TOKENS PODCAST: S3E6
Bill Cavanaugh, professor of Catholic studies at Depaul University, discusses with Lee his recent provocative article entitled "Electing Republicans has not Reversed Roe vs. Wade. It's Time to Change Our Strategy." Bill outlines some shocking realities which are being little discussed and appear to be little known about the abortion debates in America. In addition, Lee and Bill discuss Bill’s book Torture and Eucharist on the Pinochet regime in Chile, along with a brief discussion of Bill’s book Being Consumed, in which Bill both critiques naïve notions of the “free market” while not advocating state socialism as the only other alternative.
LINKS TO LISTEN:
LINKS:
Bill’s article: Electing Republicans has not reversed Roe v. Wade. It’s time to change our strategy.
Bill’s book: Torture and Eucharist
Bill’s book: Being Consumed
Bill’s book: The Myth of Religious Violence
ABOUT GUEST
William T. Cavanaugh is Professor of Catholic Studies and Director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University. His degrees are from the universities of Notre Dame, Cambridge, and Duke. He is co-editor of the journal Modern Theology. He is the author of seven books and editor of four more. His writings have been published in fourteen languages, and he has lectured on six continents.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee Camp: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Bill Cavanaugh: If you're a pro-life person, the only way you're going to win that battle is by convincing people to take a pro-life stance.
And that is much more than electing a certain president and getting certain justices on the Supreme Court. It's more a matter of winning hearts and minds, and the approach has to be one not of power but of love.
Lee Camp: That's Bill Cavanaugh, Professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University, in Chicago, Illinois. Recently the author of a provocative article about the abortion debates in America. And no spoilers here: except to say he taught me some quite surprising facts about political and social realities around abortion which I did not know, and I suspect most people do not know.
And, for the sake of open and honest acknowledgment: yes, this episode is two men, talking about abortion. Which can be problematic. But you can trust we don't presume it's the last word on the topic. Instead, it's me asking one scholar about an article of his I find really important, which points to some of the problematic politicization of abortion. We will also discuss Bill's books, Torture and Eucharist and Being Consumed. In the midst of all that we'll hear the ways in which Christians may be called to be, in Bill's words...
Bill Cavanaugh: ... politically homeless.
Lee Camp: And, if all that were not enough, we'll hear this also from Bill:
Bill Cavanaugh: It's one of the great Christian idolatries I think is nationalism.
Lee Camp: All this, coming right up.
Part 1
Lee Camp: Bill Cavanaugh Professor of Catholic studies and director of the center for world Catholicism and intercultural theology at DePaul university in Chicago, Illinois, author of numerous books and articles especially around political theology and economic ethics. Bill, it's great to see you.
Bill Cavanaugh: Good to see you, Lee. Thanks for having me on.
Lee Camp: Yeah. Welcome. Glad to get to talk to you again. You're in the midst of a snow storm in Chicago?
Bill Cavanaugh: Nice picturesque looking flakes coming down right now. It's good to be indoors.
Lee Camp: I do miss those days of getting lots and lots of snow from my South Bend, Indiana days.
Bill Cavanaugh: It builds character as Garrison Keillor likes to say.
Lee Camp: It does, it does. Indeed. That's right. Cause you spent some years in Minnesota as well, right?
Bill Cavanaugh: Yeah. 15 years.
Lee Camp: Yeah. Are the Minnesota winters harder than Chicago winters?
Bill Cavanaugh: Yeah. As a rule. Global warming has made everything a little bit gentler these days, but when we first moved up there, it was pretty severe.
I remember talking to a guy as I was moving into my office. And I asked him if it was still pretty warm outside and he said, yeah, it's about 82 above. And I thought, oh God, did he just say 82 above as if, you know, you have to specify when you say 82. So…
Lee Camp: Yeah. Living in South Bend was my first time living out of the south ever. I do remember certainly having to learn how to buy coats and clothes that could survive those sorts of winners. But I have very fond memories. In those days I would either ride a bike or ride the bus across town to go to school. And I remember very early in the morning before the sun was up, you know, trudging from our house to the bus stop in six inches of fresh snow. You know, in my sentimental ways they’re very fond memories of the cold and the quiet.
