(Ir)religiosity

Last time, I mentioned the blatant biases, omissions, and failings of the corporate media in the United States in regard to non-domestic acts of violence, and as of late, the war and occupation of Iraq.  I touched on the fact the in our minds, only Americans matter when it comes to international violence and I ended with the question: Why are we indifferent when it comes to this?

Over the next few posts, I want to unpack several reasons that I believe will help answer that question.  But before I do I want to make it clear that I don’t believe the blame to this phenomenon should be placed solely on the corporate media.  True, they are more culpable, they are in fact — at least in theory — obliged to report to us the viewers, and to speak the truth.  That is true and deserves attention because they have failed by all accounts. But I think this phenomenon is bigger and more widespread than just that.  Individual conditioning and indifference coupled with the fueling of the corporate media machine has ultimately led to our collective indifference in regard to non-American violence (e.g. the war in Iraq, the conflict(s) in Africa, etc.)

So, let’s look at the first reason and perhaps the most obvious, at least in terms of the current war Iraq, the most current and ignored example. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while since I’ve done a blog series.  I don’t anticipate this being a long one, but it’s something that has been in the back of my mind for quite sometime.  So here goes.

It’s quite interesting — especially considering that this is an election year, and a presidential election at that — to periodically step back and take a look at the media coverage of the war in Iraq and other international news, specifically those dealing with violence and death. 

Take the typical evening newscast for example.  The majority of the coverage will undoubtedly be focused on the upcoming election, the two candidates (like there is ever only two), and why we as citizens should engage in divisive, polemical arguments for or against either one.  The rest of the coverage will more than likely speak to the plummeting economy, rising gas prices and the deteriorating environment with mention of a celebrity scandal or an isolated domestic act of violence. 

Currently there isn’t much variation to that formula.  Mention to the war in Iraq or any other international incident, especially acts of violence, by and large, aren’t covered; and when they are it’s only because American civilians were killed, injured, or in some way jeopardized. Read the rest of this entry »

Tax day hangover. I’m still dealing with my contributing to, if I may borrow Brian McLaren’s language, our “suicide machine,” our military-industrial complex fueled by our hyper-consumptive addiction to global capitalism. We’re junkies and murderers. And really, when you get down to it, there’s not much we can do about it. We’re pawns, rats in a cage, fueling the machine that will eventually destroy us. Sorry to be depressing, but it’s true.

So, here are a couple of videos on war corporatism. First, Barry McNamara on the war, Bush, and the Project for the New American Century:

And, Immortal Technique and Mumia Abu-Jamal on the real face of the war:

I was re-reading some selected parts of Michael Mann’s Incoherent Empire this week and I ran across this timely quote:

“Like all imperialists, American ones are self-righteous. The politicians utter impeccable ideals of freedom, democracy, and humble rights for the world, and they promise it material plenty. They say they have achieved this ‘American Dream’ in the US and that they are now bring it to the world.. . .[But] American democracy today does not even seem in especially good shape. Only between one-third and one-half of American adults vote in national elections. Most members of Congress have to raise over a million dollars from business interests to get elected, and so inequality widens to a degree unparalleled anywhere else in the world. The media, especially television, from which most people get their news, are generally deferential to authority and rarely critical of their leaders in foreign affairs. American politicans rarely submit to sustained critical questioning from each other or from reporters—and the president almost never does. In Bush administration press conferences journalists typically ask a single question. When the question is evaded (which is always the case with difficult questions), they do not follow up. Questioning by the most famous TV interviewers, like Larry King and Diane Sawyer is sycophantic by European standards.. . .NBC did promptly fire Phil Donahue, the one television network host who opposed the Iraq invasion. It also fired veteran war reporter, Peter Arnett, who appeared on Iraqi television suggesting to the Iraqis that they tolerate foreign journalists in Baghdad on the grounds that their reports aided in US anti-war movement. All this self-censorship muzzles American democracy.”

This seems especially poignant now, when we’re in the middle of the chaotic, media masked whirlwind that is the current election cycle. What do you think?

~bh ><>

As is the case with any historical figure, Jesus cannot be understood outside the context in which he lived. The socio-political climate of Jesus’ world is extremely important because our current situation strongly resembles that of first century Palestine—history does indeed repeat itself. Jesus of Nazareth was born under, lived within and was eventually executed by, one of the most compelling and successful imperial powers in history. He was executed as a terrorist, a threat to the status quo. It is highly probable that if Jesus were living today he would be held prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib or some other ‘secret prison’ for disturbing and subverting the ‘peace’ of the empire.

