protesters

Would Jesus have opposed the Olympic Games?

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“But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to their playmates, ‘We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.” Matthew 11.16-19 (RSV)

WWJD:  What would Jesus do?  It is a good question for Christians to ask because we want to be like the author and perfecter of our faith.  The protesters have objected to the Vancouver Olympic Games for the following reasons:  (1) they used unceded native lands; (2) they dispossessed the poor of Vancouver; (3) the games are a big party for rich people to which the poor are not invited; (4) they have been compared to the games in antiquity, an entertainment to mollify the masses.

In particular, Dr. Dave Diewert argues as follows (“A Call to Olympic Resistance”; emphasis mine):

One can hardly imagine Jesus, who in the wilderness temptation scene rejected the invitation to use his power and privilege to secure his own personal comforts, guarantee protection and security in his mission, and ascend the throne of political and economic domination, advocating support of the Olympic Games. The movement of liberation that he brought, the reign of God that he instantiated, was marked by standing with the weak and the vulnerable, challenging the powerful, and paying for it with his life. Loyalty to Jesus and his way requires saying NO to the temptation to power; the kingdom of God is expressed in solidarity with the poor, resistance to the ways of the empire, and liberation into a community of generosity, justice and mutual care.

The Olympics are the antithesis of the kingdom; they are the grand spectacle of the Empire, and its purpose is to lure us into its grasp. Herod the Great, the political ruler who ordered the slaughter of innocent children in an effort to eliminate the threat of Jesus’ birth, was a strong supporter of the Olympic Games. They are the mechanism of the economic elite and the politically powerful to seduce us into serving their interests. We need to stand with those destroyed or exploited by such power (indigenous people), with those expelled and displaced (poor people), with those punished and removed from sight (homeless people), because that is where our Master stood. It seems to me this puts us in a place of explicit non-cooperation with the Olympics.

Like Jesus in the wilderness, our stance should be one of resistance, dissent and non-participation. This might be expressed as public protest, or standing with the victims of exploitation and displacement, or engaging in educational strategies – all of which disclose the destructive power masked by the spectacular convergence of wealth and coercive force that the Olympics represents and promotes. The way of Jesus, the crucified one, is a narrow path that leads us into the company of the poor, the outcast, the afflicted; it is the way of solidarity with the victims of power, resistance to dehumanizing modalities of social existence, and liberation from destructive political and economic arrangements and into communities of shared resources, life-giving justice and care for all creation.

I suppose Diewert would think it inappropriate for a Christian athlete to participate in the competition.  According to CBC News, he is on the record as saying that it is even inappropriate for Christian groups, like the Billy Graham rapid response teams, to provide hospitality and support to visitors to Vancouver during the Olympics:

Dave Diewert, an organizer with the Christian social advocacy group Streams of Justice, which works on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, says it is inappropriate for Christians to associate themselves with the Olympic juggernaut.

“It seems unthinkable to align ourselves with the massive corporate enterprise as the Olympics,” Diewert told CBC News.

Dr. Diewert, please tell me that you didn’t say that and that you were taken out of context by CBC News.  But excuse me if I find this position just a bit moralistic.  I don’t think the term that I’ve dubbed for you and your Christian associates, the New Pharisees, is out of place.

I remember my first few months in Vancouver in 1996.  It was dismaying to learn that I shouldn’t drink most brands of coffee or tea because the workers weren’t paid enough or that I shouldn’t buy gas from Shell because the company was in collusion with the Apartheid regime in South Africa.  I just got to the point where I couldn’t function anymore with all the rules:  You can’t eat meat, that’s bad.  You can’t wear fur, because that means killing a fuzzy animal.  Now days you can’t breath because that contributes CO2 or fart because of the CO, evil greenhouse gases that are destroying the environment.  Young Christians fret about their carbon footprint.  They have so many rules it’s not inappropriate to call them the New Pharisees.  Now we can’t participate in the Olympics. It’s gone from Eric Liddell refusing to run on a Sunday to forbidding any kind of participation whatsoever, even providing aid to those in distress, because that would be displeasing to our Lord Jesus.  “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is an Olympian” (cf. Luke 7.39).  I don’t see how this is different from certain fundamentalist Christians who measure their faith based upon their adherence to rules, “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t go with girls who do.”  I went to a Bible college.  I know something about rules.

