Engraving of Spaniards enslaving Native Americans by Theodor de Bry (1528–1598), published in America, Part 6. Frankfurt, 1596.
The body is central to religious life. Religious practices and teachings include insights about food, cleanliness, ritual, sex, and death. But scholarship in the study of religion has at times been oddly forgetful of the embodied grounds of religious traditions and of knowledge. This occlusion of the constitutive role of bodies and materiality is recognized as part of the legacy of modernity. Modern thought construed abstract reason as more reliable than sensibility and imagined rationality as exercising control over one’s body and non-human materiality. But these well-known elements of modern thought are intricately related to colonialism and its organization of the world.
Decolonial scholarship on the body entails not just adding a new category of analysis; it requires a shift in approach. Rather than treating religion, coloniality, and the body as self-contained or self-evident categories, we analyze their imbrication in particular contexts and the ways such terms evoke each other, even where their relationship is forgotten or hidden. In this very short essay, I point to two temporally distant, but paradigmatic examples of the intertwining of religion, bodies, and coloniality. I travel imaginatively to a point of entanglement, as Édouard Glissant suggests, in order to surface connections.
Postcolonial studies in the US academy has tended to start in the eighteenth century, while decolonial studies attends to the earlier period of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. As a consequence, decolonial studies make visible connections between coloniality and religion that are less explicit in scholarship of the later empires. Religious identities were a defining element in the formation of the Spanish empire. Walter Mignolo observes, for instance, “Christianity established itself as intolerant to Judaism and Islam as well as to the ‘idolatry’ of the Amerindians, whose extirpation became a major goal of the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (21). The relationship to Jews and Moors shapes later Spanish discursive and material practices toward the Amerindians.
The distinctions between Christians, Jews, and Moors were based on well-established categories of religious identity, and they were represented as corporeal and inherited differences. As David Nirenberg has argued, categories of religion “were replaced by the genealogical notion that Christians descended from Jewish converts (Cristianos nuevos, confessos, conversos, marranos) who were essentially different from Christians by nature” (242, italics mine). Indeed, according to the doctrine of “limpieza de raza,” “Jewish and Muslim blood was inferior to Christian; the possession of any amount of such blood made one liable to heresy and moral corruption; and therefore any descendent of Jews and Muslims, no matter how distant, should be barred from churches and secular office, from any guilds and professions, and especially from marrying Old Christians” (242). (“Old Christians” referred to those born of Christian parents.) Predicting moral character based on inheritance and managing the risk of contamination through the control of sexual relationships are today associated with “biological race.” But in 14th to 15th century Spain, religious identity was similarly woven through the body to naturalize socio-political hierarchy. This mobilization of bodily discourse in describing religious difference was transposed to the Americas, though not unchanged.
In the Americas, the term “Moor” was used for anyone of dark skin, making skin color a metonymy for a myriad of markers of religious difference. The subordination of Amerindians was asserted through arguments about their religion, practices, and embodiment. The tensions between the bodily and cultural frames for perceived inferiority are evident in the well-known debates of Valladolid between Juan Ginés Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas (1550-51). The issue at stake was the right of the king of Castile to subjugate the Amerindians. But the significance of the debate is that the arguments revolved around the status of Indians as human beings, which was treated as an inquiry into their rationality. Sepúlveda, a humanist and translator of Aristotle, based his defense of the conquest on Aristotle’s theory of “natural slavery” as well as on Augustine’s argument that slavery is a punishment for sin (112f). [1] His position was that the Indians were slaves by nature, displaying “an innate weakness of mind and inhuman and barbarous customs” (115). They are as different to the Spaniards as “monkeys are to men,” he claimed (117). In contrast, Las Casas challenged the applicability of the category of “natural slave” to the peoples of the Americas. He explained his position by appealing to cultural evolution. Turning to classical writers like Aristotle and Cicero, in addition to Thomas Aquinas, Las Casas argued: “All the races of the world are men, and the definition of all men and of each of them, is only one and that is reason” (140). If their behavior was starkly different, even seemingly abhorrent, it was not because of an inherent flaw in their capacity for rationality. The differences in the behavior of Amerindians, he argued, was the effect of their primitive culture and religion. The behavior in question included quotidian embodied practices concerning food, the use of the land, and sex. Christianity was deemed necessary to transform these barbarians into civilized men. The Spaniards had the duty to teach the Amerindians as children until they achieved the level of civility of European Christians.
Attributed to José Vivar y Valderrama, Baptism Scene, 18th century, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional de Historia, CONACULTA–INAH, Mexico City. Wikimedia Commons.
Bodily practices were mined for evidence of humanity or lack thereof. Bodies were also the site of religious/colonial intervention, the entry-point for the transformations of those subjected to colonial/religious power. Souls would be conquered through the imposition of specific forms of labor, diet, ritual, sexuality, and family. María Lugones highlights the implications of coloniality for gender by showing that colonialism entailed imposition of distinct gender systems for colonizer and colonized. Native gender identities and familiar arrangements were regarded as “unnatural.” Colonialism broke the links between communities, the land, and their ancestors. Colonialism dismissed and destroyed forms of embodied existence to impose others forms of being that it represented as “natural” and thus universal.
The problematic role of the body in these formative moments of coloniality might tempt us to veer away from theorizations of the body altogether. Indeed, I wonder if the attention to the scrutiny and debasement of colonialized bodies bolsters the appeal of the fantasy of disembodied subjectivity. After all, Christianity defined its universalism against the Jews, represented as too corporeal. The more racialized others are associated with corporeality, the more normalized an ideal disembodied subject becomes. A decolonial philosophy of religion includes the critical insights from other scholarly critiques concerning the occlusion of bodies and materiality, while also tracing the relationship between disembodied universalisms and the projection of debased materiality onto colonized and racialized others.
I have foundMaurice Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of flesh productive in its attention to the ways in which bodies, all bodies, are shaped by the materiality of the world. He attempts to think beyond the Cartesian suspicion of the senses and beyond the separation of the subject from the body. Neither bodies nor materiality are static; both shape and are shaped by human action, including ideas and imagination. Inasmuch as ideas and imagination orient human action they transform the world. And the world in turn shapes our bodies. But even as Merleau-Ponty imagined a world in which all human beings belong to the world, where we all reach toward the world and are received by the world, he lost sight of the ways in which coloniality has transformed the world. He lost sight of how encountering the world meant something starkly different for Hernán Cortez and for the Amerindian subjected to the Spanish crown and its mission. We are all constituted by our relations to the materiality of the world, as Merleau-Ponty beautifully describes, but we inhabit it differently.
Frantz Fanon articulates this critique by focusing on inter-human encounters. He dramatizes how his move toward the world is met with the violent gaze of those whose perception has been distorted by coloniality. Their reactions to Fanon’s body interrupted his approach and impeded the constitution of his body in relation to the world. His body was thus shattered. Sylvia Wynter builds on Fanon’s insights to propose a reconceptualization of the human as a nexus of bios and logos, that is, as constituted by culture and religion as much as by biology. This allows us to analyze how representations of religious differences appeal to embodied differences, or how bodily differences shape the representations of the religious practices of a particular group. It can also help us track how those representations in turn shape the lives of those affected by them—where we can live or work, what we can eat, who we can embrace—and through all of these patterns shape our bodies. A decolonial approach to religious studies might also help us imagine differently toward the transformations of our bodies and the world.
Mayra Rivera is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University. Rivera’s works at the intersections between philosophy of religion, literature, and theories of coloniality, race and gender—with particular attention to Caribbean thought. Her most recent book, Poetics of the Flesh (2015), analyzes theological, philosophical, and political descriptions of “flesh” as metaphors for understanding how social discourses materialize in human bodies. She is also author of The Touch of Transcendence (2007) and co-editor of Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology(2010) and Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire(2004). Rivera is currently working on a project that explores narratives of catastrophe in Caribbean thought.
On Monday February 3, 1919 a delegation of the World Zionist Organization, led by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, submitted to the victorious High Contracting Parties heading the Paris Peace Conference a 3 page document asking them “to recognise the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine and the right of the Jews to reconstitute in Palestine their National Home.” The West Bank was a minuscule part of the territory requested. During the 101 years that followed the sole empirical-material process that has been unfolding throughout the territory of mandatory Palestine is one that is probably best labelled “Israel’s One-State Solution,” that is, ceaseless consolidation of Zionist/Israeli domination over the area stretching between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. It is no surprise that some ponder whether a game changer can be spotted on the horizon.
“Game changer” is a concept that involves individuals, tactics, strategies, and more. As such, it saturates the mind of every losing player, team, and/or party; a player who is winning a game, let alone decisively, is rarely interested in a game changer. In the hazardous Israel/Palestine playing-field, the issue may well be more complex or counterintuitive. That is so not because the losing collectivity is somehow uninterested in a game changer (Palestinians are interested); it is because the leadership of the winning Israeli collectivity has convinced itself, perhaps paranoidly, that the “game” is not yet over and that it still needs to settle on what the endgame is. I wish to suggest here that annexation-cum-apartheid may not be this endgame.
“Peace to Prosperity”?
Conceptual Map, “A Future State of Palestine.” From The White House’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan.
A significant development—possibly even a game changer—has been three years in the making, and is led by a group of American-Israeli policy makers linked to Israel’s “Block of the Faithful” settler movement. The development reached an important point in Washington, D.C. in January 2020 when Donald Trump’s administration introduced a 181 page plan entitled “Peace to Prosperity”—colloquially referred to as “the Trump Peace Deal” or “the deal of the century.”
The Plan is mainly comprised of data-tables and what are labelled “conceptual” maps. Its thrust is to annul established international conventions that regulate border demarcations. The goal is realized through permission to Israel, given by the Republican Party, to formally annex (illegal) settlements in the West Bank unilaterally. The Plan dictates an unequal land exchange between the two asymmetric parties: while Israel is to incorporate the Jordan Valley’s fertile land, desert plots, located to the southwest of the Gaza strip, will be provided to the Palestinians. Trump’s Plan ultimately reserves a stretch of fragmented land for a future de-militarized Palestinian statelet which institutionally cannot escape the label Bantustan. As visualized in one of the official maps, the combined size of the Palestinian archipelago is set to include 19% of the 26,320 square KM of former Mandatory Palestine, assuming no Israeli infringements.
Map of Bantustans in South Africa. Image Credit:Htonl. Wikimedia Commons.
In Israel, meanwhile, a coalition government was finally formed in April following three exorbitant rounds of general elections within a span of a single politically grotesque year. The new coalition is comprised of eight parties, three of which are the most crucial: the Likud, headed by the immortal Benjamin Netanyahu; the pseudo-oppositional Blue & White Party (Kahol Lavan), headed by former IDF Chief of Staff Benjamin Ganz, who has managed to renege on every promise made to his constituents; and the junior partner, the Labour Party, headed by Amir Peretz, who has been in the past a member of the celebrated Peace Now movement and Israel’s Defense Minster during the 2006 Lebanon confrontation. This coalition includes a staggering 73 Knesset Members out of 120. Their first act as a body was to endorse Trump’s Plan. Netanyahu declared that annexation will happen within “a few months,” by which he subtextually meant prior to the November 2020 American presidential election that—at this moment of writing—still stands some chance to oust Trump, who is searching for the widest possible evangelical support.
Israeli implementation of Trump’s Plan will in all likelihood transform the West Bank’s extant de facto apartheid into a de jure one. Is that a game changer? If yes, in what direction/s? Most crucially, is de jure apartheid by definition more ruinous empirically vis-à-vis the long-term future than de facto apartheid? Attempts to unemotionally address this puzzle are morally obliged to acknowledge two issues at the outset. First, it is Palestinians who must ultimately have the final word and verdict on this non-hypothetical question (Palestinian Jews possibly included). Secondly, both de jure and de facto apartheid are abominations; they must as such be morally opposed, and socio-politically resisted, in the West Bank as much as anywhere globally. If one were to attempt and make sense of such a chilling scenario as apartheid formalization then there is no choice but to first rewind to November 29, 1947, the day the UN General Assembly voted to affirm Resolution 181(ii) to partition mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state (that were supposed to share a single economic union).
Partition as Mantra
From 1947 to date the notion of territorial partition has remained the organizing international mantra for resolving the Palestine/Israel question. As explained in detail elsewhere, the international community’s long-lasting fixation on partition has dominated, notwithstanding that there never was a consequential pre-1948 Zionist constituency, nor has there been a post-1948 Israeli-Jewish constituency in support of a viable two-state partition. Anti-partition has likewise been the historically dominant Palestinian stance, save perhaps for the 1988–2000 period. Most Palestinians and Israelis have never supported the idea of slicing into two viable states what they see as their respective “historic” homeland. Following its monumental triumph in 1967, however, Israel was able to maintain effective control over 100% of mandatory Palestine. Since 1967, the principal solution the international community has offered to resolve the collision has ceased to rest on the 1947 Plan. The new idea envisions an Israeli return to the 1949 armistice Green Line and the establishment of a modestly viable independent Palestine in the Gaza Strip and West Bank (East Jerusalem included). Not enough Euro-Americans know that this bifurcated territory consists of 6205 square KM—smaller than the state of Delaware and one-fifth the size of occupied Crimea or pre-1967 Israel.
