#GruntGod ep.2: Chris Haw
The second installment of a revolutionary exploration of faith and service.
Transcript
Episode Intro
Hi, and welcome to Grunt Works. My name is Brother Logan Isaac, and I'm broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. In this episode, we're gonna talk with my friend Chris Haw, who teaches at Scranton Catholic Ardian Scholar. When I say Gerard Renee Gerard. Is a scholar in the last generation did a lot of really incredible work on scapegoating and ritualistic sacrifice from a sociological perspective.
And Chris and I go way back. In fact, I was a part of the Camden houses in the new monastic movement back in the early aughts through the 2010s. And Chris [00:01:00] and I have some really incredible conversations, so I'm gonna keep this intro very brief. We're bumping up on an hour already without this introduction.
But what Chris and I will talk about I call T-Y-F-Y-S and it's shorthand for thank you for your service. Thank you for your service being this ritualistic. I don't wanna call it sacrifice, but here I'm calling it a sacrifice because it's not, for a lot of vets, it's a contentious issue. On the one hand, we have vets who really like hearing that appreciate it, see the value in it.
And then as there's a lot of vets increasing, number of vets who see it as a shallow gesture, that doesn't mean anything anymore because it's done so often and I'm one of them. So T-Y-F-Y-A-S is the shorthand of, thank you for your service. Thank you. Now go fuck yourself, kind of stuff like.
Why do we keep saying this thing that means so little. I know when I go to the va it almost feels compulsive. Like they're told you have to say it [00:02:00] or something. And many of VA's VA employees are vets, many are not because it's a small workforce. And I compare that to Levitical sacrifice, where the many in particularly in the Torah and Exodus.
And onward where we have the Yom Kippur goats. The Yom Kippur is the day of atonement and atonement. Kfar is paving over making the way between God and humanity level and safe. And the ceremony that's used is there's two goats. They're goat. Not lambs. And I talk about how in later New Testament literature, particularly Johanne literature, there's this phrase, the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.
This taking away azel doesn't happen with a sheep. Sheep and goats are very similar, but very distinct. Creatures and goats are independent. [00:03:00] They can eat whatever they want. Sheep have to eat pasture. And they're dependent on humans to shear because we've bred them to provide us with wool. Goats are ornery and they don't need us, and they make that very clear.
And it's goats that are used in the Yom Kippur atonement sacrifice, and one goat is, sacrificed on the altar and the blood from that goat is then taken and put on the, another goat, the goat for God. The goat that is sacrificed is called Azazel, and I talk about that word and why it's ambiguous and what it might mean, but the.
Azazel is killed and no, I'm sorry. The Azazel the escape goat. There's a the goat for God is killed, sorry. And the blood is put on the Azazel the Goat of God and the bloodied goat is then sent off into the wilderness, sent away. [00:04:00] With the sins represented by the blood, and only after the Azazel leaves, then Moses washes his hands.
And the ceremony is complete. So there is no sheep or baby sheep that takes away the sins of the world. It's a goat, and God is the goat. Obviously, I shouldn't say obviously, God is the goat who takes away our sins. And so what does it mean in our own contemporary context where. An increasing minority of individuals enlist and go to war so that the many can live in an opulence or luxury or privilege.
This is a modern day sacrificial ritual, and it's encapsulated by, thank you for your services, though. That's supposed to like, make everything, even Steven or something, I don't know. And Chris and I as I said, we get in some really incredible conversations. I hope you'll listen. But this is also, as I forgot to mention earlier, the second [00:05:00] chapter of the current God season, past which you can get@pqhq.com.
And the second chapter on Moses and the Levitical sacrifice features a new icon of Moses which you can see in the cover art to the podcast. And you can also, if you don't wanna buy the entire season pass, you can just buy the one chapter. For right now it's a dollar, but it's usually about $2. You can get the icon epub file, PDF and you'll also get.
If you sign up for the season pass, you'll get the entire ebook of God as a grunt in Morgan News for GIS on release date on November 11th, 2025. So without further ado, here's Chris Haw Ardian scholar and professor at Scranton University in our conversation on thank you for your service and Levitical sacrifice that Moses and the Israelites would've performed back in the day.
Interview
Logan M. Isaac: yeah, thanks for taking the time. You and I go back. I was actually thinking about this recently because [00:06:00] Laura and I are doing like a timeline and anyway, we met in 2006 when I came to Papa Fest. Was it when it was on Shane's property?
Yeah, it was in Tennessee. Yeah. What do you remember about that?
Chris Haw: Anything in particular? I went down there, I just went down there. I was just another
Logan M. Isaac: fanboy. And you're like, I don't even remember you, dude. But then you came to live with us.
Chris Haw: Yeah, I just went back down to Shane's land for the first time in 18 years or whatever it was. And I remember that festival very fondly.
