Monday, February 15, 2010

REMEMBERING THE BUSH BABY

Jerry Harkins



The lesser galago, also called the bush baby (Galago sene-galensis), is one of the smallest members of the order of primates, being about the size of a squirrel with a brain weighing a couple of grams. Despite its size, it is exceptionally vocal, producing loud, shrill cries surprisingly like those of a human baby. The plaintive cries and "cute" appearance may account for the name "bush baby.”

It could be a lot worse and, not so long ago, it was. This essay first appeared in 2005:

I am the bearer of very bad news. Your President is a moron. He didn’t know anything. Nobody told him anything. And he doesn’t remember anything. About anything. Fortunately, God whispers in his ear. Unfortunately, the voice he thinks is God’s actually belongs to Dick Cheney and Mr. Cheney isn’t telling him any different. The White House PR machine goes to great lengths these days to proclaim that the President is smarter than he looks and is a terrific manager who’s right on top of things and makes all the big decisions. He never looks backward. In other words, it’s become embarrassingly obvious he’s a moron. The posturing is necessitated by a series of books by knowledgeable insiders the burden of which is that the President drools a lot and is not completely toilet trained.

• He used to be a businessman who was so bad at business (three bankruptcies) he required serial bailing out by Stalwarts of the Bush family (SOB’s). In spite of his Harvard MBA.

• He used to be a bum who engaged in binge drinking and related intellectual pursuits. He was saved by the love of Jesus and a strong woman.

• He is a born again Christian. He believes the universe was created on October 4, 4004 BC at 9 o’clock in the morning, Texas time. In spite of his Yale BA.

Did I mention that he’s a moron? This is important because it explains why he keeps saying we’re winning a war we have already lost, why he paid no attention to the August 6, 2001 memo regarding terrorist hijacking, and why he can’t pronounce words of more than two syllables. It explains his goofy facial expressions and why he likes to play cowboy down on the range in Texas. It explains a lot. For instance, do you really think anyone with even half a brain would embrace tax cuts as a way to reduce the federal deficit? Why was he the last person to hear about the two most disastrous events of his administration, the attacks of 9/11 and the publication of those prison photos? And even if he was so disconnected, why in God’s name did he use “nobody told me” as a defense, thereby admitting his ignorance? Why else would he tell transparent lies like the one about cutting down all the trees, not to help his fellow plutocrats in the forest products industry, but to prevent forest fires? (Of course, technically he’s right about this: no trees does mean no forest fires among other things.)

Now a lot of you are thinking how can you say such terrible things about such a decent fellow who, as a matter of fact, was twice elected Governor of Texas? By God, you think, the American people almost elected him President of the United States. Wouldn’t that make all those voters morons too? Well, sure. If you insist on measuring the intellect of the voters by the people they routinely elect to govern themselves, then it follows that we’re all morons. You could, of course, point to the occasional exception. The more cynical among you could attribute it to the absence of “none of the above” on most ballots. Finally, if you’re really feeling nasty, you might say that American politicians and voters are no better and no worse than their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Actually, however, the only way to assure that we and our leaders are blessed with roughly the same intellectual skills would be to select the latter by random sampling. Otherwise, Harkins’s Laws of Competitive Politics inevitably see to it that, in any political contest, the worst possible candidate always wins. To wit:

• In politics, the sound bite is king. Short sentences endlessly repeated are the coin of the realm. This is a variation of the principle that empty barrels make the most noise.

• Government is the art of unkept promises. A candidate who knows this will always prevail over one who doesn’t. Voters, given a choice between a candidate whose promises are realistic and one who promises them the moon will always choose the latter. Everyone knows neither will keep his or her promises but a little fantasy can serve as a warm blanket.

• In every election, symbols trump substance. This is a corollary of Parkinson’s Law to the effect that the only factor influencing the outcome of a meeting is the seating arrangement.