As neat and soothing as the newer partition vision was for the lethargic international community, it faced a barrier immediately: it was sliced like a salami because of Israel’s unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem (against the vote of the UN Security Council), by Israel’s confiscation of public and privately-owned West Bank land, and by colonization activity involving the implantation of 620,000 Jewish settlers east of the Green Line (notwithstanding the contravention of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention). Recall that Israel’s settler population also grew by 49% during the most conciliatory government of Yitzhak Rabin from 1992 to 1995/6. The latest stage in this take-over is Trump’s Plan. Is transformation from de facto to de jure apartheid a game changer? If yes, is it exclusively for the worse? It is illogical to address this unsettling conundrum without appraising alternative options, that is, whether there are—right here and now—forces capable of unleashing into Israel/Palestine dynamics of liberal democratization in the opposite direction of apartheid. Four asymmetric power-containers could theoretically spark liberal-democratic modification: Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab world, and Euro-America.
Contra-Apartheid?
Consider Israel first. A worldwide wishful thinking spread after the 1993 Washington, D.C. signing of the Oslo Accords. On this line of thinking, a sufficiently formidable Left-Zionist force was present that was capable of reversing the 1967 occupation and delivering a viable partition. If such a Left-Zionist power ever existed empirically, it doubtlessly faded in 2005 upon Ariel Sharon’s implementation of the “Disengagement Plan”: from 2005 onwards, all Israeli leaders have (nominally) embraced the slogan “two-states”—foremost Netanyahu in his June 14, 2009 Bar Ilan University speech—for the sole purpose of its suffocation; in wrestling they term this position a “bear hug.” Note that Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” is also framed/marketed as a “two-state” solution. In the 2009 Israeli election the Meretz party—the only Israeli-Jewish party between 1993 and 2005 that promoted a viable, non-deceitful two-state solution—was erased. Save for those who willingly blind themselves, now in 2020 it is evident that only bold and less-bold shades of colonizing right-wing Zionism exist. Israel’s phantom-left can at most deliver symbolic protests. It is thus impossible to detect domestic forces emerging from within Israel that could spark liberal modification. An Israeli De Klerk likewise does not exist.
Anti-Annexation Demonstration, Tel-Aviv-Jaffa, June 6, 2020. Photo courtesy of photojournalist Oren Ziv/Activestills
Consider now the Palestinians who are currently quite weak, divided, and fragmented. Liberal-democratic modification of the status-quo is unlikely to emerge in the near future from within Palestine nor, so it seems, from the dispersed Palestinian people globally. This results from the Palestinians’ structural inability to amass by themselves a sufficient Vietnamese/Algerian-type of anti-colonial power. While a Gandhian non-violent resistance, that incidentally typified the first intifada, may stand a better chance to deliver liberation, both resistance types presently seem incapable of countering in a sufficient manner Israel’s massive military, economic, and technological forces. This profound imbalance of power enabled the present apartheid setting to begin with.
The third power-container that can theoretically spark contra-apartheid dynamics is the Arab world that surrounds Palestine. The thoroughly underutilized human “capital” in the Arab world consists of over 300 million people. The Arab collectivity probably embodies the sole potential reservoir for counterweight to Israel’s social, military, economic, and technological force. Yet the derailing of the post-2011 democratic Arab Spring—coupled with the social fragmentation of Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and (pro-Israel) Egypt—seems to mean that some time would be needed before an Arab power could become consequential vis-à-vis the Israel/Palestine question. It is worth reminding that only a democratically inclined Arab force could potentially challenge Israel: non-democratic Arab developments (such as ISIS) merely strengthen indirectly Israel’s standing vis-à-vis the Palestinians globally. The final force left then is Euro-America.
Euro-America until Trump
Unlike Israel, the Palestinians, or the Arab world, Euro-America was, and remains, the most potent power-container; as such, it could have long generated a degree of liberal-democratic change over what is after all an economically dependent Israel—the same Israel that has been exercising de facto apartheid for decades without effects on its trade. Pre-Trump Euro-America did not introduce any liberal-democratic dynamic to Israel/Palestine. It therefore seems that no contra-apartheid development will be delivered for Israel/Palestine by some benevolent Western remote control. This has been thus far the case in relation to (1) Western states that occupy the center-stage of all Eurocentric analyses of the two-state school and to (2) the symbolically pro-Palestinian Western civil society—that occupies in toto the Eurocentric (and non-Arab-centered) analysis of the 21st century one-state school. Recalling pre-1993 South Africa can be helpful comparatively.
Apartheid in South Africa was toppled foremost as a consequence of decades of organized mobilization by a domestic triangular force comprising the African National Congress (ANC), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATO), and the South African Communist Party. These organs have no Palestinian or Arab equivalents. With all due respect to Euro-American civil society and its committed activism, ending apartheid would not have materialized without, first, the non-sectarian counter-power that the triangular South African force amassed from within and, second, state-based international sanctions. The boycott by Western civil society was the icing on the cake, whereas the cake remained what it was: South African bottom-up, domestic-democratic power and activism. In this context, pro-Palestinian forces within the world’s southern and Western civil societies were undoubtedly committed to their cause; yet the fact remains empirically simple regardless of whether or not one likes it: these constituencies are not that powerful and have had only modest tangible achievements since the 1960s activism of the New Left. That said, it is possible that a sophisticated and sustained tapping of pro-Palestinian grassroots activism into the globally transformative Black Lives Matters movement—including via multilingual rap/hip-hop music—could modify the historical equation to some degree.
To date, only one single international intervention over-powered Israel in a top-down fashion: President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s forcing of Israel’s immediate, full, and unconditional withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula in 1956.
Likely Effects of De Jure Apartheid
Forces that could spark anti-apartheid dynamics are thus weak or absent altogether, unlike Trump’s Plan and Israel’s possible annexation. The most crucial subject pertaining to apartheid formalization is the tangible impact on the daily lives of “ordinary” Palestinians. Their property rights are likely to be hit: Israel may deepen its land expropriation by declaring it “state owned.” Specifically, Israel might apply to annexed land its 1950 Absentee Property Act, which was originally enacted to grab property of 1948 refugees; under the Law of Belligerent Occupation such seizing is harder to accomplish.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, the profoundly potent new existential effects that de jure apartheid would generate are finite: de facto apartheid has been in place for decades and it is uncertain whether or not its formalization will substantially modify existing life under prolonged military occupation. Egregious developments might of course emerge (for example, new aggravating legislation). Yet, it seems unlikely that it will take effect immediately.
Israeli soldiers in the occupied Jordan Valley arresting Palestinian Bedouins for (alleged) illegal squatting and grazing. October 22, 2018. Photo by Guy Hirchfeld. Used with permission.
Annexation will present conclusive proof that Israeli rulers have ceased fearing consequential protests from within Israeli civil society. This could simultaneously ignite some corrective to the prevailing wishful thinking from across the globe that a pro-partition, Left-Zionist anti-occupation force exists in Israel (or abroad). The formalization of apartheid may lead honest members of Left-Zionist constituencies to cease relying on phantom forces and ideas and explore alternatives that lean on forces that are tangible. These may include Israel’s Arab-dominated political party “The Joint List,” various campaigns that harshly target bodies operating in the occupied West Bank (as several faith-based groups do), the more “standard” BDS campaign against Israel (presently endorsed by few unions and scholarly associations), or other initiatives or groups that oppose unconditionally all post-1967 occupation and settlement apparatus.
A move to formalize apartheid will clarify something graver: that Israeli rulers overcame fears of the international community. While this may well be so, this feature per se has little to do directly with Israel. The international reality is one of comprehensive inaction vis-à-vis Israeli violations—by American administrations, individual European governments, the European Union, or international organizations. Israeli rulers have good reasons to cease fearing the international community. Yet, introducing de jure apartheid could become a tipping point of sorts—that additional straw needed to begin denting patterns of international inaction. To date Israel camouflages apartheid under an elaborate web of informal settings and this matrix may actually be more insidious than de jure apartheid.
Apartheid formalization will ridicule the countless warning letters international bodies have manufactured since 1967 against the occupation, proving that their worth equals that of their printing paper. De jure apartheid will confirm beyond doubt that Israel neither views the occupation as “temporary”—contrary to what it has argued for decades, including via its Supreme Court—nor that its West Bank activities arise from security considerations, as it argued in The Hauge in 2004. It will be somewhat clearer to see that these policies result from a commitment to expansionist colonization. If annexation is in place formally, the questions of democracy and equal citizenship are bound to surface more visibly at both the international and domestic level. The international community may start initiating a more coherent consensus for counter-actions vis-à-vis official apartheid. While external intervention of a 1956 calibre stands a modest chance to follow formalization of apartheid, it clearly has not preceded it thus far and seems unlikely to materialize without it. Palestinians are cruelly imprisoned between a rock and a hard place. The spectre of annexation did trigger some calls for a more vigorous action.
A cross-party group of 143 UK parliamentarians—curiously including one who defamed Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite—published an atypically strongly worded letter to Boris Johnson: “[…] The UK must work with other states to respond robustly to both the US plan and any annexation of Palestinian territory. It must demonstrate that serious breaches of International Law result in serious consequences just as the UK and European partners have rightly done with regards to Russia in its illegal annexation of Crimea. Double standards would have dire consequences for the role of International Law which would put in danger all nations and peoples, including our own […].” The International Relations & Defense Committee of Britain’s House of Lords meanwhile sent a strongly worded letter to James Cleverly, Minister of State for the Middle East and North Africa. The letter recommends limiting preferential economic access to the UK market that Israel has long enjoyed, notwithstanding its de facto apartheid, if annexation should go ahead. EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell declared that Israel’s annexation is “the most important item” in the meeting agenda of EU Foreign Ministers. EU’s Foreign Affairs Commission was reported to suggest that sanctions could be introduced if Israel annexes. Such a decision necessitates a unanimous vote of support by all 27 EU member states. It does not seem likely that ultra-conservative members such as Hungary, Romania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy or Bulgaria will support sanctions on Israel even after annexation.
Apartheid as a Means?
Concerns about, and warnings against, apartheid have naturally mushroomed among ideologically diverse observers of Palestine/Israel following the publication of Trump’s Plan. Practically all have overlooked one critical point: Israeli leaders are perfectly well-aware of the fact that de jure apartheid remains a toxic public relations exercise—a commodity difficult to market even in an exponentially more illiberal/authoritarian world (Russia, Turkey, Hungary, China, India, Philippines, the US, Brazil, Austria, Italy, and more). Analysts may thus be better off understanding Israeli apartheid solely as a means to a different end. While Israel is, historically, a resolutely winning player, it neither views the “game” as over nor de jure apartheid as its endgame.
Israel may well strive for a dilution of the apartheid condition. It must be firstly acknowledged that Palestinians are an indigenous national collectivity, and not an emigrant minority. It is the state of Israel that migrated onto their heads, not the other way around. That is one of the reasons why Israel’s interest is dilution and relaxation of de jure, South African-like apartheid. This could happen, for example, if Israel opts to extend to West Bank Palestinians something that legally resembles the current status of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the American “Green Card,” or the British “Indefinite Leave to Remain.” All of these are configurations of permanent-residency based on a categorical denial of voting rights in national elections.
Israel may ultimately aim not just for dilution of apartheid but for its evaporation. Contrary to the hopes of some, that is unlikely to come about by means of legal extension to West Bank Palestinians of citizenship identical to that which Israel extended to Palestinians in 1948. For the foreseeable future Israel is unlikely to join such campaigns as “One Democratic State.” Evaporation of the apartheid setting can paradoxically be maximized via the logic of settler colonialism itself. One thrust of Israel’s one-state project is demographic change: “maximum territory, minimum Arabs.” This is a continuous effort to minimize the number of Palestinians on the ground by bureaucratic, procedural, legal, peaceful, forceful, and/or violent means. Palestinian misery is never coincidental but strives to increase emigration. Military orders 1649 and 1650 of October 13, 2009 are good illustrations: they define all Palestinians in the West Bank as “infiltrators” who may be jailed and deported. The remainder of this essay consequently explores whether Israel may be in search of a game changer that surpasses annexation.
Displacement vs. Apartheid?
Trump’s Plan and/or Israel’s possible annexation are neither the sole issues in motion in 2020, nor necessarily the most critical ones. A State Department official who accompanied Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 13th of May visit to Jerusalem commented on reports that Israel has been intensifying airstrikes in Syria, chiefly against Iranian targets. For him it seems clear that Israel increased its “operational tempo” and broadened its “target set” in Syria. Contrary to most interpretations, a reliable Haaretz analyst explained that annexation was not the prime reason for Pompeo’s visit but the question of Iran’s containment (as well as Israel-China trade relations during the COVID-19 pandemic): Trump fully backs Israel’s anti-Iran actions.
