The [rhetorical] violence of your “COEXIST” sticker

I don’t like most bumper stickers.  The back of a car is hardly a fitting venue even for one’s more pithy opinions and a bumper sticker merely spews those opinions out on the poor person driving behind the car in question, who is in many cases already fighting off bad thoughts about all the other drivers on the road.  But some stickers take that extra step, trading ethical and social responsibility in for the price of making an en vogue point.  Exhibit A is the Bono-come-hipster-approved “COEXIST” sticker:

This sticker has long produced in me an allergic reaction and I hope to clarify why in what follows.

The problem with the COEXIST logo lies in that its rhetoric, a symbolic stew of religious signs and artifacts posing as letters, is irremediably violent.  It embodies a stance that assumes a secure, objective standpoint from which to make an appeal to people of all faiths.  But this supposedly disinterested standpoint can hardly avoid an agenda if it is asking the kids to “keep it down and play nice.”  Inherent in any such appeal is the leveling of all these religions to the same plane; a plane below that of the paternalism betrayed by the imperative form of the verb: “coexist!”

This command sees all religions as equal because it only sees them for their formal cultural aspects, their outward components, which are perhaps at best (mis)understood as peculiar social practices that might be sacrosanct enough to be worth preserving, in the sense that a language or culinary item is worth preserving.  Due deference is shown to the sacred cow of cultural diversity.

Nevertheless, the imperative “coexist” is just that: an imperative.  And it springs forth not only from an interested, but insecure stance.  Any posture that relativizes all religious discourse by necessity presumes to be above that same discourse because it speaks for the religion rather than allowing the religion to speak for itself.  The high horse this posture rests atop relativizes all religious discourse when by reducing religions to their formal aspects, the material question is ignored completely.  Form is not only divorced from content, but becomes more important.  Thus, Islam is not about the monotheistic way of submission revealed by Muhammad, but rather about submission in general.  Christianity is not about the love revealed in the incarnate Son of God crucified for the sins of the world, but about abstract “love” (read: feelings of good will) for everyone.  In effect, the supposed value of religion then consists solely of ethics, but only those ethics shared by the privileged stance of the secular imperative to “shut up and play nice.”  The revealed priority is then one of “common [secular] understanding,” a vapid idea of “love,” and a pragmatic “tolerance” that conveniently finds itself intolerant of any priorities it does not share.

A sacrificial economy is thereby introduced wherein we are told to keep it down, raise our knife, and slit God’s throat open upon the altar of secularism.  To do otherwise is simply rude.

And here it becomes painfully clear that we have a new religion demanding adherence, requiring the blood of gods to be placated.  But this new religion ends with death,  cue curtains.  And death without resurrection is hopeless, ultimately violent, ultimately nihilistic.

Where is the transcendence in such a violent command, though?  Where does such authority come from?  Do we not have, in the shiny veneer of populist tolerance, a dove as innocent as a snake?  The only way to placate the ideals idols of secularism is to deny the particularity of one’s own faith; the material content of Christianity qua Christianity, for example.

But we cannot and should not do this.  The premises are silly to begin with, so the conclusions are quixotic.  The Kantian reduction of religion to ethics accompanies the hubris found in the transcendentalism embedded in the secular standpoint.  For us to take this command to “coexist” seriously, we would have to deify ourselves, and thereby deny our faith.

And this is where I can speak only as a Christian: my problem with “coexist” isn’t that it’s simply senescent modernist violence masquerading under the banner of tolerance and altruism, but that it doesn’t go far enough.  You don’t need to love someone to coexist with them.  I can coexist with someone by ignoring them.  Surely the priest and the Levite were coexisting with the man on the side of the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.  The Samaritan, on the other hand, had compassion.

Within the command to coexist, one can easily hear the lawyer asking Jesus, “who is my neighbor?”

Does Christ tell us to simply coexist with people?  Yet while we are commanded to love others, there is still an element of violence within the Christian faith.  Did Christ descend and assume our flesh to coexist with his creation or did he come to set father against son and mother against daughter?  Did he not come with a radical command of self-sacrificial love that presupposes the atoning efficacy of his death, burial, and resurrection?  Was this command not situated within an active life of obedience wherein he accomplished this love for us and for our salvation? Does this command not issue forth today from his throne in the heavens, whence he ascended after he put death to death?  Is that not true, hope-filled, ultimately peaceable authority?

I think so.  And that’s why I think the “coexist” sticker is a joke that deserves all the gravity it can muster on the back of a progressive soccer mom’s SUV.

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