• Lord Acton was right: power tends to corrupt. Politicians are obsessive about power to the exclusion of all rational thought. It begins with achieving the most important goal in a politician’s career which is getting the right parking space
.
• Finally, crime pays. This is axiomatic. While it is true that most career criminals are smarter than most politicians, there is considerable overlap between the two professions.

There are a few advantages to having a moron in charge of things. First, since he can’t learn anything, no one has to tell him anything. He has universal deniability, a huge asset for any politician. Second, it is futile and unsporting to second guess his decisions. Once he acts, it would be churlish to say that heads would have been a better call than tails. Third, the only rational way to hold him accountable is to have the lowest possible expectations which, of course, he is bound to exceed half the time unless his lucky coin is defective. It could be worse and would be if Karl Rove were the de jure President instead of just the de facto one.

There are also serious disadvantages to having a moron running the country—I mean in addition to the horrific notion of having the little black box with the big red button anywhere near him. It is a well established scientific principle that morons cannot resist big red buttons. Beyond that, though, you have no idea who is making the disastrous day-to-day decisions. When the President endorsed Ariel Sharon’s assassination squads and yanked the right of return rug out from under the Palestinians, he undid 50 years of American diplomacy in a single casual sentence which he ad libbed at a Rose Garden Photo Op. The Palestinians, who never had much faith in us anyway, rightly concluded that the President was washing his hands of the peace process. Now maybe you think Mr. Bush was right. Or, maybe you think he was just lucky. He called heads and, sure enough, it came up heads. It doesn’t make much difference what you or I think. What should bother all of us is that he made this huge, earth-shattering, policy-reversing decision pretty much between potty training and coffee break. I don’t want to “misunderestimate” him, but you know he was winging it. Or maybe Paul Wolfowitz put something in that coffee. Do you think he consulted Colin Powell? Do you think he has any idea that the Balfour Declaration is not some gay rights manifesto? When he says tax cuts are good for reducing deficits, is he recycling what even his daddy called “voodoo economics?” No, it’s not that complicated. Some Republican who has his ear told him tax cuts for the wealthy translate directly into campaign contributions. “As a bonus, Mr. President, you will reduce the deficit.” Who told him such a thing? My friend, you do not know. You know it wasn’t a conservative economist like Milton Friedman or a Keynesian like Bob Ruben or even an acolyte of Ayn Rand like Alan Greenspan. All you know is that whoever told him that was (a) filthy rich and (b) a Republican.

Who’s in charge here? There are times I get all teary eyed remembering the good old days when you knew Al Haig really was running things. We have had Presidents who were happy to be thought of as intellectually challenged. Eisenhower, for one, cultivated the image of an average Joe who graduated sixty-first in a West Point Class of 164. But can you imagine George W. Bush playing Ike’s role in World War II? Please! Not even Omar Bradley, who graduated forty-fourth in the same class of 1915, could have done that. And Bradley was a genius.

When Mr. Bush drools, he’s not putting it on. When he looks puzzled, it’s because he is. Jacob Weisberg says he wasn’t born stupid, he chose it. Which is pretty much the same line the White House is trying to sell when it says he’s smarter than he looks. They’re both wrong. A smart person like Eisenhower can choose the appearance of stupidity but cannot actually become stupid (any more than a truly stupid person can become smart). Someone like Jessica Simpson can make a career out of really dumb remarks but you have to be pretty smart to get away with such a gig. George II is no Jessica Simpson. When he wants to say that repealing the estate tax is good for everyone, it comes out, “The death tax is good for people from all walks of life.” This is not a regrettable lack of fluency; it is a tragic lack of intelligence. The words come out meaning the opposite of what he wants to say. He can’t even lie logically. When he proclaims his Iraq policy has been a “catastrophic success,” it is not a Malapropism, it is a short circuit in what passes for his brain. When he claims, “We're making the right decisions to bring the solution to an end” it’s not a slip of the tongue. It is a profound ignorance of cause and effect logic. When he claims, “Our economy is on a rising path,” he means it as an optimistic metaphor. He has never heard of Sisyphus (he cut that class at Yale) and he never stopped to think about the difficulties of a rising path. When he blames the trial lawyers for the fact that, "Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country," he’s not ad libbing an inanity. He probably has no idea what an OB-GYN does for a living but he knows loving women is widely practiced among Texas cowboys. Finally, when he says, “It’s the executive branch’s job to interpret the law,” it is not a simple mistake. It is a dangerous combination of Mr. Bush’s stupidity and Mr. Rove’s megalomania. God save us!

