Show Me What Kind Of God Yours Is And I'll Predict If You Devolve Into Fascism

Continuing on where I left off in The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann, there is this important point which explains so much of what's happening today.

We will not understand the meaning of prophetic imagination unless we see the connection between the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation.  Karl Marx had discerned the connection when he observed that the criticism of religion is the ultimate criticism and must lead us to the criticism of law, economics, and politics. [*] The gods of Egypt are the immovable lords of order.  They call for, sanction, and legitimate a society of order, which is precisely what Egypt had.  In Egypt, as Frankfort has shown, there were no revolutions, no breaks for freedom.  There was only the necessary political and economic arrangements to provide order, “naturally,” the order of Pharaoh.  Thus the religion of the static gods is not and never could be disinterested, but inevitably it served the interests of the people in charge,  presiding over the order and benefiting from the order.  And the functioning of that society testified to the rightness of the religion because kings did prosper and bricks did get made. 

You might contrast that with the scientistic model of reality in which everything is caught up in an unalterable chain of material causation, determined by unchanging physical laws, which Marx, himself held with.  How anyone could imagine that such an ideological framing wouldn't come to set up laws, economics and politics that fixed social positions in the order they'd already attained or, as in the case of the manifestation of Marxism as it was applied under various experimental conditions - the new brooms, regime, nomenklatura, even as they understood that point is beyond me.

It is also no surprise how many of the stalwarts of conventional "skepticism" for which you could more honestly say materialist-atheists are,  in fact, politically and economically conservative, right wing, also how many Marxists take the tiny baby step from Marxism into rampant capitalist despotism and overt fascism. Putin could stand as the quintessential example if there weren't so many others from the 20th century, Max Eastman one of the earliest ones.   Their alternative was not in any way a radical break with what they opposed, it was just another interpretation of it.  Which is why they found that move so easy to make.

You can make the same point about so many ideological faiths, Constitutional originalism, the form of fascism that calls itself "federalism" which rule the Supreme Court, these days, in which we're supposed to live by the fixed conception of things made by a bunch of rather shifty aristocrats and slave holders in the 18th century.  The motives they have in promoting an unequal caste system, de-facto slavery and oppression couldn't be clearer as they couch their intentions in the language of secular religiosity. 

More recently there is the entirely unsurprising  recent spat between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein over biological racism and "IQ".   Materialism is just the current model of the Pharaonic static reality, which, unsurprisingly, ends up supporting the already wealthy, powerful and privileged.  It is absolutely no surprise that the great Civil Rights movement constantly referred back to Moses and not any of the "scientific" models of thinking.  Show me who your God is and I'll predict if you devolve into fascism.** 

It is the marvel of the prophetic faith that both imperial religion and imperial politics could be broken.  Religiously, the gods were declared no-gods.  Politically, the oppressiveness of the brickyard was shown to be ineffective and not necessary to human community.  Moses introduced not just the new free God and not just a message of social liberation.  Rather, his work came precisely at the engagement of the religion of God's freedom with the politics of human justice.  Derivative finally from Marx, we can learn from these traditions that finally we will not have a politics of justice and compassion unless we have a religion of God's freedom.  We are indeed made in the image of some God.  And perhaps we have no more important theological investigation than to discern in whose image we have been made.  Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology.  And if we gather around a static god of order who not only guards the interests of the “haves,” oppression cannot be far behind.  Conversely,  if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries, free from all proper godness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion.  

"We will not have a politics of justice and compassion unless we have a religion of God's freedom."   WE WILL NOT.   I have to say that that is one of the most shocking things I've found in looking at the Bible and the scholarship about what it actually says as opposed to what most people believe it says.   Including many who thump on it loudest. 

I have also found out that all secular systems of thought will inevitably take on the character of whatever they put in the place of God and I don't know of a single one of those which won't produce a fixed and rigidly deterministic view of reality and which will, as a result, produce the kind of oppression that that was symbolized in the Pharaonic system which Moses sought to smash.  The radicalism of the Hebrew tradition is the farthest thing from a static system, though fundamentalists will read The Law that way.   The Law, like all of the scriptures, inspired or not, is not a pure inspiration in which the thinking of the People who produced those documents can be ignored.  We might be made in the image of the God of Moses, but we aren't God and our documents, even the most inspired won't escape our limitations, our own limited freedom.  That can't be fixed for all time in all detail, though I doubt there will ever be a time when much of it won't be true and an expression of freedom and aspirations of freedom.   The scriptures didn't end with Deuteronomy, after all.  No more than history and human experience did.  They still had to work on their understanding. 

The security promised by the Modern Industrial Scientific model of reality is an illusion, any security it produces will, in the end, depend on the same kind of oppressive inequality and, especially, the extent to which those so oppressed can be conned into believing the order they live under is inevitable because that's just the natural order of things, the way things are and in the worst cases because science says so.  Look at what the Charles Murrays, Sam Harrises, and so many in the biologically-deterministic camp say.  Look at the pudding headed prophet Jordan Peterson says about lobsters and why women shouldn't be paid as much as men.

*  Brueggemann's note on this says.  Marx's programmatic statement from "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,"  is:  "Thus the criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of earth,  the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics."  (The Marx-Engel Reader,  ed.  R. C. Tucker

* I would make some points from my recent reading on Jewish anti-zionism from the late 19th and early 20th century but I've got to read a lot more before I have a right to say something.  I have to say, it is a fascinating topic with some really stunning predictions that have come to pass.  Much of that anti-zionism was based on the rejection of the Jewish religion by Zionism and skepticism of the results of it.   Many of the early Zionists were anything but liberal democrats.