The Wild

So begins Wild, a recent book by Jay Griffiths, in which she tells of her own personal quest to re-connect with the wildness of the world. It is a journey out of personal depression, which takes her to the Amazonian forests, to the Inuits of the Arctic, the Bajo people of Indonesia and the Aboriginals of Australia. It is part travelogue, part manifesto.

Griffiths’s aim, like others who have written in praise of the wild in recent times, is to challenge our alienation from nature.Footnote 3 Behind the drive to tame the wilderness and bring civilization to uncivilized people, she sees nothing less than a violent need to dominate and exploit the earth, and to crush indigenous peoples beneath the heel of European empires. Stories of missionaries pepper her account, and they are invariably stories of cultural arrogance tending towards the extermination of what is considered savage and pagan.

It is hardly a balanced account. The ambiguity of colonial relationships, collusions and reversals is notable by its absence. But it still offers a significant challenge to those of us wishing to articulate a Christian vision of creation, truth and community in the wake of empires and the persistence of neo-colonial ambitions. Griffiths does not simply pit an abstract and romanticized wildness over against human culture. She explores at length the intimate relationships between indigenous cultures, their landscape and the nonhuman species with which they share it.

The wild, in this view, is a sensual text and a meaningful texture. It drips with associations, through which human culture seeks to gain its bearings. Animal spirits speak through the dreams of the shaman; the shifting distinction between water and land becomes an image of the fluid boundaries of human society; the famous Inuit ability to distinguish many different types of ice and snow is shown to be rooted in a basic need for survival. In the UK, the wrong type of ice might delay the trains. In the Arctic, reading the ice incorrectly could lead to isolation and death. The wild—like the ice—has to bear a human weight.

Griffiths tries out various etymologies of the word ‘wild’. The one she prefers—whether or not it is the most accurate—suggest that wildness is ‘self-willed’.Footnote 4 It is not simply an absence of human culture, and it is certainly no prettified nature, denuded of raw vitality. The wild is always intimately connected with human identity, but it is not caught within our constructs. It does not mutely obey the mechanical laws of our empire building, be they cultural, economic or scientific. To be self-willed is to possess an otherness that is particular and unfathomable.

I believe there are suggestive resources here for re-imagining ideas of identity and community, resources, which can illuminate some of the current discontents in the church and provoke new dialogues with Christian revelation. I will argue that it is the suppression of a certain sort of wildness — a fear of the particular other — which hinders an honest facing of disputes within the church, not to mention its witness to the world.

This is strongly evident in some characteristics of the recent debates about sexuality in the Anglican Communion and their wider context. The question of sexuality is itself one of the negotiation of fluid boundaries, and it therefore constitutes a potential threat to any desire to fix it in clear categories. However, it is not an issue that is discussed in isolation. Vexed concerns about human identity gather around its flame and are ignited: where do we draw the line between humans and animals? Between men and women? Between the invader and the indigenous, the traitor and the patriot, the civilized and the savage?

Unravelling at least a few of these threads will, I believe, offer a critical corrective of the hermeneutical arrogance shown on all sides of the current divisions in the church, whilst offering the seeds of a more constructive vision: a hybrid church that gathers only to take flight, impelled by the call of a feral angel. More prosaically: a church that not only can live with difference but also sees that as the positive virtue that constitutes its life from the first. Not just any difference, of course — and that is where the critical voice, and touch and vision of revelation must make itself known.

This is not at all to suggest that, for participants in the controversy, all can be resolved into culturally constructed images of otherness or animality. There are clearly questions of truth involved, questions about the order of creation, the nature, authority and interpretation of Scripture, the limits of ecclesial identity and the God-willed content of intimate relationships. However, such questions are always worked out in dialogue with cultural norms, even if that dialogue is perceived as one of opposition or overcoming. The cultural mediation of truth claims does not make them irrelevant or wholly relative. Indeed, it could be said that this mediation is a corollary of a revelation that speaks to and within historical existence, and, for Christians, is supremely mediated through the incarnation, dereliction and embodied resurrection of the Word. There is no Gnostic denial of temporal and material mediation in Christian revelation.

As an example, we might take the recent collection The Anglican Communion and Homosexuality, edited by Philip Groves, the Facilitator of the Communion’s ‘Listening Process’. The chapter ‘Homosexualities and Cultures’ is introduced as ‘key’.Footnote 5 Within it, Griphus Gakuru offers a ‘Ugandan reflection’, which promotes the idea of ‘Culture in Christ’. Gakuru argues that this model recognizes the ‘inextricable cultural favour’ to a person’s Christian commitment. However, it also demands that cultural beliefs incompatible with Christianity are filtered out, a process of death to self, which can involve literal martyrdom. This has the positive consequences that a Christian is able to overcome cultural barriers and refuse the idea that any one culture has a monopoly on the truth.Footnote 6

Gakuru’s model offers a nuanced understanding, in which revelation and truth are clearly in dialogue with culture, both mediated through it, but also dissolving its fixity and absoluteness.

