John Milbank VS Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Nobody Wins (Re-Edited)

John Milbank was a theology lecturer I came into contact during my degree. His Radical Orthodoxy movement apparently had a major following in academic circles, though there appeared to be very little mainstream knowledge of it. More recently he's been putting forward a number of articles into major news sources. He released a couple of articles in The Guardian's "Comment Is Free" section including one advocating "Red Toryism" (i.e. I want to vote Conservative yet still call myself a lefty) and another (which really infuriated me) advocating a new feminism biased in favour of men *facepalm*

So what's he done now? Well it turns out he's really pleased about certain recent comments by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but he doesn't think she quite kisses Christianity's arse enough. So he's published a new public article. this time on abc.net.

I don't know if John Milbank mistook extracts from Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book "Nomad" for an individual article or whether he is simply treating them that way. In any case the extracts on that website are no longer available, but I was able to find a cached copy of them which you can find in my un-edited post about this along with a copy of John Milbank's reply. Click here for my original un-edited article.

So how does John Milbank's article frustrate me? Let me count the ways....




1. The Enlightenment was Christian...

As she rightly suggests, far too many Christians tend to take the simplistic stance of defending religion in general against the attacks of the new atheists.

Yet in important ways Christianity has more in common with the Enlightenment legacy than it has with Islam. Both see the role of reason as central and both favour tolerance and open debate, whereas Islam, on the whole, is more equivocal about these values.

In a sense, this is not surprising because both Christianity and the Enlightenment are Western phenomena. As Ayaan rightly observes, it is clear that the latter has recently influenced the former. What she greatly underrates, however, is the degree to which the former is itself the child of the latter.

There's no further explanation provided for this. It's just taken for granted. Of course the first part where he agrees with Ayaan is, admittedly, true. The most predominately Islamic areas were not influenced by the Enlightenment and, as such, Islam-as-a-whole has not taken on board the lessons of the Enlightenment to the same degree as Christianity-as-a-whole.

The links provided above are first of all to an article by the awesome Andrew Copson noting the extent to which the influence of Christianity is actually profoundly overrated and second of all a link to an article from LJ's snarking historian's blog "history-spork" dealing with the comically anti-Catholic movie "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" and it's bizarre presumption that Elizabeth I promoted religious freedom rather than simply co-existence (i.e. she didn't advocate out-and-out slaughter of Catholics, but she did demand that they attend services that leaned closer to Protestantism in their format). Religious freedom was not a factor in pre-Enlightenment thought and the Enlightment was most certainly a reaction against Christian hierarchies. Still, in points  -  John will try to persuade us that Christianity has always had Enlightenment values at heart *groan*....


2. Christianity is the source of feminism...

Far from being especially mysogynistic, Christianity is itself the sustained source of feminism, and it is evident that even St Paul played a positive role in this respect (so long as one does not absurdly imagine that he could have arrived at modern views concerning female emancipation in the first century AD).

This is coming from the guy who promotes marriage with the "big strong caveman" approach:

Marriage suspends sexual competition and distributes sexual partners equally. It still today usually protects women physically and compensates for their lesser muscular strength.

I've seen both John Milbank and his wife. I cannot imagine him doing much physical protecting to be honest. He might possibly be useful for getting jam jars open. *shrugs*

The link above is Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales, openly apologising for the way that all religions, Christianity included, have denigrated women. That Christianity and feminism have, for much of their history, been diametrically opposed is pretty well-established.


3. TRADITIONAL Christians are NEVER biblical literalists...

The Christian tradition has nurtured natural science, while so-called "biblical literalism" is itself a modern doctrine, completely unknown to the traditional orthodox faith.

The link above comes via Pharyngula who notes that as much as the Roman Catholic Church may have rejected Creationism, that doesn't seem to stop many Roman Catholics finding a loophole. The article Myers links to claims that evolution must be somewhat flawed because otherwise there could never have been a literal Adam and Eve.

Similarly I think the idea that Adam and Eve were not thought of as literal people for much of the Church's history seems flawed. Aquinas appears to talk quite literally about Adam and the Tree of Life. And while Augustine's book on a literal reading of Genesis appears to reject Biblical literalism, that doesn't stop the (metaphorical?) fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden from being central to his theodicy.


4. Science was nurtured by Christianity and is the direct result of monotheism.

The claim above that science was nurtured by Christianity is added to later when John Milbank makes the following claim:

...it is imperative that Christians sometimes side with Islam rather than Enlightenment, to a far greater degree than even Ayaan allows. This is true especially with regard to the area of religious self-organisation and involvement in education and civil society.

With Muslims, Christians would insist that monotheism has had a positive influence upon the formation of knowledge and social organisation, in a way that atheists often fail to recognise.

The idea that monotheism was responsible for the development of science is actually an argument more commonly used by proponents of Intelligent Design theory. Based on that premise they insist that looking at objects of scientific enquiry as if they were designed by a creator will help to advance our scientific understanding.