President Trump at the Israel Museum. Jerusalem on May 23, 2017. Photo Credit: U.S. Embassy, Tel Aviv. Public Domain.
Israel has acted in an overall provocative manner in the region. It has done so since Netanyahu’s re-election in 2009 and his uninterrupted reign since. Willful regional escalation or confrontation could serve as a game changer for Israel. Recall that the Palestinian Nakba’s pinnacle cleansing materialized in 1948 during a regional confrontation; that was likewise the case during the 1967 Naksa (“setback”) that resulted in an additional massive displacement of Palestinians (and Syrians). Israel’s hunger is for territory, albeit without the Palestinians living in it. Paradoxically, then, colonial displacement, let alone cleansing, are macabre antidotes vis-à-vis the apartheid setting itself. Should heightened regional confrontation erupt—such as between Israel and ISIS or Israel and Iran—some Palestinian communities could find themselves displaced in the same manner as countless Arabs were in war-torn Syria, let alone as happened in 1948 and 1967. Little international attention was paid when Israeli police publicly exercized a transfer scenario on October 7, 2010, or when Israel provoked Syria by bombing its nuclear facility on September 6, 2007.
Regional confrontation need not produce wholesale cleansing; it could still affect existing demography and geography in a mode conducive to annexation sans apartheid. If displacements emerge amid regional confrontations that involve Israeli victims and physical harm, it will be harder to solicit sufficiently vigorous formal opposition to them from (conservative) Euro-America. When the Geneva Convention is cited in the Israel/Palestine context, it is usually done in relation to illegal settlement activities. Yet the legal minds laboring for Israel always emphasize that international law affords sovereign states ample rights to defend citizens and territory. Under confrontations involving civilian Israeli victims/harm, it becomes easier to defend internationally (and frame as legal) acts of displacement as defensive measures. Iranian bombs on Tel Aviv—as happened in 1990 with Iraq—could be rather useful in facilitating disproportionate Israeli aggressions, including vis-à-vis a domestic “enemy-affiliated population.”
It is thus possible that otherwise triumphant Israel remains in search of a game changer as much as Palestinians are. What appears quite clear is that Israel’s endgame is more open-ended than de jure apartheid. Therefore, while anti-apartheid mobilization vis-à-vis Lilliputian Israel/Palestine is obviously needed, a considerably broader anti-war movement, whose scope is explicitly regional, seems equally critical, if not more so.
En Masse Bi-Nationalism as Game Changer?
Against Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Tel Aviv, Aug 11 2018. Photo Credit: יורם שורק. Wikimedia Commons.
Following the 50th commemoration of the Palestinian catastrophe across Euro-America in 1998, employment of the idiom “ongoing Nakba” has grown among scholars and others. Few people, however, seem to comprehend in sufficient detail and depth the idiom’s concrete meanings and continuous inner-workings, as this essay partially attempts to elucidate. This misapprehension may be one of the impediments for formulating—and propagating en masse to broader constituencies—an alternative, contra-apartheid pathway capable of addressing viably both colonial and national formations. Many have realized by now that a game-changing pathway ahead cannot rest on territorial partition. Yet only a handful dare acknowledge that liberalism, and the institutionalization of individual rights including One-Person/One-Vote, are necessary, yet entirely insufficient, conditions to ameliorate inter-communal and inter-religious tensions in post-Ottoman Palestine/Israel. Messianic liberalism that chiefly sees atomized individuals is equally insufficient to heal diverse societies in neighbouring states such as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, or Yemen.
Irrespective of one’s liking or disliking, one hundred and forty years of Arab-Zionist enmities have been socially-constructed in the (empirical) Middle East as two collectivities that cannot be understood outside the global playing-field of the phenomenon of ethno-nationalism: Palestinian-Arab and Hebrew-speaking Israeli. The non-partitioned pathway ahead cannot become a game changer that magnetizes new secular and religious constituencies so long as eyes remain obliviously shut to the foundational notions of federalism and bi-nationalism. Non-partitioned settlement in Israel/Palestine stands thus only a modest chance to materialize as long as liberalism and individual rights remain as unfastened as they presently are to bi-nationalism and collective rights. Collective identities that are informed by religious, ethnic, or national ties are unlikely to “disappear”—or be wishfully willed away—through the liberal privatization of them to some imaginary non-public sphere. It is worth rereading Edward Said’s seminal 1999 essay, preferably without bypassing its single most central contention: “real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.”
How to cite this essay:
Moshe Behar. “In Search of a Game Changer in Israel/Palestine.” Contending Modernities, June 2020.
Screen shot from The Battle of Algiers (1966). Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Representing
One of the most iconic films of political decolonization, Pontecorvo’s 1966 Battle of Algiers, has a memorable scene I would like to recall with my reader. Colonel Mathieu, the commander of the colonial forces, discusses with journalists the power of discourse in the midst of the uprising. For Mathieu, the role of activist-intellectuals in the public sphere is diminishing his possibilities of military success. Dismayed by their role and clearly containing his anger, he exclaims: “Why are the Sartres always born on the other side?” After expressing exasperation at how dangerous the existentialist philosopher is as his foe, Mathieu abruptly exits the scene.
In a film full of nuances, the scene leaves very little space for doubt. From the gaze of the colonizer, the radical continental philosopher is seen not only as a contributor to the task of political decolonization, but also runs the risk of becoming naturalized as a born-barbarian (from the colonizer’s perspective a betrayal of civilization seems inconceivable). This naturalization, however, is not innocent. “The Sartres” are made, more times than not, into the representatives of the struggle and emerge as the rational alternative to the colonial status quo. The colonizer’s gaze assumes a battlefield where there are clean, all-encompassing sides: the rightful civilizational project and the subversive radical continental philosophy, the latter appointed as the epistemological representative of political decolonization.
Yet, when we reflect on the radical continental philosopher’s role from what Enrique Dussel calls the “underside of modernity,” doubts undoubtedly emerge. When the tables are turned, the positionality of even the most radical among continental philosophers, Sartre being one example, is questioned. In recounting his personal encounter with Sartre, Edward Said reflects on the silences and paradoxes in Sartre’s political thought. He reads Sartre’s solidarity as “flat,” “innocuous,” “unrewarding” and ultimately “a bitter disappointment to every (non-Algerian) Arab who admired him.” More recently, Algerian Houria Bouteldja completes Said’s reflections. She argues that the limitations that Said rightly recognized were a consequence of Sartre’s reified framework that was unable to leave behind a Eurocentric conception of selfhood. Heir to a continental philosophy that has obscured its situatedness since Descartes, “Sartre did not know how to radically betray his race” (23).
Sartre’s “other side” is definitively a contribution from a specific European location, but may not be the “underside” of decolonial theory. In a stage set by the Mathieus of the world, Europe contains the proposal and its dissent while the underside is invisibilized. In the socially-committed film, the native Arab/Berber resisters are powerfully represented in countless scenes with dark, intense eyes full of rage, portraying the thirst for revolution. But in the few opportunities they have to intervene in the public debate, they are rapidly silenced by legitimized voices. Following the famous postcolonial dictum, they cannot speak and remain largely voiceless.
Christianizing
The attempt to erase the underside is not a problem of the past. In a series of essays published by Al-Jazeera in 2013, Hamid Dabashi and Walter Mignolo interrogated the celebration of another radical continental philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. Confronting the Euro-Marxist oblivion of the universalized claims of his framework, Dabashi asked a pungent question: “Can the non-European Think?” When Mignolo responded in the affirmative, confronting the idea that Europe has the universal monopoly of dissent, he went beyond frameworks of political colonization and entered into the realm of epistemological decoloniality. To understand the reasons for the erasure of the underside it is necessary to explore the patterns of domination that emerged during colonization but nonetheless transcended the context to develop global hierarchies that continue to exist to this day. From the perspective of those on the underside, the “universal radicality” of continental philosophy, represented by Žižek in this case, is premised on the silence and erasure of non-European thinking.
I invite my reader, therefore, to think of the revolutionary representation of radical continental philosophy as a colonially sanctioned dissent that universalizes a provincial difference while invisibilizing the underside of modernity. Coloniality not only monopolizes the only sanctioned path to universal redemption—in what Anibal Quijano calls evolutionism—but also selects its legitimate form of dissent. This is perhaps one of the most perdurable modern strategies of coloniality. In the now famous debate of Valladolid(1550–1551), conceived by critics as one of the most influential legitimizations of early modern racism, the imperial state appointed Euro-Christian theologian-philosophers to discuss “the nature” of Natives. In this discussion, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, retrieving Aristotle, offers one of the first modern formulations of biological racism and proposes to forcefully convert Natives into subservient Christians. Bartolomé de las Casas, enthroned as the radical and later liberationist alternative, develops one of the first formulations of cultural racism, insisting on Natives’ adaptability through conversion without physical force. If for the continental philosopher there is no possibility of thinking outside Europe, for the colonially appointed philosopher of religion there is no possibility of existence outside a totalizing Christian framework.
This is one of the legacies of the multiple “1492s.” As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have shown in their work, and I have also explored, this starts a process in which a diversity of communities were negated, rejected, or invisibilized. Ultimately, most had their humanity put in question and were intertwined as victims of Christian evolutionist genocides. One could think, therefore, that the first step toward decolonizing philosophy of religion would be to contest the Christian frameworks that provide the hegemonic sources of its ontology and epistemology. Some pioneers writing before the current explosion of decolonial philosophy of religion (such as Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Marc Ellis, Salman Sayyid, Tomoko Masuzawa,Gil Anidjar, and Abdulkader Tayob) have called for leaving behind disciplinary frameworks. From distinct standpoints, they challenged the hegemony of Christian schemes, the coloniality of the concept of religion, and/or its secular reiterations. For several of these authors, deeply knowledgeable of religious studies as a discipline, decoloniality delinks from evolutionism because it opens paths toward pluriversality, not toward a new Christian universality with multiple local paths.
While some trends in the field follow this early insight, in many others this impetus is missed. It is not surprising that philosophers of religion continue to privilege Christian frameworks. After all, one of the privileges of coloniality has been universalizing its provincial framework. What we need to interrogate, however, is why several works in decolonial philosophy and theology are repeating some of the same patterns. These works are valuable in other important aspects. Some, for example, offer persuasive challenges to ontological dualism. Yet, they employ frames that more often than not make discourses intelligible insofar as they are expressed within a Christian framework, or its secular reiterations. Either reproducing overt coloniality or its sanctioned dissent, often these proposals inadvertently reproduce the same evolutionism they are formally contesting.
Luis Fernando Camacho, a Bolivian civic leader, in a Cabildo calling on the people to regain democracy. Photo Credit: Ayrton. Wikimedia Commons.
This does not mean we should rule out some forms of Christianity as sources for decolonial knowledges. It is true that Frantz Fanon called Christianity the Church of “the white man” before critiquing the evolutionism of its “calling” to the colonized “not to the ways of God” but “to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor” (7). And Mignolo argued that previous radical liberationist projects, that may have called Fanon’s wretched of the earth to other ways, changed “the content but not the terms” of the conversation (92). Yet, current readers of either author may not object to the idea that, as part of a pluriversal project, some self-identified Christian communities in some contexts can depart from systemic fractures, engage critically with the encounter of cosmovisions in their own midst, and ultimately contest evolutionist coloniality. Today, however, philosophers of religion in the American academy often employ Christian frameworks that may not fully address Fanon’s and Mignolo’s concerns.
“Hernan Cortés fights with two Indians.” Image credit: Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer. Wikimedia Commons
The problem is not necessarily Christianity, but the omnipresence of Christian normativity in discourses of dominance, rebellion, and re-existence. This creates a very narrow setting that reproduces the allure of totalization. In the field, there are some incipient tendencies we may want to interrogate. A first tendency is to follow the critique that the secular is not a neutral space in order to intervene in public debates with normative Christian resources instead of delinking from them. A second tendency is to reify a world religions model, presenting other alternatives as foreign (this time) latecomers to coloniality, thereby making Christian resources the most natural fit for a decolonial project. A final tendency is to universalize an American interpretation of “Christian hybridization,” overlooking the suspicion communities around the world have of hybridity as a strategy that ignores power differentials, sublates knowledges, and enshrines European Christianity as the normative locus of existence. I am not arguing that we should universally question the potential of some forms of Christianity as decolonial resources. Unmasking secular neutrality, establishing conversations from cosmovisions one inhabits, and exploring groundbreaking accounts of “popular Christianities” can be truly useful resources for decolonial projects. The task is to confront the role that Christian normativity plays when it is predicated in evolutionism, one of the primary strategies of coloniality.
