Radiant In Joy
by
Paul Gilk
Editor's Introduction
Paul Gilk is an independent scholar and writer. He lives in
a 19th-century log house he reconstructed for himself on
land that was once a part of his family's farm in the woods of
northern Wisconsin. His roots go deep into what he calls the
peasant culture of his German/Austrian immigrant ancestors
who homesteaded there. With his Swiss-born wife, Susanna, he
raises much of his own food, and they are folk musicians in
demand for musical performances throughout the area. They
are attenders at the North Central Wisconsin Friends
Worship Group in Merrill, an affiliate of Northern Yearly Meeting.
A long-time ecological thinker and critic of
American consumerist society, Paul has lived in various parts of the
upper Midwest. He served for a time as co-editor of
North Country Anvil, a small literary/political magazine published during
the 1970s and `80s in Millville, Minnesota, and his articles
have appeared in that as well as in Synthesis/Regeneration: A
Magazine of Green Social Thought, published in St. Louis. He has
also written two books and a collection of poetry.
The essay presented here has been condensed from a
longer piece, and I hope that in "pruning" it I have preserved for
QUF readers a lot of its unique styleoften blunt,
sometimes whimsical, and always deeply thoughtful. Paul is the kind
of appreciative author an editor loves to work with, and I
follow his express instructions here in "taking a deep
bow."
Rhoda R. Gilman
Radiant In Joy
Several books have come into my hands lately that treat
of avoidance, evasion, obfuscation, and denial. One of them
is Robert Jay Lifton's and Greg Mitchell's Hiroshima in
America, written in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the
Hiroshima atomic bomb blast, which occurred on August 6, 1945. I
am reading it in advance of the sixtieth
anniversary.1
The book has a provocative subtitle:
A Half-Century of Denial, and it is this theme of denial that I'd like to explore.
I'm neither smart enough nor spiritually clear enough for the
task, so I'll stumble around in the briar patch, tearing my
clothes, scratching my hide, and trampling on some tender vines.
Bear with me.
I appreciate but am not satisfied with the
psychological analysis (especially as focused on Harry Truman) in
Hiroshima in America. To know why there was such a "flow of feeling,"
not only to develop nuclear bombs, but then to use them twice
on Japanese cities, even as the Japanese were signaling a
willingness to explore surrender, is to plunge below or beyond
psychology. The difficult areaalmost taboois spirituality. Our
Western psychology, including mass psychology, has been
powerfully shaped by the language, concepts, ideas, and yeasty virus
of the Christian Gospels. Therefore, to penetrate the
psychology of Americans in regard to Hiroshima is also to penetrate
the extent to which gospel yeast has leavened the underlying
soul and spirit of Americans who think of themselves as Christians.
As this country has such a hugely powerful
Christian heritage, at least in terms of over-all religious mythology
and church affiliation, and as that heritage is supposedly
grounded in the Jewish Jesus of first-century Palestine, I am of a mind to
take our Christian leaders at their word and attempt
an examination of avoidance, evasion, obfuscation, and
denial from within the ethics and morality of the Jesus portrayed
in the four main Gospels. Those, simply, are for me embodied
in the Sermon on the Mount and the command to love, even
to love the enemy.
I grew up a Protestant Christian, and after forty years
of exploration and digression, I still am a Protestant
Christianalthough with a very different understanding from that of
the gawky, crew-cut farm boy in the J. C. Penney's sport coat
of the early 1960s. I now stumble in the direction of Thomas J.
J. Altizer's Christian atheism, and perhaps in the
image-breaking footsteps of Bishop John Shelby
Spong.2 Meanwhile I take comfort in a circle of friends and neighbors who worship
or meditate, as the case may be, in the silent manner of
Quakers. Although my present sense of Spirit seems more akin to
the Tao Te Ching than to Christian orthodoxy, I am hoping
to alienate neither the conventionally pious believer nor
the conventionally impious unbeliever. You will neither have
to check your supernaturalism at the front desk in the briar
patch nor have your "save-me-from-religion" card punched to
take your turn among the thorns.
The question is whether people who call
themselves Christian are or are not obliged to live their lives to the
fullest possible extent in accordance with the ethics and morality
of the person they call Lord and Savior. Or does alignment
with church, nation, and "civilization" reduce the obligation to
a patchwork of creeds, dogmas, and pledges, the
heartfelt reiteration of which is sufficient for "salvation?" If so, then
there is nothing, humanly speaking, that stands between us
and Armageddon except a limited sense of what is
conventionally right and wrong. This can be seen, for example, in the
alarming elastic capacities of "just war" doctrine. Will the present
deadly blend of hostile human (largely male) realpolitik
with instantaneous deadly technologies make earth uninhabitable
for mammals and birds and who knows what other
creatures? Or can it be penetrated and pruned by the radically
nonviolent compassion displayed by a certain East-Mediterranean
peasant from first-century Palestine? There may be ways to state
the dilemma with greater elegance, but I think you get my drift.
