Race, Class and Christianity in South Africa by Ibrahim Abraham

Author:Ibrahim Abraham [Abraham, Ibrahim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Religion, Christian Church, General
ISBN: 9781000426809
Google: K5Q2EAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-08-01T02:21:28+00:00

Considering freedom of speech and freedom “to remain silent” interrelated principles (ibid.: 188), his resistance is not to self-examination or self-disclosure. David offers a Romanticist confession: “I became a servant of Eros,” he tells the committee, the experience “enriched” him, he tells a journalist, and later tells Lucy his case “rests on the rights of desire … On the god who makes even the small birds quiver” (ibid.: 52, 56, 89).6

David's morality is typical bourgeois expressive individualism, the kind originating with the Romantics (Taylor 1989, 2007: 473); he is even working at a chamber opera about Lord Byron throughout the book. He sets this almost aristocratic morality of individual liberties against South Africa's new discourse of human rights. Romanticism abides in the expressive individualism Taylor (1989: 425–9) views as increasingly hegemonic in the Global North, however, in which spiritual and moral truths come “indexed to a personal vision” rather than a shared religious framework. David's moral insecurity manifests when this subjectivism brushes against the ethical demands of radical politics, conventional religion, and even professional self-accountability in the university committee. David is also a sincere (Protestant) confessant, however. Following Keane's (2007: 211, 288) work on Protestant language ideology, explored in Chapter 7, David refuses “quotation” or the “talismanic” functions of language, but his Romantic sincerity crashes the confessional system, and since he refuses to condemn and reform himself, all that is left for him is the older confessional process Foucault identifies as ritual martyrdom.

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