You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'empire' tag.
I’ve been involved over the past few days in a discussion with some friends about the proper response of Christians to the american Flag Day, which was this past Sunday. Much of the discussion became sidetracked with a debate over the true nature of the united states: benevolent symbol of freedom or dominating empire (or both). It seemed to be assumed that the answer to this question would also answer the question of whether american Christians should celebrate Flag Day.
However, I think we miss the point when we try to determine whether or not the united states has lived up to some arbitrary level of goodness or of whether its actions and policies have matched our Christian ideals. Where the u.s. stands on the righteousness scale is ultimately irrelevant to the question (for no matter what, it will never be perfect, and neither will we as individuals, of course). Rather than ask “Should we as Christians fly the flag?”, we should be asking more broadly, “What is our identity as Christians?”
I submit that it is the question of identity and allegiance that must guide our discussion of the flag. We must consider whether or not we, as Christians, can really regard u.s. citizenship as a part of our identity, and whether or not we can “pledge our allegiance” in any real sense to an earthly kingdom. I believe (to quote John Howard Yoder) that “The Kingdom of Heaven is a social order, and not a hidden one”. Stanley Hauerwas has used the term “resident aliens” to describe our status in the world. Jesus himself said that “my kingdom is not of the this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting…” (John 18.36).
As Christians, we are citizens of a very real Kingdom that transcends the kingdoms of this world, no matter how “good” or “bad” they are. God’s kingdom gives us a real political identity and allegiance that must supersede that of the United States, or Canada, or Peru, or whatever else. God’s Kingdom provides an alternative and a witness to the kingdoms of the world, and is more often than not in opposition to and in tension with their actions and structures. As Chrstians, we can disagree about whether the United States has stood over the years for “liberty and justice for all” or whether it has often operated like an exploitative empire (or some combination of both). But no matter what conclusion we come to, we should recognize that ultimately, eternally, we aren’t americans at all. Thus, we should be very careful about how we celebrate “holidays” that are devoted purely to an identity that is in competition with the one Christ has given us.
Robert Jensen (not to be confused with Robert Jenson) is a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. His most recent book, All My Bones Shake, is a departure from his previous works: it is a book of political theology, whereas most of his previous works have been on more secular topics. He writes now explicitly as a layperson rather than an expert, bringing a fresh perspective to divisive and complicated issues.
Subtitled “Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice”, All My Bones Shake presents a new approach to the integration of faith and public life. Jensen has a unique perspective, having been an outsider to the Church for much of his life. The book is very thought-provoking, containing a diversity of valuable insights and intriguing analysis. Much could be discussed in a review of the book, but I want to focus primarily on two aspects: Jensen’s unconventional theology, and his fascinating analysis of fundamentalism.
1. The Nature of Jensen’s Personal Faith
Jensen is a member of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. He joined the church after being asked to preach on social justice issues (despite identifying as an atheist at the time). He found the liturgical recitation of the Lord’s prayer to be incredibly moving, and he writes that he left the church that day “not with a new set of beliefs but with a new experience” (29). Soon thereafter, he decided to join St. Andrew’s. He didn’t believe in God, but in a very real sense he believed in the Church and embraced the principles of Christ’s message. He no longer describes himself as an atheist, though he still doesn’t believe in God in the traditional sense.
On God, Jensen writes: “I believe God is a name we give to the mystery of the world that is beyond our capacity to understand.” He writes also that “Christ offered a way into that mystery that still has meaning today” (47). This is clearly a less-than-traditional approach to the divine, and frankly I am not sure what to make of it. The idea of “‘God’-as-name-for-mystery” is intriguing, if not convincing, and I pray that for Jensen it reveals God’s reality in a way that he can understand and relate to.
I disagree with several major aspects of Jensen’s theology: his rejection of the physical Resurrection, his depersonalization of God, and his emphasis on finding the internal strength to struggle rather than falling on God’s provision in faith. But I find his willingness to engage the truth of Jesus Christ compelling, even if it has led him to conclusions that I do not share. He seems genuinely to be striving to follow Christ, whether or not he believes all of what others might consider to be the “right ideas” about him. This is admirable.
2. Jensen’s Analysis of Fundamentalism
Jensen sees fundamentalism as one of the primary forces for evil in the world. But he doesn’t just stop at the traditional analysis of “fundamentalism = religious loony”. Instead, Jensen diagnoses four distinct types of fundamentalism: religious, nationalistic, economic, and technological. Recognizing that religious fundamentalism has already been well critiqued and analyzed, Jensen largely passes over it in his discussion.
