[1] One of Sharon Welch's gifts is to take a common ethical
question and discuss it in ways few have imagined. She transforms
questions into prisms which invite us to turn them in the light and
meditate on what the resulting refractions might mean for our moral
vision. In After Empire, Welch approaches an issue that
many scholars currently are writing on-resistance to U.S.
militarism-and asks us to pivot away from standard analyses (just
war theory, pacifism, and economic influences in international
relations) toward a "postcolonial comparative religious
ethics." She does not want to condemn imperialism as much as
understand its allure while offering another vision of strength,
power, and force arising from engagements with multiple religious
traditions.
[2] On the whole, the results of her inquiry are provocative and
creative insights about the amorality of religion, the irony of all
ethical systems, and joyful need for enlargement of the self. At
its best, After Empire beckons the reader to face the
enduring depth of moral ambiguities and claim them as the joyous
ground for wise and compassionate politics; an invitation that
almost no scholar offers as continuously and creatively as Welch.
Yet for Welch's comparative methodology to flourish over time, she
will need to deepen the complexity of her methodology, pay more
attention to resources within Christian traditions, and perhaps
modify her desire to rework the "social contract." With sustained
attention to these issues, Welch promises another compelling phase
to her unique development of, what I term, a theological ethics of
activism.
[3] Following Foucault, Welch argues that the future of theology
or religion lies outside European legacies and requires outside
voices in order to see the injustices and possibilities of
"western" systems. This is a common refrain in much liberationist
writing in the last decade, but Welch is careful in noting that her
turn to "outside" religious systems is not meant simply to "borrow
a peace mandate" but rather to evoke one from our own histories as
we encounter other peoples and, most importantly, "other visions of
community and power" (xviii). Drawing on Mark Heim's work, Welch
warns against casual appropriation of other traditions and instead
works towards "authentically relating to the same religious
fulfillment sought in our…own." In engaging challenges posed
by other religious traditions, the goal is to discover temptations
and alternatives to empire in our own histories and, more
specifically, restructure the logic of empire in our ongoing
spiritually based political activism.
[4] Seeking this authentic relation to other traditions, Welch
begins After Empire autobiographically as she invokes the
memory of her parents' activism for her two absolute principles for
life and work:
1. Even under a modicum of justice, life is wondrous, rich and
profoundly meaningful, a glorious gift to be celebrated and
cherished. (7)
2. I and every person, movement, group, and institution I trust
can be deeply, profoundly, tragically wrong. Not only can we be
wrong in minor ways, but our best ideals can be used to justify
cruelty and wrong.(10)
Welch describes her parents' work for justice as grounded not in
condemnation of others but in "good-humored resilience" and a deep
love and zest for life. She sees the gift of this activist spirit
confirmed and extended by her interactions with engaged Buddhism,
Native American traditions, and African American humanism.
Importantly, these traditions also share with her own history a
recognition that paradoxes-peace and violence; solidarity and
domination; justice and injustice-exist in every person, group,
institution, and even religion. Throughout the book, Welch builds
on these resonances to argue for practices of memory, laughter,
respect, ceremony, audacity, and risk to hold together the beauty
of life and the irony that we all overstep our bounds even through
our best intentions.
[5] To cultivate the kind of ethical virtuosity that can
inextricably link her two principles, Welch accepts the invitations
of Native Americans and engaged Buddhists to learn with them. From
co-teaching with Carol Sanchez for a number of years, Welch has
been drawn to understand the genocide and resilience of Native
Americans. In these traditions she finds an invitation to
understand the cultural myopics that drove U.S. cruelty to native
peoples and discovers that it is often "the nobility of our ideas
that has blinded us to the brutality of our practices" (103).
Detailing the often understudied history of oppression of Native
Americans (a gift in itself in this book), Welch concludes that as
proponents of freedom, we often commit atrocities in the name of
absolute good. To understand and work better with this paradox,
Welch turns to the Native American trickster myths which teach that
while the sacred always surrounds us, its power can be used for
healing or cruelty. Embodied in humorous stories of human folly,
trickster myths remind us of the ambiguity of morality and call us
to pay attention to the disharmonies in community while not taking
ourselves and our moral certainty too seriously. For Welch, the
trickster traditions invite activists to imagine calls for justice
not based on the purity of a prophetic outsider's jeremiad but a
playful and wise respect for the wonder of life, practices of
respect, and recognition of the ambiguities that surrounds us.
[6] Welch turns to engaged Buddhism after participation in
anti-nuclear protests where she observed robed monks chanting
peacefully in the midst of the angry and despairing voices of other
activists. She realized that the monks' practice was as much a
protest against the activists as it was against the nuclear weapons
and began to learn from their ways of "being peace" and avoiding
dualisms of good and evil, self and others. Through meditation and
non-dogmatic practices of compassion, the engaged Buddhism of Thich
Nhat Hanh calls for a spiritually based political activism that
does not "condone or ignore the harm that we and others may do, but
our basis for trying to prevent the damage done by others, by
ourselves, now emerges from compassion, not from a desire to punish
or blame" (148). For these engaged Buddhists, social action is not
so much grounded in immutable justice convictions and absolute
truth as in wisdom, compassion and "nonknowing." This nonknowing
involves "simultaneously knowing, bringing with deep conviction all
that you have learned and experienced, and at the same time, being
ready in any interchange for a startling shift in perception, a new
way of framing the world, of seeing depths and insights that you
could not grasp before" (155). For Welch, the practices of
compassion recast power as the capacity to act with openness,
improvise with new insights, and remember the tragedies of this
world while still affirming and working for the beauty and joy of
life.
