William Barr – Forging Ploughshares

Saved From a Perverse God

Oh my name it ain’t nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I was taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side

Bob Dylan[1]

Bob Dylan’s, “With God on Our Side,” describes how one’s name or age or distinctive characteristics may not be a primary mode of identity, but having God on your side is an identity that overrides individual details. The song recounts the various wars of the United States, beginning with the slaughter of native Americans and ending with the necessity of launching weapons of mass destruction, with each verse describing a particular war and each refrain of the song assuring “God is on our side.” The conclusion, “And you never ask questions When God’s on your side,” certainly raises questions about the nature of this God and his subjects.

Dylan has captured in an uncanny manner the pervasive identity in which one’s life is defined by service rendered to an ineffable Other. Service to God and country describes a regional ethos, but it also fits exactly how identity can be had through being an object-instrument of this Other (God, country, the law). Dylan’s lyrics sum up what psychoanalysis describes as perversion and it depicts a predominant form of human subjectivity and the reigning view of deity throughout history. In technical terms, the pervert locates himself as object of the drive rather than being himself the subject (the subject who directly enjoys). The degree to which one is caught up in perversion may or may not be put on display in perverse acts, as psychoanalytic perversion refers not to acts but to a structure in which, as Dylan describes it, questions are rendered impossible. This structure may lead to evil acts, though this is not what qualifies it as perverse, but these acts, as with the perverse structure, cannot be questioned.

One may not buy the psychoanalytic explanation of how this structure evolves (a denial of the mother’s missing phallus or a denial of sexual difference and the attempt to cover over this difference or to fill in what is perceived as lacking) but there is no question that the perverse structure of serving and establishing the law (or the reigning symbolic order) is the predominant form of human subjectivity.

As Julian Jaynes has described it, we can mark the point at which a new sort of subject appeared in which the law began to be questioned. Historically, prior to this questioning, it was as if the left side of the brain existed as an unquestioned authority through which the various cultural authorities spoke. The burial of the important dead, as if they still lived and spoke, is common to almost all ancient cultures. The Egyptian pharaohs, preserved in their pyramids, the kings of Ur entombed with their entire retinues buried (sometimes alive) for continued service, along with food and drink and even yoked draft animals, point to a static (unquestioning) entombed culture.[2] The undead, and the authority they represented, continued to speak through hallucinated voices or through the gods (often the dead are simply deified). In Assyria, Mesoamerica, and Japan, the dead are directly called gods and the various mystics or priests might be possessed by the dead so as to give them voice. Hesiod speaks of a golden race of men who became the “holy demons upon the earth, beneficent, averters of ills, guardians of mortal men.” Four centuries later, Plato refers to heroes who after death become the demons that tell people what to do and he has Socrates mention that in his own time “God-possessed men speak much truth, but know nothing of what they say.”[3] Socrates marks the point before which the human condition is to listen and obey but not to question or discern.

Jaynes is tracing a time when, in the bicameral period with its bicameral brain, everyone heard the voice of authority, but as the brain shifted only the possessed, idols, oracles, or mediums give voice to the gods. Cuneiform literature often refers to god-statues speaking, and the Old Testament refers to speaking idols (Terap) and depicts the king of Babylon consulting with several idols (Ezekiel, 21). Aztec history began, according to their reports to Spanish conquistadors (following their own perverse God), when a statue from a ruined temple belonging to a previous culture spoke to their leaders and commanded them to set out across the lake so as to come to a new land. They were sent zigzagging here and there, following their own Moses, into a new land. In Peru the conquering Spaniards presumed the voice ordering the culture was the Devil. The first report back to Europe said, “in the temple [of Pachacamac] was a Devil who used to speak to the Indians in a very dark room which was as dirty as he himself.”[4] It did not occur to the Spaniards to question their own genocidal authority.

Whether or not Jaynes is correct in his description of brain development, there is no question that the world has gone and is going through a shift in notions of subjectivity and personhood in which the old voices of authority, the authority of the law in Paul’s description, once unquestioned and absolute have now grown silent. In psychoanalytic terms we might say that human history has been predominantly perverse in its service of God and the law, and perverse unquestioning personalities have certainly been in the majority. The individual who protests, who questions, who challenges, is usually in a small minority. In fact, in most cultures the notion of questioning the order of the culture is a near impossibility. It is hard to imagine someone from a traditional culture, say an Apache brave in the old American Southwest, objecting to the whole “macho-warrior image.” I supposed it never occurred to any brave to say, “Chief, I am going to hang back at the teepee today to play my flute and think about life. I am just not feeling the whole raiding and pillaging thing today.”