His treatment of “nationalistic fundamentalism” focuses, as it inevitably must, on America. In Chomskyan style, Jensen strips away the emperor’s clothes of benevolent intervention, recognizing the inherent imperialism and oppression that lie beneath much of united states foreign policy. Rightly criticizing the “pathological hyperpatriotism that tends to suppress internal dissent” and that is often obligatory for well-behaved u.s. citizens, Jensen advocates instead that we “celebrate out connections to real people in our lives while also declaring a commitment to universal principles that are not rooted in any particular nation-state” (109-10). A compelling vision indeed, and one that is much needed in America today.
The third variety of fundamentalism criticized is economic or market fundamentalism, wherein “the naturalness of capitalism is now taken to be beyond question” and corporate capitalism is viewed as “the only sane and rational way to organize an economy in the contemporary world” (112). Indeed, the “widening gap between rich and poor” attests to the failure of capitalism to provide prosperity for more than the very few; this has been well-documented in other texts, and is a subject that I have only recently become interested in (and in regards to which my formerly libertarian views have been radically shifting).
The final fundamentalism Jensen addresses is technological fundamentalism. He describes this as the belief that “the increasing use of evermore sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology” (116). Pointing to widespread ecological degradation of the last century, he argues that faith in technology to solve our problems will inevitably lead to further destruction. This is the section about which I am most uncertain; I have always been of the opinion that technological and scientific advancement eventually bring about widespread benefits. I especially am uncomfortable with his dismissal of the worth of the space program, and his idea that humanity has “no business” exploring “the atom and the cell” (118). Nevertheless, Jensen makes valid and thought-provoking criticism of humanistic hubris and technological arrogance, and his ideas certainly merit further discussion.
Concluding thoughts
Though the book as a whole is organized around an entirely different set of themes, the twin pillars of unique theology and anti-fundamentalism are key to his overall vision. Jensen offers a way of approaching religious concepts that engages them with the goals of truth-seeking and justice-action. These twin purposes must be central to our theological and spiritual lives, even though we may differ on many details (as Jensen and I do).
There is much more to the book than what I have written about. All of it is intriguing; much of it is controversial; none of it is conventional. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is willing to consider his ideas thoughtfully, as challenging to American Christian orthodoxy as they are.
I wanted to ignore Memorial Day on this blog. Just sort of let it slide by, get back to my “Thoughts from Solitude” series, not say anything “dumb” ( =pacifist). But I realized today that to be a Christian in America means to live with Memorial Day, and to be a Christian in general means to respond, not sit quietly.
Other people have already done a fantastic job of analyzing Memorial Day, of revealing it for what it is as a very un-Christian part of the liturgical calender of the State. I want to talk about something else, not about what Memorial Day is or whether Christians should celebrate it, but rather about how we should pray today.
Many American churches will devote (or have already devoted) special prayer to America’s dead soldiers. After all, that’s what we’re supposed to do on Memorial Day as “good patriotic Americans”. Perhaps it is true that the part of the Church that happens to live in America should pray for the soldiers of America. But we cannot stop there.
Today, the American Church must follow the guidance of our Lord in Luke 6.27-28: “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” If we are praying today for America’s dead, we must also pray for the dead of America’s enemies. We must pray for the nineteen who flew planes into America’s buildings in September 2001. We must pray for the thousands who died fighting American soldiers in Vietnam. We must pray for the millions who fell trying to stop America’s military from advancing through Normandy, through Europe, and across the Pacific.
We must also follow the call of Scripture to stand for the lowly and oppressed. If we pray for America’s strong, we must even more so pray for the world’s weak, for the victims of America’s wars. We must pray for the people of Iraq, of Afghanistan, of Pakistan. We must pray for the people of Vietnam. We must pray for those who perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We are not Americans; we are Christians who live in America. But we cannot retreat from where God has placed us. Though the State has a liturgical calender that celebrates death, we have a Lord who gives us life. We serve a God of transformation in the midst of a culture of destruction. We must embody that transformation, letting it extend even to Memorial Day, that God might redeem the State’s unholy holidays for his own holy purposes.
That transformation and redemption must begin with our prayers.
