Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke, Part Trois

“I refuse to say ‘Je Suis Charlie’ because I don’t do the offensive things they do.”

As have covered this question in a previous blog post, at least as far as I myself am concerned, there is little for me to add here, except to take exception to Professor Fincke's assertion that those of us who refuse to say "Je Suis Charlie" possess a "self-righteous lack of introspectiveness."  How exactly would Professor Fincke propose to measure the introspectiveness of millions of people he hasn't met?  Is it not possible that people with whom one disagrees, even vehemently, may be just as introspective as one is oneself?

More to the point,is introspection necessarily a virtue in this case? Secularists in the West often know far too little about the religious traditions they criticize both in other parts of the world and even in their own.  Fincke's own repetition of the ills of slavery, misogyny, narrow tribalism, violence, and homophobia the Abrahamic faiths supposedly bequeathed to the world ignores the definition of "sacred text" believers in these faiths actually use. For Jews, holiness rests not only in the Torah, which on its surface seems to support the continued existence of slavery, but also in an accumulated rabbinical tradition spanning centuries that ended slavery once and for all centuries before abolitionism emerged as a social and political movement in the late eighteenth century.  Similarly, for Muslims, the Quran is supplemented with and interpreted by the Hadith--interpretations, teachings, and sayings that go back to the Prophet--without which the Quran cannot be fully comprehended.  What offends religious Jews and Muslims about the kinds of cartoons Charlie Hebdo publishes of religious figures is that they do not simply mock us personally--we are thick-skinned enough to take that--but at the way they distort and oversimplify traditions so broad that they ought to be, and often have been, conceived of as civilizations rather than mere religions.  Indeed, these traditions encompass so much of life that only in relatively recent centuries has anyone attempted to wall them off into a small box called "religion".

Fincke is perhaps on more solid ground when he criticizes the cries of "context" from religious pluralists who argue for a more nuanced understanding of scriptural passages that seem to condone evil, while ignoring the context of the Charlie Hebdo pictures that merely "play in bigoted tropes".  But context often gets lost when works from one culture are consumed by another, as happens with ever-increasing speed in a world of wireless phones and computers.  What is satirical in its home context may not appear so to people a world away, and yet people from a world away may now be as close as next door.  

Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke, Part Deux

“Freedom of speech shouldn’t give you the right to insult people’s religions.”


Since the Charlie Hebdo attack, such figures as Pope Francis have come out with the argument that freedom of speech does not encompass the right to criticize other people's religions or to engage in what another faith considers blasphemous.  Fincke is right to point out that freedom of speech not only does but must encompass this right.  If racially or ethnically offensive hate speech receives protection in a free country, so too much speech that is offensive to people on religious grounds.

That said, to defend a legal or constitutional right to engage in offensive speech is not the same thing as to say that such speech is in and of itself right.  Moreover, in both racial and religious contexts (which, in the case of the depiction of Muslims in Western media, often overlap), the line between offensive speech and an outright threat cannot always be drawn with certainty.

Let us take one example more familiar to American audiences: the practice of cross-burning by the Ku Klux Klan.  Cross burning is clearly offensive to African-Americans in the United States in no small part because of its frequent use as an intimidation tactic.  The extent to which the practice is constitutionally protected depends a great deal on the circumstances in which a cross is burned.  When the Klan (or other hate groups) place a cross on someone's lawn in order to intimidate him or her into accepting white supremacy, this is not "speech" but merely a threat, does not receive constitutional protection, is rightly regarded by most Americans today as odious.  When performed as part of Klan ceremonies, away from the eyes of people who would perceive it as a threat, cross burning has received, and should receive, constitutional protection.

But is there a middle ground between these two situations?  And if so, what should be done in such instances?  What would we make of it if a local Klan group decided to put a burning across atop a car and parade through town with it?  One could not call this an act of intimidation against a specific individual in the same manner as a cross burning on someone's lawn, but intimidation is nonetheless the clear message of such an act: its message is "Blacks, and supporters of Black people's rights, beware."  I would argue that such conduct does not constitute speech and does not merit constitutional protection; one does not have a right to intimidate a whole class of people any more than one has a right to intimidate an individual.