Perversion functions at both a corporate and individual level, but what is obvious is that corporate perversion, while more socially acceptable and even socially commendable, is also likely to be more profoundly evil as one is incapable of challenging authority and presumes the law, the father, or God, justifies one’s actions, no matter how evil. Corporate perversion is the most compelling and predominant, as the oxymoronic nature of “individualistic Nazis” gets at the point, murderous perversion is most easily mass produced. But whether corporate or individual, to challenge the evil deeds would be on the order of questioning the authority of God, whether it is participating in genocide in an unjust war or publicly exposing oneself in a theatre, the act is rendered in unquestioning service of the structure (the Other).

If this predominance of perversion is the case, then could it also be true that Christianity and Christ are primarily aimed at defeating a perverse notion of God and a perverse subjectivity? Isn’t it precisely the leading Jews’ notion of God which would result in the death of Christ and isn’t it this notion that he defeats? He defeats it, first of all in the incarnation and the fleshing out of what God is really like, and then defeats death and the perverse orientation in his death and resurrection. Perversion depends upon being able to project upon God whatever human structure, personal or corporate, needs support in the symbolic order. God as the ambiguous Other who justifies the worst forms of human perversion is defeated by God in the flesh. Flesh itself is changed up in Christ, no longer written over with a perverse orientation to the law.

The Apostle Paul describes himself as one who excelled in the law and law-keeping and this excellence was precisely what made him the chief of sinners. He only had access to God and himself on the basis of this perverse orientation to the law. The problem is not, of course, with God or the law but with the orientation to both, produced by the deceit of sin. Christ’s defeat of sin in the flesh is precisely aimed at the overcoming of this universal perversion. As Paul argues, the Jewish problem of doing identity in accordance with the law is universal. All people suffer from some form of the prototypical sin of the Jews and of Paul himself, at least that is the thrust of Paul’s argument.

The tragedy we are living through at the moment is that Christianity, through penal substitution, Christian nationalism, and a fusion of right-wing politics and religion has become the main support of a perverse form of the faith. In this understanding, Christ died to meet the demands of the law, and God’s righteousness is equated with the law. This translates, in response to such issues as white supremacy and critical race theory, into a literal unwillingness to question the constitution and the laws of the land.

According to Mike Pompeo, “If we teach that the founding of the United States of America was somehow flawed. It was corrupt. It was racist. That’s really dangerous. It strikes at the very foundations of our country.” To question the construct of race or whiteness or to question the law, is anathema in this religion. Yet, the recognition that this country’s law and legal institutions not only privilege one race but served to establish that race is simply another manifestation of the biblical depiction of the function and malfunction of the law. Jewish privilege and Gentile exclusion constitute the hostility built into the law (the wall in the temple was a concrete representation of the law as a dividing wall of hostility). White privilege (or receiving unwarranted advantage) and black and brown exclusion from privilege, it should not be a surprise, is structural and legal. It is not those who receive the privilege but those who are denied it (Gentiles, slaves, and women, in Paul’s description) or those made to suffer under the law which notice its disparities. As long as the Jews insisted on law keeping, entailing their privileged position, and as long as they insisted on the primacy of the law, this excluded them from Christian salvation (freedom from the law).

Where the religion is reduced to the law, the constitution is not to be questioned, the powers that are ascendant are not to be questioned, lest the foundation of the country be undone. The sexual perversions of this religion, on continual display in the failings of evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr., Ted Haggard, Ravi Zacharias (etc. etc.), the perversions of evangelical political leaders in their devotion to the most obscene of presidents, and their devoted unquestioning followers, are simply a pointer to this perverse structure. In other words, rather than Christianity doing the work of saving from perversion, the faith is made the primary support of a perverse religion on the order of that which killed Christ.

Christians should be the most sensitive to the hostile divisions incorporated into law, undone only in Christ, and the fact that it is evangelicals protesting the loudest, seems to indicate the perverse structure of their religion. The notion that justice and righteousness (life) are enshrined in law, the very definition of sin in Paul’s depiction, is a case in point of the universal deception and perversion. Christians are those who are no longer deceived by this sin in regard to the law (Romans 7:8), but where Christianity is made the support of deception and perversion there is a doubling down on perversion in making the problem the supposed Christian solution.

