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[...] For a moment, step back with me from specific texts, and consider in general the political and spiritual opposition I have just tried to draw out of Erasmus’s colloqy [A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake].

I said the earthly city has a political purpose of stability. It anchors the geography around it, such that everything outside of it is described in relation to it. Where locations were formerly designated in relation to various equal points of interest, the land is transformed by the presence of the city into a centric spread, connected by arterial roads to a central heart. The centrality of the city allows industries to lean upon each other, stabilizing the whole by augmenting the power of production and gathering raw material together from many sources. Talent is drawn to the city, which becomes a center of entertainment, of creativity, of the acquirement and dissemination of knowledge, a warehouse of ideas and experiences, rendering outlying places gray, tiresome, and uninspiring.

All of this ingathering and conglomerating serves the basic purpose of rendering human society in its fullness stable. Grand visions, as of a tower of Babel, no longer energize our brick-layers, but a fear of the danger of ungathered living drives us together to build walls against the wilderness. We weave our practices and institutions together until they become interdependent.

Our laws serve this political vision of stability. The laws keep us from destabilizing each other’s lives by disruptive self-assertion. Obedience to the laws, an obedience driven by the desire for stability, is the only condition for citizenship in the earthly city.

Because stability is the meaning of earthly city life, although initially political in scope it becomes spiritual by appealing to the heart, to the center of individual people. The desire for stability in the face of life in the fallen world overwhelms all other desires. The demands of individual relationships and moral convictions must give way before the demands of the city, of the desire for stability. It becomes more important to be a good citizen than a good son or daughter, sister or brother, husband or wife, mother or father. In this way, the political vision of stability can be said to become a spiritual possession, demonic in scope and power. Moreover, we are born into cities, presented with the spiritual vision of stability as a default stance toward life.

In contrast to the spiritual vision of stability, Christianity urges a spiritual vision of mobility. We have in the church the citizens of  a city unbuilt. The church stands in opposition, politically, to the earthly city precisely to the degree that the earthly city stands in opposition, spiritually, to it. To allow the desire for stability to overpower all other desires—which is precisely the tendency inspired by the structure of the earthly city that I have described—is a kind of idolatry for the Christian. Consequently, although to be a Christian does not preclude living in an earthly city, still to be a Christian means resolutely resisting spiritual possession by the earthly city’s ideal of stability. Because this kind of spiritual vision possesses one as a result of the structural tendencies of the city, the Christian inevitably subverts the earthly city where she dwells simply by refusing to submit to its spiritual dominion.

The whole purpose of this extended exposition of the meaning of the earthly city and its political opposition to the church was by way of defining the context of pilgrimage as a category for interpreting specific Christian ideas and practices. When I speak of the ensuing texts as interpreting Christianity in terms of pilgrimage, I mean that they interpret life in terms of this opposition between the spiritual visions of the earthly city and the church. [...]

CPJ’s potential could be maximized by working to become a viable political alternative at two levels: theoretical and practical. What politically-minded and -disatisfied Christian need is alternative political theories and alternative political policies to advocate. To waste itself by focusing exclusively on either of these things would result in a movement without a mission or in a mission without a movement. Currently, if I were to be audacious and upstartish enough to critique something that I am only recently familiar with, I would suspect that they err in the direction of offering theoretical alternatives without practical ones, a mission without a movement—but what do I know.

Nonetheless, going off my supposition, it occurs to me that a grassroots (cliche, but powerful) model of development at both a theoretical but also and especially a practical level would be catalytic to the formation of a movement from CPJ’s very admirable mission. The immediate goal (in terms of remedying the “practical” deficiency) would be the embodiment of theoretical distinctives in concrete prescriptions for public policy at local, regional, and national levels. CPJ could take the entire—overwhelming—burden of this job upon themselves, or practice something like the following method for organic growth and development.

CPJ should enlist the vast pool of local (and potential) Christian activists and thinkers, by en-rolling people in the movement. I mean literally giving people a sense of role within the story-in-the-making that is CPJ. Such enrollment would have to follow the basic formula for enrolling people in any movement:

• Educate
• Initiate
• Commision

For example, to enroll the constituency of which I am a part—interested university-age young men and women—these three steps of enrollment could be pursued in the following ways.

Educating a University-Level Constituency

• Provide them with information about a Christian approach to politics and about the specific policy suggestions of CPJ through mediums they would actually encounter. Examples of this would be newsletters aimed specifically at this constituency, creating a Web 2.0 community that organized and linked together the disparate student thinkers and act-ers in an online community centered around exploring (theoretically and practically) Justice in our world, seeking to form CPJ student groups (clubs? or “officially” recognized Justice Socieities?) on college campuses, and in general provoking excitement, discussion, and activity at the level of communication that students already engage.
• Provide them with information from other students. Student leaders will inevitably be a valuable asset to spreading the mission (and movement) of CPJ. But this gets into the area of my third step for grassroot growth, so hang on…

Initiating a University-level Constituency

• First there must be something to initiate them into. Again, I think the formation of Justice Socieites (or whatever they’d be called) on college campuses—to rival things like Republican or Democratic Student Socieites—with a prescribed form for campus activity coordinated between campuses, would give the members of such Societies a deep sense of enrollment and participation in the cause of Justice in their own world.
• Then, what they are initiated into should encourage them to engage politics at the two levels already mentioned. Theorizing should have a certain centralized, coordinated thrust to it; but policy suggestions should begin to derive from the application of CPJ’s distinctive theorizing to the local situations of these Societies. For example, at my college, Dordt College, the student Society could be encouraged to identify and investigate political organizations and relationships in the college itself, in the surrounding locale of Sioux Center, in the state of Iowa, and then critique them in light of CPJ’s theorizing. Perhaps the education mentioned above should include education in activism?

