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An American Tale: Introducing the Imperial Religion (S. 1, Ep. 1) · Dystopian Theology

• Kristin: So what is this empire that I'm talking about that has this supposed imperial religion? Lately I think a lot about my great great grandfather George and about his father Jerome. His father Jerome had heard stories about lands out west in the late 1800s where there was empty space for anybody who was willing to come and take the opportunity. start over, seek a new life for themselves. So on these stories, he took his s two sisters and went to homestead in the Dakotas. Pretty quickly, they found out that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. The first thing that happened was that his two sisters were taken by Sue. So for context, it's pretty likely that they were part Tuscarora Indian. They had Bronze complexion, high cheekbones, so I've been told. And so actually the Sioux thought that they were rescuing some of their own women who had been kidnapped by white men. Thankfully, this misunderstanding was cleared up peaceably and the family was reunited. But it wasn't long after that that Jesse James and his band of outlaws were beginning to create problems for the local government. And so the local militia tried to conscript my great great great grandfather Jerome and force him to join them in fighting Jesse James. By this point he had had more than enough. He said to his sisters, I didn't come here to fight Sue or Jesse James. We're going back to New York. See the Riffles had already been in New York for a few generations, though the Europeans actually arrived before the Tuscarora. whose ancient homelands had been in North Carolina before a seventeen eleven uprising against the British who had been kidnapping them and enslaving them, along with a lot of other forms of violence and harassment. when that uprising was squashed with massacres and genocides, this forced the Tuscarora to gradually move north before they ended up in western New York. Now I don't know if Jerome had any sense of Tuscarora identity or history, but I would imagine that either way this case of mistaken identity with his sisters and the Sioux was a reminder that as human beings they were really not all that different. In any case, it seems like Jerome and the Sioux met with compassion. He had been terrified after his sisters had been kidnapped. And then he came to realize that this had actually happened because Sue had endured the same thing. He had ultimately been sold a lie, but this doesn't mean that he got nothing in return. He didn't gain a new opportunity, but he gained the insight and the tough experiences to see the truth of what was happening. Next came his son George, and this is where things get really interesting. In the 1920s, George had a lucrative job in Buffalo as an accountant for a corporation. Money was great, but George was increasingly troubled by what he was seeing in that role. He told his wife what these men are doing on Wall Street is corrupt and immoral and it will not last. He advised her to extend her garden. He took a major pay cut and exchanged his comfortable desk job for a job as a rural mailman in the Buffalo area. So you can imagine fighting sometimes four or five, even six foot snowdrifts in a sleigh wrapped up in furs with a major pay cut. But he wanted a job that he thought would survive the catastrophe that he saw coming. And he wanted to be able to care for not only their family, but others too. You could imagine that a lot of people thought he was totally crazy until nineteen twenty nine. In 1929, the Great Depression, a nearly 10-year global economic collapse began. hundreds of thousands of people were out of work and a lot of people went hungry. But according to my great-grandfather, his family was always able to support not only themselves, but often have other people for dinner at their table. So the stories of my riffle ancestors have made it down through six generations, I think because they communicate something really important. Something that has held significance for children's children I don't think Jerome's story survived only because of the indirect involvement of a famous figure like Jesse James, Nor even because of the drama of the mistaken identity with the Sioux. The emphasis in the story as it was told to me by my great grandfather was the moment that John made the declaration that he would go back to New York and had the realization that things were not as they seemed and never would be. these stories both show what the strategies of empire builders are, and in particular of the empire that we ourselves are living in. They show how vast numbers of people become complicit in the schemes of the ultra wealthy through propaganda, false promises, and the carrot and the stick. The very overt, very obvious imperial expansion of the US into the West happened with this strategy. Use propaganda to lure people with tales of opportunity, which may have a grain of truth, and then when they sink their money on the trip and realize that the realities and danger are not quite what they thought, you convince or you compel them to fight your battles for you. Now that women and children are on the front line of your advancement, you can also deploy the army to not only defend them, but grab more land and carry out campaigns of vengeance. The Rifles must have had the means to cut their losses and go home. But most people didn't, and with that stick, it was easier to convince them that they had to fight it out. Surely there were also many who had moral reservations and questions about what was going on, but probably saw themselves as part of something inevitable, a forward march of progress, a wave of power bigger than they could resist anyway. If they didn't settle the West, someone else probably would. And in the end, of course, there were benefits for some settlers. Otherwise the racket couldn't have continued with the carrot side of it. But the greatest gains by far went to corporations and the ultra wealthy who told these stories and promoted them to begin with. Why would you pay a private army when people can be convinced to pay their own way and endanger themselves in exchange for handouts which are paltry in comparison to your returns? I don't doubt that a certain level of healthy skepticism was passed on from Jerome to George. The suspicion may be that Wall Street, like the