Another example comes from the North American context. Eprhaim Radner and Philip Turner advocate a conservative approach to the issue of sexuality.Footnote 7 This is rooted in scriptural authority, and also in the culture of the Anglican Church, as a church liturgically immersed in and formed by the reading of the whole narrative Scripture, and therefore resistant to innovations that press upon it from the surrounding society. In a sense, Anglicanism is its own culture, shaped by apostolic witness. At the same time, Radner and Turner offer a cultural critique of both liberal and fundamentalist approaches, which they argue reflect a ‘primordialist’ mentality specific to North America, a drive to abolish existing structures and start again from a blank slate or pristine wilderness.

Radner and Turner’s conservative approach does not sacrifice truth claims, but acknowledges the integral role played by historical and social mediation in expressing Christian truth. The question may be asked whether they are successful in determining a culture internal to Anglicanism, which resists the imprint of what surrounds it. In any case, issues of boundary, definition and identity are clearly at the heart of the question of truth as well as that of culture.

Animal Sex

I have argued elsewhere that it is not accidental that sexuality has become one of the defining issues affecting the identity of the churches in the twenty-first century.Footnote 8 It is the embodied expression of desires, which by their very nature cross the boundaries of flesh and personhood. It concerns our nearest intimacies, and yet it is intertwined with our publicly deployed notions of gender, race, class, power and bodies. In a time of fast-paced global transitions, it is perhaps not surprising that mutations in sexual identity should be accompanied by the reassertion of regimes that seek to define and police desire in regularized and decent ways.Footnote 9

The churches — both as agents and as consumers of such global trends — are in a place of tension. They proclaim an identity, which is first and foremost rooted in the creative, restoring and sanctifying grace of God. They therefore give legitimacy to identities, which are not simply pre-determined by a fixed and unchanging idea of nature. Christian communities have, since the beginning, troubled the settlements of power employed by empires to maintain their rule.

At the same time, and also since the beginning, Christians have been people of the world, with an interest in stabilizing their own identity and recommending themselves to others. One might cite the book of Acts or the pastoral epistles as examples of a need for Christians to dispel the aura of scandal that surrounded their gatherings and secure for themselves a reputation for innocence and godly decency.

This tension finds in sexuality one of its contemporary focal points. And that is related to the way in which sexuality itself has been re-imagined in the past two centuries. Michel Foucault famously argued that the idea that ‘sexuality’ was something that civilization had repressed was itself a key factor in creating our modern idea of sexual desire as the core element of our identity. The emergence of a ‘science of sexuality’ in the West, he claims, was part of an attempt to extend the range of political control into the innermost recesses of the self — by creating those innermost recesses in the first place. It is a cornerstone of biopower, ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations’.Footnote 10

Sexuality therefore becomes one of the sites of political and colonial struggle, of ambiguity and resistance. If bodies too can be colonized, the linkages between sexual identity, repression, control and the techniques of empire to subjugate and redefine colonial populations become suggestive. Sexuality becomes the key to defining what makes us human, and this unites those who take the most contradictory stances on particular issues of sexual morality.

I would like to introduce another ingredient into this suggestive set of ideas, that of species. One way of understanding human identity has been to delimit it from other forms of life that are nonhuman. That might sound obvious, though the fact that relationships between human beings and nonhuman species are conceived very differently across cultures and vary through time should give us pause before we accept a common sense humanism as a given basis for thought.

What though, is humanism? We have to guard against the temptations of creating a homogenous label to cover a diverse reality. Humanisms are many, with a long and distinguished history. What I have in mind though is a tendency in some modern versions of humanism to declare man to be the measure of all things. In the philosophies of Descartes and Kant, we find the primacy of a centred conscious rational human ego, or the primacy of a structuring power of human rationality, reaching out to comprehend and utilize an external nonhuman world. The danger is of creating a gaze — patriarchal, colonial, normative and normal — a gaze behind which the controlling human mind sits, with never a thought for how it is constituted by relationships, histories, contingencies, unconscious forces of power and language. And that gaze gives legitimacy to an exploitative grip, which unquestioningly gives centre stage to a parochial definition of humanity masquerading as universal, rational truth.