Perhaps the most regrettable and paralyzing misstep of post-Constantinian Christianity is the domestication and depoliticization of Jesus. With the turbulent and uneasy marriage of the church and the Roman Empire came the compromise of the gospel and the institutionalization of Jesus’ counter-cultural, nonviolent resistance movement. This phenomenon has become even more popular and damaging in the Western world, particularly in the United States. Jesus has become nothing more than a detached religious figure irrelevant to politics, economics, and other social issues; in short, Jesus has become uninvolved in and unrelated to the modern imperial world. Christians would rather lift the Jesus of the bible out of the historical narrative, place him on an altar and worship him, oblivious to the demands of his gospel; to do so renders him influential, ineffective and worst of all, impotent. Jesus must be understood within history and within his socio-political context, lest we run the risk of crucifying him all over again.

The Roman Empire was the most powerful, oppressive and violent power in the ancient world. Since at least 539 BCE, the Hebrew people had been ruled and dominated by some sort of Hellenistic imperial power; the Romans were not the first overlords. They were however, the most potent and the most successful. By the time a Jewish peasant named Jesus was born in a small agrarian town on the fringes of the empire, the world was experiencing an age of ‘peace’ and security it had never known. Augustus Caesar was emperor and he had ushered the empire into a golden age of prosperity and success. This peace had been brought into existence by means of unbridled war, grotesque violence, and imperial triumph—known as the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome. Roman imperial ideology, indeed Roman imperial theology was in essence peace through war and victory, peace through domination and conquest. The ethos of Rome, and the ethos of empire are just that, domination, absolute power and complete supremacy.

The Pax Romana was praised throughout the empire by means of political propaganda and actively resisted by Jewish commoners. For example, at the age of sixty-six Augustus produced a 2,500-word eulogy wherein he listed all of his imperial accomplishments, down to the very last territory conquered. This document known as the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (The Acts of the Divine Augustus) was forged in bronze and circulated throughout the empire as means political propaganda, reinforcing the imperial theology of religion, war, victory, peace; put more succinctly, peace through victory. This is just one example of many; others include a shrine and altar built at Rome in honor the Augustan peace, imperial currency, and various sculptures depicting ‘the divine Augustus.’

The importance of imperial divinity cannot be overstated. According to Roman imperial theology, the emperor was the Son of God, the Savior and Redeemer, the Lord of all. The Acts of the Divine Augustus state:

The birthday of the most divine Caesar Augustus is…the day which we might justly set on a par with the beginning of everything, in practical terms at least, in that he restored order when everything was disintegrating and falling into chaos and gave a new look to the whole world…For this reason one might justly take this to be the beginning of life and living…All the communities should have one and the same New Year’s Day, the birthday of the most divine Caesar…[who] by his epiphany exceeded the hopes of those who prophesied Good New (Gospel), not only outdoing benefactors of the past, but also allowing no hope of greater benefactions in the future; and since the birthday of the god first brought to the world the Good News (Gospel) residing in him…the Greek of Asia have decided that the New Year in all the cities should begin on…the birthday of Augustus.

The new calendar was thus divided into ‘before Caesar Augustus’ and ‘after Caesar Augustus,’ making the emperor Lord not only of the empire, but of time. Roman imperial theology worshipped and exalted the emperor as god and praised ‘peace’ through victory and conquest.

We know that the Romans viewed the emperor as the divine ‘Son of God,’ the ‘Savior,’ the ‘Redeemer,’ and the Lord who brought the whole world under his ‘peace.’ What then, did it mean for early Christians to declare, “Jesus is Lord?” Better yet, what does it mean to say, “Jesus is Lord” within the American empire, under the Pax Americana? Many modern American Christians utter this phrase nonchalantly taking it to mean Jesus “saves me,” indicating one has a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus or God—although that phrasing is never mentioned in the bible. The title of ‘Lord’ has been perverted in the American imperial context and has been individualized becoming solely synonymous with catch-phrases and buzz words such as ‘personal salvation’ and as contributed to the depoliticization and domestication of Jesus we spoke of earlier. Indeed, many American Christians in service to the empire would likely refuse to utter the phrase were they to discover what the statement “Jesus is Lord” originally meant.

To declare Jesus as Lord is to overtly and directly challenge the lordship of the emperor. The title of lord, in Rome was a political categorization. Thus, to declare Jesus as the Son of God, the Savior and the Redeemer is to rival the imperial authority. For the early church, prior to Constantine, declaring lordship of Jesus deliberately and intentionally subverted and opposed the domination of the empire. Hence, to be a Christian was to be a countercultural revolutionary who pledged one’s allegiance to Jesus and God’s kingdom rather than earthly Powers. What might this mean in our current imperial situation? Perhaps it might be better and more true to the original meaning to declare, “Jesus is President” challenging the presidency of George W. Bush and the authority of American imperialism. That is exactly what the early Christians were doing. As singer/songwriter Derek Webb states in his song “A King and A Kingdom,” “…my first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man…my first allegiance is not to democracy, or blood…it’s to a king and a kingdom. The entire system, the domination system, the myth of redemptive violence, imperialism—everything that constitutes the normalcy of civilization—belongs to God and is subject to God’s purposes in God’s nonviolent, egalitarian and domination-free order. To be a Christian is to make these claims; anything less is idolatry.

