Before Virginia Giuffre killed herself, she pronounced the entire society, which enabled Jeffrey Epstein to traffic her, as corrupt to the core. Not just those who had sex with her as a teenager, including those from academia, royalty, and the business world, but those from a much broader swath of society who never spoke up. The billionaires, media moguls, corporate leaders, political leaders, and those who carry influence and shape society, were represented by those who raped her, but they also made up the cadre of people who did not object. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were known as sex traffickers, it is the first line in Epstein’s Wikipedia profile, and had been for years, yet this was overlooked. Epstein was able to groom hundreds of young girls for sex trafficking, but at the same time the ruling class was willingly groomed by the same techniques. It is not just that he was friends with President Donald Trump and the Democratic President Bill Clinton, but he was able to worm his way deep into Harvard, MIT, Google, the Gates Foundation, and Goldman Sachs. Larry Summers the Secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard University, turned to his friend Epstein to get instruction on how to seduce a young woman he was mentoring. Mort Zuckerman, CEO of Boston Properties, owner and publisher of U.S. News and World Report, needed help getting a child into an elite school, so he reaches out to Epstein. Heads of state, heads of major institutions, elites from nearly every sector of society, willingly associated with Epstein, and there is no record of any of these individuals protesting or seeking to expose his activities.
The journalist, Anand Giridharadas, confirms Giuffre’s judgment, comparing Epstein to a kind of food poison passing through every major organ of the social body, proving the system is inherently sick.[1] There was no nausea, no vomiting, no diarrhea, no reaction. Out of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of people at dinners and parties, no one who blew up at the circumstance or objected to the girls being abused or to the influence being traded. Epstein was a test, and though he is dead and gone, what he has proven is that the system lacks the capacity to react, to notice, to expunge this vileness, because the system is corrupt to the core. The institutions that shape society, the values and incentives held throughout the system, are sick and corrupt.
Add to the Epstein story his proven connections with Israel, and the genocide in Gaza and the war in Iran, and the depth of depravity, involving not just a culture of rape but one bent on murder is evident. Sex was the lure, but Zionism and genocide the goal, so that Israel could abolish the Palestinians and dominate in the Middle East. The problem for the Christian community, Catholic and Protestant, is not simply that the illness infecting culture has not been resisted by the church, but it could be argued, that the sickness proven by Epstein, is that of the church. There is no need to recount the levels of abuse to make the point: sexual abuse, avarice, greed, capitalism, and the grab for power, are not simply at the periphery of church institutions. Christian Zionism and with it, extreme nationalism, are forces that the church unleashed and made possible. Donald Trump is president due to the support of Christians, but this could also be said of the trends Trump and Epstein represent. The question is, why is the church now at the center of the problem?
Christianity began as a resistant community, resisting emperor worship and the ethics and religion of empire, so as to proclaim Christ as Lord and his ethical mandate as overriding the demands of empire. Even into the third century, Celsus (a late pagan traditionalist) is concerned that Christianity is causing the decay of the Roman Empire (not an accusation leveled against modern Christians). He considers Christianity completely subversive to the religious and social order of Rome, which he considers to be the true universal order. It is not monotheism to which he objects, “it makes no difference whether we call Zeus the Most High, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Amoun like the Egyptians, or Papaeus like the Scythians,”[2] but the problem is Christian exclusiveness. The Christians reject the worship of “daemons and quote the saying of Jesus, ‘No man can serve two masters,’” and for Celsus this is “a rebellious utterance of people who wall themselves off and break away from the rest of mankind.”[3] The Christian teaching on humility, and against wealth, and their refusal of the traditions, their refusal to engage in war, or even to take part in public life, means they cannot be good citizens.
