David Fitch has done something that about 50 people are going to thank him for, me included. In fact, millions of American Christians, especially church leaders should thank him, but I'm betting about 1% of them would actually be able to understand what the hell he's doing. This is no knock on Christianity; the numbers would extend into other tribes or communities of reference as well. For example, I can think of four people off the top of my head whom I call friends who could read this book and follow the argument: Leighton, Cheek, Jay, and JJ. (The Reverend already read it, and he's one of the pastors who actually understood it. What can I say? I have smart friends.) Fitch has written a book of theo-political philosophy. And, I just lost half of you.
Yeah, that's the book, and this is part one of a two- or three-part review for Viral Bloggers. In keeping with church, state, and federal laws, the copy was provided for free for review purposes. Nothing personal, Mr. Fitch, because I like your book, but it ain't like they're selling the shit outta this thing at Cascade Books, the publisher.
That has nothing to do with the quality of the book, the thinking, or the writing; although, I did find some egregious copy editing errors, so feel free to send me the galleys next time, and I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. Damned Oregonians are too high to proofread, or woozy from lack of dead animal flesh. The reason it's not going to sell all that well outside of grad school classes is because Fitch has brilliantly called upon the work of Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Zizek to "read" the current state of the Evangelical Church in America. And there went another third of you. I'll try to interject more profanity to keep you reading.
Here's the shortest explanation you're likely to read about Fitch's method. Zizek's Master Signifiers, key concepts around which people rally or assert their loyalty, are being misused by the Church inasmuch as key phrases (inerrant Bible, decision for Christ) that ought to be deeply steeped in meaning are in fact empty signifiers, thereby causing Evangelicaldom to shape itself around empty ideals that contain the verbal simulacra of Christianity but none of the genuine practice. How's that?
If you're still with me, you're going to love this. I'd like to say a hearty fuck yeah at this point, because Fitch articulates clearly and Christianly what I've been saying for about a decade now: the idea of an inerrant Bible is an empty signifier. It gives the Church something to rally around, but in fact means nothing. I've used the term slippery to describe the language. I think Fitch's is much more accurate. No Evangelical truly believes the ideal of inerrant Bible is slippery, but as with many key phrases, Evangelicals live their lives never defining them. Fitch insists they can't define them. The very act of defining them reveals their absurdity and the contradictions which lie at the heart of them. This, of course, should be the task of seekers after truth, and it is what, thanks to Wittgenstein, I started doing with those signifiers; it created my exit from the faith. (Fitch either knowingly or unknowingly draws on Wittgenstein on a regular basis, and I confess to being ignorant of Fitch's academic pedigree to know if he read Wittgenstein.)
Fitch believes the Evangelical Church should exchange those empty signifiers for robust, life-giving ones. We'll part company here. I think his method is wonderful deconstructively. (Zizek is a Continental philosopher, after all. Those motherfuckers only speak deconstructively.) I think it is non-functional constructively. You can't replace an empty signifier with another empty signifier. For example, he speaks of the fullness of Christ. Great. What does that mean? To his credit, Fitch is aware of the precarious ground on which he theologizes, and he makes an effort at constructing a political theology in the final chapter (more on that later), but differences aside, his critique is brilliant. For example:
The belief in "the inerrant Bible" dares to promise certainty regarding truth about God independently of God. In other words, it dares to say we can know this truth objectively, through modern science and historiography, and we can prove it by these means! In its excess, it puts the true believer in the false position of making God and object of our own control—a truth we can know without knowing Him. pg. 63
No one in any church other than a few Anabaptist, Holiness and (real) Baptist congregations is going to thank him for that bit of wisdom, but he's painfully goddamn right. Fundamentalists and by extension their evangelical offspring have spent decades vacillating between faith and reason, calling upon one at the expense of the other when convenient, and insisting on one over against the questions of skeptics when convenient. They create an inerrant Bible (in the original autographs. Ha!), but they must know that no such thing exists if they believe in the methodology used by "liberals," and you simply have to read Fitch's explanation of how that group is "othered" (my word, not his; he uses a Zizekian term), but they borrow the methodology only to justify their persistent belief in an empty signifier. It leads to staggering moments of arrogance, and credit again to Fitch for calling them on it, including George W. Bush asserting that God told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
This is where Fitch shines like an Anabaptist beacon. Yoder would be proud. If the signifiers are shaping a community to justify the creation of enemies, to behave arrogantly, to exchange faith in God for faith in an inerrant Bible, and to claim to have truth while steadfastly refusing to live into it, then the signifiers are empty and should be discarded. The measure of a community is how they love (crazy fuckin' idea. that silly Jesus), which is to say, how comfortably they hold to belief in the truth (love your enemies) and allow that truth to shape their praxis. The revelation that they have missed it is that they use the "absolute truth" as a master signifier for the purposes of assuaging their own uncertainty and deciding who the enemy is.
This is good stuff, folks. I sincerely hope seminaries are handing out copies of this book in theology, theological method, and ethics classes. I know it won't be happening in most, but a few, just a few, would give me hope for my Christian friends. A postscript here: Evangelicalism isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and Fitch knows that, but this inability to identify what is empty and what is robust has the potential to destroy the Evangelical Church. More than once I've asserted that it already has, inasmuch as fundamentalism seems to have won the battle already.
