This book is part memoir, part travelogue, part polemic that splits again between religion and politics, and it serves as an introduction to the concept of the New Monasticism. It does a lot for such a slender volume. Enough is being said in various venues about the New Monasticism, and I want to approach that topic in a separate review. There is a sense in which the book is also and apologia, both for going to Iraq and for the manner of life the Wilson-Hartgroves and some friends of theirs (an ever-widening group) have chosen.
I also should say now that I know Jonathan and Leah Wilson-Hartgrove, and have many times been on the receiving end of the generous hospitality at Rutba House.
To Baghdad and Beyond begins with the concept of needing to be Born Again, and with the assumption that the reader knows what that’s all about and agrees. Not all Christians subscribe to the concept. I fall into the group that doesn’t, at least not in the sense meant, so I felt not part of the intended audience. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Every book has to be written toward a particular readership. Most books never find their way out of their target audience.
All the faith groups who now practice adult or believer’s baptism exclusively can trace their roots (whether they know it or not) to the Anabaptists, derived from the Greek for “re-baptizers.” Adult baptism typically (but not always) goes hand-in-hand with the concept of being born again.
In its attempt to base indiviudal and corporate life on the positive evidence of the Bibile, the 16th century Anabaptist movement choseto shun infant baptism in favor of adult baptism because all the specifically mentioned baptisms in the Christian Scriptures are baptisms of adults. (Or they seem to be of adults. I will argue that the phrase “She was baptized and her household with her,” [Acts 16:15] could logically be construed to include any infants or children who might have been present, especially since parents were considered to have absolute, life-and-death kind of control over their children at the time.)
To say the Bible should be the basis of your life begs the question, “Which Bible?” (Please, let that stimulate your own research.) It also ignores the historical fact that the Christian Scriptures were written by, to and for already-existing faith communities.
Part of the historic dispute over infant baptism versus adult baptism has to do with the peculiarly Christian idea called Original Sin. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox understanding of the doctrine (which are the same and have historical precedence) is crucially different from the Protestant concept, rooted in certain writings by St. Augustine of Hippo which were declared heretical by the Church authorities of the day. Does this make St. Augustine wrong? Good question. It’s possible to look at the discernment process of the Early Church as less an exploration for Truth and more of a consensus of belief.
In the section describing his earliest faith-life, Jonathan says his youth minister, Andy Oliver, asked him what he thought it meant to give his life to Christ, and that he gave an answer that satisfied Andy. Since Jonathan was only seven at the time this happened, I’d like to know what he said, what the conversation contained. That would have been more interesting to me than the anecdote about the water glass.
And I’m spending a lot of time on this being Born Again and Baptism stuff because so much of the modern American Church will tell you, “That is the conversion experience, that’s it, the end.” All done, once and for all. Therefore, I was quite pleasantly surprised to read Wilson-Hartgrove speak more than once about conversion as a non-ending process, and that he tells us in the subtitle about a particular rebirth, not the only conversion experience he ever had, or that he doesn’t expect to keep on having them. Every time I came across this concept in the book, I said a little “Yay” under my breath.
The profound irony that Wilson-Hartgrove served as an intern for one of the most conservative – not to mention hawkish – United States Senators ever to hold office (Strom Thurmond, R-SC), and took the post because he aspired to attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis is sadly left unexplored. His choice instead to attend Eastern University has affected many lives beyond his own, including mine. I’ve gone over the little bit that’s there several times, and each time, I ask the book for more, please, only it isn’t there. I very much wanted to understand this critical shift in ways that weren’t made available to me. I wanted the same transparency here that can be found in other parts of the book.
As foundation for the choice to go to Baghdad, Wilson-Hartgrove gives some discussion to the history of the concept of the Just War, an idea that became necessary to the Church after it merged with the Roman Empire, which was about nothing if not war. And road building, which was helpful in the war thing. There is ambiguity throughout this section, good reflection of the tension between the desire to be good citizens under civil authority and the desire to be first and foremost good citizens of a kingdom not of this world. The book is not a systematic presentation of any sort of theology, it’s an account of real experience, and real experience is messy.
Wilson-Hartgrove talks about our need to repent as a nation for our complicity in events like Saddam Hussein “gassing his own people,” as part of his own struggle to decide how he felt about the approaching war and how he should respond to it, and to the evident need to free the Iraqi people from a cruel despot.
