On Royalty, Spectacle and the Life of Integrity

I strive in nearly all my interactions with people to be a person of unconflicted integrity. By this I mean that if I decry a social injustice in the world, I have a duty to examine whether I benefit or profit from it. If I do, then I need to continue to figure new ways of being in solidarity with those from whose oppression I unwittingly and/or unwillingly benefit. I do not mean to set myself up here as a holier-than-thou type who lords it over others who may or may not follow the same reasoning. Rather, I do this because it is a religious call. As a Quaker, I feel called by the Light Within to honor that of God in all people. As a Buddhist-Quaker, I feel that this is due both to the justice claims of a transcendent Other and the very real fact that all beings inter-are with one another.

So what about royalty and spectacle? If you are reading this, there is no way you've missed the fawning praise for a royal wedding. I'll spare any recap here. Suffice it to say, here we have witnessed the marriage of two incredibly materially privileged people as a global spectacle. I do not know either of the parties in this wedding and would not speak in judgment against them for that reason. What I do know is that millions of dollars were spent on a lavish ceremony honoring the scion of a long-outdated mode of political leadership.

Meanwhile, in some of the lands formerly subjugated to that man's nation, it is a crime punishable by death to love someone of the same gender. Marriage is summarily out of the question. Yet the United Kingdom will now bear a cost somewhat north of $7,000,000,000,000.00 in lost economic production due to the national holiday for a wedding. This is in addition to the actual cost of the ceremonies themselves.

So why care? Because this is a grotesque spectacle in our time. It is a painful reminder that we have decided to value some human lives far, far more than others. A nation stops to celebrate the unearned and inherited privilege of some of its members while its former colonies groan under financial hardship and genocidal laws governing human sexuality. And the church played right along with nary a prophetic word to speak.

The churches of the world--indeed all religious communities--must remember that our spirituality is not limited to what we say in a prayer or do at a ritual. Spirituality is, to borrow a phrase from Roger Haight, SJ, life lived in the face of transcendence. What we do IS our prayer. What we fail to do IS our sin.

The Quest for the Historical Malcolm X

Irene Monroe has a good take on Manning Marable's new biography of Malcolm X up at her Huffington Post blog. I will leave her comments for you to read, but please do. She is an excellent writer with a much-needed perspective on race and sexuality in American culture. It doesn't hurt that she's a Union alumna either.

More to the point of this posting's title, I began to wonder upon reading Rev. Monroe's piece whether we might be on the brink of some kind of Schweitzer-esque quest for the "Historical Malcolm X." Schweitzer's 1906 volume The Quest of the Historical Jesus is a great introduction to the field of historical Jesus studies. In a nutshell, the central question here is what new light might be shed on faith claims to Jesus based on historical research into the person Jesus of Nazareth.

With Marable's new book shedding new light on the person of Malcom X, do we need a similar re-evaluation of the claims we can make to his legacy as well? Do we need to consider a "Malcolm of History" versus a "Malcolm of Faith" as we do with Jesus? I do not wish to draw a soteriological parallel between these two figures. Rather, I want to raise again the question of whether the facts-that-happened version of history is more important than the usable past. I don't have a solid answer, but I do have my sympathies for Martin Marty's view of history and Michel Foucault's view of discourse and narrative here.


In my own estimation, new historical evidence might shed light on a figure's past in terms of the facts-that-happened. Such evidence, however, may or may not have much bearing on the usable past version of history as a story we tell ourselves about a particular figure or event. Malcolm X remains simultaneously the person described in his autobiography and the person described by Marable. He was always both, just as we are all both the people we believe ourselves to be and the people who match our self-perceptions.