N.T. Wright Gets It Wrong

Yet despite the violent religious character of this threat, many in the West–church leaders in particular–refuse to think soberly about its moral and spiritual dimension. Indeed, prominent leaders in the Christian church, liberal and conservative, seem devoted to purely secular explanations for Islamist rage. But if the aims and tactics of al Qaeda do not suggest the existence of radical evil, what does? How are we to judge the nature of militant Islam?

Christian author J.R.R. Tolkien, living through the grief and darkness of the Second World War, produced an epic myth of humanity’s titanic struggle against evil, The Lord of the Rings. A few lines from an exchange between Gandalf and Frodo are worth recalling:

At the risk of oversimplifying the problem, it seems that a new shadow of evil has appeared, in the shape of what many now call Islamic fascism. One of its antecedents–Hitler’s fascist movement of the 1930s–appears to echo back into our own day with each car bombing, beheading, and video rant from al Qaeda. Islamic scholars such as Bernard Lewis, in fact, see a philosophical link between radical Islam and Nazism, with profound consequences for the West. “If the leaders of Al-Qa’ida can persuade the world of Islam to accept their views and their leadership,” Lewis writes, “then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for America.” The historical analogy to European fascism has its limits, and no one really knows how much of the Islamic world endorses, or sympathizes with, the objectives of Osama bin Laden. Yet the ferocity, ruthlessness, and staggering vision of his cult of nihilism–the establishment of a global Islamic dictatorship–is plain enough. Why, then, do numerous Christian leaders and institutions seem ambivalent or chronically naïve about this threat? The problem is not confined to liberal theological voices such as the National Council of Churches or Chicago Theological Seminary, or to cranky pacifists such as Stanley Hauerwas or Jim Wallis. The unwillingness to confront the rise of Islamic extremism extends to theologically conservative thinkers and educators: those who are influencing a generation of believers on issues of church and state, war and peace.

The latest and perhaps most troubling example is that of a British church historian much admired by American evangelicals, the Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright. The Christian church owes a great debt to Bishop Wright’s scholarly work on the resurrection of Jesus and the life of Paul. Indeed, it’s hard to name a living academic who has done more to defend the historical integrity of the New Testament. “I’m a classical historian,” he once told the BBC. “And I have used all the tools at my disposal to discover more and more about who Jesus was.” Wright has employed those tools–careful analysis, a willingness to weigh evidence, intellectual curiosity–to advance the claims of the gospel over a long career.

Since being named Britain’s fourth-ranking bishop, from Durham, Wright’s views on various religious and social issues have received widespread attention. A few years ago he also joined Britain’s House of Lords, a political position, and recently has applied his mind to the war on terrorism. A careful look, however, at his political thinking–in writings, sermons, interviews, and public statements–suggests that Wright has abandoned the critical tools that served him so well in the academy.

Just consider Wright’s most recent commentary for Newsweek‘s “On Faith” blog, anticipating the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Remarkably, Wright sees little difference between the ideals of Western democracies and those of Islamic terrorists. “What I wish we could say to terrorists and others: Look, we take our religion seriously too, and it leads us to different conclusions from you. We might be wrong; so might you; but in the name of whichever god you invoke, would it not be a better thing for us all to talk together about the issues at the heart of our respective faiths than to try to achieve dominance by violence?” Adding to the ambiguity, he closes with this line: “Unfortunately, they could quite well come back at us and say, ‘You mean, like you westerners have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last five years?'”

We expect to hear this sophism of moral equivalence from spokesmen at Al Jazeera television or the Arab League–not from orthodox Christian ministers. Yet it somehow has emerged as a central argument in Wright’s critique of the war on radical Islam.

In his first major address on terrorism, “Where is God in the War on Terror?” Wright never mentioned the activities and ambitions of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist allies. He failed to cite any government assessments of the international terrorist threat. Al Qaeda and its operatives are plotting violence in 30 to 40 countries, are actively seeking nuclear material to detonate in urban centers, and are responsible for attacks that have killed or injured thousands of civilians in the last year alone–but you’d never know it from a speech approaching 8,000 words in length.

The bishop exudes moral outrage–but not at the extremists. Wright reserves the weight of his scorn for the United States and Great Britain and their foreign policies since the attacks of 9/11.

