to hear that in accepting this "weakness," this powerlessness to transform society, this lack of control, one finds the joy of faithful, patient obedience to the absolute God who does control history? As Kwok warns, who would own these "truths"?

In order to unmask the agendas concealed in Hauerwas's language, we must first discover the social position he assumes as he speaks. As we saw above, his claim to represent a universal Christianity must be countered with an analysis of whom he means when he says "we." Whom does Hauerwas represent and address beneath his claim to universality?

Most Christians, at least in the industrialized societies of the West, are unsure how we ought to think about ourselves and/or our involvement as Christians in those same societies. (27)

We live in societies and politics formed by the assumption that there is literally nothing for which it is worth dying. (28)

We privilege our place as rich Christians who can justify our being rich because we are concerned about justice. (29)

Freedom literally comes by having our self-absorption challenged by the needs of another. (30)

We say we want justice but I suspect even more that we want power. (31)

So we must ask why it has been blacks, Native Americans, and women, and not Christians, who have been challenging the curriculum of the so-called "public schools." (32)

We simply cannot believe that the self might be formed without fear of the other. (33)

Our anxious attempts to preserve ourselves lead to violence. ... So the first step to peace is letting go of ourselves, our things, our world. (34)

Our lies are the correlate of our materialism. (35)

Our need to be in control is the basis for the violence of our lives. (36)

For our possessions are the source of our violence. (37)

Our sin is not merely an error in overestimating our capacities. Rather it is the active and willful attempt to overreach our powers. (38)

I only wish that Christians could be seen by the military as being as problematic as gays. (40)

"We," according to Hauerwas's descriptions, are self-absorbed, power-seeking, rich Christians who live in Western industrialized societies; "we" are neither black, nor Native American, nor women. "We" are certainly not gay. "We" live in fear of the other. "We" cause violence by our attempting to preserve our control over our lives and our material possessions. "We" sin by actively and willfully overreaching our powers. (40)

Although asserting a universal description of the human condition as revealed truthfully only in the Christian narrative, (41) by self-definition Hauerwas reveals that he speaks out of the social position and the problems, experiences, and fears of white middle- and upper-class American males. Although asserting a universal gospel of salvation, by self-definition Hauerwas reveals that he is speaking to the needs arising from the social position and experiences and fears of white middle- and upperclass American males. The social position of his Christian "we" explains his successful communication. A gospel from a position of white male privilege and power is being heard by those who share that position. A discourse that describes a fear of others, and the fear generated when one's myth of a self-reflecting, universal sameness is shaken by the claims of such others, is being heard precisely by those who are experiencing such fear. Hauerwas's unwillingness to admit the particularity and partiality of his views u nfortunately serves an ideological purpose. It helps legitimate and maintain the status quo of white class-privileged male power by turning a Christian gospel of nonviolence into an ideology of domination. White middle- and upper-class women, such as myself, are also (but not equally) complicit in this system. Despite the limitations of gender, we benefit from sharing the same dominant race and class.

The Christians whom Hauerwas describes, the white middle- and upper-classes (professors, doctors, managers, CEOs, lawyers, accountants, bankers, real estate agents, ministers and priests, small business owners, and so on) are not, in the context of our personal political-economic lives, "after Christendom." We are able to maintain our real economic and political power in the world precisely at the expense of "others": poor white men and women, men and women of color, the poor of all colors, and the people of the two-thirds world, whom Hauerwas ignores when he says, "we Christians." In the United States, white male income exceeds all others. As we have already seen, the median annual income of full-time year-round white male workers far exceeds that of all other gender or racial-ethnic groups. Although by 1980 white men no longer made up a majority of the workforce when compared to all other groups combined, they continued to monopolize the most highly paid and powerful jobs. (42) According to Directorship Dat abank, 94.7 percent of the 7,162 directors of the 786 largest public companies in the United States are white men; 72.7 percent of them are fifty-five years old or older. (43) Together, white women and men hold the majority of the upper-tier primary jobs (92 percent in 1980) which provide higher pay, greater security and benefits, upward mobility, creativity, and decision-making opportunities. (44) While white males make up 39.2 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 82.5 percent of the Forbes 400 (people worth at least $265 million), 77 percent of congresspersons, 92 percent of state governors, almost 90 percent of daily newspaper editors, 77 percent of television news directors, and 70 percent of the tenured college professors. (45)

