Category Archives: religion

by | 14 June 2005 · 4:56 am

Sultanical Reforms in Brunei?

Macam-macam reports on the latest cabinet reshuffle by the Sultan of Brunei (whose Silver Jubilee mug I proudly possess).

Two of the most striking changes included the appointment of the first non-Muslim ever to the Cabinet:

Lim Jock Seng, an ethnic Chinese, was made foreign minister 2, a post higher than deputy foreign minister, but one step below Foreign Minister Prince Mohamed Bolkiah, the sultan’s brother.

and the removal of long-time Education Minister Abdul Aziz, reviled as one of the most pro-Muslim and anti-everyone else members of the Sultan’s government.

This highlights one problem of nepotism-ridden bureaucracies: You need twice as positions, one to do the real work, the other to enjoy the title and ensure political reliability–or your customer base, in the case of a Chinese community bank I used to work for. Unrelated immigrants from China, Korea, the Philippines, and other states of the U.S. did a lot of the back office technical work, each carrying at least half the weight of a nonproductive relative of the owners who interfaced with the old-time customers. The CEO and principal shareholder, who was reputed to favor unrelated employees, but couldn’t bring himself to fire the deadwood, eventually sold the bank in frustration.

The Brunei reshuffle reminds me of a linguistic treatise I read a decade or so ago about the proliferation of “speech levels” in the bureaucratic Malay of the Sultan’s palace. Brunei’s Palace Malay has a far richer treasury of words used to exalt one’s superior and debase oneself than any other Malay dialect. (It almost equals Javanese.) And that vocabulary has expanded just as fast as the Sultan’s well-paid bureacracy has expanded during the Sultanate’s oil boom. It’s as if the U.S. government were to issue guidelines for how a GS-8 is to address a GS-12, and vice versa, and so on up the bureaucratic ranks.

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by | 12 June 2005 · 9:01 am

Richard Rodriguez on the Protestantization of Latin America

Richard Rodriguez has some interesting observations in an old interview for Reason magazine about the attraction of Protestantism for Latin Americans.

Reason: What do you think about the attraction of Latin Americans. both here and in Latin America, to evangelical Protestantism?

Rodriguez: Catholicism is a religion that stresses to you constantly that you can’t make it on your own, that you need the intercession of the Virgin Mary, and the saints, St. Jude, and your grandmother–candles and rosaries and indulgences and the pope. There are all these intermediaries, because you facing God would be hopeless.

Suddenly, into the village comes this assurance that you don’t need padrecito. You can read the bible yourself–you don’t need someone to tell you what it says. You don’t need the Virgin Mary, you don’t need the saints, you don’t need anybody. God is speaking to you. And just because your father beat your mother, just because your grandfather was poor, doesn’t mean it has to happen to you. You can change your whole life around. This is all based on the Easter promise and not, as the Catholic church has always based it, on some Good Friday suffering.

Reason: Protestants always have empty crosses.

Rodriguez: It is an enormously powerful motif, the notion that Christ just got off the cross and walked away somewhere–went off to L.A.–and you could do it too. I think Protestantism is most successful in those cases where people are beginning to taste and sense discontinuity. And they begin to make sense out of it as providential. Protestantism also establishes, in a time of social change, the memory of the village. Within the storefront church, you can hold hands and remember what it was like in another time.

It will be one of the great changes of Latin America, the Protestantization of Latin America, and I think in some way that it will change the United States. The relationship of the evangelicals in places like Texas where there are rednecks and Mexicans together is really very interesting. The new Mexican who is now appearing in places like police departments–this is a new face of Latin America, and it is not necessarily one that we want.

Reason: How so?

Rodriguez: I think there has always been a charm to Latin America as being sort of morally lazy. We’ve always used it as a place where we could go to after dark and do whatever we wanted that we couldn’t do here. We never really expected that Latin America was going to become a moral Clorox for our society, and maybe there’s a ferocity there that we don’t expect.

Reason: Aside from the desire to have this Latin America of easy virtue, are there bad consequences to that?

Rodriguez: How shall I put this? Mexican cops have never been cops I like to deal with. And there can be this ferocity–you see it in New York now with a lot of Puerto Rican and Hispanic households, the ferocity against the gay movement, the Rainbow Curriculum, for example. I see myself as a homosexual man–much freer in America than in Latin America.

via Marc Cooper

While some Latin American evangelicals are migrating in, other homegrown evangelicals are seeking a way out. ChristianExodus.org is moving thousands of Christians to South Carolina to reestablish constitutionally limited government founded upon Christian principles. This includes the return to South Carolina of all “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States.”

