So, why did I think this was so important now? This is what drove me. And I may be just as deceived as anyone I would disagree with but hear me out.
In the North American political milieu, we Christians are a Fifth Column against the "responsible government" (Canadian term) and "republican government" (US constitutional, not the partisan term) that, until recently, has done so much to make it so much more possible for so many of our neighbours to survive and thrive. This traitorous orientation must end. Now.
I have described myself, in part, as a Vineyardized Anabaptist, and in that Vineyardized context, I have seen too much willingness to adopt the leaders from the "right wing" in the US (increasingly with an autocratic bent) because they have been touted by leadership of one kind or another as God's man for the hour, whatever that hour currently is, and then approved of no matter what they do. This habit extends before that time to the ascendancy of Guatemala's Ríos Montt who was praised then as God's man for that place at that hour. He has since been contestedly convicted of being the cause of genocide of indigenous folks there. At the very least his leadership style allowed the military to commit the crimes, that much seems incontrovertible and something he admitted to.
Again, in my memory, this happened with Bush 43 being called a "Burning Bush" a symbol of God's blessing, and many American friends voted for him. In the present times, too many of the people I loved and trusted in non-political-matters have similarly been univocal in support of the criminal kleptocracy to the south. And they have come out against effective civic response to a pandemic (in the name of FREEDOM! and becoming super-spreaders and adherents of various quack-cures -- to the detriment of others that I also love). They continue to dismiss the unfolding global catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change both there and here in my own country -- earlier that it was even happening, now often just as vociferously that people aren't causing it.
Folks, we're being stupid. We're being consistently stupid. We're being invincibly ignorant (even if we're of the party that accuses everybody but themselves of that folly). Since the first days of the New Deal, the rich and powerful, who resented that imperfect implementation of a people's policy agenda (it reinforced certain sexist and racist harms), they have done everything they could to scuttle it and they turned us into a fifth column from the beginning in order to accomplish that.
They started by injecting anti-New Deal ideas into Christian preaching (I heard my own father expound their injected themes in a call to a serious and holy life).
In the days of Nixon, they turned the whole Christian world against abortion (before that time, the Baptists came out in support of abortion, and groups of nuns performed abortions so that the poor women around them would not die in the rooms of incompetent back-lane "clinics").
They called themselves pro-life while accelerating the nuclear arms race and fluffing capital punishment. (Recognizing this structural contradiction in High School was the first nudge away from the conservatism I was raised up in. As more and more such structural lies were exposed, it was only a matter of time before I rejected the whole agenda)
And they've kept pushing ever since: for instance promoting toxic masculinity in the name of God-ordained authority structures. Because it suited them. Because the ascendancy of these doctrines made us easier to hold in their sway.
These things are not a matter for debate. They are well documented in
- Kevin Kruse's "One Nation Under God?"
- in Kristen Kobes du Mez's "Jesus and John Wayne"
- in Robert Jones' "White Too Long".
And we leavened this toxic mess further with the three preceding follies that built up an expectation of a hero-deliverer. I'm not saying Jesus isn't our deliverer (as Christians, individually, or as his people, or for the whole of humanity) or that he isn't our hero. He's just not a nationalist hero, nor a temporally violent deliverer.
I'm asserting that he is the same today as he was when he walked the earth the first time. When he said, "don't you know I could call down 12 legions of angels" but he did not; when he made sure the disciples had swords in the garden but barred them from using them further, how can we find a "no more Mr. Nice Guy" future iteration remotely credible?
Here's how: Because lifelong, centuries long, history and pre-history long, in culture before it could be called culture we've had hierarchy and domination and we don't know how to accommodate or expect something different. And this must change.
Peter Thiel likes to quote/invoke René Girard and Tolkien in his philosophy but he misapplies them both. Jesus, in embracing being the victim and not exacting revenge on us opened the way for humanity to escape from the pattern of redemptive violence that Girard documented and described. It continues, to this day, and indeed, the church uses it as well -- but it ought not to; when it does, it resembles the beast from the earth in Revelation 13.11. And where it does, there it grows least quickly, it is in danger of dying on the vine in the long haul.