James Carroll, in Constantine's
Sword, says "The study of history always implies a study of its alternative."
Barbara Tuchman, in The March of Folly, says "The hypothetical
has charm, but the actuality of government makes
history."3 Perhaps the future, as an occasional bumper sticker proclaims, is
not what it used to be. Alternative visions may have charm,
but don't hold your breath waiting for them to be realized.
There are lots of evangelical Christians (not all
aligned with the political right) who insist that just as Jesus
was persecuted and killed by "the world," so he is soon to
come again and return the favor. This is a doomsday view of
divine retribution lightened (only for believers) by a prospect of
life after death in a wonderful, special, very long-term place.
This world is going to end in irreversible disaster. Earth is
destined for the same fate as the unsaved. And is it not a striking
irony that the human tradition which clings most strongly to
this viewAmericanized Christianity, primarily Protestantis
also the governing agency which has made the prospect of
irreversible disaster plausible?
Little Boy and Fat Man, the nuclear bombs dropped
on Japan, were products of the best Western scientific
minds, nurtured by more than a thousand years of
"Christian civilization." The prototype bomb was set off in a desert
stolen from its Mexican and American Indian inhabitants at a
site called Trinity, named after the triune God of
Christian orthodoxy. Witnesses felt religious awe in the presence of
the first atomic blast, and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
even speculated on the use of the bomb to bring Soviet Russia
"into the fold of Christian
civilization."4
The Christian Right in its desire to see Israel restored
(or recreated) to "biblical" conformity in order to set the stage
for Armageddon and the End Times seems to yearn for a
biblically predicted doomsday. This yearning, however, is
comfortably embedded in American affluence, with suburban homes,
green lawns, nice cars, computers, dishwashers, septic systems,
clean drinking water, safe beds, and plenty of gasoline and
electricity. There is no real-life suffering in this yearning. It is a
political, mythological, religious fantasy, devoid of the pain that
would quickly and quietly strip such atrocity anticipation of its
glamor. Those enmeshed in the hallucination believe that God has
a prophetic script to fulfill, and the saved will bewell,
saved. The rest of us will not only suffer plagues and disasters but
are also destined for eternal damnation and torment.
If American foreign policy seems like a
cross-stitched, rumpled, and incoherent reflection of this religious
mythology, it largely is. Our missionary zeal is deeply entangled
with generations of belief in manifest destiny, American
exception-alism, and all the rest of the civil religion which asserts
that virtuous America has been commissioned to uplift
and Christianize the entire world. And, since the Bible tells us
that the ox is not to be muzzled as he treads out the grain, there
are justifiable economic advantages which accrue to the oxen.
As Thomas Merton says in his
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, the discovery of America inspired some
Europeans to imagine that human society was "getting off to an
entirely new start."5 There was a new world beyond the frontier,
without a murky past, without sin, and therefore a paradise. To claim
it for civilization was our destiny, against which
dark-skinned people with murky histories snarled in envy and
resentment. This mythology has usurped whatever humble and
troubled adherence some Christians have to the difficult and
demanding teachings of the Gospels: to be a servant, to be the least,
to love both the neighbor and the enemy.
If the Book of Revelation correctly anticipates the
reign of an Anti-Christ, we have only to turn on AM talk radio
to hear its strident, all-knowing voice. Here we have
Christianity transformed into an encompassing belief system that lives
and moves and feeds from a supposed prophecy of
divine authenticity. It has an answer (or can find one) to every
nagging doubt or uncertainty, even as it is enmeshed in a deeply
anxious clinging to worldly security represented by insurance
policies, retirement plans, rust-free cars, crisp police, nuclear
power plants, and a military larger and more deadly than the rest
of the world's combined. All the while it cheers on the End Times.
The term "psychic numbing," employed by Lifton
and Mitchell, may be clinically useful, but it is much too weak
for dealing with this reality. Even the word hypocrisy is
inadequate. "Idolatry" and "blasphemy" begin to point in the right direction.
Some light on how this religious predicament came about
can be found in two articles published in a recent issue of
Zion's Herald.6 The first is an interview with John Dominic
Crossan, where the term "collaborative eschatology" comes up.
This means, says Crossan, that "whatever spiritual power there is
in the world must be shared evenly among the members of
the world." This "recipe for salvation" is also expressed in the
slogan "first justice, then peace," as opposed to "first victory,
then peace," which is the "program the world's been run on for
about 5,000 years."