Subsequently

 God did not save us.  Instead he chose to punish me for thinking he could not do worse than George W. Bush.  It was by way of reminding me that God is omnipotent.  He can do anything, even invent a President like Donald Trump.  Didn't even break a sweat.

Much Later Than Subsequently

Back in the days when I wrote political satire, I didn't pay much attention to such offenses as name-calling.  George W. Bush is not and never was a moron.  He was frequently inarticulate and he made a lot of decisions I didn't approve of.  He surrounded himself with too many jackasses but a woman like Laura would not have stuck by a moron and a moron would not have been able to do such a good job raising children.  Finally, a moron could never have turned himself into a serious and talented artist in retirement, an artist whose portraits convey a forceful emotional intelligence.  I only regret that I never had a chance to have a beer with hm.
THE CHURCH VERSUS THE GOSPEL OF LOVE
Jerry Harkins


It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to capture the historical Jesus. He was an itinerant teacher but we know what he taught only in rough outline. You sense his message was sophisticated and innovative but not radical. Much of what we think he said seems enigmatic (the first shall be last), perplexing (to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding), counterintuitive (turn the other cheek) or simply illogical (anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress). Part of the problem is that, by the time the books of the New Testament were written down, the sources were at best second and third hand memories. In many important passages what we have are historical memories in the process of becoming myths. The Bible was written by parties with different vested interests. The orthodox position is that the scriptures were “inspired” by God, but the evangelists remind one of the blind philosophers trying to describe an elephant to the king. For example, the four accounts of the central event of Christianity, the resurrection, are different in many respects. When whoever came to the tomb on the first Easter morning (there are at least six candidates in four configurations), did they find the door open or shut? Mark (16:4), Luke (24:2) and John (20:1) say open; Mathew (28:2) says closed. And whom did they meet when they got there. Matthew (28:2-5) says one angel, John (20:12) says two, Mark (16:5) says one young man, while Luke (24:4) says two men. Paul is another problem. He claimed to have received his teachings by direct revelation, but he never met or even saw Jesus in the flesh. In fact, Paul’s idea of the Christian message was fundamentally at odds with that of Jesus. He invented the fantastical notion of original sin which went on to become the lynchpin of all subsequent Christian theology.

One thing, however, is clear: the God whose personality evolves from Genesis through Job and the prophets to the gospels is, in the end, a god of love, a god who needs to love and be loved by his own creation. The story doesn’t start that way. The God of Abraham and Isaac, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Job is something of a psychopath. As he says, “ I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” The God of the Torah is a law giver. He gives the Jews ten commandments and 613 mitzvot in which love plays only a minor part. Love God (No. 4). Love both your fellow Jews (No. 13) and those who convert to Judaism (14). Jesus is only a bit more expansive—he adds your neighbor—when he tells the scribe about the great commandment, but love is the essence of his teaching and the consistent example of his life. “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” And later, “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.” God is love. These are the first words (and thus the title) of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical.

At the Last Supper Jesus said, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Later he said, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” These lines are part of a lengthy and remarkable homily that might be taken as a constitution establishing the universal church as a manifestation and messenger of God’s love. It is, therefore, reasonable to ask, “What happened?”

