Sermon: Dominion’s Contents

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

January 22, 2023

 

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

 

First Reading: Psalm 40: 1-11

I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me & heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, & set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see & fear, & put their trust in the LORD. Happy are those who make the LORD their trust, who do not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods. You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds & your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you. Were I to proclaim & tell of them, they would be more than can be counted. Sacrifice & offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering & sin offering you have not required. Then I said, “Here I am; in the scroll of the book it is written of me. I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; see, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O LORD. I have not hidden your saving help within my heart, I have spoken of your faithfulness & your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love & your faithfulness from the great congregation. Do not, O LORD, withhold your mercy from me; let your steadfast love & your faithfulness keep me safe forever. For evils have encompassed me without number; my iniquities have overtaken me, until I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head, & my heart fails me. Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me; O LORD, make haste to help me. Let all those be put to shame & confusion who seek to snatch away my life; let those be turned back & brought to dishonor who desire my hurt. Let those be appalled because of their shame who say to me, “Aha, Aha!” But may all who seek you rejoice & be glad in you; may those who love your salvation say continually, “Great is the LORD!” As for me, I am poor & needy, but the Lord takes thought for me. You are my help & my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.

NT Reading Ephesians 6:10–12 

10 Finally, be strong in the Lord & in the strength of his power. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For our struggle is not against enemies of blood & flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

 

We recently marked the 2 year anniversary of an insurrection at the US Capitol. We are increasingly learning that the impetus for such did not originate only from militant militias or radical politicians, but with reactionary religious actors.

My sermon this morning will unpack two linked concepts held by a core of these religious reactionaries: dominionism as a top-down authoritarian theology that seeks political control; and Spiritual Warfare as a church mission of so-called “power evangelism and transformation.” These concepts and movements are harmful to the communities Christians serve. All Christians committed to peace, virtue, and the shalom of their communities should recognize dominionism that seeks compliance with its favored social order, that seeks to exercise political control as a diversion from the bottom-up practice of Gospel virtues. And to recognize that “transformation”—the rebranding of Spiritual Warfare and Mapping-- is a radically misplaced focus on demons rather than neighbors.

Presbyterians have traditionally been suspicious of charismatic revival institutionalization. There has been since the 1980s a Pentecostal revival of the idea that God is doing “something new” to lead the Church by sending new, independent, and self-verifying prophets and apostles to bypass denominations based on established systems of oversight and historical confessions. These self-claimed prophets and apostles are unaccountable to denominations instead to act as charismatic entrepreneurs, actualizing the visions and dreams they claim God is sending to them as individuals to redirect and lead whole churches, whole societies.

This revival of charisma has been institutionalized, of sorts, in a continually shifting alliance of obscured networks and names under the influence of the now deceased C. Peter Wagner, a professor at Fuller Seminary who started as an academic theorist of church growth. He concluded that the way to church growth and opening the world to universal evangelization was through channeling charismatic energy especially institutionalized in Pentecostal circles. While many church growth initiatives based on charismatic leadership (too often narcissistic leadership) flame out after a while, Wagner’s so-called New Apostolic movement is designed to continually recruit the ambitious: new prophets and apostles to renew the direction and outworkings of charismatic energy. This movement, built for longevity, has rapidly moved into political spheres, accelerating since 2000 as the contested election of Al Gore and George W. Bush escalated simmering religious tensions over race and abortion into more open social and political conflict. Now extending toward destabilizing U.S. Constitutional governing institutions.

As we saw up to and including J6, some charismatic and fundamentalist religious networks organized their followers to interfere in elections and, on J6, the operation of Constitutional assemblies. Top NAR leaders were in the White House on January 5th, 2021, holding secret hours-long meetings with top White House officials. Prior they led a national campaign to whip up violent rhetoric at NAR-aligned churches. They mobilized their followers to converge on WDC, holding a series of rallies culminating in the march on the Capitol that turned seditious.[1]

So WHY? why this charismatic fury: and the What? what is the religion behind this anti-Constitutional insurrection?

In my understanding, this amalgam of institutionalized charismatic fury and the insurrection impulse is grounded in 1) a profound misreading of the Biblical idea of “dominion”; 2) a mistaken Christology—who Christ is, how he serves, and what he intends; 3) and a wrong focus on evil spirits and disembodied demons instead of a loving orientation toward flesh and blood neighbors. The first error is primarily about the “what” of God, and the third error, the focus on demonology, is practical—a mistaken knowledge of the “how” of God. The Christological error is a blend of both: it mistakes the “what” of Christ and the “how” of Christ.

Taking up the third point first: the movement of Spiritual Warfare and Spiritual Mapping intensified around 1997, when C. Peter Wagner became interested in "Spiritual Mapping" that was developing in local prayer warfare networks nationwide and in Canada. After being culturally dormant since the Civil War, the terms “Spiritual Warfare” and “Spiritual Mapping” began appearing again in published literature during the Reagan Administration for reasons we will get to later. Since then, the published frequency of these phrases has increased 10-fold, indicating their spread and cultural adoptions.[2]

Researcher Bruce Wilson explains  

the cosmology [of Spiritual warriors and mappers has] demon powers hold[ing] sway over the Earth, and it's the task of believers to identify & defeat the demons. There are several dimensions to this. Wagner & his core NAR cohort developed methods by which they could defeat "territorial spirits"—[the] major demons that controlled large areas, even whole regions of the world. They did this through elaborate ceremonies, by filling a whole stadium with believe[r]s literally shouting out their spiritual warfare; [by learning the names of the demons in order to control them.]

You can do it on the cosmic level, the city level, even in your neighborhood. In the Spiritual Mapping part, you identify the demonic influences that hold sway at whatever scale you're working at. AND you identify institutions, businesses, locales, and - crucially *people* who are associated with the demon spirits/influences. Idea being that the demons need to be invited in [by people] to do their evil mischief - demons need points of intersection with "the natural".[3]

Spiritual mapping and warfare [because of adverse publicity now being called “transformation”]  is done by walking the streets, praying, and feeding geographical data into databases.

Businesses, mosques, or Unitarian Church, a Masonic Lodge, a porn shop... or even, as a public school playground frequented by high school drama students. The "spiritual mappers" from [these networks] would pray for people too, but all the while they were compiling data - and an ideological enemies list - which might one day be turned to uglier ends.

Transformation is the process of how charismatic Christians, through collective acts of Spiritual Mapping/Spiritual Warfare, have claimed to have "transformed" their cities & towns. Crime all but vanishes, people lose their addictions, vegetables grow to enormous size, and everyone becomes a born-again charismatic Christian.[4]

Soon, not just businesses but individuals are located and identified as possessed by demons. To be harassed and sometimes, in Africa, to be evicted from their towns as witches.

 It's quite a crafty method for the mass-distribution of an eliminationist ideology - there exist evil individuals impeding the collective progress of humanity. And, we don't … need to kill them! Drumming them out of town will suffice. Subsequent "Transformations" … become increasingly malevolent… We see the wholesale destruction of native religious practice, city police forces are enlisted for the "transformation" project.[5]

The function of these mapping and warfare exercises is to wrest dominion that these religious warriors believe demons are exercising over geographical areas. They claim local victories that justify expanding the war for spiritual dominion.

Guatemala in the early 80s under Efrain Ríos Montt, a proclaimed “Born Again Evangelical,” pursued an program of “social cleansing” of Marxists.

Ríos believed that religious morality was more important than civil rights, he could dismiss people who do not subordinate themselves to his religious ideals… in December 1982, a group of North Americans interviewed [the pastor of California evangelical-supported church Ríos attended:] El Verbo…, who told them: “The Army doesn’t massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demon possessed: they are communists.”[6]

 After his mobilization of death squads in the 1980s, Ríos was later convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. American nationals enabled by Reagan administration policy contributed the ideological foundation for such eliminationalist religion and politics.

One of Reagan’s initiatives was to “privatize” foreign affairs, opening up unaccountable-to-the-Constitution private missions in overseas realms. American and foreign Spiritual Warfare networks entered into the foreign policy domain under this aegis of “discipling nations” by expelling/eliminating demons. While the phrase “territorial spirits” seems to have entered published books around the end of WWII, its published frequency has exploded nearly 8-fold from 1984 to now.[7]

An important aside here: “go and make disciples of nations” [per Matt 28:19] is of the “ethnos,” a territorial people not a government, so that “discipling nations” is about creating, by bottom-up practices of virtue, a multi-ethnic Christian worshipping and shalom-spreading, missionary community. Discipling nations is not a top-down sequence to expel demons above and install religious strong men as governing autocrats only then to purify an ethnic order through evangelization.

Theocratic private mercenaries in Guatemala became death squads under the rubric of “low intensity conflicts” so that SWSM networks aligned with USG policy for ongoing struggles against “Marxism.”[8] Marxism has become a dog whistle in certain circles for post-cold war operations domestically and abroad that private networks of SWSM have involved themselves.

