Abstract
In his 1987 book Compassion and Solidarity, Gregory Baum recounts a story told by the German Roman Catholic theologian and priest Johann Baptist Metz, who, in response to the Holocaust, developed a guiding principle: ‘You cannot do theology with your back turned to Auschwitz’. Baum challenges scholars to ask the same question. What is the cost of doing scholarship with one’s back turned to Auschwitz and other forms of radical evil? Does not business-as-usual scholarship risk conforming to the dominant culture and practices of our time, no matter what? Does it not risk pushing scholars to acquiesce to the neo-liberal model of the depoliticized, neutralized scholar? Baum’s refusal to ‘do scholarship’ with his back to evil highlights the necessity and urgency of using scholarly expertise to participate in public debates. First, society needs the unique expertise of scholars of religion to address its many interconnected crises. Second, participation in public debates affords scholars the opportunity to develop a self-critical spirit and to look for signs of ideological taint and distorting messages in their work. Participating in public debates results in better scholarship, Baum argues, but only if one adopts a critical-humanistic approach rooted in an emancipatory commitment, a hermeneutics of suspicion, and the perspective of the victims, the marginalized and the excluded. In other words, socially engaged scholarship is only valid when it is critical – as well as self-critical – scholarship. Baum’s approach promotes a scholarly humility about truth claims that avoids inauthentic universalisms. David Seljak explores the necessity and urgency of participation in public debates by the religious studies scholar by examining Baum’s biography, public role and its impact on his scholarship.
In his 1987 book Compassion and Solidarity, Gregory Baum recounts a story told by the German Roman Catholic theologian and priest Johann Baptist Metz, who pioneered Jewish–Christian dialogue in Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Metz grew up in a small Bavarian village with high participation rates in the Catholic Mass. Throughout the Nazi period, Metz recalled, no mention was made in church or during the liturgy of the Nazi death camp some 50 kilometres away. Baum writes that reflection on this experience led Metz to question his faith:
What was it in Catholic practice, in the steadfast piety, in the daily liturgy, that made the people mute and unable to react to the ongoing slaughter of human beings? He does not blame them. But he is driven to ask the question: Was there an ideological taint, implicit in the religion they had inherited, a distorting message, that made them react in such an inhuman way in the face of mass murder in their own neighbourhood? Was their religion an ideology, a myth, designed to make people subservient to, and uncritical of, those in authority, no matter what? (Baum, 1987a: 78)
In response, Metz adopted a guiding principle: “You cannot do theology with your back turned to Auschwitz” (Baum, 1987a: 79).
We might ask the same of our scholarship. What is the cost of doing scholarship with our backs turned to Auschwitz, militarism, world hunger, climate change, war, racism, neocolonialism, human trafficking and other forms of radical evil? The question of the public role of the religious studies scholar begs the question: Does not our business-as-usual scholarship risk conforming to the dominant culture and practices of our time, no matter what? Does it not risk pushing us to acquiesce to the neo-liberal model of the depoliticized, neutralized scholar? Baum’s refusal to ‘do scholarship’ with his back to evil challenges us to explore the necessity and urgency of using our expertise to participate in public debates. Exploring Baum’s biography, public role and its impact on his scholarship also inspires us to develop a self-critical spirit and to look for signs of ideological taint and distorting messages in our work. In other words, participating in public debates can make us better scholars.
The question of radical evil raised by the Holocaust had special meaning for Baum, who was born Gerhard in 1923 in Berlin to a family of Jewish origin and Protestant German culture. Defined as a Jew by the Nuremberg Laws, Baum fled Germany in 1939 to seek safety in Great Britain. Interned in 1940 by the British as an enemy alien, he later was transferred to a camp in Canada. He converted to Roman Catholicism and became a priest, taking the name Gregory (Baum, 2017: 6–16). From 1959 to 1986, he had a distinguished career as Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at the University of St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, which he left in 1986 to join the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal.
Given the length of his career (over six decades), Baum responded to an amazing variety of social ills, including racism, exclusionary nationalism, religious chauvinism, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, imperialism and colonization, war and militarism, sexism, homophobia, the ecological crisis, political oppression and the suppression of democracy (both in society and in the churches), economic exploitation and cultural oppression (especially the spread of individualism, utilitarianism and relativism that the globalized free market promoted). He also wrote trenchant critiques of the Roman Catholic Church, especially its anti-Semitic prejudices and practices, irrational approach to human sexuality, hierarchical authoritarianism, closed dogmatism, sexism, homophobia and clericalism. In response to the myriad manifestations of radical evil in the modern world, Baum (2006: 168–193) developed a unique perspective that he called ‘critical theology’, which involved a dialogue between Roman Catholic theology and a critical-humanistic sociology. In this reflection on the public role of the religious studies scholar, I will focus on the critical-humanistic sociology that underlies this theological perspective rather than Baum’s theology per se. Baum took on this sociological perspective not just to understand his society, but also to transform it.
