A Broad Context of Faith and Empire

Flowers in Concrete:

A Broad Context of Faith and Empire

Rev. Dr. Matthew Johnson

2,448 years ago, after the first year of the Peloponnesian War, the leading statesman of the Empire of Athens, Pericles, memorialized those who had died. It was the custom to hold an annual memorial and to sing the praises of the men who had died in war. Pericles, instead, sings the praises of Athens. He describes how much better it is than its neighbors — more cultured, more free, more just, more wise, and more courageous. And he says,

Taking everything together then, I declare that our city is an education to Greece, and I declare that in my opinion each single one of your citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility. And to show that this is no empty boasting for the present occasion, but real tangible fact, you have only to consider the power which our city possesses and which has been won by those vary qualities which I have mentioned. Athens, alone of the states we know, comes to her testing time in a greatness that surpasses what was imagined of her. In her case, and in her case alone, no invading enemy is ashamed at being defeated, and no subject can complain of being governed by people unfit for their responsibilities. Mighty indeed are the marks and monuments of our empire which we have left. Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. [1]

Pericles places the greatness of those who have died not above the citizens, but in their spirit, and that they were thus “worthy of their city.” The citizens are called to love their city and perpetuate the greatness of the empire, remembering that “famous men have the whole earth as their memorial.”

These citizens of Athens — because, in this telling, of the freedom they afford to each citizen, and the culture they create with that freedom, are the proper “lord and owner” not just of their own person, but of this whole earth. They are “fit for their responsibilities” and no one so conquered could complain.

Fourteen years ago, Colonel Tim Collins, commander of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, on the night before his troops invaded Iraq, said to them, “We go to liberate, not to conquer . . . Wipe them out if that is what they choose . . . Their children will be poor, in years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you . . . The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction . . . As for ourselves, let’s bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there.”[2]

It is a speech that the agents of empire have given though time and space. We, the agent says, are “fit for our responsibility” to govern, to be lord and owner of our own lives and of yours. We come not to conquer but to liberate — be that liberation from poor leadership, from another world power less benevolent, from a lack of civilization, from false religion, or from whatever other danger there might be. The rhetoric and logic of empire is rarely — if ever — naked power. It is for your own good.

Yet, there is accuracy in Jeorg Rieger’s observation that “there is something peculiar about the American lack of awareness of empire” and that “the American empire was acquired . . . ‘in a state of denial.’”[3] As Dunbar-Ortiz, Welch, and others note, some continue to teach that North America was largely empty before 1492, that Europeans “discovered” this place and that place, and that our world-striding military, cultural, and economic presence is welcome and craved everywhere. The question “why do they hate us?” is asked not rhetorically but with sincerity, even though US American domination of the lives of others is far more egregious than the British rule of the Colonies ever was.

Though American denial of empire is indeed “peculiar” it still fits the overall pattern: that the ruler believes themselves fit to rule, and that their civilized and cultured status indeed requires it.

It is my task, this Monday evening, to give a broad overview of faith and empire, and to describe what makes empire attractive, what it demands and costs, and how faith and empire challenge, weaken, and strengthen each other over time.

Following Pericles’ lead, it is my thesis, first, that the participants in empire, almost entirely with sincerity, believe themselves fit for the responsibility to be lord and owner over the world. The empire brings the ultimate good — Order, Peace, Prosperity, Salvation, and/or Freedom — to those in the empire and those who who join it. The resistance of the colonized to this empire is genuinely perplexing to those within it, and these “barbarians” (A Greek term for any who were not citizens of the Athenian Empire) only resist, in this thinking, because of their inferior (in)humanity.

The ultimate good around which the empire is organized is also associated, in this way, with the ultimate reality — with what is holy and sacred. The empire takes on a quality of divinity, it is a kind of sacrament, a visible manifestation of the holy in the world. The stars and strips, McDonalds, and Rock and Roll is Freedom which is God. A cup of tea, the Anglican Priest, and a knowledge of Shakespeare is Civilization which is God. The gymnasium, the legion, and a reverence for the emperor is Pax (Peace) which is God. And so on and so forth.