[1] Thanks to Matt for the suggestion of this song, several other suggestions, and the editing of this blog. Also, thanks to our Tuesday night class for the inspiration behind the blog.

[2]Even the ordinary dead were often treated as if they still needed feeding. In Mesopotamia it is recorded a dead person was buried with 7 jars of beer, 420 flat loaves of bread, 2 measures of grain, 1 garment, 1 head support, and 1 bed.

[3] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (p. 161-341). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

[4] Jaynes, 174-175.

The Gospel of John Lewis Versus the Gospel of Trump and Barr

As John Lewis lay in state, steps away Attorney General William Barr defended the aggressive treatment of protestors by federal law enforcement officers. The accusation of the judiciary committee, before which Barr was defending himself, is that he and Trump are acting unconstitutionally in suppressing protests and fomenting their own violence. It is not at all clear that in the world of Barr there is room for peaceful protest (he seemed to equate protest with violence) of the kind which Lewis spent his life leveraging to expose injustice. Barr claimed the force used against peaceful protesters (he acknowledged some were peaceful but nonetheless deserving of violent suppression), using pepper spray and clubbing protestors, was warranted. The methods of the civil rights icon and the methods of the President and Attorney General are of two different worlds. The way the New Testament characterizes these two worlds is through the two logics on display in the Capital: in one world we must do evil that good may come (peace is obtained through violence), and in the other the end and the means are tied together.

Lewis taught that the means of violence and peace will bring about their own end. The means of violence fosters violence and the means of peace fosters peace. According to this understanding, the turn to violent protest and violent suppression of protest dilutes the message of peaceful protest – and this may be the goal of some. Extremists on the right or the left (or perhaps both) may have reasons to foment violence, and it may be that the Attorney General and President would prefer undiluted violence. The goal, as is evident in their method, is not peace. As Lewis maintained, there is one “immutable principle that you cannot deviate from. If you want to have a good end, your means must be good and noble. Somehow, some way, the end must be caught up in the means.”

This most obvious principle may be the least noticed and least practiced tenet of the gospel. The way of the world, the necessary logic which orders politics, nations, and individuals, is the presumption that peace can only be obtained by war, that violence can only be halted with more extreme violence, and that force must be meant with more force. This, let us do evil so as to achieve a good end, is the counter-gospel. The method of Trump and Barr is the message of the world and the message of history. In this understanding, if the enemy bombs civilians than we will drop bigger and better bombs on civilian populations. If the enemy resorts to cruel torture we will duplicate and exceed this torture. The federal agents escalating the violence on the streets are following the logic of their masters and their forebears. It is this logic that set state troopers to clubbing and bloodying Lewis on the Edmund Pettus bridge. It is this logic by which we arrive at the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the firebombing of Dresden, and the destruction of civilian populations – even by those who had only a few short years before forsworn such action.

The one thing world history should teach but the lesson it cannot get across, is the message of John Lewis: war does not end war and violence does not stop violence. What is most obvious is that violence begets violence and is most dangerous when it seems to succeed, as it becomes the lure to imitation. The way in which we have arrived at mutually assured destruction, the way which would club down the John Lewises of the world, is the way of world destruction. The truth of Lewis is the living exposure of the contradiction toward which history has been moving. Barr is part of a long history in his escalation of violence. It is this logic in which we are grounded personally and corporately by dint of being enculturated into this world. The dominant force in the world, religious and personal, is not that which animated the life of John Lewis, but the opposite: violence and evil are the way to peace and goodness.

In this world human beings are thought to be incapable of peaceful coexistence. Order must be violently imposed: men over women, masters over slaves, priests over laity, the elite over commoners, rulers over people, and the police over citizens. It is necessary to dominate (“We must dominate the streets,” according to Trump) as to do anything less is weakness. The powers of state, of religion, of logic, call for dominance and unquestioning acquiescence. To cause trouble is by definition bad trouble, as the highest virtue, the supreme religious value, is obedience to the dominance of the powers. In this world, there is no such thing as Lewis’s “good trouble.” We are trained not to resist, not to challenge, as the dominating system is thought to be God’s system. We are not to exercise dominion but we are called to serve it, die for it, sacrifice our sons and daughters for it. In serving the dominating system, after all, don’t we serve God and his earthly representatives? Where violence is the norm, in the words of Walter Wink, “The tasks of humanity are to till the soil, to produce foods for sacrifice to the gods (represented by the king and the priestly caste), to build the sacred city Babylon, and to fight and, if necessary, die in the king’s wars.”[1] Where the President is God’s chosen representative, in the characterization of Barr, there is no other legitimate or legal force. Peaceful protest against the powers is an oxymoron in this world.