Against this tendency, I would support Tony Davies claim in his critical survey of humanism: ‘Humanity is neither an essence nor an end, but a continuous and precarious process of becoming human, a process that entails the inescapable recognition that our humanity is on loan from others, to precisely the extent that we acknowledge it in them’.Footnote 11

I would like to take this dynamic model further, however. The borders between the human and its other are negotiable and cultural. If this is true with relation to the divine, spirits, artificial intelligence and aliens, it is also true with relation to animals. As Derrida has argued, even to speak of ‘animals’ as if that word had the power to gather an unimaginable diversity of beings under one heading, is a travesty. It is a projection of human colonizing power.Footnote 12

Moreover, the role played by animals in defining our humanity is irreducible. That is to say, it is not ‘merely’ metaphorical, as if metaphor could be translated without remainder into some underlying, solid reality.Footnote 13 Discourse about species has its own particularity, not to mention the fact that it draws us into relationship with nonhuman creatures who have their own structure, appetites, interactions, forms of communication and, in many cases, sentience. It would be as crass to dismiss this as it would be to assume that, for example, gender and race relationships could be reduced entirely to aspects of class inequality. Identities, oppressions and resistances are formed in a complex, dynamic network of discourses and lived experiences.

In this context, I believe it is significant when animals are introduced into debates about sexuality. Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, famously remarked that ‘If dogs and pigs don’t do it, why must human beings? Can human beings be human beings if they do worse than pigs?’Footnote 14 It is a striking statement: it associates same sex activity with the behaviour of animals, assuming that subhumans must rank on a lower, primitive moral level. But then it places human same-sex activity on an even more debased footing, because ‘not even animals’ — not even vermin like dogs or unclean pigs — would disgrace themselves in this way.

Animals are both morally comparable to humans and amorally different from us. In relation to this ambiguity, human distinctiveness is affirmed, but the possibility of losing it is also announced. To engage in actions that not even the beasts stoop to is to risk one’s whole human identity. In assessing the way in which images of nature, animality and humanity are deployed in controversies about sexuality, it is not therefore a question of simply imposing labels and categories driven by an external theoretical approach. Such labels are already being created and deployed by participants in the debates. They are an essential element of their cultural mediation and deserve analysis as such.

As Neville Hoad has argued, statements like Mugabe’s are made in particular political situations, and are overdetermined with multiple meanings. For Mugabe, resistance to the acceptance of homosexuality is allied to an affirmation of postcolonial African identity. Homosexuality is seen as a Western infection, an alien import into a culture that knows nothing of it. Hence it becomes something essentially invisible, as underlined by the claim of President Museveni of Uganda in relation to HIV infection: ‘We don’t have homosexuals in Uganda, so this is mainly heterosexual transmission’.Footnote 15 In the debate at Lambeth 1998, African bishops in particular made the dual claim that homosexuality is unbiblical and it is un-African. Bishop Michael Lugor said ‘In the Sudan we know nothing of homosexuality. We only know the gospel and we proclaim it’.Footnote 16

Following the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 and controversy about the blessing of same-sex unions in the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster, the Church of Uganda produced a position paper, now published on the Anglican Communion website. It offers a scriptural and natural law basis for the rejection of same-sex unions:

Three things are worth noting. First, homosexuality is associated with other distortions that include bestiality and the abuse of children. Secondly, it is equated with a refusal of otherness, the otherness built into human identity through sexual difference. Third, it is not productive or fruitful, because it cannot lead to the conception of children and so continue the human race.

It is also significant that, at a later point, the paper clearly rejects the patriarchal views of European missionaries and argues the Bible has been a force for empowerment and liberation for women. According to the paper, the anti-homosexuality stance is not to be confused with a general cultural conservatism. However, the consequence is that homosexuality is defined as falling outside the boundaries of emancipation. It does not count as a human identity. Kevin Ward quotes a Church of Uganda reaction to the foundation of the pro-gay organization Integrity Uganda in 2000, in which the Bishops ‘strongly advise our public or citizens not to let this kind of unbiblical and inhuman movement to be established in our country’.Footnote 18

In a similar vein, a Nigerian House of Bishops statement, quoted in the church’s contribution to the ‘listening process’ of the Anglican Communion states that ‘the Old Testament regards homosexuality as an atrocious and unnatural act. The Mosaic Law is against it and stipulates capital punishment for the offender. It is classified among the most offensive crimes like idolatry involving the sacrifice of children, having intercourse with animals, or marrying a woman and her mother’.Footnote 19

Peter Akinola, primate of the Church of Nigeria, wrote in a 2003 Church Times article that ‘God created two persons — male and female. Now the world of homosexuals has created a third — a homosexual, neither male nor female, or both male and female — a strange two-in-one human’. He adds ‘Homosexuality or lesbianism or bestiality is to us a form of slavery, and redemption from it is readily available through repentance and faith in the saving grace of our Lord, Jesus the Christ’.Footnote 20

The association of homosexuality with bestiality, monstrosity, paedophilia and subhumanity in particular is certainly not unique to the African context. It was only in January 2008 when Mike Huckabee, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, argued that proposed changes to the definition of marriage (presumably including the legal recognition of same-sex unions) meant that ‘we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal’.Footnote 21