Where it does not embrace this madness, it grows even if it must do so from seeds that have been slain and buried (John 12.24).
Either way, the fruit, whether bitter or nourishing endures.
Where the price is not death itself, but rather the laying down privilege and position, we fail to do that at risk of losing the plot of the story we claim allegiance to. And in North America, many whom I love dearly, 'neath whose roof I have sheltered, at whose tables I have been refreshed are doing just that.
Insisting on the right to hurl insults and calling the resulting recrimination, or exclusion, or fines or penal sentence "persecution" and it is not: we have lost the plot.
Espousing the least merciful, most vengeful, least generous, most exacting legal, fiscal policies (why the Ten Commandments, when they have been superseded by exactly Two?), we have lost the plot.
Bolstering the chorus of jingo and nationalism mixed with the most vile racist, sexist, classist, ableist, otherizing filters of Who Belongs In, we have lost the plot.
The rich and powerful have had their way with our headspace for too long and we need to turn away from their voices -- never mind the voices of those who want only to sow chaos so as to make us still easier for autocrats to take over entirely -- for their own purpose and not just for those of our rich neighbours.
This self-deception, this choosing to be gaslit must end now. It's hurting our neigbours, it's hurting our world, and in the end it will hurt, even kill, us and our children as well. And turning away from these voices must include returning to caring about character so that whatever political party seems to reflect your values best overall, miscreants like Donald J. Trump and his whole grifting clan, like Jair Bolsonaro, like Viktor Orbán must not be permitted to gain or hold power, and instead of allowing ourselves to be inflamed by Rumsonist<1> diatribes to voting to "get it all back the way it was", we need to vote and advocate for policies and positions that will do the most good to the most of our neighbours (listening to how they see that good with as much mercy and compassion as can justly be granted -- and "unsanctified mercy" isn't as much of a problem as some may make of it), human or otherwise, turning away, as we have been commanded to do, from fear, from greed, from grasping, from trying to hold on to what we view as our own. Everything temporal like that, we only ever hold in trust, anyway. Let's fulfill our trust responsibly and for the benefit of all, not exclusively for our own selfish benefit (James 4:1-4).
This bent toward autocracy Must. End. Now. Before it ends us. That is why I wanted to publish these pieces now,
This enduring mass of madness is the thing that weighs on my mind the most. It has done so my whole life in one form or another, though when I was young I did not understand what it was.
It has done so consciously and increasingly, as I could name it and understand it, and see its tentacles wrapping around so much that I love and tainting all of it to some extent. There is precious little I can do more than watch and pray that we would escape this madness. So asking that it end is, in one way self-serving. Only, I am convinced that ending it will do all of us, and all those around us great good. So I will persist.
When I first conceived of my three answering follies to Wright's widely encompassing set, I did not see that as a potential blow against this scourge, nor when I wrote the initial drafts of the summaries describing what he meant with his two word summaries -- that might not be comprehensible to most of the Jesus Followers of my acquaintance -- as an intro to my three, even more opaque because I am not the scholar that Tom is, I did not see that as a potential blow either.
But that it might be such a blow occurred to me this spring, so I resolved to present them all, although until now, I have kept these thoughts to myself, my family, my closest companions alone.
Against this scourge, all I can do may have no more weight than shouting from a cliff-top could be seen as an assault on the canyon from which the shout echoes. But it is what I can do here. Now. If it encourages others to take up that shout, great. If it fires up others to notice and take a similar stand, then these little motes will have begun to do what I could hope for. That this would be the beginning of the end of the madness, I won't even dare to dream. But I will hope.
Against, this madness, "I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my [pen] sleep in my hand..." until mind moulder with age or moral fatigue claim me completely. God grant that this shall not be, or at least that it shall not be soon.
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<1> I couldn't avoid one footnote at least could I? This is a reference to "Bob Rumson" the character decried in the final speech of Sorikin's film, "The American President", who doesn't want to fix things, but to make you scared of them and tell you whom to blame for them.
