Dear Reader,
When it was announced last week that WNBA star Brittney Griner had been released from captivity in Russia, the responses ranged from delirious to ghoulish.
Griner was arrested while entering Russia last February, when officials searched her luggage and found vape cartridges that contained THC. She was tried for possession of narcotics (THC isn’t a narcotic, but tell that to the Russian government) and sentenced to 9 years in a penal colony at Yavas. While the conditions there aren’t quite as bad as the infamous gulags of the Soviet era, they are nonetheless brutal, meant to destroy the spirit through the destruction of the body and immersion in Russian propaganda. The Biden administration negotiated her release by exchanging her for Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer arrested in 2008 and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2011.
high on their own (identity politics) supply
At the delirious end of the spectrum, Griner’s arrest and release has been turned into an exercise in identity politics at a global scale. According to these accounts, Russia’s arrest of Griner was primarily predicated by the fact that she is a woman of color and a lesbian (Russia has anti-LGBTQ laws), and her release is a triumph of human rights on these grounds alone. This was noted by Biden’s own press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who said:
“On a personal note, Brittany is more than an athlete, more than an Olympian. She is an important role model and inspiration to millions of Americans, particularly the LGBTQIA+ Americans and women of color.”
There may be a measure of truth behind the idea that Russia targeted Griner for her sexuality, or (perhaps more likely) intensified their treatment of her because of it. But to allow their pretext to shape our response is actually a way of playing into their prejudice. Her life and her just treatment matter because she’s a human being, and human rights matter regardless of race or sexual identity. (I’ll return to this in a moment.)
release the ghouls
Then there’s the ghoulish response. This actually began months ago, when stories about efforts to secure her release through a prisoner exchange first surfaced. For instance, an editorial from The Washington Free Beacon said:
“…Griner is not exactly an American patriot. She launched a campaign in the summer of 2020—in the wake of George Floyd's murder—to press the WNBA to stop playing the national anthem before games… Maybe after her brush with Russian law enforcement, she'll realize conditions back stateside aren't as oppressive as she made them out to be.”
That editorial (and several others) argued that before arranging an exchange for Griner, the Biden administration should work towards the release of Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine imprisoned since 2019 on what seem to be trumped-up espionage charges.
Since her release, this sort of thing has only amplified. On his primetime broadcast, Tucker Carlson accused the Biden administration for passing over Whelan because he’s a Trump supporter. Citing her efforts to get the WNBA to stop playing the national anthem before games, Carlson said, “That’s the kind of position that gets you rewarded by Joe Biden. Hate America? Perfect!”
Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh tweeted, “Unfortunately Marc Fogel [another American citizen detained in Russia for drug possession] and Paul Whelan made the mistake of being white men. The rules of intersectionality dictate that the black woman gets freed first. That's one of the primary factors driving this, whether we want to admit it out loud or not.”
in praise of asymmetry
Let me stipulate a few things about the criticism of these events.
First, what Brittney Griner did was profoundly stupid. A professional athlete, with agents, managers, personal assistants, and untold other resources available to her was no doubt warned of Russia’s authoritarianism, its dislike of Americans, and its drug laws. Russia loves a little unjust detainment of Americans. The first line of defense in resisting it is to not break their laws, especially drug laws.
Nonetheless, a 9-year sentence in a labor camp is wildly disproportionate. Moreover, the idea that such a sentence is simply a consequence of Russia’s wheels of justice doing their thing misunderstands a fundamental truth: there are no wheels of justice in Russia. The law is enforced in ways that are entirely arbitrary and at the whim of an authoritarian state.
Second, Karine Jean-Pierre’s comments about Griner’s racial and sexual identity contributed to the framing of these events as part of the culture war. Granted, she stipulated that they were personal, and any good faith hearing of her would receive them as precisely that — her thoughts, not necessarily those of the administration. But nonetheless, to do so in the context of her role as Press Secretary and from the White House podium gave ammunition to critics.
Third, this prisoner exchange was profoundly asymmetric. Viktor Bout is essentially a war criminal and a terrorist. Griner is a celebrity athlete that wanted to get high.
With all that said, Griner’s return to the United States should be celebrated unequivocally by Americans. In fact, I’d argue that the asymmetry of the exchange is actually a sign of what makes America great in the first place.
The United States and Russia began this negotiation on profoundly uneven ground. Our nation has respect for the dignity of all human beings, including Russian war criminals. Russia has no respect for the dignity of human beings, including its own citizens. The asymmetry isn’t simply a matter of valuing life and liberty at a different scale than the Russians, it’s that we value it at all.