However, the valency of these words plays out differently in different contexts. When African political and church leaders make the case against homosexuality, resistance to imperialism, affirmation of African particularity and the assertion of binding human norms go hand in hand. This confluence of streams is summed up in an article by Bishop David Onuoha, published on the Church of Nigeria’s website, in which he concludes that same sex union is ‘unnatural, unbiblical, unreasonable, unethical, ungodly and unAfrican’.Footnote 22

A complex web of identities and claims is thus being played out. On the one hand, it could be argued that homosexuality as a category is indeed a Western invention. The word was after all not used until the 1860s. This does not of course mean that same sex desires, affections and practices were not present in many forms, but the idea of sexuality as a fixed and essential core of human identity was simply not available until relatively recently. The debate about whether that identity describes a universal human possibility, or is a social construction still goes on. In any case, we have to be aware that our talk of homosexuality is a culturally produced discourse, with Western origins.

It thus becomes a little more understandable that, in a postcolonial context, there is resistance to what is perceived as the imposition of sexual identities by erstwhile imperial powers. Neville Hoad, in his analysis of Lambeth 1998, regrets the amnesia of African elite leaders of the exclusions imposed upon them (not least because of sexual practices like polygamy deemed primitive and unbiblical) and their alliance with homophobic Western conservatives. However, he ends with this riposte to those who took the other side of the debate: ‘pro-homosexual liberal bishops need to remember that in the name of civilization, imperialism has been dictating what Africans should and should not do with their bodies for at least 200 years in order to enter the community/communion of the human’.Footnote 23

This is confirmed by the use of species language to underwrite the distinction between gays and other humans. It is a way of subtly or not so subtly excluding gays from full humanity, and, by contrast, affirming the full humanity of those who have emerged from the infantilizing effects of empire, in which they could be characterized as savage, bestial, subhuman or, at best, childlike.

Charles Patterson notes the extensive use of animal imagery to characterize indigenous peoples and those regarded as enemies in war. In a US context, he dwells upon the description of Native Americans, summed up by one early nineteenth century writer as ‘the animals vulgarly called Indians’. The historian Francis Parkman described the Indians as ‘man, wolf and devil all in one’ and declared that since the Indian ‘will not learn the arts of civilization, he and his forest must perish altogether’.Footnote 24 Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Harvard professor of anatomy and physiology in the nineteenth century described the Indians a ‘half-filled outline of humanity’ who should be hunted down ‘like the wild beasts of the forest’ in readiness for ‘a picture of manhood a little more like God’s own image’.Footnote 25 Commentators were not shy of calling for what William Dean Howells described at the 100th anniversary celebrations of American independence as ‘the extermination of the red savages of the plains’.

L. Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz, wrote in 1890 that the remaining Indians were ‘a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians’.Footnote 26

Emerging sciences of anatomy, and particularly the distinction of races based on physical appearance and skull shape, supported this discourse of animality. George Cuvier described Africans as ‘the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast’.Footnote 27 Paul Broca, a pioneer in neurosurgery, used the measurement of skulls to differentiate racial types and concluded that ‘the conformation of the Negro, in this respect as in many others, tends to approach that of the monkey’.Footnote 28

The sexual dimension of this fascination with categorizing inferior races becomes clear in the case of the so-called Hottentot Venus, the Southern African woman known as Sarah Baartman exhibited as a sideshow to the voyeuristic gaze of audiences in Britain and France in the early nineteenth century (in the latter country, she was under the care of an animal trainer). Baartman’s large buttocks and purportedly enlarged genitalia became a subject of pseudo-scientific curiosity. George Cuvier himself visited her, though he did note that she was an intelligent women, fluent in Dutch.

The physical classification of racial types provides a link with the eugenics movement, and the associated call to improve racial stock whilst avoiding degeneracy and racial dilution. Ernst Haeckel, the biologist who influenced later Nazi ideas, claimed that because non-European races are ‘psychologically nearer to mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans, we must therefore assign a totally different value to their lives’.Footnote 29 The Nazi tendency to classify Jews as pigs, vermin and other animals is well documented.

Through all of this, of course, the assumption is made that animals as a totality are devoid of culture, reason, communication and even sentience. They are beyond the pale of moral significance. Ironically, it is their very amorality that enables them to be deployed in making moral interventions in questions of human behaviour and identity. Human beings associated with animals (or even placed below them) are available to be used, exploited or destroyed. The longstanding humanistic tendency to endow human beings alone with rationality and ethical responsibility reaches its apotheosis in the moral abdication that funds factory farming and the gas chambers, colonization and domestication. Raising a question about how human beings are defined in relation to nonhuman species is therefore not a side issue, but something that lies close to the heart of our moral imagination, or lack of it.

Lost Worlds

I would like to illustrate this via two linked popular works that bear upon a discussion of colonialism.

