<nettime> Christianity and Cruelty

[David Garcia via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

The Christian Nationalism that Steve Kurtz has researched and highlighted so vividly in recent days appears as a world away from the Christianity of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde. Her direct public plea to Trump for ‘mercy’ was one of the more effective interventions since his re-election. Its potency came in part from the way it separated this regime’s most alarming and morally disfiguring vice from any particular set of policies, the vice of cruelty.

The worst of the many vices Trump and his minions have displayed is their cruelty. Cruelty that is exultant, relentless, swaggering, shameless and performative. Many previous administrations have exhibited a full spectrum of vices, exploitation, prejudice, cowardice, elitism, snobbery, self-delusion, treachery and above all hypocrisy. But few have been as enthusiastically and vindictively cruel. So maybe its worth asking whether there are ways in which the obvious but under emphasised fact of Trumpian cruelty can be given greater prominence in the struggle to forge a more energetic culture of resistance.

Do the Democrats have some version of CPAC where they can do more than lick their wounds? There are times when even hate can be an effective instrument of resistance, in this case hatred of Trump’s cruelty. Maybe the revulsion that most of us feel for this vice’s fearful ugliness has exposed a rare achilleas heal.

As the philosopher Judith Shklar pointed out in 1981[Putting Cruelty First] Christianity cannot escape complicity in the tendency to neglect this vice. It is not even one of the 7 deadly sins. Neither does it feature in the 10 commandments. Moreover, the countless representations of the torments of hell awaiting sinners appears to suggest that cruelty has been granted divine dispensation. “Perhaps” she argued “the extent of divinely sanctioned cruelty makes it impossible to think of cruelty as a distinct and unmitigated evil” Surely this makes it easier for the CN to tolerate or even welcome Trumpian cruelty, even seeing it as evidence of Trump as an unwitting instrument of divine retribution.



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