Diewert claims that Jesus identified with the concerns of the poor.  Here is the conclusion of his unsigned paper (I assume it is his) on Matthew 4.1-11 (“The Wilderness Temptations [Matthew 4:1-11]” emphasis mine):

The wilderness testing scene finds Jesus, recently baptized by John, recipient of the divine spirit, and identified as God’s son, in a time of intense preparation for his mission. Hungry and weak, he is offered opportunities to use his status and privilege to secure his physical needs and desires, guarantee his protection and safety, and increase his political and economic power. Acquiesence to these offers would entail abandoning the mission of the kingdom he was sent to proclaim, and set him on a path that was incommensurate with the way of the cross. The path before him was one of solidarity with the poor and afflicted, resistance to the structures of oppression and exclusion and those who backed it, and invitation into an alternative reality of healing, forgiveness, community and love.

He remained true to this way, even though it would mean encountering hostility, conflict, suffering, torture and death. It was a path of non-compliance to the dominant institutions of power and control, and the embodiment of another vision of life in a truly human community. Using our privilege and entitlement to ensure our needs and wants are met, to guarantee the protection and security of our lives and our way of life, to lever more social, political and economic power constitute great temptations indeed. Increasing personal comfort, security and power is what we are socialized to desire and actively pursue. Yet to seek these is to turn aside from the way of the kingdom that Jesus brought, it is to declare allegiance to another god.

The Olympic Games event, it seems to me, functions as the grand festival of another god; it is the seductive spectacle that summons our allegiance to another master. It constitutes for us, followers of the Way who are embedded in the Empire, a profound wilderness-like test, an occasion for clarifying our loyalty and devotion to God’s movement of liberation embodied in Jesus.

Diewert claims that Jesus mission was one of solidarity with the poor.  Diewert can therefore justify his own work, as a community organizer who rationalizes envy on the part of the poor and violations of property rights.  He calls for political action to force taxpayers to provide housing and other kinds of funding for the homeless in Vancouver–thus, he is not against the wielding of political power; he just simply wants to shift power away from the status quo to a movement which will restructure our society to help these homeless folks.

Arch of Titus, Rome

Before we accept Diewert’s position, I would like to point out that Jesus at the end was rejected by everyone: the rich and powerful, the elite, the priests, the Jews, the Gentiles, the rabble, and yes, the poor.  As the scripture says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3.23).  Arguably the poor Jewish crowd had much more to complain about than Vancouver’s poor.  They were oppressed by a foreign power who employed some of their own people to tax them.  Their own Jewish leaders worked in collusion with the Romans to maintain this status quo.  This was not just a few thousand poor people but nearly an entire nation in the millions that suffered as result of Roman rule.  But they maintained a strong hope of a deliverer, the promised messiah, who would save them and deliver them from the hands of the foreign oppressor, just as the Maccabees had succeeded  at overthrowing the Greeks in their recent past.  Jesus did not protect these poor people and he did not fight their battle.  Rather, he offended their sensibilities, causing them to withdraw from him (John 6).  Instead of delivering them from or resisting their oppressors, the Romans, he predicted their demise (Matthew 24-25) and told them that because of their rejection of him, the blessings of God would be stripped from them and given to the gentiles (Matt 22.1-14; cf. Luke 4.23-27).  When Jesus said “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven was at hand”, he affirmed the message of John the Baptist who said that the ax was laid at the root of the nation (Matt 3.10), and that judgment was coming, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”  So Jesus left these poor unrepentant Jews in the hands of their oppressors–though Christian tradition tells us that the Christian Jews escaped to a place called Pella in the trans-Jordan region (Eusebius, h.e. 3.5; cf. Matt 24.16).  While Jesus fed the poor and tried to heal them, ultimately he refused to deliver them from their oppressors on their terms, but allowed himself to be crucified, while the Romans triumphed–the Arch of Titus’ triumph of the Jewish nation stands to this day in Rome.