In the second article Paul Alan Laughlin discusses
four "Master Images" of Jesus and Christ: Historical Jesus,
Narrative Jesus, Sacred Christ, and Archetypal Christ. The Sacred
Christ, he points out, has "a life of its own" and is the "principal
object of Christian devotion worldwide." Then he asks why "so
many of [Jesus'] most ardent professed followers blithely ignore
such key teachings of their beloved `Lord and Savior' as the
dawning Reign of God, the spiritual worthlessness of earthly
treasures, the unreliability of self-righteous religious authorities, the value
of the poor and otherwise despised, and the necessity of
loving not only the foreigner but the foe as well?" One answer
he gives is that the Sacred Christ image is so powerful in
its supernaturalism that it has rendered "irrelevantand
indeed invisiblemost of the particulars of the life and teachings
of the Narrative Jesus."
Crossan's analysis suggests another reason. When
the Christian Church merged with the Roman Empire in the
fourth century, the concept "first justice, then peace" had to
be radically pruned from the faith in favor of "first victory,
then peace." This meant that the list of key teachings Laughlin
spells out had to be locked away in favor of religious creeds
and church dogmas that did not directly challenge or threaten
the ideology of empire. The Sacred Christ image, with its
sacraments and otherworldly salvation, was no impediment to
empire victory and even, through the Gospel of John, provided
the empire a new overlay of religious rationale.
In his reference to 5,000 years Crossan implicitly
alludes to the duration of civilization from its beginnings to the
present day. It is the empires and kingdoms of civilization that hold
to the slogan "first victory, then peace," while a
collaborative eschatology aligns the reign of God against these forces.
And, as we can easily see, civilization has now achieved
globalization to the near ruin of all noncivilized cultures and with
huge impacts on planetary ecology. The "blowback" comes in
a variety of formsfrom epidemic diseases to global toxins
to species extinction to apocalyptic weaponry to climate
change to rampant terrorism.
Scholars like Crossan and Marcus Borg, with their
deep analysis and explication of the reign of God, are
critically important because the Christian faith desperately needs
the creation-based spiritual traction that the prophet
Walter Rauschenbusch began articulating more than a century
ago with his "discovery" of the kingdom of
God.7 If, in Crossan's phrase, God is going to "clean up the world," cleansing will
require the spiritual humility within collaborative
eschatology. Thinking that God will rescue the saved via the "Rapture,"
or that there is no hope outside supernatural and
otherworldly anticipations fits neatly into the Sacred Christ mythology
that Christianity has become since its compact with the
emperor Constantine.
For Christians there is no more pressing spiritual need
than piercing through salvationist mythology to the
creation-based Historical and Narrative Jesus that Laughlin describes.
Without that connection, Christianity provides the utopian
religious lubricant that enables empire to conquer its way to
global disaster. A "pure" Sacred Christ, in its alignment with
empire, results not so much in the Anti-Christ as the Anti-Jesus.
Many Sacred-Christ Christians apparently believe
that God yearns to see creation destroyed. Stewardship
and servanthood are only minor virtues in that cosmic view.
They are even seen as impediments, vices and sins, if they seem
to retard the arrival of "prophetic" breakdown. To get through
to Jesus requires a potentially painful pruning of
credal dependency, a faithful trust not in religious formulae but in
the powerful compassion of the invisible God combined with
a passionate commitment to the reign of God on this earth.
Globalized civilization is reaching an epochal crisis that
is going to deepen and intensify. As it does, we will see the
program of Christ having a separate existence from Jesus to be
fraught with disastrous consequences. Sacred-Christ Christianity
has become the state religion of Anti-Christ empire. "First
victory, then peace"or, to alter slightly the famous assertion of
an American officer in Vietnam: "We had to destroy the world
in order to save it."
There are a number of peopleI mean here writers,
activists, and intellectualswhom I trust. And then there are a
few people whose life experience or depth of engagement is so
basic that, like them or not, accept or argue as much as you want,
their utterances are pivotal to our spiritual discernment in
these times. Two such persons, for me, are Dietrich Bonhoeffer
and Thomas Merton, a German Protestant preacher and an
English/French/American Catholic monk.