Dakotas, wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, and that it was also based on violence, exploitation, theft, and a crock of rich men's BS. In any case, George called it, and he called it just in time. At the very least, they both gained their souls. Far better to me than the stories of survival is that legacy of integrity and of the wisdom and foresight which can only come from that integrity, that consistency and security in one's own soul. There isn't much spiritual or moral difference between the very overt imperial expansion and territorial acquisition and the less formal, less obvious expansion through economics. They are part of the same machine of empire, and they work the same way. It's a machine which not only kills, destroys, and degrades humanity for the sake of a few men's greed, but also convinces vast numbers of people to buy into its grand narrative and put their faith in it, making defectors like George look like they are the crazy ones with outlandish ideas and unrealistic religious ideals. I want to make the case that the opposite is true. The Empire is what promotes collective insanity and a path of self destruction. Built on ideas which also must be taken on faith and on a kind of religious thinking. Today, almost a hundred years after George lived, a lot of us are also worried about impending crises. If not economic, then maybe political or social or environmental, or you name it. And I think that most of us have the sense that if something similar were to happen today, we wouldn't be even as well off as people were in the 1920s. In the 1920s, most Americans still had a family farm to go back to. Where at least they could eat even if they had no money, and at least they could survive even if they were dirt poor. Today we don't have that. I think less than one percent of all Americans are now farmers versus something like sixty to seventy percent in the nineteen twenties. And even if you did put us back on a farm, most of us wouldn't know what to do when we got there. The current imperial order that we're living in doesn't need to have formal control over territory because it has economic control over our lives. And in fact, the US, imperial policy was always a preference for making people in their own image rather than conquering them. So even with native people, it was attempts to, as they said, kill the Indian, save the man. And make them into good workers, make them into people that could be absorbed into your system and used for your benefit. Ultimately, they've done the same thing with farmers and with, if you will, peasants, the strategy here was to make people look down on what the Hebrew Bible would have called the the people of the land or the poor of the land, people who lived autonomously because they loved the land and lived from the land and were able to survive without money and without the state and without corporations. So the first thing that you do is make people look down on them as somehow uneducated or less than or savage even or dirty and then start to lure those people into the cities with the promise of money and of what only money can buy. But then once people are in the cities, of course they can only come by their food and shelter through money and they can only get money. Usually by by working in a chain of production that leads back to a corporation What this has led to is a system where we argue over who owns the means of production because we've already long ago given up the means of survival to governments and to corporations. we are now entirely dependent on governments and corporations for our food and our shelter. We have now put even more stock as far as the stuff that we need to live into the same system that collapsed in 1929 and that has all but failed many times since. On top of that, I often wonder how we today would be able to do anything like what people did even in the nineties in apartheid South Africa, where they organized mass strikes, they neutralized banks. They neutralized the government. They made it impossible, as I heard one activist tell me, for the government to govern. The only reason they were able to do that was because they had the means of being able to survive together collaboratively without the government, at least for a certain amount of time. How would we do that today when the means of our daily survival are in the hands of the very people that we would like to put pressure on to change? And perhaps worse than all of this is the increasing amount of power that we have given corporations over our entertainment, our education, and even our thoughts and our imaginations. Here's a quote from Wendell Berry that I think describes it really well. He says, Most people in the developed world have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly increasing their proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, childcare, care of the sick and the elderly, and many other kinds of service that once were carried on informally and inexpensively by individuals, households, or communities. Now, Wendell Berry says that we have allowed all of this to happen because of what he calls sentimental capitalism. He says Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism as the corporate and political powers claim to suppose. Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interests of the so called free market and the great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to the many, in, of course, the future. Communism and free market capitalism both are modern versions of oligarchy, and their propaganda both justify violent means by good ends, which always are put beyond reach by the violence of the means. The trick is to define the end vaguely, something like the greatest number, the greatest good of the greatest number, or the benefit of the many, and to keep it at a distance. Barry says that we must take it on faith that the destruction of so much that is good and beautiful and irreplaceable now in ourselves and in the natural world will somehow amount to a greater good in the future, the carrot dangling from a string, always almost within reach. According to Barry, this is its own kind of faith claim, which attempts to contradict and replace all of the world's great religious traditions. Here's what he says. If you are presently occupied in destroying every good thing in sight in order to do good in the future, it is inconvenient to have people saying things like