The truth is that science, or rather critical thinking, was already beginning within Ancient Greece even though it was a polytheistic society. The Egyptians also had some rudimentary science, and many polytheistic cultures had some form of arithmetic. China too, had very early scientific thought without monotheism. If you actually search for people proposing a link between monotheism and the origins of science the most prominent name that crops up is Rodney Stark who, in his book "Facts, Fable and Darwin", criticises the "Darwinian Crusade" and their "tactic of claiming that the only choice is between Darwin and Bible literalism".

Here's an article where Rodney Stark's arguments are debunked. It also notes some rather interesting things about the history of science and the Church which seem to distinctly undermine John Milbank's assertions about the Church "nurturing" science.

And what political issues is John advocating here? "The area of religious self-organisation." Female priests and bishops? Catholic adoption rules? Monitoring of child abuse within your organisation? If John includes all of these in his list of issues which secular bodies should be forced to stay out of, then he was right not name them explicitly. However, if he wouldn't have included all of those he could probably have done with being rather less vague about it. "Involvement in education." While I'm pretty sure John Milbank would disagree with creationism, that doesn't mean that he thinks secular bodies should be allowed to step in and stop it being taught. Presumably John doesn't want secular bodies to be able to demand sex education be taught accurately in faith schools, though once again he doesn't explicitly say this.


5. Christians have historically been against forced conversions...

The advocacy of tolerance is also grounded in the Christian insistence on the integrity of individual conversion and the initial emergence of this faith is a world of highly pluralistic debate.

Just click on the link and look at the number of instances of forced conversion "insisted on" by Christians.


6. In various theocracies and dictatorships around the world Islam has an unfair privilege. Why don't we give the same unfair privilege to Christianity in the west? (Also, Christians don't get enough opportunities to proselytise. Blah Blah Fatwa Envy Blah Blah...)

And this brings me to what I regard as the second critical issue her piece raises: the lack of a level playing field between Islamic and Christian mission.

There is no proper tolerance of Christian practice and mission in many Muslim countries and cultures, while perhaps the majority of Muslims still think that apostasy is legitimately punishable by death. No Christians take this attitude and almost no Christian polities prevent Islamic dawa or mission.

It is also true that radical Islamists are systematically infiltrating Western educational institutions. I would agree with Ayaan that in the face of all this Christians need to take a more militant approach to mission and that, in the name of freedom, secularists should welcome such a venture.

John's noticed that in certain predominately Muslim countries there is strong discrimination against Christians as well as discrimination against sects of Islam they don't like too. So what should our response be? Well presumably just keeping preachers of hatred out of the country is not enough. No, the only sensible option is to step up the amount of Christian proselytising. Clearly there isn't enough Christian doorknocking going on and "in the name of freedom" (did he really say that?) we should expect even more of it. In fact, as secularists we "should welcome such a venture". (Meanwhile atheists who publically and explicitly, though not maliciously, express their atheism, with a bus campaign for example, are "militant" *sighs*.)

That is essentially John's main argument: "Muslims in certain countries are horribly intolerant, therefore you should let Christians proselytise the s*** out of you". It's utterly daft.


7. Muslims will prefer Christianity if they are properly informed, whereas they tend to choose Islam because they are coerced.

One can also agree with Ayaan that there is some evidence that, when faced with a genuine, well-informed choice, many Muslims, and especially women - for example in Bangladesh - find Jesus to be far more attractive and universally relevant figure that [sic] Mohammed.

Surely she is correct that Muslims, like everyone else, need better education about other faiths and that spiritual allegiance should not be a matter of covert coercion.

Once again, to put this in context, John is advocating proselytising. It strikes me as the height of arrogance to say that Muslims would choose your religion if only they were properly informed. Personally I would not wish to suggest that anyone would be an atheist just because they were properly informed. These things are often about being in the right frame of mind.


8. Muslims ought to be apolitical mystics. Christians on the other hand...

John makes a number of statements about Sufism and mysticism in Islam.

For instance, among some interpreters of Qutb (such as in Iran) one tends to find, interestingly, a radically modern approach to the reading of the Qur'an, as well as a certain amount of openness to Sufism and to philosophy.
...
What the West needs to do, I maintain, is to encourage the growth of more mystical forms of Islam, which are also the forms that stress a religious mode of organisation that is not directly a political one, or even necessarily a legal one.
...
...Islam has largely taken such a dangerous, non-mystical and often political direction in recent times.

What John seems to like about these forms of Islam is that they are less political. Personally, I'd share his interest in Islam becoming less political and I would admit that Sufism does so. However, it strikes me as quite dodgy when this statement comes from John Milbank who is well known for advocating that Christianity become more political.

He has previously claimed that religions dominate one another in the marketplace and claims that there is nothing wrong with this. When he suggests that Islam become apolitical even while he constructs Christian political theories, he is presumably trying to take part in such a domination and in quite a Machiavellian way too.


