Getting “Punked Around”

Wow. I haven’t seen this until now (hat-tip Andrew Sullivan) but Slate has an incredible “new” blog called “the Wrong Stuff.” Basically it’s a bunch of interviews with people who have an interesting relationship with the concept of “wrongness.” They have interviews with a marriage counselor on how being wrong — and the desire not be — affect relationships, with an accomplished mountain climber whose life was at risk if he made a wrong decision, and with a young conservative Christian who joined the army, was dismayed at the culture and what he was being asked to do and became a conscientious objector. 

This last one is the most interesting one that I have read so far, and the one I want to comment on. It’s incredible for what it reveals about the military as it is for the young interviewee’s moral courage — “There’s really no way to defend yourself against a sniper shot or a roadside bomb, so some of our leaders felt that the only way we could defend ourselves was to intimidate the local population into preventing the violence in the first place. So our battalion commanders gave the order that every time a bomb went off, we were entitled to open fire on whoever was standing around.” — as it is for the young interviewee’s moral courage — “The way I interpreted that was that we were told to out-terrorize the terrorists. That was really troubling for me; I found it wrong both morally and strategically…I was in a couple of situations where I was ordered to do that and I refused that order. So that was when I was really forced to make a decision about what I stood for.”

Moving on, this soldier pays creedence to a part of Christianity that I also always had troubled with. I guess I should this has more to do with taking issue with “Christians” — or followers of the Christain faith — and their conceptions of Christ. Here’s the relevant anecdote from the former soldier:

One night, I was guarding a prisoner with a friend of mine, a guy I had gone to church with before we had deployed. So we’re sitting there and my friend starts making threatening statements about what he wants to do to the prisoner. It wasn’t too uncommon to abuse prisoners, but I didn’t feel like it was right, so I asked my friend about the American ideals that we grew up hearing about. I said, “Why would you do that to this guy? Isn’t one of the values that we were raised with is that somebody’s innocent until proven guilty?” My friend said, “No, this guy is Iraqi, he’s part of the problem, he’s guilty, and here’s what I want to do to him.” That wasn’t unusual. It had gotten to the point where most people blamed the entire Iraqi population and said that if they would just fix their own country, we could go home.

I thought back to all the stuff I’d heard sitting next to this guy in church, and I asked him, “Well, even if he is guilty, what about the idea of loving our enemies and returning evil with good and turning the other cheek? How do you reconcile all those teachings?” My friend said, “I think that Jesus would have turned his cheek once or twice but he never would have let anyone punk him around.” Hearing him say it that way just made it sound so ridiculous. Here we supposedly had faith in this guy who very clearly was punked around, and ended up living and dying with sacrificial love. From then on, I really had to face the fact that I couldn’t have it both ways. Either I was going to try to find this inward reality where sacrificial love was possible for a higher goal, or I was going to let self-defense be my ultimate value.

This reminds me of Bill O’Reilly’s recent attempt at taking a “Christian” attitude toward Unemployment Benefits (hat-tip Andrew Sullivan): 

Every fair-minded person should support government safety nets for people who need assistance through no fault of their own. But guys like McDermott don’t make distinctions like that. For them, the baby Jesus wants us to “provide” no matter what the circumstance. But being a Christian, I know that while Jesus promoted charity at the highest level, he was not self-destructive.

The Lord helps those who help themselves. Does he not?

A commentator from the Daily Dish has the best response: 

 … isn’t a literally self-destructive act of charity the whole point of the Christianity? As in Jesus intentionally acted in a way which led to his own physical death in order to do good for others who didn’t deserve it?

I left the Christian faith because I was not that radical nor “self-destructive” — because I believed — and still believe — that turning the other cheek is always, universally the right course of action to take… to just cite one article of the faith. Of course, I would have been much more inclined to buy into the turn the other cheek stuff if I shared the same eschatological worldview, so maybe this was influenced by lack of faith in an afterlife… 

But what I want to say is there is a big cognitive disconnect between mainstream (American) Christians and how they approach the text and life example of the man they consider their leader and savior. I think that’s a problem because it most likely leads to more cognitive dissonances. This would be one of my biggest arguments for religion being a s — though there are obviously more reasons, and that’s part of a bigger discussion. 

Anyways, it’s good to people talking about this cognitive dissonance and call out people who project their own worldviews onto a spiritual leader and then use that spiritual leader’s moral standing as a validation and justification of their own beliefs and actions.