This singular world of legal violence is not new, as the myth of redemptive violence constitutes the oldest form of religion and is the organizing principle, according to René Girard, of human society. For example, in the Babylonian creation myth violence is the primordial condition from which life arises. The god, Marduk, murders and dismembers Tiamat, and from her cadaver creates the world. Order arises from a primordial disorder and chaos. Evil precedes the good and the gods themselves are violent. This basic structure is shared by the myths of Syria, Phoenicia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, Ireland, India, Japan, and China. Girard maintains that the violence of the myth, whether hidden or obvious, is what generates the mythic form and it constitutes the violent organization of society. As Wink describes it, “Typically, a male war god residing in the sky— Wotan, Zeus, or Indra, for example— fights a decisive battle with a female divine being, usually depicted as a monster or dragon, residing in the sea or abyss (the feminine element).” Once the enemy is vanquished by war and murder, the victor fashions a cosmos from the monster’s corpse. In Japan (a myth with which I became acquainted partly because I lived at the base of the Mountain where the gods descended) the various gods are formed from the body parts of Izanagi while Izanami was shut up in to the place of the dead. As Wink notes, “Cosmic order requires the violent suppression of the feminine, and is mirrored in the social order by the subjection of women to men and people to ruler.”[2] Girard’s point is that myth, or the very structure of religion, is framed around the notion of redemptive violence and murder. The murder mythologized channels violence and organizes society around sacrifice and oppression. The murdered scapegoat becomes the redeeming mythological deity, making all things possible (warding off the chaos of violence and its various representations).

This tendency toward murderous myth indicates the deep psychological ties to the necessity of violence. It constitutes religion because it is already the substance in which we seem to live and move and have our being. It is the personal necessity, Paul describes, in which we experience our own ego. We are continually subject to an agonistic struggle apart from which we cannot imagine our own existence. We are set over and against ourselves, doing what we would not and incapable of doing what we would, and this reality seems to define us. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, to resolve the conflict would be to destroy personhood, as we are born and have our being in chaos and conflict. The myth and logic of redemptive violence, the world of Barr and Trump, speaks with the voice of God and cannot possibly recognize a prophet, such as Lewis. The deep grammar of deploying evil and violence to gain peace finds the message of peace incomprehensible and totally impractical.

Christianity, rightly realized, is the counter to the world constituted by violence and the logic of doing evil to gain the good. Once violence is identified as the force which would rule and destroy us, biblical redemption can be read as the counter to this all-pervasive dominating force. Beginning with an alternative creation, not by means of chaos but the good ordering the chaos, the anti-myth of Genesis can be read as a direct rebuttal and counter to Babylonian myth and all creation myths. Rather than a primordial chaos and violence, the Bible portrays a good God who creates from an original peace and goodness (he is the good and peaceful origin). God pronounces creation good and this goodness reigns prior to the existence of evil, murder, and violence. Violence is not the means to something else in Genesis but is a product of the Fall and is posed as the primary problem.

The culmination of the gospel, like the powers that presently divide this country, pits the religion, the law, the powers, of the world against the religion of Jesus. The war that is still being waged is between those who put Jesus on the cross in the name of power and religion (“to save the nation, for the greater good, our religion requires it”) and those willing to take up crosses (to counter the religion and powers of the day). It was the equivalent of the president and the attorney general, not rabble rousers, not protesters, but the religious and political powers, who put Jesus on the cross. What we can now perceive, because of Christ, is that the violence done to Jesus follows the age-old rule of redemptive violence. This violence has always been an attack on God, which would displace him with the god of violence. The peace of the gospel is the counteraction of God, in which the war on God is exposed and is being defeated, through the cross and its warriors.