This accusation of being different, a testament to the resistance of the early church, describes the faithfulness of the early Christians to being a peculiar people. As Thomas Merton sums up, “Christians not only believed that Celsus’ world was meaningless, but that it was under judgment and doomed to destruction. He interpreted the otherworldly Christian spirit as a concrete, immediate physical threat.”[4]
Origen responded, however, that Christians are not simply subverting society but make good citizens:
Christians have been taught not to defend themselves against their enemies; and because they have kept the laws which command gentleness and love to man, on this account they have received from God that which they would not have succeeded in doing if they had been given the right to make war, even though they may have been quite able to do so. He always fought for them and from time to time stopped the opponents of the Christians and the people who wanted to kill them.[5]
The evident linchpin in this argument is the role of violence and war. Celsus presumes war is necessary for human society, while Origen argues for a more profound understanding of peace: “No longer do we take the sword against any nations nor do we learn war any more since we have become the sons of peace through Jesus who is our author instead of following the traditional customs by which we were strangers to the covenant.”[6] Origen makes reference to the passage in Isaiah, Christians are “to beat the spiritual swords that fight and insult us into ploughshares, and to transform the spears that formerly fought against us into pruning hooks.”[7]
Origen argues that Christians play their part in the city through their spiritual influence and activity, especially in prayer: “The more pious a man is the more effective he is in helping the emperors – more so than the soldiers who go out into the lines and kill all the enemy troops that they can.”[8] Christians as a “priesthood of all believers,” are not unlike the pagan priests who devote themselves to offering sacrifices: “that it is also your opinion that the priests of certain images and wardens of the temples of the gods, as you think them to be, should keep their right hand undefiled for the sake of the sacrifices, that they may offer the customary sacrifices to those who you say are gods with hands unstained by blood and pure from murders. And in fact when war comes you do not enlist the priests.”[9]
Origen counters Celsus’ notion that all citizens “help the emperor with all our power . . . and fight for him,” arguing that Christians offer an even greater service: ”We may reply to this that at appropriate times we render to the emperors divine help, if I may so say, by taking up even the whole armour of God.” He quotes Paul, who exhorts Christians to take up spiritual armour: “I exhort you, therefore, first to make prayers, supplications, intercessions, and thanksgivings for all men, for emperors, and all that are in authority.”[10] If not even pagan priests kill in war, then neither should Christians offer violent resistance, but they do a higher service “keeping their right hands pure and by their prayers to God striving for those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously, in order that everything which is opposed and hostile to those who act rightly may be destroyed.”[11] Origen concludes, “We who by our prayers destroy all demons which stir up wars, violate oaths and disturb the peace, are of more help to the Emperors than those who seem to be doing the fighting.”[12] As Merton notes, “If these evil forces are overcome by prayer, then both sides are benefited, war is avoided and all are united in peace. In other words, the Christian does not help the war effort of one particular nation, but he fights against war itself with spiritual weapons.”[13]
Unfortunately, this singular idea of the early Christians is gradually eroded with the Constantinian shift, and the rise of Augustinian theology, which now dominates among both Catholics and Protestants. In the two hundred years between Origen and Augustine, Constantine had his vision at the Milvian bridge in 312, and Christianity is officially recognized by Rome, and then in 411 Rome fell to the Goths. In 430, Augustine as bishop of Hippo, is confronted with the invasion of the Vandals and he develops his theory of just war. He understands Christians as split between two cities and two types of love. Confronted with the same objection Origen faced from Celsus, Augustine formulates a very different answer. Christians do not simply pray, but they may participate in the military, as long as the war is just, and as long as the Christian has the right motives. “Christians may participate in the war, or may abstain from participation. But their motives will be different from the motives of the pagan soldier. They are not really defending the earthly city, they are waging war to establish peace, since peace is willed by God.”[14] Origen would argue this false peace, through war, is unworthy of Christian peace, but Augustine succeeds in creating a lasting confusion.