And yet, as Rieger writes of Christ, there is a surplus in this ultimacy: both a gap between the empire’s behavior vis-a-vis its own highest value, and space for an alternative and transformative conception of divinity. When violence is necessary to keep peace, when oppression is required for freedom, when we must “destroy the village to save it,” the empire’s own house of logic begins to crumble. And when someone — usually someone from the literal or metaphorical margins of that empire — presents a more living vision of divinity, a empire interwoven with a dying God might die alongside it.

Indeed, that some, supposedly within an empire, might be on the margins of that power and not fully convinced by it, is evidence that within the logic of empire is its own downfall. Crossan, quoting Mann and Wright, refers to empire as a “protection racket.”[4] We protect you from violence, says the empire — but when the empire requires violence to be maintained (as all empires do), the curtain is pulled back and the hypocrisy exposed. Or as I first read from Ijeoma Olou, “white supremacy is a pyramid scheme.” So is empire. Each layer of the pyramid must find another to be below it.

This is my second claim: that in the seeds of the logic of empire are also the plants whose oxygen might give us life. As Rieger writes, “Resistance to empire is often like a blade of grass growing through concrete; it happens precisely where ambivalence is acknowledged, tensions are not resolved, and where the pressure is greatest.”[5] We see the flower poking through as beauty, others see it as a weed to be destroyed. When structures of power set a theological value as their justification, that value can be turned around to transform and critique that power. Without “righteous certainty”[6] we will see, in both historical and fictional examples, the ways that claims of ultimacy, like water making a canyon, can transform the landscape of empire.

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Near the beginning of his speech to the returned but silent Christ, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor says:

That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever be equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, with their daily bread on earth?[7]

The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that he “has no right to add one syllable” to what has already been said, and chastises Christ for rejecting the offers of Satan: to feed the hungry, to unite the world under his leadership, to become immortal. How much misery and pain, he says, did You cause by choosing to let people be free? For, he says, “the chief concern of these miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol of their own choice, but to discover that which all others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass.”

Such is the logic of empire. It looks at the world, and at human nature, and says, they must be ruled by those who know best. Those who are ordained by God, who are chosen for their superiority, who are strong, are fit for responsibility and must step forward to provide direction, order, truth, and security. “With great power comes great responsibility,” as the saying goes. The great heresy of Thomas Hobbes was that he placed the authority to rule in one chosen by the most enlightened, instead of in God’s authorization. Yet, he concurred completely with the Inquisitor when he wrote that “it is manifest that, during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.”[8] In such condition, without a power to provide security, industry, development, and direction, there is, “worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[9]

In a 2002 essay in the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last wrote, “the deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.” It is a hot take with the fire of a burning Alderan, but the logic of his case has been made over and over again. The Empire sweeps away the inefficient and impotent republic, which cannot stop war. It governs with force to prevent civil war and terrorism. “Palpatine is a dictator,” Last admits, “but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It’s a dictatorship people can do business with.” The 3,000 people Pinochet killed, and 37,000 he tortured, would find this claim, as I think we all do, appalling. Yet a version of Last’s view is sincerely held by many in power in the real world today.

Empire is, as many of our authors indicate, a way of thinking as much as an economic, political, and military power. It labels freedom anarchy, opposition terrorism, and difference blasphemy. It believes that those who are leaders are better than others — that the pyramid scheme is the natural order of things, and that the protection racket is not extortion but benevolence. “The conviction of the right to rule, the presumed knowledge of what is required for order and peace, from the splendor of Pax Romana to the “civilizing” rule of the British Empire and the prosperity, security, and democracy promised by American internationalism — in all, domination is masked as benevolent leadership in the inevitable exercise of power to those wielding power,” writes Welch.[10]

Since humans do not just live under nasty, brutish, and short conditions but are themselves nasty and brutish, they must be compelled and controlled by a wiser, stronger, and more holy force.

We need, says empire, a savior who will say to the devil, I shall take the bread and the power, thank you very much.