However, it is also true that in this age of postindustrial capitalism middle- and upper-class white men are experiencing their own fears of loss of income, social position, and control. Despite the numbers indicated above, a 1993 Newsweek poll of white males reported that 56 percent believed they were losing an advantage in terms of jobs and incomes. Sixty percent believed that white males are more frequently targets of antagonism from women and minority men. Fifty-two percent felt white males were losing their influence over U.S. culture, including style, entertainment, and the arts. (46) In fact, the shift from an industrial to a service-based economy has seen a drop in the real wages of men. Downward mobility in terms of income and occupational change is now beginning to touch more and more people whose middle-class status was always assumed to be the starting point of achieving more abundance. Structural changes in the job market place increasing pressures on the new entrants to the market as fewer middl e-class jobs are being created. For the first time since the Depression, most workers can expect to earn less than their parents. (47) The biggest losers in this downward trend are white males. (48) In 1986, the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress estimated that had women riot entered the wage labor market in great numbers in the last two decades, real family income would have dropped 18 percent between 1980 and 1986. (49) The impact of these economic changes and of the increasing presence of white women and women and men of color into what have been all white male prerogatives was described by Glenn Bucher:

Because whiteness and maleness and heterosexual preference were the primary qualifications of those who shaped and controlled collective social life, each straight white male was led to believe in the potential of his own future....

For straight white males to see that they are on the way down the American ladder of success is no casual discovery....

What is more frightening is that blacks, women, and homosexuals are moving in to take places previously reserved for straight white males. With their emergence comes the prerogative to make and to write history. History is beginning to expose straight white males for what they really have been and are. (50)

In this particular social context, Hauerwas's proposals become part of the ongoing social discourse. On the one hand, this discourse acknowledges the fear that the dominant group holds toward others. It rightly identifies the fear that arises when one's social location is at risk, or even just imagined to be at risk. It names the moral chaos that occurs when the moral basis for one's privileged social identity is challenged. It rightly identifies the temptation to violent defense of one's dominant position. However, by universalizing these feelings, by claiming that these are the sins of all humans, Hauerwas's anthropology serves to obfuscate the reality of this concrete system of domination and its relationships of unequal power from which his audience benefits. Confronted by the challenges of others, white middle- and upper-class women and men may be comforted by a gospel that removes from us the ability or responsibility to respond to structural injustice.

Notes

(1.) Kwok Pui-Ian, "Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World," in Lift Every Voice, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Mary Potter Engel (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 272.

(2.) David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 57-58.

(3.) Pui-Ian, "Discovering the Bible," 273. For a similarly compelling analysis of the embeddedness of Christianity in Western paradigms, from the perspective of Native Americans, see Vine Deloria, Jr. God Is Red (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1973).

(4.) Ibid., 274.

(5.) Ibid., 278.

(6.) Ibid., 273, 278.

(7.) Ibid., 281.

(8.) Susan Thistlethwaite, "'I Am Become Death': God in the Nuclear Age," in Lift Every Voice, 99-100.

(9.) Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), xxiii.

(10.) Ibid., 105.

(11.) Ibid., 113-14.

(12.) Augustine, De Civitate Dei 14, 15, as cited in Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, 120.

(13.) Pagels, 147.

(14.) Ibid., 124.

(15.) Susan Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race, and God (New York: Crossroad, 1989], 121.

(16.) And this represents a point at which Hauerwas can (and has been) criticized for having an extremely pessimistic theological anthropology. Whether he believes it or not, he writes as though there is no presence of grace, of the Christ, or the goodness of creation in the "world." Essentially, the world has no revelatory word to speak to the church other than to challenge the church to be faithful despite the world's ongoing display of possible forms of unfaithfulness. While I do disagree with Hauerwas's theology of the fall, my own interest is in showing why that theology makes sense from his social location -- and not from mine -- and the concrete social realities that result from such a "theological" choice.

(17.) Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), 16, 36-37.

(18.) Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 25. He says, "I will not apologize for being at war with war."

(19.) Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), xvi.

(20.) Hauerwas, After Christendom?, 97.

(21.) Ibid., 180, n. 6.

(22.) Ibid., 105.