How does this apply to the situation of Muslims who see cartoons as offensive as those recently printed in Charlie Hebdo?  To many Muslims, grotesque depictions of the Prophet Mohammed are not simply mockery of their religious beliefs but attacks upon them.  Their purpose is viewed not merely as satirizing religious figures but as an attempt to make all Muslims seem narrow-minded, backward, bigoted, Other, and by extension to make exclusion of Muslims from the body politic seem justifiable. Charlie Hebdo has published cartoons satirizing Mohammed in the context of a wider French and European culture that has seen a spike of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in recent years.  Controversies concerning the wearing of the veil in French public schools are the obvious case in point.  While French secularists may see laws prohibiting religious garments in schools as necessary to protect a cherished principle of laicite, France's Muslims see the same laws--often selectively applied only against them--as attacks on their ethnic identities and, in the case of female students donning the veil, as attacks on their notions of modesty. This context makes the line between insult of a religion's belief or of major religious figures and advocacy of discrimination against a religion's adherents much harder to draw.

In the end, one can affirm the principle of freedom of speech while maintaining that some instances of speech are grotesque, gratuitously insulting, and unworthy of responsible and enlightened discourse.  To say so is not to give in to terrorism.

“Even if we should honor the legal right to blaspheme, it’s still morally inappropriate for being so disrespectful.”

This argument--substantially similar to the one I made in the above entry--has come to be a focus of discourse around the Charlie Hebdo attacks.  Fincke deals with it by arguing, in essence, that the right to satirize is sacrosanct--that they "play a vital role in puncturing the air of reverence around religious figures."  Comedy and satire do not have a moral obligation to avoid the topic of religion altogether, but the line between satire of a religious figure and demonization of an entire religious tradition is blurry at best.  Where does satirizing racism, sexism, or Islamophobia end and engaging in actual racism, sexism, or Islamophobia begin?

Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke

The recent attacks on French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo have tended to push other stories concerning religion and world affairs into the background.  Much of the discourse around the Charlie Hebdo slayings has centered around questions of the media's responsibility in to the attacks, to the point that the media coverage of the attacks has become a news story in and of itself.  Recently, professor or religion, history, and philosophy Daniel Fincke has posted on his blog Camels with Hammers his responses to what he sees at sixteen of the worst memes to surface in the wake of Charlie Hebdo.  Fincke's perspective is atheistic and vigorous in its defense of freedom of expression. Nonetheless, I feel that his points merit some discussion, and in some cases, dissent.  So I am devoting some blog postings to discussions of these memes, dealing with one or two per post.

1. “Why are people insisting we show the images? We can stand up for free speech without approving of or republishing images we disagree with.”

Fincke, and many others, have argued that it is cowardly for news outlets to refuse to republish the satirical cartoon in Charlie Hebdo that led Al Qaeda of Yemen to kill Hebdo's journalists.  Those who make this argument claim both that failure to republish these cartoons is irresponsible journalism at best and giving in to terrorism at worst.

It is certainly within the purview of news organizations to republish the cartoons, but I think many news outlets have been wise not to.  Last week, Judy Woodruff of the PBS News Hour made the best case against showing the cartoons on air by noting the network's policies with respect to foul language and racially offensive epithets.  The network chooses to maintain certain standards of civility on air, and in those interests bans, or at least severely curtails, the use of such words.  I doubt many people would argue that the media are irresponsible when, in the course of reporting on a politicians use of a racial epithet, they choose not to use the epithet itself.  Woodruff also noted that the cartoons in question are readily available on the internet and that interested viewers could find them at their leisure, without PBS's having to air pictures of them.

It is not giving in to extremist Muslim terrorism when networks choose to accord to Islam the same standards of civility they give to racial or ethnic groups, or to non-Muslim religious groups.  While freedom of speech may allow for the publication of uncivil speech or writing, the media are not required to echo such incivility to infinity.