It is this reality which Lewis’s principle puts into play. Paul describes the enactment of peace, truth, and righteousness, as their own weapons their own means and end. The armor of God (Eph. 6:10-20) does not consist of secondary means or material: truth, righteousness, and peace, are their own armor. The movement called “salvation” is the deployment of weapons of nonviolence which constitute the word of God. These are not simply defensive weapons but are part of the offense against the lie, the unrighteousness, the way of violence which Paul describes in Romans 3. In this world, understanding is obscured as all have given themselves over to the lie of violence. The organs of speech deal in death: throats are graves, tongues deceive, and lips spew poison, and this culminates in the shedding of blood and mutually assured destruction (Ro. 3:10-18). Paul sums up this deadly logic as the perversity of doing evil for the good (Ro. 3:8), establishing the law through sin (Ro. 7:1), and committing transgressions to gain grace (Ro. 6:1). Where the undergirding logic, the feet or the moving force of this way, is bloodshed, Paul describes the gospel of peace as its own moving force (an inherent “readiness”). Only peace can counter the contagion and logic that has gripped the world and only peace brings together means and end. It is not by evil that good shall come but the means to the good – peace, righteousness, truth – foster the end through the means.

[1] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (47). Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.

[2] Wink, 45-46.

Apocalyptic Story Time in the Midst of the Plague

President Trump has recently been repeating that there are much worse things that might result from social isolation, in the attempt to halt the coronavirus, and the implication is that this ultimate worst thing is the failure of the economy. R. R. Reno, in First Things, has chimed in with a full-bore theological support of Trump, explaining that we need to recognize that the sacrifice of a small percentage of the population may be necessary to save the system as a whole.[1] Like Trump, he never specifically names the ultimate catastrophe (perhaps it is too fearful and unimaginable to even utter), but he ridicules the “sentimentalism” which would attempt to save a small number of lives concluding, “The Eucharist itself is now subordinated to the false god of ‘saving lives.’”

The Eucharist, in Reno’s version, is on the side of hard free market choices, which he describes as a system of triage. Doing triage, or choosing who must be sacrificed, always “requires the hard moral labor” of rationing “healthcare by price, waiting times, and physician discretion.” The unspoken message, that the present economy requires human sacrifice, is articulated as, “Only an irresponsible sentimentalist imagines we can live in a world without triage.” Reno seems to recognize he is near to defining Eucharist (what he calls the “no to the reign of death”) in the same way Paul defines sin, so he clarifies, “We must never do evil that good might come.” But he hedges and qualifies his way back to embracing Paul’s formula for evil, as if it is the good: “But we often must decide which good we can and should do, a decision that nearly always requires not doing another good, not binding a different wound, not saving a different life.” In other words, the zero-sum game of capitalism (the life of “finitude”) embraces the necessity of sacrificing the few for the many.

To not embrace this individualistic survival of the fittest obscenity is, in Reno’s estimate, to miss the imperative of the Gospel, which he rightly pinpoints as overcoming the fear of death. What he misses in the Gospel, is that the fear of death reigns through the lie that proposes death as the solution to life, so it need not be feared (the ultimate result of fear is believing this lie). Every good samurai, every devout religionist, every fervid nationalist, would follow the Satanic injunction to embrace death as the means to life. Reno has confused Satan and God, the Truth and the lie, evil and the good.

He demonstrates this through the unfortunate example of the Spanish flu epidemic. “Unlike us, however, that generation did not want to live under Satan’s rule, not even for a season. They insisted that man was made for life, not death.” It was for this reason that this generation threw caution to the wind, “bowed their head before the storm of disease and endured its punishing blows, but they otherwise stood firm and continued to work, worship, and play, insisting that fear of death would not govern their societies or their lives.” As a result of this robust refusal to be turned aside from work, worship, and play, between 20 to 50 million people lost their lives. Reno could be paraphrasing the serpent in the Garden in urging us to embrace death. “We must reject the specious moralism that places fear of death at the center of life,” and the way we do this is to embrace death.

Reno warns us not to believe what is most obviously true: “They abandoned the weak to the slaughter of the disease for no good reason.” No, he says, rather, “They insisted that man was made for life, not death.” The way one really lives is not to take precaution but to continually fuel life with the reality of death. Life, in this view, is structured by death. This is the impetus behind every form of violence, every justification for war, every turn to defying death through death. Death, war, and violence, are presumed to be made controllable through embracing them. As Sue Mansfield has put it, through active violence, death and destruction “are forced into an ordered gestalt that human consciousness can encompass because it is commensurate with human limits and meanings.”[2] Reno would turn the death of Christ into a fellowship of death, in which life is a limited commodity ordered by death (resurrection does not enter into it). Saving lives is not important in Reno’s religion, as life seems to have little intrinsic value.