As Christians who happen to be citizens of the American empire we must actively resist and oppose imperial domination and proclaim as loudly as possible that normalcy is not inevitability. The myth of redemptive violence and the scapegoat mechanism were unmasked and exposed through Jesus; we must now live as though they have, actively subverting imperial violence with creative nonviolent tactics. We must continue to proclaim Jesus as lord, realizing God’s domination-order and building God’s kingdom, “…on earth as it is in heaven.” Above all, we must remember, “The Powers are good, the Powers are fallen, the Powers must be redeemed.” We live in between the ‘already’ and the not ‘yet’ in a process of transformation and restoration; we must never lose hope in our endeavors. In April 1995, following the tragic bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City a group of rescue workers left this statement in spray paint on one of the surviving walls, “We search for the truth. We seek justice. The courts require it. The victims cry for it. GOD demands it!” As Christians seeking to follow in the footsteps of Jesus we seek truth, we seek justice, and we seek peace. Let us never lose hope and let us never deter from our task, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for—it starts now.

~bh ><>

The following will be the prologue to my senior paper.

Prologue

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

-President Dwight D.Eisenhower in his
farewell address given January 17 1961.

I still remember exactly what I was doing morning of September 11, 2001. It was fall of my sophomore year in high school and my entire graduating class—of 44 people—had gathered in the cafeteria to order our class rings. We were all in the middle of picking the symbols that would be on our ring when the principal walked in and told us that a commercial airplane and just crashed into the World Trade Center. You could hear a pin drop. The room fell still for what seemed like an eternity and then, as quickly as we had become silent we went right back to our task. The room was re-filled with the excitement and anticipation of finally having a class ring—for in Carnegie, Oklahoma this was a rite of passage. We had completely our freshman year of high school and now we had arrived. First came the class ring, then the letter jacket and the senior spread in the yearbook. We knew the drill and we weren’t about to let some ‘accident’ overshadow our day. Not five minutes later the principal reentered the room and told us that not only was the first plane hijacked by terrorists, but another aircraft had crashed into the other trade center tower and another hijacked plane was heading toward Washington DC. Suddenly the $320.66 I was about to spend on my class ring wasn’t so important.

The remainder of that day was and is still a blur to me. I remember going to class and watching the news replay those planes crashing into the building over, and over. Then the towers finally fell and they played that over, and over. I was 16 in 2001, so I distinctly remember gas prices skyrocketing to feel over six or seven dollars that day. I can remember going to football practice and our coach telling us to go home and pray because of the strange things happening in the world. Like most Americans, I was mostly scared. And like every American living at the time I had never witnessed an attack on our home soil, much less an act of terror. In the weeks and months following that horrific day I, like most Americans I suspect, remained glued to the television trying to see or hear every bit of information we could about the attacks. I remember President Bush declaring a War on Terror and congress voting to give me all the power necessary to carry that war out. Most of all I remember almost every developed nation in the world standing behind the United States as we tried to painfully move forward.

In 2004, I was able participate in another rite of passage for the first time and I exercised my right as an American citizen to vote, not just in any election, but a presidential election. Had I known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have voted the way did. Like many Americans, I found myself caught in the middle of all the debate, all the rhetorical smoke screens and all the ‘layers of the onion.’ Frankly, I’m still quite upset at the federal government for exploiting my emotions after 9/11 and using them to justify a preemptive war against a sovereign nation. The American people were not told the truth; we were led to believe justice would be served while our leaders hatched a grand plan to exercise and secure global American power. My trust in government has been broken—and I’m not sure it will ever be restored.

This essay is the product of my reflection upon our country’s actions following the tragic events that transpired on September 11, 2001. Indeed, we claim to be a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles (though some of us would doubt the truth of that claim and cringe at what others call ‘Christian’). Moreover, this essay is my reflection as an American Christian—no, as a Christian who happens to be an American citizen—who is trying the best he can to follow Jesus despite the circumstances and despite what the governing body of his country might tell him is ‘just.’ How can a follower of The Way build God’s peaceable kingdom in a time of war?

