A Church Seduced

Baboons don’t have empires.

Baboons don’t have empires because they can’t meet one of the fundamental requirements of empire-making; They can’t organize in groups larger than 44.

44 baboons just isn’t an empire. Though one wouldn’t want to meet 44 baboons in an alley, it’s not an organization of any note whatsoever.

Humans, on the other hand, have had many, many, many empires. Several at a time, in every generation, for all of human history. We are just terribly prone to empires in a way that baboons will never be.

Partly because we’re capable of symbolizing. Baboons don’t get into groups larger than 44, because bigger than that, Underling-Baboon can’t see Leader-Baboon and so can’t be included in group tasks. Incas sent messages by runners over their vast and complex web of high mountain roads. Rome put the face of their leaders on their currency and then distributed it all over their conquered lands. So does the U.S.

But beyond just being capable of empire building’s foundational activity (symbolic communication), we’ve also clearly developed, as a species, a real yen for empire building. We just keep doing it, over and over.

Why?

Because, in service of our personal and communal aspirations, Empire WORKS. Now. Powerfully.

Empire just gets phenomenal results. Pyramids. Coliseums. Cathedrals. Manhattan.


Empires can get this incredible momentum and unleash an unbelievable amount of power very quickly. We live short lives and we feel rather impotent for much of them. If we can hitch our wagon to a movement that gets monumental results relatively quickly, we think, “well, sign us up!” That power is often constructive (as in the above), sometimes destructive (Pogroms, the Holocaust) but usually both (slave trades, environmental disaster, atomic energy/bombs). The Empire is a sublime thing that humans can do. It is immense and awe-inspiring. Many people more intelligent, thoughtful than any of us have attached themselves to empire unquestioningly, starry-eyed at the magnitude of its possibility.

So, you’re a Christian and you have this really magnificently lovely thing that is the Christian story. You’d really like to see this magnificent, lovely thing do quite well for itself. You think it’d be good for people, for the nations. And after all, Jesus told us to make disciples of all nations. And Paul tells Israel this is for everybody, not just their community, their ethnic group. So, lets get this show on the road. Let’s hitch this wagon to some horse-power.

Let’s let the good gift of Christian life be carried on the back of the trusty steed of Empire.


And Empire is often cool with this, because empire is about power-through-force. It’s direct like that. That’s part of how empire is so effective. It doesn’t have qualms about petty things like individual dignity or transcendent beauty or rigorous theory. And yet people like to believe in dignity and beauty and truth. And religion lets the brutish empires wear elegant clothes replete with beauty and meaning and truth and honor.

And then these two horrible things happen:

All the beautiful, meaningful, true, and honorable things that are contained in our religious life are put to the service of justifying and/or obscuring the brutish, violent, selfish work of empires doing what empires do. War is justice. Greed is charity. Pride is piety.


And while parts of our religious life are being put to the service of empire, other parts are being sidelined and forgotten because, if we keep talking like that, we’re going to be undermining the fundamental work of empire. If we start saying that peace is justice and love is charity and humility is piety… well, then we are at odds with the way things are done around here.

So. the instrument of imperial violence becomes a gold necklace. The body and the blood become symbols of an abstract idea, not the material of martyrdom. An empty bottle of luxury perfume next to dirty feet becomes irresponsibility. Inefficiency.

And once our allegiance is to the Empire in the Church’s clothing, we spend our days gather straw to build bricks to expand the dominion of Empire and we feel despair. We feel wrong. We feel like nothing we’ve been promised every turns out to be what we thought it was going to be. All this stuff was supposed to be abundance. Instead, it’s turning out to be clutter, to be more shit to stash in a storage container.

And if this goes on long enough, we forget WHY we feel the way we feel.

We sing songs about a Kingdom we don’t remember, so we just try to make them about ourselves.

We recount stories of actions that, six 7ths of the week, we have no time or space or energy to re-enact. So we try to shrink them into our lives.

Well, fuck that.

I’m over that.

It’s killing me.

But you see, the problem is that I don’t know any other life. It shaped me and my desires and my hopes and my imagination. Luckily, I encountered this story of God’s work in history, culminating in Jesus and His Church. It gives me a counter-story. An upside-down Kingdom, like my dad is always calling it.

But we’ve got to figure out what it means now, in the face of THIS empire. And I don’t know exactly what that is yet.

But we’ve got some inklings. We’ve got a few anticipatory ideas that we think are a) true to The Story and b) a decent place to start.

But we’ll get to those next time.