Excommunicated the Newsletter of the International Society for Heresy Studies
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Vol. 1, No. 2 (June 2015) excommunicated The newsletter of The International Society for Heresy Studies A biannual newsletter heresystudies.org Charlie Hebdo and Charlie’s Heterodoxy Heresy in the News: Teaching Corner: Belief, Philip Jenkins’s The the Wrath of Faith Edward Simon on Thomas Jay Oord Heterodoxy, and Liberal Great and Holy War: James Morrow Page 4 John D. Holloway Education: a Test Case How World War I Page 1 Page 6 Bernard Schweizer Became a Religious Je ne suis pas Charlie, mais… Page 9 Crusade Response to James Morrow Richard Santana Featured Heretic: Gregory Erickson John Daniel Holloway, III Page 5 Tom Paine Page 10 Page 2 Edward Simon Also: Anti-Islam: The New Anti- Page 7 Check out the Charlie's Orthodoxy Catholicism? Journal of Heresy Studies. Jordan E. Miller Book Review: Geremy Carnes See page 11 for more information. Page 3 Page 5 Editor: Bernard Schweizer Assistant Editor: Edward Simon The International Society for Heresy Studies Officers: Advisory Board Members: Contact: Gregory Erickson (president) Valentine Cunningham David Dickinson Gregory Erickson Bernard Schweizer (vice-president) Lorna Gibb Rebecca N. Goldstein 1 Washington Place, Room 417 John D. Holloway (secretary-treasurer) Jordan E. Miller James Morrow New York University Geremy Carnes (webmaster) Ethan Quillen Robert Royalty New York, NY 10003 James Wood CHARLIE HEBDO AND THE WRATH OF FAITH James Morrow about the Paris killings) called “the wrath of To characterize the creation of pen-and-ink faith”—and it's a foregone conclusion that the abyss drawings as “bullying,” I feel, violates the plain Novelist will win. meaning of the word. Bullying occurs when one or As the murders of four French cartoonists—plus more individuals gang up on a live victim who has eight of their colleagues—soaked into the From where I sit, the insistence on making the no choice but to endure their abuse. When we use consciousness of Western journalists last January, an Charlie Hebdo horror an occasion for revisiting the the term to indicate a person’s entirely optional apparent consensus emerged to frame the tragedy free speech controversy—as opposed to revisiting consumption of impertinent artifacts skewering a vis-à-vis the Enlightenment ideal of free speech. questions about the larger workings of the world— dead historical figure (whether allegedly holy or This default setting for the debate was has led to a surfeit of muddled thinking. Two not), we have sidled into incoherence. The Charlie understandable but also, I would argue, misguided. examples come immediately to mind. Hebdo artists might have behaved recklessly, Let me suggest that our reflections on the Charlie insensitively, and loutishly, but they weren’t bullies, On the Friday morning following the murders, Hebdo massacre should lead us into a less and no amount of moralizing about marginalized Hussein Rashid, a Hofstra University professor of comfortable, more heretical zone: the domain of communities can ever make cartoonists or their religion, spoke about the event on the WNYC radio discourse about how the world works according to editors legitimate targets for the wrath of faith. program, The Takeaway. Professor Rashid took pains supernaturalist and other systems of thought. to clarify that he regards the right to sacrilegious Continuing the theme, Professor Rashid also When a gunman screams “Allahu Akbar!” while expression as virtually unqualified, and he came remarked, “If we talk about the difference between proposing to blow your head off for mocking his across as erudite and knowledgeable concerning satire and bullying, it’s about understanding who preferred prophet, you and he are not having a France’s struggles to assimilate immigrant your audience is and who you’re going after. We conversation about the merits and disadvantages of populations into its body politic. But near the end of look at the [Little Black] Sambo comic tradition in unfettered expression. You and the gunman are not the interview Professor Rashid made me sad when America. We would never run those things now— having a conversation at all. Rather, the gunman has he remarked, “I think what we see often, though, is right?