On Russian television right now, pundits are mocking the United States for many of the same reasons that Carlson and Walsh are, calling it a sign of American weakness. The response to that criticism shouldn’t be agreement; it should be defiance. To measure lives in the balance because of their utility to the state is itself ghoulish, and we should refuse to accept their premises.
This doesn’t mean that prudential concerns don’t matter in negotiations like these. But it makes perfect sense to me that if the Russians said an exchange for Whelan — who they consider a political prisoner and a spy — wasn’t on the table, they meant it. You take the deal you can get when you’re negotiating the release of your citizens from unjust detainment. Prisoner exchanges aren’t the only point of conflict or negotiation with Russia, and whatever advantage we might lose here, we have plenty of other ways to make up in matters of trade, sanctions, and support of our allies.
it’s a mitzvah
One interesting note for this discussion comes from Jewish tradition. According to the Talmud, captivity is considered worse than both starvation and death, and the ransom of captives is known as pidyon shvuyim. It’s considered a “great mitzvah,” which is to say it is both a commandment and an act of valor and obedience when it is carried out. Its origin is traced back through Abraham, and its highest expression is seen in God’s rescue of Israel from captivity in Egypt.
The real-world application of pidyon shvuyim has been debated among Jewish scholars for centuries. It’s also created difficult circumstances for modern-day Israel, where the duty to ransom those kidnapped or captured by terrorists and terror states has created asymmetries similar to and more severe than that of the Griner case.
As Christians, whose faith emerges from shared origins and whose anthropology shares the central idea that human beings are made in God’s image, pidyon shvuyim should at least be illustrative as an expression of those shared values. There is something profoundly evil about unjust captivity. There is something profoundly evil about the forced labor and deprivation of the prison camp that Griner was sent to. A radical commitment to ransoming her from that captivity shouldn’t be seen as a matter of identity politics or geopolitical tactics; it’s a moral imperative.
This takes nothing away from the duty of rescuing others who are unjustly detained, but as I said before, an appropriate value on the dignity of any captive seems (to me) to dictate taking the deals you can get.
Russia’s posture toward human rights should not dictate ours, and we should fiercely resist stooping to their level, treating our citizens as commodities to be weighed on the scales of power politics. Whatever we might lose in the exchange of Griner for a war criminal we gain as a demonstration of a moral order that is superior in every way to that of their authoritarian regime. The fact that Griner once exercised her right to free speech and objected to displays of patriotism at basketball games — something well within her rights as an American — only underlines our commitment to these values as transcendent and applicable to all, not just those most loyal to our government.
For all these reasons, I say welcome home, Brittney. I don’t think most of us can imagine the conditions you’ve endured as a prisoner of the Russian government. I hope and pray for your recovery from whatever that hardship may have been, and I hope you’ll use the platform you’ve been given to appeal for the release of other detainees and for the universal values of human rights.
varia
I got something wrong in last week’s newsletter. In it, I noted a series of exchanges between John Fea and a number of folks on Twitter around the way modern Christians treat the work of Jonathan Edwards. According to them, Edwards needs to be taken down a peg because his ownership of slaves stains his witness and disqualifies him from the kind of quasi-sainthood and high regard many evangelicals bestow upon him. Fea had spoken up not so much in defense of Edwards but as a historian, arguing that such a posture is intellectually untenable.
That same week, Fea resigned from his role as President of the Conference on Faith and History. When that happened, a number of his interlocutors over Edwards took a victory lap on Twitter, connecting the events. I followed suit here, assuming the connection and speculating that the tone of his comments may have contributed to the resignation. I realize now that by saying this, I implied that he may have been asked to resign.
I got this wrong, as did a few other folks. His resignation was voluntary and related to events within the conference itself. Fea accounts for that in a blog post of his own and you can read the whole thing here. I’ve apologized to John for misreading the situation, and I want to apologize to you here as well.
On an entirely different note — next week will be the final newsletter of the year, and it’s going to be primarily focused on my own “best of” for 2022. Books. Movies. TV. Podcasts. Music. I always love these lists, though narrowing them down is always a real pain.
Lastly, news broke this week that longtime Colts receiver T.Y. Hilton has signed with the Dallas Cowboys. I’m happy for the Ghost; I thought Indy’s failure to re-sign him this year was short sighted in all kinds of ways, especially given the youth of the other receivers and the lack of institutional knowledge on the offense. I think Matt Ryan could’ve performed much better with an experienced vet running routes for him. Yes, Hilton’s lost a little speed in recent years, but he’s still scary good, has reliable hands, and would make any defensive back think twice, every single snap. Congrats to him.
Meanwhile, at least we have Hoosier basketball.
See you soon,
Mike Cosper