What Christianity was, and how it still matters.

We are born, suffer, die, in terror and beauty, and somehow are able to grasp that if we ought to live ‘as if God existed,’ as a recent 'conservative' head of the roman church remarkably said, ‘he’ in a way 'chose' this, as if Being itself were a creative force that when conscious wills its very contingent, fragile, even mortal, suffering reality whose sole absoluteness is not its perfected establishment but its mere being, and wills it not only as what, and who, to love, but how, and as 'who', to live. The 'eroticism', what is thought of in the metaphysical figure or metaphor of love, which a Biblical love poem calls strong as death, or what Georges Bataille defined as the appreciation of life even in the inevitability of dying.

Though also with a refusal of the imperial idea of Roman society that identified state and family, which in Christianity would mean love and obedience. The ruler as familial, who ‘loves’ his subjects as such, subject to his power, was a figure of domination with, in local cases (father as boss) a sovereign right to decide on the life or death of subjects. The canonical Hebrew texts struggled with these ‘pagan’ ideas, sometimes in the context of foreign imperial encounters.
The refusal of this paradigm, which revised given ways of thinking about society and family, may help sustain the determined will to fight imperial forces that kill babies because the killers and their accomplices so cherish their ties to official authority that they are terrified they will one day overthrow them. The Jewish Palestinian revolt crushed in AD 70 bears similarities to the one fighting, there, against today's global capitalist empire with the Israeli state the local outpost of the now explicitly (long implicitly) neofascist United States, whose institutional life manifestly shows its failure to learn the lessons of its key defeats (of slavery, of neocolonialism driven to genocide in Vietnam), the Jewish establishments of metropole and colonial outpost now both siding fully with the Roman power, because they wager this serves their self-interest.

The mostly literary figure of Jesus and the remarkable political entrepreneur who was Paul are figures in Jewish antiquity whose appropriation by that complex and contradictory formation that was Greek and Roman Christianity is not the property of members of the set of corporate governmental organizations that claim it, to say nothing of the absurdities of the far-right American white evangelical protestantism that was built up during the Cold War to sell obedient moral convictions to a media-fed public on the grounds that it legitimates the ideological stances Americans are so often invested in with ferocious if idiotic pseudo-militancy, since they hate authority when it is against them as much as those who rebel against it when it is theirs.

Christianity as a religion was ambivalent towards state authority, and thus took an antinomian position (which was not Paul's) on Jewish legal culture, with the fatal consequences we well know. This ambivalence is perhaps its defining contradiction. It drove key medieval schisms and provoked the Reformation, which could not solve it. Christianity did not refuse either Gnostic nihilism and antinomian or its form in Manichaean dualism, but instead, with the idealism in which abstracted figures of evil and good function as cosmic forces, incorporated it, abetting the violent potentialities of this ambivalence, which always needs to decide on its position as self in face of an other.

Because of this dualistic ambivalence between worldly power and divine good founded in love, a division deepened by the fatal association of Jewish legalism with Roman state domination with its military ethos and administrative logic, Christianity made redemption a private affair, salvation. This reconciles subjects to a world imagined as, having been produced and given fixed and unchanging form, beyond contestation, as what is just is what is, in the static logic of empire, and thus also created what we know as ‘spirituality’, the cherished personal cultivation of a body’s inner self, presupposing this dualism ultimately rooted in an impossible will to resist a worldly life distrusted as property of masters. What American protestant culture would do with all of this is another story that implicates our nation’s unprecedentedly capitalist society whose ethos is superficially egalitarian but focused on uncertain bids for success in markets and remarkable conformist intolerance as well as hostility to those left in its path as having somehow failed or lost, failure and suffering in Calvinist protestantism always indicating one’s own culpability, the ethos of a latently fascist police state whose face may well be friendly, as in its Californian form.

Far-right readings of Christian texts is a possibility latent in them as much as genocidal extermination of conquered natives in a project marketed as liberation is a possible use of stories and statements in Deuteronomy. This reminds us that it is insanity to suppose that literary texts canonical to religious study and practice can be read as authorizing, which merely presupposes a God identified as political authority, ‘master and ruler of the world’ in one ancient conceit. That is, to be sure, precisely the principal claim underlying American evangelical protestantism: this literary canon is a product made by God, all his statements the commanding ‘word of God’ whose truth expresses this power, and of course you had better obey. Which is how it was presented to the American slaves, permitted to develop ways of singing but not to study the texts and argue about their meaning, and the associated ethos is among many of America’s persistently operative relics of the institution that has to this date most characterized our nation’s famous ‘exceptionalism’. It must be insisted on that the ethics, including religiosity, of oppressors and that of the oppressed, even when using the same forms, linguistic and others, are forms of the same thing far more in appearance than reality, because the differing voices and accents in which they are read, spoken, sung, etc., make them different absolutely from the political standpoint, and the rulers and ruled alike will readily admit that the power struggle they are involved in is what is central. All the more so when ideas of authority and rebellion are central to the texts. If the rebellion, once achieved or at least announced and attempted, is declared foundational, the basis of ‘the true’ authority, it is corrupted by inseparable association with the domination whose refusal defines it. This may well mean the achieved kingdom of liberation from oppression is an impossible figure. Does that suggest the desirability of a faith in the will to contestations of states of things and how they are ruled without any faith in ‘good’ institutions, and would that be ‘the political’ freed from the merely ‘governmental’? I think the political is that, and Jesus like Moses, Prometheus, and some others, is one of the figures of it we have. I note also that religious narratives tend to be constituent, arriving at some program of legislation, and that does make them conservative. The charmed notion of nineteenth century anarchists that one might reject all forms of governance or management is no longer current in political thought or practice, as we cannot live without managing how we do so, which is why we need medicine, law, and other forms of administration of bodies, though the political as I understand it by definition lies outside them, as art since romanticism (hence its link to the political) more or less does, except when it is appropriated to sell social normativities as religion once did. In any case, the idea of liberation remains with us, it calls, it commands. The empire speaks a peace that always means stop bothering us, go back to the machine, keep on working. When I hear Christians on the left say Jesus’s message is a very different one…