The additional lie surrounding the Spanish flu epidemic, is that out of concern of appearing weak before their enemies during WW I, government officials suppressed reporting on the number of deaths and the seriousness of the disease. In other words, they were advocates of doing evil that good might abound; better to lose a few thousand citizens than to risk losing the war. Of course, fear of death looms behind this willing sacrifice of tens of thousands. Reno portrays this same unspeakable fear in advocating business as usual. Rather than seeing this as an opportunity for reevaluating life’s chief concerns, Reno seems to be recommending “family reunions,” “visiting the elderly,” and “serving the Eucharist,” all in death defying support of not turning from routine. A moment alone, a time of boredom, a period of reflection, may contain the chief fearful realization: the ordering principles of the American Way, of liberal democratic capitalistic society, are inadequate and subject to failure.

Reno (perhaps, along with his magazine and its ideology, fleshed out in this political moment) is living proof that Eucharist, Gospel, or Jesus, might all be so twisted so as to serve the most profound evil. The structuring principle backing his ready willingness to secure the system at the expense of its people, concerns the guiding philosophy, not only of his right-wing Catholicism, but the undergirding thought of right-wing evangelicalism. Richard Neuhaus, founding editor of First Things, proposed that the American experiment in self-government be reconceived in terms of a communal “covenant” under God. The political and theological implications may be most simply expressed in his understanding that “when he died and stood face-to- face with his creator, he expected to do so as an American.” He holds that the American experience is a “sacred enterprise.” As Michael Novak (a fellow traveler) has described it, the market economy mirrors the will of the divine Trinity, meaning the spread of democratic capitalism is “the greatest story ever told.” Or as Attorney General William Barr would have it, “the traditional Judeo-Christian moral system” is under threat as secularism threatens the United States. Each would conflate the story of the United States with Christianity. Where the system of the United States is threatened so is the Christian moral system. Christ and Christianity are made to fit the American story and are understood in this context.[3]

In the Christian story, the recognition is that we are all in this together, and this is an all-inclusive “all,” without geographic (space) or historical (time) boundaries. It is not enough to add Christ to an already existing story or to imagine the community from which the story of the United States arises is the Christian community. In this sort of virtual reality, actually existing lives count for very little. By the same token, it is not enough to simply imagine that foregrounding the story of Christ with the story of creation, the story of Abraham, or the story of Israel, or the story of the Church, will adequately contextualize our understanding of Christ (as illustrated with Catholic/evangelical ideology). Christ is not added to or understood in the context of other stories, even the unfolding narrative of Scripture.

In the New Testament, time and space bend around the life, death and resurrection of Christ. As in Ephesians 2:6, God has already “raised us up with him.” His past resurrection accounts for a present experience which will be realized in the future. In I Corinthians Paul states, “our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food;and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ.” Christ was present with Israel in their exodus and wilderness journey. As Paul says a few verses later (detailed in Numbers 21 and Psalm 77), it was Christ that they had put to the test and the Corinthians should avoid doing the same. The incarnate Christ as the pre-existent Christ bends all of history around the incarnation. He “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4) and “all things have been created through him and for him.” The same one that is “head of the body, the church” is the one that is in the beginning.” This narrative simultaneously focuses on the historical Christ as encompassing the beginning and end “so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything” (Col. 1:16-18).

The saving work of Christ does not abandon the physical, the historical world, as in Reno’s theology, nor does it abandon the many or the few for the benefit of the saved. Any version of the story which is not centered on the singular story of Christ (his life, death and resurrection as context) will, of necessity, produce the dead wood of the expendable darkness so as to provide the fuel for producing the light. As Chris Tilling depicts it, this sort of narrative time (“stretched over a sequential template”) “locks key truth claims about the whole into the beginning” so that the problem is determinative of the answer. The hero or heroine is constituted by an already determined task. The beginning, the particular historical context, a moment in time, preceding or separate from Christ, “by force of being first, contains key or axiomatic truths for the articulation of the whole.”[4] A beginning, history, or Fall, which is read as unfolding toward Christ will be determinative of the meaning of Christ, so that sin will be determinative of salvation and creation will contextualize and control incarnation. Just as the beatific vision of Augustine, Calvin, and Aquinas, is dependent upon an eternal delight in witnessing the tortures of the damned, so too the poor unfortunates sacrificed in Reno’s Catholicism do not require sentimental consideration but are the necessary expendables of a faith, contextualized by this present moment.