Guatemala became a violently dysfunctional society with religious reactionaries working for constituting it on terms of “Christian citizenship.” In this way, Guatamala has been a laboratory of charismatic authoritarianism pushing the frontiers of cultural and ethnic genocide. These are radically contrary to Jesus’ command to disciple all ethnic peoples by leading them to green pastures in the peace-making church.

The Reagan administration initiative to privatize foreign affairs continues to this day to promote the private expression and export, in deadly fashion, of popular American folk fundamentalism that translates inner experience to the outer condition.[9] If one is battling demons within oneself, one is tempted to universalize that battle in American manifest destiny, the preeminent American folk ideology. Many of us remember Reagan’s religious framing of his Dominionist political vision: America was “a shining city on a hill,” a meme written by slaveholder and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, in 1630. The eliminationist ideology of American exceptionalism has deep roots in toxic Dominionism powered by slaves. It’s not a huge leap from considering neighbors in bondage to sin to making bondage a reality—making heathen bodies into corpses or into chattel slaves to save their souls. Toxic theology has real world effects.

Dominionism undergirds an imperial, power-seeking branch of charismatic and theocratic American religion working to “disciple the nations” by conquering and displacing their territorial spirits. The dominionist doctrine of American Manifest destiny and policies of anti-Marxism and “anti-terrorism” have become in certain circles categories of demonology. The next step is to call out witches and then eliminate them. This is where hyper-Calvinist white nationalism fits with imperial power-seeking charismatic Pentecostalism. Spiritual Warriors see demons controlling politics; congruently doctrines of “total depravity” often attribute a radical Manichaean dichotomy of evil or good, retrobate or saved to categories of political human actors. These are your neighbors. The blend of American Manifest Destiny as dominionism with Manichaean demonology applied to real people is the most pernicious of toxic theologies.

Toxic theology undergirding political violence and eliminational “social cleansing” is tragically mistaken in focus, in how God intends us to practice dominion, and in Christology—what Christ revealed to us about God and humanity—how God is incarnated in humanity to bring shalom from the bottom up, in virtues. Christology reveals how disciples in union in Christ are to be in the world.  And it isn’t to cleanse our politics by demonizing and eliminating our neighbor or enslaving them to our values. Or subverting Constitutional policy-making assemblies justified in and by the moral will of We the People because the misled, on J6, saw We the People corrupted by sin and demons both individual and systemic.

Up to now, my sermon has posed three questions:

·         What is biblical dominion? 

·         Are we Christians directed to battle against demons on the ground or in other nations?

·         And how does Christ—how does having an authentic Christology—a true understanding of Christ person and ministry--direct us to live in a political world?

First, Biblical dominion is gentling “grace pressure,” not hard power--antagonistic domination and compliance seeking by means of pagan imperial norms. I can’t take the time to present the voluminous Biblical witness on this point, but suffice Torah of the King Deut 17 and the peaceful images of Gen 1 as the world is formed and dominion granted to humanity. The domineering cruelty of ANE monarchs, esp. when it was mimicked in Israel and Judah, was Biblically and prophetically condemned. Dominion is gently encountering creation, taming its beastly agonistic strife by the practice of virtues, the pattern and grace pressure exemplified by Christ.

The pagans saw the chaos of creation exemplified in the sea. One of its myths has the Persian emperor Xerxes whipping the tides after a storm destroyed his fleet.  Isa. 45:19 I did not create the world to be a chaos.  How does Jesus encounter and tame the waters? By calmly walking on them: Dominion in the way of Jesus grace pressure, not whipping. Gentling the horse, not breaking it.

Second: fundamentalist Manichaeism--Either you’re with us or you’re evil-- is contra Ephesians 6:12.

It behooves us to recognize the combinatorial role of evangelical/charismatic Protestants in fascist, reactionary political uprisings in Guatemala, the U.S., and now in Brazil, and to hold them accountable.

“Our battle is not against flesh and blood.” I can say much more, but I’ll let the Apostle Paul originate that meme for our age: “Our battle is not against flesh and blood.” Focusing on gaining power over demons and what is occult is both a misplaced focus from loving our neighbors, but psychically most dangerous as well.

For Christ’s disciples: There can be NO domination in "dominionism." "Subduing" the land (Gen. 1:28) involves Christ's gentling presence, not control and compliance through "breaking" as of a horse. I titled this Sermon, “Dominion’s Contents.” Both its CON-tents and Dominion’s con-TENTS. Dominion has a content that brings contentment to others. Dominion is messianic, at a minimum fulfilling Deut. 17. It is pictured in the watchful and light presence of a kestrel aloft not the soaring of eagles. By contrast, dominionism as a religion is dis-contenting. It is a miss-content. It misses what dominion is meant to contain.

Dominion is the fold of the lamb of God incarnated as a baby born in a manger where outside is the howling wolf lair of imperial Rome. Dominion is re-learning to walk with a gentling and virtuous presence in a world of chaotic rage. “Grace pressure” is exercising dominion that subdues chaos. Any dominion absent the centrality of the Sermon on the Mount so to hybridize with non-Christlike strife brings about false mission, false Christology, and toxic theology. I call it metaphysical mud (the "miry bog" from this morning's reading of Ps. 40:2): the idea that violence an forceful compulsion can bring in the conditions of God’s peace and bottom-up order.

Unlike Sermon on the Mount theology originating from a manger, Dominionist theology is an expedient tower to check into to plan and launch conflict. That transient hotel tower turns into a mirrored prison of our own violent making from which only God can release.

Dominion is walking in the way of Jesus in the world. Bringing the divine attributes to the earth from heaven. It is not an imperial destiny for a nation.

“Our battle is not against flesh and blood.” If something bleeds, they are not our enemy. Let God control what is unseen, both demons and hidden conspiracies. When you think of kingdom faith as a war to be won—religion seeking dominion without Christian virtue-- you will focus on demons and see people as enemies to be conquered by compulsion and strife. When you think of kingdom faith as a world to be explored and gentled, a local community with which to dance and paint and sup, you will see neighbors to be virtuously encountered and loved. May Christ’s way be so for you and me:

AMEN.

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NOTES

[1]Coulter, Dale M. “Neocharismatic Christianity and the Rise of the New Apostolic Reformation.” Firebrand Magazine. Last modified January 18, 2021. Accessed January 11, 2023. https://firebrandmag.com/articles/neocharismatic-christianity-and-the-rise-of-the-new-apostolic-reformation. 

Taylor, Matthew D., and Bradley Onishi. “Evidence Strongly Suggests Trump Was Collaborating with Christian Nationalist Leaders Before January 6th.” Religion Dispatches, January 6, 2023. https://religiondispatches.org/evidence-strongly-suggests-trump-was-collaborating-with-christian-nationalist-leaders-before-january-6th/.

Onishi, Bradley and Daniel Miller, “Charismatic Revival Fury: Dutch Sheets and NAR Go To Battle on J6." Straight White American Jesus. Podcast, January 2, 2023.

[2]books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spiritual+mapping%2C+&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3

[3] @brucewilson, Twitter, 1/4/23.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Egoshi, Miho. 2018. “Evangelical Dictatorship Driving the Guatemalan Civil War: Reconsidering Ríos Montt, the ‘Savior of La Nueva Guatemala.’” https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1780&context=cc_etds_theses. https://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2012/julaug/spiritualwarfare.html?paging=off

[7] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=territorial+spirits&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3

[8] @brucewilson, Twitter, 1/4/23.

[9] R. Holvast (2008), Spiritual Mapping: The Turbulent Career of a Contested American Missionary Paradigm, 1989-2005.  https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/29340

What’s in a Name?

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

Rev. Douglas Olds

January 1, 2023

 

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

 First (OT) Reading: Ecclesiastes 3:1-13.

3 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 

    2a time to be born, and a time to die; 

    a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 

    3a time to kill, and a time to heal; 

    a time to break down, and a time to build up; 

    4a time to weep, and a time to laugh; 

    a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 

    5a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; 

    a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 

    6a time to seek, and a time to lose; 

    a time to keep, and a time to throw away; 

    7a time to tear, and a time to sew; 

    a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 

    8a time to love, and a time to hate; 

    a time for war, and a time for peace. 

9 What gain have the workers from their toil? 10 I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. 11 He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a “sense of past and future’ [olam] into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12 I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; 13 moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. 

 GOSPEL READING : Luke 2:15-21: 

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.//

Let us pray from the Litany of the Feast of the Holy Name:

Jesus, Son of the living God, 

splendor of the Father,

brightness of eternal light.

 sun of justice.

 most amiable.

most admirable.

Jesus, the mighty God.

Father of the world to come.

angel of great counsel.

most powerful.

patient.

obedient.

meek and humble of heart.

Jesus, author of life.

example of virtues.

zealous lover of souls.