Love as an abstraction has been a consistent teaching. In practice, however, there has been at least as much hatred in the history of the church. Indeed, the church rejects entirely any manifestation of sexual love outside its own extremely limited definition. Gay love is an abomination. Heterosexual love is tolerable only in the narrowest of circumstances. At various times, it has been perfectly acceptable to slaughter infidels and heretics, to mutilate eunuchs, to burn witches, to practice slavery, to promote tyranny and even to wage war. Christianity is not the only religion that has done all these things but it is the only one that has done them in the name of a loving God or, since God is love, in the name of love.

The problem is that love challenges power whether it is the infinite love of a God who has no need to browbeat his creatures, no need to torment them with the fear of hell, or the love of sexual partners who, being swept up in ecstasy, have no need for the preaching of dour priests.

The power of the church is based on the assertion that the Pope and the bishops are the “successors” of the apostles, and that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth. The church believes, without biblical or historical support, that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome and all subsequent members of the hierarchy have descended from him in unbroken succession through the laying on of hands. Unlike so many other parts of the “sacred tradition,” apostolic succession is a truly ancient belief tracing back at least to 90 CE or, in other words, no later than two generations after the death of Christ. There were still living witnesses to his preaching and death.

The church’s reasoning begins with Christ’s charge to Peter as reported by Matthew 16:18-19: “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” This may be coupled with his final words before the Ascension: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” We are dealing, then, with three clauses: build, whatever and always.

It is notable that this grant of seemingly absolute power appears only in the gospel of Matthew even though Mark (8:27-30) reports the same occasion. Mark was the first gospel written. It is thought to be dated about 64 CE written by a companion of Peter and based on Peter’s sermons. It may seem strange that one of the most important statements in the life of the church escaped such a well-placed evangelist. Matthew, on the other hand, wrote around 90 CE about an event at which he had not been present. It seems clear that he had access to Mark’s account but he made many additions and changes. His also contradicts the others in fairly important respects. For example, Matthew says Jesus was born during Herod’s reign which means no later than 4 BCE. Luke, on the other hand, says Jesus was born when Quirinius was the governor of Syria which was between 6 and 9 CE.

Regarding the build clause, whatever you believe about Matthew, there is no indication that Peter was told to pass his authority to a successor. Nor is it anywhere said that Rome was to be the seat of the church or that the Bishop of Rome was to be supreme. Indeed, the Council of Nicaea in 325 said there were three primacies: Rome, Alexandria and Antioch. This was twelve years after Constantine had issued the Edict of Milan which legalized Christianity in the Empire and made the Emperor, who was still a pagan, the de facto head of the church. It was, in fact, Constantine who called and presided over the Council of Nicaea. And, while he did not proclaim doctrine, he did try to force doctrinal conformity throughout the realm, not through the Bishop of Rome, but through his Council. In the early church, the title of Pope was given to any bishop and it was not until the sixth century that it began being reserved to the Bishop of Rome.

The whatever clause is more interesting still. First, Peter did not or could not impose his views on the others. Even the non-apostle Paul engaged him on the most serious matters and won every time. The modern church is much more the church of Paul than of Peter. But the real problem is that the church invokes the whatever clause when it is convenient but denies it when it is not. Thus, in a letter to the world’s bishops, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, given on May 22, 1994, Pope John Paul II said, “…in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.”

No authority! So much for whatever you bind. The historian Garry Wills titled his 2000 book Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit by which he referred to the persistent lying employed by the Popes as basic strategy. A perfect example of this is John Paul’s claim to Peter’s mission of “confirming the brethren.” He propounds a deliberate distortion of Luke 22:32. It is the famous scene near the end of the Last Supper. Jesus says, "Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers." But he replied, ‘Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.’ Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, Peter, before the rooster crows today, you will deny three times that you know me."

