Benny Tai as a political theologian, or what Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig might have to say about Occupy Central #HongKong

Enter Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig. As Owen White the Ochlophobist put it on his blog recently, ‘Let’s face it, political theology desperately needed a new media sensation and Stoker Bruenig is it.’ That’s putting it mildly. Writing for Salon, The Week, Ethika Politika, as well as her own blog, Bruenig seems to have taken public political theology by storm.

One of Bruenig’s central complaints about the way that politics is currently done is to reduce everything to property ownership. Writing in an Anglo-American context, Bruenig excoriates a host of debates for this sort of lazy thinking — but she’s especially on point when talking about sexual ethics in relation to poverty.

Keeping in mind that Hong Kong has been a British colony since 1842, Bruenig’s property complaint very much applies to Hong Kong. After all, if there’s one thing that everybody in Hong Kong talks about, it’s the property prices.

In fact, that’s exactly what’s at issue in Occupy Central. While the newly consecrated auxiliary bishops in the Catholic Archdiocese have supported acts of civil disobedience for democratic political agency, and while Baptist pastor Rev. Chu Yiuming is one of the three founding heads of Occupy Central, the Anglican Province of Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui’s primate, the Most Rev. Paul Kwong, and his provincial secretary, the Rev. Peter Koon, are less than enthusiastic.

Their reason? Because Occupy Central will disrupt the business flow of the Central district.

This is a very peculiar reason. After all, one of the major reasons that Kwong has been criticized in the Hong Kong press is because of his participation in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to the Chinese Community Party. That’s hilarious, because Karl Marx himself would direct criticism to Kwong. Here’s Marx, for example, in the preface to the First Edition of Das Kapital: ‘The Established Church, for instance, will more readily pardon the an attack on thirty-eight of its thirty-nine articles than on thirty-ninth of its income. Nowadays atheism itself is a culpa levis, as compared with the criticism of existing property relations’ (p. 92, 1976 Penguin edition).

Coming from the Christian left, Bruenig would tack on a theological critique. It’s been said to me on more than one occasion that what I call the ‘private consensus‘ is what Bruenig is observing to have been the move toward propertizing public politics in moves that have been made since the birth of modernity. I agree. But what is striking to me about Bruenig’s propertization argument is that she is saying that this is a theological move. The body — yes, the Body — has become property. The body politic, as Hannah Arendt also observes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, has become locked into business relations. The oikonomia, the management of the household, has become a capitalist economy.

That is precisely the logic that Benny Tai is trying to disrupt with Occupy Central: property does not trump political agency.

That assertion can mean only one thing: Benny Tai’s bookshelf is a reflection of the public theological debate in Hong Kong where names like Alastair McIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas are routinely thrown around to defend different political stances on Occupy Central in the press.

A new name needs to be added. Her name is Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig.

POSTSCRIPT: In an interview with Bloomberg, Benny Tai has admitted that support for Occupy Central’s civil disobedience campaign may well have waned and that there is more to be gained from describing the movement as a ‘civil awakening.’ Nothing he says there contradicts my argument that Occupy Central has always been a public educational campaign. And no, Tai’s interview is not as ‘extraordinary’ as the South China Morning Post says it is. It’s what Tai has been saying all along.