The Controversy of Easter. The Crucifixion & Freedom.

It has been interesting following one of the conversations over at the Aotearoa (NZ) blog Not PC, run by Peter Creswell. It seems that Peter has a real and very understandable issue with Christianity and has used the controversy around Easter trading laws to vent that issue.

Allow me to state right from the beginning that I am a Christian who believes in the life of Jesus as God in human form, the crucifixion and the resurrection (no surprise except maybe to some new readers) and I enjoy having a couple of days off at Easter. I see Easter as the most significant time in the year. That said, I would have no issue with the public holidays at Easter time being scrapped, or at least the untidy laws around trading on Easter Friday and Sunday being tidied up. Easter would still be of great significance to me and I would still use the time to recognize the crucifixion and the resurrection.

Why would it not be an issue? Because I believe that society at large has no obligation to recognize my beliefs. It would be a different story if the state pursued a course of action that sought to remove my ability to practice my adherence to the Christian life but then I would imagine that Peter, as a member of the Libertarianz party would get up in arms about that as well.

That said, it seems that Not PC’s post is less about Easter trading than it is about his abhorrence of Christianity. This country’s confused Easter trading laws simply provide a catalyst to vent the bigger issue.

The crux of the matter seems to be the violence and sacrifice of the crucifixion event and a problem with the idea of self sacrifice. In his post Peter also points to it as fictional, but that’s a side issue since he points to another fictional story as providing an ethic worthy of reverence. Clearly even if the life of Jesus, the crucifixion and the resurrection were fiction, Peter would have no issue upholding it as virtuous if he agreed with the ethic it leads us to.

I understand where he is is coming from. I understand how backward and barbaric paying reverence to the event of the crucifixion must seem and I understand how self sacrifice can be seen as an acquiescence to all that is wrong. The latter is summed up in Peter’s statement:

The contrast with the demand of Christianity that The Good inheres in the act of suffering and dying for the expiation of others could not be stronger, or the question more important!  Rather than demanding and worshipping the sacrifice of the highest to the lowest — or as Nietzsche did, retaining the ethic but reversing the beneficiary of the sacrifice by demanding the sacrifice of the lowest to the highest — the ethic of The Fountainhead insists that The Good is not to suffer and to die, but to enjoy yourself and live — without any sacrifice at all of anyone to anyone else.

At the heart of the discussion is freedom and the ability to enjoy yourself and live without any sacrifice of anyone to anyone else needed at all. The question that needs to be asked here is – what is freedom? The most common view of freedom is probably best summed up in the view of individual sovereignty expressed in the principles of the Libertarianz party (I draw on this as I’m sure Peter ascribes to it since he is part of the party, though his views do not necessarily represent the party):

Each individual is the owner of his own life and has the right to live it as he sees fit, as long as he respects that same right in others.

This view of freedom plays out in the other principles of the Libertarianz, all of which I agree with – the only place we may find disagreement is in how a truly free market is established – a market that provides economic freedom for all and not just the mighty few in our current world.

But is that first principle true freedom? It may be if it leads to the point of the last sentence in the larger quote – to enjoy yourself and live; but is a person truly free if their life is wrought by addiction, lust, gluttony, the pursuit of glory through material wealth if it leads to perpetual dissatisfaction, a lifestyle that leads to chronic illness through the likes of obesity or by being seriously underweight and so many other things that actually destroy our lives? Is this freedom or simply enslavement to self and the forces that may compel us toward choosing to live such lives?

A secular libertarian (such as I assume Peter of Not PC is) may very well argue that the destruction of one’s self for no purpose other than the pursuit of one’s seemingly independent choices is indeed an act of freedom as long as it is not done under the coercion of an outside force, but this would be self destruction for no purpose and surely this is a more abhorrent pursuit than the idea of self sacrifice to achieve a greater good? For libertarians that hold this view, I conclude that they and I may have to agree to disagree because I cannot view the destruction of one’s self for no purpose other than enslavement to inner compulsions as freedom.

There’s an interesting philosophy that relates to this. I find the idea of hedonism intriguing and it could very well be aligned closely with the libertarian views of freedom. Hedonism argues that the only thing of real value is pleasure. The pursuit of the hedonist is the pursuit of pleasure – I assume that principles of the Libertarianz have this as their real desire  as long as it does not impinge on the pursuit of the pleasure of another.

Most schools of hedonistic thought conclude that a certain amount of sacrifice, restraint, self-control and even altruism are needed to truly find pleasure and joy in life and that enabling others to find pleasure is one of the greatest sources of this. Hedonist philosophy recognises that while our own pleasure may be our highest pursuit, we are still communal beings. With this in mind we can conclude that “the good” referred to at Not PC, to enjoy yourself and live, requires that humans engage self sacrifice from time to time, employ self control, restraint, altruism and the pursuit of what is best for those around us, for it is in doing so that we find pleasure and enable others to do so as well.

This faces a problem when we recognize forces, powers, institutions and authorities that oppress humanity and engage slavery for the pleasure of a few. The question then becomes, if we value freedom, enjoyment of life and the right all have to pursue pleasure and to live, then how do we confront those forces, powers, institutions and authorities especially since we are well aware that where oppression exists it is often done so through force, violence, manipulation and the destruction of humanity? It is naive to uphold the right of everyone to enjoyment of life and to live and not recognise that there are oppressive forces that stop this and therefore not offer an answer to them.