The Pope wants his readers to believe that because Jesus told Peter to reassure his terrified colleagues, he, John Paul, has the right to declare definitively that women cannot be priests. That is obviously not what Jesus meant. The Pope is proclaiming an absurdity on the basis of an absurd claim of authority unless, of course, one assumes that the doctrine of infallibility can transform an absurdity into an eternal verity. Sadly such miraculous mutations are often the sum and substance of papal logic. Virtually all proclamations are infused with beatific love for that which is being denounced. Thus, you will read that the church loves and respects homosexuals, women, heretics and sinners of every description. “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is pretty much the official mantra even though it has no correlation with actual actions of the church. Indeed, when it was abandoning such malefactors as Joan of Arc to the stake, it prayed the formula Rogando eam ut cum velit mite agere, that the executioners should treat her with gentleness. Burn her alive but do it gently.

There have also been formulas for less sedate occasions. On July 22, 1209, the crusaders of Pope Innocent III invested the town of Beziers in what is now southwestern France. The knights asked Papal Legate and Cistercian monk Arnold Amaury how to distinguish friend from foe. Arnie replied, "Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius!" Slaughter them all! God will know his own! And they did, all 20,000 men, women and children according to Arnold himself in his report to the Pope. The dead included a thousand women and children huddled in the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene. The bones of these martyrs were uncovered in 1840. As Stephen O’Shea wrote about the massacre, “In the days before gunpowder, to kill that many people in so short a time required a savage single-mindedness that beggars the imagination.”

Some may think that the fully documented stories of the Cathars and Joan of Arc represent not the rule but the exception in church history. Of their kind, they are certainly egregious but their kind is not at all uncommon. It is also true that from the beginning the church has been blessed with adherents who were kind and loving, wise, gentle and courageous. But it has rarely admired these virtues and has often persecuted their practitioners. Consider Saint Francis of Assisi and his followers. During his life (1181-1226), he was generally accepted and even venerated as a holy man and a man of peace. He founded his order on the basis of the rule of poverty in Christ’s mandate to the apostles, “Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts; take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep.” He and his followers preached the holiness of poverty and opposed the ostentation of the papal court and the Italian hierarchy. Francis was canonized by Gregory IX two years after his death but during the following decades, the Franciscans and the papacy became estranged over the issue of poverty. A group of Franciscans led by Umbertino of Casale (1259-1330), William of Ockham (1288-1348) and Michael of Cesena (1270-1342) mounted a strong opposition to the papal court which, by this time, had fled to Avignon. Michael was excommunicated as a schismatic and sent to prison for the rest of his life. He was rehabilitated twenty-one years after his death. William was excommunicated for reasons that were never made clear. Umbertino ultimately escaped being tried for heresy by fleeing to Germany. The Pope, John XXII, lived a life of extreme luxury and was opposed to evangelical poverty because he felt he needed to impress his competitors, the electors of the Holy Roman Empire, whom he regarded as his spiritual and temporal vassals.

The lust for power, like other lusts, feeds on itself and seeks as many outlets as are available. Princes and prelates acquired vast art collections, for example, not because they were expressing their esthetic sensibilities but because the ostentatious display of wealth was a metaphor for their power that was obvious to friends and foes alike. The church nearly bankrupted itself in the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and, in the process, had to resort to extortionate tactics to raise money, tactics that ultimately cost it Germany. St. Peter’s is not beautiful. It is not an expression of the faith and hope that inspired the builders of Chartres. It is, in fact, ugly but it is big, boasting the largest interior of any church in Christendom. By far. It dominates Rome. It inspires awe as it was meant to.

The same forces translate easily to the parish level. Until very recently, they protected clergy engaged in the most odious, depraved sexual crimes against children. The church purports to see no relationship between the psychosexual pathology characteristic of the enterprise and the fierce historical misogyny and self-destructive insistence on a celibate all-male priesthood. What must be protected at all costs is the power. If anything frightens them, it is not the slippage in sacramental observance or mass attendance but the exposure of the church as Oz-like. The wizard of Vatican City is a small, frightened man with a megaphone hiding behind the elaborate façade of a Potemkin village. Popes like John XXIII and John Paul I are regarded as mistakes. This explains why Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae with all its embarrassing theology and fraudulent history. He was persuaded that to change the teaching on contraception would erode his own power and that of his successors.