I remember a lot of dirty people. It was very muddy, I think. And I remember you as I don't remember too many details 'cause Yeah. This is push in 20 ish years. Oh six, yeah. 19 years. Yeah. God dang. Wow. As somebody who was just fervently thoroughly. Thinking that you were devoted [00:07:00] to contemplation and so I remember we were able to hit it off right away by being able to talk a lot.
I don't know, that's maybe the only ambiance that I remember from it as being able to connect with you as somebody who I guess intersected with. What I was trying to do with Shane in trying to critique certain, forms of Christian nationalism in Jesus for president.
Logan M. Isaac: Dawn on me.
I should have mentioned this earlier, but that's definitely in the water, in the Kool-Aid with this chapter on Moses and Levitical sacrifice and God as a grunt. You wrote, co-wrote Jesus for President with Shane, and you wrote a little bit about me in there, but one of the things that stuck out with me is some of the stuff.
That you guys did with John Dominic Crossin and using some of the historical Jesus stuff. And then what I really loved, actually, instead of the bibliography, you just did the spines. I love, like there's this Peter Morin quote that I've been rolling around in my head. The scholars must become workers so that the workers may become [00:08:00] scholars.
And I love that Jesus for President was highly visual and critiqued a lot of things that needed to be critiquing. But also I took some liberties with, an academic. Not, maybe not a pedigree, but certainly academic credentials or like standards, but bringing it to as many people as possible.
Chris Haw: Yeah. Yeah. Anytime it, that book would be put into an academic setting, I would start to get a little bit read in the face and a bit shy, partly because I wrote that even before. Doing a master's work. Yeah. Yeah. And then PhD work such that at this point, we could maybe go through with the fine tooth comb, but I don't have any massive total embarrassments.
But my sort of, I've grown a lot since then. And yeah, I don't to my knowledge take anything back. But I was happy that we were trying to do something that. Was unique, visual and trying to digest for a popular audience. Some of [00:09:00] what was going on in, in the theology of whether it was Yoder or Hwas or Gerhard Lo or some others to, yeah, respond to the Christian nationalism that has only since then taken on a, a,
Logan M. Isaac: yeah,
Chris Haw: tense fermentation.
Logan M. Isaac: Yeah. Yeah. Really briefly, I, and I don't think I'll remember this, but I also wrote about it and reborn the 4th of July, I was on leave from active duty and I was in a bitter fight with my command to let me take leave. So I went to DC where Sojourner interviewed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and it must have been oh six, like the early campaign.
And I think I spoke with Clinton at some Anyway, so then I. Drove down to Tennessee and I didn't have a tent, so I just set up my, I set in the military, we call him hooch. I took my camouflage poncho against the fence. I slept under there. Nice. With just like an open tent. Yeah. It wasn't muddy, but it was [00:10:00] dirty.
Yeah. I think Jesus for president, set the stage for me also, not only to make sure that I evangelicals taken on such a difficult. Tone, especially with Christian nationalism. And yet I can't quite drop it. But it definitely made me think outside the box in terms of what it was that I received and who from, and like what.
What were they saying and why? Yeah. And so Grunt Works I think really takes that stance and is really inspired by a lot of that stuff as well. The second big influence for me was Christian's Catholic Social teaching. And you wrote from Willow Creek to Sacred Heart. What was the subject?
Or the subtitle on, I forget the subtitle.
Chris Haw: That's funny because I hate the subtitle. It's title we can move on. Rekindle Rekindling My Love for Catholicism. And I asked them, wouldn't you mind adjusting that? 'cause that's not I don't have some sort of Thomas [00:11:00] Kincaid type love for the Catholic Church in the sense of that.
It's, I have that sort of. Converts type affection for the Catholic church. Yeah.
Neophytes. Yeah.
Chris Haw: I start a little bit more with that sort of cranky tone of voice that Tony Campolo would quote from St. Augustine. The church is a whore, but she's my mother. A lot more of a sort of.
Grinding difficult challenge of what it means to be part of terrible organizations, like that's even one of the chapter titles. But, they I think, wanted to fight for that subtitle because I think they thought maybe a few more folks from like the Catholic Convert world would be drawn to it.
But I walked in through the left wing of the Catholic church, when it came to like Vietnam protestors and stuff like that. Yeah. Who shaped me a bit and I've been touring the Catholic facility ever since and it's, let's just say it's a big tent.
Logan M. Isaac: Yeah. I was [00:12:00] actually, catholicism and the structuralization of religion and faith is something that I'm still I'm still very much on the fence with I was confirmed the Episcopal Church and the hospitality of St. Martin is within the Episcopal tradition. But I have this I maybe even have a more cynical one-liner 'cause I, that quote from Augusta and I thought of frequently, but.
I often feel as though the church is a dumpster fire, but I've got friends trapped inside and so I can't pull away, not because I don't want to, but because there's something that draws me to keep. A foot in a toe in or something and call it a savior complex or whatever. But maybe we should use this as a segue to begin speaking about Moses and the Levitical system, or mostly the Levitical system.
