Okay, here’s a tangled one. Joseph Loconte, writing for The Weekly Standard, takes N.T. Wright to task for his attitude about al-Qa’ida, the war in Iraq, American empire, and all that stuff. What he writes can be found here (HT: Justin Taylor). Loconte does a very fine job in avoiding shrillness in his response — he differs with Wright very strongly, but is deeply appreciative of Wright’s contributions to the faith. To his credit, he basically accuses Wright of having some real blind spots, but does not accuse him of sedition, or treason, being on al-Qa’ida’s payroll, or any kind of general orc-ishness. I think Loconte has a point, but I would also like to respond to Loconte in a similar way — because he also has some significant blind spots.
Here is the deal. Loconte shows that Wright neglects to deal with the rising evil represented by radical Islam. And this is the perennial temptation for Christians in the political realm, trying to navigate “a third way.” The establishment of an alternative is often just a cover for switching sides — going from one partisan side to the other partisan side, all in the name of Jesus. But why should we have to choose between the Fox News Jesus and the CNN Jesus? Don’t want either one, thanks.
Lefty clerics are soft-pedaling Islamic violence, which is deeply disturbing. Since 9-11, there have been almost 10,000 Islamic terrorist attacks around the world. The response to this cannot be that the right-wingers soft-pedal our bombing runs — this is quite true, they do, and is profoundly beside the point. Christians who defend one outrage for the sake of guarding against the other “bad” outrage have abandoned what the Church’s prophetic stance should be, and are simply being suckered into choosing up sides. And so we have the spectacle of Christians debating whether they prefer dog turds or cat turds. Jim Wallis hates the dog turds and James Dobson hates the cat turds. So the compromises that Christians have made with the secular right-wing are deeply disturbing as well, but nothing is better calculated to entrench them further in those compromises than the spectacle of other Christians compromising in the other direction. If there is an idolatrous affinity for dog turds on the right, do we really think that we are going to lure them away from it with these lovely cat turds?
For example, Wright simplistically says that the “United Nations and the International Criminal Court are the only bodies we currently have which even approximate to a legitimate international authority.” As Loconte notes — a body that has Zimbabwe chairing the Commission on Sustainable Development is to be taken seriously? Libya is heading up the Human Rights Commission, and there are other howlers where these came from. If Wright thinks that he is going to get someone like me to think twice about the idolatries of Americanism by showing us all the beauties of powder blue internationalism, he needs to rethink his entire approach.
So I agree with Loconte about Wright — he sees some things that Wright doesn’t see, and which Wright ought to see. But I also agree with Wright about Loconte — Wright does see some things that the neo-con fog of war has obscured for us. America is an empire, and America is secular. That is not good news. And consequently, I don’t agree with either of these fine gentlemen — they are both missing the point in terrible ways.
The hook that Loconte uses in his article is the image of the Shadow taking shape and growing in The Lord of the Rings. He says that in our day the shadow is, Sauron-like, the rise of Islamo-fascism. He rightly observes that all kinds of people, who should know better, appear to be unconcerned about this. We ought not to look at total fire-power available. I am willing to bet there was more explosive power in one American bomb than in all the suicide bombs put together. But Mark Steyn has shrewdly observed that suicide bombing is not a potent tactic . . . unless it deployed against a suicide culture.
But Tolkien was wiser than to buy into false dichotomies. Not only was Sauron gathering his forces, but the Shadow was also growing from within. Saruman was one who once stood against evil, and was corrupted in the process. Our oaths of office are frequently wiser than we are. The Constitution has enemies both foreign and domestic. Why is it that those who see the threat of radical Islam frequently cannot see the threat of a secularist American empire? Why is it that those who see the threat of a swollen American empire cannot see the threat of radical Islam? Is it allowable for us to think that the Patriot Act would have had Patrick Henry running to his gun cabinet . . . without praising Hamas as a humanitarian group similar to Rotary? Is it permissible to think that Ahmadinejad is a terrible man without thinking that presidents get to declare war whenever they feel like it?