Diewert’s application of Matthew is tendentious; he attempts to show Jesus’ agenda as aligning himself with the poor. This is not the case.  He didn’t stand with the weak and vulnerable, as Diewert contends, but rather he stood alone before Pontius Pilate.  He was rejected by all people and he died for all people, men and women, slave and free, Jew and Gentile (cf. Gal 3.28) .  He called upon all people to repent, the rich, the poor and the religious and political leaders of his day.  That is why the position of the Billy Graham rapid response teams, of Eric Liddell, and of Christian Olympians seems far more balanced than that of the New Pharisees.  They can shine the light God in dark places of the world, so that some may be saved.  Jesus was apparently not against a big party, with dancing and drinking (Matt 11.16-19).  In my opinion, Jesus would not have refused to participate in the Olympics.  Why would he have refused when he was a friend of the prostitutes and the sinners? Jesus was even a friend of the very tax collectors whom the Romans used to oppress the poor.  Paul used athletic metaphors to make his point (e.g., 1 Cor 9.24-27), the very games that Diewert says that Herod loved so much.  There is in Paul a tacit acceptance of games, as having admirable virtues which were worthy of emulation.  So today, the Olympics games, while flawed, have many virtues that are worthy of admiration and emulation.

What is envy?

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At City of God, Dan repsonded to my comment on his post on Olympic Oppression at City of God.  Here is correspondence between us:

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You really didn’t bother to read my post. First of all, I don’t know what would make me a “new Pharisee” and therefore I very much doubt I can speak intelligibly about one. What I said I found troubling about the Olympics is how we are all expected to derive some noble sentiment from them how Canada as a nation was supposed to “come together” and support the games. Being critical about something like that may hardly have anything to do with envy. Accusing the poor of envy does not provide the rich with anything more than an ad hominem attack. Calling someone envious is almost as sneaky an attack as calling your opponent “defensive.”

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Dan,

I did read your post several times. Originally, after hurriedly writing my comment, I wondered whether I’d unfairly lumped you with the new Pharisees. But I see from your comment that it was probably fair, at least to certain degree. For you accept uncritically the argument that the Vancouver Olympics were a just a big party for the rich. You add in fact to that argument by mentioning the price of hockey tickets. Of course, Maple Leaf tickets and Raptor tickets are also very expensive. Does that make the NHL or the NBA a party for the rich? Should the funding that goes into these sports be spent on the poor instead? Let’s be consistent. Certainly the sins of professional sports are greater than that of the Olympics, because they do their gig every year, week after week, and not just every two years. Maple Leaf gardens, the SkyDome, and Air Canada Centre take up an inordinate amount of space in downtown Toronto that the Federal government and evil Stephen Harper should use to build low-cost housing for the poor and homeless which number nearly 10 times the homeless of Vancouver!

The first definition of envy according Webster’s is (11th ed.): “painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another joined with a desire to possess the same advantage.” This perfectly sums up the protesters’ complaint: they resent the Olympics; it is being done to their detriment and to the advantage of the rich; the money should have been spent on them instead so that they can have housing and adequate support. This is an unadulterated case of class envy. The community organizers like Diewert and Oudshoorn contribute by stirring up and adding legitimacy to the envy of the poor; it doesn’t usually take much to get that emotion stirred up after all. And once stirred up, it doesn’t take much more before it leads to vandalism, theft, and eventually in certain cases, to murder, which too often happens when the masses rise up and murder those that those that they believe to have wronged them. The most recent example that I can come up with off the top of my head is the Rwandan genocide, where the Hutus were stirred up to murder as many as a million Tutsis (a less dramatic example would be the recent anti-Kikuyu riots in Kenya)–if the mass murder doesn’t happen here in Canada, it’s because the envious poor and their organizers are still a relatively insignificant proportion of the population. But it seems that the number of sympathizers is growing.