In the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the Hostage Crisis, during the war between Iran and Iraq, when Saddam Hussein was our Flavor-of-the-Month, when we were funding and supplying arms to Iraq because we didn’t want the Islamic Revolution to move beyond the borders of Iran. If you weren’t around then, or perhaps not old enough to be paying attention, it’s difficult to appreciate the depth of anger everyone in the US felt toward Iran at the time. It was during this larger war that the Kurdish population of Iraq chose to provide the Iranians with a sort of rear-guard, guerrilla, one might even call it terrorist, action.
Saddam gassed insurgent members of a specific political group who were working actively within the borders of his country in support of a foreign enemy during a time of war. And we were actively supporting the Iraqi military in the war against Iran at the time. So, yes, to the extent that one feels this action to have been immoral or sinful, and to the extent that one feels to have been a participant in that action (taxes and whatnot), it’s legitimate to call us as individual citizens to repentance.
But also, while you’re assessing that situation, imagine that we were at war with Canada and the Francophone population of Maine decided to fight on the side of Canada in hopes of eventually forming a unified, resurrected “Acadia.” (I made that up. There never was an actual nation-state called “Acadia.”)
We’d probably do something about it. Hopefully something less draconian, but still, we would do something. Any government would do something to quash an uprising within its own borders.
In 1985, our elected representational Government deemed it to be in our interest to help Saddam stop the Kurds (whom he had in fact betrayed and who were therefore slightly pissed) from joining with invading Iranian forces. Seventeen years later, in 2002, The Powers That Were deemed it to be in our interest to use a revisionist version of the events of 1985 to create supportive public opinion here at home and to fire up Kurdish support for our troops as they invaded.
Wilson-Hartgrove buys into the gassing as an example of Saddam’s despotic rulership, which underlay the concept of needing to remove him from power, and comes close to endorsing the legitimacy of other nation-states taking some form of action to do so. Most of us did, at the time, accept this statement and there’s no reason in any case to think of Saddam as a nice man. His objection to the war itself seems at times based primarily on the action not rising to the standards of a Just War than on the more-to-be-expected categorical opposition to war that might be expected from a burgeoning Mennonite. In doing so, he lets the text transparently reflect his own changing attitudes. There’s a vulnerability to the telling of this story.
Practically speaking, and this is me now, once you begin to question the authority of the earthly state, you begin to move down a slope that’s more terraced than slippery, but which requires you to decide where that authority should stop. If you oppose the power of the state to make war and exert the death penalty, do you also say the State has no business saying it’s own grace over marriage, for example? Legal marriage, after all, is more about property than anything else, in that property passes down in lines that are declared legally legitimate. If you’re abjuring or perhaps limiting the concept of personal property and private ownership of property (in the sense that led to Proudhon’s pronouncement that “Property is theft”), then you have to go back and ask the question again.
So there is this tension, for the pacifist, that cannot be resolved, between being a good citizen and being in opposition to a fundamental function of the state – any state, under any system – of the use of force to maintain order, and the extent to which the state can or should insert itslef into thelives of the citizenry. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just acknowleging it, and the intense scrutiny it brings to bear on an individual’s choices and actions.
The other thing the Anabaptists accurately brought forward is the awareness that to be Christian is to be different from being anything else. Where this awareness shines out in To Baghdad and Beyond is in the willingness of the Wilson-Hartgroves (Jonathan wrote the book, but Leah is not to be over looked – she is a formidable woman), and the others whom they meet along the way, to put themselves in places of danger – to put not their money where their mouth is, but their bodies.
Speaking of which, Wilson-Hartgrove describes visiting the tomb of Oscar Romero, and says “To the people of Ecuador, Oscar Romero was a saint.” As true as this is, it’s worth noting that Romero’s Cause for canonization is stalled largely because there is the sense on the part of the Vatican that Romero’s death was more political assassination than martyrdom. For my money, being shot while celebrating Mass because your faith leads you to take positions that are disliked by the powers that be is fairly close to the modern equivalent of a crucifixion. If Romero’s death doesn’t count as martyrdom because of the political elements, it seems logical that you must also re-visit your ideas about Jesus’ death at the hands of the Roman Empire.