2. “Charlie Hebdo’s murdered staff aren’t heroes and martyrs. They were just insulting marginalized people and disrespecting religion.”
To deal with this meme, one must first start with a working definition of what it means to a martyr.  A martyr can be understood as someone who suffers, even to the point of death, for a cause, whether wittingly or unwittingly, or it can be understood more narrowly only as someone who does so wittingly.  While the writers and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo may or may not have been aware that publishing these cartoons was like drawing a target on their backs, it is doubtful that their main motivation in publishing was to court martyrdom for the cause of freedom of expression.  It is far more likely that their aim was lucre and notoriety. It does nothing good either for the cause of freedom of speech or for the full integration of Muslims into the social order of the west, which prizes freedom of speech, to make martyrs of Charlie Hebdo's journalists.

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Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie

Je ne suis pas Charlie.

There.  I said it.  I imagine lightning bolts from liberals are likely to rain down on me, attacking my commitment to free expression.

But the fact remains, I am not Charlie Hebdo.  Setting aside the obvious fact that Charlie Hebdo is not a person--and therefore not someone I could potentially be or not be--I find this modern trend of identifying with victims of violence by taking to the streets and claiming to be them as ineffective as it is offensive.  I am sorry for Trayvon Martin's family, and I think the failure of our justice system to convict George Zimmerman is an outrage, but I am not Trayvon Martin.  I do not possess his particular set of circumstances, his particular outlook on the world, his particular genes and tastes in food and music.

But I have a deeper reason for saying that I am not Charlie.  Before the attacks, Charlie Hebdo had a circulation of around 60,000; National Public Radio announced yesterday that a print run of 3,000,000 was expected for its first post-attack issue.  While this clearly shows that terrorist attacks can have the opposite effect of the one intended, it does not show that rushing to the side of purveyors of religious disrespect is the best way of either preserving freedom of speech or of countering the threat of fundamentalist forms of Islam.  Indeed, the more liberals in the West proclaim that they are Charlie, the more embattled the likes of Al Qaeada of Yemen--who claimed responsibility for the attacks yesterday--are likely to feel.  Fundamentalist religion of all stripes thrives on its adherents' sense of being embattled against a modernity that threatens to overwhelm their faith.  This is why chants and hashtags proclaiming "Je Suis Charlie" are unlikely to be effective; such claims can only work with people who place values of avoiding harm to others above those of doing nothing to undermine authority.  But fundamentalist religion, of whatever faith tradition, makes the opposite choice.  Arguing for, or proclaiming, the values of free expression will do nothing to soften the ire or change the behavior of those who dot share that value.

How then is the problem of violent fundamentalist Islam to be dealt with?  I would contend through education.  The slide in religious literacy--not just belief and practice, but basic literacy--that has marked modernity must be halted.  I am not suggesting a return to mandatory devotional Bible reading in public schools, but of mandatory courses in World Religions.  The more students are forced to understand and contend with differing faiths and worldviews, the less likely they are to engage in the kind of immaturity Charlie Hebdo showed in its cartoons; the more they are able to see people of different or no religion as people, the less likely they are to seek violent retribution to religious slights.

And this is where blogs like mine can make a difference.

How Many Klingons Can Pray Toward Mecca?

Sometimes, a story becomes so useful to people with a philosophical or ideological axe to grind that it manages to continue in circulation no matter how unbelievable it may seem and no matter how thoroughly and repeatedly it has been disproven.  The best case in point is the much-repeated rumor that the phrase "rule of thumb" derives from an archaic English law allowed a man to beat his wife as long as he used a stick no thicker than her thumb, an idea first bandied about by feminists in the 1970s.  In the sphere of religion, the best example of this phenomenon is the widespread but misinformed belief that Scholastic theologians used to sit around debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (Thomas Aquinas did in fact discuss whether several angels can occupy the same space in his Summa Theologica, but this was in the context of a discussion of what it meant for angels to be incorporeal).  This particular belief about the Scholastics circulates, I believe, because it serves the ends of people who need to stereotype religious leaders as hairsplitting harebrains out of touch with the real world.  So it does not surprise me that in recent years, people intent on arguing that religious people are out of their minds have started hypothesizing about what would happen if people concerned with otherworldly matters had to face the existence of other kinds of creatures who are from beyond our world in a more concrete way.