Jesus, our God.

Jesus, our refuge.

Jesus, father of the poor.

Jesus, treasure of the faithful.

Jesus, good Shepherd.

Jesus, true light.

eternal wisdom.

infinite goodness.

Jesus, our way and our life.

Jesus, joy of Angels.

Jesus, King and

Master of the Apostles.

 teacher of the Evangelists.

strength of Martyrs.

Jesus, light of Confessors.

Jesus, crown of Saints.

[We ask for your gracious hearing], O Jesus. AMEN.

Today our Church’s calendar celebrates the Feast of Jesus Name. 

In earlier times the Church called this calendar festival the Circumcision of the Lord. 

    Both circumcision & Jesus’ name are listed in this morning’s Gospel reading from Luke as occurring on the 8th day after birth.  Because the Christian Church has considered that the sacrament of Baptism substitutes for OT rituals of circumcision,  we moderns honor the naming of Jesus rather than his circumcision as we consider the dawning of a new calendar year. 

    Before I speak about a New Year, I want to propose some considerations of what Jesus’ name means for us—why we pray in Jesus’ name, & why names are power.

Traditional & ancient societies deemed knowing the name of another gave one power.  

The goal, as in old Hollywood Westerns, was to keep your own name private while you tried to learn the names of others. 

Aliases are important in these systems: “the Pecos Kid,” “Wild Bill,” “Doc or Kit.” 

    These more traditional cultures believed that being able to know the real name of a demon gave one power over that demon.  We see conservative Christians today who practice Spiritual Warfare on a national & political stage  consumed with learning the names of demons over the powers & principalities. 

    I believe that this focus on demonic names is misplaced.  Rather than learning the names of demons to have controlling power over them, it is more important to learn the name of your neighbor in both church & society & act graciously & non-dominatingly toward them.. 

Demons hide their names, western outlaws covered up their identities. By contrast, the Gospel accounts of Jesus coming into the world reveal his name early after conception.

In the Gospel of Matthew, an angel visits Joseph to announce to him what he is to call the child. 

In the Gospel of Luke, the angel announces to Mary the name of the child to be called Jesus. 

The name of Jesus. 

The name of Jesus that the Apostle Paul says in Phillippians (2: 9) is over every name in the world. 

The name of Jesus in which we pray, because it has a power & honor which brings grace from heaven. 

    Unlike ancient pagans who invoked incantations, Christians pray this in Jesus’ name because it is he who reveals God’s ultimate character & will in grace & word, so that an invocation of the name “Jesus” makes prayer efficacious. It brings results.

But there is more to be said.

    “The naming—or the renaming—of a person is even more significant when it is God Godself who is doing the naming."[3].

The name Jesus which we celebrate in today’s church calendar is both divine—announced by angels--& has the intrinsic power of the divine name. 

The angel in Matthew chapter 1 says that the name “Jesus” indicates that he will “save his people” from their sins. 

    The Semitic/Aramaic form Yeshua is often rendered in the Greek as Jesus (Iesous),  which also hearkens back to the OT antecedent “Joshua” yəhôšûaʿ who opened up the earthly promised land after the Israelites wandered for 40 years in the desert. 

yəhôšûaʿ is adapted into "Yeshua" in the Books of Ezra & Nehemiah when the Temple is being rebuilt, with the earliest Greek Bibles called the Septuagint—at least 2 centuries before Jesus' birth--rendered as the Greek name Jesus. 

    Yeshua became a common name starting around the time of the Jews’ exile from Judah in the Babylonian captivity. The name’s popularity suggests that the message “the Lord saves” was particularly relevant in this period, which was marked by great uncertainty & foreign, imperial rule. 

    “Iesous” becomes the Greek form of the name that marks the congruent anxious historical period when new temples to God are being built. 

    Yeshua was a name for anxious parents as the Judahites are dominated by Mesopotamian imperial powers, “Iesous” when Judeans become dominated by the Roman imperial power.

 Yeshua/Iesous as names cycle through ancient Jewish traditions.

The name Jesus thus renders yəhôšûaʿ, Joshua, & Yeshua: “YHWH is saving help/generosity.” 

Joshua announces something of the earth-bound character of God, the conqueror by grace. 

Isaiah 45:22 (NRSV) uses the same verb:

22Turn to me & be saved --hiw·wǒš·ʿûʹ -- all the ends of the earth! For I am God, & there is no other. 

Isaiah is announcing the need to be saved & that God is named for that task. 

    The naming of Jesus by the angel announces that the savior is arriving, with both Isaiah & Matthew also naming the coming one Emmanuel, “God with us.” In the announcement of the name, the Angel is announcing God's solidarity with anxious Judeans. Jesus/Yeshua was a surprisingly common name at the time.

    Relatedly, a second way to transliterate the name is “Yesh-ua,” with “Yesh” meaning “belonging to,” so that Yeshua belongs to Ja, belongs to God. The one who is named as belonging to God & the bringer of conquering grace will also belong to God  & will open up the new promised temple in the heavens that comes down to earth.

    God through Joshua had liberated Israel from wandering in the desert after slavery under Pharaoh once before & would do it again. This time by liberating the Jewish people from their Roman-backed overlords & installing a new political & religious order in its place. We need only follow him our leader into that new, spiritual temple that dispenses & rewards grace. And as we follow, we pray in that powerful & manifold name.

    This is my opening message for today’s Festival of Jesus’ Name. 

In the divine instruction that Joseph & Mary call their son ‘Jesus’, the child—the Joshua Commander of the Israelite Wanderers of the Lord in human flesh—is identified in times of anxiety & imperial domination with the great Holy Warrior who achieved the victorious entry of God’s liberated people into the promised land on earth. 

    In the naming of Mary & Joseph’s son, a window into our own incorporation into the praying & victorious community that enters the promised heavenly temple can be opened this Christmas season./

    Thirteen years ago this season I was in Jerusalem for the pealing of the noontime bells from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher which marked, according to tradition, the cave where Jesus’s body was laid after being brought down from the Cross. 

    As the bells rang, my heart sang with the words, “Holy Holy Holy, you are blessed.” I was moved to tears of joy in that plaza outside the church. 

Jesus, the name & Word of God, escaped the tomb & lives evermore & eternally in the Holy of Holies. 

Praying in his name leads us there as God the Father gives grace to those who honor his son by the name.

    Now we have moved into the New Year’s phase of the secular calendar in the midst of the 12 day Christmas season. 

Our first reading this morning has us consider how the history-conquering announcement & effect of Jesus’ name fits into the historical understanding of the pre-incarnation people of God, the ancient Israelites. 

    Our reading from Ecclesiastes (3: 1-13) suggests that history cycles.  In the personal & the cultural:  

Ecclesiastes 3For everything there is a season, & a time for every matter under heaven: 

Birth & death, planting & plucking, killing & healing; deconstruction & rebuilding, weeping & laughing, mourning & dancing, embracing & rejecting, seeking & losing, tearing & sewing, silence & speaking, loving & hating, war & peace.

Everything is possible, but without God the human attempt to guide history is vanity. Which side of this list do we choose to participate and pray for? There is only one side, God in Jesus' side. 

    Strategizing the consequences of human acts by human systems of morality,  especially attempts to secure peace through finance, is fruitless vanity [1]. 

Continuing confusion on the world stage may be a feature of 2023. 

The dichotomies of Ecclesiastes 3 suggests that there will be a lot of political and cultural phenomena people don’t understand and thus reject in favor of simplistic conspiracies and preposterous readings of the Bible. 

“The craft of accurate sense-making will be in high demand, once people realize their old mental models [put in service of religious tribes and secret services] have failed.” [2] 

    Peace-loving and holiness-guided Christians are in position to make sense and meaning of seeming chaos from what Ecclesiastes notes as the sense implanted into our minds by God of eternity--from the position that God is controlling history for the Holy Spirit’s progressive purposes.

OT life before the widespread receipt of the Holy Spirit was perceived as cycles to make sense of purported chaos, but the spirit-guided OT prophets & the NT announce progress, a landing on the better ground of the teeter-totter dichotomies listed in Ecclesisastes. 

    The victory of grace in the name of Jesus means that the cycles of sin have been broken in history,  though perhaps not in every individual life./

    "Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian historian of religion, proposed that ‘traditional’ societies lived in ‘cyclical time,’ innocent of history…In traditional societies, according to Eliade, everything important has already happened. All the great founding gestures go back to mythic times, when animals could talk or turn into humans, sky & earth were not yet separated, & it was possible to create genuinely new things (marriage, or cooking, or war). 

    People living in this mental world of cyclical history saw their own actions as simply repeating the creative gestures of gods & ancestors in less powerful ways,  or as invoking primordial powers through ritual. According to Eliade, historical events thus tended to merge into archetypes. If anyone in what he considered a traditional society does do something remarkable – establishes or destroys a city, creates a unique piece of music – the deed will eventually end up being attributed to some mythic figure anyway. 