In both Bonhoeffer and Merton I perceive a man in
the wine press of moral extremity, driven by crisis to a kind
of intellectual clarity, a degree of spiritual lucidity in
which conventional religion was seen as part of the mythology
and world structure that are fostering global destruction. First
I'd like to wrestle with a concept for which Bonhoeffer is
famousa glimmer, perhaps a vision, that he saw as he was waiting to
be hung for his (relatively minor) role in a plot to
assassinate Adolph Hitler. That concept is "religionless
Christianity."8
One might compare religion to a kind of soup
kitchen where people come for a truly healthy meal. The purpose
of eating is not simply to go away full, slowly get hungry,
and eventually come back for another bowl of soup. The object
of the meal is to awaken, enlighten, and empower. It is to
change, to deepen, to intensify the spiritual gravitas of the eater.
Human beings need to grow, to mature, to become more
spiritually awake, alive, and solid.
You will know whether the soup kitchen is putting
out the real goods by whether those who eat there are
spiritually alive and growing. Part of such growth is spiritual
discernment, and part of that discernment, despite the terror and
reluctance, is to recognize the complicity of religion with "the world." It
is to see the extent to which religion kisses and blesses
empire, patriotic identity, strategic advantage, national interest,
and both the commercial predation and military violence
that advances self-interest and empire.
If the soup kitchen is feeding only mythological
baby formula, it is engaged in religious infantilization. It
becomes either rigidly strict or sloppily permissive. While the latter
may lead to an erosion of cultural standards, the former is by far
the larger problem. Permissiveness is deflating and demoralizing,
but it has the capacity to be self-correcting, rather like
the Prodigal Son who got sick of eating with the pigs. Rigidity
is more dangerous, for it is inclined to align itself with
authoritarian forms of political organization.
As a Protestant pastor Bonhoeffer had in him the
spiritual lucidity by which to see not only the madness of Hitler and
the Nazi Party but also the obsequious idolatry of the
German churches, both Protestant and Catholic, as they
aligned themselves with fascism. Daring a mortal sin in his
involvement with an assassination plot, Bonhoeffer found himself on
a trajectory to be hung. This crisis drove him deeper and
deeper into the necessity of spiritual discernment. It caused him
to recognize that unless Christianity produced
"religionless" Christians who stood for justice, not victory, the reign of
God, not empire, the soup kitchen was only cooking a toxic
baby broth of foamy mythology, counseling comfort and
complicity, not creating prophets and martyrs.
The perniciousness of this broth goes back to "first
victory, then peace," whether or not the Constantinian
compromise was what created the recipe or only standardized it. What
makes the broth so poisonous in our time is the lethal power of
global civilization. The religious broth is ancient; its alignment
with empire did not in the past make for universal toxicity. Now
it does.
"Religionless Christianity" means daring to step
beyond the infantile safety of soup kitchen mythology. It means
we have to grow up and eat real food. The condition of the
world and the amazing spectacle of Christians lusting for the
Rapture along with the demolition of the earth tells us that not
growing up is no longer an option. Or, insofar as it is an option, it
will lead, by whatever bizarre choices and erratic actions, to
global disaster.
We all have been indoctrinated with the understanding
that civilization is our savior from primitive savagery, from the
pagan, the heathen, the barbarian, from backwardness of
all typesand from violence itself. Civilized state power
now constitutes the only form of legitimate or "sacred"
violence (even when it is used pre-emptively) against any form
of illegitimate violence. This is our myth, and it has served,
in Crossan's words, to protect "the program the world's been
run on for about 5,000 years." The explict myth of Rapture
and End Times is only the outer layer of the myth that
perpetuates and justifies sacred violence. The inner myth, the myth
of civilization as our savior from primitive brutality, protects
the economic structures of exploitation and inequality as
it downplays and excuses the ecological damage resulting
from those things.
In the Foreword to Gil Bailie's
Violence Unveiled, Rene Girard says: "The Gospels contain an anthropology of
religion."9 According to Bailie, what "Scripture is intended to achieve
is a conversion of the human heart that will allow humanity
to dispense with organized violence without sliding into the
abyss of uncontrollable violence, the apocalyptic abyss."
Bailie asserts that the hidden, subversive energy of
the Gospels lies in identification with the victim. That
identifi-cation undoes the efficacy of sacred violence, which is
the special kind of violence that is supposed to end illicit
and profane violence. Gospel, says Bailie, is a
"demythologizing virus." Myth, on the other hand, is "fragile and survives
only when its premises are accepted uncritically. . . . Myth
remembers discretely and selectively." Then he goes on to say: "The
gospel truth gradually makes it impossible for us to keep
forgetting what myth exists to help us forget. It thereby sets up a
struggle between the impulse to sacralize, justify, or romanticize
the violence that generates and regenerates conventional
culture and the impulse to reveal that violence and strip away its
mythic justifications. Fundamentally, human history is a
struggle between myth and gospel."