Image credit: psalters.com with hattip to CatholicAnarchy.org
Properly understood, the Church functions as a community that:
- Embodies an alternative ethics of nonviolence and transformation, rather than violence and destruction. We overcome evil through good. (Matthew 5.38ff; Luke 6.27ff; Romans 12.14ff)
- Embodies an alternative identity and allegiance in a Kingdom that is not of this world but is present in it. We act as witness to and dissident from Empire and Nation-State. (John 18.36; Luke 17.20f)
- Embodies an alternative economics of generosity rather than greed, of Jubilee rather than exploitation. We give freely and forgive debts as ours have been forgiven. (Matthew 6.19; Luke 4.19; Acts 2.44ff)
Each of these aspects of the Kingdom of Heaven, to which the Church is witness, requires hard commitment and flies in the face of “conventional wisdom” and cultural norms (especially in America). Christianity in this form becomes, ironically, more difficult to live out in societies where Christian rhetoric and nominal institutional membership are normative — i.e., in large countries with a “Judeo-Christian Tradition” or societies where the majority of citizens attend church. This paradox arises because in these situations Christian religion is appropriated by the State, compromising its essential pacifism (and, in individualist-capitalist societies, often its economic/social aspects as well).
Thus for the Christian who aspires to restore the Church to a model like that advocated here, “separation of church and state” is central — not to protect government from undue religious influence, but to allow the Church to maintian its integrity as a witness to the dominant order.
I’ve been doing a lot of writing on American Nationalism in Christianity recently. But something that I haven’t discussed as much is the development of my own theopolitics in this area.
Like so many in America, I was raised to believe that Christianity and patriotism are natural counterparts. To me, America was a uniquely Christian nation, founded on Biblical principles that were tragically being corrupted. Christians were supposed to be model citizens. Liberals were stamping out references to God in our history, in our public ceremonies, in our schools, and thus America, the “greatest nation in the world”, was in danger of losing its status as a country specially blessed by God. God bless America!
But over the past year or so I have rethought these ideas. I have come to recognize that God works first and foremost through the Body of Christ, through the poor and the oppressed, through the victims of injustice — not through nation-states, who are more often than not the perpetrators of the evil that Christians are called to stand against. (And that includes, unfortunately, the United States of America.) This change in my views was a long process, brought about by my exposure to the Christian anarchist movement, books like Jesus for President, and much more.
Today, I realize that the message of Jesus of Nazareth is a subversive one, a radical one (both theologically and politically) — a message explicitly in opposition to the sins of Empire. In the first century, Empire was Roman. In the twenty-first century, Empire is American. I believe that Christians are called out of the world’s empires into a separate identity, an identity formed by the community of the Church, which is post-national and totally non-statist. Christians cannot expect both to be true to our calling and to be model citizens (or model businessmen, or model capitalists, or model churchgoers).
My identity, then, is not as a citizen of a polity, but as a member of an entirely different body: the Church.
But the fact remains that I live in the United States and partake of American culture. And I do indeed love America. I am a part of the American people, I am shaped by American culture, I benefit from those things that America does right. (I do not love the government, clearly; but as Noam Chomsky has noted, it is a “profoundly totalitarian assumption” to equate a nation with its government).
So am I patriotic? It’s a complicated question. Many would read what I have written and say that I am not.
My answer would be different. I would say that I am culturally patriotic (or, alternatively, culturally American) in much the same way that many “nonbelievers” are culturally religious (or culturally Christian). I do not give “allegiance” to America, just as a nonreligious person does not give allegiance to the Church; but I am a participant in a distinctively American ethos and culture. Holidays like Independence Day, to me, are great ways to spend time with family and friends, analogous to the role of Christmas in the life of a nonbeliever. Other similar comparisons could be drawn.
But regardless of how my attitude towards America is best classified, I am long past the idea that the United States is specially favored by God. I think we can all tell who benefits from that sort of theology. Hint: it’s not the poor and oppressed.
I went to see Watchmen last night, having read the comic book graphic novel some months back. The novel is a work of art; it’s richly interlayered, accomplishing literary effects and conveying subtleties of meaning that are impossible in straight prose. It was of course impossible for the movie to live up the original, but the film nevertheless was well done. And incidentally, though many fanboys will protest over the film’s changed ending, I thought it made the finale stronger. 
Like any narrative of artistic merit, Watchmen, as both film and graphic novel, raises profound theological questions. Lengthy papers could be written on the “Theology of Watchmen“, but this post will seek merely to briefly consider and draw attention to a few of the issues the story raises.