In the address in Durham, delivered last November, Wright condemned not only the war in Iraq, but also the U.S.-led coalition that toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan–a military offensive unanimously approved by the U.N. Security Council. He compared the United States to a “rogue elephant teased by a little dog,” staggering along on a militaristic rampage and “imposing the will of the West” on hapless populations. A first century historian, Wright can’t help but regard America as ancient Rome, nurturing similar imperial dreams: “All empires claim they possess justice, freedom and peace and that they have a duty to share these things with everybody else.” Imperialism, in fact, is a recurrent theme. “We have relied on the same methods as we used in the nineteenth century,” he said. “If in doubt, send in the gunboats and teach Johnny Foreigner a lesson he won’t forget.” And, as if the imperial metaphor weren’t crude enough, Wright reached for a cartoon reference: “The Superman myth, or the Captain America complex, has been shown to underlie the implicit narratives of generation after generation of American leaders,” he claimed, “generating the belief that the hero must use redemptive violence to restore the town, the country, the world to its proper state.”

America as deranged elephant-cum-Caesar-cum-superhero: These hardly qualify as accusations, much less as arguments. The failures of the Bush doctrine in the Middle East are both numerous and grievous. The hubris of those who acted as if democracy-building were “a cakewalk” in broken societies like Afghanistan and Iraq boggles the mind. But can America’s historic struggle against tyranny–Nazism, Communism and, now, Islamic radicalism–be denigrated as the product of a cartoon-shaped ego? It all begins to sound like the lament of an embittered utopian: the moralist who cannot reconcile his ideals with the morally ambiguous world in which he finds himself.

Likewise, in his recent book, Evil and the Justice of God, Wright supposedly sets out to offer a sober reflection on evil in the age of terror. Too often, however, he descends into sloganeering, revisionist history, and downright incoherence. He chastises the “dualism” of the “us-and-them disjunction” that supposedly finds no fault with Western democracy. He characterizes the U.S.-led effort against radical Islam as a “knee-jerk, unthinking, immature lashing out” against its enemies, real and imagined. “Just as you cannot eliminate evil by act of Congress or by a philosophical argument,” he writes, “so you cannot do so with high explosives.”

No democratic leader, of course, believes that evil can be eliminated by military force. Neither does anyone claim that democracy is a perfect political system–only that it seems preferable to the alternatives.

Wright’s straw-man arguments all ignore the character and reach of militant Islam. A serious reading of the U.S. government’s most authoritative study on terrorism, the bi-partisan 9/11 Commission Report, would correct the deficit. “Bin Laden and Islamist terrorists mean exactly what they say: to them America is the font of all evil, the ‘head of the snake,’ and it must be converted or destroyed,” the commissioners concluded. “It is not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate.” The most recent National Intelligence Estimate of the threat of global terrorism confirms that view. Its authors believe that “the global jihadist movement” is spreading, adapting, and plotting new attacks on civilian targets. “We judge that most jihadist groups will attempt to conduct sustained terrorist attacks in urban environments.” No wonder, then, that the 9/11 Commission Report summarized the threat of al Qaeda thus: “With it there is no common ground–not even respect for human life–on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated.”

Surely this is the beginning of political wisdom: We face an enemy that vows our annihilation and will not rest until it is accomplished.

There are mature Christian responses, in political terms, to this kind of threat. One of them is called the just war tradition, and it provided the moral rationale for the US-led war in Afghanistan. Astonishingly, Wright gives it almost no attention. He movingly describes the hope of the coming Kingdom, “God’s final victory over evil.” But he has little to say about the enduring need for governments ordained by God to enforce justice–with the sword–until that blessed day arrives. Instead, we’re informed that “the only way” to combat terrorism is “by working for mutual understanding and respect.” We’re told that believers are to “bring [God’s] wise and healing order to the world under his just and gentle rule.” What God intends the secular state to do about those who despise life itself, who violently resist his gentle rule, remains a flimsy afterthought.

It is not as if the bishop lacks a Biblical view of evil in the modern world. But it does not seem to figure at all into his critique: He assumes that the root causes of Islamic radicalism have much more to do with politics–with U.S. and British foreign policy–than with the tragedy of the human condition. There is no suggestion that Islamic fascism may represent a fundamentally spiritual crisis: that Muslim rage results largely from the admixture of monstrous ego, envy, and perverted religion.