Early career and public debates
Baum’s first experience of public scholarship involved his critique of the Catholic Church’s opposition to ecumenism and its centuries-long hostility to Jews and Judaism. His doctoral thesis became his first book, That They May Be One (1958), a defence of ecumenism that the Church had repeatedly condemned. Shortly afterwards, Baum published The Jews and the Gospel (1961), analysing the roots of Christian theological anti-Semitism in the gospels and early church. He joined other theologians in developing the Ten Points of Seelisberg to aid churches to avoid anti-Jewish sentiments in their preaching of the Christian message (Baum, 2017: 32–39). However, Baum’s first real experience of engaging in public debates came in 1960 when he was named peritus (‘expert’) to the Secretary for Christian Unity in preparation for the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). In preparation for the Council, Cardinal Bea instructed Baum to change Catholic opinion on ecumenism by publishing articles in both academic and popular media, giving public talks, and speaking on radio and television (Baum, 2017: 42). In response, Baum founded in 1962 a small theological journal called The Ecumenist, which continues to this day under the name Critical Theology. It was also in his work for the Secretariat that he wrote the first draft of what would become Nostra Aetatae, the Vatican Council’s declaration that overturned the Church’s ‘preaching of contempt’ against Jews and rejection of the world’s other religions. In the 1960s, Baum gave innumerable public lectures to church groups to promote ecumenism and to confront the demons of Christian anti-Semitism. However, Baum’s work to this point was entirely theological, and his audience was the church community.
Conversion to sociology
Baum’s second experience of scholarship and public life followed his time at the New School for Social Research in New York, an experience that would introduce him to a critical-humanistic sociology and broaden his public audience. Excited by the Council’s rejection of centuries of religious chauvinism, authoritarianism and rigid traditionalism, Baum was dismayed to see the retrenchment of curial and papal authority in the late 1960s. He publicly opposed, for example, the Vatican’s rejection of most forms of birth control in the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae. It was his effort to understand how and why the Church resisted change that led Baum to undertake a two-year sabbatical to go to the New School to study sociology. In 1975, he published the product of his conversion to sociology in Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology, a book that saw a second edition published in 2006.
At the New School, Baum adopted a sociological approach to evil in the modern world. This integration of the sociological imagination into his theology inspired Baum (2006: 172–174) to rethink the central Christian categories of sin and redemption, which, he argued, had become narrowly privatized and legalistic. He began to interpret the harm done to individuals and groups in modern societies in terms of alienation, dehumanization, exploitation, oppression and exclusion, the results of what he variously called ‘social sin’, ‘death-dealing forces’, ‘dehumanizing trends’ or ‘structures of sin’. Consequently, addressing these collective harms in the light of faith required both a social scientific analysis and collective action that addressed the structural and cultural forces behind them. Baum’s critical theology, then, represents a faith-based-ideology critique that focuses on systemic evil in its modern forms. The relationship between his critical-humanistic sociology and his theological commitment was dialectical. His sociological imagination transformed his theology just as his theological commitments shaped his approaches to sociology, by inspiring him, for example, to reject reductionism and narrow positivism in the social sciences and to adopt an emancipatory agenda.
A broader audience
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Baum increasingly involved himself in the Canadian left, contributing to broader debates on human rights, the economy, neo-liberalism, Canadian and Quebec nationalism, social justice, feminism and LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, other) rights – in 1974, he published the first defence by a Roman Catholic theologian of homosexual love (Baum, 2017: 114). Addressing these issues led Baum to reimagine his public audience to include the broader society. For example, in 1984, he published Ethics and Economics: Canada’s Catholic Bishops on the Economic Crisis with the well-known Canadian economist Duncan Cameron in order to publicize and defend the 1983 message of the Social Affairs Commission of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, entitled ‘Ethical reflections on the economic crisis’. The book, which defended the bishops’ analysis of the crisis and their criticism of the government’s project of taming inflation through a monetary policy that increased unemployment, was published by a secular press (Baum and Cameron, 1984). In 1987, Baum delivered the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s prestigious Massey Lectures under the title ‘Compassion and solidarity: The church for others’. That same year, these lectures were published in a book of the same title by another secular press. In these lectures, Baum attempted to explain the Christian churches’ public commitments to peace and social justice to a broader audience.
Impact on his scholarship
Baum’s participation in public debates affected his scholarly agenda and method. Influenced by the theology of liberation, Baum (1987b: 157) believed that committing to an emancipatory praxis and examining society from the viewpoint of the victims, marginalized, oppressed and exploited was the only way to accurately analyse the nature and dynamic of any social order, structure, institution or culture. The ‘preferential option for the poor’, a religious value adopted by the bishops of Latin America and later integrated in Catholic Social Teaching and papal documents, helped to safeguard social scientific analysis from ideological distortion and dehumanizing frameworks of analysis. Hence, a public commitment to peace and justice was the foundation of good scholarship. The starting point of good work was not abstract curiosity but scandal, and perhaps even visceral anger at an unjust world, as well as compassion for and solidarity with its victims. These commitments guided the questions scholars asked; the methods that they undertook to answer them; and, directly or indirectly, the conclusions they made.
