Faith Among the Faithless by Mike Cosper

Author:Mike Cosper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2018-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

POWER, VULNERABILITY, AND VICTIMHOOD

There’s a profound message here about the dangers and limits of power. As we’ll see, Haman’s own grasp for power was toxic—not only for the empire, but for himself. Mordecai had the foresight to resist that temptation, and he modeled a path of resistance that Esther, too, would follow. He embraced weakness. He embraced vulnerability.

Vulnerability is a buzzword right now. The writing and teaching of Brené Brown is incredibly popular, and her work focuses on shame, vulnerability, and what she calls “wholehearted living.”4 In Christian circles, similar work (some inspired by Brown) has been offered by Chuck DeGroat, Curt Thompson, and Andy Crouch.

Vulnerability, as Crouch defines it, is a capacity for meaningful risk. That might mean risks taken on behalf of oneself, or risk on behalf of others. It has a thousand applications, and Crouch’s work Strong and Weak explores both the personal and the social power of vulnerability.

But we have to be careful when we start talking about vulnerability, because in our culture today, there’s something at work that looks like vulnerability but is actually a means of acquiring power. This is victimhood, and it’s directly related to the values of a secular age.

If, as a culture, we’ve lost any rooted sense of morals or values, we also lose ways to navigate conflict and tension. We don’t have language for it anymore because one person’s definition of good is radically different from—and perhaps opposed to—someone else’s. Even so, generally speaking, no one likes a bully, and it’s still universally agreed that oppression is a bad thing. That fact provides leverage for cultural power; if you can claim victim status, and if you can point out the nearby bully who’s oppressing you, you gain a tremendous amount of cultural power.5

The late philosopher René Girard described our culture as one obsessed with victims and scapegoats. Once you gain the status of victim, you rise above any kind of moral responsibility or scrutiny. The moral imperative is about justice: How do we defend these victims from their oppressors? Any sins of the victim can and will be overlooked because, after all, they only committed them in response to their oppressors. Victimhood can also empower others who would advocate on behalf of the victim. Girard wrote, “The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same. They always think first about the victims for whom they hold us responsible.”6

Theologian Derek Rishmawy, writing about Girard, connects this to the cultural battlefield:

Haven’t you been agitated by that progressive who is always taking every chance they get to share a devastating story about some victim and immediately tacking the moral on that “this is what Republicans/Evangelicals/Fundamentalists views lead to” or some such statement? Or on the flipside, the way that some legal absurdity just shows the moral bankruptcy of the progressive/Democrat/Post-Evangelical capitulation? Doesn’t this latest tragedy (beautifully) highlight their horrid lack of concern? (A concern which, quite admirably, you have). Don’t

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