Gil Bailie leads us to a point from which we can begin
to see a possible future, as a nonviolent gospel steadily replaces a
multitude of myths packed with sacred violence. From
this vantage point, it's possible to see how fanatic End
Times Christianity only knows the Sacred Christ as a largely
religious abstraction, as an element within a cosmic myth blown up
like a biblical blimp.
Thomas Merton quotes Gandhi as saying:
Truthfulness is even more important than peacefulness. Indeed, lying is the mother of
violence. A truthful man cannot long remain violent. He
will perceive in the course of his research that he has
no need to be violent, and he will further discover
that so long as there is the slightest trace of violence
in him, he will fail to find the truth [for which] he
is searching. . . . The mother of all other lies is the
lie we persist in telling ourselves about ourselves.
And since we are not brazen enough liars to make
ourselves believe our own lie individually, we pool all our
lies together and believe them because they have
become the big lie uttered by the vox populi, and this
kind of lie we accept as ultimate truth.10
So we need to look behind the curtain of myth,
behind "the lie we persist in telling ourselves about ourselves." It is
in its mythological alignment with civilized values, with
civilized weaponry, that End Times Christianity becomes so
dangerous and deadly. Which is to say: the myths that cloud and fog
our consciousness are not simply religious; they are profoundly
and even more importantly civilized. Many people are prepared
to throw off or deflate the biblical blimp. That's the easy part.
But don't imagine for a moment that the task is finished
there. Penetrating the mythological sanctity of civilization is
next, and even harder.
What led me to my current conviction was a process
begun by a simple, sincere question I began asking of older,
smarter people in the early 1970s. "Explain to me," I said, "why small
farms are dying, why small-scale agriculture is
getting hammered." I was then a young man living in a large city,
but with unexpectedly strong longings for the small-farm life
and the countryside of my youth.
The answers did not satisfy. In fact, they seemed trite
and shallow. So I began to study and read in earnestfrom
Martin Buber to Lewis Mumford, E. F. Schumacher to Wendell
Berry, Elise Boulding to Carolyn Merchant. Over my own
reluctance and anxiety, perhaps even over religious dread (I hadn't
exactly been raised a fundamentalist, but religious indoctrination
had virtually made me one), an answer slowly
congealed. Civilization, I realized, came into being with the armed
and deadly expropriation of the agricultural abundance of the
pre-civilized agrarian community. Institutionalizing both
militarism and slavery, civilization has lived by expropriation ever
since. It produced the underlying structure of class. The
explicit pattern of aristocrat and peasant may have (except for
token remnants) ended with the industrial revolution, but
elite prerogative continues to saturate all civilized societies.
To live by what Gil Bailie calls "gospel" is to enter into
a world where justice comes first, then peace. Getting there
means facing and overcoming the avoidance, evasion, and denial
that myth enables and encourages. To penetrate myth and
repent of it in favor of the lucidity of truth means to disavow
any further alignment with the economic advantages that
come from institutionalized violence and systemic inequality. It
means taking the ethics and morality of the Gospels in dead
earnestservanthood and stewardshipas we trust that the world
so configured will be radiant in joy. I do not say that this is
the fully articulated reign of God; I do say it is a critical step in
the right direction.
To love God with all your heart, mind, and strength,
and to love your neighbor, including the neighbor who is
your enemy, as you love yourself, is to enter a divinely
nonviolent revolutionary world of stewardship and servanthood. As
Merton puts it:
The tactic of nonviolence is a tactic of love that seeks the salvation and redemption of the
opponent, not his castigation, humiliation, and defeat.
A pretended nonviolence that seeks to defeat and humiliate the adversary by spiritual instead of
physical attack is little more than a confession of
weakness. True nonviolence is totally different from this,
and much more difficult. It strives to operate
without hatred, without hostility, and without resentment.
It works without aggression, taking the side of the
good that it is able to find already present in
the adversary.11
Gil Bailie says, "If we humans become too morally
troubled by the brutality to revel in the glories of the civilization
made possible by it, we will simply have to reinvent culture." I
believe this is exactly what Jesus was about and exactly what
God-detoxified people everywhere across the world must do at once.
The outer myth of religious End Times and the inner
myth of civilization are packed within the traditional
Christian doctrine of the two kingdoms. It is precisely this
two-kingdom arrangement that not only permits but encourages
institutions of violence. In Kingdom 1, God the good cop offers
salvation; in Kingdom 2, God the bad cop wields the sword. But to
live by gospel is to live by what Gil Bailie calls "a powerless God
of love," a God who "chooses to suffer violence rather than
to sponsor it."