Bill Cavanaugh: That's because you knew that someday you'd be moving back down South.
Lee Camp: Yeah, I guess so. Well, I'm fascinated with your recent article: “Electing Republicans has not reversed Roe v. Wade. It's time to change our strategy.” And I probably stuck that in numerous, numerous conversations on Facebook, just because I saw you raising issues there of which I have heard very little discussion. But you first talk about your experience as a pro-life college Republican.
This was something that you've been concerned with for a while, as far as Roe V. Wade and abortion and so forth, right?
Bill Cavanaugh: Yeah. When I was a freshman at Notre Dame in 1980, I joined two organizations: the right to life and the college Republicans. And I assumed that the two kind of went hand in hand, all we needed to do was elect Republicans and Roe vs. Wade would be overturned and we'd go back to the good old days.
Lee Camp: And so then in time you came to realize later that there appears to be some hypocrisy or at least a failure to keep some promises around the issue?
Bill Cavanaugh: Well, I think that's right. If you look at what's actually happened, you know, another 40 years have passed since 1980.
And Republicans have had control of the Supreme Court for the whole time. In fact, 50 of the last 51 years, there's been a Republican majority on the Supreme Court. Now the only exception being the year after Anthony and Scalia died when there was a tie. And nothing's changed. You know we keep hearing all we have to do is elect Republican presidents and they will name justices to the Supreme Court that will overturn Roe vs. Wade. And it just keeps not happening. It keeps being Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown.
Lee Camp: I was quite surprised. If I remember correctly from your article, you indicated something like that when the Roe v. Wade decision was passed it was a seven to two vote. And at that time there were seven Republican appointees on the Supreme Court.
Bill Cavanaugh: Six.
Lee Camp: Six, okay. And then one of the dissenting votes, I think you said, was actually a Democrat appointee.
Bill Cavanaugh: That's right. There were only two votes against Roe v. Wade. One was Rehnquist, the Republican appointee who was Chief Justice and the other was Byron White, who was a Democratic appointee. So five of the six Republican justices voted for Roe versus Wade.
Lee Camp: I’ve been quite interested. And this is going a bit astray from your article but, Randall Balmer has argued for some years now, especially in his book God in the White House, that it was in the late seventies, leading up to the campaign for Ronald Reagan, that Republicans actually didn't care much about abortion. And then at that point, they began to kind of fish around for an issue by which they thought they could capture American evangelical vote.
And they strategized and figured out maybe they could get the vote this way which at that level seems to have been successful. Any kind of commentary on that from your perspective as a Catholic theologian?
Bill Cavanaugh: Yeah. In some ways it's a kind of extension of Nixon's Southern strategy. You appeal to people in the South on the basis of cultural issues even if the economic issues are against their own interests.
Lee Camp: You speculate some about perhaps why the failure to overturn Roe v. Wade has occurred?
Bill Cavanaugh: Yeah. I mean, there's a number of possible reasons.
One is that the Republicans haven't really wanted to overturn Roe vs. Wade. If you look at the record of the Republicans during Republican administrations, they've been remarkably successful in all sorts of ways. You know, lowering taxes, especially taxes on the wealthy.
And cutting taxes for corporations, increasing military spending, cutting food stamps, and other safety net programs. You know, making sure that there is easy access to assault weapons promoting the death penalty, torture during the post 9/11 period, preferring nationalism over refugees, and immigrants gutting environmental protection laws. Green-lighting the Contras, the list just goes on and on.
Lee Camp: It's a bit of an overwhelming list.
Bill Cavanaugh: It is. It really is. All of which, you know, in all of these things, none of them seem very gospel oriented to me. And, but the one thing, their main selling point to Christians has been this position on abortion.
And they've been strangely ineffective in doing what they say they're going to do, which is overturning Roe vs. Wade. And so you have to ask why this is the case. And it seems like they get done what they really want to get done. What are really priorities. And this is not a priority. So that's one possibility.
And another possibility is, is that it doesn't really matter who is nominated for the Supreme Court that at this point the principle of stare decisis means that it's not going to be overturned.
Lee Camp: Stare Decisis is a latin phrase that means "to stand by that which is decided." So it is, in my layman's understanding, a legal doctrine by which a court is bound to follow historical precedent.
