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Response to Jonathan Draper and Kathy Gaca
Sharon D. Welch
University of Missouri � Columbia
I enter this conversation with Professors Gaca and Draper, and with the seminar on Romans Through History and Cultures, with anticipation and trepidation. I am neither a biblical scholar nor a historian of religions. Our interests converge, however, at a key point politically and theoretically the understanding of Christian intolerance, of colonial reason and the on-going challenges of post-coloniality. I am currently working in the field of post-colonial comparative religions and ethics, and examining this issue in three different arenas 1) experimenting with teaching a large lecture course to undergraduates as an exercise in post-colonial comparative religion 2) participating in the formation of a research center on religion and the professions designed to increase an understanding of the policy issues and ethical concerns that arrive from the interaction in the professional world of people from a wide range of religions traditions (American Indian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian);3) exploring the challenges of post-colonial ethics for colonizers.
How do we account for radically different attitudes toward Otherness, not only within the same religious tradition, but also within the interpretation and utilization of the same texts? As Kathy Gacas paper so cogently demonstrates, the understanding of Otherness shifts within a few centuries in Christian history from an uneasy tolerance of ignorant religious outsiders to active Christian intolerance and suppression of Greek and other pagan religions. (Gaca, 198) Furthermore, as Draper demonstrates in his analysis of the life of Bishop Colenso and his commentary on Romans, we can find contradictory tendencies not only across centuries, but even within a single text, and a single life. The text used by Church leaders in the late fourth century to legitimate the prohibition of pagan religious practices is used by Bishop Colenso in the 19th century to challenge the presumed superiority of Christian colonizers to the colonized heathen(Draper). Bishop Colenso is largely sympathetic to the religious and political concerns of the Zulu community, yet, as Draper demonstrates, this concern is conveyed through an essentialist reading of Judaism and the use of anti-Jewish polemics as a key rhetorical device. Bishop Colensos critique of Judaism is mitigated, however, by his awareness that Christians have no basis for racial pride over against the Jews. On the contrary, their cruelty and bigotry towards the Jews has made it impossible for Jews to believe in the Christian religion. (Draper, 15)
In a world in which religious intolerance is still rampant, what can we learn from Gacas analysis of the genesis of one potent form of Christian intolerance? In a world in which colonial domination continues under the guise of economic, political and cultural globalization, what can we learn from Drapers analysis of Bishop Colensos participation in, and challenge to, colonial domination in 19th century Natal? I am responding to both papers in light of the concerns of post-colonial comparative religions and ethics. What do I mean by post-colonial comparative religion? A brief detour into the work of Foucault will help clarify the challenge facing us.
After spending time in a Zen temple, Michel Foucault offered an assessment of the turning period in European thought occasioned by the end of imperialism. He claimed that the philosophy of the future would be born outside of Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and impact between Europe and non-Europe (Foucault). What Foucault predicted for philosophy has become true in the comparative study of religion. The very category of religion emerged as a result of European contact with other religious systems (Chidester, Long). The traditions of non-Europeans were seen as Other, sometimes in an ostensibly positive sense as an exotic reality to be explored and appreciated, often in a negative sense, misunderstood as primitive or superstitious (Dean, Chidester, Long). The use of material objects in religious rituals and ceremonies, for example, while taken for granted as valid in the Christian reverence for the cross and use of bread and wine in religious ceremonies, was described pejoratively as the use of fetishes in other than Christian religions (McCarthy Brown). Other forms of misunderstanding followed from the application of western assumptions about religious knowledge and experience to non-western traditions. For example, the bearer of religious experience in western traditions is most often understood as the individual, and the locus of religious meaning the individual mind or soul. Alfred North Whiteheads well-known definition (religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness) reflects this assumption. This definition of religion as a matter of individual belief or faith is accurate for some forms of western Christianity, but inadequate when applied to many non-western traditions. If one focuses on religious knowledge as held by an individual, it is difficult to understand traditions in which religious knowledge is also born by the community, or by the cosmos. Even if the focus of another tradition is the human being, the ontology of that being may include multiple souls and a focus on the body that is foreign to western traditions. In Buddhism, for example, the person is seen as composed of five skandhas, or elements, and enlightenment is born as much in the body as in the mind (Abe). The problem now being examined in the post-colonial comparative study of religion is quite straightforward: the categories for defining religion were taken from western traditions and then applied to other traditions, a process in which the other traditions were often found wanting, or, even if seen as complex and worthy of appreciation, were still misunderstood by western scholars, missionaries, and colonists.