Love thy neighbor as thyself, or sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them. Communists and capitalists alike, liberal capitalists and conservative capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism so that they can say to their victims, I'm doing this because I can't do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable. The question that we're asking in dystopian theology is why we believe that it's inevitable. So in the first round of discussions in this season on the imperial religion, we're going to just be looking around and trying to understand where we are at and the the crises and the troubles that we are facing. Why do we feel so disconnected, lonely, unsure of ourselves in the future and so helpless to do anything about it? Why are so many things getting worse when we thought that they would be getting better? Why are we so divided, not only from each other, but even from our own selves and the truths that we w run from through so many distractions? Why do we refuse to take collective action? What has happened with our humanity to make it so hard for us to think or even imagine something different being possible? I'm going to ask us to consider that the answer has very little to do with who is in power. The solution will not come if we can just put our people in those high places, if we can just give the right people power within this system. None of this is going to fix our larger collective disorder. The disorder of power and of the system itself. It is not actually our differences that create the biggest problem, but it's what we hold in common and the pact that we have all made together with this imperial world order. It is about the deep assumptions that we're making about what is most real about the world that we are living in and about what it means to be human. Assumptions that we are making together with that imperial order. This is what I call theology. These are the kinds of assumptions that are theological. Because even if you don't believe in a higher power, even if you're a complete atheist, human beings have to believe in highest powers. We still have to make fundamental, deep assumptions about the nature of reality and about the nature of our own humanity in our own place within it. These deep assumptions have actually been the theological foundations of every empire that human beings have ever built. The modern Western colonial empire that we're living in, of course, has its innovations and its reach and its ability to destroy is greater than perhaps we have ever seen. But if we can see that we're really not all that different, that these fundamental assumptions have always been the same, I think it helps us to understand more clearly what we are dealing with and also to understand that there are real alternatives, that people have survived empires in the past, and that people have also found ways to opt out and found ways to save their own humanity and to adopt. A different vision of humanity than the ones that empires have promoted. If we can name our imperial religion and its theologies, we can begin renouncing it and make way for other spiritual possibilities and new encounters with life and with ultimate reality. So, the first round of discussions will be about examining where we are at and what the challenges are that we're faced with right now in the world around us. In the second round, I'm going to make it a little more concrete what I mean by this renunciation in a discussion about being a Christian who is renouncing Christianity. This is going to let me put a few more of my cards on the table and let you know where I'm at on my journey. As a Christian, I feel the need to renounce Christianity because as a system of thought, it's become indistinguishable from the larger imperial order of which it is a part. So renouncing Christianity isn't in order to become something else or to adopt some other kind of ideology within this imperial system. It's actually my journey of repentance. And it's part of the call that I want to issue to everybody, regardless of your background. regardless of your religion, to renounce the empire that we are living in and to renounce imperial religion and make way for something better. Finally, the third round will be about identifying the core assumptions behind the imperial religion, the theological foundations of all imperial religions, along with the unique innovations, the unique spin that has been put on it in our current one. I will then show how we could look at our current religious, ideological, and political landscape as a pantheon of gods, which may sometimes make love and sometimes make war. But can all still find a place in one imperial religion, undergirded by the same deep theological assumptions. So, as far as my approach to this, I'm trained as a theologian. And so those core questions about what it means to be human and our place in the cosmos are the things that most concern me. But my PhD studies and research has also involved violence studies, which attempts to understand. the the causes and the preventions of violence from the standpoint of psychology, sociology, et cetera. My work is also always done from multicultural perspectives. I think on these topics, coming especially from my background in collectivist and non-state cultures, in places where there are still great cultural resources among people who have a legacy of opting out of imperial orders and out of empires. So my frameworks are theological and philosophical, but they're also informed by other kinds of evidence and ways of knowing. Even though I want to resist the urge to let any imperial or colonial system, whether it's religious, secular, or otherwise, dictate answers or tell people what the renouncing should look like. I want to focus on letting the evidence assist us in asking better questions. Not in telling you what the answer program is that you need to join up with. We are not after answers or even after building a new system. My prayer is that in questioning and renouncing what is destroying us, we will begin on a journey of reconnecting with existence, reconnecting with life, with one another, and with the living spirit in the ways that can truly bring about change and that can restore us to our true humanity. So let's get into it. This has been the Dystopian Theology Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. 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