Ursula Heise has offered an analysis of the 1993 film Jurassic Park, which focuses on its complex narratives about species and conservation.Footnote 30 She emphasizes that the film concerns the use of genetic manipulation to re-create extinct species of dinosaur. As one of the film’s characters notes, the drama is created by the sudden, artificially engineered co-existence of two species — dinosaur and human — separated by 65 million years of evolutionary history. The techno-fix offered by advances in modern science is revealed to be a destructive illusion.

It is worth noting that this is essentially a white man’s adventure, with a white female scientist and two children thrown in for good measure and to increase the family appeal of the film. South Americans are almost invisible save for one or two minor roles. It is the white man’s burden to create new life. The geographical space within which the drama is enacted appears to lie beyond all national governmental control. It is a private techno-wilderness, a blank slate. The white colonizer defines what that space means. However, that dominance is called into question as the monsters thus created turn upon their creators — a familiar motif of the Frankenstein-inspired genre.

The creation of dinosaurs is a prime example of the self-confidence of pure science, but it is placed in the service of economic motives: the dinosaurs are to be exhibits in a zoo-cum-theme park, replete with all the branded merchandise one would expect from Disney. As the film’s action progresses, the technology that maintains the barrier between dinosaurs and humans fails, and the fenced-in realm of prehistory breaks through into the peopled world. Wonder gives way to fear, as carnivorous dinosaurs pursue the hapless humans. There is an underlying fear of the aggression of these other species, based on the confusion of contexts that results when they are put alongside or within the human world. As one character puts it, these are living things that have no idea what century they are in and will defend themselves, with force if needs be.

The godlike power to create and extinguish species is thus revealed to be limited, and this raises questions about the empire of humanism. Land — islands somewhere near South America — is colonized, life is shaped and moulded, otherness is contained. And yet, the human subject cannot maintain its control. It cannot entirely deprive other species of their wildness. Though the dinosaurs have been engineered to be all female to prevent uncontrolled breeding, one of the characters comes across hatched eggs, evidence of spontaneous reproduction. Life, he muses, finds a way.

The sequel to Jurassic Park was called The Lost World (1997), which was the title of one of the original inspirations for this kind of story, the 1912 novel by Arthur Conan Doyle.Footnote 31 The author is significant: immensely popular in his own day, his stories have continued to engage the popular imagination in new ways. Moreover, he was an enthusiastic promoter of British imperial interests, not least in relation to the Boer War.

Doyle’s narrative concerns an expedition to an unexplored region in the Amazonian forest — one of the remaining unmarked parts of the world map, as one of the characters puts it. In this place, at the edge of the known human world, the novel’s protagonists go to discover a raised plateau, where prehistoric forms of life have survived. Geological events rather than human intervention are the cause of this anomaly, but the interactions between ideas of colonial exploration, race and species remain strongly evident, and not without a sense of irony and duplicity.

The scientist Professor Challenger, whose claims lead to the expedition, is portrayed as both arrogantly intellectual and possessed of a bestial violence. All the members of the party are described in such a way as to connect their physical bodies with their character. The party’s servants represent a portion of the complexity of South American identities: Indians, half-breeds and a negro. It is the half-breeds, the crossers between worlds, who betray the party and leave them stranded, whereas it is the negro Zambo who remains loyal in a fairly childlike way. Indeed he is described like a faithful dog with the intelligence to match.

The mysterious plateau — its physical isolation an image of its otherness — does contain dinosaur life. But it also contains a microcosmic re-staging of human colonization and conflict. A tribe of ‘ape-men’, a presumed evolutionary missing link, aggressively pursues the explorers. But the ape-men are also in a longstanding conflict with an Indian tribe, which has somehow found its way up to the plateau. The climax of the action in the lost world comes in a battle between savage ape-men and harried humans, in which the explorers back the latter, with the result that the ape-men are exterminated or enslaved. The humans become the successful colonizers.

The explorers’ part in this is somewhat accidental, but they quickly become active in hastening the demise of the ape-man. The tone is set by one of the party, Lord John Roxton, a seasoned adventurer and hunter. Roxton’s London apartment is full of the trophies of the hunt, and we soon learn that he is willing to train his gun on humans for a higher purpose. In his past he has waged a personal war upon South American slavers (and it is because of this that the party is betrayed by the half-breeds, one of whom is related to a slaver killed by Roxton). Roxton’s violence is justified by a rhetoric of emancipation. As the group prepares to embark on the plateau, he asserts that they are ‘invadin’ a new country’, and invokes the spectre of cannibals as reason to be armed and ready.Footnote 32 The half-breeds, the imagined cannibals and the ape-men all represent an unstable crossing of borders. Roxton, for all he is a man of the wilds in some respects, plays his part in establishing normality and freedom by the elimination of these deviant elements.