So you start with the premise that is based upon envy. It is this notion that the Olympics are done for the sole benefit of the rich for their own selfish pleasure all others be damned; it is an unfair assessment of the Olympics which is full of envy. Many people benefit from the Olympics, not simply the rich, but every poor schlub who got a job providing security or hammering a nail (who managed to show up for work not wasted), First-Nation owned businesses, vendors selling hot dogs, my chiropractor, my sister who rented out her condo at Whistler, the athletes (they’re not rich are they?), and many others.

And nobody, not even one person, ever told me that if I wanted to be a good Canadian, I had to somehow cheer for the Olympics. I didn’t follow the events on TV but only heard about the news through newspaper reports or third hand. So I am a neutral and indifferent observer with regard to the Olympics.

What about emphasizing personal responsibility when helping the poor?

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Giving his opinion of the discussion at Nathan Calquhoun’s blog, Dan posting at the City of God also came down against the Olympics, though not as hard as some others.  He agrees that it is also just a party for the rich, but the insufferable thing is that we taxpayers have to pay for the Games, and then told we have to like the games:

What is really oppressive about the Olympics is how we are all supposed to like it. I mean rich people also have private playgrounds in places like Macao or Monaco but we aren’t all expected to embrace these playgrounds like we are the Olympics. It would be nice if some Olympics organizers would just own up sometime and say “look, we’re bringing in a bunch of amateur athletes because they’ll act as free entertainment for celebrities and captains of industry, by the way, your taxes pay for this so we’ll let you watch at home too.”

I wrote the following comment:

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Would you say that the sin of the Olympics’ rich and powerful is one of omission, of ignorance, or of willful disregard? I am trying to see how the new Pharisees conceive of sin. I guess that the most important thing is that the chief sinners are the wealthy and powerful, because they like to have their exclusive parties (like smoking stogies and drinking champagne and beer on the rink after winning the gold medal?).

I don’t see how any of this protesting helps. To me it appears as heavily motivated by the politics of envy. As my friend explained to me this morning, the real problem is that the money spent on the Olympics should have been spent to help the poor, provide housing, lasting jobs, etc. This strikes me as envy. One begrudges how the funding is spent. George Will recently said at CPAC that envy is the one deadly sin of the seven from which the sinner does not receive even momentary pleasure.

Finally, I suggest the politics of envy does nothing to help the poor because it places the responsibility for their situation on others. Walter Williams has explained the formula for avoiding poverty as such:

Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior.

Williams’ formula emphasizes personal responsibility. It seems to me that having the Olympics or not having them will neither help nor hurt Vancouver’s poor. Spending the money on the poor instead of on a big international circus will not help the poor. For the problem of the poverty will not be solved by throwing money at it. Liberal democracies have been throwing money at poverty for decades now, and the problem has not gone away or even become less. Many, myself included, believe that welfare has only exasperated the problem.

We live in Canada, not Haiti or sub-Saharan Africa where there is little hope of escaping endemic poverty. Many millions of poor have come to North America, including my own forebears (on both sides of my family), and have enjoyed the freedom to make a very nice life here. They were not, for the most part, oppressed nor discriminated against because of their poverty but allowed to work, to study, and to realize their potential.

Source, Walter Williams’ article:
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4223

Protest the Canadian Women’s Hockey Team!

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We have damning evidence that the overly competitive Canadian Women’s hockey team, which shamefully won the gold medal, beating out all other competitors by wide margins and flaunting their superiority the whole time, have spent money on booze and cancer causing cigars. This money should have been given to the poor and homeless living in the streets of Vancouver.