There are two ways to oppose such oppression:

1. By employing the same means – violence, force, manipulation and the destruction of humanity.
2. The exact opposite.

The post at Not PC expresses an abhorrence for the Easter story because of an ethical disagreement with the idea of self sacrifice – a sacrifice we do not celebrate, but humbly and gratefully remember. My challenge to Not PC then, and any other secular libertarian who abhors the idea of self sacrifice, is to offer another answer that brings liberation from forces, powers, institutions and authorities (this includes the nation state but also anything else that destroys human freedom) that oppress humanity through the use of force, violence, manipulation and the destruction of human life. To not offer a response to these is to render yourself and in this case, your political cause of libertarianism, irrelevant. You need an answer, but must we not conclude that to employ the tools of force, violence, manipulation and the destruction of human life in the name of freedom is to simply become the oppressor with a different face and battle cry?

The Easter story offers two things – freedom and liberation.

Oppression lives, breathes and finds its voice through force, power and violence. The Easter story offers the exact opposite – it offers weakness (not to be confused with lack of choice) and thus it completely and utterly offends the pursuit of power and oppression. Whilst seemingly the oppressor might win, as I’m sure the disciples probably saw it that way the day after the crucifixion and before the resurrection, the tools of enslavement are undermined by active and chosen non-retaliation, which is exactly what the cross was.

Ghandi understood this and thus non-violent pursuits of active non-retaliation and non-violence became the method of standing against the state in India and eventually winning independence. When force and violence were employed to squash the agitators (and make no mistake, Jesus was a deliberate agitator against oppressive forces), they responded with an unwavering commitment to value every person, even the oppressor and thus they wholly and completely undermined the tactics of oppression. The same philosophy was then followed by Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement in the United States. These pursuits involved great measures of self sacrifice, but they were neither a capitulation or acquiescence to oppressive forces, they were the exact opposite – they were the deliberate rejection of the means of oppression and human enslavement.

When Jesus said to turn the other cheek, to go the extra mile when an oppressor asks you to carry him, to give more when someone asks for something that you have, to love your neighbour and to pray for your enemies, he was seeking to undermine those tools that push humanity down and when he went to the cross, he was taking that understanding to its conclusion.

It is not enough to just desire that all would have the freedom to enjoy life and live, one must pursue it and provide a means for others to live it and this involves actively standing against forces that do otherwise. To do so would those who understandably reject self sacrifice ask that we employ the tools of oppression and violent revolt or another way, the way exemplified in the story of Jesus followed by Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr? The Easter story offers liberation, but it is not an easy pursuit of liberation and freedom.

Allow me to lay a hypothetical challenge down to Peter Creswell, not to be antagonistic, but to wrestle with the thinking a little more. The principles of your party talk about voluntary association, non coercive society, non aggression, common law and free market capitalism yet it would be my guess that submissively you participate daily in the opposite of these – it is near on impossible not to. My guess is that you pay taxes that support the state in areas where it actively works against these things. Please correct me if I am wrong – I really do not want to create a wrong picture of you, but if I am right I would like to challenge you to actively stand and live for those principles you uphold.

I encourage you to do one thing, stop paying taxes that prop up those things you do not support and publicly state that this is what you are doing. When you do so, also stop using services that are employed by taxes beyond what you believe the government exists to provide (maybe you are already doing this):

The only legitimate function of government is to uphold these principles.

When the authorities then pursue the force that the state employs to see that the law of the land is followed (whether that law is good or bad) you will need to either respond with force, violence, manipulation and the oppression of the oppressor or you will need to employ the use of non-retaliation and be willing to face whatever means the state employs against you.

Either way you will need to engage self sacrifice. You will engage sacrifice through denying yourself the services of the state offered through the coercive gains of tax revenue – they are many and vast. You will also engage sacrifice through giving up some measure of pleasure as you respond to state calls to pay your taxes and unless employing force and violence to oppose it, you will engage self sacrifice by facing the means the state employs against you to stand for what you believe in.

Note: I’m not actually asking anyone to break the law. The written hypothetical challenge is to demonstrate how a principled stand will most often engage self sacrifice.

Jesus stood against and agitated against oppressive religious forces of his time and he faced the consequences of doing so – he never acquiesced. Myself and all those who identify with the Christian tradition believe this played out on an infinitely bigger scale as well for all of humanity. The story of Easter is one of liberation and freedom. I will be one of the first to admit the many wrongs committed in the name of Christianity, but it is this legacy of liberation and freedom that I identify with.

Last year I had the pleasure of visiting a poverty relief project in the middle of the world’s biggest urban slum, Kibera in the capital of Kenya, Nairobi. Extreme poverty represents one of the heights of humanities legacy of oppression and loss of freedom. In response to poverty, Christianity has a tradition of engaging self sacrifice to combat it and lift its victims out of it. That tradition of active engagement in beating poverty aside, I had the chance to tell someone a story, the story of Easter.

I told a young lady about a God who valued us enough to become one of us, who showed us a way to live that offers freedom and liberation no matter what the world forces upon us. I told her that he was arrested for living that way and encouraging others to do the same and he was so adamant about the stand that he took that he died for us, that he died for her.

I told her the story of the resurrection and how oppression has no real power over us. What struck her though was that someone would die for her; that she was so valued by someone that he would lay his life down for her – self sacrifice. In her moment of grasping that, poverty was not ended, but some of the oppression that held her down was broken – just a little she caught a glimpse of freedom and liberation because for a moment she felt valued because of an act of self sacrifice someone else employed. That’s the story of Easter and yes, the sacrifice was gory – none of us take delight in that fact.

I am wholly dedicated to the pursuit of freedom and liberation and the story of Jesus shows me a way to do that without employing the means of oppression and enslavement. The Easter story is part of that.

Note: If I have misrepresented anyone’s views, I am more than happy to be corrected – just leave a comment.