Decolonizing
Today a decolonial philosophy of religion in the American academy may be at risk of becoming a sanctioned space of dissent within an omnipresent Christian normativity permeated by evolutionism. It is then necessary to find alternatives. Dussel, no stranger to evaluating Christian forms of dissent, challenges evolutionist models by appealing to another methodological resource: barbaric philosophies’ analectics. Confronting those models that attempt to create universal consciousness by sublating all other possibilities, he uses this resource to challenge totalizing frameworks. Objecting to narrow epistemological alternatives to internal contradictions of a hermetic framework, he elaborates decoloniality from a positive reaffirmation of cosmovisions that live under the pressure of coloniality, but have not been swallowed up by modernity. As such, they resist demands of hegemonic universality and work toward a world where, as the Zapatista movement has proclaimed, “many worlds can fit.”
While the abrasiveness of totalitarian evolutionism spread throughout the whole world, the knowledges that were rejected, negated, and/or invisibilized were not ingested. In many cases they not only resisted colonially imposed frameworks of dissent, but also took distance from essentialist, apolitical, romantic claims to return to utopian pasts. These barbaric lenses provide a framework to learn from the work of dynamic, heterogenous, and transversal communities that, suffering from the wound of coloniality, have found ways to transform, translate, and create knowledges to resist centuries of evolutionist epistemological genocide. Christianized and not, within and between these communities we find social movements, political coalitions, and intellectuals who are practicing a dual critique against both coloniality and power structures within their own collectives, opening spaces for intersectional and pluricultural conversations. They provide other frameworks the philosopher of religion can draw upon for decolonial critical theories, practices, and horizons.
Philosophers of religion in the American academy, then, have options in front of them. They can opt to develop a radical critique from already legitimized sources in the field, but may need to question how they became legitimized (and sacralized) as colonially sanctioned dissent. They can opt to creatively subsume coloniality and resistances into a hybrid third space creating a new superseding option, but should consider the unequal weight of a Euro-Christian framework that may inadvertently result in the fulfilment of the work of colonial evolutionism. Or they can unmask the systemic allure of totality by acknowledging colonial difference and think from, and with, critical thought emerging from barbaric (rejected, negated, or invisibilized) cosmovisions. These can all be radical options, but not all of them will be decolonial proposals.
Santiago Slabodsky is the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York. He is co-director of the journal Decolonial Horizons/Horizontes Decoloniales at the GEMRIP institute in Latin America and convener of the summer program of Liberation Theologies and Decolonial Thought at the Global Dialogue Center in Spain. In the past he was co-chair of the Liberation Theologies unit at AAR, convener of the PhD Program in Religion, Ethics and Society at Claremont School of Theology and associate director of the center for Race, Culture and Social Justice in his current institution. Concurrently to his permanent posts in the US, he has served as visiting professor at institutions in the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Costa Rica, Macedonia, and Argentina and has lectured throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Courtesy of Girlie Press. Used with permission. Available for download here.
In the last sentence of Robert Orsi’s recent post on the Contending Modernities blog, he confesses to worrying about an Ohio woman killing “us all.” What has she done during this pandemic to elicit his worry, apparently more than any politician or sneezer might have done? She gained a short-lived viral fame for saying, in a report filed to CNN by its reporter Gary Tuchman, that she was not concerned about her health because she was “covered in Jesus’s blood.” We might be able to reason with a politician who utters falsehoods for political gain, for example by showing evidence that got Mitch McConnell to confess that he had lied in saying that the Obama administration had left no pandemic guidelines when Donald Trump became President of the US. I might be able to turn to etiquette when confronted with a sneezer in the baking aisle of the grocery store, noting that we customarily turn away from others when we sneeze. But for Orsi, there is no commonality with the woman covered in Jesus’s blood. She is far from us scholars; she lives in a radically different ontological reality; we scholars should not delude ourselves that we could have any power with which to pathologize her difference; we should not fantasize about becoming “deputies of law and order” who could get our fellow citizens to judge her as we deem appropriate.
I, for one, am not particularly worried about this specific woman killing me. I live far from her. She most likely has no desire to visit Leon County in Florida. I have no desire to travel to Monroe, Ohio, near the border between Warren and Butler counties—both located between Cincinnati and Dayton—where Tuchman interviewed her as she departed from the Solid Rock Church. (In the wake of Tuchman’s story, Solid Rock Church has posted guidelines for worship during the pandemic.) I feel fortunate, at present, that we both live in counties—assuming that she lives in either Warren or Butler county—that have a fairlylow number of positive cases and deaths per capita. I am happy to learn, as I write this, that her area has not recently seen an increase in the rate of daily new cases. No matter how much confidence these facts give me that I will not soon die as a result of something that has its origin in virus-laden droplets that she will emit, these facts might not mean much. An outbreak may start in the future no matter what the current statistics say, and our relatively good fortune should not preclude us from caring for and worrying about our fellow citizens in the many many counties in the US that have higher rates, or the sick in counties with lower rates than ours.
Nevertheless, I am worried for this woman’s neighbors, since Butler County was the site of a recent rally against Ohio’s governor Mike DeWine and the director of Ohio’s Department of Health, Dr. Amy Acton. Such distrust of political and public-health leadership that was universally praised in early April may very well kill Ohioans in the future. Solid Rock Church’s guidelines for worship close with an affirmation of gratitude for Acton’s and DeWine’s leadership, and pray for their “continued wisdom.” Given this affirmation, I wish that Tuchman would return to that congregation, and ask people there for their thoughts about the rally organizers and attendees in Butler County. That would be more productive than Tuchman’s modeling what we now know to be bad public-health guidance, by sensationalizing the brief hugs that members of Solid Rock Church gave each other at the entrance to their church. After all, the risk that they run of becoming infected has to do with the length of time that they spend in each other’s vicinity, especially indoors.
In the midst of this pandemic, I am the sort of person who thinks about statistics and practical concerns (how long is too long for me to spend in the grocery store?). My pearl-clutching thoughts about religion and its dangers are not any greater in quantity or intensity at this moment than they were before the pandemic started. This is perhaps an odd temperament for a professor in a religion department to confess. Shouldn’t I be thinking about religion all the time? Shouldn’t I be thinking about it more deeply when matters of life and death are at stake? But perhaps I might justify this temperament by explaining why, at the same time that I do not understand the religious life of the woman in Ohio who is far from me, I neither feel a secure hold on the story that Orsi—a scholar whom I take to be close to me (whenever I feel a need for happy memories of my late fiancé, invariably among them is a morning when he made breakfast for Orsi)—tells about plural ontological realism, and his implication in that story that there is nothing for scholars to do except proclaim a need for, and develop, “new ways of thinking.”
“God Works.” Exterior sign of Solid Rock Church. Photo Credit: Joe Shlabotnik.
In reading various friends’ reactions on social media to Tuchman’s CNN piece, I am continually surprised that attention has fixed on the white woman who says that she is covered in Jesus’s blood. While Orsi mentions that nonwhite evangelicals say similar things, no one in my networks has turned to the African American woman in Tuchman’s story who, almost ninety seconds into the story, says “The blood of Jesus cures every disease! Psalms 91—read it!” This is perhaps one of the key moments of biblical prooftexting in recent media stories on religion. And certainly, that woman is reading the plain sense of the psalm correctly; those who trust in God (and follow God’s commands) will see themselves as the addressees of the verses in that Psalm (91:9–11) that claim that “because you took the Lord … as your haven, no harm will befall you, no disease touch your tent. For He will order His angels to guard you wherever you go.”
This woman’s worldview is biblically grounded. There is nothing prima facie wrong with her calling herself a Christian, holding Psalm 91 to be sacred, and holding membership in a church that affirms “divine healing of the sick.” Yet we should hesitate before continuing to say that Psalm 91 expresses the essence of the biblical worldview. The blood of Jesus may indeed have ontological properties that cure every disease, but it is the epistemological story about this cure—about how a woman might come to know for certain that she is covered in it, about how she might come to know that it will either heal her or prevent her from contracting illness—that is more vexing for the Christian than the ontology of disease. As Paul says in the complex argument of Romans 3, it is both true for the Christian that “there is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding” (Romans 3:10–11, restating the early verses of Psalm 14) at the same time that the true Christian is “justified by [God’s] grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). Without understanding, how can one know that one has received the divine grace that will lead one to be cured of any disease that one might contract? How could one say with any command of fact that one is bathed in Christ’s blood? Elsewhere, Paul writes that the peace of God “surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). But is not such understanding precisely what the members of Solid Rock Church claim to possess?
Where is the secure grasp of ontology, for the Bible-believing Christian? How is it evident? It would seem that the extent of human sinfulness would make it impossible to know for certain whether one is covered in Jesus’s blood, or in a placebo. The Bible opens up plural ontological realities, but it also opens up the possibility for skepticism about (but not dismissal of!) the ontology to which one is committed.
This skeptical space ought to be common to me, to Orsi, and to the churchgoers interviewed by Tuchman. We each may arrive at it through different paths—Orsi and I through the university curricula, the churchgoers through the Biblical text—but it is shared nonetheless. It allows Orsi and me to judge these churchgoers, to be the “deputies of law and order” that Orsi fears we cannot be. It allows these churchgoers to be deputies and judge Orsi and me as well; neither being an insider in a community nor being an outsider is sufficient to make one’s claims correct.
To the extent that North American undergraduates know Orsi’s published work, it is likely that they know his critique of Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain for arbitrarily positioning Covington hierarchically above the snake-handling preacher Punkin Brown, with whose community in northeastern Alabama Covington spent almost two years in the early 1990s. Orsi’s response to the Ohio woman displays more anxiety than his response to Covington, but both share a commitment to the belief that “the point of engaging other religious worlds should not be to reassure ourselves and our readers that we are not them” (192). With this I agree. But Covington had reasons for suddenly judging Brown negatively. Covington gave a sermon in that community that endorsed women’s equality, and cited Mark 16, in which the risen Jesus first appeared to Mary Magdalene, as evidence for this view. For this, a member of the community tells Covington that he is “out of the Word,” and Brown agrees. It is at this point that Covington turns to his othering of Brown that “makes the world safe again for Covington and his readers” (100). Nevertheless, Mark 16 says what it says, although it is also the case that its narrative is not quite paralleled in the other Gospels. To point this out is not to reassure myself that my ontology is right. It is to point to the difficulty of finding a secure footing in a tradition, whether one takes that tradition as reporting on an ontologically true reality (as Covington and Brown do) or an ontologically false one (as I do).
One can think of secular versions of this story as well. In his 1993 book A Place Among The Nations (reprinted with some changes in 2000 as A Durable Peace), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly places himself in the tradition of the Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom Netanyahu describes as almost a lone seer in comprehending the importance of Jewish military power (359). Yet in his own writings, Jabotinsky saw Jewish power in Palestine as something that would cause moderate Arab voices to emerge, and peace with them (43). Almost a century later, one has the right to ask those who claim Jabotinsky as an intellectual forebear why there is as yet no peace. Was Jabotinsky wrong about the Palestinian Arabs (as Netanyahu’s anti-Arab racism in A Durable Peace implies), or was he wrong to believe that Jewish power would generate peace (as the fact of the passage of almost a century implies)? What would be the criterion for deciding between these two options? How would one know that it is the correct criterion? Here too, the ability to engage in immanent critique leads ontological security to recede as one grasps for it.
Nowadays, scholars of religion are not always scholars of texts. There are good reasons for this. An emphasis on textuality can reflect a bias for the modern (and its critical techniques), a bias for the elite (who read and discuss these texts), or a bias for the mainline Protestant (as so much of Orsi’s work on Catholic religious practices has shown). As a lapsed Catholic who studies Jewish philosophical texts, I am wary of replicating these biases in this response to Orsi. Nonetheless, if Orsi is wondering how to respond to the threat that he sees in the Ohio woman and her ontological reality, I suggest that he turn not to a new way of thinking, but to an old way of being with a believer, with a text that the believer takes to be sacred. If he were to offer to read the Bible with her—asking her questions about the text, letting her ask him questions, allowing the far to become close—the fragility of both of their ontologies might very well come to the surface.
Bible Study. Photo Credit: WELSTech Podcast.
Or it might not. This conversation, were it to happen, could collapse after a few moments. She might show herself to be irresponsible: perhaps by refusing to see other justifiable readings (even if she does not commit herself to their truth), perhaps by refusing to wear a facemask with Orsi if he were to ask her to do so. So be it. As Max Weber wrote in “Science as a Vocation” (recently retranslated as “The Scholar’s Work”), the role of the teacher, in a time when multiple values collide against one another in a sort of “polytheism,” is to show the effects of some commitment or other “on social conditions and people’s lives” (27). This makes it possible for the listener to take responsibility for one’s commitments by gaining a clear knowledge of the full range of their consequences (36). Whether one sees the teacher as Orsi or as the Ohio woman, the possibility of being judged as an irresponsible student (failing to read, failing to take seriously the wages of sin) is always possible. Cultural politics is a matter of trying to persuade my fellow citizens that this other person is irresponsible, and not I.