Bill Cavanaugh: Chief Justice, John Roberts, pro-life Catholic appointed by Republican administration.
He invoked that principle last year in the case of knocking down abortion restrictions in Louisiana on the basis of starry decisis. And so it's possible that it won't be overturned no matter who gets elected to the presidency and who gets nominated to the Supreme Court.
Lee Camp: So from your perspective in your article, the subtitle is “It’s time to change our strategy.” What sorts of other possible strategies do you see for those who kind of want to be more thoughtful about how they might think about embodying a pro-life witness? What might that look like?
Bill Cavanaugh: Yeah. Well, I think the first thing that needs to be realized is that even if the strategy were to work, it's possible that the current Supreme Court with a six to three Republican majority, it's possible that they will overturn Roe vs. Wade. But it's not gonna make that much difference.
It'll go back to the situation before Roe vs. Wade in 1973. And that was not a situation in which abortion was outlawed. That was a situation in which it was legal in some states and not legal in other states. So actually the rate of legal abortions in the United States in 1972 before Roe vs. Wade is actually higher than it is now. Right?
And so people don't realize, they think that, abortion went from being illegal to being legal in 1973. And that's not the case. In the 1930s there were over 800,000 abortions a year in the United States, legal abortions. And so all that would happen if Roe vs. Wade were struck down was that it would just return to the states and become a state-by-state issue. And so if you wanted an abortion and you lived in a state where it was illegal, you'd go to a state where it was legal. And so it then would become a kind of, you know, hand to hand combat on the state level. And so, if you're a pro-life person, the only way you're going to win that battle is by convincing people to take a pro-life stance.
And that is much more than electing a certain president and getting certain justices on the Supreme Court. It's more a matter of winning hearts and minds and the approach has to be one not of power but of love. I think the only way you're going to convince people of the sanctity of life is by actually taking care of women who find themselves in crisis pregnancies.
Lee Camp: I just want to make sure I heard what you said a moment ago. So you're saying that in 1972, prior to Roe v. Wade, the abortion rate was higher than it is today. Yes, that's right. There were over 600,000 legal abortions in 1972. And on a per capita basis, that's actually higher than the rate has been now for several years.
The rate has been dropping under both Democratic and Republican administrations now for the last couple of decades and continues to decline.
Lee Camp: I’ve seen some folks argue, and then I've seen other people who discredited these arguments, that the rate actually dropped more under Democrat Presidents. Is that your sense that that's correct, or no?
Bill Cavanaugh: Yeah, there's kind of dueling statistics on this. And it seems to be the case that it dropped the fastest under Obama. But it's dropped under both Republican and Democratic administrations for the last like 25 years or so. It doesn't seem to be a real significant difference in the rate of drop under both kinds of administrations.
Lee Camp: What are further specifics on things that you would like to see happen to win minds and hearts as you described a moment ago?
Bill Cavanaugh: Well, one of the things I think that needs to happen is we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot. So you've got two narratives out there. One is that restricting abortion is promoting human life. And the other is that restricting abortion is oppressing women. And so there are these two competing narratives out there. So how do you convince people that it is in fact, a matter of protecting life and it's not a matter of restricting women's freedom? While you have to actually be pro-life then. You have to be consistently on the side of human life.
And that means all of those things that I had named before: torture and war and the death penalty and you know, cutting support for poor people and so on. That all of those things are life issues and you have to be consistently on the side of life in order to not be accused justifiably of hypocrisy, right?
In order to convince people that, in fact, it really is about life and not about the domination of men over women. The way to lose that argument is to elect a president, to go all in on a president, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women. Right? Hitching the pro-life wagon to Donald Trump might be one of the most damaging things that's ever happened to the pro-life movement.
This is not going to convince anybody that this is really about the sanctity of human life about which our former president didn't seem to care much. So one of the things that can happen I think is that people can try to be consistent, but of course being consistent on these matters means not being an adherent of either one of the parties, right?
I mean, both of the parties kind of fall short on some of these issues of life. And so in some ways, if you're a Christian, you need to be kind of politically homeless. But definitely not just kind of go all in on what we've seen for the last four years. I think that's just been a disaster for the pro-life movement.
So those are some of the things that I think pro-life people should avoid. What they can do positively are the kinds of care for women who find themselves in pregnancies and feel alone. A lot of what we can do is not just advocate for restrictions on what women's options are, but give them more options.
Promote adoption care for women in crisis pregnancies. And this is the kind of thing that can and should happen at the micro level. You know, individual churches instead of getting all fired up about presidential elections, that don't really seem to have any effect on this issue over the long run or in the short run. That local churches and local communities can actually band together and start supporting women that find themselves in difficult crisis pregnancy situations, and actually support them and give them options that make them feel like they can carry a baby to term and receive some support.
Lee Camp: In talking to Professor Bill Cavanaugh, Professor of Catholic studies, director of the center for world Catholicism and intercultural theology at DePaul university in Chicago. We'll be right back the discussion of another one of Bill's writings, entitled Torture and Eucharist. Be right back.
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
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This is our interview with Bill Cavanaugh, Professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University. Coming up, we discuss Bill's work Torture and Eucharist about the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the role of the Catholic church in that setting, and our own experiences in Santiago, Chile related to the book. If you don't know of this book, and/or if you do not know some of the basic history of Chile in the 1970's and 1980's, you will not want to miss part two, coming up in just a moment.
Part 2
Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with Professor Bill Cavanaugh.
Lee Camp: Bill, some years ago, I guess it was in 2014. You Zoomed into a class I was teaching in Santiago, Chile about your troubling and humbling book, entitled Torture and Eucharist: Theology Politics, and the Body of Christ. I knew before going and teaching in Santiago a bit about the story of Chile. But for those who are unaware of what happened in the late 1960s, early 1970s, why don't you just quickly give a brief historical overview of some of the key developments there.
Bill Cavanaugh: In many ways, Chile was one of the most stable democracies in Latin America in the period before the 1960s, 1970s. But large-scale inequality was always a problem as it is in much of Latin America, right? From the conquest. And so people were agitating for land reform distributing the land much of which was appropriated during the conquest and so on, more equitable societal and economic relationships. And so there was a very active left socialist and communist parties in Chile. And in 1970, they succeeded in electing Salvador, again, who was a Socialist. And said about, instituting land reform and nationalization of certain industries and so on.
And this was very unpopular amongst the upper classes in Chile. Ultimately the middle classes as well. The United States played a part in trying to destabilize Allende’s regime. And in the end on September 11th of 1973, the military lit a coup and took over. And everybody thought that this would be a kind of transitional period and they'd get back to democracy. But general Pinochet kind of took power and didn't relinquish it, established a regime of torture and disappearances, and terrorized the population, and stayed in power for another 17 years. And so I worked in a poor area of Santiago for the last couple of years of the Pinochet regime, And by that time, the church had become a thorn in his side.
The church had kind of taken on the role of the only sort of institutional bulwark against the military regime because in a lot of ways the church was sort of untouchable, the one organization that Pinochet couldn't shut down. And so the ideology of the military regime took a lot from Milton Friedman and neoliberalism. Milton Friedman was an invited guest of general Pinochet a couple of times after he took power.
And the economists that were supposed to reorganize society were known as Chicago boys all of whom had been trained by Friedman at the University of Chicago. And the idea was to kind of individualize a society. You get rid of unions, you get rid of political parties, you put restrictions on any way that people can gather.
And you envision society as a group of individual entrepreneurs. And so that then becomes the strategy and torture then becomes part of that strategy. When you torture people, they stay away from other people. Fear and anxiety spread throughout society and people spend as one person said, I spent years swearing at the television set.
You do away with all of the torture as an attack, more on social bodies than it is just on individual bodies in this way.
Lee Camp: When I was teaching there that one semester, we had the privilege of spending a day with the gentlemen who toured us. I'm drawing a blank, is it Villa Grimaldi, that you discussed in the first chapter of your book. And we showed up to Villa Grimaldi, which was prior to the Pinochet regime, apparently this beautiful Italian Villa right at the base of the Andes mountains. Just a gorgeous space, gorgeous setting and was used as one of the chief torture centers for the regime. And he took us through telling us how people were received there, how they were brought in, and slowly began to take us from one place to another in the remains of the Villa, describing the horror and the grotesque way, especially in early years where it sounded like there was no real purpose to it at all. Other than this, this infliction of fear and horror. And as we had been with him for probably an hour and a half or two hours, he then said, and this is where they took me.
