Latest / Dystopian Theology / Intro to Season 1: The Gods of the Status Quo
Transcript
- Kristin: and you're familiar with its theologies even if you struggle to speak about them or name them clearly. I struggle too, but I'm going to try to speak the unspeakable anyway and hopefully get a conversation started. Here it goes. I've seen it in the ultra progressive radical coffee shop. I've seen it in the rural conservative American Evangelical Church. I have heard it at Ivy League schools and in working class dive bars. I've witnessed it in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the African continent, in mosques, synagogues, and sweat lodges, in war zones and in gated communities. You may have been there before yourself. It goes something like this. Normal day to day conversation turns more serious. Tones grow hushed, eyes get wider, and brows are furrowed. In one way or another we are trying to name it, the fact that we are unwell, and that the world order we live in seems to be snowballing down a path of self destruction. Some might mention the division and the polarization, others bring up environmental catastrophes, inequities of power, the fragility of the economy, the lack of true democracy, the degradation of what we once called basic decency, spiritual emptiness, tech, nuclear war, declining mental health, rising deaths of despair, and the list goes on. But then something even more troubling begins to happen in all of these conversations where the people, places, and the particular topics could not be more diverse. We then begin to tell each other about our helplessness, that even though it's awful we can't do much about it. The powerful are just too powerful, and the people too stuck in their ways and too apathetic. These systems we live in are just the way things are. The way of the world and of human nature is greed, violence and ignorance. Even though we usually think that we and our friends are good people, or at least a little better than the apathetic, ignorant average, we see these forces as somehow inevitable, unstoppable, bigger than ourselves or anybody. In short, godlike. The truth we all know if we allow ourselves to admit it is that we could choose something else if we all came together and if we really wanted to. These things only seem to be true because we all believe them, and because at the end of the day we all live by them. The idols of the imperial religion only live because we constantly feed them with the sacrifices of our time, thoughts, and efforts, because we constantly lay our humanity down on their altars. We don't do these things because we are inherently evil or because we have evil human desires. We do these things because we long for goodness, beauty, and connection. But have been woefully misguided and blinded about what it means to pursue them. And so we settle for things which fall tragically short. As C.S. Lewis put it, the problem is not that our longing and our desire is not deep enough. The problem is not that we are too human, but that we are not nearly human enough, that our desires are not nearly deep enough. We all know the imperial state religion of which I speak, because we have all practiced it, and because we have all practiced it, We all struggle to name it clearly and to bring it out fully into the light of day. To paraphrase Jesus, everyone who has participated in evil things struggles to approach the light, for fear that those things will be seen for how bad they really are. This is not a matter of me or you. It is a whole society and a system of power where we have chosen, together, to hide from the light. The powerful may do it because their every deed and intention is evil to Epstein Island and beyond. The rest of us do it because we fear the despair, helplessness, and guilt we may feel if we see what it all really means. I am not here with answers. I'm actually hoping that we can ask better questions and to make my contribution to an effort which we all must join and where we all must bring a missing piece. I'm here to see if we could set off together towards something none of us have even seen or even imagined yet. I'm not here to tell you it isn't all that bad or to tell you how it can be fixed. I'm not here even to give you hope. I am here to invite you home to your true humanity, your true purpose, and true beauty, to a home found only on the other side of the light.