Chris, you are a Ardian scholar and you have a Cambridge book on monotheism out. But one of the reasons I thought about you with Levitical sacrifice and the [00:13:00] sacrificial lamb and. What Passover is doing from a or at a human scale. Certainly it's the Hebrew scriptures version of a kind of a set of rituals that, and correct me if I'm wrong or feel free to stop me, but that people need ritual.
This is the Hebrew ritual that absolved mistakes or re what is the Passover or the Levitical system doing in a gian sense from a human perspective?
Chris Haw: Huge, an amazing question, and I like it. I too will have to be corrected or I'm quite aware of that. The deeper and deeper I get into scholarship, the tighter and more expansive the knots can feel.
So there are many ways by which the Old Testament or Torah sacrifice systems that you see in Leviticus or Numbers and Deuteronomy. There are many ways that they resemble the ancient [00:14:00] world. There are tons of societies that practice different kinds of human and animal sacrifice. Notably. Genesis, I think it's 22, with the binding of Isaac sort of gestures at a turning point you might say, away from human sacrifice towards replacing it with an animal.
Some scholars think that, earlier versions of that text were quite much more simple. God asks for his son and then he sacrifices his son. So there are ways in which the Levitical system can be seen as similar to any of the other ancient emulation systems, and a dardan looks at sacrifice as a way of containing violence in the double sense of the word. So when if you say something [00:15:00] contains violence, it. Has or entails violence, but it also restrains and holds back violence.
And the ardian theory of human evolution is that humans evolved from a. What used to be much earlier than homo sapiens, but even before, several other species within Homo that we used to live according to the ways that many other animals used to live, which is dominance patterns containing violence.
So dominance patterns are also called like pecking orders. Or if I. Get into a fight with another ox or another goat. A lot of animals might escalate a little bit, but at some point, most of the other animal species, something will back down. The beta will back down and the alpha will win, [00:16:00] or their rolls may get reversed.
And we call that dominance patterns because they are moments in which dominance checks or holds back. Violence from erupting into, damaging the species such that it would start, maybe going extinct. So there are other things in a species that might hold back its violence greeting rituals or grooming rituals like among our primate cousins.
But with us, we are evidently way too imitative. To be held back by dominance patterns. So if I hit you and you are an imitative creature. We have a lot more likelihood for you to imitate the hit back and for us to turn the other cheek
escalate.
Chris Haw: Yeah. Yeah. We aren't too inclined to just hold to [00:17:00] dominance and submission patterns.
We're much more inclined to mirror one another. Is that,
Logan M. Isaac: sorry, I have in mind. Like a system of nesting dolls, but instead of trying to become the bigger one, I wonder if maybe we should wait until the Christianity element comes in. But I'm wondering in terms of like nesting dolls, is it that is what makes humans distinct that we refuse to submit to our ourselves.
Chris Haw: Let's put a pin in that. That's an interesting question.
Logan M. Isaac: Sorry, I didnt mean to derail you as
Chris Haw: No. It's 'cause these are questions about what exactly we are as humans. And for anybody who thinks a lot about evolution, and I actually do, is that what humans are moldable, they're plastic.
And we have changed over time such that. It appears that humans killed our way out of alpha male patterns. And out of submission [00:18:00] patterns this is the theory of Richard ran them. This will relate back to Mimetic theory, but Richard ran them is a Cambridge and Harvard primatologist who suggests that our species domesticated itself and shaped itself.
Yeah, by killing off the most dominant alpha male type figures like the hotheads and the assholes we killed those off and it put a selective pressure on our species and it domesticated us such that we have less reactive aggression than let's say any of our primate cousins. But we're better at Cary murdering.
In other words, we're better at creating a coalition to stamp down any hotheads or alphas because we as a society homo sapiens for our larger scope of [00:19:00] history have policed against any big alphas that are going to break the. Some anthropologists call it aggressive egalitarianism, like policed egalitarianism, where we won't handle shit from anybody.
And kind of the most famous example of this is called insulting the meat, where when groups go out to go hunt, somebody inevitably comes back and they say, I hit a, I might have hit a deer down by the river. They don't start. If they don't dare start bragging, but they just say, I might have nicked one.
Then everybody knows to go and get the deer, drag it back. But then when you start cooking it up, you start insulting it, saying. Oh my gosh, this is such a tiny deer. Even if it's big or you say, ah, this tastes like shit. Even if it's perfectly fine meat, what are you doing? This is a practice at, in so many [00:20:00] tribes of making sure nobody gets a big head and brings us out of balance.
We need to have a balanced, egalitarian structure and fuck the hotheads kind of stuff. So we have a sort of containment of violence in that kind of aggressive egalitarianism, but Gerard suggests that the more and more we became. More and more imitative compared to other species. That also made us more and more inclined to escalate, like I said, so when you hit, I hit back, we're prone to that escalation.