—because we’re aware of a population that is sent you plummeting into an abyss—a void that under the rhetoric of free speech and satire we not subservient to us anymore. We treat blacks as dredged out by what Adam Gopnik (in writing see bullying of oppressed and marginalized people in this country now.” communities. I think Hebdo mixed those lines.” excommunicated 1 CHARLIE HEBDO AND THE WRATH OF FAITH Leaving aside the question of whether a consensus rendered, loathsomely pornographic scenes of their audience—through a series of deliberately now exists among white Americans to treat “blacks ordinary, oppressed, pious Muslims going about coarse and tasteless solicitations—to think about a as people,” I believe that Professor Rashid’s their daily lives. But the cartoonists’ overarching troublesome set of absolutist ideas. example is utterly irrelevant to the Charlie Hebdo theme was the theocratic legacy of the Quran and its debate. First of all, Helen Bannerman’s 1899 exalted author, Muhammad, a man who presumed Or consider this nugget from the same speech: “At children’s book, The Story of Little Black Sambo, was to set the entire human race straight about the some point free expression becomes childish and never intended as satire. And, of course, nobody workings of God and His Creation. Contrary to Mr. unserious. It becomes its own kind of fanaticism.” brought weapons to conversations about the Sambo Trudeau’s indictment, the Charlie Hebdo artists Not only does this observation verge on the character. Nobody cried “God is Great!” while weren’t picking on the afflicted. They were inviting meaningless—what human endeavor isn’t simultaneously gunning down Helen Bannerman. vulnerable to silliness, insincerity, and (Nota bene: Professor Rashid is not alone in his obsessiveness?—it distracts us from the core of the mistaken assumption that Little Black Sambo is an problem, the reflexive deference to faith that African-American figure; the author was British, characterizes political discourse in both the East and and the story is set in South India.) the West. To return to our Martian: an extraterrestrial reading Mr. Trudeau’s thoughts on I am perhaps being unfair to Hussein Rashid. Even “fanaticism” might infer that for Earthlings there’s the most brilliant people often fail to say exactly no important difference between a zealous devotion what they mean in extemporaneous interviews. On to free expression and a zealous devotion to the other hand, I have no sympathy for cartoonist homicide committed in fulfillment of a Garry Trudeau’s response to the Charlie Hebdo supernaturalist worldview. tragedy, which he articulated in his carefully scripted acceptance of the Polk Award last month at Either our species has made intellectual progress Long Island University. since the Middle Ages or it hasn’t. Either the cosmos contains a supernatural stratum or it doesn’t. Either Consider this assertion of Mr. Trudeau’s: “By the universe is being supervised by a person-like punching downward, by attacking a powerless, divinity—knowable, accessible, appeasable, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar opinionated, and dependent on human beings to drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie Cover of January 14, 2015 edition of Charlie Hebdo; protect Him from ridicule—or there are more wandered into the realm of hate speech.” A Martian the first published after the shooting. A cartoon of plausible alternative models. And that is the reading those words might conclude that the Muhammad bears a Je suis Charlie sign and is conversation we should be having, I believe, in the cartoonists in question had imagined, and then captioned Tout est pardonné ("All is forgiven"). post-Charlie Hebdo world. RESPONSE TO JAMES MORROW John Daniel Holloway, III nor transcend God;” rather, they emerge from God’s “eternal and unchanging nature of love” (The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Union Theological Seminary Providence, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, forthcoming, 40–43). God cannot go against God’s own nature, and because morality is part of God’s essential James Morrow makes a compelling point about the Charlie Hebdo situation: nature, God cannot act immorally or sanction others to act immorally. Thus, to religious extremists committed a violent act because they believed in a God appeal to the deplorable suspension of the ethical that springs from one’s belief who justified their suspension of the ethical—and so he refers to “the wrath of in God is not actually to argue against theism, but only against bad theology. faith.” Thus, honest reflection on the event might inspire us to view theology/ religion/faith as inherently negative, and so if we are to cultivate a rational and Morrow’s analysis is overly-dismissive and neglects the potential value of free society we should move on from such things. Philosopher and sociologist theology. His thinking is typical of Enlightenment rationalism, and so he is not Slavoj Žižek made a comparable point about theism, saying that it gives certain venturing into a “more heretical zone,” as he says, but is actually embracing the groups something beyond themselves to appeal to in order to justify their modernist orthodoxy of the all-determining quality of reason. He concludes, inhumane actions. As “the instruments of God’s will,” they need not adhere to governing moral precepts. He explains, Either our species has made intellectual progress since the Middle Ages or it hasn’t. Either the cosmos contains a supernatural stratum or it doesn’t. The vast majority of people are spontaneously moral: torturing or killing Either the universe is being supervised by a person-like divinity— another human being is deeply traumatic for them.