Does God call us to obey the law of the land? Good question. I can point out that it was the ability to call on this Biblical principle that made possible the “banality of evil” so beautifully documented by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem. (If you haven’t read that most-excellent and important book, it should be the very next thing you do.) Does God in the Bible call us to question earthly authority? Which earthly authorities? Perhaps you should come to own conclusion.
Working with various groups, Jonathan and Leah finally make it to Iraq, along the way meeting people like Marty Jenko, who provides a profound lesson about forgiveness and gratitude.
From this point on, the reasons for going, the reasons for acting, and choosing, are woven into the narrative, we are out of exposition and into the course of events, and this is the best part of the book. It should have started there, and brought the other elements in through the course of the narrative, but this is a first book, and Wilson-Hartgrove is most concerned to explain to his target audience how a good boy from King, North Carolina wound up going to Iraq just as we began to bomb the place.
The brief discussion of Ghandi further provides proof that the Church (at least in America) is in deep trouble. To whom can we look for the most effective example of the implementation of the non-violence preached by Jesus? Not to any living Christian leader I know of. Martin Luther King, Jr., was by his own admission influenced as much by Ghandi as he was by Jesus, but to Ghandi, a man who accepted Jesus’ teachings but rejected the Church that claimed to follow Jesus.
I found interesting Wilson-Hartgrove’s reaction to the same assurance received from two different sources. One, a trusted friend of like mind, who assures the team that God will take care of them. Another from a friend who worked at the Pentagon (therefore, not of like mind) who, when Jonathan called to tell him what they were about to do, assures him the same thing, in the same words, “God will take care of you.”
In one of the more dramatic moments in the narrative this assurance gets tested. It puzzles me that Wilson-Hartgrove does not consider that God takes care of them in the situation precisely through the instrument of the friend at the Pentagon.
I am fascinated by the phrase “abandonment to reality,” which can be found as part of the narrative I’m trying not to describe in detail. The Western religions tend to assume first of all that there is such a thing as ontological reality, and that God has something to do with that ontological reality such as having thought it up and keeping it running in ways that are according to his will (they also have in common that the creator of reality is to be spoken of in masculine terms). It follows, in this model, that to abandon oneself to reality is to abandon oneself to the God who runs it. Anyone who chooses to follow a man who got himself nailed to a cross can’t expect that sort of abandonment to guarantee personal safety.
Most important, though, is Wilson-Hartgrove’s realization, sitting there in the desert, that while he had book-knowledge of God, he had yet to meet God in those “dark places where we must go,” to paraphrase an old Egyptian blessing.
Frankly, it is impossible to meet God, whoever and whatever God is, anywhere else.
There is some awkward struggling with metaphors from the Psalms. This could have been left out, but it also shows a young mind trying to reconcile some things that ultimately can’t be reconciled. In terms of the writing as writing, the attempt to entwine allegory and reality doesn’t quite get where it wants to be, at least not for me, and Wilson-Hartgrove does best in this text when he’s simply telling the story. What does work, and rather beautifully, is Wilson-Hartgrove’s account of a fugue state under stress.
The core events of the narrative took place seven years ago. In most cases, a narrative of this sort would gain a second life as a conversion story once the political incidents resolved themselves. But the U. S. military is still in Iraq, nothing is resolved there, and the conversion hasn”t actually ended.
The rest of the book leads toward the early days in the formation of the New Monasticism movement. I’m leaving that topic alone for now, as Wilson-Hartgrove has another book devoted entirely to the subject, and I need to know more before I go shooting my mouth off in a global venue.
The Rutba House as it is now is not the Rutba House as it is depicted at the end of To Baghdad and Beyond. When I asked, Wilson-Hartgrove said he would not now use the phrase “Mennonite Worker” (which comes not from his own mouth in the text but is used in the text as a way of defining the nature of the place) to describe Rutba House. Things evolve, and sometimes it takes a while to know what something is.
If you aren’t a professing Christian, To Baghdad and Beyond is worth your time as a look at what it was like to be on the receiving end of the actions covered so well by the embedded reporters. By telling the story of entering Iraq, their time in Baghdad, and what happened in Rutba, Wilson-Hartgrove provides a perspective on the invasion we would never have gotten from the six o’clock news.
