Ekklesia

Three Inquiries in Church and State

Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela E. Klassen, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226545615
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State offers a New World rejoinder to the largely Europe-centered academic discourse on church and state. In contrast to what is often assumed, in the Americas the relationship between church and state has not been one of freedom or separation but one of unstable and adaptable collusion. Ekklesia sees in the settler states of North and South America alternative patterns of conjoined religious and political power, patterns resulting from the undertow of other gods, other peoples, and other claims to sovereignty. These local challenges have led to a continuously contested attempt to realize a church-minded state, a state-minded church, and the systems that develop in their concert. The shifting borders of their separation and the episodic conjoining of church and state took new forms in both theory and practice.
The first of a closely linked trio of essays is by Paul Johnson, and offers a new interpretation of the Brazilian community gathered at Canudos and its massacre in 1896–97, carried out as a joint churchstate mission and spectacle. In the second essay, Pamela Klassen argues that the colonial churchstate relationship of Canada came into being through local and national practices that emerged as Indigenous nations responded to and resisted becoming "possessions" of colonial British America. Finally, Winnifred Sullivan's essay begins with reflection on the increased effort within the United States to ban Bibles and scriptural references from death penalty courtrooms and jury rooms; she follows with a consideration of the political theological pressure thereby placed on the jury that decides between life and death. Through these three inquiries, Ekklesia takes up the familiar topos of "church and state" in order to render it strange.

THE PEOPLE AND THE LAW OF THE HOUND AT CANUDOS

Paul Christopher Johnson

Backed up by the law,

Those evil ones abound,

We keep the law of God,

They keep the law of the hound!

Text recovered in the ruins of Canudos1

In Brazil as elsewhere, many citizens now see the state as a fragile shell. The republic seems hollowed out; there is no “there” there. In September 2015 the lawyer and professor Janaína Paschoal submitted a motion to launch impeachment proceedings against Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff. On April 4, 2016, in a video that went viral, she took the podium at a rally to describe the government in diabolical terms. “When we succeed at impeaching Dilma,” she shouted into the microphone, “We will destroy the Republic of the Serpent!” Two weeks later Brazil’s lower house in congress voted to begin impeachment proceedings against the president. Fifty-nine deputies prominently invoked God in the televised process of declaring their vote, including the (then) president of congress, Eduardo da Cunha. God was rolled into verbal screeds against corruption, and not without justification. The country was in economic turmoil, with many federal and state employees long unpaid. Yet as one congressional deputy after another found themselves accused of corruption and bribery or were discovered to hold secret offshore bank accounts or rely on illegal “box number two” (caixa dois) campaign funds, the political and economic impasse mutated into a moral crisis of trust.2

On the feast day of Santo Antonio, June 13, the Convent of Saint Anthony in the center of Rio de Janeiro was filled to overflowing. Usually the faithful petition Saint Anthony for marriage, lasting love, and children. That year, said Cardinal Orani Tempesta, “people’s biggest worry is the question of their getting paid at the end of the month. Obviously we ask for intercession so the state will have jobs and be able to pay people.”3 The cardinal implied that even divine aid needs the state for its administration and distribution, while the state, for its part, needs some transcendent guarantee. But if the congress that impeached the president is itself packed with thieves, where is the solid body around which justice settles and gathers force? What guarantees the wages of those who work for the state? Where is stateness at all and, given its elusiveness, how will the church help to broker its benefits?

Fears that the republic was a fragile mirage caused concern not least because in August the Olympics would begin, and the bright lights of international media would be turned on Rio. The former capital city required at least the look and infrastructure, the “metaphysical effect” of a republican state.4 It needed to pop on television screens with the sounds and colors of national unity, security, tradition, and competence, with foundation. Instead the state appeared febrile and thin, a trompe l’oeil propped up by the army now called in to protect arriving tourists on normal city streets. On the eve of the games, the unfinished husks of apartments at the Olympic village and the still-idle new metro line testified more to the obscurity than the presence of stateness.

When the games were done, the political clouds massed and stacked again. On August 30, 2016, the yearlong felling of a regime was a fait accompli when the senate voted to confirm the president’s dismissal. Dilma, criticized from the right as an atheist, even sought last-minute help from God, or at least the godly.5 Yet, far from settling matters, the impeachment launched new debates and marches on the fate of democracy in Brazil and, tangentially, the place of religion and religious discourse in that future. The jurist Janaína Paschoal, who had helped to launch the charge, weighed in again as she summarized and sealed the case before the senate on the eve of the last vote: “It was God who made various people perceive, all at once, what was happening to our country, and who gave them courage to get up and do something about it.”6 Paschoal clarified that she was a not an evangelical but a spiritist: “I’m devoted to St. George, St. Michael the Archangel, and Iemanjá [the Yoruba and Afro-Brazilian goddess of the sea and maternity] . . . If I was a Pastor or a Mãe de Santo [priestess of Candomblé], would my request for impeachment be less legitimate? . . . I think it’s necessary to talk about God, because materialism, intrigue, indifference, falsity and dissimulation have taken over the country.”7

Some senators echoed the need for religion to repair the republic. They too hoped to play Saint George slaying the serpent.8 Despite Paschoal’s presentation of a stereotypically Brazilian-style ecumenism, many of those echoing her position in bringing God into Brazilian politics hail from the so-called bloco evangélico (evangelical block), a cross-party alliance of evangelical congresspersons who mostly vote in chorus and who had aggressively rallied for the “leftist” Dilma’s demise.