The narrative is not without its own self-conscious irony. The combination of the bestial appearance, violent temperament and intellectual arrogance of Professor Challenger is brought to the fore in two instances. At one point, uncertain of the way the rest of the whites place their faith in their local Indian companions rather than in Challenger’s directions, the Professor complains that the party chooses to ‘trust the fallacious instincts of undeveloped savages rather than the highest product of modern European culture’.Footnote 33 Needless to say, the Indians turn out to be right. The second instance comes when some of the party are captured by the ape-men. Challenger is able to intercede for them because he provides such a close physical resemblance to their king.

The end result, however, is the victory of human over beast. Challenger sums it up in the aftermath of the massacre:

Colonialism is above all the securing of a future for ‘man’, defined from a particular Eurocentric point of view. This may involve a number of relationships with indigenous peoples, including alliance, co-option and commerce. But it also opens the door for dispossession, enslavement and extermination, once it is decided that indigenous ways are savage and therefore obstacles to the full emancipation of the human spirit. The human domination of animals becomes the key testing ground and symbolic code for the colonization of lands and cultures that are deemed bereft of human status. The wild animal is the other we need to expel, domesticate or eliminate, even if that animal has a face that looks superficially like ours.

I do not claim that these examples are anything more than illustrative, nor am I trying to argue that the logic and practice of colonialism is the same in all contexts. Clearly, the particular histories of empire in South America, North America and in different parts of Africa, for instance, need to be respected. However, I believe that attention to the rhetoric, which surrounds savagery and animality in these diverse situations, can help to deepen our understanding of what is at stake in the colonial encounter and its shadowy afterlife.

This may be so even where explicit references to bestiality are lacking. For example, take the case of the Bugandan martyrs, when, in 1886, about 30 pages of the court of the Kabaka, or king, were killed on his orders. The pages consisted of both Protestant and Catholic Christians. Contemporary accounts associate their deaths with their refusal to take part in what are variously called the private vice, the things of Sodom or unnatural desires of the king. The case has been invoked by the Church of Uganda’s bishops in their refusal to accept homosexuality and so betray what the martyrs stood for.

However, the historical significance of the martyrdoms cannot be reduced to the issue of same sex practices. As Kevin Ward has shown, such an interpretation is relatively recent. Rather, he argues ‘political questions of power and the limits of obedience have been fundamental’.Footnote 35 The pages have been seen as those who resisted despotic power. However, he also notes that it has been possible to see Mwanga, the Kabaka, as someone who resisted the encroachments of British imperialism, and the pages as unpatriotic pawns.

Neville Hoad supports the contention that this event has had multiple meanings. On the one hand, Mwanga would have been anxious about European imperial aspirations, and the role of the missionaries who were taking increasingly prominent positions in Buganda. The missionaries are the ones who put the focus on the unnatural nature of his supposed activities. In reality, it is unclear what these practices involved, or how they functioned to uphold and preserve Kabaka’s symbolic status. In any case, it would be anachronistic to project on to this story modern notions of homosexual identity.Footnote 36

A further complication is added by the suggestion that the Kabaka learned his ways from Muslim Arabs. In that case, the pages could be seen as resisting a foreign, corrupting import, with all the undertones that claim would possess, associating Arabs and the Orient in general with the exotic, the strange and the perverse.

The weaving together of themes of imperialism, despotism, ‘foreign’ influence, Islam, Christian mission, symbolic power and African authenticity makes any one-level reading of the story as about homosexuality very dubious. Instead, what we have is a story shot through with the ambiguities of colonial negotiations, in which identities are unsettled and it is unclear who is on which ‘side’.

Although, as I have said, there is no explicit species discourse involved in this case, there are implicit claims at play. The Kabaka, through torture and burning, turns the bodies of the pages into the objects of his power. They are made into a holocaust, a repetition of animal sacrifice. Conversely, the pages refuse the unnatural acts the king wishes to perform with them. They preserve their humanity intact and are not degraded. Each side can claim to represent an African identity, which will not be dictated to by foreign powers. Their opponent is placed beyond the human pale as butchered meat or perverse monster.

The adoption of the Bugandan martyrs as emblems of an anti-homosexual African Christianity carries with it the freight of these claims to humanity. The religious ideology of empire is used by the colonized to voice their own authentic identity. Simply to assert universal human rights in the face of this risks missing the point, and confirming the suspicions of those who see in universalism of that sort another mask for neo-colonial adventures. It was, after all, in the name of freedom and democracy that Iraq was occupied and tens of thousands of its people killed. The problem in a naïve positing of human rights is that it assumes an essentialized knowledge of who the human subject is and what human identity is, with little regard for history, and scant attention to the particular cultural factors that give otherness a real face, a place to stand and an audible voice.

It appears that this is what is at work in the Anglican Communion’s current divisions. As Hoad puts it, ‘It is possible to read the conflict around homosexual questions at Lambeth as symptomatic of a wider tension between a religiously inflected postcolonial nationalism and emergent global human rights culture, with both sides evading the question of their respective imperialist legacies’.Footnote 37 Are we then stuck between a liberal universalism, which is really a parochial Western imperialism, and postcolonial particularity, which is really founded upon abstract, ahistorical, imported ideas about nature and revealed truth?

Any way out of this vicious cycle must go via a renewed engagement with the many faces of Anglican imperial legacy. To quote Hoad again, the Anglican Church ‘is an institution partially founded to resist foreign domination, which later plays a significant role in the implementation of British, as well as in resistance to it’.Footnote 38

We also need to revisit ideas of identity, truth and revelation, to question the ways in which they are deployed to silence marginal voices, or reduce complex meanings to systems and totalities that serve functional or imperialistic ends. It is with this in mind that I will end with some constructive suggestions. Perhaps surprisingly, I will argue that it is reimagining the relationship between humanity and animality that can provide a helpful way beyond our current impasse.

Christ in the Desert

I began this paper with a quotation from Jay Griffiths about the nature of wildness. She spoke of the feral angel who calls us beyond convention, and the domesticated routines that provide unwitting support to Western colonialism. There is an echo of that call in the terse summary of Christ’s time in the desert in Mark’s Gospel: ‘And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited upon him’ (Mk 1.12-13).

In a sense the whole of Mark’s Gospel is a fleshing out of its initial claim to be the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God, with Jesus’ appearance following ‘immediately’ — that word again — from John’s announcement of one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit that descends on Jesus at his baptism when he is declared Son of God, before driving him out into the wilderness. Jesus then proclaims the Kingdom of God, and, in a series of urgently linked stories, demonstrates how he is locked in struggle with the demonic forces that oppress people.

It is in the wild, beyond human society, that Jesus prepares for this ministry and confirms his identity. It is an identity that is particular to his humanity and his calling, at the same time as it transcends human categories. Jesus is not alone in the desert. He is there with his adversary, he is there with the wild beasts, he is there with the angels. He is who he is in relation to others, but his relationships are not arbitrarily confined to a human plane that has been defined in advance.

The Spirit, we are told in John’s Gospel, blows where it will (Jn 3.8). It is self-willed—wild, in Griffiths’s sense. It has the power to overcome divisions and undermine hierarchies, without reducing people to being reproductions of sameness. It creates a body of differentiated gifts. It is a theology of the Spirit, which will challenge our false totalities and empty universalism, without abandoning us to mere relativism and the violent assertion of incompatible identities.

But such a theology has to be shaped by a recognition that the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, who shows how God crosses boundaries, and accepts the vulnerability that this entails. Ultimately, Christ is pierced for our transgressions. It is as a wounded and disfigured person that he is the image of the invisible God. It is in his self-emptying that the fullness of God dwells.

The church, as the body of Christ, formed by his Spirit, is hybrid from the beginning of its existence. It is beautifully disabled. If it follows its Lord, it will walk into the wilderness, and be with the wild beasts and the inhuman bearers of grace.

As the editors of Postcolonial Theologies put it ‘what is Christianity but a great hybrid, comprised at the urban crossroads of the Roman Empire? It exploded into mission on Pentecost: a vision of a multilingual understanding dancing in dissident flames upon the heads of its first communities’.Footnote 39 At the same time, they acknowledge the church’s subsequent collusion with empire. That is the risk of its sending, but it is unavoidable, and there is no return to a simple identity—a risk I believe is all too evident in recent ecclesiological investment in notions of koinonia and communion. All too often such idealizations pay only lip service to diversity, conflict and ambiguity in the real life of the historical churches.Footnote 40

In contrast ‘hybridity in all its ambiguity, remains incurable’.Footnote 41 A very particular instance of this is given by Michelle Gonzalez, who reflects on the specific way in which Latin American experience of colonialism shaped a multitude of identities. Labelling them all ‘Hispanic’ is an act of symbolic violence. She quotes the philosopher Maria Lugones; ‘The door to an untroubled identity is always closed’.Footnote 42 But she also cites a poem by Cherrie Moraga, which includes these lines:

The animal I am: the line recalls Derrida’s already cited seminal work The Animal That Therefore I Am, in which he sets out to trouble our easy confidence that we can draw the line between ourselves and animals, that we can deny them any subjectivity, capacity for response or sensitivity to suffering.

As long as we operate within the bounds of a narrow humanism, the question of competing identities will be irresolvable, since all sides are claiming sole possession of the same ground. If we are to become truly postcolonial — not in a utopian sense, but critically aware of the Satanic lure of empire building — then recasting our relationships with ideas of identity, communion and communication can be greatly helped by opening our humanisms to their excluded others. To conceive of the unfathomable integrity of animal lives, which will never simply be transparent to us, or part of our system, may go some way to ending our fascination with categorizing and dehumanizing others.