It may turn out that love of neighbor, in these unsettling times, results in full realization of what it might mean that we are all in this together. This simple but apocalyptic realization may best be learned in the midst of this global pandemic, in which we realize GDP, money, the market economy, do not really count for much in the face of recognition that my good cannot be purchased at the expense of my neighbor. This common place assumption cannot be absorbed where the values of the of the market reign supreme.

It is time to find ourselves a different ordering principle, an alternative hermeneutic, a different story. As my friend Matt Welch has written, “This awful situation is also an opportunity for us to learn something deep & mysterious & wonderful & telling about the world God created for us: that the good of each individual human being is bound up with the good of every other human being. We each *need* the well-being of our neighbor for our own well-being. Our good depends upon the good of our neighbor. The human race is a family and God is our Father.”

As Tilling notes, where “the revelation of God is conditioned by something other than the reality of God in Jesus Christ, then that which conditions it has become the real lord.” Due to “human sinfulness and rebellion, such constructed interpretative lords are prone to idolatry,” and as in all idolatry (every market economy) human sacrifice is the unfolding necessity.[5] Where the interpreter contextualizes herself in the revelation of God in Christ, and not in their time, their country, their narrative, the necessity of the moment is overridden by the power of resurrection and an entirely different “necessity” – love for the neighbor.

[1] R. R. Reno, “Say ‘No’ to Death’s Dominion,” First Things (3/23/20), https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/03/say-no-to-deaths-dominion?fbclid=IwAR05eb3RIgb_ZeApkHugwNH54vOt4SmwrT7KAfb3C990GI5ozXJCrpJglP8

[2] Sue Mansfield, The Gestalt of War, quoted from William Frazier, How the God of Jesus Makes Peace (p. 23). Kindle Edition.

[3] I have written of all of this here – http://forgingploughshares.org/2020/01/09/have-the-dark-ages-returned/

[4] Christ Tilling, “Paul, Christ, and Narrative Time,” in Christ and the Created Order: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science, Andrew Torrance and Thomas McCall, eds., (Zondervan, 2018) 162. Thank you Tim for putting me onto this.

[5] Ibid.

Have the Dark Ages Returned?

How is it that the United States is entering yet another war, a war which is arousing enthusiasm for Trump among his evangelical base? In the rhetoric of various evangelical leaders (as Franklin Graham has put it, Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion”), war seems to be part of a “necessary” clash of religions and civilizations? This seemingly medieval perception is, I would claim, precisely that – medieval in its theological/Roman Catholic roots. How is it that a medieval ideology has come to dominate evangelical religion and American politics?

The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical religion begun under Ronald Reagan and the rise of the Christian Coalition (with Pat Robertson designating Ralph Reed as its leader), the turn to partisan politics and the cry for cultural war begun by Newt Gingrich (a convert to Roman Catholicism), is the first phase in this two-part story. Gingrich’s name-calling, conspiracy theories, strategic obstructionism through government shut-downs, all in the name of bringing religion back into the public square, is certainly echoed in the Trump phenomenon. But underlying the politics is the rise of a peculiar Catholic sensibility first expressed by George W. Bush.

Three days after the massive terrorist attacks of September 11, president Bush assured the nation that America’s duty was clear – not only to “answer these attacks” but also to “rid the world of evil.” Bush concluded his address by invoking St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans (8:38-39) that nothing can divide us from the love of God. America set out on a holy war as Bush described it, “our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there.” The “mission” was not merely to bring justice to the men and the groups that had attacked the country but also to “defend freedom” in a world where “freedom is under attack.” This battle for freedom would be “civilizations fight,” led by the United States. In this struggle, both military and metaphysical, “the outcome is certain,” since “freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.” In Bush’s picture we would win the fight against evil through violence, war, and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives. Bush began a crusade which would fuse state and church in the fight for Christian civilization and in his conception of this world struggle, it is precisely Catholic intellectuals to whom Bush would turn.

Damon Linker in his book, The Theocons, traces the key thinkers and shapers behind Bush doctrine and the fusion of right-wing politics and theology. Richard Neuhaus, founding editor of the right-wing Catholic journal First Things, proposed that the American experiment in self-government be reconceived in terms of a communal “covenant” under God. The political and theological implications may be most simply expressed in his understanding that “when he died and stood face-to- face with his creator, he expected to do so as an American.” He holds that the American experience is a “sacred enterprise.”