Power, red in tooth and claw, is the sum and substance of papal ambition. The God preached by these men is a God of fear not love, of Genesis, not John. The “faithful” must be taught that it is virtually impossible to gain entrance into heaven and that only the hierarchs hold the keys to the kingdom. Only they can commune with the divinity and only their blessing can counteract man’s natural wickedness. They invented the idea of original sin: the sin of Adam passed on to his descendents so that every human being except the Virgin Mary is born in a state of degradation, of alienation from God. In the words of the official Catechism of the Catholic Church, there is an, “…overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination towards evil and death cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam's sin and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is the ‘death of the soul.’” Baptism cleanses the soul but, “After that first sin, the world is virtually inundated by sin…Scripture and the Church's Tradition continually recall the presence and universality of sin in man's history.”

This is the logic of the Red Queen. It is not biblical. The Catechism itself claims that it is a “mystery” but even that is absurd. There is nothing mysterious about it. It is exegesis in the service of a political ideology. The church is interpreting a perfectly conventional creation myth, that of Genesis, to support the centralization of absolute power in its own hands. And the church’s interpretation is incompatible with the gospel of love.

Imagine a religion based on the notion that God is love. This would be a religion that understands its mission to be promoting love of all kinds by helping people find their way—their own way—to lives of love. Now think of the leadership of this religion. Is there a central figure who sits on a gilded throne wearing a huge crown and an elaborate costume? Does he affect red patent leather shoes made for him by Prada? Do its legions of celibate bureaucrats and canon lawyers spend their lives promulgating detailed instructions on the sexual behavior of members and non-members? Does it profess the inferiority of the female half of the species because of a warped understanding of the myth of Eden?

On December 7, 1965, Pope Paul VI promulgated Gaudium et Spes, the final major document of the second Vatican Council. Its first sentence declared, “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.” Yes. Gaudium et Spes is a revolutionary declaration. In language that is diplomatic but perfectly clear, it affirms that the church must always change to address the needs of a changing world. It has many themes, among them the notion that the church is the servant of the “people of God.” It embraces human freedom, the “dignity of conscience,” the high estate of marriage and, most importantly, the dignity of the human person. It is not without compromise as the council tried to accommodate its critics, notably Joseph Ratzinger who was otherwise regarded as a progressive (and is, of course, now Pope Benedict XVI). But aside from the gospel of love preached by Jesus himself, it is the only document in the history of the church that might serve as the creed of a church based on the notion that God is love.

Gaudium et Spes was sabotaged, deliberately and with malice aforethought, by the Holy Roman Curia which saw it, correctly, as a challenge to its power. The opposition was led by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, perhaps the most conservative prelate of the twentieth century. Taking advantage of Paul VI’s indecisiveness, the curia practiced the politics of delay and obfuscation, ultimately convincing the Pope to issue the birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which halted the momentum of the council and then reversed it. That single document came close to destroying Roman Catholicism as priests abandoned the ministry by the thousands and lay people first ignored it and then stopped going to church. Ten years later, the curia engineered the election of Karol Józef Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II. There is little doubt that they knew that their preferred candidate Giuseppe Siri of Genoa could not prevail and that they were worried that the liberal Giovanni Benelli of Florence could. They then seized upon the suggestion of the progressive Franz König of Vienna, knowing as apparently König did not, that Wojtyła would be reliably ultraconservative on the issues that mattered most to them, most importantly, the power of the Vatican. Thirty-two years later, it is clear that the church is more conservative than it has been at any time since the death of Pius IX. The gospel of love survives only as a talking point to be trotted out occasionally to disguise the latest corruption of the good news. Love is dead and the church is dying.