A good example of this comes from Sharon Betcher’s article ‘Monstrosities, Miracles and Mission. Religion and the Politics of Disablement’. Betcher argues that ‘Certain bodies have been socially constructed as lacking full humanity — that is, as less than “whole” ’.Footnote 44 She relates this to the early church’s imagining of monstrous races existing at the edges of the known world, a fantasy that came to be projected on savage others without and degenerate others within a society that quested after normalcy, racial purity, wholeness, civilization. The other becomes the inhuman monster who must be medically or militarily quarantined.

Christian eschatology, she claims, has too often supported this ideology, with its hope for the making whole — the correction — of imperfect bodies at the end of all things. In place of this, she argues for the releasing of the Spirit, allowing the Spirit to disrupt our settled ideas of what is normal and what is not.

Revelation, then, is not simply the transmission of a truth from beyond, but the troubling of our ideas of truth and beyond, of otherness and identity. The Spirit is wild, desert-driven, it does not sit easily within propositional or institutional structures, however necessary these may be. It is not the other face of an unreformed, complacent humanism.

Mayra Rivera, in her quest for a postcolonial theology, argues for shift in our ideas of transcendence: from seeing God as essentially separate to encountering God in and through the other. This is not a matter of reducing God to being part of the human world, because transcendence disturbs the limits of that world, and indeed any totality that seeks to suppress irreducible differences. At times, it sounds like Rivera is arguing only for a God revealed in the face of the human other, but in her final chapters, she takes up the thought of Spivak and others to argue for a transcendence that runs through all creation. She writes of ‘A God who knows (in the broadest sense of the term) each and every creature . . . embraces each one of them and is touched by each one in her/his singularity — caressing and calling the particularity of each and every creature to its new births’. She adds ‘This radically inclusive reality relates us to one another while maintaining a space of difference between us’.Footnote 45

Talk of inclusion can raise suspicions of covert colonialism: a central ‘we’ generously opening its doors to an alien other, accepting you on our terms. But Rivera’s radical inclusion is decentred, and it is helped by a relocation of its focus from human others to all creatures, to all who share life, whatever their body structure or mode of communication and reproduction.

The Christ who dwells with animals and angels; the wild Spirit, unconfined by human categories; the church of multiple languages, founded on a creation of irreducible difference: these, I believe, are the keynotes of a revelation that can interrupt our enclosures of sameness, our structures of domination.

The Anglican Communion could be well placed to bear witness to that revelation. It has no central magisterium, and arguably needs no extra statements of faith. Its hybridity and disability, once recognized, do not need a top-down cure. It can bring people together who share from different sides the experience of empire (and we should not forget that the history of the Episcopal Church in the USA was also forged in a difficult renegotiation of its independence from former colonial masters). Perhaps shared reflection on that topic would help the Communion’s instruments of unity avoid simplistic identity politics, which mask a complex history and presence of geopolitical power shifts. Writing off Nigeria as bereft of human rights, or the USA as a cesspit of degeneration only strengthens the grip that empire’s shadows have upon us.

Might it then be possible for Ugandan Church leaders to acknowledge the actual diversity of African sexual practice and experience, without subsuming it under overly abstract categories of sexual identity, without denying that same sex unions are a real encounter with otherness? Might it be possible for those advocating the affirmation of same sex unions to do so without an uncritical liberal triumphalism, without buying into patronizing notions of development?

We are after all dealing with people, and people’s lives (like animal lives) do not all fall under easily assimilated norms. That is in fact their potential glory. We do not have to advocate that all animals are the same in order to afford them dignity and respect their otherness. We can still be sensitive to their capacity for life and suffering, and commit ourselves to ending their abuse. Can such an open ethical attitude also characterize our response to non-abusive sexual relationships?

In the light of revelation, identity becomes a question once more. To recall Tony Davies phrase, ‘our humanity is on loan from others’ — but, I would add, not only from human others. It is not a static given, not a control tower gazing down on the inhuman residents of concentration camps and gulags, not merely a determined effect of impersonal powers, but in Christian terms, it is a gift, a calling, a relationship held in the web of all created life. To receive that giftedness is liberating, but it does require us to live with open ends in ways that can be uncomfortable. Sometimes suspending judgment is enough, for now. Sometimes it is better than creating new mechanisms of consensus, and new concentrations of power, especially when that power falls into the hands, once again, of unelected men.

Perhaps we can learn to live with difference, in a world without monsters that are not also part of ourselves. Perhaps: if we walk with the wild beasts, if we take our mongrel name, if I accept the animal that I am. I do not suggest that this will provide straightforward answers to our disputes. But at least we might just begin to discover what the questions really are.