    The alternative notion, that history is actually going somewhere (the Last Days, Judgment, Redemption), is what Eliade referred to as ‘linear time’, in which historical events take on significance in relation to the future, not just the past. 

    This ‘linear’ sense of time was a relatively recent innovation in human thought. Embracing the notion that events unfold in cumulative sequences, as opposed to recapitulating some deeper pattern, brought on the “terror of history” that rendered humans less able to weather the [necessary] vicissitudes of war, injustice & misfortune,  plunging us instead into an age of increasing anxiety &, ultimately, nihilism. 

    Eliade[’s…] basic argument was that the ‘terror of history’ was introduced by the [Old Testament prophets] [4]

who saw life in God as full of ups & downs, with ups the final word on earth. 

NOT: as a simplistic reading from Ecclesiastes might suggest, that we can't control anything that happens to us, & we can't predict what the future on earth will hold, only when history is fulfilled & arrives “in heaven.” /

So what comes in this new year? 

    A culturally significant portion of religious conservatives believes that “the church seems to be headed into the same sort of antagonistic world as the first followers of Jesus experienced.  The small band of disciples left on earth to spread the gospel was surrounded by enemies,  many of them lethal. 

The church of today is seen headed into the past.” [5]

But is it?

Is this really a Christian message for the New Year? 

That we need to go back into the past, to repeat its cycles of so-called Holy Wars against the unfaithful & rebuild the Jerusalem temple? 

To recall the Persian emperor Cyrus as our security-ensuring political messiah? 

To blow shofars so that enemy walls of Jericho at the nation’s capitol crumble?

Is the New Year going to experience these or any other recrudescence of cyclical sin & history? 

So like traditional people we will (and want to) see history repeating? 

Tragically & violently? 

    To consider this possibility, let us practice  the virtue of recollection to understand human history as cyclic or progressive. 

The Feast of the Holy Name litany that I quoted from in my opening prayer considers the character of Jesus to recognize the one who belongs to God [Yesh-ua], the one who saves. 

The One who guides history. 

The meaning of God’s name reveals that the incarnation of God is going to bring radical change to the cycles of sin & the defeat of the powers of death: greed, selfishness, domination, violence, & authoritarian impurities of all sorts.

    As God redeems these defeats to sway history to the positive side of the Ecclesiastes 3 lists, we recognize what the name embodies, so that we may work toward developing those same excellences. 

If we do, we may be confident that we live inside Jesus’s Spirit-led historical progress. 

By virtuously following Jesus’s example, we participate in God’s church bringing progress to history defined as shalom.  If by contrast our values are strife, war, contention, hierarchy, pride, tyranny, then we may expect to be dominated by the cyclic eruptions of history’s sins. 

Personal ethics & hopes matter. 

Live into the name of God in Jesus’ shalom.

Into human cultures that try to force history into violent cycles to make it predictable to the fearful, the Name of God in Jesus ensures that the serpent’s cycles of sin are crushed & to bring to fruition the progress of shalom. 

    The name announced by the angel transforms history into the process of the Holy Spirit: 

that the name’s announcement is soft power! 

    New Year’s Day is a time of recollection & anticipation. Recollection of God’s activity in the past year & what can be relied upon in the new. 

    The Church is in one of those seasons of life where so many things seem to be going wrong. 

We may feel it is hard to imagine being more stressed & how it's likely there are more crises to come. 

In times like these, we are like a wounded animal tempted to retreat & isolate. 

But where is the growth & sanctification in that?

Instead, Christians welcome times like these as opportunities—opportunities to grow spiritually by serving others. To stay the course & let Jesus illuminate the way by his excellent virtues & faithfulness.

    Living prayerfully inside the name of Jesus who bears such grace-dispensing virtues is the potential of grace to disrupt history for the better. In his name’s constant call to prayer, we recall the revolutionary historical inbreaking of grace. 

    We can, through a cyclical reading of history, "make the God of the Bible look like a vindictive Canaanite war god." [6]  Or—We can make the God of the Bible in the name Jesus where the Word of God is read with a progressive view of history, where the Spirit is leading toward the heavenly destiny of abundance and peace.

Where the name of God involves grace.

"Only one name is a right reading of Scripture."/

    We Christians bear the honor & responsibility of reflecting Jesus’ name of Christ, the anointed ruler.

Let us strive to live lives that honor & reflect that name in which we pray,

As we pray for God's blessing for the beginning of the civil New Year to make it a year of universal progres  and not the return of cyclical violence.   I can't tell you what your new year's resolutions should be, I am goinga to resist the proliferating mating calls of petroleum and cryptofinance, 

I am going to resist the dog whistles of racism and fascism, 

I am going to resist the triggering slogans for warrior religious nationalists, pandemic disinformation, and social strife. 

While we cannot individually bring in our preferred future by our strategems, 

 we can trust that God is in control & has a plan for history that includes us as individuals. 

    Last night many of us sung: “Auld Lang Syne.” Which is a wistful tradition, just don’t make it the incantation of your heart. 

Don’t make it into a soundtrack for nationalism.

A compulsion to bring back safety, predictability, and uniformity of an imagined past,a compulsion to live in the past is the signal of living with the Terror of history.

Nostalgiacs and reactionaries choose to go back in time toward feelings of a golden age of safety while living in terror of the future—anticipating a final but cataclysmic restoration of the Garden of Eden.

    Progressive Christian forecasters by contrast apply a more linear trajectory to the Spirit-led unfolding of the Kingdom of God on Earth as in Heaven, open to the wonder of ever-advancing, ever-renewing & challenging newness—the forward trajectory of soul growth that overcomes fear & anxiety.

    The Ecclesiastes reading explicitly speaks of the Virtues of silence, gratitude, recollection, courage, acceptance, impartiality. By these, God transforms us from the self-directing agents in service of recrudescent sin into the dispensers of radiating grace. 

God will transform tears into dance [Psalm 30:11–12], shame into joy.

The New Year is a time to dance. 

Dance in the purity of conscience. 

Dance & pray in Jesus’ name. AMEN.//

----------

Notes:

[1] "The most extreme of vanities," Ecclesiastes 1:2. הֲבֵ֤ל הֲבָלִים 

[2] Dave Troy @davetroy, Twitter December 30, 2022.

[3] Alastair Roberts, https://theopolisinstitute.com/you-shall-call-his-name-joshua/

[4]Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 497.

[5] Michael S. Heiser, Facebook post, 2/8/22.

[6] Zahnd, Brian. “God Is Like Jesus.” Brian Zahnd, August 12, 2011.  https://brianzahnd.com/2011/08/god-is-like-jesus-2/.

 

Soothing Modernity’s Combative Anxiety:

Virtue in Culture and Politics

 

 Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

Autumn 2022

 

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

 

Intellectually-cultivated, companionable reticence rather than ignorance and tribal symbols serves Providence-constructed polity in diversity. The mode of “virtue ethics” have an underappreciated value in building stakeholder consensus through interfaith partnerships and politics--for building peaceful networks across religious traditions. Social renewal and shalom emerge from ethical transformation one disciple—one ego--at a time, which includes the intellectual virtues applied to deliberation. Governing and moral authority in the United States is invested in the people’s legislative assemblies and not located in an executive autocrat or religious totem, even if that totem has the name of Jesus.

 

“Religious people who relate to a God in an uncertain or anxious manner are more likely to experience psychological distress disorders, including anxiety, paranoia, and obsessive compulsions… those who are less avoidant and those who are more avoidant in their relationship with God both have lower levels of psychological distress…These data suggest it’s only those in the middle, those who experience uncertainty in the relationship with God, and not the avoidant, that have worse mental health” (Westmont College [2022], reporting the study of Henderson and Kent [2022]).

Many consider that the culture and practices of agon (aggressive strife) offer a virile and effective path for the realization of the Kingdom of God—aggressively “contending for the Gospel.” However, many Bible passages rule out a third-way syncretism (heterodox hybridization) that blends agon with shalom.[1] Especially in its moral center, the Book of Proverbs, the Old Testament speaks of but rules out blending the dichotomy of paths—the way of the good (good and justice) and the way of wickedness (Prov. 2:20-22). In chapters 10-23, Proverbs contrasts the two ways of strife and righteous peace, death and life in B-A and A-B structures. This dichotomous structure formalizes the explicit contrast between (as opposed to hybridization of) shalom and agon. No diversion is allowed from the right path (Prov. 3:6; 8:20; Proverbs 4). The good is straight and straightaway to be followed. It is the one true way that does not admit a third-way syncretism between the truth and error, between the straight and what strays. We are to never waver from the one path of truth and peace—not “to the right or to the left” (Deut. 5:32-33; 17:11; 28:14; Josh. 1:7; 23:6; Prov. 4:25-27; 2 Kings 22:2; Cf. Prov. 10:9, 17; 12:28) by applying the techniques of agon in the attempt to deliver oneself from agon. To do so is to live inside death-dealing clouds of deception.