In the post-colonial era, contact among religious traditions has taken a radically different form. By post-colonial, scholars refer to a political situation in which the process of colonization (economic, cultural and political conquest) is both contested and relatively visible. A critique of colonial reason is well established in the field of religious studies, and has led to a proliferation of works that describe patterns of misunderstanding and misnaming in regard to particular religious traditions. ( Long, McCarthy Brown, Chidester, Deloria).
Kathy Gracas paper helps us with a key aspect of post-colonial comparative religion, a critique of the logic of colonial reason. She analyzes a rhetoric/polemic that precedes colonialism by centuries, yet it can be argued that this justification of intolerance and suppression continues through the colonial period and into the present. The denunciation of political and ideological opponents as willful apostates and suppressors of the truth (Gaca, 173) is, in the United States, at least, a rhetorical strategy that is almost synonomus with intense ideological engagement. For example, in a report on November 13, 2000 in The New York Times, the debates between democrats and republicans over the presidential vote is characterized as one in which each party sees themselves involved in a fundamental battle between good and evil, right and wrong, with themselves being fair, and the other party renouncing democratic procedures and seeking an unfair advantage playing political dirty tricks.
Many of us would argue that the polemics of our time are as unproductive intellectually and as dangerous politically as the apostate conspiracy theories analyzed by Gaca. For example, in an interview conducted by Paul Rabinow in 1984, Foucault answered a simple question: why dont you engage in polemics? by emphasizing that a whole morality is at stake, the morality that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other. Not only are polemics unproductive (Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a polemic?) but polemics function as an obstacle in the search for truth.
Very schematically, it seems to me that today we can recognize the presence in polemics of three models: the religious model, the judiciary model, and the political model. As in heresiology, polemics sets itself the task of determining the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary principle that the adversary has neglected, ignored, or transgressed; and it denounces this negligence as a moral failing; at the root of the error, it finds passion, desire, interest, a whole series of weaknesses and inadmissible attachments that establish it as culpable. As in judiciary practice, polemics allows for no possibility of an equal discussion: it is processing a suspect; it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the infraction he has committed, and pronounces the verdict and sentences him . . .But it is the political model that is the most powerful today. Polemics defines alliances, . .; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears. (Foucault, )
Foucault challenges us to forego the ready satisfactions of polemics, while yet being attentive to the continuing presence of error and domination. He offers a vision of an alternative form of critical engagement:
I cant help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes - all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; Id like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms. (Foucault,)
We see an imperfect, yet challenging, exercise of such critical engagement in Drapers account of the work of Bishop Colenso. A core componoment of another form of critical rhetoric is to be as attuned to the possibility of error and rationalizations of privilege and power in ourselves as in the Other and in our opponents. As Draper demonstrates, the decisive rhetorical move that propelled Colenso into political struggle against the injustices of colonialism was the recognition that Christian colonists were not in a position of racial superiority to the Zulu people.
How was it possible for Colenso to break with the overwhelming force of colonial reason? Colenso read the texts of his faith within a different interpretive community, one in which he gave at least partial, if not full, respect to some members of the Zulu community as challenging interlocuters. The following passage, cited by Draper, is indicative of the tensions we see in Colensos work:
To teach the truths of our holy religion to intelligent adult natives, who have the simplicity of children, but withal the earnestness and thoughtfulness of men to whom these things are new and startling, whose minds are not prepared by long familiarity to acquiesce in, if not to receive, them, - is a sifting process for the opinions of any teacher, who feels the deep moral obligation of answering truly, and faithfully, and unreservedly, his fellow-man. (Colenso, 1861:198, in Draper, 12)
Draper argues that Colenso takes the Zulu people as his primary dialogue partners and reference points (Draper, 9). In addition to his conversations, in which he assumes the missionary role of conveying adequately the light and guidance of the Christian faith, Colenso was certainly also dependent upon his interlocutors in the translation of biblical texts into Zulu. A question at this point for Draper how explicit was Colenso in acknowledging this dependence? We certainly see a creative destablisation following these conversations. On the one hand, Colenso comes to an affirmation of his prior commitment to Maurices Christian universalism, and from that vantage point, recognizes the outrage of an interpretation of Christian mission which would separate the Zulu converts from their community, their culture and their ancestors. Colenso comes to appreciate the Zulu emphasis on the continuity of the living and the dead in unbroken community and is outraged by a Christianity that would ask the convert to reject that community. (Draper 13)
Furthermore, Colenso supported the voice of his converts, publishing the diaries of his three Zulu companions.
