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.

The Faux-Abundance of Imperial Life

“The U.S. military budget is over 450 billion (dollars) per year, and it would take the combined budgets of the next 15 countries to equal that of the US.” Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President (2008, p. 178)

“Over 50 percent of the Roman budget went towards the Roman military.” Dominic Crossan, God and Empire

“We must keep shopping.” Former-President George W. Bush


I own a MyTouch 3G phone by HTC. It’s got the Google owned operating system, “Android.” I can check my e-mail, send texts, get maps and directions, and follow twitter and facebook and myspace. I can check the weather report and my bank account balance. Sometimes, I even use it to make phone calls.

I always have my smart-phone with me. I left it in the back of a cab a few weeks ago, but luckily a friend noticed and grabbed it. I didn’t get it back for about 24 hours. I spent those waking hours frustrated, not sure how to go about my daily tasks. Without my fancy-ass cell phone, my life was impoverished. My life was a little less alive.

I believe that my cell-phone offers me abundant life.

I mean, I don’t REALLY think that. Of course I know that it is just a luxury item and, though it has many useful functions, my life would probably go on just fine without it.

And yet, I behave as though my cell phone offers me abundant life.

I have been saying for some time that our normal, everyday Western way of life makes us complicit with all kinds of evil. Having a smart-phone is perfectly normal. It’s also become a kind of idolatry.

The normal and the evil, side by side.

We find many very creative ways of hiding the evil and injustice our lifestyle rests upon. We never see the factory farms where our chicken-nuggets come from. We import our cheap goods from far away places with factory conditions that our department of labor and our investigative journalists are unlikely to ever see. We cover our landfills in green, green grass. We pretend there’s no connection between the demand for more jobs and off-shore oil drilling. We work 60 hours a week and say that we’re doing it to provide for our families.

But our most creative way of hiding the evil and injustice our lifestyle rests upon is by living a story in which that kind of thing is just the normal, everyday way of doing things.

In an oft-noted curiosity of statistics, it seems that the more “developed” and wealthy our culture becomes, the less we perceive ourselves as happy. I’ve witnessed myself the hurt our children carry in their hearts from broken homes, despite parents who have worked so hard to provide so much for them. We’re doing our best in these normal, everyday lives and we’re still having hard a time of it. I’ve begun to worry that it’s not just the obvious vices that are tearing us apart. I’m worried that our “normal, everyday” way of living is making us complicit with all kinds of subtle, systemic sin. Our dissatisfaction perhaps comes from the inherent consequences of our sin, however blind to it we may have become.

What is that system of sin?

Well, we’ve taken to calling it “Imperial Life,” following the cue of some folks we rather respect. (See: Rob Bell’s Jesus Wants To Save Christians; Shane Claiborne’s Jesus for President)


In Imperial Life, we put our faith in the sprawling progress of the empire. The problem is, empires need slaves. Sometimes those slaves are people who live on less than $2 a day who have to work for the factories our companies build in their country because otherwise they starve. Or their children starve. Or worse. Other times, those slaves are people who are so addicted to the pleasures the empire has to offer that they sell their whole lives to keep a steady supply at hand. Slaves the way junkies are slaves.

And the empire feeds on both of these people. Many inexpensive hands are needed to shape inexpensive resources into inexpensive goods that can be purchased to keep us other folks working to create new ideas for new products for the inexpensive hands to make from inexpensive resources.

And so the corridors of Babylon go craning for the skies. So, the sun never sets on the American empire.

And in order for this sort of economy, this economy of quantity over quality, to flourish, there must be stability. There must be peace, no matter how many enemies our naïve greed (and let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?) makes for us around the world. So, there must be, along side the most prosperous, creative, productive, progressive nation the world has ever seen, the most sprawling, inimitable military the world has ever seen.

Our Empire needs the Pax Americana

And, if that military also makes jobs for every day people building jets and guns and predator drones, which makes money for those who own factories and makes careers for those who legislate the defense spending budgets? Well, then all the better.

And yet here we are, just normal, everyday people, trying to get by in the land of the Empire. Working our jobs. Raising our families. Going to church, singing about abundant life and then going to the mall to buy some.

And yet we feel ourselves sinking into a living death.

And every time we go to the Empire to ask for a remedy, they give us more of the same poison. Every time we ask them for bread, they hand us a stone.

And we go home, singing their praises.

And what we do in church makes less and less sense.


What exactly are we doing at church, anyway?

Coming up next: What does a Church capitulated to Empire look like?