The Kalbeliya, Pluralism, and Intellectual Humility

Recently to feed my mind and soul, I've been watching the occasional documentary on Youtube.  Today Raphael Treza's film Cobra Gypsies struck me as deeply profound and beautiful.  The film is his record of three months spent among some nomadic tribes of Rajasthan in northwestern India.  Some of the footage of ceremonies, eating rituals, dances, funerals, etc. have apparently never before been seen by modern western eyes.

Though I could write much more about the documentary itself, that isn't my reason for writing today.  The burning question in my own mind while confronting such a foreign culture through film is this:  how are these nomadic peoples so happy and content with their lives?  Though they have very little in the way of material possessions and by western standards live an extremely harsh life in which they regularly confront death, disease, snakebites, and other natural disasters, yet they are always smiling and dancing and celebrating.  What is it that provides them with this deep peace?  Of course, I don't want to fall into the old trap of lionizing the "noble savage" or of elevating them to a mythical status, yet they do seem from the film to embody a deep, spiritual peace which is largely absent from my own life and the lives of many other busybody, lonely, technology-addicted North Americans that I know.

Kalbelia Snake Charmers

At one point in the film they show a man who, according to the translator, has never before showered or bathed.  He's an elderly man who looks to be in his sixties, yet the people claim not to be bothered by his smell since they understand what he is doing to be an act of worship to God.  The filmmaker then points out that "radical forms of worship" are deeply respected by many nomadic groups like the Kalbeliyas.  Some Christians will insist that such an ascetic act of piety to a false god is mere paganism and darkness.  Yet others like C.S. Lewis often seem to suspect that the sincere worship of another god, albeit a god with the "wrong" name, is in fact worship of the One True God.  Perhaps the most classic example of this in Lewis' thinking can be found in his Chronicles of Narnia in which the worship of the false god Tash turns out to be an offering acceptable to Aslan.

For years I have wrestled with questions surrounding soteriological exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism.  Raised within the exclusivist tradition, I began rebelling against it intellectually at the age of seventeen when it became impossible for me to worship a God who would necessarily condemn huge numbers of people to eternal hell simply because they were born in the wrong time or place.  At Asbury I confronted the work of my friend Jerry Walls and, through him, his mentor Alvin Plantinga who seem to argue for a "generous" inclusivism in which Christ is understood as the only way to salvation, but this is to be held in distinction from the "knowledge of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth."  Also influential in my thinking during those days was Gerald McDermott's Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? (recommended to me by Rick McPeak at Greenville).  At Asbury I dove deep into the thinking of John Hick, a representative of the pluralist perspective on world religions, through his book God Has Many Names.  Of course all such questions are deeply complicated within Christian theology by their ties to larger doctrines of Christology, divine providence, and so on.  They are explored carefully in many wonderful books and I cannot rehash that huge debate here.

However, all these questions are in my mind this morning as I learn about the "gypsy" peoples of northern India.  Ironically, the whole reason I'm watching such a documentary is because I have befriended a brilliant Christian man from Ahmedabad, India (the fifth largest city in India with a population of six million people, a city which I had never even heard of being the ethnocentric American that I am).  My friend was raised in a culturally Christian home, which makes sense since Christianity has existed in India for basically as long as it has anywhere else in the world.  He immigrated to the United States in the hopes of finding a new life and helping his family back home, which he has done quite successfully.  However, in a very dark chapter of his life Richard nearly rejected the faith of his parents until he decided that he should, in his words, "investigate what it is that I might be rejecting."  Through an intellectual quest that took him through the works of Tim Keller, William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, G. K. Chesterton, Ravi Zacharias, and especially the 16th century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, he came to a robust understanding of his own faith and through many long, long conversations I sometimes think that this odd Indian stranger is going to save my own faith too.

But here's the point:  God is everywhere.  The Christian Church has no monopoly on God.  The Holy Spirit blows where it pleases and, though we may try to bottle it up, we simply cannot contain God in any meaningful sense.  Our metaphors are too weak, our language too frail.  As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once pointed out, if we are not able linguistically to describe the aroma of coffee, what on earth makes us think that we could ever describe with words the ineffable nature of the Holy God?  It's a fair question and one that perhaps ought to keep us a bit more intellectually humble than most of us in the Christian academy tend to be.

Politics and the Other

2017 has been a year that has made me less political in general.  As a teenager I was a staunch conservative; since at least 2004, however, I have proudly called myself a liberal.  These days even though I still am a bleeding-heart liberal deep down, I have mostly been lamenting the inability of people within our culture to talk to one another.  I myself am extremely poor at this because, like all of us, I tend to gravitate toward my own echo chambers, a destructive tendency which has only been exacerbated by the rise of social media.