A religion based on liberatory and redemptive faith may be, by its intrinsic logic, one of imperial conquest, salvation calling for conversion, faith implying loyalty, to faction if not empire. If nothing else, however, it also called attention to a problem that in parts of the ancient Mediterranean world had been in the process of becoming remarkable: state authority may be unjust, and the divine basis it claimed contested. The 'religious' world appropriated a dissidence now consecrated as confirming its power, a tactic as intrinsically unstable as resistance always is and causes power to be. For centuries in Europe, rulers and loyal subjects on the one hand and rebels on the other could both claim a common cultural canon to authorize their desires, and did so because people use the tools available, and there is no idea of the good that is external to the demands of power or the social divisions that trouble them and it. Revolt is with us still today, because empire is. In situations of crisis, caring about the world and not only self, a possibility that in its collective form has become so horribly salient in today’s Jewish world (the sign of this is often easily noticed: someone says they are committed to this because of something about what ‘we’ are about), calls for decisions, which divide, since conflict is unavoidable and peace awaits equal liberty and a justice that is not the administrative rulings of managerial functionaries of corporate empires.

In any case, the literary stories that also inspire so many believers who may live by them remain with us, and every great story may be said to have its truths, some of which matter so much. For my purposes, the context is often decisive in fixing the meaning of statements, for the torturer and rebel alike might quote the same ones, and they are not similar but opposite. Christianity, like Judaism, is not a single and definite thing, which could thus be represented, reiterated, appreciated in calls for a religio, re-binding, as return to its essence, and that could be applied, enacted, enforced, but an open and plural field involving numerous contestations, as is the fate of every great text and art work and any institution, or social thing, claiming one as foundation. One of the interesting legacies of the now (in scholarship) very contested figure of Paul is the idea of universality they are said to have introduced, which is not the same as that in the later Gospel of John, which introduces the divine incarnation as metaphysical conceit identifying God with Philo’s Platonic idealism. Read rightly, it may be that what they leave us with today is not or not only the idea of particular communities united in fidelity to some idea or project, as in the evangelical Christian model, or tradition and community as in the Jewish one), but — ?

Religions are disciplinary, according to ideas, today usually somewhat abstracted, form of life one is always reminded of being bound to, re-ligio. The major religious groups that proliferate and have much importance in American society are relics of medieval and early modern Europe, where religious thought still dominated life and was constitutive of communities, constituted quite differently from now, and the original material constitution of this nation’s nascent society, almost uniquely devoted to free enterprise, was based on them as they were central to its functioning and ethos. They are in this way and others a relic of the early modern formation of capitalism. The future of a culture marked by these religious traditions is not their forgetting but a studious form of the respect due our past. Religious identities are a thing of that past, as the today the very fact that they may be chosen underscores (traditionalism invents tradition and markets it as ideology). In the art world I work in, this is more or less taken for granted (though anyone may have their tastes or quirks), but the way we understand the world there is quite alien to the way the dominant social institutions that are also relics of early capitalist modernity do, such as the legal, medical, and finance-related professions, whose forms are little changed from the seventeenth century. Our religious institutions are very much part of that. Their art and literature, and what we make of them now, may or may not be.

In Judaism, as it now stands, things are, as in the Jewish world generally, a bit different, only today I cannot help wondering if a new break is not incipient, and of course where it might lead. The cause is the determination of many of us to separate ourselves absolutely from the current genocide and all that we can identify as its apparent causes in intellectual as well as social life. Perhaps with a (admittedly Pauline and non-Talmudic, transgressive and thus dangerous) ‘radical’ will to find the roots and draw the most far-reaching consequences, wherever this inquiry might lead, with no privilege accorded the givenness of tradition. It is fascinating to ponder earlier ‘radical’ breaks and departures in situations of crisis, as well as the truths that may be found in texts the institutional forms of a tradition can simply rejects as outside it, when they have inspired so many people to struggle to create a more just world. For Christianity was, sometimes, also that.