In the press appeared familiar wry laments: given the anemic condition of the nation’s futebol, usually the favored totem (it was never the church or the republic), only the long-running telenovelas would be left to convene collective civil life. Once upon a time a backlands town named Canudos was the subject of such a telenovela, in 1997. It flickered on screens in almost every home. A century before that, in 1897, the real Canudos and its destruction served as a narrative pivot of the nation, through the medium of newspapers.9 In that moment, the new republic was similarly suspected of being possessed of a demonic quality manifested by the serpent or, as the people of Canudos called it, the Law of the Hound.

Here I take up a question raised in the introduction on the techniques of making and unmaking social orders that install new renditions of the People. The essay takes the reader to Brazil and the first decade after a confluence of key events: the abolition of slavery (1888), the founding of the republic (1889), the exile (1889) and then death (1891) of the emperor, Pedro II, and the separation of church and state (1890). The paradoxical event I explore is the appearance of a powerfully weaponized churchstate alliance that emerged just a few years after the official separation of church and state. In fact, the separation of church and state helped to generate a more forceful and aggressive edition of the church than had existed before.

Looking at churchstateness through the window afforded by Brazil’s first republican decade and, within it, the ekklesia of Canudos and the astonishing war waged against it by the new government, offers a rare opportunity. In just a few years unfolded a radical national reimagination of the people in relation to church and state. The reporter Euclides da Cunha called it a “revoltation” (revoltação)10—more than a revolt but not quite a revolution—the neologism struggling to name a wide-ranging transition compressed into a single riveting decade. Among the first challenges to the republic and its ideals was the emergence of a large frontier town in the middle of “nowhere” a thousand miles from the federal capital in Rio de Janeiro.11 Its name was Canudos, or, as its religious and political leader Antonio Conselheiro (Anthony the Counselor) renamed it in 1893, “Belo Monte.” There, in a shantytown that swelled to as many as fifty-two hundred houses12 and approached thirty thousand persons, a specific politics of refusal erupted: the refusal of the republic’s separation of church and state and a refusal of the idea that a lawful polity and governance could not exist outside the republican state. They imagined the republic as the Antichrist and its laws as the Law of the Hound. In the 1890s, Antonio exhorted the faithful to resist the new republic and its signs—civil marriage, state burials, federal taxation, the national census, and the forced exile of the emperor. He did not seek military conflict but did not shy from it when it came. He described visions of four wars, of victory in three followed by a fourth conflagration whose terminus was unknown, but that would bring change.

Over the course of a year, from 1896 to 1897, the humble villagers of Canudos—the plebs, the serfs, the frontier, the fanatic horde, as they were called—defeated the republic’s well-equipped military three times. The fourth expedition brought six thousand soldiers reinforced later by several thousands more, Krupp cannons, and mounted machine guns. It brought fire and the total destruction of the city, almost all its inhabitants, and the Counselor himself. But it also authorized the republic in acclamation, in glory, and in blood. The journalist Euclides da Cunha was direct on this score in his diary entry: “What is being destroyed is not Canudos—it’s our unnerving apathy, our morbid indifference about the future, our ill-defined religiosity spread through strange superstitions.”13 The total war on Canudos was waged to destroy a renegade people—their religion, polity, and polis—and advance a still-precarious stateness to the edge of the territorial and religious frontier. The republican state succeeded, at least superficially: the head of Canudos’s sovereign, Antonio Conselheiro, was carried back to Bahia for craniometrical evaluation at the Faculty of Medicine: a thorough conversion to a state-informed body indeed.14

My wager is that the case of Canudos can move us closer, even into, the oblique processes of transition from sacred king to sacred state—this “pass into,” that “comes to replace” named in the introduction—by revealing how the republic no less than the people or the king depend for their efficacy on their capacity to take hold of emotions and direct actions, to grip persons and quicken them toward certain affinities and predispositions. Santner called this this the “jointure of the somatic and the normative.”15 Through the events at Canudos we may be able to see how the loss of the king and the arrival of the republic helped produce the church/state dyad and what that actually meant in the lives and deaths of a people at the frontier,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• the people and the law of the hound at canudos
• spiritual jurisdictions  Treaty People and the Queen of Canada
• banning bibles  Death-Qualifying a Jury
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography