Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics

Encountering Traditions

by Ted Smith

Conventional wisdom holds that attempts to combine religion and politics will produce unlimited violence. Concepts such as jihad, crusade, and sacrifice need to be rooted out, the story goes, for the sake of more bounded and secular understandings of violence. Ted Smith upends this dominant view, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and others to trace the ways that seemingly secular politics produce their own forms of violence without limit. He brings this argument to life―and digs deep into the American political imagination―through a string of surprising reflections on John Brown, the nineteenth-century abolitionist who took up arms against the state in the name of a higher law. Smith argues that the key to limiting violence is not its separation from religion, but its connection to richer and more critical modes of religious reflection. Weird John Brown develops a negative political theology that challenges both the ways we remember American history and the ways we think about the nature, meaning, and exercise of violence.

Genres: Theology, Politics, Philosophy, Religion, History

222 pages, Paperback

First published November 26, 2014

Reviews

[Griffin Duffey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really worthwhile and uncommon work. I have a lot of scattered thoughts on this but here's a blurb I scribbled down quickly after finishing:
Smith takes up the task initiated in Melville’s poem “The Portent” of theorizing John Brown not as a religious fanatic nor a freedom fighter but as weird. John Brown is a touchstone that scrambles the usual logic of both law and ethics— the later makes the basis of judgment universalizable moral obligations (deontology) or evaluative weighing of consequences that assumes an immanent frame of cause and effect. The former, which seems to be more of the emphasis of the book, is only ever authentically granted it status by an external sovereignty.

For Smith, Brown is exceptional in both cases. His actions cannot be justified by the consequences/principles (murder can never be made right, even if for redemptive means) and the law of the day permitted the practices Brown murdered against. Smith borrows heavily from Benjamin, and primary his notion of ‘divine violence,’ most clearly defined on pg. 72: ‘Divine violence is the way justice manifests itself in this world.’ DV is manifest as a negative presence that is law-destroying. It breaks the grip of the present order to open space for politics (where, for Schmitt, DV performs a sacred violence in the state of exception which grounds or renews a social order.) This also opens up practical reasoning to better and more complete deliberation.

Smith does a great job directly modeling what this kind of deliberation looks like in thinking through the politics of pardon. John Brown, in the end, is a ‘great criminal’ who, like Samson, lost himself in the rubble of his own righteous but flawed tactics. For Smith, Brown was not right for what he did, but ought to be pardoned and seen as a Robert E. Lee kind of figure. He uses Agamben to situate the space of the exception to the law in and through Benjamin and Adorno’s messianic history (and, of course, Christianity.) Even in our contemporary political hellscape we have executive perogative that makes pardon possible. He wants to see this function more integrated into our political and legal reasoning, and calls for reparations from slavery.

In the end, I found this book to be a perfect on ramp for thinking about a lot of really cool stuff. I don’t think I buy the entire vision Smith is articulating—one that I believe basically reinstates the liberal democratic state form onto itself. He’s brilliantly critical of state violence in chapter two, but the language of the critique remains positive and within the tradition of the status quo, that, for me, was founded and remains undergirded by mythic violence:

“For when an act of violence founds the authority that establishes the laws, institutions, customs, and characters that constitute a political order, that founding violence continues to radiate throughout the order.” (Pg. 136)

Is this not still true of the regime of power we continue to live under? Does expanding pardon really deal with the vestiges of the same institutions that John Brown resisted? Should John Brown really still be marked as a criminal, if even a great one?

[Jess Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really digged this one. Read for a Political Theolgoy course. Beautiful writing and some really crispy sentences. Got to ask Ted Smith if Karl Barth was a skeleton in the closet lurking behind his argument and whether or not grace/judgment could be thought of as an act of “divine violence” (that’s Walter Benjamin’s use of the word)—still thinking through all that and his answer. Reading this helped me consider further what it means to think history theologically. The reading of John Brown and his afterlife in American memory was epic, slippery at times, but really compelling. His interpretation of Cain and Abel against the story of Romulus and Remus was really cool. The concluding note was just shy of taking on how God in Christ brings about the “Reign of God” (Ted Smith’s key for interpreting history theologically) and what that means for his understanding of divine violence and John Brown. While he’s certainly not trying to “do ethics,” I wonder if he is almost as coy about doing theology. What difference would talking more explicitly about Christ have made to deepen his argument for the necessity of theology to describe and disrupt “the collusion of the law and violence in the afterlives of slavery” (paraphrasing Smith from Zoom)?Anywayyyyssss… def recommend!!!

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

An attempt to understand the life, body, and acts of John Brown through a variety of philosophical lenses in order the understand our own time and sense of justice. I think my lack of familiarity with different philosophies hindered me significantly from dealing with this work meaningfully, but the parts I felt I was able to confidently grasp were deeply thought-provoking and meaningful.

[Joel Call · Rating 4 out of 5]

#KeepJohnBrownWeird

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m very glad I read this book. The author caused me to think about about my life and our lives in this nation and race and violence and law. There is much here to think about. His meditations both on the issues raised by Brown’s acts in leading the raid on Harper’s Ferry and what it has to say about the rule of law and the racism of this nation and our attempts to navigate those passages is very helpful. I appreciate what the author offers to even lay folks like myself.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not about John Brown. This book is about the limits of ethics and immanent secular thinking, and the ways religious thought can be useful in a purely secular government. I came into this book half expecting a defense of theocracy, and a few chapters in I was still sort of expecting to end up there. Instead Ted Smith points out the ways in which ethics fails to tell the whole story of John Brown, and creates a generalizable framework for how to reason about justice without involving ethics.
Despite being a deeply Christian book, nothing about this framework (which Smith calls political theology) is inherently Christian, or even necessarily religious. He makes several examples of purely secular reasoning that acknowledge the necessary elements for political theology, often using American revolutionary thinkers to illustrate this. I felt like I was reading a philosophical text rather than a theological one.
I find it difficult to describe this book adequately, apart from the fact that it's very good. In a way, it's not just a text about a framework for politics and justice but about the ways religious thought can be useful to us in the age of modernity and after Nietzsche's death of god.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this one all the way back at the end of 2019/early 2020...the days before COVID!

One of my favorite books that is able to weave together history and theory. Smith interacts with Schmitt, Agamben, Benjamin, and Taubes through the lens of John Brown's life and action. In doing so, Smith is doing a form of ethics that is all about the limit of “ethics” (reminiscent to me of a Bonhoeffer/Barthian form of ethics), in which divine action/presence is a negative presence that is the judgment on all forms of political identity that see the secular as transcendent. Thus, Smith is disenchanting and demythologizing the state’s claims and uses of violence. In denying the identity between the immanent and transcendent, the political and the theological, a space is opened for real action that is non-mythological (so to speak, in so far as contemporary state violence is mythological), it’s practical and not claiming divine sanction.

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad that I went back to read/re-read this book after I skimmed it for Intro to Ministry Studies last fall (no clue what it was doing in that class). It's definitely an academic read, but I found it to be worth it for Smith's theological claims about sovereignty and the state, violence and enacting justice, and the relationship/contrast between human and divine power.

[Graydon Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at John Brown and what he reveals about violence, politics, and religion. Smith offers an intriguing critique of the state's monopoly of violence, understandings of religious fanaticism, and the use of exclusion and pardon beyond the limit of ethics.

[Serge · Rating 4 out of 5]

An uneven book, but Chapter 4 is well argued shows a scholarly grasp of Habermas and Benjamin's thoughts on divine violence within the context of the abolitionist imaginaries.

[Hank Spaulding · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic contribution to ethics. Names the genuine need for the exception and that Christian ethics need not serve as code.

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wish I could give this a 4.5...