Is this our nature? Without the discipline of force, are we doomed to turn on each other in fits of greed and malevolence? The answer of empire is that those ordained (graced) with power can hold in check these sinful and simple others. Even more liberal theologians, such as Las Cases and Schleiermacher, “have a similar feel because they operate from positions of self-confidence and power.”[11]

The fitness for responsibility, endemic to empire thinking, requires the duality between those with the ultimate virtue (be that virtue order, peace, culture, freedom, progress, or a similar abstraction) and those without. The duality of empire is, of course, closely tied to the duality of patriarchy; men learn to be rulers in “their own” families and of “their own” lovers before they learn to rule “the world.” All the logic of empire is replicated on the interpersonal scale: imagined superiority of logic over emotion, domination, and intermittent extraordinary violence. Like misogyny, empire necessarily erases the humanity, indeed sometimes the existence, of the dominated and the colonized. As Dunbar-Ortiz, quoting Francis Jennings, notes, Amerindians are excluded from participation, “except as foils for Europeans, and thus [it is assumed] that American civilization was formed by Europeans in a struggle against the savagery or barbarism of the nonwhite races.”[12]

Those who defend empire rarely look to themselves as the nasty and brutish ones — if force must be used, it is for the good of all. The rebel is the cause of the disharmony — “Join me,” Last quotes Vader speaking to Luke, “and we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.” Yet, sometimes those who defend empire see in their own souls the desire for brutality, project that onto others, and seek to purge and dominate their sinful impulses.

William Golding described himself as a child as a bully and found himself, later, teaching entitled and unruly teenage boys. Enlisting in the Royal Navy in the 2nd World War, he, like many, saw the struggle as the fight of civilization against evil. And in the order and discipline of the military, he saw salvation from our nasty and brutish nature.

Two generations before him, a Polish refugee and former Merchant Marine considered a less heroic picture of empire’s power. The quest for control turned to horror, and revealed not our best but our worst, when the heart of empire was expressed by the dictum “kill all the brutes.”

Our interlude, then, from the last scene of the 1990 adaption of Golding’s novel and a scene near the middle of a 1979 adaption of the Polish refugee’s novel.

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(please don’t turn the page until after the interlude, lest you spoil the effect).

* * *

The helicopters which appear in both scenes — Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now — are known as HUEY’s, after their original designation, Helicopter (Utility) #1, or HU-1. But they are officially called Iroquois, as all US Military Helicopters (which are thought of as calvary) are named for Indigenous people.[13]

Something in many of us longs for the authority of the US Marine on the beach, bringing an end to chaos. And part of us all, I think, knows the terror that that whoop-whoop sound has meant to some. If you are like me, you read Lord of the Flies in your adolescence, and Heart of Darkness in young adulthood. We create the myth first. Then sometimes we question it.

Some, of course, never believed it from the start.

Though domination is masked to the rulers, Welch reminds us that “it is not, of course, so masked to its victims.”[14] Throughout the history of empire, there have been those who have resisted the power of empire. Their stories are often erased by the narratives of power, but — like plants that come through concrete — they continue to emerge. Liberation theology and post-colonialism have centered the voices that are not at the top of the pyramid scheme, but these voices have always spoken, sung, shouted, and mourned.

Nearly all of the world’s religious traditions emerge, as it turns out, from the edges of empires and from the resistance or withdrawal from them. Lao-Tzu, the empire’s librarian, leaves power for the mountain. The scholars and prophets of Judaism articulate their faith while in exile - refusing to become Babylonians. Muhammad begins with a withdrawal from the empire of Mecca into Medina, only to sweep away the old order with a new empire founded on a faith of radical equality under omnipotent unity. Siddhartha walks away from the palace in search of a truth greater than the attachment to comfort. And of course, Jesus of Nazareth, and his followers, imagine a Kingdom of God greater than the Kingdom of Rome, and he is murdered by that very empire.

Though empire consistently seeks to see itself as ordained by the holy as “fit for responsibility”, there is a tension in this claim; voices from other places in the scheme reveal this tension. The prophet’s own words and deeds can unravel empire from the inside. Those who have resisted empire have always been able to draw out of the conqueror’s own professed values the contradiction that empire presents; they have also, of course, drawn out of their own faith the strength to resist.