Orsi is correct to note that death is at stake. Even if the Ohio woman will not kill me or “us all,” people have died in the past due to others’ irresponsibility. Hundreds have died today, and many more will surely die in the future. In the midst of all that death, I choose to wager that some respite—perhaps more than I might dare to hope—can be found in studying a complex text with another.
The author is deeply grateful to Ryan Donovan, Joshua Lupo, Atalia Omer, and Jason Springs for their comments on previous drafts, as well as to Robert Orsi for the integral role he plays in a happy memory.
Martin Kavka is Professor of Religion at Florida State University, where he also directs the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities. He is the author of Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, which won the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Philosophy and Jewish Thought in 2008 from the Association for Jewish Studies. With his colleague Aline Kalbian, he co-edits the Journal of Religious Ethics.
Corrina Gould, Chochenyo Ohlone, speaks at an Occupy Oakland decolonization protest at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Photo credit: dignidadrebelde, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Image size has been modified.
Comparative religious ethics, as a subfield of religious studies and as a method of inquiry, assumes that the categories of both religion and ethics apply across cultures. Is our assumption of the possibility of comparison across cultures with regard to religion or ethics valid? In its purest form, comparative religious ethics examines ethics in various religious traditions and draws similarities and differences among them. In its practical form, comparative religious ethics typically involves comparison between Christianity and a non-Christian tradition, or the study of ethics in minority and non-Christian traditions. Comparative religious ethicists may compare influential figures in different traditions, for example as Lee Yearley does in Mencius and Aquinas (1990); explore an important theme in a non-Christian tradition, as William LaFleur does in Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (1994); or examine an idea, such as human rights, that has been adopted in multiple traditions, as I do in The Rights of God (2007). In any case, when scholars engage in comparative religious ethics, they do so with the understanding that both religion and ethics are categories that exist across traditions.
Decolonizing Religion and Ethics
Work on the theme of decolonization by scholars such as Christopher M. Driscoll and Monica R. Miller, Kathryn Lofton, and Tomoko Masuzawa questions the integrity of the category of religion, and by extension, of religious ethics. Endeavors to decolonize religion unearth the many ways in which the study of religion has contributed to, if not created, the conditions for oppression. The origins of the idea of religion are in European Christianity, which took the primacy of scripture and the centrality of humankind—especially white men—as archetypical of a valid belief system. Beliefs and practices that did not fit neatly into this mold were classified by scholars and clergy as inferior, less highly developed, or even evil. As such, these descriptions of other traditions provided justification for the subjugation, colonization, and conversion of Asians, Africans, indigenous peoples, and other groups at the hands of “enlightened” European Christians.
Sculpture of Plato and Aristotle in conversation. Photo Credit: Sailko. Wikimedia Commons.
The very existence of comparative religious ethics—indeed of religious studies as a discipline altogether—has grown out of a deeply unjust European colonialist legacy. Within the study of ethics outside the modern study of religion, the process of decolonization is perhaps a bit more muddled. Ethics has a much longer history than the study of religion, dating at least as far back to the ancient Greeks, whose meditations on concepts of the good, the right, and virtue influenced countless traditions, not just Christianity. One would be hard pressed to find any community that lacks some notion of preferred behaviors, acceptable social structures, and customary ways of relating to other members of the society. If we consider societal laws to be a type of ethics, in that laws approximate the dominant ethical norms of a given community, then the idea of ethics dates back even further to at least the ancient Mesopotamians, the laws of Moses, and the laws of Manu, among others. Decolonizing ethics and the law would likely take on a different form than decolonizing religion. Of course, ideas of ethics and the law have—like religions—been utilized by imperialists to oppress non-Christian subjects, but ethics and the law likely existed as discrete topics in many cultures prior to colonization.
Given this, what are our options with regard to the future of comparative religious ethics? First, we could abandon the discipline altogether given its compromised origins. Second, we could continue to carry on with our research as we have previously and ignore the efforts to decolonize religious studies. Third, we could acknowledge the validity of efforts to decolonize religious studies and make adjustments accordingly.
Option 1: Abandoning Religious Studies
The first option, to abandon religious studies altogether, is simply unrealistic, at least in the foreseeable future in the United States. While it is the cleanest theoretically of the three options, the academic study of religion is deeply embedded into the structure of colleges, universities, and research institutions across the globe. Of course, universities and colleges do eliminate departments, but usually as the result of financial distress; and this strategy is often met with backlash from students, faculty, and alumni. An alternative option, as described by Birgit Meyer, is to follow the model in the Netherlands, where public universities folded theology faculty into humanities departments, and then replaced theology with religious studies. While this does not erase religious studies altogether, this does more to place religious studies within a larger interdisciplinary context. As such, religious studies becomes part of an academic community that considers equally relevant the knowledge produced in history, literature, philosophy, languages, and other humanistic disciplines.
The elimination of religious studies as a discipline, however, does not provide strategies for analyzing a massive body of literature about religions. We have libraries, both physical and online, full of books, essays, articles, as well as films, movies, and documentaries all dealing with the theme of religion. The category of religion as a means to describe peoples has become part of polling statistics, the national census, and international research data. Religion has been incorporated into national and international legal structures, most notably in those structures’ protection of freedom of religion. Although the origins of the idea of religion are rooted in unjust colonial practices, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres has described, how would we possibly dismantle the juggernaut that religion has now become? To do so would present an impossible task, and would not necessarily be a wise one to take up. Given that religious minorities in many countries may now turn to legal systems to seek protection, doing away with religion as part of a larger decolonization strategy could have the ironic and unintended consequence of jeopardizing the survival of marginalized religious communities. Legal systems, of course, are not without their own flaws when it comes to the use of religion as a category. As Winnifred Sullivan and others have described, religious freedom is a highly politicized concept that dominant parties have wielded to protect their own interests at the expense of weaker minorities, both domestically and internationally. As Sullivan and others note, however, there is no easy solution to this problem. There are some religious minorities that have definitely benefited from such protective laws, including—as I describe below—Muslim women in France who had been penalized for wearing “burkinis” until France’s highest court, the Conseil d’État, determined that burkini bans violated fundamental freedoms.
Option 2: Ignoring Decolonialism
The second option would be to carry on with our research and teaching as if decolonialism had no direct impact upon scholarship in comparative religious ethics. Many of us—even if we do not or have not specifically addressed decolonization in our scholarship or teaching—are sympathetic to the larger project. In particular, comparative religious ethicists are 1) keenly aware of, and try to avoid, a hierarchy of beliefs and practices based upon an inherited notion of the supremacy of Christianity; and 2) supportive of research that investigates non-Christian and minority traditions as rich sources of ethical knowledge.
If we consider the origins of contemporary comparative religious ethics as emerging from the 1978 publication of David Little and Barney Twiss’ Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method, the work done in the field has been sensitive to concerns about stigmatizing the cultures and traditions of the colonized, oppressed, and marginalized, and committed to elevating the status of non-Christian traditions as serious sources of ethical material. Comparative Religious Ethics, although not without fault, takes seriously the structures of moral reasoning found not just in Christianity, but also in the Navajo and Theravada Buddhist traditions. There is no discernable motivation to rank these traditions in terms of their moral superiority. There are clear attempts to show how these traditions share some similarities concerning “other-regarding” norms, as well as to show how these traditions differ from each other.
Applying a decolonial lens to Comparative Religious Ethics—as well as to other works that have since emerged from the discipline—would help to uncover some of the assumptions about the categories used in ethical analysis. The commonly accepted definition of ethics as other-regarding, for example, can be scrutinized as a perspective that requires first, the separation between self and other, and second, that other-regarding actions are praiseworthy, rather than assumed. In one of the early critiques of Comparative Religious Ethics,Donald Swearer points out that the Buddhist concept of no-self presents significant complications to a notion of ethics in which individual persons exist as discrete beings. Similar critiques in religious ethics have been previously offered along similar lines by feminist and womanist scholars such as Katie G. Cannon, Deidre Nicole Green, and Virginia Held.
Option 3: Incorporating Decolonization
The third option, to acknowledge the validity of efforts to decolonize religion and adjust our approaches to comparative religious ethics, is not just practical, but may also improve our methodology in comparative religious ethics. Although the field—like so many other academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences—has been affected by the self-reflexive turn advocated for by Pierre Bourdieu, comparative religious ethics has thus far not been explicitly concerned about its broader origins in colonial practices. What might scholarship in comparative religious ethics that addresses decolonialism look like?
First, work in comparative religious ethics ought to make explicit whether the object of inquiry—whether it be religious clothing as Elizabeth Bucar discusses in Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress, or just war as explained by John Kelsay in Arguing the Just War in Islam—exists from the perspective of the practitioners of the tradition itself. Perhaps one of the most egregious missteps ethicists can make is to force the moral relevance of issues onto another culture. The heated debates in France over Muslim women’s clothing, for example, have revealed how divisive and oppressive traditional French norms about women’s appearance can be. French “burkini” bans that essentially required Muslim women to reveal their bodies when sun-bathing were not only unnecessary from a security perspective—this had been the prevailing argument against the face-covering burka—but rightly condemned and eventually overturned by higher courts for violating civil liberties, including religious freedom.
“No Burkini Allowed.” Photo Credit: Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño. Flickr.
Second, we ought not to assume that simply because a specific word or phrase does not exist in another linguistic culture, that the idea does not have resonance there. The concept of human rights, for example, may have been borne out of North American and European legal traditions, but has found audiences in communities around the world. The clear majority of cultures support human rights as a general principle, even if violations of human rights continue to occur. The process by which representatives from highly diverse cultural backgrounds discussed, debated, and then created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reveals how dialogue can lead to a shared understanding of important issues. Hans Georg Gadamer’s term Horizontversmelzung (“fusion of horizons”) captures this phenomenon well. Horizontversmelzung describes an understanding that takes place among participants in dialogue, whereby each person standing at a distinct vantage point is nonetheless capable of sharing a metaphorical horizon with others, who likewise stand at their own distinct vantage points.
Third, recognizing the full humanity which should be accorded to subjugated peoples means insisting that they be recognized as intellectual and moral agents, and not be objectified as carefully preserved museum pieces. As with the interlocutors from Gadamer’s dialogues, people regardless of their location are agents who may themselves initiate exchanges with others, agitate for change and progress, and, unfortunately, engage in oppressive practices both within and outside their communities. Work in comparative religious ethics can illuminate the ways in which people from various communities have applied and responded to colonial pressures, as well as the ethical implications of using religion to further and to protest the aims of empire.
Conclusion
Mural of Frantz Fanon. Photo credit: photographymontreal. Flickr.
The application of decolonial theory to comparative religious ethics would emphasize the necessity of bringing forth distinct voices and perspectives from non-Christian and non-European traditions to represent ideas on their own terms, rather than mediated through the theories and categories of colonialism. This requires the inclusion of theoretical frameworks developed by peoples, both from the past and contemporaries, whose worldviews have been shaped by and are critical of colonial histories. Although comparative religious ethicists take seriously the ideas advocated by thinkers from multiple traditions, many of us rely almost exclusively upon frameworks informed by European and North American male scholars—Bourdieu, Durkheim, Habermas, Marx, Rawls, Weber, and Gadamer, among others. This is not, of course, to condemn such influential scholarship, but rather, to press the necessity of evaluating and incorporating alternative methodologies relevant to comparison. How might the works of Frantz Fanon, Aníbal Quijano, Sylvia Wynter, and other thinkers help us to push and to question the boundaries of comparative religious ethics? The responses to this question will likely engender new directions in comparative religious ethics by interrogating dominant modes of thinking in the field and by expanding discussions about the environment, the economy, race and ethnicity, and gender.
Irene Oh is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at The George Washington University. She is the author of The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights, and Comparative Ethics (Georgetown UP, 2007) and is a founding member of the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics. She has served on the board of the Society of Christian Ethics and on the steering committees of the Comparative Religious Ethics and Human Rights and Religion working groups of the American Academy of Religion. Her research focuses on contemporary issues concerning motherhood, justice, and comparative ethics.
Wooden model of a house explaining the Constitution created by activists in Ahmedabad, India. Photo courtesy of RAJEEV KHANNA/TheCitizen.in. Used with permission.
Beginning on December 14, 2019, and lasting until they were forcibly removed when India went into lockdown to address COVID-19 on March 24, 2020, protesters occupied a major road in the neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh in the southern part of Delhi in order to demonstrate against the combined effects of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC)—a 24/7 protest that has lasted over 100 days. Susan Ostermann’s post explains these new laws in greater detail. At the heart of this peaceful protest were women from the middle-class neighborhood itself who were often identified in the press as “housewives.” Many of them were middle-aged or older and many were wearing hijab. Around them sprung up street art, a revolutionary library, children’s activities, and more. The protest inspired solidarity protests around the country. Protesters faced threats from far-right Hindu groups to forcibly clear the area. These threats materialized into actual violence when vigilantes fired guns into crowds of nearby protesters. On social media and in the press, protesters at Shaheen Bagh describe protesting not just against the CAA and NRC (and the Bharatya Janata Party [BJP], the ruling party in government that passed these laws) but on behalf of India’s constitution and the secularism it enshrines, offering an argument about how to define Indian democracy, and who best represents that democracy. They do so by deploying precisely the identity markers that supposedly mark them as oppressed and other: their status as women, female family members, and Muslims.
