Captain Jack Aubrey from the movie
"Master and Commander: Far Side of the World"
leading a boarding party.
Should Chaplains be part of the military? The question
brings up the larger question of what place religion has in a state.
As commissioned officers, chaplains represent their faith,
but they also represent a state claim to spiritual power, a power that the state
wants on its side, on the state’s terms.
When I read Captain Aubrey’s musings on Chaplains in the Royal
Navy (more below) in the “Master and Commander” books, I thought, ‘Yes! This is
what bothers me about faith and power.’
Specifically, I believe faith in the service of power is
always evil. Always.
But Aubrey does not think in universals, he simply does not like
Chaplains on his ship. He believes they are bad luck. He sees the contradiction
of having services on board the ship.
Aubrey drills and trains his gun crews to “smash enemy ships to splinters.”
When necessary, Aubrey loads his guns with grape shot—a shotgun
blast from a cannon with hundreds of pieces of metal and chain—and slaughters
the enemy crew while they are on deck manning the guns and the rigging. He has watched blood pour off the deck scuttles
(drains) from the slaughter of a dozen cannons firing grape shot.
When Aubrey leads his men on a boarding party, they carry
pikes and axes and swords and pistols. They kill everyone in front of them as
they swing from their ship to the enemy ship, firing, cutting and stabbing.
In a moment of reflection, Aubrey thinks about the deep
contradiction when he has a Chaplain on board. On long voyages, a Chaplain will
give weekly sermons, exhorting the men to love their neighbor, love their
enemy, and any number of things that Captain Aubrey has trained out of his
men. They can’t really love their
neighbor in the French frigate and pound his wooden ship to splinters with
24-pound cannonballs, then jump onto the enemy ship as they crash together and
impale his neighbor on an 8-foot-long pike or split his skull with an axe.
Which brings me back to this issue of faith and power. In defending their own Holy Lands, a Muslim
or a Jew split an enemy’s skull or run them through with a pike. Islam and
Judaism have a territorial imperative.
But Christianity can never take power and be true to itself.
Jesus had every opportunity for money, power and glory and pushed it away. Based on the words of Jesus, no one could
raise an army, conquer a foreign land, kill an enemy or run a government, which
means having exclusive control of the means of violence. The horrors of the Crusades, the conquest of
the New World, African Slavery, the Hundred Years War, and every conflict waged
with a Christian label is simply wrong.
There has never been a Christian nation based on the words of Jesus. It
is always Moses, twisted into theological pretzel.
As an officer in what he considers a Christian nation, Captain
Aubrey is fine with religion away from his ship and nods his hat to Christian
morality as he sees it, but he is clear-eyed enough to know that his duty for
that Christian nation is a flat contradiction of what a Chaplain tells his
men.
In another passage I quoted at length, Aubrey’s great friend
Dr. Maturin muses on how power corrupts the men who pursue it.
Jews ached for and prayed to return to Israel for two
millennia until seventy years ago when a Jewish state came into being in 1948:
including Jerusalem, the spiritual center of the Land of Israel and Judaism.
Even before they had a state, Jews developed a pioneer army that became one of
the toughest of all the armies on earth.
Protecting Israel means fighting when necessary.
Islam has holy sites and the promise of a Caliphate. The
Koran describes the sites and the land. Conquest and holding an empire is
consistent with Islam.
Buddhism, from what I have learned about it, has a very
uneasy relationship with this world, power, territory and all that makes a
state. A Buddhist state seems to me to
have the same inherent contradiction is a Christian state. Buddha, like Jesus,
said nothing that could be construed as encouraging the taking and wielding of
power.
Christianity goes completely wrong every time and in every
way when it takes power. The concept of
a Christian nation is so foreign to the words of Jesus, that it seems to me as
crazy as a Vegan hog butcher. Every
institution with a Christian label that takes power contradicts Jesus. Every
one. And the hypocrisy is evident to those inside and outside the Church. Every
Church that has become a state Church has thrown away the Gospel in pursuit of
power.
Ever since I first believed, after being a vaguely agnostic
nominally Jewish teenager, I have thought power was antithetical to faith. The
Jewish state must protect itself so it can only exist by wielding power. But
the dangers of the pursuit of power are just as real for those who rise through
the ranks of the Israeli Army as any other Army.
There is no territorial imperative in Christianity. There are no words of Jesus say take earthly
power, hold earthly territory, and conquer in His name. Nothing.
I truly believe that Christianity plus power equals
evil. Always.
White Evangelical America will collapse under the weight of
its lust for power just as every nation that has conquered in the name of Jesus
in the last 1,500 years. And every expression of Christianity that aligns with
the pathetic pandering of the Evangelical majority will be tarred with the same
brush as the Crusaders and post-Reformation wars of religion.
In the 1970s, I remember a prominent Baptist talking about
sending missionaries to the “spiritual wasteland” of Europe. Well there was a project that failed. He confidently said secularism and 19th
Century philosophy had made Europe secular and resistant to faith.
He never once mentioned that the churches in Germany
expelled Jews who were confessing members in 1935, just two years after Hitler
took power. Nearly all of those believers were killed in the Holocaust. Churches
of every kind across Europe embraced or fell in line with Nazi rule. In his
history of the Holocaust “Black Earth” Timothy Snyder said that churches across
Europe utterly failed as protectors of the weak and persecuted. And now the American Evangelical Church is
following that well-worn path of pandering for power. In his book “The Immoral Majority” Ben Howe
says 68% of Evangelical Christians in America believe they have no
responsibility for refugees. The people who are supposed to show God’s love to
the world are the worst group in America for “caring for the least of these.”
Captain Aubrey is a man of action, not philosophy. Soon
after his deep reflections on the paradox of power and faith, he joined the
boarding party on a ship on which he was a passenger. With his injured right
arm tied to his side, he swung a cutlass left handed and led a party of men
jumping onto the enemy ship, fighting hand to hand.
But the conflict in his mind will not leave my mind. Real faith and pursuit of power will always
be in conflict and deep contradiction.