9. Rowan Williams advocated "parallel legal jurisdictions"...

To this extent I can understand her dismay over Archbishop Rowan Williams's remarks concerning the possibility of parallel legal jurisdictions in Britain

Now this is just plain lazy, a quick look at Rowan Williams' own website reveals the following:

The Archbishop made no proposals for sharia in either the lecture or the interview, and certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law.

Instead, in the interview, rather than proposing a parallel system of law, he observed that "as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law" . When the question was put to him that: "the application of sharia in certain circumstances - if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples' religion - seems unavoidable?", he indicated his assent.

10. Rowan Williams and Tariq Ramadan are idiots - therefore that whole Christian proselytising scheme...

More recently, Tariq Ramadan has praised Sudanese leaders whose record of oppression is atrocious, while Rowan Williams naively cites Malaysia as relatively tolerant (despite the fact that it does not tolerate many aspects of Christian practice and is increasingly falling into the hands of radical Islamists).

In spite of the previous point, I'm not a big fan of Rowan Williams. He's not even remotely as liberal as he is made out to be and actually his campaigning for the right of Muslims to Sharia law is part of a wider wish to encourage freedom of conscience for religions even when it conflicts with the rights of others. (For example he wants Catholic adoption agencies to be free to discriminate against homosexuals.) And certainly John is absolutely right to note that John Milbank's original article advocating Sharia law in Britain did, albeit briefly, talk in overly positive terms about the system in Malaysia (though his article was less obviously filled with inaccuracies than this one from John Milbank). Tariq Ramadan openly advocates the cruel practice of execution by stoning, so there's no doubt that he's very dodgy. His supporters even used the plight of ordinary victims of Islamophobic attacks in order to protect Tariq Ramadan's unprofessional promotion of Iran when working for the Rotterdam City Council.

However, none of this serves to justify Milbank's arguments. That other people are getting it wrong does not mean that you have got it right.

11. "The lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires."

Oh yeah, you read that correctly:

This surely has to do with the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires (as a consequence of the European wars) and the subsequent failure of Third World national development projects, with the connivance of neo-colonial, purely economic exploitation of poorer countries.

Nothing I write will be quite as good as what has already been written in another critic's response to this:

I would humbly suggest the following counterpoints:

· The problem with decolonization was not that it happened “too fast,” but that the only state structures that had been put in place in most colonies (above all in Africa) were geared solely toward population control and the extraction of natural resources. Not surprisingly, after these structures were handed over to the locals, we got “national security states” presiding over the extraction of natural resources. The same thing would’ve happened regardless of when decolonization took place, because the Western powers never had any interest in authentically governing and developing their colonies — “purely economic exploitation” was the agenda all along, as it continues to be today.

· The forms of Christianity that are having the most success in the Third World are not characterized by any close kinship to Enlightenment values — instead, they are largely shaped by a general Pentecostal ethos that fosters magical thinking. Even the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches are often affected by such trends. It appears that the countries where such a Pentecostal awakening is not taking place are generally those where the national security state forbids new forms of social organization from arising.

Another writer has also noticed this issue with John's article, decrying his article as "a throwback towards the more obscene forms of Orientalism and colonial arrogance".

Bits I actually agreed with

But it is also important to say that Ayaan's characterisation of Islam is far too monolithic and negative. It is doubtless true that mainstream Islam is too much permeated by a spirit of ressentiment, but this is largely the outcome of a specific history of decline, and there are significant minorities not touched by this ethos.
...
Ayaan appears to think that it would be better if Muslims all converted to Christianity. And yet, as a Christian theologian, I would say that, even where they do convert, they need to find their own Islamic path to Christ.

I would also say that there is much more possibility of Muslims acknowledging the importance of reason, tolerance and debate in Islamic terms than Ayaan allows. This can occur without such Muslims necessarily feeling compelled to say that the Prophet was fallible or that the Qur'an can err, because Islamic mystical thought has many resources for stressing esoteric meanings of scripture as more important than the literal ones.

Political Islam offers itself as a new international, but non-colonial, vehicle for Third World identity. Unfortunately, it also perpetuates over-simplistic accounts of the imperial past and fosters a spirit of resentful rather than self-sustaining and creative response to the ravages of Western capitalism.

That said, in the case of this last quote while Islamic scholars might occasionally perpetuate over-simplistic accounts of their own imperial past, that hardly excuses John Milbank's rather dodgy account of the imperial past of the colonial powers.

Some silly links

There's another criticism of John Milbank here (on a different issue).

And he's found on a list of University Professors who have supported 9/11 conspiracy theories.

And if that didn't amuse you enough, here's a link to an old post of mine where I typed out a definition given by one of his Radical Orthdoxy contemporaries, Catherine Pickstock, of the concept of "transcendence".
(Cross-posted to atheism)