Augustine agrees with Celsus, against Origen, maintaining that war is inevitable, and universal peace impossible. Maybe the early church was too intent on the Parousia, but Augustine is more of a realist amidst the collapsing empire, and he felt war was unavoidable. The question was not if, but how Christians might fight in war, and thus appealing to Cicero, Augustine drew up his notions of just war theory. But even in a just war, the Christian must be only motivated by love: “The external act may be one of violence. War is regrettable indeed. But if one’s interior motive is purely directed to a just cause and to love of the enemy, then the use of force is not unjust.”[15] Augustine poses the new possibility of a distinction between interior motive and exterior action, which will have tragic consequences. The divide between church and world is more or less demolished, as the Christian can serve the world with his exterior body, and reserve his mind for spiritual activity. This divide marks Christian entry into serving state values and purposes. One can even kill fellow Christians, given the right motive and circumstance. For example, better to kill heretics and save their souls, which will become the motive behind the crusades. “And so, alas, for centuries we have heard kings, princes, bishops, priests, ministers, and the Lord alone knows what variety of unctuous beadles and sacrists, earnestly urging all men to take up arms out of love and mercifully slay their enemies (including other Christians) without omitting to purify their interior intention.”[16]
The contradiction of Augustine’s logic should be felt, and yet is not, even in this nuclear age, in which the world may need to be destroyed so as to achieve peace. The Augustinian logic consigns the world to hell, not imagining that the church or the Christian might act as a constraint on the voracious appetites of the flesh. Along with the Conquistadors, who felt the need to destroy civilizations in Christianizing them, and the inquisitors willing to torture to death so as to save, we, in the United States, are subject to a leader ready to destroy a civilization, supposedly in the name of peace.
Jeffrey Epstein, like one emerging from the primeval depths, exposed the lie undergirding our culture. As with Nazi Germany, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s description, it is a “time of confirmed liars who tell the truth in the interest of what they themselves are – liars. A hive of murderers who love their children and are kind to their pets. A hive of cheats and gangsters who are loyal in pacts to do evil.”[17] If as Gandhi maintained, “The way of peace is the way of truth” then according to Merton, “lying is the mother of violence.”[18] A world of necessary violence and war is built upon a lie, and this lie serves in place of truth. As long as evil takes accepted forms and there are no objections, then it is “good.” The Augustinian (Constantinian) merger of church and empire through just war, the division between internal and external, creates a split mind and necessary duplicity. Killing in love makes nonsense of morality. The unfalsifiable claim of good intention opened the floodgate to the crusades, the inquisition, and ultimately to a series of holocausts. This church can no longer claim any likeness to the resistant New Testament Body of Christ or to the counter-ethics of Christ.
Merton quotes Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as the counter to the stink of this moral decay: “It is not astuteness, by knowing the tricks, but by simple steadfastness in the truth of God, by training the eye upon this truth until it is simple and wise, that there comes the experience and knowledge of ethical reality.[19] The truth, peace through Christ, is the singular resistant counter to the lie of the reign of death in the city of man. It is easy to convince ourselves that the lie is irresistible, that peace and purity are an impossibility, and that truth cannot endure, yet, Christ has spoken and those who hear his voice have a singular obligation to this Truth and Peace.
[1] See the interview on the Daily Beast, I Know How Epstein Groomed America’s Corrupt Elite, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57xynBbVUuw.
[2] Origen, Contra: Celsum, tran. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) xvii.
[3] Origen, xix.
[4] Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (New York: Orbis Books, 2004) 35.
[5]Origen, III: 8, 133, cited in Merton, 35.
[6] Origen, V: 33, 290, cited in Merton, 37.
[7] Origen, V: 33, 290.
[8] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509, Cited in Merton, 37.
[9] Origen, VIII: 73, 509,
[10] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509.
[11] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509.
[12] Origen,Vlll: 73, 509, Cited in Merton, 37-38.
[13] Merton, 38.
[14] Merton, 40.
[15] Merton, 42.
[16] Merton, 43.
[17] This is Merton’s summation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 60.
[18] Ibid, 79.
[19] Ibid, 60.