And his suggestion is that for societies that stumbled into the behavior of everybody imitating a killing of a third party, that those societies basically. Birthed a, you might say like a [00:21:00] safety valve or a lightning rod such that everybody's
Yeah.
Chris Haw: Memetic attention can, we can all imitate one another's hits upon a scapegoat on a third party.
Chimpanzees do this a little bit in groups of more than 18 individuals and. But they do it like randomly. Gerard suggests that groups that started to habituate this and stumbled into repeating these sort of. Killings of a third party and maybe even those that sort of redirected it onto animals like you see in chattel Ook 10,000 years ago, where everybody's beating up on an animal with their special cheetah sort of loin cloths on.
Those are what Gerard regards as the birth of sacrifice, and these are. Naturally selected because they actually serve our fitness, [00:22:00] they collective fitness structure. Yeah, our collective fitness such that, it's, it hurts the person who is killed, but it provides. A way that we can keep getting these bigger brains and bigger esis.
Part of the bigger brain comes from the fact that we started wielding fire a long time ago, which gave us this massive uptake in calories such that we could grow these big ass brains that sort of stress our birth canals, but that imitation ballooning and ballooning. It destroyed dominance patterns. We weren't going to suffer any dominant submission anymore.
And Gerard suggests that sacrifice is one of the things that made up for. Containment of violence. So sorry, that was like a five or 10 minute. No, that's great. I through, as you look at the Levitical sacrifice and say it shares [00:23:00] something in common with all societies that are doing that outsourcing work of containing violence.
Logan M. Isaac: Yeah. Some of the implications that I think we can talk about more in depth in the sec in the next part and. Let me, I'll state what might be implications and we can pick it up after the break. In general esp and if we agree that we have derive from primates. Primates are pack animals, but they have this alpha system and a lot of animals do.
And I want to, if I'm, let me know before we leave, if I've got it more or less Correct. Before we get into implications and if what you're saying is right and if I was listening, effectively or effectively what socially is happening is we are tamping down the centralization of violence in the alpha male system.
It's particularly at, if that's true, what Torah or yeah. We'll just stick with Moses and the Levitical system. One thing that it accomplished by [00:24:00] being we turn the attention to it, but also like we're turning our attention to the victim rather than the perpetrator. And the perpetrator and the perpetration is dissolved amongst the many instead of being conducted, inflicted by the one who then sits on the top of the throne. Let's talk later, assuming I'm more or less right. What that does with social groups and the patriarchy. Like it seems as though. Drawing from what you've said that you could make the argument that the anthropological or the social thing that the Levitical system in particular seems to do is to attract attention to the victim explicitly.
It's about the goats or the lambs or whatever. It's not about Moses, it's not about the high priest. We, all of us are the perpetrator and therefore are. Lowering the particularly androcentric kind of temperature on violence. If that's more or less right, let [00:25:00] me know and we'll go to break.
If not, then feel free to correct me.
Chris Haw: Yeah. It's interesting that the Bible sort of straddles. Some different structures. Yeah. One is a tribal structure where a lot of rituals need to be unanimous in which everybody participates in a ritual, often in a tribal setting, it doesn't even necessarily have to become temple based or sedentary.
But they can be a group where everybody is somehow engaged in the emulation ritual. Of, of killing either a human or an animal. Now, Gerard refers to those societies as when they're practicing sacrifice. It is very often what we would call like indirect and preventative. And it's a bit vague. And so what he means by that is in contrast to societies that have. [00:26:00] Laws and judiciaries.
Logan M. Isaac: Oh, ah, yeah. And
Chris Haw: what they do is they do very precise and reactionary violence. Instead of it being like with sacrifice, it's more, again, preventative in general.
With judiciaries, you transform into societies that still might practice the all against one mechanism in it. Let's say in the courtroom where everyone decides who is guilty, it is meant to be very precise. You definitely have to kill the killer, but it's being done through the monopoly of violence that the state and the judiciary wield.
That's different than a tribe where the tribe, everyone tends to be the police. Now, there might be a council of elders. There might be the tyranny of cousins, as anthropologists call it but the reason, at least one of the reasons you induct [00:27:00] young men by putting ant gloves on them or making them nearly fall off a cliff, or you send them out into the wilderness to possibly die.
Literally. Yeah. Is because they are entering the protective ring of fire that guards and protects the community as a, it contains violence and everyone is the police, everyone is, yeah, the military, so to speak. But with societies jumping over to sedentary, larger societies, the ring of fire becomes bigger.
And you start to outsource who does what with violence. And so that's where you do have soldiers and militaries and maybe specialist priests who Yeah. Yeah. They enact specialist sort of rituals of ation, unlike the tribe where maybe everybody is present for a ritual. These are ideal types in the sociological sense that there can be fuzzy differences between these.
And it [00:28:00] seems the Bible kind of at times lives in different worlds. It eventually centralizes sacrifice around a temple. It centralizes a military. Both of these are two different layers of containing violence.
Yeah.
Logan M. Isaac: One of, I think it's the next chapter after this is gonna be on Joshua and I pick up on the Shemar and Abed, which is Serve and Protect, which becomes this thing for police officers. And what you were saying earlier about the Ring of Fire actually thought of wait. So you know, zooming out, let's say the Hebrew scriptures in general is trying to break down the centralized hierarchical structures that sedentary communities are particularly.
Inclined toward, and yet once we get big enough, you have to recreate that hierarchy. And they do. Yeah.
Yeah.
Logan M. Isaac: So what, and keeping in mind, and I think one of the things [00:29:00] that I want to push back in general is the idea that mil I like to use the word military. Etymologically. With etymological coherence, like when we say milli, it means a thousand. It goes back all to the way to Milita in Latin, and it's as much about order and structure and rank and file as it is about. Containing violence with violence.
And so I want to, I want, I would love for civilians to think of when we say the military, not just the armed forces, but the police and municipalities the sheriffs. What does that look like that we've now got, for whatever reason I have this. Image of a bagel. There's some, there's a central point with a king, and we try and dissolve that, but we always come back to how do we essentially, in our worst moments, like maybe now we seem to just have this habit or desire to have centralized power.
And that's also in the Bible like Samuel and it's prefigured in Bim in judges [00:30:00] nine where we don't want to, we don't want. To have chaotic intertribal conflict. We want a king so that we can be like everybody else stable. Like when I was in Iraq, as shitty as it was to hear, like I heard it from my platoon interpreter that under Saddam it was more predictable.
You felt more secure because you knew who you didn't have to piss off. Yeah. But then once America comes in and dissolves its military. Now that's, it's right back to the tribal tyranny of cousins, you called it.
Yeah. And
Logan M. Isaac: like the Sadr militia in Najaf in mid to late oh four. It's like we create, there was a point that we're trying to pull down and we're trying to federate the containment of violence.
And
Logan M. Isaac: one of the things that I don't get into in the book, but that I'm starting to think about now is the. Stratification, social stratification, how the Bible, the Hebrew scriptures in particular, deal with that. [00:31:00] And the priests could be this pyramid of power. The king could be this pyramid of power.
But what I see, one of the recurring cyclical themes is like not tearing down the king, but what does it mean to focus on the victim? It also means those who have been socially victimized, the widows, the orphans, those who have no place to lay their head, leave the edges of your crops for them.
Yeah. And so this, like Shane used to talk about the layers of the onion and what if or I imagine, or I think one of the things that your work encounters is in social sciences is like, what is it that we're doing and is there a way to do it justly and. Coherently over time.
Yeah.
Chris Haw: That earlier I talked about
Logan M. Isaac: these nesting dolls.
Chris Haw: Yeah.
Logan M. Isaac: What if scripture is saying well be a small doll? Be the underdog. And that means sometimes you'll get slapped in the face. The underdog is the non-dominant one, but they're getting fucked.
Symbolically, [00:32:00] but what does it mean that we have a Christ or a, an anointed one that is both, Cyrus the elder was named the anointed, and then also this guy who we call Jesus.
But if we, if there's a direct translation, it's If's Joshua. And what do we do with we, we don't want to look I'm rambling now, but I wonder what you have to say about some of that. Yeah. I love you draw out some of these really important points that I think I never got in church. If we don't understand ourselves as like a ref, a referent object, if we can't look at our own society and culture from the outside, are we not just drinking the Kool-Aid?
So I, it's always really refreshing down these conversations, but I gotta make sure you're my guest and I've got at least two or three listeners that might be interested in what you have to say.
Chris Haw: You've got your mind a little bit on Kings and I want to talk a bit about that, especially given that we're evidently [00:33:00] a species that is averse to Alphas. What the hell? How did we end up with alphas and get kings? And here's where Gerard and are very interesting. Gerard suggests that we didn't.
Invent or choose to have kings at its deepest root. We had human sacrifices that turned into celebrities. Now, let me give you an example of this. There is an ethnography that Girard sites from Rwanda in which. A king is going to be publicly renewed in his kingship, and what he must first do is eat disgusting foods.
Second, he must commit incest with his sister, and then as he comes out of the incestual tent, he is then brought to a nearby bowl. And mounts the bowl. They slaughter the bowl and pour all of [00:34:00] the blood on this to be king.
Now this is weird. Gerard says, insulting
Logan M. Isaac: the meat.
Chris Haw: That's, no, that's something different here.
This is Girard says, probably older versions of this ritual were quite simple. You are attaching guilt. Disgustingness and incest. Yeah. Feeling upon somebody who is going to deserve to die. And so probably earlier iterations of that would've been, force them to eat the food, force them to commit incest, and then you kill the king.
But Gerard suggests that the time between when. People were consecrated to be mated and the time of the actual emulation that those eventually grew over time, because as those figures hang around, people might throw their feces at them. They might make fun of them. They might also treat them as dazzling, intriguing, [00:35:00] magical figures who.
Because they're going to be sacrificed. They're numinous and weird
Logan M. Isaac: walking train wrecks.
Chris Haw: Yeah, they're walking train wrecks. Yeah. And so eventually these figures, they have all of this scapegoat energy coming at them, but it's possible for that energy to start treating them as majestic.
Interesting. And they eventually start replacing their emulation with someone else's, like maybe a bowls or maybe another humans. In Marshall So's last book he talked about a ton of these kinds of rituals, and this was also David Grabber the late David Grabber, a great, historian and many other theorists, they talk about how there are indeed some forms of kin kinship, which the day of their inauguration, they kill them and they reign as [00:36:00] ghosts.
So Gerard suggests what's happening underneath all of these mechanics is not that people suddenly started to become political and chose to have kings. It's that their scapegoats eventually transformed into figures who reign against the horizon of their future emulation.
So another figure that talks about this is Simon Simone, amazing name anthropologist in Kenya who says, look at a ton of these tribes that I look at their ethnographies, and when those tribes are at war with one another, other, their king figures aren't that important because they're all busy fighting with one another.
Yeah.
But
Chris Haw: if peace breaks out. Look at what's going inside the tribes. What's going on inside them is that they will start to get this sort of. Gnarly attention around [00:37:00] these kings and say, Hey, if there's a drought, you better figure out if it was your sins. And if it was we might have to kill you.
Or if you can't find the sins, then you have to find them upon your father. And so these are occasions in which. Kings seem to come not so much from social contract, jurisprudence or people inventing politics, but it is the scapegoat mechanism that takes a different form. Wolfgang Ver pointed this out even in our United States context, when Alexander Hamilton was thinking about, should we have something like a king and.
Hamilton was like, I know we are trying to get rid of the whole king thing, but when something goes wrong, we need one person to blame. Yeah. And that was his reason for [00:38:00] having the executive. He probably has some other reasons layered in, but he's talking about that. Lemme
Logan M. Isaac: stop you.
Chris Haw: Yeah.
Logan M. Isaac: I want to go straight from there.
Chris Haw: Yeah.
Logan M. Isaac: To American soldiers and Veterans with last five, 10 minutes. Sure. 'cause I think we've had this big academic conversation.
Yeah.
Logan M. Isaac: And a lot of my listeners will be able to follow about 5% of it. I followed maybe 15.
Okay.
Logan M. Isaac: But think about that for a moment. We are in a society and I'm, I know you've been following my work, but I'm able to do this stuff because I spent a lot of time fighting for civil rights and pointing out like the kings the idols of our hearts.
According to Mark Twain, the soldiers they don't actually have the thing that we all, that their service secures civil rights. My listeners will already be well familiar with gi justice.com. But it seems as though let's walk through briefly what that, what might be going on that are kings if we're playing at the idea that we [00:39:00] have federated responsibility, federated guilt.
But the kings we just can't look away from that train wreck. We can't look away from two failed wars. And Vietnam, when they came home they spit on 'em. And I have an article about how they really did. And then there's a veteran, an anti-war veteran, Jerry Lemke who wanted, who did make the argument that no, it's all just, it all lives in mythological fantasy.
It happened once or twice in. That everybody else is lying.
And so we're walking, the thank you for your service, in my mind has been this pendulum swing. And that's why I named the, this chapter T-Y-F-Y-S. It's, thank you for your services. So overdone, the words have lost their meaning. I think at the va they're required to say it or they get dinged on their like performance evaluations.
Chris Haw: Yeah.
Logan M. Isaac: But I think what you said. I want to hear your, I wanna hear civilian's perspective, like we need someone to blame. It wasn't us Americans, it was you [00:40:00] veterans. It was you, Vietnam, it was you, Iraq. What does that mean as a civilian, what does it mean if the, if all that's true, like how do we come out of this cycle?
I don't know why I think of it as the donut, but I can't get my mind around like. We are trying to get rid of kings, we're trying to get rid of alphas, and yet we create them. There's 2.1 million active duty service members in total force. Whatever it is, the 6% are veterans or something.
Maybe we're just like widening that shitty pyramid where like the kings are fewer and farther between, but they still serve. Do they still serve a similar function? Does that parallel? Why or why not do you think?
Chris Haw: Yeah, you might think in terms of our lightning rods aren't really working anymore.
They're not we aren't able to [00:41:00] figure out. A stable location for where we can put all of our violence and where like part of Gerard's point is not that like societies that practice human or animal sacrifice, were somehow maniacally evil. Like they somehow just were belligerent or violent.
He said all of. Ancient religion is trying to get rid of our violence. It's trying to push it out and trying to purify ourselves of violence in a way. Now, I think one of the things that's interesting is that those who are at that site of violence, we usually need some way to clean it up and make it make sense.
Like I said, with that one Rwandan King who has to be, you have to get blame attached to him to make sure that he, deserves the sacrifice that's going on, which is, he's [00:42:00] guilty.
Yeah.
Chris Haw: Other Executioners used to have. Their heads covered because as containers of violence, they are right there at ground zero.
They're interacting with it.
Yeah.
Chris Haw: And then you know, Michel Foucalt and GK Chesterton both pointed out to me in different ways that something really happened. Very seriously when we stopped performing violence in public like executing people in public. Yeah. And we made it secret. Yeah. And part of that is that even though if there's, a few million people in the armed services, they're on that ring of fire that a lot of people are getting further and further alienated from the, those who.
Touch, violence, those who touch the fire, so to speak. And a massive critique of the entire liberal worldview is that it is out of touch with violence containment. [00:43:00] It is out of touch with those who have touched the fire of violence, whether as an executioner or as a soldier. And I don't know.
I think there's something going on right now where. People want to always say, other people are the scapegoats. They want to make sure that they say whoever is handling violence, like that's other people and so we are alienated to it. That's at least some of the spirit of the spitting on the soldier.
Yeah. Yeah. Kind of sentiment. Look
Logan M. Isaac: at how nonviolent I am. Yeah.
Chris Haw: And then that just starts to become a really ironic form of. In trying to pure ourselves of violence we become scapegoats.
Logan M. Isaac: Yeah. It brings to mind the, like the crowd with Jesus, everybody's there yelling crucifying when I listen to this Orange County Supertone song, and it reminds me like, if you don't think you're in the crowd, [00:44:00] fine, you're outta the crowd, but you're not in touch with the violence that you're benefiting from.
My last question. And if you don't have an answer, that's fine, but one of the things that we've been asking each other for probably is when we met in oh six, is does Christianity or what we think Christianity has to offer, what do we call that expectation of non-violence? Like I've begun talking about toxic pacifism where it's like certain.
I'll say certain, yeah, they're usually progressives who have a lot of disdain for violence. I'll just say. In general, I'm not a pacifist in the way that I've seen it used. Because a lot of pacifists who wear that badge so proudly are very happy leaving soldiers and veterans on the street to Jericho.
Is there a middle ground between Yoder and neighbor, or is neighbor the middle ground? Like where are you at generally in that question of what do we do with our own [00:45:00] expectation of violence and what, how close are we willing to come or are we expected to come to that ring of violence?
Chris Haw: That's, that is really tricky. I don't wanna hide behind Gerard, but it's helpful for me to even mention him as helping lay out. What I see as at stake is Gerard, early in his career, had this sort of theory of sacrifice and violence and he pushed back hard from it and said, obviously looking at Christianity, it is entirely anti sacrificial.
It is a total devotion to nonviolence in this. He was slightly resembling a little bit of the pythagoreans and the orphans who were people who in the ancient world looked at sacrifice and said, screw all of that. It's like bloody, it's violent and you should have nothing to do with it. And Gerard, early in his career said, I think like we should maybe throw out the book of Hebrews because gosh, like it's using all of like [00:46:00] the violent, notions of sacrifice and like applying it to Jesus.
So that starts out as a anti sacrificial view. But Gerard matures over time. He doesn't abandon all of that earlier stuff because some of that earlier stuff, it has a mind of the dove. It has a mind of. Taking Jesus seriously when he says, do not resist an evil doer. Love your enemy. You have to.
You have to engage that way of thinking, especially when sacrifice is no longer working. We have to learn how to reconcile. But as he matured his thought, he came to say that if you're going to renounce sacrifice. That means you're going to have to engage in self-sacrifice. You're going to have to be prepared for, sacrifice to come back on you.
Yeah, that's [00:47:00] the language of Dr. King or Gandhi, which is. To get rid of sacrifice. You can't just get rid of it. You have to take on a new form of sacrifice, a preparedness for self-sacrifice. And now as Gerard talked about that he still maintained some strong tones of non-violence and pacifism, but in some occasions in his work, he recognized that there is no easy answer to this.
And we do have to engage in, I. Let's say the political or juridical forms of containing or restraining violence perhaps through Yeah, law or military action. Now, is he talking outta both sides of his mouth? But he's taking advantage of the full breadth of his mouth. I think also
Logan M. Isaac: one of the things that I am.
That I'm, I think I wanna push also in general is like sacrifice is, we're talking about symbols. Sacrifice is not all death. [00:48:00] There is one of my frustrations with some of the folks that I've run with is no amount of sacrifice is acceptable. No sacrifice of my privilege and power. No sacrifice of my way of life.
And so that's a certain amount of recalcitrants that, sure nobody's dying, but. If you follow the logical kind of steps, like you're either forcing someone else to do violence so that you can have freedom and you don't have to answer for it. Yeah. Or you want to do violence because you don't think you're free, like the January 6th MAGA movement.