(23.) Ibid., 152. Hauerwas puts this comment in the context of recalling the missionary work of Bartolome de las Casas. Therefore, it seems to me that Hauerwas continues to confuse whether he is addressing the liberal Western world or the world.

(24.) There is a particular blindness in the U.S. to the issue of class. And there is great disagreement among social scientists as to how to define this term. Barlett and Steele note that in Washington folk like to identify the top of the middle-class as whatever is being earned in Congress--$125,100 in 1992--or more than 97 percent of all American households! I accept Barlett's and Steele's own definition of middle-class as "those wage-earners who reported incomes between $20,000 and $50,000 on their tax returns in 1989." This is 35 percent of all tax returns. Another 10 percent of returns were filed by those making between $50,000 and $75,000--what Barlett and Steele call an upper extended middle-class. Only 6 percent of all tax returns were from individuals or families making over $75,000. Donald Barlett and James Steele, America: What Went Wrong? (Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews and McMeel, 1992), xiii.

(25.) Hauerwas, After Christendom?, 14.

(26.) Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 57.

(27.) Hauerwas, After Christendom?, 23. I think that Hauerwas is directing his views to Christians in liberal Western societies. However, he also seems to assume that the gospel he brings to liberal societies is the same gospel that should be brought to the world. In other words, I don't think he would acknowledge that his gospel is a social construction within the liberal Western world. His use of the story Watership Down by Richard Adams in A Community of Character, 12-34, displays his conviction that a foundational, fixed narrative can exist to guide a community through history and changing contexts.

(28.) Ibid., 44.

(29.) Ibid., 47.

(30.) Ibid., 54.

(31.) Ibid., 60.

(32.) Ibid., 144.

(33.) Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 47.

(34.) Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989),89.

(35.) Ibid., 131.

(36.) Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 47.

(37.) Ibid., 86.

(38.) Ibid., 31.

(39.) Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front, 153.

(40.) Recent demographic statistics show that the great majority of the population of the U.S. still identifies itself as Christian. According to the Census Bureau, in 1991 81 percent of the noninstitutionalized, civilian population over 18 identified themselves as Protestant (56%) or Catholic (25%). Reports from 133 church groupings identified 55 percent of the population as members of churches (this figure includes children under the age of 18). See Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the U.S. 1993 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 67-69. Individual denominations often provide further demographic information. For example, surveys by the Presbyterian Panel show that most Presbyterians have middle- or upper-class incomes. The median family income for Presbyterians in 1992 was between $35,000 and $49,999, compared to a median income for the U.S. population of between $25,000 and $34,999 in 1991. Thirty-six percent of Presbyterian families reported incomes of $100,000 or more in 1992. See Presbyterian Panel, Summary (Louisville: Presbyterian Distribution Service, 1994).

(41.) Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today (Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth Press, 1988), 39-42.

(42.) Teresa L. Amott and Julie A. Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 315. White men hold 61 percent of the upper-tier primary jobs and white women hold 31 percent of those jobs. However, most women continue to work in female-dominated jobs that pay less than men's jobs of comparable educational and responsibility levels. See Arnott and Matthaei, 341.

(43.) Steve Lohr, "Pulling Down the Corporate Clubhouse," New York Times April 12, 1992, 5(3).

(44.) Amott and Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work, 341.

(45.) David Gates, "White Male Paranoia," Newsweek (March 29, 1993): 49.

(46.) Ibid., 50-51.

(47.) Task Force on Issues of Vocation and Problems of Work in the United States, Challenges in the Workplace (Louisville, Ky.: Publications Service, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.),1989), 19.

(48.) Katherine S. Newman, Falling From Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle class (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 31.

(49.) Task Force on Issues of Vacation and Problems of Work in the United States, Challenges in the Workplace (Louisville, Ky.: Publications Service, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 1990), 19. For other resources on the troubled middle-class, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); and Katherine S. Newman, Falling From Grace.

(50.) Glenn R. Bucher, "The Enemy: He Is Us" in Straight White Male, ed. Glenn R. Bucher (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 13, 16.

Excerpted from The Character of Our Communities by Gloria Albrecht. Published by Abingdon Press.

Gloria Albrecht is Associate Professor of Religion and Ethics at the University of Detroit Mercy. She teaches business and economic ethics, feminist ethics and theology, and women's studies.