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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2020
Informed by theories of biopolitics and necropolitics, I argue that Christian orthodoxy is a colonial power formation that manufactures the subjectivities of those within the Church and those without. The operation of biopolitics and necropolitics coalesces around two Christian bodies – the local body and the corporate body catholic – and is thus explicable according to the synthetic framework of ‘body politics.’ Within the body-political calculus, orthodox Christians qualify as genuine lives and, consequently, benefit from biopolitical interventions to promote their flourishing; heretics, by contrast, represent (non-)subjects whose bodies orthodoxy/colonialism consigns to destruction. As a case study to illustrate the import of my theoretical analysis for ecclesiological reflection, I examine the rhetoric of the leaders of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), who, despite presenting their movement as a decolonial project, espouse a body-political theology and, therefore, remain firmly within the matrix of Christian colonial orthodoxy.
Special thanks are due to Willie Jennings and Andrew McGowan, with whom I had several productive conversations regarding the contents of this article. Thanks as well to the journal’s three anonymous peer reviewers, who provided generative feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Any errors or omissions that remain in the manuscript are solely my own.
Charlotte Dalwood is a candidate for the degree of Master of Arts in Religion at Yale Divinity School, 410-350 Canner Street, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.
3 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. xii.
4 On modernity/coloniality, see Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Latin America Otherwise; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). On the connection between orthodoxy and modernity, see, further, the analysis and critique of T-Theology in Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000); Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God: Sexuality and Liberation Theology (London: Routledge, 2003).
5 See, relatedly, Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Radical Thinkers; London: Verso, 2009), pp. 18-21Google Scholar.
6 On the social body, see Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (ed. Colin Gordon; trans. Colin Gordon et al.; New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 55.
7 The ‘assemblage’ is described in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). My use of the term is informed by Kevin Grove and Jonathan Pugh, ‘Assemblage Thinking and Participatory Development: Potentiality, Ethics, Biopolitics’, Geography Compass 9.1 (2015), pp. 1-13 (esp. 2-4).
8 On legibility/recognizability and intelligibility, terms I shall use throughout, see Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Butler, Frames of War, esp. ch. 1. Both Butler and I are, in turn, indebted to Foucault’s notion of ‘regimes of truth’, for which see Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge, pp. 109-33; Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Critique?’, in Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (eds.), The Politics of Truth (trans. Lysa Hochroth; New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), pp. 23-82; Michel Foucault, ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (trans. Leslie Sawyer; New York: Taylor & Francis, 2014), pp. 208-26.
9 Walter Mignolo coined the phrase ‘body politics’ in The Darker Side of Western Modernity, p. xxii. As he put it there, body politics, together with what he calls ‘geo-politics’, challenges ‘the imperial assumptions constructed around theo- and ego-politics of knowledge…. Thus it is crucial to distinguish bio-politics from bio-graphic or body-politics of knowledge. Bio-politics (or bio-power) is a concept that has served to analyze state-oriented strategies (and now used by the corporations) to manage and control the population. My use of bio-graphic or body-politics of knowledge describes instead the responses, thinking and action, of the population who do not want to be managed by the state and want to delink from the technologies of power to which they are being summated.’ While I find Mignolo’s phrase useful for capturing the manner in which biopower and necropower coalesce around both individual and social bodies, I am otherwise unsatisfied with the definition he provides. It remains unclear to me what he means when he characterizes biopower as ‘state-oriented’. If he is intending to suggest that biopower and biopolitics are localized to states and corporations, that would be a rather unfortunate misreading of Foucault, for whom power generally, and biopower specifically, permeate the entire social body (see, e.g., Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 114). Given the ambiguity of Mignolo’s definition, I am therefore hesitant to adopt it for my own argument without significant qualification.
10 See, especially, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 135-59; Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (trans. David Macey; New York: Picador, 1997), pp. 239-63.
11 A critical appropriation of Foucault’s writings on biopower is necessary in such discussions because, as Scott Morgensen observes, neither Foucault nor Giorgio Agamben (whose study of the figure of the homo sacer contributed significantly to the theorization of biopolitics vis-à-vis Western law; see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen; Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998]) ‘directly theorises colonialism as a context for biopower’ (‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now’, Settler Colonial Studies 1.1 [2011], pp. 52-76 [55]).
12 For a discussion of which, see Morgensen, ‘Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism’, pp. 62-64; Mark Rifkin, ‘Making Peoples into Populations: The Racial Limits of Tribal Sovereignty’, in Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (eds.), Theorizing Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 149-87; see, further, Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15.1 (2003), pp. 11-40 (27).
13 George E. Tinker, ‘American Indians, Conquest, the Christian Story, and Invasive Nation-Building’, in Harold Recinos (ed.), Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), pp. 255-74.
14 My reference to historical indebtedness is inspired by the discussion of the same (albeit on highly divergent lines) in Achille Mbembe, ‘Borders in the Age of Networks: The Idea of a Borderless World’, Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Yale University, March 28, 2018.
15 See, similarly, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s parable of the Angelus Novus in Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 75. And, further, Orlando Patterson’s discussion of the distinction between having a past and having a heritage as this distinction pertains to slavery in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 5-6.
16 Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 93-96.
17 On the biopolitical significance of obituaries, see Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 34-38.
18 For a detailed account of the abuses committed at Canadian residential schools and the long-term impacts thereof, see the final reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, especially: Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939 (The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 1a; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015); Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 2, 1939–2000 (The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 1b; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), esp. ch. 41; Canada’s Residential Schools: The Legacy (The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 5; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015).
19 ‘Necropolitics’ and ‘necropower’ are coinages of Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’. While I find Mbembe’s account useful as a point of departure for my own analysis, I make no attempt to slavishly adhere to his construal of either term.
20 See, further, Butler, Frames of War, p. 12.
21 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 40.
22 It is this malleability that allows for the emergence of such phenomena as ‘homonationalism’ in the United States; see Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Next Wave; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
23 Judith Butler, ‘Sexual Inversions’, in John Caputo and Mark Yount (eds.), Foucault and the Critique of Institutions (Studies of the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium; University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 81-98 (97); Butler, Frames of War, p. 42.
24 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, pp. 26-27.
25 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 24.
26 See, e.g., George E. Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
27 To reference the oft-cited remark by Richard H. Pratt, ‘The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites’, in Francis Paul Prucha (ed.), Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the ‘Friends of the Indian’ 1880–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 260-71 (261).
28 Wendy Farley, Gathering those Driven Away: A Theology of Incarnation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011), p. 29.
29 John Calvin’s remarks are in this respect instructive. Characterizing the visible church as the ‘mother of believers’, Calvin argues in a body-political vein that ‘there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive [sic] us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels… Furthermore, away from her bosom one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sins or any salvation, as Isaiah [Isa. 37.32] and Joel [Joel 2.32] testify… By [the words of Scripture] God’s fatherly favor and the especial witness of spiritual life are limited to his flock, so that it is always disastrous to leave the church’ (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion [ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; LCC, 20–21; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1960], §IV.I.4 [p. 1016]).
30 On the difference between having a heritage and having a past, see, again, Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 5-6.
31 Farley, Gathering those Driven Away, ch. 1.
32 Leanne Larmondin, ‘New Westminster Synod and Bishop Approve Same-Sex Blessings’, Anglican Communion News Service (June 18, 2002), http://www.anglicannews.org/news/2002/06/new-westminster-synod-and-bishop-approve-same-sex-blessings.aspx.
33 J.I. Packer, ‘Why I Walked: Sometimes Loving a Denomination Requires You to Fight’, Christianity Today (January 1, 2003), http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/january/6.46.html.
34 Justin Taylor, ‘J. I. Packer to Be Suspended from the Anglican Church of Canada’, The Gospel Coalition (March 11, 2008), https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/j-i-packer-to-be-suspended-from/.
35 Solange Desantis, ‘Vancouver Church Votes to Leave Canadian Church’, Anglican Journal (February 14, 2008), https://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/vancouver-church-votes-to-leave-canadian-church-7728/.
36 See, similarly, Ellen Davis’s argument that those on either side of the present dispute within the Communion adhere to discrete ways of reading the Bible apropos of questions of human sexuality: ‘Reasoning with Scripture’, AThR 90.3 (2008), pp. 513-19.
37 It would be tedious to cite more than a modest selection of texts to illustrate the degree to which questions of sexuality have captured the imaginations of both Anglicans themselves as well as external commentators on the Communion, for examples abound. Besides the literature discussed below, see, e.g., Stephen E. Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Challenges in Contemporary Theology; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), ch. 4; Terry Brown (ed.), Other Voices, Other Worlds: The Global Church Speaks Out on Homosexuality (New York: Church Publishing, 2006); Kathryn Tanner, Richard W. Corney, and W. Mark Richardson (eds.), ‘Homosexuality, Ethics and the Church: An Essay by Richard Norris with Responses’, Special Issue of AThR 90.3 (2008); Jason Bruner, ‘Divided We Stand: North American Evangelicals and the Crisis in the Anglican Communion’, Journal of Anglican Studies 8.1 (2010), pp. 101-25; Godfrey Mdimi Mhogolo, ‘Human Sexuality in the Anglican Communion’, in Ian S. Markham et al. (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anglican Communion (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 627–42; ‘Statement from the Global South Primates and GAFCON Primates Council Concerning Same-Sex Unions’ (GAFCON, October 6, 2016), https://www.gafcon.org/news/statement-from-the-global-south-primates-and-gafcon-primates-council-concerning-same-sex-unions.
38 This is so even if we allow for the substantial variation that obtains between the views of individual members of the Communion, which of course gives the lie to the reductionist view of the present dispute as merely having two sides.
39 Peter Jensen, ‘Why GAFCON Truly Matters by Peter Jensen, General Secretary GAFCON’, GAFCON (January 1, 2016), https://www.gafcon.org/news/why-gafcon-truly-matters-by-peter-jensen-general-secretary-gafcon; Peter Jensen, ‘Is Gafcon Divisive?’, GAFCON (September 19, 2017), https://www.gafcon.org/blog/is-gafcon-divisive; see, further, Peter Jensen, ‘The Need for GAFCON’, GAFCON, (December 22, 2015), https://www.gafcon.org/blog/the-need-for-gafcon. Jensen’s construal of GAFCON as a force for unity echoes the language of ‘GAFCON 2013: The Nairobi Communiqué’ (GAFCON, October 26, 2013), p. 1, https://www.gafcon.org/sites/gafcon.org/files/news/pdfs/Nairobi_Communique_Final.pdf.
40 Peter Jensen, ‘The Mythical Middle’, GAFCON (August 3, 2017), https://www.gafcon.org/blog/the-mythical-middle; see, further, Jensen, ‘Why GAFCON Truly Matters’; Peter Jensen, ‘Slipping into the Slumber of the Spirit’, GAFCON (February 22, 2018), https://www.gafcon.org/blog/slipping-into-the-slumber-of-the-spirit.
41 Jensen, ‘Why GAFCON Truly Matters’, under ‘What GAFCON Means to You’.
42 Jensen, ‘Slipping into the Slumber of the Spirit’.
43 Peter Jensen, ‘How Important Is Sex?’, GAFCON (January 10, 2018), https://www.gafcon.org/blog/how-important-is-sex.
44 Quotation from Jensen, ‘Why GAFCON Truly Matters’, under ‘What GAFCON Means to You’.
45 Jensen, ‘Slipping into the Slumber of the Spirit’.
46 It is worth noting that attendance at these meetings was severely regulated by the conference’s organizers. For a discussion and analysis of attendance patterns at the first GAFCON, see Joanna Sadgrove, Robert M. Vanderbeck, Kevin Ward, Jill Valentine and Johan Andersson, ‘Constructing the Boundaries of Anglican Orthodoxy: An Analysis of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON)’, Religion 40.3 (2010), pp. 193-206 (196).
47 ‘GAFCON 2013: The Nairobi Communiqué’, p. 1. On the coalitional politics of GAFCON, see Sadgrove et al., ‘Constructing the Boundaries of Anglican Orthodoxy’; Gill Valentine, Robert M. Vanderbeck, Joanna Sadgrove, Johan Andersson and Kevin Ward, ‘Transnational Religious Networks: Sexuality and the Changing Power Geometries of the Anglican Communion’, Transactions 38 (2013), pp. 50-64.