And he then began to open up about his own experience and he was simply as I recollect the president of his law school class. And simply because he had the “power” as the president of his law school class, he was targeted. And even then, you know, decades later, you could see the sort of horror that had been inflicted in him, both psychologically and physically.
And I'll say too, that he told us stories that day of some of the grotesque forms of torture that are so personal and so demeaning that I've never repeated them to anyone because like, they're just so horrific and demeaning. Like it's not my place to tell and repeat some of those stories.
Bill Cavanaugh: Right. It's interesting that a lot of people that have been tortured have the same response to their torture is that they can't speak about it. Torture has a way of eliminating people's voices. And that of course is one of the points of the whole strategy of torture is that you eliminate people's voices and it gets replaced by the voice of the regime. And so, a lot of what they did was electricity and other things that were not meant to leave permanent marks on a person's body. So that the whole thing remains invisible. You just disappear people off the streets. They vanish into the system of the secret police. They're tortured in ways that can't be shown or proven and then released again. And the whole system is meant to take people's voices away and to eliminate these kinds of intermediary bodies between the individual and the state. The individual is entirely at the mercy of the state.
And in that sense, it's part of the whole kind of strategy of neoliberalism as well. There's nothing left, but individuals.
Lee Camp: I asked Bill to comment on the role of the Catholic Church with regard to the policy of torture in Chile. He tells in the book how the church initially responded too slowly to the despotic policies of the Pinochet regime.
Bill Cavanaugh: Yeah, I think Catholic bishops tend to be conservative by nature. You know, they're the kind of gatekeepers. And, you know, not just Catholic bishops, but bishops and other denominations as well. They tend to be gatekeepers, bureaucrats, and pastors, trying to keep the sheep from going astray and so on. And so in Chile you had this basic sort of idea even among the progressive bishops. That the church is the soul of society and the state is the body. And so we don't get directly involved in politics. But we, you know, urge people to play nice.
And that's the role of the church. And I think it took a few years, but, once the military regime took over and began to torture and disappear people, the church kind of woke up and said, this is not adequate because the state doesn't just want the body. The state wants the soul as well.
And so we need to kind of respond in some ways by being a body. Right? By being a space where people can gather. And so the reason the book is called Torture and Eucharist is that torture is this process of atomizing and individualizing the body politic. And Eucharistic is a way of bringing bodies back together, social bodies, back together, giving people a way of gathering in Christ's name and resisting this process of individualization.
And that eventually does happen in several different ways that I described. The church kind of becomes the one place where people can gather. And it begins sponsoring soup kitchens, and workshops for unemployed people, and places for the relatives of the disappeared to gather, and human rights work. I worked on a cooperative house building project which was affiliated with the church and so on.
And so it becomes this kind of intermediate body between the individual and the state and a way to gather. And there were other ways a group of bishops excommunicated torturers, which then becomes this kind of very public sign of what the Eucharist actually means in a situation where some Christians are torturing other Christians. And it also sponsored these kinds of flash mobs. The Sebastian Acevedo movement against torture where people would on a kind of pre-arranged signal, all gather in front of a place where someone was being tortured, handout leaflets you know, begin chanting that sort of thing.
At great personal sacrifice. Of course they would then be hauled away to prison, but this was one way they talked about kind of communicating the word “?” meaning kind of Eucharistically communicating with the people that are being tortured in prison by receiving blows on their own bodies in these kinds of flashmob street protests. So the story ultimately becomes a fairly good one, where the church becomes this kind of resistance to the military regime, which eventually leads to a transition to democracy.
Lee Camp: I was also struck by you mentioning the Chicago boys. I did have a friend loan me a book right before going down there that started talking about the Chicago boys. But prior to that point, I was unfamiliar with them.
And I was speaking one day to a Chilean professor at the school where we were teaching classes and he asked me something about my knowledge of the Chicago boys. And I admitted it only very recently had I ever learned of them. I said, so is that widely known here? And he said, “oh yeah, yeah, everybody here knows about the Chicago boys.”