Monday, February 08, 2010

JESUS-COME-LATELY CHRISTIANS
Jerry Harkins


The English were not history’s most obnoxious colonialists for which they can thank the Belgians. But they were, by far, the most successful. For nearly three hundred years it could be said that the sun never set on the British Empire and, although Winston Churchill did not become His Majesty’s first minister to preside over the collapse of said Empire, he did his best. Personally he was probably the nastiest colonialist since George III and he tried valiantly to stick his finger in the dike against the tide of history. It did not work and when the “blood-dimmed tide” was loosed, the world was swept up in a sea of unintended consequences that still plays out tragically in Ireland, the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Southeast Asia. But the Brits always tried to be soldiers of the cross, trading salvation for slaves and raw materials. They saw it as their Christian duty:

Take up the White Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child. (1)

One of the more amusing consequences of Kiplingesque insouciance was the emergence of Anglicanism in the former colonies. The Church of England has its roots in the marital misadventures of Henry VIII. Unlike other Sixteenth Century exercises in religious reform, its Protestantism was confined mostly to liturgy except, of course, for His Majesty’s marital preferences. Theologically, its mainstream has always remained close to Mother Rome and it claims the true apostolic succession. It tends to be more flexible than Rome in the breezes of change but it is still essentially a very conservative organization. Indeed, in some parts of the world—Africa notably—it is more Catholic than the Pope. There are several reasons for this. First, the Africans are new at Christianity. While today they are a majority of the world’s Anglicans (2), they are only a generation or two removed from their pagan past and they must constantly struggle against regression. They are surrounded in many places and under siege by the most extreme sorts of Muslims. And, of course, they cannot be indifferent to the reality that they are a remnant of the white man’s burden. This puts a chip on the shoulders of many African hierarchs, especially those whose churches remained more or less loyal to the mother country during the wars of liberation.

These forces converge to produce an attitude toward women and homosexuals that is as extreme as any to be found anywhere in the world. The Africans are currently in the process of causing a schism within Anglicanism over these issues and, worse, they are carrying the day within the worldwide Anglican Communion. In terms of practical effect if not hateful rhetoric, they are a more serious threat to the Christian ideal of brotherhood than Pat Robertson and all the other fundamentalists combined. Consider, for example, the leader of the evangelical (i.e., conservative) Anglicans in Nigeria, His Graciousness the Primate Peter Akinola. In February 2006, he issued a communique on behalf of his Church of Nigeria Standing Committee lending support to a law outlawing same-sex relationships in Nigeria. The bill also proposed to criminalize gay clubs and other organizations and prohibit publicity, procession and public display of same-sex amorous relationships through the electronic or print media directly or indirectly. This was too much even for the Bush Administration which denounced it a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. When you’ve been labeled a human rights violator by George W. Bush, you are well advised to get your spiritual affairs in order.

Not all African prelates are so burdened as Akinola. The Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, retired Anglican Primate of South Africa and Archbishop of Capetown, recently wrote:

“Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?” (3)

The difference is that Tutu has been on the front lines of the struggle for human rights all his life. For him, it is not a theological abstraction or a political ideology. It is personal and emotional. "I am deeply saddened,” he said, “at a time when we've got such huge problems ... that we should invest so much time and energy in this issue...I think God is weeping."

There are two intriguing questions about the coming schism: why is so much of the African hierarchy so vehemently opposed to homosexuality, and why is the Anglican Communion taking its lead from the Africans? As to the first, the simple answer is that the Africans are more literalist in their reading of the Bible than their more experienced fellow religionists. Unlike Europeans and Americans, they do not have the witness of two thousand years of the horrific effects of Biblical inerrancy. Nor have they been forced to cope with Christian hypocrisy. They have been told the Bible is the inspired word of God and they do not yet understand the winking of the theologians. When the well known Anglican theologian John Stott writes, “However strongly we may disapprove of homosexual practices, we have no liberty to dehumanize those who engage in them,” they do not parse the logic carefully. They jump at a chance to hate the sin and love the sinner without reflecting on the fatuous disapprove/dehumanize dichotomy. It does not occur to them that making hand holding a five-year felony for gay couples but not for straight ones is, in fact, dehumanizing the former.