What were the multiple forms of exchange that enabled this creative destabilization? Draper mentions conversation, yet what made such transformative conversations possible? There are numerous barriers to potentially transformative conversations between Christians and practitioners of other religions, between colonizers and colonized. Draper mentions the first - an unquestioned sense of superiority belonging to a social universe which appeared self-evident, secure and superior to the indigenous cultures and beliefs of the colonized peoples. (Draper 1) . This assumption leads to the erroneous inference that the language of others is simple (Draper, 6), as are the people themselves (Draper, 12) What can break this self-justifying cycle? One break, noted by Draper in Colensos work,   is serious conversation with Zulu people, respecting the questions asked, understanding the inconsistencies of the missionary message from their point of view.
What is behind such respect? What can enable such connection? A fundamental barrier to the colonist recognition of the humanity of the Other was the way in which essential and life-giving exchanges, depending on native others for material survival (food, appropriate shelter), was taken as what is always provided to the elite by the working class: they are supposed to serve and house us. The divisions of class poison thereby a life-giving exchange (I expect that my background as the child of generations of farmers is here apparent).
Another barrier to genuine conversation, one partially breached by Colenso, is a construction of religious truth that is ill-suited to the recognition of other forms of religious knowing, knowers, and knowledge. Colenso challenged the interpretation of Christianity as individual belief, choosing to respect the Zulu connection to ancestors, and expressing faith, not by the Zulu word for belief, or assent, but the word temba, which expresses confidence, hope, and trust. (Draper, 19)
A key task of post-colonial ethics is not just a critique of colonial reason, but an examination of what can keep us open to the mind-numbing and politically devastating polemics and construals of the good. I suggest we may begin by assuming that religious experience, far from intrinsically compelling us toward respectful engagement with others, is itself fundamentally amoral. I will not repeat the cut, the division into legitimate/illegitimate, natality/death, faith/religion for a simple reason. To take refuge in such a divide (or even in the possibility of such a divide) is to miss the power and peril of the religious and of all religious discourse. In itself (a loaded phrase to be sure) religious experience is profoundly meaningful, central to a communitys and an individuals sense of identity, and, at the same time, intrinsically amoral.
The experience of religion, of intense forms of connection is simply that - the crucial synthesis of the energies of people from the past, within the present, and even in the future. We may be energized, but that does not meant that our theological and political analyses are true, that our ethics and political strategies are just. It is disconcerting to acknowledge that our ecstasy in connection, whether political, religious or conceptual, is simply the energy of connection, an energy that may be used in amoral, immoral or moral ways. We so want the energy we experience in connection, the affirmation we encounter in being-seen or being-loved to be an affirmation of the rightness of our choices, our actions, beliefs, and desires. While these may be affirmations of our being, they are not affirmations of how we frame and express that being.
Although this construal differs in its placement of error and injustice, (acknowledging the amorality at the core of the religious), it is not, for that reason, more likely , nor less likely than any other construal to lead to justice or injustice. Here I draw on Nietzches notion of the longest lie - the belief that outside the haphazard and perilous experiments we perform there lies something (God, Science, Knowledge, Rationality, or Truth) which will, if only we perform the correct rituals, step in to save us.
How is it possible that all manifestations of the religious are amoral, if morality, if the demand for justice, is intrinsic to our names for the religious? For Levinas the name of God is a call for justice, for Derrida, the tout autre challenges the violence and fanaticism of any concrete messianism, for Irigary and Jantzen the imperative of the religious is to become divine which in itself is an act of justice, the open-ended participation in human flourishing.
I am not saying the religious is immoral, and thus, such names are, by definition, unwarranted. Rather, the language of freedom and openness to others, the language of love and justice, coheres with the ecstasy and claim of the religious as easily, but no more easily, than the language of exclusion and self-righteousness.
If we follow Bishop Colenso in a genuine conversation with others (in this case, if we as Euro-Americans listen to, and learn from African American construals of religion), if we depart from the fourth century church leaders and learn from the paganism of vodou, we may find another logic of religious meaning, power and critical engagement.

Theophus Smith, for example, describes the power of conjure in African American religion. Conjure is the eliciting of spiritual power which transforms internalized oppression, and evokes and sustains acts of political transformation through a complex interaction of religious symbol systems, ritual performances and political action. By definition, conjure escapes the dualistic oppositions of good and evil, sacred and profane. : Working with Derridas notion of the pharmokos, Smith claims that that which can heal can also harm.
