Reimagining Anarcho-Pacifist Political Theology amidst Empires of Imperial Masculine Violence

Abstract

This dissertation is situated within Anabaptist discourses and responds to critiques raised by survivors of gender-based and sexual violence. I extend these critiques to discuss the larger body of anarcho-pacifist political theology centered around a shared profession of "nonresistance," turning the other cheek, and loving one's enemies as interpreted from Matthew 5:38-44. The political stakes of this project are drawn from the field of postcolonial theology and the study of politics of difference in medieval Christendom and colonial modernity. I explore the ways in which theology has played a role in race making, broadly construed, and how responding to such race making or difference making shapes new theology. I argue that such politics are located in the body and in the imposition of gender as a category. These differences have also undergirded the logic of ascetic, monastic, and martyrological conceptions of virtue, conceptions that are gendered according to Roman imperial masculine frameworks. The social stakes of this project relate to the lived experience of secondary victimization of victims of gender-based and sexual violence. I attempt to bring attachment and relational dynamics into conversation with professed political theology and situate this project within the "feminist kenosis debates" (Selak, 2017). Broadly construed, I am contemplating ethics in relation to violence. More specifically, I use immanent critique to think within anarcho-pacifist discourses and then to respond by considering the stakes in gender-based violence, sexual violence, and secondary victimization, suggesting potentialities and limitations in soteriology, the study of salvation, ecclesiology, the study of community, and ritual, where a community embodies and enacts their politics. With regards to cultural thought, this project is located within the study of a lived religion, North American Anabaptism. I make the argument that asceticism, monasticism, and martyrological spirituality are both specific to this culture and also shared in a larger anarcho-pacifism tradition. Ultimately, I end by weighing asceticism, monasticism, and martyrological spirituality as a vocational option, going through an embodied and ethnographic process of contemplation. I use contemplative art reflecting on Christ as a "Battered Sheep" (Figure 9) and engage with liberative theologies in Cone (2011), Tombs (2023), and others to reimagine asceticism, monasticism, and martyrological spirituality, undoing imperial masculine and kyriarchal conceptions of virtue while pursuing the "Practice of the Passion of God", a passion that seeks to counter gender-based, sexual, and imperial violence.