Over the course of the last 3-4 years my studies have, among other things, lead me to believe that Jesus cannot be understood outside of his context. We can’t simply lift the Jesus of the bible out of the narrative of history, place him in 21st century America and expect the truth to jump out at us; to do so renders him impotent. We cannot place Jesus in the cultural vacuum of Western culture and worship him as Lord. To do so, I believe is a sin. Of all the travesties committed in the name of Christianity—of which there are many should one choose to read a summary of church history—perhaps the most despicable is the domestication of Jesus. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’s classic The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In the story the children have entered the magical kingdom known as Narnia, and they meet a ferocious lion, Aslan is his name, he is the Christ-figure of the story. Naturally, the children are uneasy and anxious in the presence of such a mighty creature. So, the ask some of the other animals in the kingdom, “Is Aslan—this lion—is he safe?” And the animals answer, “No! He isn’t safe—but he is good.” Likewise, Jesus and his gospel, his good news, his evangellion—a term Jesus took from the Roman imperial lexicon and turned inside out—are not safe, but they are good. Too often in the Western world and in the United State particular we opt to tone down Jesus and his gospel, to make them more safe. As theologian and lecturer Tony Campolo puts it, we “neuter the gospel” in order to make it easier to teach, easier to preach and easier to put into action, pending we ever get that far. And by doing so we’ve created Jesus and his gospel in our image.

Most people are put aback when I tell them that Jesus probably looked more like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden than paintings on display in their churches or in their homes. We tend to forget that here in America, which is tragic because that is part of Jesus’ context. The Jesus of history was first century Palestinian peasant living under the rule of an oppressive empire. An empire that wanted nothing more than to expand its borders and exercise its military might throughout the world. This was the original meaning of “securing our national interests in the area.” And the most astonishing thing about Jesus—or at least what should be the most astonishing thing for United States as the sole superpower in world—is that he subverted and actively resisted the tyrannical rule of the empire. As Walter Wink puts it, “Almost every sentence Jesus uttered was an indictment of the empire and the domination system of his day.”

So—given this fact about Jesus and his gospel, what is a person living in the ‘New Rome’ to do? Furthermore, how should the ‘New Rome’—that claims to be a Christian nation, indeed a nation that follows Jesus and his gospel—conduct itself in the world? These are tough questions, questions of which there are no easy answers. But they must be asked nonetheless. My hope is to provide an efficient framework from which to ask these questions. A starting place from which others and myself can, as the great prophet Micah once stated, “…do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.”

~bh ><>

Today is the day we celebrate American Independence. It seems ironic. Perhaps we should be celebrating the comfortable illusion of American independence, or maybe, we should just call it what it is—American Dependence. Because the truth of situation is we can’t function without the rest of the world. We need foreign resources like oil, we need cheap outsourced labor, we need European and Asian countries to buy our exports, and frankly, we need unstable parts of the world to hate us so we can arrogantly flex our muscles. We thrive on it. And, even more sickening, we’ve shown that we’ll fight—killing innocent people—to ensure and secure it.

Roughly 200 years ago, we fought to secure our independence from tyranny and oppression. Today, we fight to secure our dependence on the rest of the world, our addiction to power and dominance, and exploitation of resources, all of which ultimately turn us into the very thing we fought to destroy. This country was formed in the name of liberty, diversity, and freedom of expression, all good causes—that is until someone is too diverse, too different, or too expressive. Then those rights are stripped from them in the name of justice. We should just call in what it is—maintaining the status quo.

The line distinguishing the difference between status quo and the truth has become so blurred that we don’t know the difference anymore. Truth telling is rarity and the prophetic voice is being traded in for a different commodity, complacency and greed. This can be seen everywhere, the government, the media and yes, even the church—the one place where truth should be cultivated. Perhaps we’ve become more interested in the dangerous arrogance of over-zealous nationalism and imperialism than the kingdom of God. This time of the year we are oh so quick to throw around “patriotic” buzz words and catch phrases like, “freedom,” “independence,” and most disgusting “God Bless America.”

It would be nice to be truly free and truly independent, to resist the temptation to destroy another country’s infrastructure to feed our addiction, but we shown that we can’t. Worse yet, we can’t even admit when we’re wrong, but we sure can point at the speck in everyone else’s eye while chanting our mantra, “God Bless America.” First and foremost our allegiance isn’t to democracy, the United States, or even the American church. Our allegiance is to justice, humanity, and the kingdom of God. Not a pie-in-the-sky dream, but a present, tangible, reality and is a working force in the world. This should be the essence of our patriotism. It’s time we start taking the catch phrase “Jesus is Lord” seriously and start acting like we mean it not using it as some short secret qualifier for church membership and pseudo-evangelism.

So, it is with bittersweet emotion that I celebrate the founding of our country. Bitter because I know we can do better, but lack the motivation and leadership; and sweet because I believe we will change in time as long as the disciples of Jesus Christ remain diligent, truthful and committed, to the task of transformation that has been given us. Most of all, I believe it because as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “the moral arch of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The hour is late and the time has come; let us not forget it.

Happy 4th of July and God Bless Everyone.

~bh ><>