The Shaheen Bagh protests deploy representations of kinship and home to underscore the vision of a secular, inclusive democracy enshrined in the constitution. Rather than understanding the home as a passive space to which persons retreat from the “real” world, the protesters at Shaheen Bagh demonstrated the enormously generative potential of home and kinship for rewriting democratic values. The Shaheen Bagh protests are innovative not because of the gendered identity of the protesters, but because of how protesters have mobilized that identity to contest powerful scripts of citizenship, religion, family, and nation. Shaheen Bagh’s protesters offer lessons for how to reconceptualize links between public and private, providing new terms for inhabiting domesticity and democracy. Such reconceptualizations are especially valuable as the COVID-19 crisis underscores connections between private labor and public value which are typically hidden from view.
The protesters at Shaheen Bagh address and invert the representations of Islam, gender, and family that the BJP has deployed to defend the CAA and other legislation that many see as Islamophobic. In passing the CAA, India’s ruling party has suggested that some people belong in the Indian nation-state while others do not, depending on religious affiliation. This notion builds on longstanding efforts to portray Muslims in India as outsiders, “invaders,” or, more recently, “guests” of a Hindu nation who ought to follow the norms of their hosts. The supposed negative treatment of women at the hands of Muslim men plays a central role in these representations (while conveniently distracting from the many ways the Indian state has failed to support women from all backgrounds). Since the late twentieth century, the Hindu right has targeted Muslim family laws, and their supposed ill-treatment of Muslim women, to argue for universal (read: Hindu) family and inheritance laws. Some on the Hindu right have even suggested that gender inequality in contemporary India stems from the arrival of the Mughal empire. These strategies allow right-wing Hindu nationalists to co-opt critiques of gender inequality in contemporary India for the sake of undermining the status of Muslims in India more broadly. Narratives of oppressed Muslim women draw on a long-established, globally circulating Islamophobic discourse that treats the status of women as an index of how “civilized” a social group is. Such anxieties about the status of women were a trope in civilizing missions going back to India’s colonization by the British, and continue to justify Western imperial missions in the Middle East and Central/South Asia (as numerous historians and anthropologists have demonstrated, including Lata Mani,Antoinette Burton, Mrinalini Sinha and Lila Abu-Lughod).
As the contemporary life of these narratives shows, binary distinctions such as civilized/uncivilized, oppressed/liberated, and public/private are highly portable, easily translated from one scale of comparison to another (what anthropologists call “recursion”). For example, longstanding distinctions between the “West” as “civilized” in comparison with “uncivilized” colonized societies (or, today, the “developing world”) can, in turn, be used by powerful groups within so-called “developing” countries like India to distinguish between more or less “civilized” citizens based on religious identity. The cruel irony of these recursive translations is that they enlist people in reproducing the very distinctions that, at other scales of comparison, are used to marginalize them. On the other hand, such interpretive practices can allow people to remake those categories by applying them to new contexts. In Shaheen Bagh, for example, a group of “housewives” domesticates the public space of a major road, and in so doing emphasizes that such public spaces were home all along.
The Shaheen Bagh protests invert representations of Muslim women as oppressed by the men of their community by centering a leaderless group of Muslim women who emphasize their status as women and as family members. Instead of being trapped at homes run by men who are not themselves full, “real” citizens of the nation, they present themselves as representatives of the nation by invoking their status as female kin. They draw on the language of family to describe their relations with fellow protestors. The older protesters are frequently described as “dadis,” grandmas, and visitors describe being addressed as betis, daughters. To those who paint Muslims as guests overstaying their welcome, these invocations of female kinship provide a different language of belonging in the nation state: grandmothers always ready to welcome you home. In claiming ties of intergenerational kinship, protesters draw on shared understandings of female familial solidarity. Such claims of kinship push back against the NRC, which requires citizens to prove citizenship via documentary evidence of property ownership and descent from male kin—documentation less readily available to women than to men.
At the same time, such invocations invert assumptions that female kin are subordinate or passive, shared across communities in India (and beyond). These aren’t just dadis—they’re described in the press as dabaang dadis, bold or fearless grannies. In invoking female ties of kinship, these dabaang dadis respond to the aggressive, austere models of masculinity that inform the Hindu right, where leaders emphasize a virility that derives from ascetic discipline. These are best encapsulated in representations of Prime Minister Modi, who lives alone, or in representations of the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Ajay Mohan Bisht, known as Yogi Adityanath, who dresses in the saffron robes of a mendicant. For these leaders, such discipline must also be applied to the nation itself, which must be defended via borders and bullets. Against this model, the women of Shaheen Bagh draw on longstanding ideas about home and family to experiment with other modes of belonging, one where citizens are strengthened rather than weakened through their relations with diverse others, where open-ended relations of pyaar, love and affection, draw citizens to the nation. When vigilantes chanting right-wing slogans fired at protesters, protesters responded with a nara, a protest slogan of their own, while holding signs that said “not bullets but flowers:” Desh ke in pyaaron pe phool barsao saaron pe (Let flowers rain on the heads of those beloved of the country).
In reframing the links between gender, kinship, and citizenship, Shaheen Bagh’s protesters are remaking the definition of secularism in India. Against those who seek to use religion to define who can call India home, offering, at best, a space of tenuous tolerance for “guests,” protesters at Shaheen Bagh and others are reimagining constitutional secularism as a kind of home, a space of belonging. This approach is beautifully encapsulated in images that circulated in the wake of the CAA’s passage, documenting efforts to create educational “constitution houses” that embody India’s constitution as a literal house, with key tenets providing the foundation, windows, and roof. Along the roofline, above the door, reads the words: “this home belongs to people of all religions.”
Julia Kowalski is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs and a concurrent faculty member in the Gender Studies Program and in the Department of Anthropology. A cultural anthropologist by training, she has been conducting fieldwork in north India since 2007, focusing on issues of gender, kinship, women’s rights, personhood, gendered violence, and institutional practices.
Kowalski’s research draws upon methods and theories from cultural, medical, and linguistic anthropology to understand how people work together across differences of culture, social status, and political commitments to create social change. Her current project examines how elite activists, middle-class female staff, and clients facing household violence debate the meaning of women's rights, via an ethnographic study of family counseling centers run by women’s rights NGOs in Rajasthan.
Closure at the New York Ave Presbyterian Church during COVID-19 outbreak. Photo credit: dmbosstone.
March 2020 was a time of unprecedented change and innovation for religious organizations around the world. The global COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many countries shutting down their borders and banning public gatherings to combat the spread of the virus. As a result, hundreds of places of worship were forced to close their doors and quickly find alternative ways to meet and conduct services. As public lock-downs and quarantines continued into April, the challenges were heighted for religious groups. Rituals surrounding Jewish celebrations of Passover and Christian observances for Holy Week and Easter had to be reinvented. The inability of religious communities to meet in person over these key religious holidays raised questions about how well religious groups are able to adapt to such unexpected changes. What would it mean for religious groups if social distancing continued to be required and enforced? What becomes of religion if its traditional practices and regular forms of gathering are not allowed?
The common response during the pandemic in America was for Christian churches to opt for technology-based solutions. This meant transitioning away from long established embodied practices that take place in the church building such as communal prayer, celebratory meals, or responsive readings to disembodied practices that take place on digital platforms. Several studies conducted during this time by Church groups and researchers found pastors were both overwhelmed and excited by these changes.
New Challenges
A survey of 1573 pastors conducted by a collaboration of church consultancy groups found many churches conducted online services for the first time ever in March 2020. Because of this, most pastors (41%) reported feeling ill-equipped to use the digital tools required, such as internet streaming and video conferencing. A follow-up survey by the same group in April reported that while pastors were beginning to get a handle on the new technologies, they were now becoming aware that doing church online did not automatically create opportunities for community engagement, which many of their members were missing. This shows that churches’ sudden dependency on technology did not come without problems for leaders.
Many religious leaders have seen this forced engagement with new technology as an unplanned challenge. The Barna Group, a Christian resource and research company, found that nearly half of pastors (48%) said that the unexpected growth and “innovation around technology” in their churches made them uncomfortable. Barna’s online survey of 434 Protestant Senior Pastors found that most of leaders’ time in the first few weeks of the pandemic were taken up with implementing technology. The transition from in-person services to online gatherings required hours of impromptu media trainings, the redesigning of sanctuary spaces to accommodate cameras, and the modification of traditional service structures and liturgy.
In addition, leaders suggested that trying to bridge the physical separation between members and leaders during worship through technology-driven alternatives has, rather than overcome such social distance, simply created another form of it. Some noted that worshiping online seemed to encourage members to be passive-observers, rather than engaged worshipers.
Transferring, Translating, and Transforming Worship
Yet, this critique of online spaces—that it encourages observation over interactivity—could also be made of many churches offline worship services. This is something I argue in a recent essay from an eBook collection that brings religious leaders and scholars of digital religion together to reflect on how the COVID-19 Pandemic might be altering religious practice in America. Here I assert that American religious culture since the mid-20th century has become primarily event-focused, where pastors spend most of their time planning and preparing for their weekly worship service. This observation is also echoed in the research data cited above, as pastors ranked the Sunday worship service and it’s adaptation at this time as their number one priority.
Reverend David Silverkors of the Church of Sweden engages his members in a liturgical response during a livestreamed service online. Photo courtesy of author.
My essay discusses three common approaches to doing church online that I observed over a month of participant-observation in over 60 online Protestant and Catholic worship services. These include transfer, translation, and transformation approaches to services.
The transfer or broadcast approach attempts to replicate the traditional service online as closely as possible. Here most churches set up a single camera in the center of an empty sanctuary and attempt to get a wide angle shot of a service conducted as if it were any other gathering.
Other church leaders focused on translating and adapting certain elements of their traditional in-person services, such as communal singing or liturgical readings, into a space constrained by camera angles or the screen dimensions of the streaming platform.
Zachary Lambert, Lead Pastor of Restore Austin, discuss children’s worship opportunities provided online during a livestreamed service on Facebook. Photo courtesy of author.
Yet, just as the pastor’s survey noted, these transfer and translation strategies still created challenges for religious leaders. 59% of pastors surveyed felt online church services struggled to create opportunities for social engagement and conversation within the community. This concern was also voiced by Christian religious leaders outside America who are seeking to build and adapt to a new form of remote worship and church life. In March 2020, a survey of Australian pastors similarly found church leaders were concerned with how to build community in this new environment in ways that encouraged true connectivity over feelings of isolation.
These concerns point to the third strategy, transforming church, an approach taken up by only few of the churches I observed. It is here where we can see the sense of excitement amongst pastors that the survey pointed toward. In this approach, religious leaders reflected both on what new forms of gathering digital technology could facilitate, as well as on the needs voiced by their members for online experiences that would help support and build community. Transforming worship online looked like a pastor turning his home study into a space where he could give nightly “fireside chats” to his church, responding to the issues people had voiced to him that day via phone calls, emails, and texts. It also looked like a minister in England using her blog to get people to participate in a group conversation about the themes to be addressed in her sermon, integrating their responses, photos, and artwork into the actual service.
Reverend Bryony Taylor the Rector of Barlborough and Clowne in Derby UK presents the results of a corporate worship activity she posted online to help member prepare for “Palm” Sunday. Photo courtesy of author.
I argue that this moment, when churches are forced to abandon old models and reimagine church in new ways, creates a unique opportunity for religious communities to reflect on the needs of people in contemporary society. The COVID-19 pandemic offers an important moment for religious institutions to re-evaluate whether or not their models of ministry truly meet people’s desires for community and connection with others. This is not only true of Christian communities; Jewish and Muslim groups have also been forced to re-evaluate their practices concerning valued religious traditions and gatherings at this time, from communities turning Passover into a mediated family affair to cancelling the hajj to holy sites in Saudi Arabia.
Pastor Steve Evoy of the Wolverine Free Methodist Church in Michigan invites members to spiritually reflect on their day during his nightly “Fireside Chats” on Facebook. Photo courtesy of author.
These disruptions also point to the event-based focus of many contemporary religious groups. Individuals’ commitment to religious rituals and public gatherings remain the central way most religious institutions evaluate religious commitment.
The use of ritual events as the basis for determining community membership or investment defines community primarily in institutional and place-based terms. Yet, over the last three decades people’s understanding and practice of community have shifted. The reality is that most people, both religious and non-religious, experience and live out community as a social network of relations. This means that for most people, community is something that is dynamic and changeable, holds multiple connections, and is determined by personal needs and choices. This idea of the network challenges most religious group understanding and practices of the community.