In Michael Novak’s view, Christianity, modern democracy, and modern capitalism arose from and continue to share “the same logic, the same moral principles, the same set of cultural values, institutions, and presuppositions. Markets don’t simply produce economic growth; they mirror the divine Trinity in the way they enable many diverse individuals to function as one in perfect harmony. For Novak, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” guiding the market was quite simply the hand of God – and the rise and spread of democratic capitalism in the world is the “Greatest Story Ever Told.”

William Kristol, the non-Catholic of the group, claims that modern conservatism should be based on a synthesis of religion, nationalism, and economic growth and that republicans should give up their resistance to the transformation of their party into an explicitly religious organization – all for the sake of banishing liberalism, the “enemy,” from American political life (all of this and the manner it came to shape Bush’s doctrine is set forth in Linker’s 2007 book).

Steve Bannon, perhaps the key thinker behind Donald Trump, believes the United States is a Christian nation, not just in the sense that an overwhelming majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, but also in the sense that the country’s culture is Christian. This means our war with evil is a literal war against Islam: “We” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or we will be overrun by dangerous outsiders (Islamists) who will impose a different identity upon us. In a speech at the Vatican, he said, “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism.” During broadcasts of the Breitbart News Daily radio show, he alleged that “Islamist sympathizers had infiltrated the U.S. government and news media.” In his dark vision he planned, according to The Washington Post, to make a three-part movie in which radical Muslims take over the United States and remake it into the “Islamic States of America.” According to Newsday, an article published in La Civiltà Cattolica, a Vatican-vetted journal, singled out Bannon as a “supporter of apocalyptic geopolitics,” the logic of which is “no different from the one that inspires Islamic fundamentalism.”

Attorney General William Barr in a recent speech at Notre Dame, warned that Catholicism and other mainstream religions are the target of “organized destruction” by “secularists and their allies among progressives who have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry and academia.” He insisted that “the traditional Judeo-Christian moral system” of the United States was under siege by “modern secularists” responsible for every sort of “social pathology,” including drug abuse, rising suicide rates and illegitimacy. The Guardian reports that C Colt Anderson, a Roman Catholic theologian has warned that Barr’s brand of radically conservative Catholicism is a “threat to American democracy.” He described the speech as a “dog whistle” to ultra-conservative Catholics. “The attorney general is taking positions that are essentially un-Democratic” because they demolish the wall between church and state, according to Anderson.[1]

As The Guardian notes, while the president enjoys the support of right-wing Christian evangelical leaders and their followers, he has also surrounded himself with conservative Roman Catholics like Barr and Patrick Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel, both of whom served on the board of directors of a Washington-based organization staffed by priests from the secretive, ultra-orthodox Catholic sect Opus Dei. Ron Dreher is an example of why conservative Catholics are falling in line behind Trump: “As we religious conservatives think about how to vote in the election next fall, we should ponder the fact that under Donald Trump a man of William Barr’s convictions is heading up the Department of Justice. Thank God Bill Barr is there.”

While Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not Catholic but a devout evangelical, his open discussion of Christianity and foreign policy (particularly pro-Israel and anti-Islamic leanings) have raised questions about the extent to which evangelical beliefs are directly influencing recent decisions. The New York Times reports, his was the loudest voice in the administration pushing President Trump to kill Iran’s most important general, Qasem Soleimani.

Perhaps the new middle age has commenced, just as Steve Bannon would have it:

“And we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if … the people in the Church do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the Church Militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”

The line being drawn between this present moment and the Middle Ages is seen by alt right thinkers as a positive strategy. A variety of Catholic journals and thinkers would counter the cry of “Allahu akbar” with “Deus vult” (“God wills it”) as the call to war against the imagined Islamic enemy. [2] If ever there were a moment for the peace of the Gospel to receive a hearing and to make a difference this would seem to be that moment.

When “Christians” take up the sword to secure themselves and their people they have joined themselves to the power of death, linked to the power of Satan. This means that they have retreated from doing the work of God’s Kingdom, founded on the power of resurrection and not the power of death. As Christians faced with a profound Medieval form of Christianity we must turn firmly away from the means and method of empire. We are not seeking power and security through tight borders, strong military, or the defeat of Islam in war. The danger is that in aligning with the powers and methods of empire, Christians have joined forces with the counter-Kingdom of the antiChrist.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/19/william-barr-attorney-general-catholic-conservative-speech

[2] For example, see the Imaginative Conservative, The American Conservative,