Like you're willing to do some things, but putting it on the other, and that's, I dunno, that's how I think of the, like this weird cycle we're in of I think. One of my favorite speeches was Obama's second inaugural, where he talked about personal responsibility and hessel. Abraham Hessel is like in a democracy.
Some are guilty, but all are responsible. And so when we talk about sacrifice, I wanna make sure that we're not all just talking about symbols, the symbolic death, but okay, what is [00:49:00] symbolic death? Giving up a little bit of what you have, so that. The thing that has value is distributed more justly.
Yeah. But I also noticed you didn't answer the question and maybe I didn't ask it as strongly. Yeah. Do you still consider yourself a capital P pacifist or is there somewhere where do you land in that very typical, very boring and binary option? Yeah, what is your answer if when someone does ask?
Chris Haw: Nobody asks it in a sort of on or off way of me, oh, maybe we should. Which is nice. I'm, it echoes in my mind sometimes when h was said, I call myself a pacifist so that other people will keep me from killing other people. I've come to identify with that a lot because I spend a lot of time going into prisons.
I run a college and prison program and I, I don't bother looking up all of their everybody's sentences or convictions, but a lot of them are, have killed [00:50:00] people and I just feel so. Not alien to them. I feel like a murderer myself. I just haven't had a lot of opportunities. So one of the reasons that I'm engaged in the pacifism conversation is to almost step outside myself and tell myself who I need to be because I am so violent in myself.
But more deeply like the question of the use of let's say military force. I've come to realize that the opposing pacifism to just war, for example, isn't too helpful or useful. Because like in the wake of the October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel's response, it would be.
Extra useless to shout pacifism at them. Yeah. And it would be only moderately useless to shout. Just war at them. Yeah. Because just war would be one way [00:51:00] to restrain and give reasons for what they're doing is out of their minds. A, but B, actually worsening the violence. Yeah. Like Israel right now is like conducting, as I see it, a.
Hamas recruitment campaign. Because they've killed what now? 40, 50,000? Yeah, it's absolutely
Logan M. Isaac: disproportionate. Yeah.
Chris Haw: So if they were engaged in more like critical subordination to just war criteria of proportionality, no targeting of civilians, yeah. That would be a form of. You don't even need to get constrained pacifism.
You need to talk about what does it mean to do this smart and not literally worsen our situation. So I do think it is very reasonable to talk about, restraining, modifying or qualifying what it means to use responsibly the democracy into which we were [00:52:00] born on, like the military front. And I also think we have to use our language of violence or conflict even a little bit more about what it means to engage in democracy.
To engage in democracy politics.
Yeah.
Chris Haw: Is, yeah, to engage in politics is to engage in. Muted conflict. It is to engage in, not antagonism, but agonism. It is a low grade form of conflict without. Explicit violence. And I see that as very important right now because there are a lot of folks who look at that conflict and they wanna do the deep down scapegoating thing, which is they see some fine people on both sides or Yeah.
Or bad. Or bad people on both sides. Yeah. And they say. Democrats are Republicans. They're all terrible, or every form of media is terrible. And then what they do is they then step back from that feeling that they've [00:53:00] purified themselves of the conflict and then being neutral, heavy air quotes on neutral.
Yeah.
Logan M. Isaac: And
Chris Haw: you are not being, they're
Logan M. Isaac: not the anti priests.
Chris Haw: And they're their own
Logan M. Isaac: priest. They're their own judge.
Chris Haw: They're their own judge. And I do think we need to, in a way. Very carefully with a Christian spirit. Sometimes take sides. Yeah. Not just on conflicts with, let's say maybe arming Ukraine, but even in our own sides by saying, in my case, I would say, I think the Democrats are really not great, but I would be prepared to pull on the tug of war.
Right now for the sake of what I see as constitutional principles. Yeah. Even if they're not perfect. So what I'm aiming at here is a sad dirtiness of engagement. And instead of,
Logan M. Isaac: so you're neighbor,
Chris Haw: I'm a little closer to neighbor than Jesus for President and I'm elated [00:54:00] that Jesus for President never.
Said, don't vote because it'll dirty you.
Yeah.
Chris Haw: It got close. But we shouldn't go there. We should say to be a pure person, to be holy does mean to get involved.
Yeah.
Chris Haw: Now how to do it and how to do it you, that's where the spirit of Christ needs to come into us. But I don't. Think the sort of purification mode where we neighbor, it's self purification self.
Sure, yeah. Yeah. That I just, yeah, I don't like it. I don't like how it's really an antagonism that's under the guise of peaceable,
Logan M. Isaac: with that, yeah. Chris, I really appreciate the time you took. There's a bunch of books I'm gonna run 'em by on the screen, but I can't remember all of them. Yeah, we go way back and I really appreciate you being on, and thanks for your friendship and yeah, you're always a pleasure to chat with.
Chris Haw: It's been a delight. Thank you.
