This post is in response to a very big mistake I made last month. I should have known better, and it has bothered me profoundly ever since. The mistake cannot be undone, but I am writing this as a way to correct the record, as it were.
In the middle of April, I attended a conference organized to mark the millennium of the so-called Moster assembly. According to twelfth-century sources, such as the Law of the Gulathing Law Province, which covered most of what is today Western Norway, it was at this assembly that Saint Olaf and Bishop Grimkell introduced the Christian law to Norway. The date of this assembly is traditionally set to 1024, and although the dating is debated, there are good reasons for accepting that such an assembly did indeed take place. What is more contested, however, is the importance of this assembly in its own time, and much of current scholarship is of the opinion that the importance for the Christianization of Norway was rather limited, partly because much of Norway was already Christian at that time. The importance of the historical assembly was much greater for the twelfth-century Norwegian Church, as this event became a historical point of reference that the clergy could use to formulate its institutional identity and provide an anchor point in the country's past. In other words, the assembly became a tool of legitimization for the Norwegian Church.
At the conference, I gave a presentation called 'Stories of a Violent Triumph – The Conversion of Norway in Light of the Hagiographical Tradition'. My aim was to show how our ideas about Norway being converted by the sword was established in the twelfth century, and is largely exaggerated, although not completely wrong. I sought to problematize our willingness to subscribe to simple narratives, and to show that our understanding of the history of eleventh-century Norway is hugely influenced by the way in which the Norwegian Church sought to establish its identity.
During the conference, I was contacted via email by someone from a Norwegian conservative Christian media outlet. They asked if I would give a written interview about my talk, and sent me a number of questions about the topic and about our own contemporary approach to this part of Norway's past. It took a long time for me to decide on what to do. I had never heard of this outlet, and after checking some of its texts I was disgusted but not horrified - disgusted because I could see that they were conservatives of a type that I both dislike and disrespect, but not horrified because from the samples that I made, they did not seem to espouse the more militant views typical of American conservative Christians, such as a blind and militant support of the Israeli government in their effort to commit genocide on the Palestinian people.
After mulling it over in my head for a couple of days, I said yes, and wrote some responses to each of the questions I had been sent. I said yes, because I thought I had found a way to both take this opportunity to do some outreach, and also to challenge their conservative views. As I am myself a Christian, I thought I could use my familiarity with the Christian frame of reference and the Norwegian Christian tradition to make my points in a way they could understand, and in a way that would be familiar to them. Consequently, in my responses, I talked about how the Christian law did not suddenly and radically improve the life of those members of society that were at the bottom of the hierarchy, such as slaves and the mentally or physically handicapped. I also explained that while I do not believe Norway to have been converted predominantly by the sword, there are plenty of examples of how Christians became persecutors once they had attained power, drawing on the case of Archbishop Ambrosius of Milan, who ordered the torture of Arian Christians, and also emphasizing that the Crusades led to unimaginable atrocities committed against Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. I stated that I do not believe that milestones in Norway's Christian history should be celebrated, even though they should be acknowledged and be used as opportunities to reflect on our understanding of the past - i.e., that they could be commemorated, but not celebrated. I also made sure to make reference to the ongoing genocide in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli government in two of my responses.
I hoped that my interview would provide a small measure of balance in a media outlet that espouses a Christian nationalism that I find revolting. I hoped that I could enter into this territory and provide a countervoice that could potentially lead to some readers less mired in the myopic and simplistic understanding of reality to distance themselves from the outlet's grand narrative. I hoped that I could make a difference. I was utterly, completely and gut-wrenchingly wrong.
After the interview was over, the whole affair escaped my mind for a while, as there were other things to think about. However, a few weeks later, I decided to check how the person who contacted me had rendered the material that I had given. After all, they had said that they had only made some teeny-tiny changes to the text. The changes, however, were not teeny-tiny, as both my references to the ongoing genocide had been deleted. All that remained of my effort to counteract Christian supremacism was the reference to the atrocities of the Crusades, and that they had been committed against Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. To increase my utter dismay, it seems that the outlet has also ramped up its Zionist rhetoric in the past few weeks - or perhaps I only now have managed to notice it properly.
I feel very stupid for having agreed to participate in the interview. I feel very stupid for having lent my name to this outlet in a way that only serves to legitimize it. I feel very stupid for thinking that I could make a difference when the outlet was in control of how the final product would appear. I abhor Christian supremacism, conservatism, nationalism and Zionism, and I have contributed to the outlet in a way that only strengthens. For this, I am both deeply ashamed and deeply troubled. Hopefully, I will know better than to engage with such people in terms that are so in favour to them a second time.
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