This same failure of imagination taints a 2005 report, “Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11,” released by England’s House of Bishops, to which Wright was an important contributor. Its feverish tone approaches that of the conspiracy theorist, fingering the United States for nearly every crisis or grievance on the planet. Terrorism, the bishops said, “has to be understood, first of all, in political terms.” Thus, a “political settlement” that “meets some of the terrorist concerns” will mitigate the problem. Nowhere–absolutely nowhere–in the document’s 100 pages is there any treatment of al Qaeda’s apocalyptic and genocidal ambitions. Such rhetoric, the lexicon of appeasement, continues unabated–despite repeated terrorist attacks and attempted attacks on American and European soil.

Sometimes it takes voices far outside the Christian tradition to penetrate the fog over issues that are essentially religious. “We know very well what the ‘grievances’ of the jihadists are,” writes Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. “The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law .All of these have been proclaimed as a license to kill infidels and apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.”

The current soft-pedaling of Islamic violence is jarringly reminiscent of the posturing of clerics during the 1930s. As Hitler began his campaign of terror in Europe, the editors at Fortune magazine berated the nation’s Christian leaders for failing to reckon realistically with the Nazi menace. Instead, they picked up the appeasing cant of their secular counterparts. “We are asked to turn to the Church for our enlightenment, but when we do we find that the voice of the Church is not inspired,” they wrote. “The voice of the Church today, we find, is the echo of our own voices.”

It comes as no surprise, then, when Wright envisions the political way forward: All hope rests with the United Nations; it alone can provide the moral authority and “a credible international police force” to cope with threats to peace and security. “The United Nations and the International Criminal Court are the only bodies we currently have which even approximate to a legitimate international authority.” What kind of political theology, it must be respectfully asked, confers sole legitimacy on a U.N. Security Council that cynically enables the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan? What Biblical principle blesses a U.N. system that names Libya, a terrorist state, to head its Human Rights Commission and Zimbabwe, plunged into economic and social chaos by the thuggish Robert Mugabe, to chair its Commission on Sustainable Development?

There are plentiful reasons to doubt that the United Nations–which grants state sponsors of terrorism a seat on its Security Council–has either the will or the capacity to combat international jihadism. James Turner Johnson, one of the nation’s pre-eminent just war thinkers, sees a “well-intentioned but rather utopian investment” in the U.N. system. “Its failures,” he writes, “are the result of fundamental limitations embedded in its character as an international institution”–from its lack of accountability to its universal membership. Wright either ignores these failures or blames them, quite literally, on the “strong, vested interest” of U.S. foreign policy.

Yet the bishop goes even further, adding to the burden of his lapses by bringing his style of politics directly into the pulpit. His 2006 Christmas Eve sermon is an especially mournful example. “I’ll tell you something,” he intoned, referring obliquely to the war in Iraq. “If it was our country that was reduced to chaos by someone else’s inept and money-driven warmongering, we’d be getting to grips with the promises and prophecies of peace quite quickly.” Put aside the manner in which Wright demeans the decency and sacrifice of the U.S.-led coalition trying to achieve a more humane outcome for the Iraqi people. What does this spasm of selective indignation have to do with the hope of Christian redemption–the message that Wright has been spiritually entrusted to deliver? Yet he carried on, oblivious to the muddied and divisive nature of his appeal.

N.T. Wright’s instinctive hatred of war is surely admirable: It is not for nothing that Jesus included “blessed are the peacemakers” among his beatitudes, or that it continues to inspire the faithful across religious traditions. Nevertheless, Wright’s angry and simplistic utterances against military action threaten to confuse Christianity with a partisan agenda. The great sorrow of the bishop from Durham is that by politicizing the gospel–even in the name of peace–he may actually discourage many from responding to its offer of grace and genuine peace, peace with God.

It all brings to mind again Frodo’s lament over the intrusion into his world of a new Shadow of Evil. I wish it need not have happened in my time. Something like this shadow, something unspeakably malevolent, has appeared and taken root in Islamic societies. We must debate the most prudent and just ways to confront it. We must be vigilant about our own inclinations toward injustice and learn from the mistakes of arrogance already made. Yet we cannot appease this darkness, rationalize it away, or wish it had not happened in our time. It has happened.

What we must now decide–what only the work of enlightened preaching and sober statesmanship can help us decide–is what to do with the time given to us as we seek to overcome it.

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a columnist for the London-based BritainAndAmerica.com. His latest book is The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm.