"WE ARE WHAT WE PRETEND TO BE,” Kurt Vonnegut once observed. “So we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” What a funny and paradoxical and intensely true thing to say. This is indeed the drill. The world runs on pretense. We play along with norms, strengthening their power as we go, borrowing a sense of legitimacy—sometimes trading in acts of legitimation with others—in the hope of being seen by others as credible and worthy of a salaried position.
If we aren’t careful, we learn to stop asking whether the reigning legitimacies in which we live and move are, in fact, good or worthy or true. When they aren’t, our pretense is a form of earnest wickedness. I’ve gained power, a tiny world of fake legitimacy, while slowly and dutifully forfeiting my soul. I’ve become what I’ve played at and lost any righteous sense of self and others in exchange for status. Henry David Thoreau described the way his own conscience sometimes succumbed to such peer pressure thusly: “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”
We are, of course, responsible for our own words and actions, but we’re also responsible for the conflicts we avoid to more effectively get by, the lies we allow others to propagate unchallenged in our presence. Thoreau worried over all the ways he played along and didn’t raise a fuss in the face of the terrors his government enacted and the subtle fashion in which his own behavior, by proving polite and acceptable, abided injustice.
There’s a time to stop pretending, to kneel during the anthem, to firmly address a senator in an elevator, to refuse service to a press secretary in a restaurant, or, if you’re Therese Patricia Okoumou, to climb onto the foot of the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July to publicly demand the return of the terrorized children of asylum-seeking families to their parents. Is it a subtle form of demonic possession that keeps us from doing these things more often? Are we worried about vexing someone?
With an eye on where risking vexation can get you, the poet-priest Daniel Berrigan once proposed an adage: “If you want to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.” Such lines are typical of the dark humor and prophetic seriousness I associate with Berrigan and his brother, Philip, but they are of a piece with a long life of steadfast joy. Beware when all people speak well of you, Jesus warns, for this is a sign of a false prophet. If your alleged devotion to God is not met with resistance, you are doubtless doing it wrong. Keep religion out of politics? Stay in your lane? Every news cycle—and even a cursory reading of the prophets and the gospels—reminds us our common life does not work this way.
If we are what we normalize, we’ll need to be alive to all the ways we can withdraw our consent or flip the given script when avenues for doing so are placed before us. For Daniel Berrigan, one such opportunity arose as a 1968 trip to Hanoi with historian Howard Zinn to bring out three American prisoners of war being released by North Vietnam. There Berrigan hid in bomb shelters, held infants, and took in the scenery. He experienced the facts on the ground as a live-action lesson in all the ways “American power” serves as “the active, virulent enemy of human hope.” His conviction concerning the psychic toll of endless war intensified.
Meanwhile, Philip had begun to take courage from younger men refusing induction into the military and suffering imprisonment for it. Wanting to engage the crisis himself in a way that involved risk, he had walked into Baltimore’s Selective Service Board with artist Tom Lewis, poet David Eberhardt, and minister Jim Mengel, who handed out copies of the New Testament while the other three opened draft files and poured blood over them. Lest anyone misunderstand the meaning of their action, they also passed out leaflets containing the following statement: “This sacrificial and constructive act is meant to protest the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood in Indochina.”
Philip would eventually receive a six-year sentence for this action, possibly making him the first modern American Catholic priest to be tried and imprisoned for having committed a political crime. Before his case went to trial, he felt compelled by God to perform another liturgical raid on the sacrosanct, the paperwork of American war-making. Daniel was unsure, but he was committed to praying the matter through. What’s a self-respecting Jesuit citizen to do? Daniel Berrigan famously characterized his dilemma this way: “I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence.” Anybody know the feeling? I imagine these words name the danger we’re all in. If not them, who? If not now, when? Berrigan later articulated the state of play:
Who owned the tradition, anyway; and who was worthy to speak on its behalf? ... The tradition was a precious voice, a presence, a Person. The war had silenced the voice, outlawed the Person. Church and state had agreed, as they inevitably did in time of war, that the Person was out of fashion, “for the duration.” He had nothing to offer in the face of guns ... He was a prisoner of war this Jesus. He was in a species of protective custody.
And yet, the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it: files, designated areas, the whole of it. Could they keep their vows to be ambassadors of God’s righteous order without vexing the nation-state? They would bring the liturgical forms entrusted to them by their tradition to the war-making liturgies of their government, whose enlisting of young men to commit acts of violence upon the people and the land of Vietnam constituted, biblically speaking, a demonic stronghold. On May 17, 1968, they joined seven other activists and walked into a draft board in Catonsville, Md., removed papers with the names of young men scheduled to be conscripted, and conducted the prayerful burning of draft files with homemade napalm.
Apologizing for their fracture of what they could no longer abide as “good order,” and noting that they were no longer able to say “peace, peace” when there is no peace, they observed that they thought it fitting to burn paper instead of children: “We could not so help us God do otherwise.” As the fire burned, they punctuated this purposeful ritual by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
What was accomplished? They went to jail. The Berrigan brothers were placed on the cover of Time magazine. It was a palpable hit in the sense that it made the news for a time. Similar nonviolent actions were undertaken and continue into our day, now aimed at nuclear weapons facilities, the most recent at a Navy submarine base in Kings Bay, Ga., last spring. These endeavors are often staged under the moniker of the Plowshares Movement and pose, as the prophetic always does, the question of authority. Who do we credit and why? Who speaks for God?
THE ACTIONS OF the Catonsville Nine, 50 years on, are like a clarifying, largely buried memory in American history, but such moments of clarity persist. Six years before making headlines by disrupting the World Cup this past summer, members of the Pussy Riot protest collective were charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to prison for staging a performance of “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out!” in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.
Pussy Riot’s punk prayer resides along a trajectory of deep continuity with the early church, a continuity interrupted by the Russian Orthodox Church’s alliance with the Putin regime and exemplified, most recently, by the Moscow Patriarchate threatening to sever ties with the global Orthodox communion if the Orthodox Church in Ukraine is granted ecclesiastical independence. Noting this co-option, Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina believes the “meanings and symbols” of God’s righteous demands “are being replaced by those that are diametrically opposed to them” and that liturgies of conscience like their own are essential. While Putin pitched their art as an attack on religion, members of Pussy Riot argue that it’s their devotion to right religion under persecution.
Citing Socrates as a righteous irritant in ancient Athens as well as the apostle Stephen’s death by stoning in the book of Acts, another Pussy Riot member, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, places their witness alongside that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who insisted that, in time, artful words will break the cement of tyrants. Nevertheless, the collective noted that they would be happy to repent of any alleged indiscretion so long as Putin joined them in repenting of his own crimes and committed to confining himself to a monastery. “Our trial,” they argued, “showed the world the face of the judicial system and the current government, which is afraid of truth and smiles.”
What do we have to fear from truth, smiles, and observational candor? Nothing at all if the power we have isn’t dependent on keeping anyone quiet, if we live in the hope of more transparency, not less, in our everyday doings with others. “We are intimately related,” Fred Rogers once observed. “May we never even pretend that we are not.”
But pretend we do, denying the fact of relationship at every turn to, as the saying goes, get ahead. But it’s never too late to turn around, to risk the vexingly prophetic move together with others. Avenues for these risky moves are everywhere and ever before us. One human exchange at a time.
David Dark is the author of four books, most recently Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious. An assistant professor of religion and the arts at Belmont University, he also teaches at the Tennessee Prison for Women.
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