Anyway, this is my experience this morning:  Feeling pretty down and not knowing what to do after my morning prayers I turned on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" only to hear the talking heads screaming at each other about the Russia Investigation, the #MeToo campaign, and every other trending topic under the sun.  My first reaction was to think, "What are we all squabbling about?  I know that this stuff matters immensely, but is this really what life is all about?"  The things I had read in the Psalms and in Thomas Merton seemed far more profound and important than what they were so angry about.  Now I say this with plenty of hesitation because I am an intensely political person.  History/Political Science was my major in college.  Politics fascinates me because I believe that it matters and that it matters on a grand scale for lots and lots of people.

But what if all real, genuine political action is local?  I think this is an intellectual option that most on both the right and the left today do not consider.  It is so very easy for us to hate-watch certain TV shows, get pissed off at how screwed up Washington is, and vent our rage out into the internet ether.  It is like we are all collectively screaming at each other and no one is listening.  But what if the most faithful political action that we can engage in as Christians is to feed the local hungry, befriend the lonely, and share a peaceful life together in small, organic faith communities?  The very alluring alternative is what my professor Luke Bretherton at Duke called "Fabianism": the notion that if we could only fix the "out there" then everything would be all right "in here."

I'm going to be hard on my fellow liberals for a minute.  Liberals are really smug.  Their views of the world emerge from privilege (a fact that many of them cannot help).  Liberals fall into a pharisaical judgmentalism every ounce as harsh and counterproductive as that on the right. And then when someone dissents from liberal orthodoxy -- however anyone wants to define it at the time -- they are shouted down as "racist," "sexist," "violent," and "evil."  I have confronted such venom personally in the classroom up on Chicago's north shore.  The guilt produced by such confrontations can be crushing:  am I supposed to be ashamed for being a male?  for being white? for being born into a Christian home?  for being straight? for being a simple midwestern boy?  I can't help it!  Of course I can strive to learn and stay open minded and listen to varying perspectives, but what if I one day have a perspective that is not in conformity with one particular tyrannical liberal's personal orthodoxy?  When we all go around with a chip on our shoulder saying "I have the right to not get offended by you and I have the right to shut you up if you do offend me," then dialog and free speech disappear.  This is how totalitarian regimes are born.  (I write this right around the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; we would do well to examine that chapter of the 20th century very seriously to see what exactly went wrong).  Two of my newest friends, a Christian man from India and a Muslim man from Turkey, both tell me the same things:  "Stop feeling guilty for being white!  You white people can't help it and the guilt of it is driving you all insane!"  I often suspect they might actually just possibly be right.

I type this on my MacBook (likely the product of South-East Asian slave labor) in a McDonald's (oh how my orthodox liberal friends would hate me for eating here, but it is all I can afford) with some old farmers sitting in a corner shooting the breeze and sipping coffee.  We are, all of us, helplessly enmeshed in structural evils.  We sin in thought, word, and deed all of the time.  Yet these good farm folk are talking about the World Series, problems with their boats and with diesel motors, how the workers at this McDonald's are related to each other, and so on.  It sounds like they've probably been coming to this place at 9am on Sunday mornings for years.

So do I judge them?  Do I look down on these good, sincere, salt-of-the-earth people?  Do I hate them because they don't have any black or gay friends?  Do I snidely judge them for using a word like "retarded" in their private conversation?  Now I certainly would not use such a word, but are these hard-working, uneducated old white men bad people because they don't use all the proper nomenclature?  They probably have no knowledge of the non-binary, gender-neutral pronouns "zim" or "zey."  Are they evil for that reason?  I think not.

It seems to me to be very important to look at people's intentions.  This was key to the ethical thinking of John Wesley.  Whereas man looks at the outside, God looks at the heart.  Whereas we often look at the actions of "the Other" and attribute it to their own malicious and evil nature, it might often be far more accurate to attribute their words or actions to ignorance.  Yes, it might at times be a willful ignorance, but we do not know when it is willful or not.  Only God knows such things which is why only God is granted the right to judge and redeem.

I know this blog entry covers lots of territory.  I tend to write in a stream of consciousness mode these days.  But I suppose here is my primary admonition today:  Can we all just try to stop screaming for a few seconds and try to listen?  Can we "shut the hell up" for a minute as a veteran in AA recently said to a first-timer in the program?  That takes deep humility to respond with a "yes" to such a question!  Can we actually swallow our damn pride for long enough to gain "ears to hear"?  It seems to me like our collective salvation might be at stake.