Integrity & Realism
Posted on: June 5, 2024
In 1948 the famous French writer Albert Camus was invited to address the Dominican Monastery at Latour-Maubourg on the theme “What do unbelievers expect of Christians?”. Camus surprised his audience by saying that what the world today needed was for Christians to be stronger Christians. He shared how during the “frightful years” of oppression and war, he and others like him had waited for “a great voice to speak up in Rome”. “I, an unbeliever? Precisely. For I knew that the spirit would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation when faced with force.”
Camus continued:
“It has been explained to me since that the condemnation was indeed voiced. But that it was in the style of the encyclicals, which is not at all clear. The condemnation was voiced and it was not understood!…. What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.
That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally… Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?”
Courageous words, challenging to pietists and communitarians as much as to theologians. No doubt the Roman Catholic church has been far more bold in condemning and fighting social evils since the Second World War than most Protestant churches worldwide. Camus’ exhortation has proved salutary, but the Church does not take its agenda from him. Camus spoke out of a culture that still retained memories of the Hebrew-Christian story: the intrinsic value of a child’s life; the “blood-stained face” of history was a moral aberration, a clue that something was radically out of joint, not the outworking of biological or logical necessity.
Whether such a repugnance towards evil can be vigorously sustained in the hedonist, morally relativist cultures of the late modern world remains to be seen. So, while being open to the challenge of men and women like Camus who remain outside the Christian community, we also need to ask them: “What is the story of the world that makes sense of your moral outrage? Can we divorce values from facts- or public condemnation from the public telling of the Gospel story within which that condemnation finds its force?”
I wrote the above paragraphs as the Epilogue to a book published in 1998 (Faiths in Conflict; Christian Integrity in a Multicultural World?). I return to Camus’ words repeatedly when I am angry and bewildered by the silence of Christian church leaders, biblical scholars and theologians in the face of evils committed by their own governments. I find myself more in tune with non-Christians like Camus than with the former. They are my fellow companions, although our paths ultimately diverge.
Consider: How many American theologians and biblical scholars have openly challenged the US government’s use of their taxes to fund a genocidal regime in Israel and the ethnic cleansing that it is committing in Gaza and the West Bank? How many have challenged the biblical heresy called “Christian Zionism” which is embraced by some prominent politicians in the Republican Party and exported to other parts of the world? Even those who call themselves “public theologians” seem to write scholarly articles and books only for their fellow theologians to read, and do not speak into the public square. I confess little patience with such compartmentalized scholarship.
Neither Israel nor the Western powers benefit from the war in Gaza. It is only the giant weapons industry in the US and their shareholders who profit. Israel, the US and Europe will be more insecure even if Hamas were to be completely destroyed. For, as I have written before, the children who have seen their families slaughtered will grow into the next generation hell-bent on revenge. The anarchy that will follow the end of Hamas will be the seedbed for new terrorist groups, even as the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003 sprouted ISIS. And the overthrow by NATO of Gaddafi, without any plan for a post-Gaddafi Libya, unleashed chaos and the flight of thousands to the shores of Europe (the maligned “illegal boat people” of right-wing political rhetoric).
To those who say that we should never negotiate with terrorists, I reply, “Wake up to the real world! Most Israeli Prime Ministers since David ben Gurion himself in 1948 have been leaders of the terrorist group Irgun. And have we forgotten the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to the IRA terror campaign in Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom?”
In his recent book, The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, the veteran American war journalist Robert Kaplan observes that the tragic sensibility “begins with the searing awareness of the narrow choices we face, however vast the landscape: the knowledge that not everything is possible, regardless of the conditions. This is the world of constraints, both human and physical. To be self-aware is to understand what, realistically, is possible and not possible in any given situation.”
Vinoth Ramachandra 
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