The findings of empirical psychologists suggest that blending strife with the pursuit of peace brings psychological distress and political neurosis. The healing of these fragmented states requires repentance and the pursuit of unfettered and unadulterated shalom. However, psychologies may instead be sublimated in the “affective polarization” (Mason 2018, 866) of tribalism that holds out the prospect of psychic relief in religion’s affiliative assurance that one belongs to the inner ring of true religion. There appears a psychic reward to being one of the few—and being with the few--that really KNOW what’s going down, on earth and in heaven. Such cultural collectives may be

define[d by] both a system of beliefs, but also a sense of connection to like-minded Others…Identity does not require values and policy attitudes; it simply requires…a sense of inclusion and a sense of exclusion [that] designate who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them.’ [I]dentity-based elements of ideology [in the current American politico-religious culture]…[g]enerate[s] social distance [from] the ‘otherness’ of ideological opponents, more than issue-based disagreement, [to] drive [political and cultural] rancor… [A] study of [religious-political] ideology argues that looking at issue positions alone is inadequate to understanding ideology… making a clear distinction between issue-based (operational) ideology and identity-based (symbolic) ideology (Mason 2018, 867-868).

 

CS Lewis (https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/) provides a description of the tribal “phenomenon of an Inner Ring…[T]he passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.” The inner ring involves an informal hierarchy that is not

even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline… There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration…

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated…

[The impulse to seek membership in an inner ring is an adaptation and accommodation to this world’s] whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement… If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man… the makings of [agon’s scoundrels:] unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists.

[T]he choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

 

Aldous Huxley (in Brave New World Revisited [1958]) writes of “Herd Poisoning,” the intoxication of large groups with high emotion and suspension of standard consensus behavior patterns—skepticism of charismatic leaders and outlandish, illogical phenomenological claims. Inner rings as herds become “poisoned,” beguiled by the polemics of social media and enabled by its seeming anonymity and privacy:

Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords... and by…associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.

 

Symbolic identity takes on heightened performative valences and intensities in the cultural sphere. Religious groups with low commitment to formal liturgies often sublimate symbolic performances of the peaceful community and the operationalization of virtue by exercises of titular prerogatives, contentious leadership, and spectacles of dominating or hold-taking power. Politically-charged tribal identities are characterized by a particular set of moral foundations (Graham et al. 2013): 1) expressions of loyalty (and denunciation of betrayals—e.g., see Shepherd [2022]), recognition and submission to 2) authority (and denunciation of subversion), and definitions of 3) purity/sanctity of a tradition (and attribution to outsiders of degradation, disorder, and depravity). These features combine in certain high-visibility conservative Christian circles to define all other Christian ecclesiological and theological circles as “heretics.” Only the inner ring has access to saving truth.

Seemingly accelerated since 2016, the tribal melding of symbolic identities in American religion into politics has prioritized political contention to the detriment of virtue and shalom. The justification for these performances of agon is “contention for the Gospel” that wins back the culture for Christ. Taking back “our freedoms” becomes a common ideological totem to construct religiopolitical, symbolic, and culturally-affiliated identity.[2]

Christian libertarians repeatedly point to their freedom in Christ as if such meant more than liberation from the contagion and chains of sin. The liberation for good works. Instead, libertarians seek a life free of accountabilities to and for others. For Christian libertarians, “socialist” government is the ultimate enemy that seeks to re-enslave them, by policy, into the “secular noesis of sin.” This flawed noesis (condition of cognitive understanding) is alleged to ground the persecution of “believers,” to be materialist and collectivizing (“Marxist”), and to deconstruct valorized traditions that introduces insecurities and disrupt “family values.”

Ideologies that valorize libertarian “freedom” (negative freedom—the impulse to be left unhindered to pursue personal preferences) above other religious and political values may be symbolically reconstructed for political and religious action. Conferences, rallies, and thematized spectacles promote peak experiences aligned with material content. Such symbolic performances risk mistaking peak experiences of politics with the Spiritual, especially when the latter is conceptualized in agonic, rather than self-denying, power. Gun culture and conventions demonstrate the pretense of negative freedom as a claim of personal security. With the ceaseless onslaught of gun-fueled shooting sprees, the metaphysics of freedom as grace—the endeavor to give life—is tragically and perversely contradicted. So-called “2^nd Amendment freedoms” function to risk taking life while falsely promising body security. They are an idol that makes a travesty of trust in the living God’s sovereignty and providence that establishes shalom. The ultimacy and metaphysics of life-giving and -sustaining grace affords no freedom to desecrate, desolate, flee, or destroy.

Symbolic identities have begun to coalesce into the strange bedfellows of vicious inner rings within American religious and political-cultural spheres. Anxious members of contemporary consumer society may be drawn to participate in mediagenic religious cultures that offer safety in numbers. The ideas, identities, and alliances of religious cultures are shaped and amplified within commercialized activity, revealing that an enclosed cultural identity became a component of modern capitalism. Capitalism historically has favored enclosure of the resource commons, and boundary-making is inherently capitalist. Enclosure historically has drawn on Biblical symbols and justifications (Attie 2011). Contemporary American religious and cultural affiliation has recently become increasingly grounded in capitalist pursuits and its adulterated and circumscribed “prosperity gospels.” These link righteousness with positive material results--personal wealth, suaging of debility, displays of spiritual “power,” and/or community affiliation and assurance. Alienated individuals who crave such are recruited by appealing to these benefits and symbols linked with messages purporting these accrue to those righteous in the Gospel. While both its purveyors and consumers may see religious tribalism’s outreach to fulfill the Great Commission of Matthew 28, it is readily being coopted to serve political inner rings. Church and para-church ministry growth become both the signal and the raison-d’etre of prosperity righteousness (i.e., that God’s favor is manifested in wealth and cultural impact) carrying forth the immodest banners of political power.

Fostered by attempts at a third-way synthesis of agon and shalom, religious neurosis recruits political malcontents by packaging the Gospel as the avenue for both eternal salvation and temporal and hierarchical power. This package promises the possibility that both eternity’s peace and temporal power are accessed by thymic striving. If the world is to be won for the Gospel by strife, some heterodox, syncretic form of spirituality is claimed to resolve the contradictions of peace won by antagonism. Some intermediate condition of shalom and agon becomes proclaimed in contentious and adversarial pulpits, the straight and soft edge of which state is not to be found because it is a Biblically-attested impossibility. The result of this destabilizing syncretism--like a blood-sucking parasite on a gentle lamb--is the discontent and disquiet of culturally affiliated actors and the collective performance of neuroses on civic and cultural stages.

Rather than cultivate the self-reflexivity of theological reflection to enable virtuous living for others, cultic warriors futilely seek to discern their power (and thus their assurance of divine acceptance) by their impact and ephemeral monuments and banners. Their need for planting standard-flags manifests their need for divine approval in an update to Weber’s (2002 [1905]) thesis—their symbols and standards manifest prosperity and power that signals to them that they are in accord with the furtherance of God’s plans. In ephemeral demonstrations of cultural sway, bombast, and thunder, these symbolic collectives seek the assurance that settles their anxieties. For them, even when absent virtue, temporal noise manifests divine favor.

The neurotic attempts third-way adaptations of Christianity with pagan agon to promote order and assurance: “what happens when you just stop relying on God—you don’t trust that God will be there for you, so you learn to rely on yourself” (Henderson and Kent 2022). Tragically, this lack of divine trust and allegiance pulls instead toward practices of agon—strife, contention, violence, domination, and manipulation.

Inside anxiety’s unresolved questions and discontents are the foundations of authoritarianism that promises to restore order without the necessity of prior establishment of interior peace and the virtue of accountability to justice. However, by instilling the virtues of patience and courtesy that is tolerance, order may result providentially and organically in shalom that dispels neurosis. Through mirrored virtue, we can assuage our neurotic neighbors, helping them live in an increasingly crowded and challenging society. Democracies, by assembling the gamut of citizen stakeholders, more optimally foster the civic virtues of accountability to justice than autocracies (see below).

On the religious right, syncretism and commercialization promote heterodox totems. At the same time, the cultural left subordinates cultivation of virtue to techniques and practices of exotic inwardness and relational detachment—the various detachments of “spiritual but not religious.” If the self is discovered and absolutized inside its spontaneous and unevaluated urges, spiritual formation inside an agonist tradition becomes nihilistic, nominal, and idiosyncratic. Inwardness tends to “find oneself” in one’s sexual and antagonistic inclinations (“nature”) rather than submitting to the great tradition of virtue that continually announces Christ’s supra-historical existence and enduring power to shape our actions and guide our thinking towards shalom. The Church may lose focus on moral cultivation when pursuing self-determination and -awareness inside crafty narratives of identity, autonomy, sexualization, and deconstruction--the kind of academized nonsense and empty self-display, willfulness, and prejudice for inventions of glitz, spectacle, and celebrity. The neurosis of the right is in repressive tribal inner rings that pull and orient toward narcissistic, immodest, thymic, and ruthless (“spiritual badass” [Du Mez 2020]) temporal leaders. Neurosis of the left manifests in tendencies of ostentatious identity derived from self-gratifying sensuality that too is narcissism. Both sides tempt egotism in authorities by celebrification based on the performative attractions of narcissism.

Neurosis conflates the attributes of God with itself while formally and informally repressing its own faults (Matt. 7:5). The conflation that attempts to synthesize agon and shalom is culturally--not theologically--performed and proposed, marked by the bald assertion that agon represents a side of God that is hastening by agon to drive forth the eschaton of peace. This putative, divine agon is often portrayed through a violent and earth-bound reading of the Book of Revelation. In their tribal inner rings and neurotic forms, dispensationalist readers of the Bible (Vlach n.d.) seek assurance by trying to shape and participate in this supposed ultimate cause of eschatological violence. They misattribute their culturally broadcast agitations for Kingdom-building. They seek to predict the next temporal world order (2 Tim. 4:3) rather than living here and now in the eternal world of truth and shalom.  Conflating God’s fearsomeness with its own ruthless nationalism (Isa. 8:12-13; 25:3) is a hallmark of agon’s neurosis, particularly when accompanied by the fetishes of the anxiously fragile--the gun and symbols (bromides and “camo”) of the military. In no way are violence, compulsion, and contention—and their symbols--representations of and trust in the Holy Spirit.

From Here to Modernity: Virtue and the Public Square

Philosophically grounded in the Enlightenment, American Constitutional structures have come under populist assault by various identitarian, libertarian, and religious symbolic actors (Rose 2021). Church-state separation, one-person-one-vote elections, and the establishment of the voice and venue of moral policy-making inside a representative body (rather than by a divinely-ordained hierarch) are being questioned and attacked by domestic groups as at no time since the Civil War.

The opponents of Enlightenment liberalism have various ideological commitments and beliefs.  Still, as the symbolic images at the assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 manifest,  these opponents include both religious actors and those who more cynically have tied their cause to the symbolic power of religion’s forms and claims. The violence acted out on that date demonstrates the vicious tribalism of agon applied toward an anti-progressive set of objectives.

Because of the human propensity to mirror and emulate what we admire of others in close proximity, political communities are training grounds of both vice and virtues. Do our politicians reveal virtues that promote shalom? Or is it the violent virtus of classical traditions of agon? In the latter case, we would expect tribes to form in space around traditions and “heroic” (thymic) powers of anatomy, virility, and patriarchy (see Du Mez 2020). In the former case, we would expect collectives to be more socially diverse because both space and power are shared. We would expect each tribe or collective to have varying degrees of syncretism with pagan, agonistic traditions. The dichotomous phenomenology of agon and shalom set in relief with the witness of empiricism and history proposed earlier provides a taxonomical frame to relate commitments to past traditions compared with relative openness to what is prophetic and peace-making in modernity.

Modernism’s project of increasing subjectivity of agency exposes the virtues that manifest inside a polity. These virtues structure the design of liberal government enacted in the U.S. Constitution and thus would be most relevant and practical in its political spheres. Among other innovations, the U.S. Constitution:

•           Establishes (democratic) accountability to non-tyrannical justice in a robust separation of administrative, legislative, and judicial powers.

•           Establishes moral voice and policy inside a representative, deliberative body rather than in the will of a divinely ordained autocrat.

•           Recognizes that political conscience in the embodied electorate is served by free speech, allowing a domain for moral claims—not just self-interest--to change hearts and minds toward diversity, sharing, and tolerance.

•           Separates Church from State as spheres for the former’s modeling of egalitarian grace to be recognized by, mirrored, and extended to the material and political economy of the latter.

•           Processes in history by rights-granting amendments sensitive to social developments, including those that extend the voting franchise to originally disenfranchised groups (now under the threat of rollback).

Wholeness includes eternity and infinity, so diversity and pluralism must be primary and desired features in God’s Kingdom--where grace is spread and shared. Wholeness consists of the spaciousness in time and space given to wonder and tolerance. Wholeness is relational in its fullest human sense and representations. Hospitality of diversity celebrates the distinctives and particularities of God’s human creation, including of plebiscites. Racial identification and exclusion can never be wholly relational in this eternal sense of shalom.

It follows that democracy is a worthy Holy Spirit-enabled arena for governance. It reflects the Bible’s critique of monarchy, particularly in the tradition of the critique of kingship in Deuteronomic History (see Chapter 2).  The precepts in the Law of the King (Deut. 17: 14-20) radically—in its ANE context--limit the monarch’s autonomy and prerogative. These limitations fit the more general theme in the Hebrew Bible of Israel’s adaptation to vassalage (subordination of sovereignty to another monarchic power [Ska 2015, 429]) than with hierarchy and domination (Wright 2015). Laying out its demerits, the prophet and judge Samuel robustly decries the people’s demand for a king (1 Sam. 8:4-20). Earlier, contextualized by Abimelech’s leading question to the people in Judg. 9:2, Jotham’s tragic parable of the bramble king in Judges 9 clarifies that autocracy has less warrant for the Israelites than polyarchy.  The qāhāl (קָהָל) was Israel’s cultic—God-ordained and therefore morally (and theologically [Neh. 13:1]) concerned—collected assembly “of the people” (Jer. 26:17; Ps. 107:32; 89:6; Judg. 20:2 etc.). 

While disorder results from the situation in the Book of Judges where everyone acted as they saw fit (Judg. 17:6; 21:25), the failure of autocracy to adhere to the virtues of humility and loyalty leads to the alienation and estrangement of God’s people from their historical milieu labeled “the land.” The Bible thus illustrates antipathies to both libertarianism and autocracy. Representative democracy, as the American founders recognized, coheres with Biblical wisdom that promotes polyarchy. It becomes the governing resource for the revolutionary as opposed to the autocratic spirit condemned by the Deuteronomic Historian. 

As a political ideal, democracy valorizes the gentle acceptance of defeat, allows for calculations of acceptable compromise, and ensures human rights to participation, free speech, and bodily integrity. Democracy institutes the progressive aspect of modernity—the location of intrinsic value in the individual and the individual conscience represented in an assembly—the Torah’s קָהָל qāhāl—carried forth into history by the Holy Spirit. Once established in history, support for the people’s assemblies—as opposed to that for executive autocrats--is warranted by Rom. 13:1, Titus 3:1; 1 Pet. 2:13; and Prov. 8:15. Using these texts blindly to support an American administrative autocrat is a misapplication because the Constitution structures the ruling authority in this country on the people’s moral authority invested in legislative and polyarchic assemblies.

In light of these historical and Biblical warrants for assemblies, the formation of a wise political actor is the possession and prudent exercise of both deliberative and moral virtues. The mission of political deliberation in representative bodies agreeing to policies representing the people’s collective will has become the standard of modern governance. Like all collaborative endeavors, these bodies solicit and reward virtues that accord with the shalom and grace which is God’s will. To the extent that political actors can deliberate virtuously, they transform disordered spaces into ordered and relational places. The more deliberative microcosms seek to accommodate and serve the Providentially-constructed plebiscite, the broader the scope and scale its representative, political, and civic virtues transmit to the social macrocosm. Representatives are civic models especially accountable to God’s justice and shalom.

Deliberation’s principal virtues are openness to compromise and discernment activated by the love of and pursuit of truth and its animating and morally-directive power of persuasion. Its “chief ancillary virtue is studiousness – assiduous, open-minded, objective, consistent and well-tempered application to the pursuit of new knowledge. Studiousness is earnest, ardent deployment of intellectual faculties, powers, and talents, resisting premature satisfaction of intellectual appetite, and continuing to study until the desired [attributes and dispositions] are acquired” (Webster 2016, 176). Studiousness recognizes that even the most worldly of knowledge offers some aspect of communion with neighbors and enemies, and thus with God.

Next are deliberative virtues which open us to discerning the moral claims of others:

These virtues include attentiveness (steady, observant direction of the mind to that which lies beyond ourselves [Prov. 8:5]); humility (awareness and acceptance of intellectual [and material] limitations); modesty (temperate estimation of one’s own excellence and resistance to the desire to be conspicuous); and docility or teachableness.

There are those virtues which fit us to contribute to and [benefit] from common [deliberated] life: intellectual benevolence (the disposition to promote the…good of others);…generosity (sharing [moral and material] goods); affability (friendliness and approachability in [political] exchange); impartiality ([accountability to] justice in .... conduct towards others); gratitude (glad recognition of intellectual [and political] indebtedness)[and loyalty towards our benefactors].