48 ‘GAFCON Final Statement: Statement on the Global Anglican Future’ (GAFCON, June 29, 2008), under ‘The Global Anglican Context’, http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/blog/printing/gafcon_final_statement.
49 ‘GAFCON Final Statement’, under ‘The Global Anglican Context’.
50 ‘Statement at the Lambeth Conference 2008 – Global South Primates’, Global South Anglican Online (August 3, 2008), http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/blog/printing/statement_on_lambeth_conference_2008.
51 ‘GAFCON Final Statement’, under ‘A Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans’ and ‘The Jerusalem Declaration’.
52 ‘GAFCON Final Statement’, under ‘A Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans’.
53 Not only did missionaries frequently translate the BCP into non-English languages during the course of their evangelistic efforts, but, as Eric Woods observes, the liturgical language of the text itself reflected imperial commitments to assimilation: ‘A key signaling event that Anglicans had begun to think more seriously about evangelism was the publication in 1662 of the revised Book of Common Prayer. Notably, the revisions included a baptism liturgy for adults – those of “riper years”. While this new liturgy was mainly aimed at providing a mechanism for admitting “lost” Anglicans back into the church in a time of the rapidly increasing visibility of Protestant dissenters, the book suggests that the service, “may be always useful for the baptizing of Natives in our Plantations, and others converted to the faith”. Thus, with the adoption of the new Book of Common Prayer any formal liturgical barrier to missionary work among the indigenous communities of North America was now cleared. The reference in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer to “our plantations” hints at the impact that the American colonies were having on metropolitan Anglican perceptions about the mission’ (A Cultural Sociology of Anglican Mission and the Indian Residential Schools in Canada: The Long Road to Apology [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016], p. 24).
54 ‘GAFCON Final Statement’, under ‘The Jerusalem Declaration’.
55 ‘GAFCON Final Statement’, under ‘Primates’ Council’ (emphasis mine).
56 ‘GAFCON Final Statement’, under ‘Primates’ Council’.
57 ‘GAFCON 2013: The Nairobi Communiqué’, p. 2.
58 ‘GAFCON 2013: The Nairobi Communiqué’, p. 2.
59 ‘GAFCON 2013: The Nairobi Communiqué’, p. 3. Note, further, the following statement in the communiqué from the 2018 GAFCON in Jerusalem: ‘To proclaim the gospel, we must first defend the gospel against threats from without and within’ (‘GAFCON Jerusalem 2018: Letter to the Churches, GAFCON Assembly 2018’, GAFCON [June 22, 2018], p. 7, https://www.gafcon.org/sites/gafcon.org/files/news/pdfs/gafcon_2018_letter_to_the_churches_-_final.pdf).
60 ‘GAFCON 2013: The Nairobi Communiqué’, p. 4.
61 ‘GAFCON 2013: The Nairobi Communiqué’, p. 1. GAFCON is incorporated in the United Kingdom as the GFCA; see the notice at the bottom of the GAFCON website (https://www.gafcon.org).
62 In the Nairobi Communiqué, the content of that false gospel was described thus: ‘This false gospel questioned the uniqueness of Christ and his substitutionary death, despite the Bible’s clear revelation that he is the only way to the Father (John 14:6). It undermined the authority of God’s Word written. It sought to mask sinful behaviour with the language of human rights. It promoted homosexual practice as consistent with holiness, despite the fact that the Bible clearly identifies it as sinful’ (see ‘GAFCON 2013: The Nairobi Communiqué’, p. 1).
63 ‘Jerusalem 2018 – Introduction’, GAFCON, under ‘2. Change the communion from within’, GAFCON, https://www.gafcon.org/jerusalem-2018/introduction (accessed February 10, 2018).
64 ‘Letter to the Churches’, 5.
65 ‘Letter to the Churches’, pp. 5-6.
66 My thanks to this journal’s anonymous second reader for suggesting this turn of phrase.
67 See, further, Miranda Hassett’s study of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century coalition building among conservative Anglicans, which, although predating the first GAFCON in 2008, helpfully details some additional ways in which the resultant alliances represent the continuation of colonial trajectories: Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), e.g., p. 210.