With the rise in the U.S. of the Christian Right,
the cleavage between those who live by Christian myth and
those who at least attempt to live by gospel has grown wider
and deeper and has reached the point of radically
distinct spiritualities. When myth achieves the power by which
to function independently of gospel, those who struggle for
gospel become the enemies of myth. Within the
overarching mythology camp there are many Christians whose personal lives
and behavior are exemplary. It is also true that the
articulation of the social, economic, and political implications of
gospel often tends to be both heady and strident, more given to
image-breaking than to creative culture reinvention. The
frequent stridency, however, of the civil rights, women's,
environmental, and same-sex movements has resulted from the
huge resistanceeven demonizationthat they have faced from
the myth camp.
In today's world, the Christian myth is allied to the
historical myth of American exceptionalism. In his book
American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged
Sword, Seymour Martin Lipset says: "Americans are the most churchgoing in
Protestantism and the most fundamentalist in Christendom." And he
goes on: "The very emphasis in the Protestant sectarian tradition
on the religious chosenness of the United States has meant that
if the country is perceived as slipping away `from the
controlling obligations of the covenant,' it is on the road to Hell.
The need has made Americans particularly inclined to
support movements for the elimination of evil by illegal and
even violent means if necessary."12
Chris Hedges, writing an article on "The Christian
Right and the Rise of American Fascism,"
agrees.13 He recalls: "Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard
Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close
to 80, we would all be fighting the `Christian fascists.'"
This warning, Hedges says, came 25 years ago, and it was hard
to take it seriously at the time. Now he is a believer. Adams
had been in Germany in 1935-36, and he "saw in the
Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with
the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities
that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or
a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of
religion, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals,
who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly
platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them
ineffectual and impotent."
Hedges names various Christian Right ideologues
and books, including one entitled America's Providential
History, which is the "standard textbook used in many Christian
schools and a staple of the Christian home schooling movement."
It "calls for `Bible believing Christians' to take dominion
of America." This "Dominion Mandate" is simply a more
fortified, mythological step in the direction of American exceptionalism.
The roots of this dogma go deep. Andrew Bacevich,
in The New American Militarism, has a keen and incisive
chapter called "Onward." In it he says:
Well before 1776, Americans claimed for themselves a pivotal role in the panoramic drama
of salvation. Indeed, the American story begins
with the forging of a special covenant. God singled
out Americans to be His new Chosen People. He
charged them with the task of carving out of the wilderness
a New Jerusalem. He assigned to them unique responsibilities to serve as agents of His saving
grace. America was to become, in John Winthrop's enduring formulation of 1630, "as a city upon a
hill," its light illuminating the world.
Present-day Americans beyond counting hold firm to
these convictions. Even among citizens oblivious to
or rejecting its Christological antecedents,
widespread, almost automatic support for this doctrine
of American Exceptionalism persists.14
Thus it's a mistake to believe the Christian Right is
some sort of mass delusion springing mysteriously out of nowhere
in the last thirty or forty years. The Christian church
has, historically, used the following names for itself, names (or
concepts) borrowed biblically from ancient Israel: chosen
race, royal priesthood, holy nation, purchased people.
To explain its present ascendancy Bacevich points to
a book by Rene Noorbergen and Ralph Hood, published in
1980. In The Death Cry of an Eagle these authors "found
abundant evidence that a decadent America was in an accelerating
spiral of decline. Turning away from God and toward corruption
and licentiousness, the United States was in danger of suffering
the same fate as Babylon, Greece, Rome, and other
great civilizations of the past." He quotes their "'shocking
discovery that global power, once thought to be the monopoly of
the United States, is fast slipping from this country's grasp.'"
Identifying with the Christian righteousness of
American empire, these writers and others whom Bacevich cites
"linked the revival of U.S. military power to the nation's fulfillment
of its larger providential mission." This led to a "crusade
theory of warfare," with scriptural sanctions for striking the first
blow. "God was literally on America's side, and He had
empowered Americans to act on His behalf."
Because of the doctrine of premillennial
dispensationalism, to which many, but not all, American evangelicals
subscribe, Israel lies at the convergence of national security
and eschatology. Crucial to the sequence of events leading
to Christ's second coming is the return of Jews to the Holy
Land. According to Bacevich:
In that sense the founding of the state of Israel
in 1948 started the clock tickingthis was a
central premise of Hal Lindsey's 1970s mega-bestseller
The Late Great Planet Earthand suggested to
many evangelicals that the end days are indeed
fast approaching. . . . As one consequence, the
Religious Right has been unflinchingly loyal to the Jewish
state, eager to support Israel in the performance of
its prescribed role (although according to the
most
commonly accepted script, before the Millennium arrives all Jews will either convert to Christianity
or be killed off).