Commissioning a University-level Constituency

• Commissioning is, to my mind, the single most significant aspect of grassroots growth that turns a motley crew and diverse energies into a movement. It involes creating ties back to the centralized head of the movement, to the custodian(s) of the mission.
• Perhaps a national convention—I know this is sounding huge, but why not? let’s think big—or even several aimed at separate constituencies, or even regional conventions, with keynote speakers from the CPJ staff and immediate cohorts, to annually remind members of the student socieities of the big picture, meta-narrative movement they are participating in.
• Officially recognize the student societies. Even simple things like being listed on the CPJ website as one of the student organizations officially recognized—perhaps with certain standards for achieving such recognition (number of members, representation at national convention, etc.).
• Commission specific individuals within the societies to carry the gospel of CPJ (literally!) to their fellow students. Encourage these individuals to write editorials in school and local newspapers about political issues, to form Justice Socieities, to organize political discussion and activism, to investigate local politics. Perhaps provide them with mentors in some way from within the CPJ leadership. In short, create a sense of training for leadership within the movement.

Well, those are my quick, half-baked thoughts on the subject of enrolling and mobilizing a university-level constituency. I dream of a passion for Christian political engagement taking hold of my generation and shaking the foundations of our polis.

He walks toward them, toward the church, with his usual slow step, as if he were pushing his way through the secrets that have built walls around him in every direction. His son—the almost-groom—and his wife understand before he can speak. The fear that has dogged them for so long has finally proven itself well-founded. His bride, her soon-to-be daughter—is dead. And it is all because of him, the man who would be loyal to his country, would keep its secrets, would serve—the CIA.

I am, of course, describing one of the closing scenes of The Good Shepherd, a 2006 film that received generally negative reviews from critics. The origins and early workings of the CIA are the ostensible subject matter of the film—although its accuracy has been severely challenged. Viewed as such, as an historical and inevitably political statement, it probably deserved its negative reception. The New York Times called the film a CIA origins story which boiled down, for the film-makers, to “fathers who failed their sons, a suspect metaphor that here becomes all too ploddingly literal.” But I am willing, remembering as carefully as I can, to affirm that the film was very gripping when I first watched it, taking it on its own terms, as what it was rather than what one might have expected it to be (a story—not an historical statement).

That story, as far as I could make out, was about identity. It dealt deeply with the subject. Because identity is such a pressing concern today, in this culture, especially for a rising generation, I recommend The Good Shepherd for viewing and reflection.

In the film the lead character Edward Wilson is once confronted by a question:

“Let me ask you something… We Italians, we got our families and we got the Church. The Irish have their homeland. The Jews their tradition. Even the niggers—they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Carlson [Wilson's current assumed name], what do you have?”

“The United States of America.”

That, indeed, is all that Wilson ends up with. His life story, told in flashbacks throughout the early part of the film, took him from a promising vocation in poetry and a budding romance with a beautiful, deaf young woman whose needs and personality exactly fitted his reserved attention to detail—took him from this idyll to membership in the secret Yale society Skull and Bones, and eventually to a shotgun wedding to a woman he could not love and an overseas job with the CIA. This combination of circumstances creates the situation on which the film focuses: a CIA operation in Cuba has failed because of an internal leak, and all the clues point to Wilson’s own son as the culprit. Only he knows this truth, and a KGB counterpart with whom he has been struggling for his entire career, offers to cover up the treason in exchange for a “little help, when the time is right.” It would be easy to take the film as a portrayal of the tension of loyalties between family and country—and, indeed, it is that.

But more deeply than that, the film is a prismatic reflection on one man’s desperate struggle to find and maintain an identity. The coherence of Wilson’s life is broken early, when his father commits suicide and rumors subsequently fly that he had betrayed his country’s naval service. For the first half of the film, Wilson’s unemotionality and lack of words seem more related to a drifting, undirected will than to secrecy. Gradually, through his CIA career, Wilson’s identity hardens into an abstract loyalty to his nations “interests.” The only tie he maintains to concrete, ordinary means of identity, is love for his son, for whom he remains with his wife and for whom he seeks only the best. When his son betrays their country, and any meaning that loyalty to country might have is brought into question by the potential danger of his son, Wilson’s sense of identity is, presumably, shaken even more deeply.

What the film highlights so powerfully is this: the deep connection between faithfulness and identity. Wilson is trying to find a rock to build the house of his identity upon, but (as my brother-in-law once said about rock-climbing in Arizona), when he commits to a rock, the rock doesn’t commit to him. This is the truest thing about the film—historically true in a way that even the best-documented account of the origins of the CIA could never rival. That is to say—it is true to life, in the deepest sense.

Identity is a vital possession. —As in the quotation above, identity is what one has. It is the possession according to which one values oneself. (Strange, isn’t it, that what we have dictates our value. But true.) The hard truth Wilson’s life illustrates is this: when you have to fight to protect the possession according to which you value yourself, the foundation of your identity, then your identity is constantly at risk. The only possible solution is to value yourself according to a possession that does not require defense. (Such as, dare I suggest it?, the possession of the Pearl of great price, the kingdom of God, participation in the divine perichoresis…)

This is a commonplace enough lesson, especially in religious circles, but the remarkable thing about The Good Shepherd is that it calls into question two rocks that tend to define folk who would claim “Christian values.” Country and family. For the average American evangelical these are indeed the touchstones of identity. Doesn’t Scripture hold up family life as supremely important? And isn’t America a Christian nation, which deserves our loyalties just as much as church (if not more—since the church comprises a bunch of sinners, while America is founded on CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES)?

What can a mere subversive gospeler like myself say to such unassailable claims? Perhaps just this: what you clutch is who you are.