Conclusion
This global pandemic calls into question religious group’s dependence on older models of community and religious commitment. It also amplifies the need for awareness that religious communities now function on a network model, a fact made visible by offering mediated online interactions and gatherings. Being forced from offline religion to online religion requires religious communities to reconsider what it means to truly practice and live out community and their faith. Recognizing this moment will help religious groups not only create viable worship-based social distancing strategies. It will allow them to consider the changes that are in store for them as they play catch-up to these societal changes, and seek to prepare for a post-pandemic future for religion.
This is a synopsis of ten research articles written by Professor Heidi Campbell over the past two decades addressing important Issues of how religious communities use the internet,
Hutchings, Timothy (2017). Creating Church Online: Ritual, Community and New Media. New York: Routledge.
This book is a comparative study of how online churches function as internet-based Christian communities and traces three specific groups’ development and engagement over a ten year period.
This eBook of 30 essays brings ministers and priests, reflecting on their moving religious service online during the COVID-19 pandemic, into conversation with media studies scholars and theologians who have extensive research expertise in religion online so they can learn from one another.
Heidi A Campbell is Professor of Communication and Presidential Impact Fellow at Texas A&M University. She is also Director of the Network for New Media, Religion & Digital Culture Studies and author of over 100 articles and books on religion and technology. This includesWhen Religion Meets New Media (Routledge, 2010), Networked Theology (Baker Academic, 2016) and a forthcoming book Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority (Routledge). She is an expert on religion and digital culture having been quoted in such outlets as the Houston Chronicle, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and on the BBC WorldService.
Central Wing of the Supreme Court of India where the Chief Justice’s courtroom is situated. Photo Credit: Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedia Commons.
In December of 2019, India’s Hindu-nationalist majority parliament enacted into law the Citizenship Amendment Act (“CAA”). Like it sounds, the 2019 CAA amended India’s 1955 Citizenship Act. What the CAA does is provide a faster path to citizenship for certain individuals who entered India as refugees prior to 2015. According to the Act, individuals who may receive special treatment are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians. And, in particular, the Act specifies that the residential wait period for citizenship for these individuals is reduced from 11 years to 5 years. The Act was intended to functionally aid non-Muslim refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, all three of which are Muslim-majority countries. It treats Muslim refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as largely-Hindu Sri Lankan refugees, Nepali refugees from Bhutan, Burman refugees (who are mostly Rohingya Muslims), and Tibetan refugees differently from the preferred category described above. Because of its overt discrimination on a religious basis, many believe it to be an attempt to augment the body politic in India and, perhaps more to the point, the voting public. This is particularly true in light of India’s strong, constitutional commitment to groups that have traditionally been discriminated against. Indeed, the India Supreme Court has held, in Nagpur Improvement Trust V. Vithal Rao and Others (AIR 1973 SC 689) that “the object [of a law] itself cannot be discriminatory, for otherwise, for instance, if the object is to discriminate against one section of the minority, the discrimination cannot be justified on the ground that there is a reasonable classification.”
Alongside the CAA and, in fact, a trigger of it, is the National Register of Citizens (“NRC”). The NRC was mandated by a 2003 Amendment to the 1955 Citizenship Act, which passed with little or no contention, even though it introduced the “illegal migrant” category that is now the source of much acrimony. It was only 10 years later, however, that, at the Supreme Court of India’s behest, it was implemented in a single Indian state, Assam, located in India’s North East. NRC implementation in Assam resulted in 1.9 million people present in India who claim to be Indian citizens not meeting the documentary requirements for registration and, therefore, being in danger of losing their citizenship. Many of these individuals were Bengali-speaking Hindus, who may or may not have originally been immigrants from Bangladesh. The Hindu-nationalist BJP government took up their cause and drafted the CAA with their particular issues in mind. The fact that a Hindu-nationalist party drafted the CAA to specifically help Hindus is, at least in part, why some believe the CAA to be a non-secular effort to change the nature of Indian citizenship.
Importantly, the NRC has not been implemented outside of Assam, but the government plans to do so in 2021. And it is the combination of the CAA and the NRC that is concerning many citizens. Whether their fears are well-founded or not, many are worried that the NRC will be used to essentially strip individuals born in India of their citizenship and then the CAA will be used to deport them. Whether their fears will materialize remains to be seen, particularly as it is unclear if the CAA will pass constitutional muster when it is tested in the courts.
The courts, for their part, and the Indian Supreme Court in particular, have played an interesting, and sometimes inadvertent role, in India’s winter of protests. To start, the Supreme Court has steadily been forcing the executive branch of the government to carry out its own laws in Assam. It is important to note that the Assam case is unusual though, as the locals who back it, the “Assam Movement,” are anti-immigrant, but not anti-Muslim. Local opposition to the CAA and NRC in Assam is, therefore, based upon the CAA’s permissive stance with respect to non-Muslim immigrants. Still, without the Supreme Court’s push, the NRC might not have been implemented when it was and the combined power of the CAA and NRC might not have been as obvious to the wider population. One might even say that the Indian Supreme Court’s insistence on its institutional role, especially vis-à-vis the executive and legislative branches of government, has precipitated what may become a constitutional crisis if either of these latter, more overtly political branches insists that the CAA is within its constitutional rights.
Anti CAA NRC protestors in New Delhi. Jamia Millia Islamia students and locals. Photo Credit: DiplomatTesterMan, Wikimedia Commons.
In addition to its role in forcing NRC implementation in Assam, the Supreme Court has acted permissively with respect to Foreign Tribunals. Those excluded from the NRC rolls can argue their cases before Foreigners Tribunals. These are fast-track, quasi-judicial bodies that put the burden of proof of Indian citizenship or long-term residence in India on the accused. Anyone who fails this test is sent to Assam’s detention centers or is deported. There have been reports of families separated in detention centers and individuals spending years in them, under very poor conditions, before finally proving their citizenship and being released.
The Supreme Court also acted, inadvertently, to fuel protests this fall when it released its ruling that granted Hindus a right to build a temple to Ram on the place in Ayodhya where the Barbri Masjid once stood. The Barbi mosque was torn down by Hindu nationalist activists, after several failed attempts, in 1992. While the Supreme Court certainly didn’t mean to provide advance fuel for the CAA fire, it contributed to a public sense that all branches of the government had turned anti-Muslim, leaving those concerned with protest as the only meaningful route to secure change.
Finally, anyone who follows India’s activist courts should not be surprised that, despite incredible backlogs, the CAA is already before them. The Supreme Court received over 140 petitions to stay the law and issued a ruling in late January that gives the central government four weeks to respond to the petitions. It also issued orders to India’s high courts to not take CAA and NRC-related petitions, thus centralizing Supreme Court control over this particular issue.
The question that activist lawyers would like to get before the Indian Supreme Court is, in some ways, a simple one. Is the government allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion? India’s constitution, in Article 14, clearly states that it cannot. Given that the CAA is, on its face, religiously discriminatory, against citizens and non-citizens, as Assam has proven, it will be difficult for the court to find otherwise. What the court can do is regularize and slow down the process, provide a forum through which to channel public debate, and hope that a political solution is reached before it must provide a legal one, potentially causing a constitutional crisis. If it comes down to the latter, the court, for its part, would likely have to act as a conservative force, insisting that the government adhere to India’s founding constitutional principles.
Susan L. Ostermann is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She completed her Ph.D. in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and worked for several years as a practicing litigator, focusing on class actions and intellectual property disputes. While Professor Ostermann’s research focuses mainly on regulatory compliance in South Asia, she is broadly interested in understanding rules and norms and how they change. Towards this end, she has published on inter-caste marriage, the role of skin color in Indian politics, the Indian Election Commission, state capacity in South Asia, and conservatism in modern Indian political thought.
“The name of Jesus is above COVID-19.” Message on a sign at Joy Christian Center in St Cloud, Minnesota. Photo Credit: Lorie Shaull.
The woman leans confidently out of her car window, her right hand at high noon on the steering wheel. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else,” she tells the reporter for CNN, who has just asked about her decision to attend a crowded late afternoon evangelical church service in the middle of a deadly global pandemic. “Aren’t you concerned you could infect other people inside?” the reporter presses. The woman swings her head defiantly, her straight black hair catching the overhead lights. “No, no, I’m covered in Jesus’s blood,” she says. People who don’t go to her church “could get me sick,” she says, when she goes to Walmart or Home Depot, “but I’m not, because I’m covered in Jesus’s blood.” Then she drives off.
It may protect this woman against infection, but Jesus’s blood paints me into an epistemological corner. I have argued for an approach to religion I’ve been calling plural ontological realism, which in this case means I take this woman at her word: her experience of Jesus being really present to her in the community of other Christians (she was clear in her brief comments how important the church was to her) protects her from infection (and perhaps from infecting others, although she seemed to care less about this). I am committed to resisting the impulse, deep in the theoretical inheritances of the modern study of religion, to lift this woman out of the ontology in which she became (or remade herself as) a subject and through which she lives her subjectivity in relation to others, among whom are, in this instance, the people she meets in Walmart and Home Depot. Any theoretical work about the role of religion must begin (although it does not end) with the reality of this woman’s claim of immunity, within her world, without translating it, and relocating her, into alien ontologies. This is not to suggest that her world is singular: it is adjacent to and cross-cut by other ontologies (such as the reporter’s). Amid this ontological diversity, evangelical Christianity of a particular sort is determinative for this woman, at this moment in history and in her life.
Every sentence of the preceding paragraph requires discussion, but this is not why I am here right now. Rather, I want to think outwards from the corner. I begin by wondering why, ever since I heard this woman’s comment on the night’s news, I have been feeling I needed to do something about it. What is this imperative and where does it come from? Is it the disciplinary impulse to speak for others (she seems to be doing ok on this front); or, is it the drive to translate her to others? If it’s the latter, then to what end? The way the question insisted on itself to me was specifically in the form: what is to be done about this woman? Eventually, I came to see this as an articulation of the drive to power that moves through the study of “religion” in modernity. We scholars of religion are more aware of this drive now, but, still, the temptation exists to offer our services as deputies of law and order. Resisting this is the first thing to do in response to this woman’s statement about being washed in Jesus’s blood. I accept the ontology of facts as given: she continues to shop at Walmart in a pandemic because she is protected by the blood of the Lord in which she has been washed.
Ontology is not a structural or structuring given; it is the living environment of experience, imagination, relationship, and understanding. This woman leaning out of the car on an Ohio evening lives amid “a plurality of actual worlds,” in philosopher Markus Gabriel’s words, and so do we who do not share her vision (16).[1] This plurality calls for, in response, a disciplined agility in moving among worlds, a sort of ontological multilingualism. Sometimes, in certain circumstances, such agility is possessed by religious practitioners themselves (and not just in the modern or contemporary eras). This woman might have thought to herself, well, when I’m in Walmart, I will be among people who do not live in my world and I must act accordingly. Why she apparently does not is itself a question for religious, historical, psychological, and sociological analysis. To accept the plurality of actual worlds is to recognize discrepancies of power among them, as well as within them. This woman’s world appears to be underwritten by the privileges of whiteness, social class, and a certain kind of Protestantism that has been aligned—as much by scholars of evangelicalism as by politicians—with US nationalism in its most exclusivist iterations.
Leaning out of her window, the evangelical Christian woman in Ohio was speaking a world that was as much political as religious, as racially white as Christian (although African American and Latinx evangelical Christians have been heard to say similar things, which raises some interesting questions too), and as nationalist as evangelical. It is neoliberal in its qualified individualism (qualified by the allusion to the fellowship of others like her, in the context of which her supernatural immunity is given). It is exclusionary. Christ’s blood is circulating through all of this. And it is circulating through the insistence of Georgia’s governor on opening bowling alleys, tattoo parlors, hair salons, and fitness clubs well before knowledgeable health experts think it is safe to do so, even though he makes no reference to Christ or his blood. In this way, plural ontological realism renders the old sacred/secular dualism otiose.
If I am not thinking about what I might do about this woman, what’s on my mind in the corner? I am curious about how this woman’s neighbors are responding to her confidence in Jesus’s blood, if they do not share it, or her non-evangelical family members, and how she will deal with their concerns in turn. Why is she (seemingly) unable to extend Jesus’s protective ablution to all people or to align it with the self-sacrifices of health care professionals in this time, to see the holy in the work of doctors, nurses, and orderlies? I am aware that her most strident construction of her ontology comes in response to a question posed by a representative of what has been framed in her world as “fake news.” Would she be as strident were her voice not amplified at the highest levels of political and economic power? I wonder if this woman is ever drawn to realities that are alien to the ones she knows and, if so, where she may encounter them. I also acknowledge—as a citizen of this democracy—that I find her position on the pandemic absolutely terrifying. I have been intrigued by an idea circulating among my solidly left-wing Twitter friends that asks people who refuse social distancing on ontological grounds to accept responsibility for their health care if they are infected with Covid-19 and to be taxed accordingly for the health of others. Ontology creates responsibility, for this woman—and for those of us who live alongside her.