So as a bit of background here: Milton Friedman was a Nobel prize winning economist, famed for his embrace of so-called free-market mechanisms. The so-called Chicago boys were a number of Friedman's devotees who helped set up free-market mechanisms in Chile after the dictator Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende. To be fair, Friedman did make numerous public statements which critiqued the despotic policies of Pinochet.
And again, it was this is humbling, sort of reality of here's this whole country that knows this story of the ways in which the United States and this representative of neo-liberalism inflicted, or at least contributed to the infliction of great pain upon this populace and of which I was relatively ignorant until that point,
Bill Cavanaugh: Right. Friedman actually made comments in a press conference when he was in Chile. He said the economy needed shock treatment. And this was at a time when electricity was being used to torture tens of thousands of people. He of course did not have that in mind, but people know that story and see the parallels in ways that were just oblivious to it.
There was a billboard in the neighborhood that I lived in that read “Crea la libre empresa. Cree en la libre empresa” which means free enterprise creates, believe in free enterprise. And that was part of the ideology of the military regime. Happiness is going to come eventually. The wealth will trickle down if you just let the free market do its magic. And of course it is magic. If it's something that needs to be believed in because the evidence of it was never present and still isn't.
Lee Camp: I'll stick in a parenthetical here for those who might be unfamiliar with your book Being Consumed. You don't generally tend to make an argument for socialism as such, while you're also doing a critique of capitalism. But at least as I read being consumed, you're making an argument that arguments around so-called free market economies have failed to take account of the realities of power. And that if we don't take account of the realities of power, then both the socialist state or so-called free market economy, both can become mechanisms of immense oppression. Is that a fair enough kind of summary?
Bill Cavanaugh: Yeah, absolutely a lot of what I write is very critical of the state. And so I'm not a kind of advocate of increased state power generally. But I'm also not an advocate of the so-called free market as such, because I don't believe that there is such a thing as the free market, you know. It's usually defined as a market in which the state does not intervene. But that does not guarantee that it's free. It might be free in the negative sense that nobody is interfering with people getting what they want. But that ignores the huge disparities of power. Right? So if a corporation is paying, you know, young Thai girls, 30 cents an hour to work, in their factories. Technically it's free if the transaction is not coerced by the state. But in a very real sense that it's not freedom at all. It's close to slavery. The person who takes a job like that takes it because they have no choice because they're desperate. And because of these kind of tremendous disparities of power that exist in the world.
So the real question is not whether we should affirm or damn the free market as such, but when is the market free? And I think it's only free when you can actually point to the flourishing of all of the parties involved. And so you have to have a much richer concept of freedom where you define it's not just negatively, but positively as something that leads to the flourishing of all of the people involved and the earth included all of the parties involved.
And for that, you need some kind of theological discernment about what are the true goods of the human person. It can't just be this kind of excuse where you say that the market is free, as long as there's no government interference.
One of the great Christian idolatries I think is nationalism. You could see it certainly in Chile, there were all these kinds of Patria Libertad kind of movements, father land and liberty. Kind of right wing movements that claim to be Christian. And I think it's really of most salient kinds of idolatries that Christians have been involved in, in the United States as well. This kind of Christian nationalism which treats the United States as a kind of privileged actor and providential actor in God's dispensation. And there's just no scriptural basis for it. The chosen people in the Bible is the people of Israel, and the church. And it's meant to be something international that transgresses these artificial boundaries that have been set up among nation states. And so this idea of America first, and so on, is really a Christian heresy and a really distinct form of idolatry that we need to resist and need to talk a lot more about. It's something that kind of goes under the radar people just kind of assume.
And part of the reason of course is that nationalism is parasitic on certain kinds of Christian virtues. It's a loyalty to something larger than oneself. It's a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of one's neighbor, and so on. And these are real virtues. But it usually translates into this kind of exclusion of others and a certain sort of willingness to not just sacrifice oneself for others, but to kill for the country, for the nation state that I think is deeply problematic.
Lee Camp: This has been our interview with Bill Cavanaugh, Professor at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. Check out the episode notes on our website to get links to the article we discussed on Roe v. Wade as well as get links to Bill's books. All highly recommended.
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Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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