Liturgy as politics: an interview with William Cavanaugh

Christian Century, Dec 13, 2005

IN HIS REFLECTIONS on theology and politics, Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh has focused attention on how Christian liturgical practices embody and inform--or should embody and inform--Christian political witness. His book Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Blackwell) is about the Roman Catholic Church's responses to the rule of Augusto Pinochet in Chile during the 1970s. Cavanaugh, who teaches at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, has also written Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (T. & T. Clark) and coedited The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Blackwell).We spoke to him about liturgy, politics, the entertainment culture and Christian education.

You've suggested that Christians ought to draw on their own liturgical practices as they consider how to engage in politics. What do you have in mind?

I recently was asked to give a talk on "the social meaning of the Eucharist," and the first thing I said was, "'You have to promise that if I tell you what the social meaning of the Eucharist is, you won't stop going to mass." In other words, the liturgy cannot be reduced to a meaning. If it could be, why keep going to church once you've grasped the meaning? How many reminders do we need? Only those who are really thick would have to go every Sunday. This is often our approach to liturgy and social life: we try to "read" the liturgy for symbols and meanings that we take out and apply in the "real world"--the offering means we should give of our wealth, the kiss of peace means we should seek peace in international relations, and so on.

This is fine, but it doesn't address the liturgy as all action that forms a body, the body of Christ.

Henri de Lubac says, "The Eucharist makes the church," and the church is more than just a Moose Lodge for Christians. The church is a social space in its own right, an enactment of the politics of Jesus. This does not mean that the church should become a political party or interject party politics into the liturgy. It means the church should help create--in collaboration with non-Christians too-spaces of peace, charity and just economic exchange.

I think Voices in the Wilderness or the economic communities of the Focolare movement are good examples of the politics of Jesus. Far from being a sectarian or quietist withdrawal from the world, these movements are effective at producing change--more so than movements that ask the state for peace and justice.

One of the assumptions of modern secular politics is that the state must be secular and religion private, lest we return to the wars of religion that devastated Europe in the 16th century. Is there anything wrong with that assumption?

I don't think there is any reason to want to restore the churches to political power, if by that one means coercive power. There is, however, good reason to question the myth of the secular state as peacemaker. The so-called wars of religion did not pit one religion against another, as in Catholics versus Protestants. They are more accurately described as wars between different theopolitical orders. This explains why, for example, Catholics killed Catholics. The second half of the Thirty Years' War involved Habsburgs fighting Bourbons--two Catholic dynasties fighting each other.

Obviously, the church was not innocent of the bloodshed, entangled as it was with coercive power. But neither was the modern state an innocent bystander. The whole apparatus of the state arose to enable princes to wage war more effectively. As Charles Tilly has written, "War made the state, and the state made war." The modern nation-state is founded on violence. If the church is going to resist violence, it has to emerge from its privatization and have a political voice, one that seeks not to regain state power but to speak truthfully about it. Christians can atone for their complicity with violence in the past by refusing to be complicit with state violence now.

People who fear an alignment of religion and state often point to Taliban-style Muslim regimes as an example of the danger. Is that a legitimate worry?

Obviously, I'm not a fan of the Taliban. We should be concerned about any regime that abuses people. I worry, however, about the way that the great myth of religious violence serves to justify certain kinds of violence: "Those people over there are crazy religious fanatics; their violence is irrational, absolutist and divisive. We live in a democratic, secular state; our violence is rational, modest and unitive. They have not learned the lesson we learned: religion should be kept out of the public sphere. So we need to help them by bombing them into the higher rationality." This way of thinking is, I think, one of the subtexts of the Iraq war and of much of public discourse on terrorism. Both Republicans and Democrats assume it.

This myth helps us to think of ourselves as the most peace-loving nation on earth at the same time that our military budget exceeds those of all other nations combined. Our violence doesn't count as violence, because we are just trying to spread democracy, rationality and peace. Wars by U.S. forces or by proxies--resulting in the death of 50,000 Iraqi civilians, 2 million Vietnamese, 200,000 Guatemalan peasants--don't make a dent in our self-image as long as we make "religious violence" the bogeyman. I think we should denounce all kinds of violence, religious and secular.