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by | 5 June 2005 · 9:51 pm

J-School as Seminary, Reporters as Missionaries

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, who blogs on PressThink, offers an interesting essay, Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion, about journalism school as a seminary of sorts that churns out idealistic do-gooders who pretty much all share the same faith without realizing they belong to a minority faith that often differs radically from the faiths of their readers. (Also see Rosen’s earlier essay entitled Journalism Is Itself a Religion.)

I’m going to show you a passage where I think the religion of the newsroom appears in everyday life. It comes from a piece called The Useless Credential, which ran at testycopyeditors.org. The author, Darryl McGrath, graduated from the Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1986, the year I joined the faculty at NYU. She writes:

I would tell the dean that this business does not know what to do with career reporters, the people in their 40s who realized years ago they were never going to make it to the New York Times or win a Pulitzer, but nevertheless loved chasing stories and exposing public corruption and giving a voice to the downtrodden. (Yes, I’m still that idealistic.) We are the journalists who never wanted to move into the higher-paying jobs, like editing and management or newsroom Internet technology, because we absolutely loved being reporters. But as we got older, we realized that very few newspapers wanted to pay a salary that would allow us to continue doing what we do best: report. The journalism school did little to prepare me for this reality.

Which is a good point. Notice how McGrath said she still believed in the religion, despite salaries so pitiful they suggest employers do not. She said she “loved chasing stories and exposing public corruption and giving a voice to the downtrodden.” That’s the lord’s prayer in the mainline church of journalism right there. And I think it’s dead on too when she adds: “I’m still that idealistic.”

Deans of Journalism, scribble a note: Investigative reporting, exposing public corruption, and carrying the mantle of the downtrodden were taught to McGrath not as political acts in themselves–which they are–and not as a continuation of the progressive movement of the 1920s, in which the cleansing light of publicity was a weapon of reform–which they are–but just as a way of being idealistic, a non-political truthteller in the job of journalist. (Which is bunk.)

This kind of instruction is guaranteed to leave future journalists baffled by the culture wars, and in fact the press has been baffled to find that it has political opponents. Well, jeez louise, so did the progressives of the 1920s! As far as the religion knows, none of this is happening. And J-schools–by passing the faith along but making little room for non-believers–are part of the problem.

In the newsroom faith that I have been describing, Watergate is not just a big, big story with a knock-out ending. It is the great redemptive tale believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. It is a story of national salvation: truth their only weapon, journalists save the day. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers–and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism–is to my mind a big question. Whether it should continue is an even better question.

More so now that we know about W. Mark Felt. If Deep Throat was not Hal Holbrook but the number two guy at the FBI, was he Woodward’s source, or was Woodward really his agent? Now look at Epstein’s conclusion: “agencies of government itself…” were mainly responsible for getting the truth out about Watergate. Suppose he’s right, more or less. Admitting it would crash a big portion of the religion.

Missionaries, anthropologists, aid workers, peacekeepers, and other such outside agents also frequently end up being used in power plays by rival leaders in their target communities.

The whole essay is worth reading, along with the comments.

via Instapundit

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by | 30 May 2005 · 10:08 pm

Conscientious Objectors Who Earned Medals of Honor

At least two U.S. soldiers awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor have been conscientious objectors: Desmond T. Doss of Newport News, Virginia, during World War II; and Tom Bennett of Morgantown, West Virginia, during the Vietnam War. Both served as combat medics.

World War II

Desmond T. Doss seemed an unlikely candidate to become a war hero. As a devout member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, he would not drill or train on Saturday because his church recognizes it as their Sabbath Day. He would not carry a gun because he believed all killing was wrong. He wouldn’t even eat meat after seeing a chicken flopping around with its head cut off….

Prior to the time World War II had broken out Doss had been working as a joiner at a shipyard in Newport News, Virginia. This was considered an essential industry to the military so he had no worries of being drafted. He had begun dating Dorothy Schutte and they had fallen in love, but they decided that they should wait until after the war to get married. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he knew he would be drafted if he did not enlist, so that is exactly what he chose to do.

His minister went with him to establish his status as a non-combatant. The officer in charge told him there was no such thing, but that he could register as a conscientious objector. Doss said he wasn’t a conscientious objector because he would gladly serve his country, wear a uniform, salute the flag, and help with the war effort. He would gladly help tend sick or hurt people any day. Finally he was convinced to accept the 1-A-O Conscientious Objector classification, so he could join the army without fear of court martial….