This week, theweek.com published an opinion piece by David A. Weintraub speculating on what will happen to our religious beliefs when human beings make contact with sentient life forms on other planets.  Setting aside Weintraub's misuse of the word "sentient" (cats and dogs are sentient beings as much as humans are--though I suspect Weintraub is not terribly concerned about our contacting a cosmological canine), Weintraub's assessment of what will happen when humans encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life is shot through with absurdities that ignore the past and present realities of the traditions he examines. To whit:

Weintraub asserts that Christians will have to deal with the question of whether there can be intelligent life that is not susceptible to original sin and thus of whether Jesus is the savior only of humankind.  While noting that there is no answer this question that currently satisfies all Christians (not surprising, since even belief in the Trinity is not held by all self-defined Christians), Weintraub ignores that Christianity has dealt with this question before, when Christianity had to face the question of whether Native Americans were fully human.  There is no reason to suppose that the Church would reach a different conclusion about intelligent extraterrestrials--though as with the Native Americans, it might take a lot of time, a lot of sorting out of conflicting reports about these extraterrestrials, and a lot of contact before the question became settled.

As humorous as this question is, Weintraub is at his most hilarious when he speculates about how Muslims on another planet will manage to pray five times a day in the direction of Mecca on a planet light years from earth, where determining the direction of prayer would be difficult.  In fact, rabbis have had to deal with similar questions.  Traditional Judaism requires the faithful to pray three times a day--at sunrise, in the afternoon, and at sunset--in the direction of Jerusalem.  Rabbis have fielded questions from Jewish astronauts about how they should handle their prayers in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the sun does not set for part of the year, and in outer space, where the sun neither rises nor sets.  Muslims have also long dealt with the question of what to do when the direction of prayer cannot be determined--not surprisingly for a religion born in the Arabian desert, where traveling Muslims could easily find themselves lost.  In fact, the astrolabe, one of the Islamic world's great contributions to the Age of Exploration, was developed not to help sailors lost at sea, but to help the Muslim faithful figure out how to pray toward Mecca when they were in the middle of nowhere.

Weintraub is on firmer ground when he posits that, after the discovery of extraterrestrial life, adherents of many faiths will have to ponder whether their God is the God only of earth or of the entire universe, but this is also a question religious traditions have had to ask before; indeed, the question has been asked every time one faith has come into contact with another.  If history is any guide, Weintraub is right that the experience will be discomfiting at first, but not that it will be disruptive.  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all survived the shock of having to determine whether they were particularistic faiths meant for particular groups of people, or messages meant for all of humanity.  If the accepted definition of "humanity" comes to include intelligent life forms from other planets, there is no reason to suppose the myriad faith of mankind will not survive.

And they will do so with a clear answer as to how Muslims on Klingon can pray toward Mecca.

One Denomination or One Direction?

Sometimes, writing on religion gets basic facts--not just what is written in creeds, catechisms, or codes of religious law, but facts of what actually happened when a religious figure spoke or acted--so horribly wrong that it can only properly be considered entertainment, not news.  A good example of this is this piece on Inquistr.com about Pope Francis's most recent message for World Day of Peace (known to non-Catholics as New Year's Day).

Inquisitr begins innocuously enough by noting, accurately, that Pope Francis chose to focus his speech this year on the continued existence of slavery in the world, despite its having been outlawed by the laws of nearly every country as well as by the United Nations' Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and by noting, equally accurately, that the Pope urged the leaders and laity of other world religions to work together with Catholics to bring an end to enslavement and human trafficking.  Later, however, Inquisitr veers off into the deep end by suggesting that the Pope urged the formation of one world denomination--a suggestion that was not made in the Huffington Post piece Inquisitr directly quotes and that is equally absent from the Vatican's webpage publication of the Pope's speech.  Inquisitr even quotes--but does not name--"responses" (presumably readers of the Huffington Post) as asking "how [members of other faiths[ would...feel if someone suggested that al [sic] people become a different religion…like say Buddhism" and stating that "Muslims in general will never agree to anti-slavery, at least not in practice, else they’d have to edit their [holy] book[, the Qur'an]."

