Today I heard someone refer to Remembrance Day as an expression of civic religion. If so, it’s a religion without the benefit of theologians. In our more conventional expressions of religion, theologians help in the task of interpreting religious expression, of giving it meaning and depth and context. Remembrance Day has none of that. This morning, I passed a makeshift (at least I hope it’s makeshift) cenotaph on the field in front of University College at U. of T.—a plain grey monument with the words lest we forget and a cross on its face. It suggests several things:
1) Remembrance Day is not really an expression of civic religion but an extension of Christian belief and ritual;
2) Because the cross is also a sword, it draws on Christianity’s historical alignment with power;
3) Within this civic religion, the chief sin is forgetfulness.
Remembrance Day is not just an expression of Christian religion, but adopts (or mimics?) an acutely conservative form of Christian religion. It invites us to celebrate a blood sacrifice which has produced a debt we can never repay but for which we must nevertheless give thanks. Just as the blood of Christ is a ransom which purchases our freedom from sin, so the blood of our veterans is a price paid to purchase our freedom from our enemies.
Most Christians only pay lip service to a theology of blood atonement or they ignore it altogether. Once theologians set to work at interpreting the Christian story, they offer it as a way to think about the spiritual life, not as a set of historical claims. The challenge of Remembrance Day is that it does relate to a set of historical claims and so it is easy to behave as if Remembrance Day doesn’t need interpreting; we can simply proceed like a fundamentalist Christian and behave as if the Day’s meaning is obvious on its face.
We tend to utter the same platitudes year over year without examining them. These platitudes involve words like sacrifice and freedom. But how exactly does the military secure freedom? One can trot out Hitler only so many times before someone notices that our troops have done a lot more than defend us from the one threat that actually gives some credibility to just war arguments. But how were they defending our freedom when they put my mother-in-law in an internment camp when she was six years old? How were they defending our freedom when they submitted me and thousands like me to illegal searches during the G20 summit in 2010? And how does any of this have a bearing on the historical trajectory of freedom among people of the First Nations?
In my view, a measure of freedom is the capacity to dissent. Let’s test how free I am. I wish to dissent from the conservative theology of Remembrance Day. I reject its literalism. I think it is incoherent to speak of fighting and freedom in the same breath. I affirm the statement of Thich Naht Hanh who says in the simplest terms: the path to peace is peace. There is no other. I also think it is incoherent to speak of freedom without speaking of responsibility.
If we are to spend this day remembering how we have come to enjoy our freedom, then we must do our remembering responsibly. If all we remember is horror, then we are picking scabs from wounds and making them fresh again; we are like trauma victims who wake in the night from flashbacks. There is a virtue in forgetting, or at least in a forgetting of a particular sort. It is a forgetting that is the beginning of healing and reconciliation.
If all we remember is horror, then we are like Mel Gibson who used the medium of film to resurrect the scourge of Christ and, in doing so, emptied the story of its meaning and left us with only our prejudices, including a gratuitous hatred of Jews. To find meaning, we have to take care in our interpretation of events, and if we are to do so with any measure of objectivity, then we must distance ourselves from them. Like a good theologian, we must ignore the literal trauma and give events a symbolic gloss:
The sacrifice which buys my freedom is not the literal death of soldiers on a front across an ocean two generations ago; it is the personal sacrifices I make each day as I exercise the responsibilities of citizenship. Some are formal, like voting and writing to my elected representatives. Some are less formal, like engaging in public protest or posting to this blog. And some things are amorphous. For example, I have recently moved into a building where perhaps a quarter of the women wear hijab or niqab. I view it as my responsibility to ensure their freedom to be as they are in a city where I belong to the dominant cultural group. I don’t really know how to do that, but I try by smiling in the elevator and asking them how their children are doing. Simple acts, but maybe the beginning of something more.
To borrow from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theology of Remembrance Day often sounds like a theology of cheap grace: people made sacrifices for my freedom (as if my freedom is a durable cloak that I can hang in my closet and put on whenever I need it). But a considered theology of Remembrance Day preaches a costly grace: although I may have my freedom without doing anything to deserve it, I must forfeit all sense of entitlement and work daily to deserve it.