I cannot reassure anyone that what this woman says is “not religion,” “not Christianity,” that she is crazy, that hers is an example of bad Christian evangelicalism versus some putatively good version of it, or that her claim of supernatural immunity is alien to the world that “we” moderns ostensibly inhabit. That is modern religion on display in the Ohio parking lot. The attempt to cauterize it with any prefix—anti/pre/alternative—is self-delusion. Religion(s) have rarely been “modern” in the normative sense of the word. The other-than-modern quality of modern religion empowers the challenge particular religious actors pose to contemporary political conventions, for instance. It also makes religion(s) exceedingly dangerous. We need new ways of thinking about how to live with, and against, ontologies as threatening to our common life as this woman’s is, before she kills us all.
[1] Gabriel defines “ontology” as “the systematic investigation into the meaning of ‘existence,’ or rather the investigation of existence itself aided by insight into the meaning of ‘existence’” (5). There is a new interest in ontology and in what might be called lived metaphysics across the disciplines. A helpful overview may be found in Greg Anderson, The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Robert Orsi is Grace Craddock Nagle Chair of Catholic Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also Professor of Religious Studies, History, and American Studies. His most recent book is History and Presence, which was published in 2016 under the Belknap Imprint of Harvard University Press. Orsi is currently at work on a book called Give Us Boys about the formation of young men at a Jesuit high school in New York City in 1967–1971 as an episode in the broader history of modern Catholic sexuality, class, and urbanism.
The arrival of Cortés in Veracruz and the reception by Moctezuma’s Ambassadors. {{PD-Art}}
The ethics of war might be the single area of study within ethics for which it is most difficult to imagine a decolonial approach. War is, of course, one of the primary tools of imperialism. Very recent events such as the targeted assassination of an Iranian military leader in Iraq and the presidential pardon of former U.S. servicemembers who committed war crimes against civilians only serve to confirm that fact. Though the tradition of just war reasoning attempts to introduce ethics into the theory and practice of armed conflict, many of this tradition’s critics suggest that ethical discussions about war have in many historical cases done as much to enable war as to restrain it. My own recent work, for example, has focused on how just war reasoning has functioned to enable harm to noncombatants by facilitating the evasion of responsibility for inflicting and responding to such harm. Here, I want to briefly consider how a decolonial approach to ethics can help to explain the degree to which this enabling is not merely an accidental outcome or intentional distortion of, but is rather an intrinsic characteristic of, modern just war reasoning—and, more significantly, how such an approach might help to counter it: by recognizing and treating vulnerable persons in war not merely as human rights-bearers but as embodied, relational, particular human persons.
In his essay on decolonial ethics, Nelson Maldonado-Torres suggests that to fully understand the colonial implications of our modern concepts of race and religion, we must critically examine the ways they were transformed during the “age of discovery.” Similarly, to address whether and how just war reasoning is a colonial discourse, we must look at the early modern period in which much of contemporary ethics of war is founded. Doing so reveals that the justification of colonial violence was in fact one of the primary objectives of highly influential just war thinkers.
Sculptures created by Joseph Mendes da Costa of three Dutch generals of the East Indies over the main entrance of the De Bazel building (Amsterdam City Archives) at Vijzelstraat, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The generals are from left to right: Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587 – 1629), Herman Willem Daendels (1762-1818) and Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz (1851-1924). Photo Credit: Slaunger, Wikimedia Commons.
Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), often regarded as two of the most significant figures in the modernization of just war theory, were both motivated to write about war in response to the contemporary colonial activities of their respective homelands (Spain and the Netherlands). While this context has been widely recognized by scholars of the history of the just war tradition, few have offered a more critical account of how their resulting just war theories were themselves tools of colonialism. One exception is Richard Tuck. Tuck emphasizes the way Grotius, motivated by a desire to defend the violent activities of Dutch companies in the East Indies, expanded individual rights to include the rights of private individuals and companies to punish violators of natural law and to seize land deemed uncultivated.[1] This new understanding of natural rights, according to Tuck, had “often brutal implications” (108).
Grotius is sometimes characterized as unique and innovative in his use of just war arguments to support imperialism. Vitoria, by contrast, is often considered to have been strongly opposed to describing the conquest of indigenous peoples as justified war, in part because he recognized indigenous people as rights-bearing human beings.[2] However, as Ashley Bohrer has recently noted, while Vitoria did reject the popular claim that Europeans could justly punish indigenous peoples for reasons such as their lack of Christian faith, he yet endorsed Europeans’ right of “self-defense” against indigenous people who prevented Europeans from exercising their natural right to engage in free travel and commerce in any part of the world.[3] Indeed, as Bohrer puts it, for Vitoria,
The inclusion of indigenous peoples in the universal brotherhood of humanity had the effect of binding them to a putatively equal and universal system [of global commerce], even if it had vastly unequal effects…. [P]recisely because Amerindians are rational humans, they are bound by the laws of nature to accept the Spanish colonial presence. (29)
In a different context, feminist philosopher Kate Manne makes a similar argument about the workings of misogyny; misogyny does not rest on the assumption that women are not human beings but rather requires the identification of women as responsible human beings, such that certain women can then be identified as having failed to meet their socially defined responsibilities (xv–xix).
What these accounts, taken together, suggest is that there is a way in which, in spite of the apparent progress they represent from earlier discourses that made identification as “Christian” the prerequisite for land ownership and protection from attack, seemingly universalizing concepts such as “humanity” and “rights” can imply symmetry where it does not actually exist. Moreover, moral discourses based on these concepts can force vulnerable populations into systems that make claims to equality but are in practice aimed at their own domination and exploitation, and that enable appeals to claims of violation of natural law (or dereliction of natural duty) to justify treating someone as less than human. Just war reasoning generally presumes a kind of symmetry of rights and duties between belligerents; in recent years, more just war thinkers have begun to question this presumption, focusing on issues such as the increasing frequency of asymmetric warfare and whether combatants on either side of a conflict necessarily share “moral equality.”
But less attention has been given to an even more dramatic asymmetry—one that may be more analogous to the relationship between invading Europeans and indigenous peoples: that between combatants (and civilians living in combatant states where war is not being fought) and noncombatants living in regions where armed conflict is taking place. The protection of civilians from direct harm is a longstanding value of just war reasoning. Medieval canon law listed classes of people (such as clerics, travelers, and farmers) whose social roles meant that they did not participate in war. Because people in these classes were innocent (meaning that they did not perpetrate harm to others), targeting them was considered unjust and dishonorable. This reasoning is similar to classical Islamic jurisprudence that identifies protected classes of people based on their lack of participation in war.[4]
Modern western just war theory’s principles of discrimination and noncombatant immunity recognize noncombatants as a single class made up of persons whose rights as humans preclude their being intentionally targeted during war (unless they give up those rights by participating in warfare as combatants). But those same rights do not prevent a vast range of harms understood as unintentional (what is typically characterized as “collateral damage”), nor do they entitle noncombatants to the redress or repair of such harms when they occur. Indeed, much as defining indigenous persons as humans was central to Vitoria’s argument that Europeans might use armed force against them in self-defense, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini have argued that in some contemporary cases defining noncombatants as civilian persons is a necessary prerequisite to legitimizing violence against them, when they are illegally used as “human shields” (183–84). Gordon and Perugini note that while international humanitarian law clearly prohibits the use of civilians as “human shields,” it also maintains that an enemy’s doing so does not render otherwise legitimate targets off-limits (172). Should civilians being used as human shields be harmed in a proportionate attack on a legitimate military target, their deaths or injuries are classed as lawful “collateral damage” rather than as an unlawful attack on civilians (174). The modern war context thus replicates and reiterates the colonial context in which its moral foundations were located, insofar as its discourse of equal human rights obscures (and enables) a very unequal distribution of harm and vulnerability to harm.
A Palestinian student inspects the damage at a UN school at the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip after the area was hit by Israeli shelling on July 30, 2014. UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan.
A decolonial analysis suggests that part of what is happening here is that noncombatants are recognized as human only in an abstract sense—as part of the universal community of rights-bearers. Yet of course being human encompasses much more than bearing rights and duties. Maldonado-Torres emphasizes that the racism inherent in colonialism has a profoundly anti-ethical impact, instituting a notion of “sub-ontological difference” according to which some people are not fully human and from which “fundamental ethical distortions” follow (705–706). Like Western colonizers in relation to indigenous persons, Western combatants have regularly failed to see noncombatants in non-Western regions as persons in a full, particular sense—as embodied and emotional and embedded in relationships.
This failure enables including noncombatants in a universal regime of rights and duties while simultaneously evading responsibility for the particular ways in which that regime and its maintainers inflict upon them grave harms. In this model, noncombatants are ostensibly recognized as persons who have a right not to be targeted. But this right turns out to not protect them from a great deal of harm, because so long as that harm can be determined to have been inflicted unintentionally and proportionately (as the vast majority of harms to civilians inflicted by Western militaries are), that harm is legally permissible and no one bears any responsibility to repair it or even to acknowledge it. The failure to see non-Western noncombatants as full and particular persons makes it impossible to account for—and to take responsibility for—the fullness and particularity of the harms they suffer.
Rejecting the idea that ethics is possible only in conditions of mutual freedom and equality, Maldonado-Torres identifies the most profound ethical relationship in a colonial situation as that of love between persons characterized by the colonizer as “sub-other.” Such a relationship challenges the system according to which sub-alterity is maintained because through it, individuals whose personhood has been systematically denied enact and affirm their status as ethical subjects (707). Building on Fanon, Maldonado-Torres notes that this kind of relationality demonstrates the existence and power of the inner life or soul that racism obscures and denies.
Seeing noncombatants as particular persons with bodies and relationships and inner lives is a practice that shares some similarities with the medieval Christian and Islamic account mentioned above—according to which noncombatants were identified by their particular social roles and the relationships those roles implied—but that also moves beyond those precedents by making embodiment and particularity central. In other words, to take this approach is not necessarily to adopt a form of reasoning completely foreign to the just war tradition, and it may also strengthen existing points of contact between moral traditions on the ethics of war. At the same time, to see noncombatants as persons in the full sense described above does not reject but rather strengthens the force of the human-rights-based account that now dominates just war reasoning by requiring just war thinkers to conceive of the human in a manner that recognizes the particularity and relationality that makes humans persons. Seeing noncombatants as persons means, in part, seeking and responding to their testimonies about the harms war inflicts on the various particular aspects of their personhood. War is not harmful to noncombatants only when it violates their right to not be intentionally targeted. Hearing the words of persons harmed by war makes this very clear, as survivors recount suffering caused by harm to their bodies and minds and relationships and life plans. Yet these voices are almost entirely absent from just war reasoning (whereas the study of the state of mind of soldiers and their commanders has a long and rich history within this tradition).
A decolonial critique of just war reasoning, then, might begin with an attempt to bring noncombatants as persons into the conversation. Only when just war thinkers enter into relationship with persons harmed by war as persons can they begin to understand and account for the myriad forms of violence perpetuated by war (and thus potentially authorized by their ethical discourse). Achieving a more complete understanding of the variety and pervasiveness of harm that war and warriors inflict on persons should radically change how just war thinkers view the prudence and justice of specific acts of war. It should also lead us to a much more critical view of the very concept of just war, given its imperial and racist history and the way a disproportionate share of its harmful effects has been borne by innocent and otherwise vulnerable persons. Importantly, while such critique will likely lead to radical changes in how just causes for and just conduct of war are understood, such changes would promote what has long been stated to be the central aim of just war reasoning: the achievement of just and lasting peace.[5]
[1] On the concept of “private war,” see Grotius, De Iure Belli Ac Pacis (1625) Book 1, chap. 3. For the argument that one may wage a just war for the purpose of punishing violations of natural law, see Grotius, De Iure Belli Ac Pacis Book 2, chap. 20. In that chapter, Grotius noted that such violations need not result in any injury to the punisher in order for the punishment to be permissible. He also specified that such violations may include religious beliefs and practices that were commonly (though often incorrectly) attributed to indigenous persons, such as denial of the existence of God, worship of evil spirits, or human sacrifices.
[2] In Part I of De Indis(1532), Vitoria argued that indigenous persons did possess reason and bear rights of self-defense as well as rights to own land, even though they were “unbelievers.”
[3] Vitoria argued against the right to make war against indigenous persons because they refused to accept Christianity in Part II of De Indis. But in Part III, he added that the law of nations, derived from natural law, granted Europeans the right to travel within indigenous peoples’ land, search for natural resources there, and preach the Christian gospel there—and to “defend” themselves against indigenous persons who denied them the exercise of those rights.
Rosemary Kellison is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at University of West Georgia. Her recent book Expanding Responsibility for the Just War: A Feminist Critique (Cambridge University Press, 2019) presents a feminist immanent critique of just war reasoning focused on the issue of responsibility for harm to noncombatants.
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I invite my reader, therefore, to think of the revolutionary representation of radical continental philosophy as a colonially sanctioned dissent that universalizes a provincial difference while invisibilizing the underside of modernity. Coloniality not only monopolizes the only sanctioned path to universal redemption—in what 