Would that the explanation were so simple! Of course, if you believe it, you have to also believe the Africans are stupid or at least unsophisticated—the half devils, half children of Mr. Kipling’s poem. Sadly they are neither. His Righteousness Akinola is a very smart man as is evident from the ease with which he is dominating the discussion. By contrast, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Douglas Williams is a naïf. Both may think they can undo the American Revolution and intimidate the U.S. branch of the Communion but Williams is leading from wishy-washy hope and Akinola from steely determination. For both of them, this is not theology, it is politics—for Akinola, power politics of the most brutal kind. Williams, in the great tradition of Neville Chamberlain, is merely trying to appease his brother in the Lord. His position, of course, has evolved although always in the context of what he claims is his profound concern for the dignity of gay and lesbian people. In 1989, he said, “In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures." Yes, this is gobbledygook but it is gobbledygook clearly on the side of the angels. By 2007, however, he was calling for the exclusion of the Americans and Canadians from forthcoming meetings of the Communion unless they repented and changed their ways. This is not gobbledygook. It is high church hypocrisy. But it is necessary to placate the noisiest members of his flock.

On the face of it, it is absurd to imagine that the Africans can excommunicate the Americans even though they outnumber them twenty or so to one and even though the Americans themselves are divided on the subject. The problem is that the Episcopalians contribute fully 70% of the Communion’s budget. His Grace Akinola knows this and appears to take the view that God will provide or, failing that, the Americans are so pusillanimous, they will continue to provide. His assumption is based on his experience of the English and his belief that the Americans are their genetic clones.

The problem His Excellency does not dwell on is that he and his congregants live in a maelstrom of chaos. Nigeria is an oil-rich nation with a Gross Domestic Product per capita of about $1,400 a year. The average age expectancy is about 46 years and about 6% of the adults are living with AIDS. Even Sudan is richer, healthier and in many ways more stable than Nigeria. Akinola’s self-sufficiency is empty braggadocio. He may be able to open his churches on Sunday but his Christians are routinely “disappeared” and without American political support he himself would be dead meat for the Muslims in the North. Thus when His Magnanimity denounces gays, he is acting out of fear. He tosses a red herring to his tormentors hoping thereby to distract them. He reasons that the Islamic fundamentalists hate gays more than they hate Christians. By waving his homophobia in their faces, he does not have to denounce their theocratic idealism too loudly and can hope to live another day. Those of us who have never lived in terror of night visitors must not be overly critical of this strategy.

The second question is even more intriguing. Why are the Africans winning the debate? Again there is a simple answer: they are enjoying the natural fruits of being the majority. The rubber ducky is theirs and the rest of us need to accede humbly to this democratic reality. The founder, of course, was a man who consorted with prostitutes and tax collectors. His reverence for democracy was never obvious and his followers have never felt it necessary to put doctrinal issues to the vote of the “faithful” who are regularly referred to as sheep or pigeons.

In theory, the Archbishop of Canterbury might think Akinola’s crusade was an opportunity for loving instruction in the gospel of love. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Whoever. The class of the saved is coextensive with the class of the believers. Whoever. Males and females, sinners and the just, whites and blacks, cowboys and Indians, even blonds and soccer players. But God forbid a white Englishman should be seen as instructing a black Nigerian.

Notes
1. “The White Man’s Burden” was written for Empress Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 but Kipling decided to go with “Recessional” instead. The latter reflects on the inevitability of hubris in the colonial enterprise and portends its ultimate decay. It is said that he tweaked “Burden” to turn it into a commentary on American imperialism in the aftermath of the Spanish American War. But it should not in any way be read as an anti-colonialist screed.

2. At least 40.5 million of the world’s 77 million Anglicans (53%) belong to one of eight African Provinces, and that does not include the Provinces of Congo and Sudan for which there are no reliable statistics.

3. Preface to Sex, Love and Homophobia by Vanessa Baird, Amnesty International UK, 2004.