Metro Pulse/Pulp/Gil Bailie

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Who:
Gil Bailie

When:
Friday, April 4, 7-9 p.m. Saturday, April 5, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday, April 6, 3-5 p.m.

Where:
New City Cafe, Old City. Call 544-0100 for more info.

Christian author Gil Bailie pulls aside the veil of sacred violence

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

When Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council in February to argue for a tougher approach to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, U.N. bureaucrats did him a small favor: They hung a banner across a tapestry of Pablo Picasso's painting "Guernica," which adorns a wall in the chamber. The painting shows the anguish and chaos wrought by German bombing of a small Spanish village (Spain's fascist leadership allowed Hitler's army to use the village for target practice, one of the first instances of modern aerial bombardment). It was thought that it would be unfair to force Powell, with his dry presentation of satellite photos and garbled Iraqi cell phone calls, to compete with Picasso's accusing canvas.

The story is nothing new to theologian Gil Bailie. This is what human beings have been doing since the dawn of civilization, maybe since the dawn of consciousness—hanging draperies of one sort or another across our acts of official violence, hiding from ourselves the truth of what sanctioned violence looks like and does. In his expansive and sometimes stunning 1996 book, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, Bailie advances an explicitly Christian and deeply humanitarian theory of the role violence has played in human history and, in his view, the inevitable erosion of that role. The book is based on the groundbreaking work of French theologian Rene Girard, Bailie's friend and mentor. Bailie will be in Knoxville on April 4 thru 6 to conduct a seminar on "Violence Unveiled" at New City Café, a nondenominational Christian coffee shop in the Old City.

Bailie's (and Girard's) basic ideas revolve around the role of the scapegoat, the sacrificial victim whose death makes an orderly society possible. He argues that from the earliest tribes, humans have used violence as an organizing principle. Recognizing that unchecked violence—in the form of murder, rape, assault—is the biggest threat to collective existence, we have controlled it by channeling it into rituals of bloodletting that serve both as cathartic release and as a means of building bonds and consensus. Participating in ritual killing, even just as spectators, creates a shared sense of responsibility and obligation. These acts, whether actual sacrifices on an altar or military campaigns undertaken in the name of God, are what Bailie calls "sacred violence."

Although his book takes a generally horrified tone toward much of the blood-soaked past, Bailie doesn't exactly condemn sacred violence. For a long time, he argues, it did serve its appointed purpose: It helped bring civilizations together, made law and order possible, and thereby constrained unsanctioned brutality. But he doesn't think it's working any more. As societies have evolved, so have the moral sensibilities underlying them, so that the old acceptance of the difference between "sacred violence" and other kinds of violence has been called into question.

A greater awareness of our social and political systems, not to mention the realities of our history, has settled into gnawing uncertainty about the acceptability of any form of violence. It is harder for us to cheerily send the troops off to war in the name of God and country, knowing not only that some of them won't come back, but that the very acts they are being ordered to undertake can easily lead to Guernica or My Lai or any of the other scenes of carnage we have witnessed.

On balance, a growing reluctance to invoke violence for sacred ends—for any ends—might seem like a good thing. Bailie agrees. But what troubles him is this: If our civilization, our sense of mutual obligation, is built on periodic bouts of ritual violence (the Enlightenment era version being Jefferson's contention that, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants"), what will hold us together once we can no longer in good conscience invoke those rituals?

In an interview from his home in California, where he runs a nonprofit religious and educational organization called the Cornerstone Forum, Bailie says, "To analyze the situation we're in right now in terms of politics and economics is to miss what's really going on here. It's a cultural shift at a very deep level...I think the big question is going to be, what can we draw on for moral and cultural authority in the future?"

Not surprisingly for a theologian, Bailie's answer starts with the Bible. But his and Girard's reading of the scriptures goes well beyond Sunday platitudes. Bailie argues that the issue of sacred violence, and the erosion of its power, is central to the gospels. The story begins earlier, of course, in the Old Testament's halting moves away from sacrificial violence and its shift from lionizing military and political heroes (Moses, David) to sanctifying lone (and often martyred) prophets, away from the perpetrators of violence and toward the rebukers of it.

This reaches its apotheosis in the gospels themselves. Christ is the ultimate scapegoat, the final sacrifice. In accepting him as messiah, Bailie argues, the religion that became Christianity started to pull back the curtains on sacred violence for good. What makes sacred violence possible is the objectification and dehumanization of the victim being sacrificed. This has gotten harder and harder over time, starting with the Abrahamic ban on actual human sacrifice (a trend Bailie traces in a number of other cultures as well, one that seems an inevitable evolutionary step). But Christ completely obliterates the possibility of an objectified victim—he is the victim as savior and as God. And, Bailie argues, societies built on a religion that worships the sacrificial victim will find it harder and harder to enact blood sacrifices of their own. He contends that Christian societies have essentially sacralized empathy, and empathy is the enemy of organized violence.

Non-Christians might take issue with Bailie's claims for the Judeo-Christian uniqueness of that idea. The Buddhist creed of compassion, for example, is certainly rooted in empathy. But Bailie's analysis is persuasive, and the question he's grappling with is important and basic: How will we live together now? Bailie sees two possibilities: We won't, we'll disintegrate into anarchy and apocalyptic violence (not mark-of-the-beast apocalypse—he has little patience for eschatologists—but man-made horrors); or we will actually internalize at a societal level the revelations of the cross, the impossibility of sacrificing others for our own ends in a world where we all live or die together.

"I feel that ultimately the solution is going to have to be religion," Bailie says. "I think fundamentally it's a religious crisis...There is no outside anymore. We can't solve it the old-fashioned way of just being over/against the Other. What will inform us, very powerfully inform us of our common humanity?"

His answer is simple, at least in principle.

"My religion teaches me that everybody is my brother and sister," he says. "That doesn't mean I always act that. But I'm happy to be taught that...The only way we can possibly survive the collapse of the old sacrificial system is to learn how to self-sacrifice. Not just in violent situations, but also in the sense of being a little more understanding of each other, just each of us try to be as sort of gentle and forgiving as we can. That's a life of a form of self-sacrifice."