Dr. Manhattan, the only superhero in Watchmen with genuine superpowers, is seen by many as a godlike being. He can manipulate matter; he perceives his entire life, past and future, as a continuous present (mostly); he can walk on the surface of the sun; he can grow to titanic size.
In the story, when the existence of Dr. Manhattan is made public, newspapers record a prominent official as saying “The Superman exists, and he’s American.” The official later clarifies that he was misquoted; his actual statement was “God exists, and he’s American”.
It is interesting to note how close this statement is to the implicit attitude of many in America. The state’s established religion of American Nationalism is all too often cloaked in the language (and, tragically, the institutions) of Christianity, using phrases like “One nation under God” and “In God we trust”. An examination of the radical, subversive message of Christ should make it clear that the God of Christianity is not the same as whatever deity the government “trusts”; but nevertheless, many in America ascribe to a political theology that in some sense assumes that “God exists, and he’s American”.
Of course, this is not a problem limited to the US. As Walter Wink has noted, Christian moral discernment in national affairs “tends to follow the flag”. But in America, it is exacerbated by the fervent, obligatory, patriotism that colors everything in public life.
[Spoiler warning] The film version of Watchmen reaches its climax when one of the superheroes wreaks destruction in major cities around the world, framing Dr. Manhattan for the dastardly deed in order to force America and the USSR to make peace and unite against this new common threat (the film is set during an alternate-history Cold War). To the American government, it is as if God has suddenly turned against them. God still exists, but now he is anti-American.
Could real-world America face such a crisis? Though the God of the New Testament is not a God of empire, the conception of Deity embraced by Christian Nationalism could never turn on the US. There are millions of American Christians who, attending churches that obscure the cross with the flag, have rarely considered the possibility that God could oppose the United States in any substantial way (though many millions more elsewhere in the world have rarely doubted God’s un-Americanism!). It is inevitable that someday these two conceptions of God will run smack-dab into each other (as they did in Nazi Germany, for example), creating massive cognitive dissonance for man, and shaking the religious foundations of American society.
Perhaps, then, Watchmen in some way echoes the archetypes of biblical apocalyptic literature, wherein all the nations of the earth come together against God in the “last days”. In the film, the warring nations of the world unite to counter a hostile superhero. In “real life”, the nations continue to war physically, but spiritually they are united in countering the peace of God with the cult of Empire.
This post was featured on the CCBlogs Network, and was also crossposted at Crossleft.org
Recently I was reading the Gospel of John, and I came across a curious part of Christ’s trial before Pilate that I had not remembered. The relevant passage is John 19.12: “From then on Pilate tried to release him, but the Jews cried out, ‘If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor.’”
I suspect that we often think little of this passage, casually assuming that it retells another frivolous charge against Jesus by his accusers. But if we do that, we are reading it precisely wrong. For the claim made by Christ’s enemies is in fact entirely true, for as N. T. Wright has written, “If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not.”
Pilate thus was torn between multiple allegiances. As a Roman official, he had an allegiance to the Emperor. As a judge, he was supposed to have an allegiance to “the truth”. But as John 18 records, he had already rejected that obligation. Jesus had told Pilate, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” Pilate responds, “What is truth?” And then, without bothering to wait for an answer (from perhaps the one person most qualified give one!), Pilate leaves, returning to the crowd. He didn’t want to know what Truth is; he had already decided that it didn’t matter.
He chose the other allegiance, to his government, his Emperor, doing his “civic duty”, if you will. This story thus provides one of the best Biblical arguments against the excesses of nationalistic patriotism, for in this story, we see most clearly the fundamental opposition between the Kingdom of Heaven (a kingdom of truth, peace, justice) and the Kingdoms of the Earth (kingdoms of deceit, war, and oppression). Pilate, servant of Empire, killed Jesus not merely because he was some religious nutcase who messed with established dogma; no, he killed Jesus because Jesus embodied a new kingdom that makes Empire impotent.
This is not to say that it’s impossible to advance God’s kingdom while working within other structures (consider Rep. John Lewis, for example), nor is this to say that there is no role for a theologically-guided sense of patriotism among Christians (which there is). But the story makes it clear that sometimes choices must be made. Pilate made his. Let us hope that when it comes our turn to ask, “What is truth?”, we shall wait to hear to answer — even if it makes us an enemy of the emperor.