[7] One of Welch's most compelling points throughout these
engagements is the amorality of religion and the necessary
practices the must accompany the acknowledgement that even our best
ideals may be used to justify brutality (a point Scott Appleby also
develops in The Ambivalence of the Sacred). For even as
Welch recognizes the many gifts that engaged Buddhism shares with
her, she recognizes that Japanese Buddhism underwrote much
brutality and imperialism in World War II. Welch does not want to
idealize the "other" but learn with outsiders to see her own
traditions injustices and possibilities more clearly. Yet with her
careful attention to certain strains of Native American and engaged
Buddhist traditions, there is little in After Empire that
directly reconstructs "western" religious traditions, let alone the
major religious tradition of the United States, Christianity. While
Welch's pedagogical style is to encourage the reader to ask
questions of their traditions, more is needed within the text to
enable this process.
[8] For example, Welch purposely contrasts Western definitions
of the sacred (defined as invoking absolute standards of
righteousness) with the fluidity of Native American conceptions
embodied in trickster stories. While this is an evocative point, I
find this approach to comparative religious thought wanting in its
inadequate attention to the complexity of one of the religious
traditions. The contrast with "western definitions" is made with no
source citations and the complexity of Christian traditions is left
wholly unmentioned-especially feminist re-workings (e.g. Sally
McFague). Unlike the insightful theological excavation that
grounded Welch's criticisms of Christian conceptions of sovereignty
and control in A Feminist Ethic of Risk, the western
tradition and implicitly Christianity is often a mere foil or ghost
in this text. Christian readers of this text will find few aids for
comparing their understanding of theological concepts, such as sin,
with insights about moral ambiguity from Native American
traditions. While in Sweet Dreams in America Welch clearly
contrasts her understanding of ambiguity as a joyful gift of
finitude with the depiction of ambiguity as a fundamental flaw
(theologically named as sin/falleness), After Empire
offers fewer places to clarify the contrasts between other
traditions and that of the Christian majority in the United States.
While Welch is certainly not obliged to write about Christian
understandings, omitting a fuller discussion of Christianity in a
time when pretensions to empire are often driven by Christian
theological assumptions is a choice that has to be more explicitly
justified within the text.
[9] This limitation also arises when Welch turns to her rework
the social contract tradition in light of her encounters with other
religious traditions. Her proposal for restructuring the western
tradition comes through developing a new "collective historical
social contract" that includes attention to "all my relations"
(from the Native American influence). While she acknowledges
the historical limitations of the social contract (e.g. centrality
of individual property rights and its idealized autonomous
individual), she argues that new practices and attention to both
our animate and inanimate relations can recast the spiritual and
ethical nature of the social contract. In Welch's new understanding
of the social contract, democracy becomes a western version of a
sacred ceremony which collects the wisdom of generations and
cultivates attention to our impact in the world. In fact, she
criticizes feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young for seeing the
intricacies of democracy as necessary drudgery and offers instead a
trickster understanding of the everyday practices of democracy
which focuses on the ironic joys and lessons of political life.
[10] Welch's hopes for a collective, historically aware social
contract are compelling and her trickster and nonknowing metaphors
invite us to think of democracy in generative ways. Yet, as a
Christian ethicist, I again wonder why she does not turn to another
resource/metaphor even deeper within the historical and religious
history of the "western" tradition. Why seek to alter radically the
social contract when "covenant" might be a better option for our
visions of political activism? Covenantal political relations are
based on promises between peoples who entrust themselves to one
another and thus create new moral communities; not a social
contract balancing of rights. Covenants historically involve more
key actors than social contracts including the Divine/sacred,
peoples, and the land and they explicitly argue that
individual identity is only lived out fully in sociality.
Ceremonies of remembrance, healing, and renewal are also built into
the cycle of covenantal promising. Yet for Welch, the covenantal
tradition does not even emerge as a possibility for the western
tradition despite its prominence in Christianity and the numerous
religious ethicists who have been working to reinvigorate the
covenantal tradition in the republican tradition. Again, while
Welch certainly is not obligated to turn to Christian resources,
discussing empire while also engaging Christianity and
complexifying the western political tradition would greatly extend
the needed impact of her project.
[11] Sharon Welch is truly one of our most gifted public
ethicists in the last half century. Her capacity for poetic
beckoning into moral complexity and sustained political activism is
matched by very few. Every text she writes promises to introduce
the reader to people, practices, and texts that they have never met
before. After Empire offers another intriguing offering to
dance in Welch's world of honest, joyous, work for justice. My
criticisms of her newest adventure are offered in the deepest
admiration of the risks she takes for all of us. I only want more,
not less of her gifted ethical imagination.
© June
2005
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 5, Issue 6