NT Wright - what would I do?

The Artist Leads through Us the Pain After Denial has become our only Refrain. Oh thank God for the Artist

True Grit, Evangelicals & Real Justice: Part 2

In the film, True Grit, we begin to see a few examples of a double standard when real justice is in view.

Granted, some of the examples I include could be slowed down by the historical context in which we find our characters, but to be honest, I'm getting a bit tired of that idea.  There have been abolitionists, freedom fighters and just causes from the dawn of humanity.  With that said, let's look at a few examples.

When young Maddy comes to retrieve her father’s body and belongings, she is also intent on avenging her father’s death.  Upon arrival, she is accompanied by the family slave, and man maybe in his 50's or 60's, whom she abruptly sends home.  Her primary narrative is that she is after justice and will do so at any cost.  She begins by arranging the hire of a US Marshall, known for leaving little room between his gun and his prisoners and then sets off with him in search of the criminal, Tom Chainey.  Before they leave though, a town hanging demonstrates the next injustice.  Two white men and a Native American stand at the gallows.  The two white men are given a chance to give their last words but as the Native American begins his, the executioner immediately bags his head and the lever is pulled.  Obviously, he wasn’t supposed to speak.  Then, before they leave, a slave boy helps Maddy pick out her horse.  Much later in the film the US Marshall unnecessarily and violently kicks two Native American boys sitting on the porch while Maddy gazes past them, eyes intent only on discovering the criminal’s whereabouts.

 

So while the chase is on for Tom Chainey, and a brand of retributive justice is being held as the highest ideal for a known criminal, flagrant social injustices surround this pursuit, blind to the dominant eye.  It’s not that these injustices are ignored, it’s that they don’t exist as injustices in the eyes of those that define the dominant culture.  While the narrative of justice traced out by the author is pursued by Maddy, the other narrative of True Grit participates in a myriad of gross societal injustices.  The author is also genius in his use of a young girl.  Too many stories of revenge are fought between adults or equals, entailing that the audiences’ faith in the hero is undermined by his or her own vigilantism.  In this story, the hero, or heroine, is a young girl.  Dismissed for her age, yet still wielding a weapon of revenge, she is able to allude the natural disdain an audience would attribute to a vigilante. 

What’s the point?  When we pursue justice, we do so in constant danger of incurring a string of unintended consequences.  Justice should be played like a good chess game; slowly, and in anticipation of as many future implications as is possible.  Many times in the pursuit and applause of justice we are at the same time active or passive pursuers and applauders of injustice.  While we publicly praise and open a warm embrace to lady justice, we could at the same time be mocking her scales and undressing her with our eyes.

Sadly, this summary remains more a critique than anything else.   Yet, I would hope for a wider grasp and awareness of our own failings and faults each time we administer justice and realize that many times the messages we send cannot be distinguished from the mediums we package them with.  Our methods and forms of communicating are just as important as the message and content and some would say are the message itself. 

In True Grit, Maddy ends up killing Tom Chainey with a shot from a rifle.  She doesn’t get to kill him with her father’s hand gun, though she is able to wound him with it earlier in the film.  Part of me enjoyed that ending, a little poetic justice to finish my day.  I enjoyed the fairness it executed.  I enjoyed that the story had resolution and I enjoyed the satisfaction that the ending provided me. 

I had enjoyment, resolution and satisfaction.   Though, if I’m really honest, I wasn’t genuinely at peace or completely satisfied.  Nor did I sense that real justice had been administered and no matter how poetic it was, it was still revenge.  Justice never really has the last word at least real justice doesn’t. 

So, I think I need to be more careful with the things that give me joy, peace and resolution.  Somewhere else in the world or even more likely, right in front of my eyes, those things that give me joy, peace and resolution could actually be causing someone else real misery, stifling strife or the constant pain of dissolution and dislocation.  For us as Evangelicals and many others the message is hopefully clear - The Medium is the Message and “Real Justice” will always require more than “True Grit” will ever have to offer.

True Grit, Evangelicals & Real Justice: Part 1

True Grit is a synonym for courage, honor, fortitude, braveness, unfaltering courage; devotion to what is right; indomitableness...

True Grit, a western film I watched as a boy, has been remade with two leading actors, Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon.  If you haven’t seen it, I recommend doing so.  Not only for the quality of the film, but also for the interesting but shaded and ambivalent approach to justice that the Coen brothers projected.  Jeff Bridges’ character is an interesting mix of moral and immoral characteristics.  Though he is on the side of justice as a US Marshall, he himself has a sketchy past as well as fledgling methods of justice when it comes to his criminals. 

His character reminds me of a book that I just finished called, The Unlikely Disciple, in which a Brown University student leaves his very liberal college to attend America’s largest Evangelical University, Liberty University.  In it, he comes in as a 19 year old “mole” looking to report on what it is like to be a pious evangelical college student.  He has to fake that he is one while there and ends up writing one of the most fascinating outsider perspectives on the evangelical world that I have ever read or heard of.  I couldn’t recommend the book more.

Throughout the book, one of the most stark and riveting observations that Kevin Roose makes is the radical disconnect between form and content when it comes to the beliefs and convictions that evangelicals hold.  This may remind us of the quip, “The Medium is the Message.”  In Liberty’s case, Roose continues to unveil that many times for evangelicals, the medium is not the message.  To be fair, this blanket statement cannot cover all the categories and aspects that one could summon up to apply but for Roose, it became a recurring theme during his time at Liberty.  The obvious wincing that Kevin experienced when confronted with a belief or conviction about God and people that did not always match up with how a person with that belief or conviction would end up treating others, is what we’re after here.   This kind of moral finagling within Evangelical culture, or any culture for that matter, is what I call Incredulous Morality. 

An incredulous morality is a morality that claims purity and a high standard and seeks to achieve that high standard.  At the same time though, the methods or mediums employed to achieve that morality can contradict or undermine those high standards.  An incredulous morality seeks justice or realignment with a moral compass while at the same time, the immorality of one’s methods is not recognized or worse, they are justified.  As a professor friend of mine once smirked, “If God is on our side then we don’t have to count the bodies.”  Even worse is when an act of benevolence is offered as a replacement for justice, when swine are given pearls instead of hog-food.

This contrast could also be compared to the analogy of a ship and crew setting sail on a moral mission.  The ship is steered by a moral captain and encases a moral crew who are devoted, life and limb to the moral mission.  Yet, when the ship is not powered by the winds of their moral God, the power has to come from somewhere so it ends up coming from below deck where whips crack the back of slaves tethered to an oar.  Many times throughout history, if not continuously, these kinds of ships have been owned and operated and set sail on behalf of the church.  Are they still sailing today?  I can’t help but answer yes.  So why the disconnect and how did we get here?  Many of us don't realize that we are part of the crew until we are out in the middle of the ocean; what do we do then?  More in part two