While critical of narrow positivism, Baum rejected much of postmodernism’s mistrust of the social sciences. To understand oppression and exploitation, we needed, for example, accurate information about the effects of globalization, rising unemployment and climate change. How many people suffered? What were the effects of social dislocation and cultural imperialism? Who benefited and who suffered from government policies? While he accepted the methods of established academic disciplines along with their commitment to overcoming bias, he argued that they lacked this emancipatory commitment. In the 1990s, he found resonance between his critical embrace of Enlightenment reason and that of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which likewise began with a hermeneutics of suspicion, a commitment to emancipation and an orientation to praxis.
Baum in Quebec
I mentioned that Baum left St Michael’s in 1986 and moved to Montreal. There, he was invited to join the editorial board of the Jesuit journal Relations, which allowed him to enter public debates on subjects such as nationalism, immigration, human rights, environmental harm and economic justice. He also published articles and interviews in Le Devoir, Quebec’s independent large-circulation, French-language newspaper. He was happy to join Quebec’s dynamic Catholic left, and eventually became a member of Quebec’s new-style socialist party, Québec solidaire (Baum, 2010: 36–37). Baum supported Quebec nationalism as long as it remained open to diversity, committed to social justice and defined by participatory democracy. He often criticized racism in Quebec society (Baum, 2002: 52–53), praised its unique model of cultural diversity (interculturalisme) and supported the Bouchard–Taylor Commission’s conceptualization of laïcité ouverte (pluralistic or open secularism) (Baum, 2017: 126–127).
Baum (2004) also publicly opposed Islamophobia, which, after 9/11, increasingly convinced Quebecers – and especially French Quebecers – that Islam and Muslim immigrants were a danger. Baum defended forms of Islam that respected democracy and pluralism, and began attending meetings of Présence musulmane in Montreal. For the first time, at the age of 80, he dedicated himself to the serious study of Islam, producing articles and co-editing a book on Fethullah Gülen, leader of the Hizmet movement in Turkey (Baum, 2010: 43; 2017: 154–159). He also publicly defended Gülen after the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, accused the Hizmet leader of organizing a coup (Barnes and Baum, 2015). Baum (2009) also published a book on the theology of the European Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan (who, after Baum passed away, was accused of sexual harassment and violence). Finally, from Quebec, Baum, who communicated effortlessly in French, attempted to inform English-speaking scholars in Canada about the concerns of French Quebecers, publishing frequently on religion in Quebec, French Quebecois theology and francophone scholars (see, for example, Baum, 1991, 2001, 2014, 2015).
The religious studies scholar and public debates
It is clear that Baum would answer ‘yes’ to the question of whether scholars of religion have a responsibility to participate in public debates, whether those debates occur within religious communities or in society at large. Reflecting on the experience of Metz and the death camp, Baum (1987a: 79) writes: ‘The Holocaust points to other death-dealing modern fabrications of genocidal or near-genocidal proportions’. Today, we cannot do our work with our backs turned to the important public debates around climate change, world hunger, threats to democracy, resurgent racism and nationalist chauvinism, imperialism and other manifestations of radical evil. The world needs the expertise of engaged scholars of religion. Moreover, participation in public debate can make for better scholarship because it offers researchers the opportunity to develop a self-critical awareness and protect their work from ideological distortion. For example, writing about church history in Canada without understanding the dynamics and effects of settler colonialism is to seriously distort our conclusions and conform our work to the dominant ideology. Linking one’s scholarship to efforts of decolonization and reconciliation protects scholars from these pitfalls.
The risk, of course, is that one’s political commitments may distort one’s scholarship. However, Baum’s approach encourages a self-critical humility. He would argue that this dialogue between scholarship and public participation requires that scholars root their work in an emancipatory commitment, a hermeneutics of suspicion, and the perspective of the victims, marginalized and excluded. Socially engaged scholarship is only valid when it is critical scholarship (let us not forget that eugenics was a form of socially engaged scholarship). Moreover, Baum’s critical-humanistic sociology reminds us to take our social location (power, wealth, prestige, access to education, etc.) seriously (he was, after all, a student of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge). He reminds us to question our assumptions, probe our blind spots and judge our conclusions in light of their practical effect on society. Baum shared with many positivists the belief in the universality of truth. However, Baum (2001: 112–114) believed that an ‘undifferentiated universalism’ – academic or not – always represented ‘an ideology of domination’, a particularism straining after universal power. His critical approach to the social sciences represented our ‘striving’ towards a universal truth, one that no one could ultimately claim – not even the critically engaged scholar.
For his contribution as a scholar and public intellectual, Baum received many honorary doctorates and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1990. His search for truth never ended, which is why he continued his scholarly participation in public debates, publishing three books (Baum, 2014, 2015, 2017) after his 90th birthday and before his death at 94 in 2017.