Chris Hedges, in the article already cited, talks about
"a vision of Christ at the head of a great and murderous army
of heavenly avengers." The spark that could ignite it, he
says, "may be lying in the hands of an Islamic terrorist cell, in
the hands of the ideological twins of the Christian Right.
Another catastrophic terrorist attack could be our Reichstag fire,
the excuse used to begin the accelerated dismantling of our
open society. The ideology of the Christian Right is not one of
love and compassion, the central theme of Christ's message, but
of violence and hatred. It has a strong appeal to many in
our society, but it is also aided by our complacency."
We may well ask why complacency is so widespread
among mainstream "liberal" Protestants, especially those who are
lineal descendants of the Puritan tradition. In the words of
Bacevich they are "inclusive, proudly heterodox, dwindling in
overall numbers, and politically anemic." Why have they "vacated
the public square" while right-wing evangelical Protestantism
has taken their place?
The most concise answer is that by the 1960s
Christian mythology had been so largely discredited by the
discoveries of science that huge portions of the Christian
mainstream entered into a troubled, difficult re-evaluation of what
the Christian religion was all about. Because of uncertainty
and deference to the "conservatives," this spiritual struggle
was mostly hidden from view, not openly discussed with or
among the laity. So the churches tended in the direction of
mildly abstract piety, neither facing up to the end of mythology
nor engaging the radical challenges now lying more fully
exposed in the Gospels.
Sensing uncertainty in the opposing camp,
right-wing Christians smelled opportunity. They mistook this "dark
night of the soul" for fatal weakness, and this produced in them
a kind of victors' exultation. Such uncertainty, they said,
"proved" who was right and who was wrong. In some places this had
real institutional consequences. At the Missouri Synod
Lutheran seminary in St. Louis, for instance, the "liberal" professors
were removed in a reactionary take-over in the mid-1970s.
To say that the direct heirs to the Puritan tradition
have become inclusive, heterodox, and anemic is also to say a
similar thing of American liberalism and therefore of the
Democratic Party. The dark night of the soul generated by
liberalism's acceptance of the demythologizing critique has
profoundly affected the previous presumption of superiority which was
(and is) deeply ingrained in the mythology of manifest destiny
and American exceptionalism. Thus forty years ago
liberalism entered a period of troubled soul-searching, which
conservatism insisted was a liberal pathology, a neurosis, a breach of
faith with the obvious truth of biblical revelation and the status
of American superiority.
Inclusiveness for liberals has meant reaching out to
those whom the mythology previously kept in their places:
racial minorities, indigenous cultures, women, and
homosexuals. Embracing the heterodox has meant distancing from
the assertive, arrogant superiority of mythological victory
and taking seriously, in a new and truly attentive way, other
religions and even the rejection of religion. It may not be exactly true
to say, as Bacevich does, that these lineal descendants
have vacated the public square. It's not that simple. To move in
the direction of heterodox inclusiveness requires a kind and
depth of self-critical thought that, especially in its early stages,
involves psychological conflict and suffering. In the past forty years
the movements for civil rights, feminism, and the environment
have challenged, explicitly or implicitly, all the privileges
and prerogatives of the dominant white male society.
Meanwhile the public square has, in a certain
sense, abandoned the lineal descendants. As a result of
embracing the inclusionary and heterodox, liberals were deserted by
a huge proportion of white society. A major example
occurred in the aftermath of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
The white South, previously aligned with the Democratic
Party, switched to the Republicans, a shift in party loyalty which is
at least as strong a factor in the rise of the Christian Right as
the Vietnam defeat.
The current strength of the Christian Right is based on
a messy mix of anxiety, suspicion, resentment, and
reaction. These feelings are attached to ongoing uneasiness
regarding the complaints of minorities, from the consequences of
slavery to the extermination of self-sufficient Native American
cultures to the immigration of peoples like the Hmong, whose
lives were disrupted by U.S. intervention and war. Racial
prejudice has not gone away. Resentment toward women still
deeply infiltrates male consciousness. To take the
environmental critique seriously is to foster an awareness of ecological
limitation which has pervasive economic and public policy
ramifications in the direction of frugality.
Bacevich essentially perpetuates the notion that
liberalism has devolved into a peculiar elite snobbism and is
composed of a self-selected group of wealthy bleeding-hearts
hopelessly bogged down politically by all the needy, whining tails
that wag the dogminorities, women, tree-huggers,
peaceniks, animal-rights enthusiasts, vegetarians,
gun-controllers, homosexual sissies, and so on and on. Opposed to this
pathetic grab-bag are the real Americans who work for a living and
don't complain, who go to church and pay taxes, who are
patriotic and think global warming, like evolution, is a stupid
liberal theory.