On April 1, 1942 he was inducted into the U.S. Army and headed to Ft. Jackson in South Carolina for basic training…. 23-year-old Desmond Doss entered service as a medic for the 77th Infantry Division. From the beginning, the other men in his company made fun of Doss for his beliefs. Even though he worked long, hard hours to make up for not working on Saturday, the men cursed, ridiculed, and taunted him….

In July of 1944 on the island of Guam Doss began to prove his courage and compassion for the very men who had taunted, belittled, and even threatened him…. By now, his fellow soldiers were used to his reading the Bible and praying, so it didn’t seem unusual when, on that April 29th morning in 1945, he suggested that they might want to pray. They were facing a sheer 400-foot cliff that split the island of Okinawa known as the Maeda Escarpment….

However on May 5th the tide turned against the Americans as the Japanese launched a huge counterattack. Enemy fire raked Company B and almost immediately 75 men fell wounded. The remaining troops who were able to flee, retreated back down to the base of the escarpment. Left at the top of the cliff were the wounded, the Japanese, and Desmond T. Doss.

For the next five hours, while his wounded comrades fought back their attackers, Doss began to lower man after man to safety down the face of the cliff using little more than a tree stump and a rope. Doss said that he just kept praying that the Lord would let him rescue one more man. No one knows for sure how many men Doss lowered to safety that day. The Army determined that this medic, whom no one had wanted in the Army, had personally saved 100 lives….

On October 12, 1945, Desmond Doss was invited to the White House to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Harry S. Truman for his brave service on May 5, 1945 – the first noncombatant to ever receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. He would spend a total of six years in hospitals as a consequence of his wounds and a bout with tuberculosis…. Incidentally, May 5, 1945 was a Saturday, Doss’ Sabbath day.

Vietnam

The Vietnam War presented many young men with a moral dilemma as they became subject to the draft in the late 1960s. These were men whose deep-seated religious convictions held that killing was wrong, even in war. At the same time, a number of them also possessed a strong sense of patriotism and felt that service to one’s country was a vital duty. One youngster torn by those conflicting values was Thomas W. Bennett of Morgantown, West Virginia.

By Christmas 1967, Bennett was on academic probation at West Virginia University because of poor grades. He didn’t lack the mental acumen to do college-level work. Bennett earned high grades whenever he applied himself — but he applied himself more vigorously to extracurricular campus activities than to his classes…. His main focus was the Campus Ecumenical Council he’d helped found in his freshman year.

Tom Bennett saw himself as a moderator. Though raised as a Southern Baptist, he openly embraced the validity of all religions — hence his activities in the ecumenical council. He wanted devotees of different religions to share their similarities rather than face off over their differences. To learn more about different religions, he began attending services of different faiths, visiting some churches so often that parishioners thought he was one of them. Through these experiences his belief in the sanctity of human life solidified — a frequent theme when he preached at his own church….

But Bennett was torn by other allegiances. His stepfather, Kermit Gray, a World War II Navy veteran, had raised him to believe in patriotism and to be ready to fight for his country if necessary. By late 1967 a number of young Bennett’s friends had already entered the service…. Bennett reported for induction on July 11, 1968. Under the Army’s program, he and the other conscientious objectors would take their weaponless basic training at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, then attend the field medical school there. It was a perfect compromise for Bennett, the moderator….

On January 12 he learned he was going to the 4th Infantry Division in the Central Highlands. Ten days later he joined Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry, at FSB Charmayne, deep in the thick jungles of the Central Highlands….

On April 7, 1970, Tom Bennett’s 23rd birthday, President Richard M. Nixon presented his posthumous Medal of Honor to his mother and stepfather. When first notified of the award, Bennett’s mother had considered refusing it, her way of protesting the war and the senseless loss of her son. But then her husband spoke up, “No. It was the boys in his outfit that put him in for it. They wanted him to have it.”

Thus Thomas W. Bennett became the only conscientious objector to earn the Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War, and only the second in history to be so recognized. The first was Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist who was cited for his heroism on Okinawa in World War II.

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by | 3 May 2005 · 6:57 am

Evolution of a Fantasy-based Save-the-world Community

Aum is an extreme example of a religious movement that, operating from a position of righteousness, set out on a grand mission that reflected the ambitions and visions of its leader and that was affirmed and strengthened by the beliefs, actions and commitment of its followers. That mission, although it also began with a promise of universal salvation, had an innately polarising dimension in its conceptualisation of a sacred war between good and evil. In its rejection of the external realities and the materialist orientations of the everyday world Aum rapidly set itself apart, creating a spiritual hierarchy that claimed superiority over the world at large. Due to the continuing failures of its mission–or rather, in Aum’s terms, the refusal of the world to listen–its alienation from society increased, and as it did so, it constructed an alternative and self-directed view of morality. Its doctrines developed accordingly, sanctifying acts that were committed in order to protect the position and authority of its leader and to safeguard what it saw as its mission of truth. As it followed this path, Aum lost its grasp of external reality and turned inwards into a self-constructed world in which all who remained outside the movement were unworthy while those inside were transformed into sacred warriors who believed that they could kill with impunity and that in so doing, they could save in the spiritual sense those they killed.

The tragedy of Aum Shinrikyo is not just that its symbolic fight against evil and for world salvation was transformed into a real and brutal fight which resulted in indiscriminate murder, but that in claiming to operate on exalted spiritual ground beyond the boundaries of normal morality, it severed all links with the spiritual status to which it aspired. Asahara started with messages that resonated with the needs of many Japanese people and expressed ideas that have been at the heart of religions through the ages, such as the imbalances and problems of societies based on materialism and concepts of progress that fail to give due consideration to spiritual explanations and needs, and the affirmation of spiritual techniques and practices that can lead to happiness and liberation.

The tragedy and irony, of course, is that, in seeking to implement such messages, Asahara Shoko and his disciples–the buddhas and bodhisattvas with the mission to create a Buddhist new age of Lotus villages and a Shambala kingdom–betrayed every one of their ideals, killing not only those outside the movement who symbolised the corruption against which they fought, but their own devotees. In setting out with a mission to save the world from disaster, Aum ended up by killing the very people, such as Ochi Naoki [who died hanging upside down during religious training and was then incinerated], it needed in order to carry out its mission. The process through which it reached this position was centred around religious themes, doctrines and images, and was linked closely to its self-image as a religious movement with a sacred mission. As such Aum Shinrikyo provides us with a salient example of the violence-producing dimensions of religion and reminds us of how religious movements can, through a confluence of circumstances, engender, legitimate and commit acts of violence in the name of their faith.

SOURCE: Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo, by Ian Reader (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 248-249

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by | 26 April 2005 · 9:08 pm

Theocrats vs. Democrats in East Timor

Macam-Macam has been blogging up a storm on the less-covered regions of Southeast Asia: conflicts between the Catholic Church and democrats in East Timor, and more atrocities in Myanmar/Burma, and (most important of all) Southeast Asian Barbies.

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by | 17 April 2005 · 9:23 pm

Florida Church Excommunicates Schiavo Judge

The latest issue of The Christian Century reports that a Florida judge was asked to leave his Southern Baptist church over the Schiavo case.

Judge George Greer, a Florida county judge in the spotlight three times for ordering Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube removed, was advised by his Southern Baptist pastor to leave the congregation—despite the judge’s reputation as a conservative Republican and conservative Christian.

Greer, 63, a Pinellas County circuit judge based in Clearwater, also rejected an attempt by the U.S. House to subpoena the brain-damaged woman as a means to force reinsertion of her tube….

Calvary is regarded as one of the Florida (Southern) Baptist Convention’s most prominent conservative churches. According to the St. Petersburg Times, Greer became inactive in the congregation because of its free distribution to members of the Florida Baptist Witness, one of the denomination’s most conservative publications….

Mary Repper, a longtime friend of Greer, told AP that while Greer took comfort in being upheld by higher courts, he was upset by the church’s stance. “The people in that church should be ashamed of themselves, to demonize George and to ask him to leave for doing his job, for upholding the law,” she said. “To me, that was the most offensive thing that has happened so far.”

via my brother Ken, another ex-Southern Baptist, but he at least remains a Christian

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by | 22 March 2005 · 10:01 am

Media Coverage of the Aum Shinrikyo: A Retrospective

Ten years have passed since 20 March 1995, when the Aum Shinrikyo staged a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system.

After the subway attack every area of the media was for weeks afterwards saturated with coverage of Aum. Indeed, it was several weeks before anything other than an Aum story captured the front page of newspapers, while the main television companies devoted hour upon hour of primetime television to the affair every day for weeks on end. A lot of the coverage was sensationalised and there was profound disquiet in Japan at the lurid ways (which included peddling rumours, harassing members of Aum and their parents, and riding roughshod over the privacy of those associated in the affair) in which the media had behaved….

The sensationalised coverage at first glance appeared to verify the frequent criticisms scholars have made of the media’s treatment of new religious movements. There is an extensive academic literature on this topic, providing detailed analyses of how the mass media treat small religious movements outside the mainstream in unbalanced and inflammatory ways. The consensus has been that the mass media tend to discuss new religions in terms of deviance from mainstream attitudes or in terms of what some scholars have termed ‘atrocity tales’–stories that depict such movements in a bad light, highlighting odd behaviour or alleging breaches of social norms. As some scholars have pointed out, these often turn out to be far less dramatic or ‘atrocious’ than initially portrayed. However, the Aum case offers a cautionary warning that this is not always the case. In Aum, while many of the earlier ‘atrocity tales’ (besides those relating to the subway attack and suspicions about the murder of the Sakamotos) were highly sensational, such as stories of Hayakawa’s fantasies about nuclear weapons, much of the later evidence that came out as result of investigations (such as the internal killings, uses of drugs, extortion and experiments with weapons designed to kill vast numbers of people) showed a far deeper culture of violence and criminality than even the early media stories appeared to suggest.

Naturally, besides reporting the events relating to Aum and speculating about the movement’s intentions, the biggest single question that ran through all the discussions of the affair in Japan was how a society that prided itself on its high levels of public safety and order could have produced such a movement, and what this said about the nature of Japanese society in general. These issues were discussed over and over in the weeks after the attack by social commentators and analysts, and their discussions tended to revolve around two interrelated themes.

One focused on the assumption that Aum was not a real religion, but a ‘cult’ (Japanese: karuto) established by an evil manipulator who was only out for power and money. The term karuto was used much in the ways the word ‘cult’ has been in the media in the West, to suggest a deviant, fanatical group led by a charismatic person who postures as a religious leader but who is in fact a self-serving individual who beguiles people into following him or her, and who manipulates and uses them for his or her own purposes….

The most common theme running through Japanese discussions of the affair focused on its national dimensions. In observing that the perpetrators of the affair were Japanese, it saw the seeds of their violence as being related to their discontent with their society, and their behaviour as reflecting and being produced by the Japanese system and cultural environment….

The Aum affair, in other words, provided every critic of Japanese society with avenues through which to vent their particular grievances. The interpretation which relates the Aum affair primarily to the shortcomings of the Japanese social and cultural environment clearly has some resonance. Aum was, after all, produced in the Japanese environment and, as has been seen in this book, many of the factors leading people to join it were related to general problems within mainstream society, such as the over-rationalised, stratified and pressurised education and work system, excessive materialism, and the familial demands for success coupled with the emotional deprivation that can be engendered by such a system….

However, it would be problematic to limit analyses of the Aum affair to such Japanese cultural-specific interpretations. What Aum, as a world-rejecting religious movement with a focus on internal spiritual development, reacted against and criticised most harshly was not Japanese society per se but contemporary materialism. Aum’s antipathies had universal dimensions and its primary target of hate was materialism in general and the USA in particular. This was underscored by the views of one of my interviewees, who told me that, even if he did decide at some stage to leave Aum he would not want to return to the mainstream of Japanese society because he found it so corrupt and materialistic. He was also certain that he would not have felt better in any other society that was governed by materialism. Hence he felt most comfortable withdrawing from society and entering into a closed, world-rejecting order that focused on internal self-development.

SOURCE: Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo, by Ian Reader (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 225-228

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by | 17 March 2005 · 5:21 pm

Multinational Coalition Invades Japan, 1643

In the summer of 1643, a multinational coalition of Jesuit missionaries arrived in fiercely anti-Catholic Tokugawa Japan, just three months after another group of nine had been tortured to death in Nagasaki.

The leader of the second group was the Jesuit Pedro Marquez (1575-1657), born at Mouram, in the archbishopric of Evora, Portugal. After his training and admission into the Society of Jesus at the age of seventeen, we find him in 1627 in Tonkin and in 1632 on the island of Hainan. In 1636, he was in Macao, where he cosigned the order expelling [infamous Jesuit renegade Christovão] Ferreira from the Society for his apostasy. At the time of Marquez’ capture, he was sixty-eight years old and had just received his appointment as Provincial, or head of the Roman Catholic Church in Japan.

His three European companions were: Alonzo de Arroyo (1592-1644), fifty-one years old, from Malaga in Andalusia, doctor of philosophy and former priest of the Spanish settlement of Cavite in the Philippines, where he had arrived in 1621; Francisco Cassola (1603-1644), forty years old, a mathematician and astronomer who had been in Manila in 1636 with Mastrilli, later to become famous as a martyr in Japan; and Giuseppe Chiara (1603-1685), an Italian, also forty years old and recently coming from Manila as well. These four Jesuits were accompanied by six Asian converts: one lay brother (iruman) and five supporters (dojuku). The lay brother was Andreas Vieyra (1601-1678), forty-two years old, who had been born in Mogi and brought up in Nagasaki. He was later named Nampo, and had been educated in Macao and Manila. The supporters included two Japanese men: one from Imabashi Itchome in Osaka, known to the Europeans as Julius and to the Japanese as Shiro’emon, fifty-one years old; and one from Mototsuchimikado machi in Kamikyo of Kyoto, known as Kassian and Mata’emon, also fifty-one years old. These three men had left Japan in the early 1620s and were coming home, pathetically, to certain torture and death.

Then there was Lorenzo Pinto, thirty-two years old, whose father was Chinese and whose mother was of mixed Japanese and Portuguese descent. Even though his parents lived in Macao, Pinto had many friends and connections in Nagasaki. The last two supporters were a twenty-year-old Chinese man from Canton, called Juan and later Saburozaemon, and a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese man from Tonkin, known as Donatus or Nikan. These men were the last of the group to die, in 1697 and 1700 respectively.

The captives freely confessed they had come to Japan to preach Christianity, or as the Japanese put it: “to spread the Evil Doctrine in order to snatch away [authority in] the country of Japan.” They had disguised themselves as Japanese because the shogun had forbidden foreign priests to proselytize. Nevertheless, they were put to the water torture to make sure they were holding nothing back.

SOURCE: Prisoners from Nambu: Reality and Make-Believe in Seventeenth-Century Japanese Diplomacy, by Reinier H. Hesselink (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 51-53

I’m surprised there wasn’t at least one Irishman in the group.

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by | 23 February 2005 · 8:56 pm

The Power and the Glory

When Andrés Gentry asked me to cite the most influential book I have read, I listed Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, which I read in high school, as a missionary kid questioning the faith of my family heritage. When I googled the title, I found an interesting take on the book’s Themes, Motifs, and Symbols at SparkNotes.com. I’ll give one example of each.

Theme: The Dangers of Excessive Idealism

To put it simply, an idealist is one who imagines that the world can be a much better place than it is. What could be dangerous about that? The [Mexican revolutionary] lieutenant, in many ways, illustrates the danger. Obsessed with the way things could be, he remains mired in dissatisfaction and bitterness about the way things actually are. Although the wish to help the poor is a noble sentiment, dreams of “starting over”, erasing history, and wiping out all religious belief are simply not realizable. Moreover, being unable to bring about the impossible leads the lieutenant to feelings of frustration and anger, an even more keen awareness of how imperfect the world is, and hatred for those people whom he views as obstacles to the realization of his dream. Moreover, his conviction that he knows what is best for the people is itself a form of arrogance. The priest, on the other hand, comes to accept suffering and death as a part of life; that is not to say that he does not wish to help alleviate suffering, but his faith in the next world helps him to accept the trials and hardships of this one….

Motifs: Abandonment

Many things are abandoned in this novel, and the words “abandoned” or “abandonment” crop up repeatedly. Many of the townspeople feel that the clergy has abandoned them, and the priest, in turn, feels that the people have abandoned him. Mr. Tench has abandoned his family, Captain Fellows and Mrs. Fellows abandon their house and their dog, and the priest tries to abandon the mestizo on the road to Carmen. These are just a few examples. It is an important motif, because it implicitly raises the most important question, whether human beings have been abandoned by God and left to the cruelty of nature and each other. Significantly, the greatest act of heroism in the novel–the priest’s decision to return to help the gringo–is a refusal to abandon someone in need, and a refusal to abandon a dangerous and ugly world….

Symbols: Alcohol

Alcohol recurs throughout this book as a symbol with two very different meanings. On the one hand, it represents weakness for “the whiskey priest”; a mark, to him, of his unworthiness and the decadence of his former life. The authorities’ attempts to rid the state of alcohol are a manifestation of the impossible and detrimental desire to purge the world of all human weakness. On the other hand, alcohol is an integral part of the Catholic mass, evidenced by the priest’s persistent attempts to procure wine. As we see throughout the book, the sacred and the profane are often portrayed not as opposites, but as two halves of the same coin.

Not bad for SparkNotes. The other two companion books I cited were Endo Shusaku’s Silence and Ooka Shohei’s Fires on the Plain.

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