Quoting this reader, without raising any questions about his or her comments, is doubly troubling because it implies that Inquisitr accepts at face value the idea the Qur'an unambiguously endorses slavery, or at least that all Muslim clerics accept interpretations that validate slavery.  In fact, the issue of slavery has had as long and complicated a history within Islam as it has had within Christianity.  While the Qur'an does contain passages that can be read as supporting slavery, this is within the context of the enslavement of prisoners of war, and in fact all Islamic countries have abolished slavery--the most recent being Mauritania, in 1981. Clearly, no alteration of the Qur'an, which traditional Muslims regard as a God-given and thus unalterable miracle--was necessary to make this happen.

Thus, the Pope was not suggesting that the world ought to become one denomination--only that it ought to continue moving in the one direction of ending, in fact as well as in law, the enslavement and trafficking of human beings.

Rushing to Judgment

Recently, as part of an ESL class I was teaching to upper-level undergraduates, I gave my students an excerpt of a Brooke Gladstone's Influencing Machine, a graphic novel dealing with the public's relationship to the media.  Gladstone points out that, while the public tends to be focused on the question of whether the media have a liberal or conservative bias, there are actually other biases--many rooted in the media's need to make money--that ought to be of more concern.  One of the ones she points out is "narrative bias", the attempt by the media to create story where, in fact, there is none.

A good example of this kind of narrative bias occurs in Bob Unruh's recent piece on WND.com sensationalizing the appointment of Anglican priest Jane Shaw as Stanford's Dean of Religious Life.  Unruh's title, "Stop Conversions, Stanford Religious Dean Tells Churches", is as melodramatic as it is misleading.  In the video of an interview Uhruh supplies, the Rev. Shaw never says that the church should stop performing conversions, only that the church must be an environment in which all can be welcome, including people of other faiths who have no intention of converting.  The title, however, implies that Shaw does not believe the church should welcome sincere converts in the fold.

Uhruh's distortions also extend to misrepresenting Shaw's comments on global climate change.  Noting that climate change has become one of the great issues of our time, Shaw quite reasonably suggests that the church can have a role in doing something about it.  This position seems to be consistent with Gen. 1:26, in which God grants humanity dominion over animals--a dominion that implies responsibility on humanity's part to ensure the continued existence of God's creation.  She does not claim, as Uhruh suggests in quoting Rush Limbaugh's laughable reaction to her interview, that we ought to "worship earth as a religion."

Nor does Shaw suggest that the church should "stop doing religion", as Uhruh and Limbaugh claim; she says, more mildly, that the church shouldn't "just be doing religion"--that the church must do more than simply provide doctrinal instruction and worship services.  This seems consistent with a long tradition of churches involving themselves in social and political controversies that gave us, among other things, abolitionism and the civil rights movement.

Uhruh and Limbaugh's motivations in distorting Shaw's interview are pretty clear. They are more interested in promoting a conservative political and social agenda--one that ignores the reality of global climate change and even seeks to reverse the basic constitutional principle of birthright citizenship.  It is a shame that, in advancing their agenda, they choose to pillory a woman who has achieved such distinction within her denomination and within academia as well.

But the real shame is that millions of Americans know so little of the teachings of their own faith that Uhuh and Limbaugh's rantings can seem plausible.  Far too few Americans know that religion
has anything to say about the responsible use of the earth, or that the Bible specifically demands protection for the stranger.  Deuteronomy 10:19 specially commands the Israelites not merely to welcome, but to love, the stranger, as they have been strangers in the land of Egypt; in the parable of the sheep and the goats, in the book of Matthew, Jesus notes that at the final judgment, those who welcomed in the stranger will be as those who welcomed in Jesus himself.  It says a lot about the religious literacy of many Americans that assertions such as those of Uhuh and Limbaugh can seem plausible.