Leftist, anarchist Christians against the Winter Olympics in Vancouver

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My friend the Brooks pointed out a conversation at the blog of Nathan Colquhoun, in a blog post, “The Enchanting Economics of Death, Spectacular Resistance, and the Pursuit of New Life: a reflection from the streets of Vancouver“, in which Colquhoun repeats the anxious rant of an anonymous protestor at the games.  It has aroused a discussion in which Dan Oudshoorn, a.k.a. Poserorprophet, insults everyone who disagrees with him and basically condemns wealthy Christians.  Poser offered on his own blog another post by the same anonymous poster called “F— the police”.

Many of the institutions with which I do business, Royal Bank, oil sands, Latin American mining companies, TD Bank, were mentioned.  So I decided to write the following comment against Poser, against the anonymous Poster, and against the generally anarchist marxist tendencies among certain Christians today:

This conversation really baffles me. The other day on his blog Poser said that he needed to raise funds for his new job: amongst whom was he going raise this funding this except ordinary Christians who have money and jobs? He studies at Regent College which is richly endowed by wealthy Christians. He then condemns them all with a sweeping, Bourgeois Christians: “my friend is now being vilified by a bunch of bourgeois Christians who are far removed from the struggle for justice”.

I don’t have a particular ax to grind about the Olympics but the disconnect to me is related to the “economics of death”. Besides the poor Georgian luger, who has died? When Christians talk about the culture of death it is easy to see who has died, 100s of millions of babies. But “economics of death”? That is a play on the term “culture of death”, and yet it is hallow. Who is dying? Who did TD Bank kill that they deserve to have their windows smashed? And for that matter, just because RBC is behind the oil sands, why is that so bad? If it weren’t for oil, you poor folks would have to walk everywhere you go. That’s fine if you live in some African country where it is warm all the time, but some of them work 18 hours a day carrying firewood on small carts for $3 a day. I’d much rather burn oil sands in my Toyota than die at 38 of exhaustion in that kind of misery. But walking everywhere you go is not really an option for living in Canada, particularly in winter.

What are the protesters doing to create life. Anyone can smash a window. The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy. Vandalism is theft by destruction. That is not what Jesus did. He overturned the tables to prevent the moneychangers from stealing from the people of God and thus charging them to worship God which the moneychangers had no right to do.

Finally, the poster refers to destroying the structures of the economics of death, forewarned that others who have done this (communists around the world) have created misery. Yet Canada is one of the greatest countries in the world and the envy of many millions who long to have an opportunity to come here to live, to study and to raise their families. Yet all the protesters, the poster, and Poser can think about is how to destroy what other people envy. Is that not a sign of their own envy? There is something deeply wrong with that. TD Bank, by employing thousands of people, by extending mortgages to allow young couples to buy their first house, and by providing a safe place where people can put their investments, has done more to promote the welfare of the many than these sad anarchists. That is why I am a proud, bourgeois Christian stockholder of TD.

“In order to construct a society that is more just, less just ways of organizing life together must be destructed. This should be obvious.” This is an extremely scary prospect. When people who hold such views have succeeded only misery results. Please name one case where death was not the result of destruction of capitalism. 100,000,000 people were killed by communists in 20th century alone. Is that not enough?

Signed, an investor in oil sands and Latin American mines, shopper at the Bay, a proud-soon-to-be Canadian, Bourgeois Christian, who owns more than one pair of shoes.

Poser responded, and I replied:

  1. dan says:

    Shame on you, Peter. That’s my cue to exit this conversation.

  2. P. W. Dunn says:

    Poser, your response confirms what one of the professors at Regent told me a few months back: he said there is among the students a new generation of Pharisees. This reminds me of Matt 23.4: “They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.” You leave in a huff, telling me to be ashamed, but you fail even to explain for what things I should be ashamed or even to give a single counterargument. I can only suppose it is because I am a proud-soon-to-be Canadian. Or is it just because I am wealthy, owning two pairs of shoes?