There are those virtues which ready us to deal with difficulty in the pursuit of [moral] goods [and justice]. These include magnanimity (the largeness of purpose which causes us to attempt demanding tasks); [political] courage (firmness of mind in enduring what is outstandingly difficult); and, finally, patience (Ibid.).

Magnanimity and openness to compromise combats agonism’s psychological tendency to extremism and intransigence, the hardening of one’s position that claims material and public goods and constructs exclusionary politics.

Schismogenesis is a “conscious cultural inversion” where groups in geographical (or religious) proximity define themselves in contradiction to their opponents.  Schismogenesis results in an us-them framework of historical and demographic identities and national mission operating under cultural duress and the threat of political marginalization and displacement (See Pally in Telos Group 2022). Schismogenesis amplifies Schmittian politics (Schmitt 2005 [1934])—the coalitions of friends and the animosities against enemies to locate the source of all duress in the political neighbor. The resort to radical separation and cultural divergence is self-defense in extremis. It breaks traditional or aspirational relationships under conditions of existential vulnerability preoccupied if not obsessed with socio-cultural threats, including threats to group (white patriarchal) autonomy, normative definitions (of freedom as negative without general obligations to include), and nostalgia (for hierarchical traditions and idealized social order).

Holiness may become a religious resource that relates to outsiders by contradicting prevailing secular and cultural norms (tragically losing sight of the Apostle Paul’s warning in Eph. 6:12). The rage of agon in cultural proximates is quick to demonize, reducing the humanity of their political peers. In such dehumanizing rage, the virtues of deliberation are swallowed up by unholy culture war and the false claim that the level of anger and loudness of denunciation proportionately reflects the level of righteousness held by “truth’s” inner circle.

Patience and hospitality, by contrast, lays the groundwork for agreeing to worthy ends. Patience puts a rein to anxiety—that jailer of reason--and allows parties in a deliberative process to breathe inside the Spirit. Patience resists stifling the legitimate moral claims of others that our undisciplined aggrandizement and ruthless willfulness would otherwise bring on.

The list of deliberative virtues includes tolerance, which allows and mutually reinforces equity applied to heterogeneous interests arising in modern, postcolonial polities. Tolerance of stakeholder diversity and its varied moral claims promotes deliberative wisdom and morally-sensitive policies: toleration works toward both the diverse membership and morally inclusive society and its protection and enablement of free speech. It follows that the political virtues of democratic norms counter environments of intimidation characteristic of authoritarianism.

Constituted in major part by colonialism and immigration, the United States is structurally pluralist in culture and polity, and its governing institutions have heretofore fitfully but directionally established juridical pluralism as both a norm for extending rights to previously excluded groups and interests as well as distributing legislative (moral policy-making) powers according to the principle of subsidiarity in Constitutionally-negotiated federalism.

Constitutionally-ordered assemblies of democratically elected representatives—and their modern genius for efficiency and equity—host and allow for a broad polity’s deliberative knowledge structured by virtue to secure more accountable and just ends than can be achieved by a constricted, unaccountable, homogeneous, or vicious autocracy.  This explicit intention to locate ruling and moral authority in the people’s assemblies is found in the Preamble to the United States Constitution  valorized by the conclusion to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  The deliberative and legislative power of the people to make moral policy is located in the assemblies of Congress. The People are in covenantal relationship because they have been established in and by God’s providence within the Constitutional polity.

Deliberative diversity of interests is the impetus behind modern democracy. The investiture of ruling authority (ἐξουσίας exousias) in the people’s representative deliberative assemblies optimizes policy beyond entrusting decisions to a single leader’s solipsistic perspective.  While all authority may come from above and not from below, the establishment of people’s assemblies may be seen (as did the American Founding Fathers) as the reflection of the ultimate cause (God) inside secondary agencies (people). In this, God is becoming all in all. Contrary to some post-liberal claims, representative democracy is not destructive but a way station in the unfolding Kingdom of God operating from the ground of Christ’s immanent power inside people seeking justice and peace absent monarchy. By this, “the people” invested with common grace may repudiate their fascinations and desire for King Saul.

The U.S. Constitution invests the Executive agency with carrying out the ἐξουσίας of the people’s moral and deliberated will. However, with the recent, regional disestablishment of civics classes in secondary education, many American religious leaders lack the knowledge to make the connection between these developments of modernity and American Constitutional ἐξουσίας. They instead misapply scriptural texts to rally behind and unquestioningly support the government’s executive leader. Tragically, pastoral leaders ignorant of history and suspicious of Enlightenment modernity feed religious inner ring tribalism’s neurotic impulses for order, control, and security to make accommodations with—and blind and unquestioning support for—the Executive prerogative as the seat of administrative compulsion. This accommodation conflates temporal leaders with Jesus. It also enlists OT verses and symbols (like the display and blowing of shofarim—ram’s horns—at the nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021) to valorize violent political struggle. Protestors re-enacted ancient biblical rituals, ratcheting up their political significance. Such actions associate political objectives with biblical symbols, transposing them into a totemic amalgam with seeming divine endorsement.  These symbols integrate personal experience with ideological concepts to produce an overly-determined significance for these displays. Their integration consequently normalizes (because of their religiosity) increasingly extreme political action—especially of compellence and assaultive ruthlessness as representing God’s warrior will. Political factions—even the non-religious--try to harness the power of eternity for their shameless spectacles by allying themselves with commercialized religion. The Christian Right in the U.S. has an especially accommodating, fearful posture for political alliance with mammon. Both desire social order as ultimate ends though they differ in what that order looks like. Those ends would surely reflect the harmonization of means--of fear aligned with greed. But they will not come about. Another kind of eschatological order will surely come forth within the metaphysics of grace.

Pluralistic societies that move toward fascist, absolutist conformity are corrupted by dichotomous thinking of God’s inner circle vs. totally depraved outsiders. This dichotomous thinking is decadent and rigid, not the relativism that grounds deliberative tolerance or extends the value of recognizing common grace.

Because most traditions in a pluralistic interfaith society have a program for virtue, such can become the common grounding for deliberative policymaking. Building institutions that instruct and reward virtue and assess a political cost to oppositional ruthlessness can be the ecumenizing (bridge-building) principle for politics rather than turning inner circle conservative Christianity into the institutional banner of the coalition overseeing material allocations of public goods. Popular Christianity’s cooptation with thymos has all-too-frequently manifested the promotion of mammon (Matt. 6:24): libertarian economics, consumer symbols, and immodest, affluence-signaling and -seeking lifestyles.

            Rather than virtue, consumerist elements and contentious and selective applications of the written word of God become adapted to signal who is inside the polity and who is outside. Tragically, Biblical elements are syncretized with traditions and practices of agon in the attempt to gain the victory for their battle standards—their Christian flags, their denominational or mega-church brand, their heroes of contemporary faith, their urgent seeking of personal safety and national security.  Their militarized and authoritarian syncretism in service to cultural influence and “freedom”-securing power is predictably but tragically seen by outsiders as hypocrisy to the Gospel grounded in the orthodox ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. Christian syncretists have replaced the Sermon on the Mount as the center of their social message with a violent reading of Gen. 1:28 “dominion” and the Book of Revelation that manifests their own neurotic anxieties regarding their relationship with living inside God’s promises and steadfast love. Church order and mission realized in syncretic blends of features and practices of agon do not correspond to the Sermon on the Mount. Instead, they operate in conjunction with secularized will-to-power, grotesquely distorting ethics through religious violence and blasphemous politics. Agon is not a feature of human ontology.  Those who, by reasons of fear, syncretize Christianity with violence lack concord with the assurance of Hebrews 2:15.

Any hypocrisy of violence and abuse abrogates the social influence that these culture warriors crave. Their syncretic accommodation with agon and thymic culture has created a new cadre of political actors and consonant alignments, but the data seem contradictory in terms of advancing the Gospel. The rise of religious “nones” in American society, Christian disaffiliation, and turning away from Christian institutions among younger generations (PRRI 2021a) suggests that syncretist narratives to program the blending of hierarchies and violence with the Gospel are, except for reaching fellow neurotic worriers and graspers, a misdirection of effective evangelism. Packard and Rusert (2022) report that members of Generation Z have turned away from their parents’ Christian institutions in favor of a “spiritual” identification alongside a more “dynamic” set of non-traditional religious practices.

Highjacking Jesus in support of nationalistic and compulsory agendas and personalities alienates many who claim no adherence to Christianity but instinctively recognize—and turn away from--these overly-determined propagations of malice and false ethical narratives inside Christian symbols. Those outside the Christian faith expect its Sermon on the Mount witness of peace and justice. Likewise, those progressives living in union with Christ expect that the sum of political virtues and deliberative faculties are directed by the Church toward creating a polity that is the harbinger and pull of the just society—the Kingdom of God.

Political virtues enable powers to be exercised in a morally and providentially optimal way. God reveals and contrasts the pattern of wise and unwise rule and virtuous and vicious governance in the Psalms (especially Psalms 2; 7; 9-11; 21; 45; 58; 82, etc.). Their themes of the basis, purpose, and virtues of human rule keep the focus on “returning to God as model for the perfect realization” (Adam M. Carrington @carringtonam 5/9/22) of politics and governance. In the psalms concerning political leadership, deliberative virtues like humility and discernment are portrayed as an optimizing means to just and shalom-building ends. These ends include their social recognition and mimetic emulation for the sake of moral justice.

Recognition of virtue operating inside public deliberative and political spaces may be more effective to evangelization of those spaces than proclaimed and broadcast dogmas, particularly in those modern contexts that have formalized the separation of Church and State. The recognition of virtue in the neighborhood sphere and assembly promotes shalom, while in the deliberative spheres of moral suasion and policymaking, their recognition can sway debate to mitigate deprivation of the kind outlined by Matthew 25.

Christian deliberative virtue and conduct is that by which all may recognize the processive Spirit—insiders and outsiders alike. As stated earlier, recognition is no less a theological resource than the traditional quadrilateral of Bible, experience (of which it may be a subset), tradition, and reason. One kind of politics deals with others from considerations of their merit, and another which does so with respect to the others’ need. One of these is Gospel. One of these is radical grace. The Church distinguishes itself from the culture of its age by the politics of grace. It does not distinguish itself by ethical subordination to or accommodation with the reward systems and appetitive and thymic strife and hierarchies of capitalist agon.

Virtue Ecumenism: the shared lived values in mixed-faith society

Reconsidering the polity along the lines of lived values—of which virtues its varied faith traditions hold dear—may break the yoke of material identity and oppositional symbolic propaganda to bring forth a more fruitful political discourse and policy regarding the common good. Toward this end, Christians ought to refrain from the lens of disparate demographic identifications that have been instead transformed into spiritual community articulated by Paul in Galatians 3:

Early Christian thinkers drew inspiration from the New Testament’s vision of a world in which differences of race, class, and sex would be healed. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male and female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” Saint Paul instructed the church in Galatia. This early Christian universalism also insisted on the primordial unity of the human family, arguing that “God has made of one blood all the nations of the world.” (Rose 2021, 149).

God restores territories and histories of mutual hostility into a new and united people in Christ. Rather than making up an ethnicity or race, the blood that circulates to make one world—one people—is that of Jesus’ love. Shalom is accomplished in and by the one blood:

[T]his [blood] pedigree included not only Jesus and the patriarchs of Jewish scripture, but the wisest philosophers of antiquity, who sought the truth about God with a sincere heart. All were part of the “race of the saved,” as one scholar has put it, because they had rendered sincere worship to God.

Religious universalism may be derived in and from the blood—in that love of God for the material creation of blood that God extends toward all people--and from which all are intended to mirror and reflect back to God and to neighbor:

Christian thinkers were aware of the extraordinary nature of their genealogical claims, and they invoked scripture to defend them. They drew on Paul’s idea, understandably shocking to Jews, that Christians acquire Abraham as an ancestor, becoming descendants of Israel through faith. They imagined that Christians were reborn by being grafted onto a new family tree, exchanging the traditions of their earthly fathers for those of their forefathers in faith. But was it only a spiritual lineage that early Christians imagined they shared with faithful Jews and noble pagans? Astonishingly, no. For some theologians, since the humanity of all believers…was included in the flesh of Jesus, Christians had a kind of sacramental kinship with all those united in his mystical body. The Christian …genealogy boasted of saints, sages, and heroes with whom they were related through God.

Christians need not call this community [in love’s blood] a “race” to make stronger claims about the way it binds them together across time…[Christians] might be more willing to bear witness to an ideal of ethnic solidarity that is open to transcendence, rather than closed to it (Rose 2021, 151-152).

In seeking to worship and embody transcendence, society as created by God progresses toward the unity in diversity marked with shalom. Many if not most traditions that recognize transcendence have a program for virtues—Buddhist, pagan, Muslim, Stoic, Jewish, and Christian. The key to forming community inside this religious pluralism is training our children and ourselves to recognize the organic, common grace virtues in and of our neighbors. Universal grace is found in conduct rather than simply in beliefs. But Christians, in their sacraments, are constituted as the vanguard for the waves of communion with neighbors that bring forward God’s Kingdom shalom. The blood we share with neighbor is circulated in the love that neighbor has as God’s creature. Because we share in the one blood, we seek its health and proliferation wherever it is found.

Shalom is promoted by the wisdom of others with whom we live in proximity. While the unforeseen will arise, it is never entirely unprecedented. The wisdom of our elders and our traditions prepare us to weather the shocks of novelty.

Deliberative wisdom is proffered without expectation of the self’s advantage (Phil. 2:4). Working for the good of others without considerations of self-advantage or reciprocity is the practice of saints. The free grace of wisdom is the mirror and gesture of recurrent experience given for the benefit of others in community. It follows that diversity of both elders and of the community as training grounds for wisdom recurs in God’s eschatological plan. Diversity in the social structures and pedagogy of wisdom includes sound principles for interfaith networks and networking. These networks tend, in part, toward the centrifugality of boundary-making parochialism. But this book argues that interfaith deliberation is “perichoretic” --it centripetally processes to solve problems by gracious, mutual deferral serving commonly agreed virtues, especially honesty and accountability to justice. A functioning community of diverse interests is most optimally centered on shared lived values common to humanity.

Classicist Martha Nussbaum and Development Economist Amartya Sen propose that Aristotelian virtues have the broadest potential for identifying and making concrete socially unifying capabilities and functionings toward health and safety (Nussbaum 2008; Olds 1997) toward the common good of shalom inside a pluralist society. From thence, the particular Christian vanguard of social virtues may take hold.

Deliberative pluralism founded in an educated public represented by wise and virtuous elders is the means for a people’s good ends and moral policymaking, not an authoritarian system. By this, the social location and diversity of learning and experience serve the common good less bound by material totems and solipsistic biases. Toleration and diversity of wisdom advance in interfaith recognition and implementation of virtue.

Virtues discourse is the singular praxis of deliberative wisdom applied for the common good. It counters neoliberalism’s elevation of market transactions and utilitarian productivity to the summum bonum of human existence. Decoupling from the utilitarian and financial nexus of reciprocity instead to work for the benefit of others by the free grace of virtues is both redemptive and radically reconfiguring. Virtues resist established, antagonistic political economics but instead seek solidarity with those most deprived. Shalom has the whole community participate in material sufficiency and spiritual freedom. Freedom, it needs always to be emphasized, must be tempered by virtue and structured by the Golden Rule.

 

 

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[1] Agon is physically competitive and compelling strife, valorized in pagan epics like the Homeric as the arete (excellence) of combative cultures. Shalom is the Hebrew Bible’s alternative to pagan agon—it is the state of a cultural collective living with secure attachment to its God and God’s gracious provision. The state of shalom is thus peaceful, with its civilian constituents living with a wholeness of body, soul, and God’s spirit.

[2] Totemism is marked by “affiliat[es that] share certain general attributes of physical conformation, substance, temperament, and behavior by virtue of a common origin localized in space. Now, these attributes are … derived from … the name of an abstract property” (Descola 2014, 275). The American term “evangelical” has become abstracted and relativized to serve the ends of a cultural amalgam of unfettered freedom-seeking, nationalism, libertarian economics, and traditional and commercialized household images and symbols in addition to an identity marker of those of the “inner ring.” These social inner circles broadcast and proclaim the Gospel’s call for individual repentance as the prelude to salvation but increasingly have moved into the political economic sphere.

            The collectivizing totemization of the figure of Jesus without following his ethics is discerned in the concern with membership (loyalty, authority, and purity) and the physical (“racial,” not spiritual) “essence.” Because of the radical disparateness of interiorities, assurance is sought in the continuity of materialities (Ibid., 277). When totems combine religious identity with a non-religious ideology, they amplify in-group loyalty and prejudice against outsiders. By this combination, totemic communities sacralize biases, attributing them to the ultimate, cosmic, and transcendent. Rather than advancing the Spirit, it serves instead to protect the material order.

Tribal religion offers seekers ritual spaces of belonging, comfort, concern, and matters of meaning more than of fact. The increasingly totemized coalitions in American society manifest the seeking of assurance inside majoritarian identity and “racial” essence. For some “believers,” the growth of religious tribes may reveal assurance as it is marked by material (demographic or economic) attributes as well as spiritual affinities. For others, political and material objectives may be sought and become psychically assured by participation in the totemic collective.

            A consequence of dichotomizing the essence of people as either fully saved or totally depraved is that it risks slipping into naturalism that privileges the “beliefs,” subjectivity, moral conscience, hermeneutics, and identity pertaining to one form of human culture and deeming others unable to image God.