Yet for all its flaws and floundering, this liberalism
of heterodox inclusion represents a serious attempt to
grapple with real and pressing issues. It is terribly constrained by the
righteous judgmentalism of the so-called conservatives as
well as by its own accrued habits of affluence and
comfort. Maintenance of the economic status quo has a wide array
of self-interested advocates, from huge corporations to
the relatively poor shopper who loves Wal-Mart for its
made-in-China bargains. Only Green politics is bold enough to call
for a serious pruning of overdevelopment and lifestyles.
The wealthy, as always, have the money by which
political candidates are made or unmade. The big media are owned
by the same economic class. The capitalist ideology of
perpetual economic growth, of continuous affluence, represents a big
hunk of our secular mythology, our unacknowledged linkage to
the privileged "American dream." The Christian Right
provides cover for the evasion of self-examination and repentance.
It keeps uneasy feelings at bay and gives comfort to
the comfortable with teachings about how God wants
Christians to prosper and how (as Bill Moyers has shown) pollution
and resource exhaustion don't matter, because the end of the
world will soon be upon us.
The Christian Right is the Anti-Jesus. For centuries
Christian mythology slept in the same bed with gospel. When those
lucid scientific discoveries shattered the historical veracity
of Christian mythology, gospel realized with a shock that it
was the only adult in that bed. It therefore sought to explain
to mythology (no doubt rather condescendingly) that it
needed to grow up. Mythology, governed internally by fear,
responded by turning the political tables. And, as gospel invariably
learns, the real path of the adult is crooked, narrow, rocky, and
hard. Relatively few people tough it out.
Mythology meanwhile builds mega-churches on the
broad highway, floods the airwaves, and gives confident
reassurance to presidents, generals, and CEOs. It aligns itself with
empire and turns its wrath on Gospel. This is the program of
the Christian Right. If it succeeds, it will crumble and
collapse. And the wailing of the deceived will be pitiful to hear.
It is astounding how frequently these days the
references to the Christian Right and End Times show up in print and
on talk radio. In a recent issue of The
Progressive, there is an interview by Amitabh Pal with Randall Robinson, the
founder of the TransAfrica Forum. In advising "progressives who
feel beleaguered" Robinson says:
Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the
country is in almost terminal descent. The business class
is combined with the evangelicals. And I think
the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of
Christ.15
At the same time Gil Bailie says the
scapegoat/sacrificial mythology "is collapsing, and good riddance, but if it
collapses while the mimetic passions it existed to tame continue
their explosive growth, it will collapse into the kind of
pandemic crisis that sacrificial religion existed to prevent." I think
that the dismantling of sacrificial mythology is rapidly under way.
It cannot be stopped, even (and paradoxically) as the
Christian Right attempts to force its own system of sacred violence
on the entire world.
The only way through this disaster is by the truth
that penetrates and discloses the veil of myth, truth aided
by servanthood and stewardship in the life-flow of the
"powerless God of love." For truth is the opposite of forgetting, just
as love is opposite to the wrathful hysteria of those in thrall to
the empire god of death.
Notes
1. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell,
Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of
Denial (New York, Avon Books, 1995)
2. See Thomas J. J. Altizer,
The Gospel of Christian Atheism
(Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1966) and John
Shelby Spong, A New Christianity for a New World
(New York, Harper Collins, 2001)
3. James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the
Jews (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2001); Barbara
W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to
Vietnam (N. Y., Alfred A. Knopf, 1984)
4. Lifton and Mitchell,
Hiroshima in America
5. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
(Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1965); Merton,
Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Maryknoll, N. Y., Orbis Books, 2004)
6. "Interview with John Dominic Crossan," and Paul
Alan Laughlin, "Master Images of Jesus and Christ," both in
Zion's Herald, July/August, 2005
7. Benson Y. Landis, ed. and comp.,
A Rauschenbusch Reader (New York, Harper, 1957)
8. Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Letters and Papers from Prison (New York, Macmillan, 1972)
9. Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the
Crossroads (New York, Crossroad Publishing, 1995)
10. Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
11. Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era
12. Seymour Martin Lipset,
American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword
(New York, W. W. Norton, 1996)
13. Chris Hedges, The Christian Right and the Rise of
American Fascism, published on the internet by the Center
for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy at Cornell
University (www.theocracywatch.org/chris_hedges_nov24_04)
14. Andrew J. Bacevich,
The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War
(New York and London, Oxford University Press, 2005)
15. Amitabh Pal, "Interview with Randall Robinson," in
The Progressive, October, 2005
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