In some African religions and in the African-American religious of vodou, Anthony Pinn claims that we find not only a recognition of the ambiguity of our own sacral activities but a recognition of the ambiguity of the divine. In his description of Orisha worship in the United States, the orisas are seen as neutral energy forces affecting our lives, energy that can be used for good or ill. It is startling, to the Western eye, to see a clear recognition of the amorality of the divine. ... [i]ndeed, there is no force in heaven which dictates a morality. (Pinn)
If the forces that create and sustain us and the universe are amoral, what is the source of any particular moral vision? For there is a strong moral sense in orisha worship, a morality that seeks to create and sustain a proper relationship with the orishas, ancestors, other humans, and the earth. We learn how to be moral not from God, not from a being beyond-being, but from the experiences, teachings and guidance conveyed to us by other human beings. (Pinn, )
What differentiates these communal responses to constitutive energies? Our perception of these energies is socially constructed - the creation, and legacy, of our ancestors. Our mobilization of these energies is the creation of the interpretive communities in which we are formed. This energy can be used, and is used, for moral and political purposes: justifying our superiority and control of others, or, conversely, eliciting greater respect for and openness to others.
What then, is the religious? This is the name we give to those encounters, those energies, which are constitutive, but amoral,: those encounters, those energies, which are vivid, compelling and meaningful, but fragile. This symbolic of desire is not better than other construals of the religious, for it has its own peril and promise the dangers of complacency, or accepting too readily as tragic ambiguities, what are removable injustices.
In her novel Paradise, Morrison recounts the tragedy of a town that in escaping slavery and exclusion, defined itself as exclusive, and violently so, a town that in trying to give its youth safety, denied their vitality and creativity. Even the energy of generations is amoral :   it can be used to stifle and bind, rather than to frame and nourish.
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it. Soon Ruby will be like any other country town: the young thinking of elsewhere; the old full of regret. The          sermons will be eloquent but fewer and fewer will pay attention or connect them to everyday life. How can they hold it together, he wondered, this hard-won heaven defined only by the absence of the unsaved, the unworthy and the strange? Who will protect them from their leaders?
How can we acknowledge that there is no fundamental divide of us, the righteous, us the vanguard, us the enlightened, and the unsaved, the unworthy and the strange? We can return to laughter, learning from the stranger within and the stranger outside, blessed with the legacy of seeing all as worthy of dignity, privacy and respect. We can return to laughter, the generous laughter that relishes the irony of knowing that that which funds our morality is itself amoral, and morality, far from being the demand or gift of the divine, is the perilous and at times beautiful human response to the energy and wonder of life.
References:
. Return to Laughter is an anthropological novel written by Laura Bohannen under the pseudonym of Elenore Smith Bowen, and first published in 1954. Bohannen, an American anthropologist, describes her attempts to objectively study tribal peoples in Nigeria. Bohannen describes the breakdown of her conviction of cultural superiority, from her initial arrogant impatience with education into the names of different plants, to her discovery of a communal social logic of rage, laughter, forgiveness and intensity that proved more resilient in the face of social crisis than her own dualistic moral vocabulary of good and evil, friend and foe. Elenore Smith Bowen, Return to Laughter: An Anthropological Novel, New York: Anchor Books, 1964.
Batchelor, Stephen, Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening. New York: Riverhead Books, 1997
Brown, Karen McCarthy, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1991.
Chidester, David. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996
Dean, Thomas, ed. Religious Pluralism and Truth: Essays on Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1995
Deloria, Philip, Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998
Draper, Jonathan A. Bishop John William Colensos Interpretation to the Zulu People of the Sola Fide in Pauls Letter to the Romans
Foucault, Michel, Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault, conducted by Paul Rabinow in May 1984; in Michel Foucault, Ethics Subjectivity and Truth, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume I, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1997.
Michel Foucault, The Masked Philosopher, inteview conducted on April 6 7, 1980 by Christian Delacampagne, reprinted in Michel Foucault, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth.
Foucault, Michel. Michel Foucault and Zen: a stay in a Zen Temple, in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette. New York: Routledge, 1999
Gaca, Kathy L., Pauls Uncommon Declaration in Romans 1:18-32 and its Problematic Legacy for Pagan and Christian Relations, Harvard Theological Review 92)2 (1999).
Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. 1986
Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Pinn, Anthony. Varieties of African American Religious Experience. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.
Smith, Theophus. Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.